Mende, Sande, and Poro

Topic: Origins - Africa
The Gola were considered the oldest ethnic group in Liberia, although they recalled their ancestors met others when they arrived. [1] The above demographic map was made in 1947, and showed their then current location near the border with Sierra Leone.

Warren d’Azevedo discovered "certain of their traditions make reference to former matrilineality in terms such as ‘we were ruled by women and looked to our mothers’." [2] When he interviewed them in the middle-1950s, they told him that before the Portuguese arrived

"vast regions of the interior of what is now Liberia and Sierra Leone were dense uninhabited forests. They themselves were a small isolated group in the mountains of what is now northeastern Liberia. Large game such as elephant, water buffalo, and hippopotamus were profuse and their hunting parties made extensive excursions. They also view themselves as having been at one time a great hunting people, and that this was true of most of the early tribes of the forest. It is noteworthy in this regard that the content of Gola myth and other traditions is highly explicit about matters of hunting, fishing, and gathering, but vague and inconsistent about agriculture" [3] which he associated with matrilineal societies.

The meeting of Gola and Mandé speakers occurred when Songhai attacked the Mali Empire. As mentioned in the post for 24 March 2019, it seized the Taghaza mines in 1493. That probably led the Vai to move along the Atlantic coast looking for a replacement source. [4] The Mandé speakers were settled around Cape Mount near the modern Liberian-Sierra Leone border by about 1500. [5]

The Mandé-speaking Mane began moving into modern Liberia some time after. John Fage noted they

"were military bands that systematically attacked and overcame the villages of each group they came across. Some of them would stay behind to organize these conquests into small kingdoms, while others, reinforced by auxiliaries recruited from among their victims, would proceed farther west to repeat the pattern." [6]

The Mane reached the Vai at Cape Mount in 1545, [7] then move northwest parallel to the coast. Walter Rodney noted the lançados, who purchased slaves for Portuguese ships, "hovered like vultures in every river, waiting to take hold of the victims of the struggles. So numerous were the unfortunates, that the boats sometimes rejected further offers of slaves after they had gorged themselves full." [8]

Margaret Washington reported the Gola response:

"In the beginning was Sande, a women’s society which governed, and was the custodian of ritual and of the spiritual powers necessary to defense ancestral interest. The initiation and training of women was a central task involving the entire community. And into these days of ‘peace and perfect order’ came terrible wars, but women resisted the men’s mobilization for defense. Thus the men invented a forest monster—the ‘Great Spirit of Poro’ (a mask form) which frightened the women. This spirit provided men with the power to wrest control of the country, take away the sons, teach them the art of war and of politics, and to enforce loyalty exclusively among males, via the secret bush initiation." [9]

The new settlements, with their mix of Mane and local people, became the Mende. According to Wikipedia, they

"say that their original members were hunters and fishers who populated the area sparsely in small peaceful settlements; they say that their leaders came later, in a recent historical period, bringing with them the arts of war, and also building larger, more permanent villages. This history receives support from the facts that their population consists of two different racial types, and their language and culture show signs of a layering of two different forms: they have both matrilineal and patrilineal inheritance, for instance." [10]

In the late 1600s, power within Gola society still was divided between the male Poro and the female Sande in their communities, which were called fuwa. D’Azevedo said they alternated

"‘ownership of the country’ every four and three years respectively. These alternations were coincided in all the Gola fuwa so that women were said to ‘own’ the Gola for three years, and then ‘turn the people over’ to the Poro for four years. In these periods each society was to hold its ‘bush’ for initiation and training of the young. The graduation of the youth and the subsequent turning over of ‘ownership of the land’ to the other society are ritual events of great importance among the Gola and all the ‘Poro tribes’ today." [11]

The equilibrium, such as it was, ended when the English entered into slave trade. In 1702, groups living southeast of the Vai complained they "had been there, with two large vessels and had ravaged the country, destroyed all their canoes, plundered their houses, and carried off some of their people as slaves." [12]

People in smaller settlements moved into the territories of their neighbors, where they were welcomed as defense recruits. D’Azevedo recorded the "Gola were engaged in a major tribal dispersion" and "they soon became a majority in many of these expanding chiefdoms, and their dependent villages began to welcome, in turn, migrants and refugees from all interior tribes." [13]

Everywhere the Gola settled, they took their Poro and Sande societies. With time, Poro became integrated into their hosts’ leadership structures. The local societies served a function similar to the Masons or fraternal lodges like the Elks or Veterans of Foreign Wars: they recognized members from other communities by the marks made during initiations, and thus formed a unifying net over settlements reconstituted from destroyed communities both in Liberia, and among the Mende in modern Sierra Leone.

Graphics
George Schwab. "Tribes of the Liberian Hinterland." 20 in Tribes of the Liberian Hinterland. Cambridge: Peabody Museum, 1947. Uploaded to Wikimedia Commons by Metilsteiner on 3 April 2015. The book reported fieldwork done with the groups marked by dots.

End Notes
1. "Culture." Liberia Past and Present website.

2. Warren d’Azevedo. "The Setting of Gola Society and Culture: Some Theoretical Implications of Variation in Time and Space." Kroeber Anthropological Society Papers, 1959. 56.

3. D’Azevedo, Setting. 54-55.

4. Yves Person. "The Coastal Peoples: from Casamance to the Ivory Coast Lagoons." 301-323 in D. T. Niane. Africa from the Twelfth to the Sixteenth Century. Paris: UNESCO, 1984. 318.

5. Ayodeji Olukoju. Culture and Customs of Liberia. Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2006. 9.

6. John D. Fage. "Western Africa." In Encyclopædia Britannica. Last updated 29 March 2016.

7. Fage.

8. Walter Rodney. A History of the Upper Guinea Coast 1545 to 1800. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970. 120. His source was A. de Almada. "Tratado Breve dos Rios de Guiné." Momenta Missionaria Africana, Africa Ocidental, 1569-1700. Series 2, 3:363, 364.

9. Margaret Washington Creel. "A Peculiar People." New York: New York University Press, 1988. 51. Her sources were Warren d’Azevedo, "Gola, Poro and Sande: Primal Tasks in Social Custodianship," Ethnologische Zeitschrift Zürich I:15-16:1980, and d’Azevedo, Setting.

10. Wikipedia. "History of Sierra Leone." Its source was Kenneth Little. The Mende of Sierra Leone. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1951. He, in turn, cited F. W. H Migeod "on the Mende racial mixture." Migeod. A View of Sierra Leone. London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, and Company, 1926.

11. D’Azevedo, Setting. 56.

12. Willem Bosman. Nauwkeurige Beschryving van de Guinese Goud-, Tand- en Slave-Kusk. Translated as A New and Accurate Description of the Coast of Guinea. London: James Knapton, 1705. 475. Quoted by Hugh Thomas. The Slave Trade. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1997. 379.

13. D’Azevedo, Setting. 58.