Ancestors in Search of Descendants: Stone Effigies of the Ancient Sapi by F. J. Lamp (review)

It is many years since there has been a major addition to the literature on the ancient stone sculptures of Sierra Leone and Guinea. Fred Lamp’s new book bids to be such a publication. It is comprehensive in the topics it covers; places the stone sculptures in their historical context; gives a detailed formal and iconographical analysis of a wide range of the sculptures, drawing upon early documents and his own ethnographical fieldwork; provides a map of their geographical distribution; and offers a possible interpretation of the sculptures as memorial art for the dead.

In one respect the book fully lives up to a reader’s expectations. It is beautifully illustrated, with more than 60 of the color photographs being images of stone figures, the majority (one guesses) from Lamp’s personal archive. There are photographs of less well known but stylistically related heads and figures in wood and terra cotta, including photographs of Sapi-Portuguese ivories and others from Lamp’s field research in Sierra Leone in the 1960s and 1970s.

The section “Dating Analysis of Comparable Materials” recycles material from his article “Ancient Wood Figures from Sierra Leone: Implications for Historical Reconstruction” (Lamp 1990), but adds something new with a report on the carbon-dating of a wooden figure in the style of the pomta acquired more recently by Yale University Art Gallery. The date obtained, between 928–996 ce, is the earliest yet recorded for an Upper Guinea wooden sculpture and is important evidence that the stylistically related stone figures could be from the tenth century or even earlier (pp. 22–32).

In fixing their terminus ad quem, however, Lamp is on shakier ground. The evidence he cites that stone carving was still being practiced among the Sapi peoples of sixteenth-century Sierra Leone is thin at best: A single stone figure holding what may or may not be an imported European tankard (p. 72); a couple of sentences in sixteenth-century European sources which might, but most probably do not, refer to stone sculptures (pp. 81–82); and comparisons with the Sapi-Portuguese ivories (1490–1530) which, although they clearly emerge from a common sculptural tradition with the stone figures, cannot be shown to be contemporary with them (p. 74). Significantly, the former seem most likely to have been made around the Scarcies delta or the Sierra Leone estuary—areas where stone sculptures have never been found.

Why is Lamp, despite the paucity of evidence, so wedded to the view that stone sculptures were still being made by the sixteenth-century Sapi? It seems that he, like others before him (Yves Person [1961]and Walter Rodney [1967]), is captivated by reports of the catastrophe that overtook the coastal peoples in mid century, when an invading force of Manding origin, the Mani, overthrew the existing Sapi elites and replaced them with Mani overlords. True, there is no actual evidence that this “Mani invasion” was responsible for ending Sapi stone carving, but Lamp is nevertheless “inclined to assume” that this was the case, whether it was due to the predatory behavior of the new rulers causing a loss of morale among the Sapi population in general or by their disrupting existing structures of artistic patronage (p. 70).

The main part of Lamp’s text is largely a restatement of the arguments set out in his article “House of Stones; Memorial Art of Fifteenth-Century Sierra Leone” (Lamp 1983). Its most distinctive and controversial claim—that the Temne prior to the sixteenth century inhabited southeastern Sierra Leone up to and even beyond the Moa river and therefore that their practice of commemorating their dead by placing unsculpted stones in a shrine am-boro-ma-sar (“the house of stones”) might shed some light on the meaning of the ancient stone figures found in that area—is repeated here, albeit in a more tentative...