(gentle piano music)
- [Zucker] We're in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,
in their African galleries,
looking at this extraordinary terracotta figure.
- [Van Dyke] We have a seated figure who's pulling one knee
up and wraps his upper body around that knee,
turning his head in this uncomfortable way
to the side on his knee.
- [Zucker] And the way that the clay was shaped
creates this snakelike quality
that allows the body to turn and move
in a way that seems to defy any kind
of internal skeletal structure.
- [Van Dyke] I think that this object
could represent somebody who is ill.
When I first started studying these objects
I was very drawn to, frankly, how weird they are.
- [Zucker] And expressive.
- [Van Dyke] There's something fantastical about them.
What I saw as very highly imaginative
but the longer that I've studied them
the more questions I've developed around
what exactly is being represented here.
- [Zucker] We should say at the outset
that we know very little about these figures.
This is one of approximately 1000 objects
that have been found.
Most have been looted and so we have very little
firm archeological context for these objects.
- [Van Dyke] They are a perplexing group of objects.
We have a very wide date range for them
because we have very few objects that were found in context.
But they pose a tough question to us
because lacking context, we can never really fully
understand how they were used.
However, they constitute an incredible resource for us
because they're one of the few large corpuses we have
of objects before the colonial period.
So they absolutely demand study.
- [Zucker] If these are figures with a kind of affliction,
if this is an expression of pain or perhaps sorrow,
it stands in such contrast to so much sculpture
where the ideal figure is represented.
- [Van Dyke] And even within this corpus of 1000 objects
there are objects that are very strong.
There are horse and riders, for example,
the paragon of strength during this period
of the trans-Saharan trade.
- [Zucker] And by trans-Saharan trade you're talking
about kingdoms that developed trade networks
that crossed the desert, that moved from Sub-Saharan Africa
through to the Mediterranean coast.
- [Van Dyke] We think that these figures
emerged in the context of the collapse
of the first major empire, the empire of Ghana.
We know that there was a big population movement
into the inland Niger delta
and that there was a lot of population pressure
around this period when these objects
seem to emerge in the historical record.
The next empire to emerge is the Empire of Mali
and the founder of that empire, Sundiata Keita,
is born lame and has to learn to walk
and overcome this in order to become this powerful leader
who unites the kingdom of Mali.
- [Zucker] This is such a complicated moment
because you have the introduction of Islam,
you have older traditional religions,
you have the building and collapsing of empires.
- [Van Dyke] And you also have an incredible movement
of goods and people.
You have traders coming down to Timbuktu,
you have another group of traders
coming up to the city of Djenné
and you have the Niger river which is the super highway
of the trans-Saharan trade.
I would argue it's also a disease factor.
- [Zucker] And so these could be representations
of disease, either those that have contracted disease
or perhaps those that are trying to ward it off.
In this particular sculpture
we have the most elaborate back.
We see these forms that stand off the back
that almost look like soft buttons
and we also see these circles that have been incised
in rows in between the button forms.
And it's all so regular and decorative
that they could be pustules, perhaps a kind of abstract
representation of a pustule or of a buboe,
of a blister of some sort but they also could be some
kind of scarification, they could be deliberate.
- [Van Dyke] Are we seeing a number of symptoms
loaded onto a figure, that kind
of representation of illness in a big sense?
Is this a depiction of various particular symptoms
of a particular illness and could this
kind of stylization on the back,
could that be a kind of response,
an attempt to ward off illness?
It's almost impossible to know.
But people who overcome illness,
we can imagine might also be seen
as very spiritually powerful.
- [Zucker] If we look at the torso there is this flaring
from the narrowness of the neck
into this very large belly and very strong legs.
- [Van Dyke] I think other scholars might even argue
that they don't see illness here
and that just see a very expressive
and very creative representation of the human body.
But I would go back to the point that you're making about
looking at the body swelling and the way that the torso
swells and we move down into these very substantial thighs
but as you move down the rest of the leg
you really see a kind of shrinking in the calf
and then these very tiny feet.
This is the value of having put together
a very large corpus.
We've a lot of comparative material
and I frequently see this kind of shriveled lower limb
and even have see it to the point of great elasticity
where the limb becomes very plastic
and is even thrown over the shoulders
which, to me, looks like something very much akin to polio.
Again, raising the question, are we seeing a representation
of arrival of particular diseases
that may have come through the trans-Saharan trade.
- [Zucker] The fact that we have so few find spots,
that we have so little archeological eveidence
to go with these figures makes interpretation
difficult in and of itself.
So this is a real conundrum.
When these figures were first discovered
they were being excavated using scientific
archeological methods but very soon, looters took over
and the vast majority of objects in museums today
are coming from looted sites which means we don't
have a find spot and we don't have archeological evidence.
There's another layer though, which is that
in order to reduce further looting
there's been a kind of a moratorium on scholarship
about these objects to help reduce their attractiveness
to the market and to private collectors.
- [Van Dyke] It's an understandable position
and as you say, rightly, it's a conundrum.
However, the objects that are out are out
and I would argue that we must find a way
to make these objects speak.
We have to ask them different kinds of questions
than the kinds of questions we would ask
if they were in an archeological context.
- [Zucker] We can't pretend that they don't exist.
(piano music)