A large Muso Massa

A large Muso Massa sculpture of the Godjiila village, Kuruma region, 80 km from Segou, wearing a Koakoto hat, which has a certain similarity with the crown like cap of the Gwandusu, but without the fetish packages on each side, which is called Kongoro. In reality these haeddresses don´t exist anymore, but there should be photos of old Bamana women around 1900, wearing these tradition headdresses. Maybe one day I will find one exemplare, which would be a great ethnographic treasure. It shows the first woman of the chief de village, the great healer of the village or the woman of the warlord, all three high ranked personalities in the Bamana hierachie. The second woman is called Dokamissa a type of sculpture we also collected several times and it was sacrfied in the Bamana film clip, we published recently. According of the traditional Bamana law the first child of Muso Massa has to be given to Dokamissa - the second woman in the familial hierarchy of the women, if Dokamissa hasn´t at that moment no child, the first child of Muso Massa has always the name Sujulu Kuruma and the first cild of Sukulu Kuruma has always the name Sunjata Keita., which shows the Bamana society has much more named familial relations than we know. It would be a great challenge to find out the sociological reason for this particualarity,

Muso Massa sculptures from Godjiila (Kuruma region) are large, carved female figures that function as emblematic representations of the highest-ranking woman in the village—often the wife or principal female of the village chief—and serve a visible role in the social and ritual topography of Bamana-speaking communities in the wider Kuruma area. s. Wolfgang Jaenicke Gallery

Formally the Muso Massa is notable for an emphatic, upright presence: generically tall in scale, frontal in orientation, and often wearing distinctive local headgear (recorded examples from Godjiila include a Koakoto-style hat). These figures appear in the material record of the Kuruma region and in collecting documentation as discrete named types related to, yet formally distinct from, other Bamana sculptural categories such as the Gwandusu and Dokamissa. Provenance notes in sale and collection records place a large Muso Massa from Godjiila c. 80 km from Ségou in the Kuruma zone; audiovisual documentation and catalogue descriptions from field collections corroborate these attributions

Footnotes

1. Object identification and social function: Jaenicke-Njoya collection entry, catalogue description for “Muso Massa,” which describes the figure as representing the village’s highest-ranking woman.

2. Formal remarks and provenance: Wolfgang Jaenicke blog and collection notes documenting a large Muso Massa of Godjiila village (Kuruma region), including mention of the Koakoto hat and the 80 km from Ségou provenance. s. Wolfgang-Jaenicke blogspot com

3. Audiovisual/source corroboration: field footage and short video documentation of a Muso Massa attributed to Togoloba / Godjila (Godjiila) villages in the Kuruma area.

Height: 113 cm
Weight: 16,6 kg