When the Ancestors Came to Court: The Hidden Drama of a Mossi Figure

A 47 cm wooden figure, a royal court, and a glimpse into the world of the Mossi.

Looking at this Mossi figure from Burkina Faso, I found myself stepping into a ceremony that may help us understand it.

There is something slightly unsettling about a good African sculpture.

You can put it on a table, photograph it from every possible angle, write down its measurements and provenance, and still not quite explain why it holds your attention.

This Mossi female figure is a good example.

She is 47 centimetres tall, carved from wood, and at first sight almost deceptively simple. There is no elaborate costume, no theatrical gesture and no attempt to overwhelm the viewer with decoration. She simply stands there: elongated, balanced, self-contained.

But look at her for a little longer and the simplicity begins to disappear.

The proportions become more interesting. The treatment of the body becomes more deliberate. The face, rather than trying to tell us everything immediately, seems to retreat into the sculpture. And then there is the surface — dark, deep and uneven, with the accumulated character that only old wood can acquire.

This is the point at which a Mossi figure stops being merely an attractive object and starts to become a historical survivor.

A kingdom behind the sculpture

To understand something of what we are looking at, it helps to leave the gallery for a moment and travel back to the Mossi kingdoms of what is now Burkina Faso.

For centuries, the Mossi maintained powerful kingdoms, with royal courts in places such as Ouagadougou and Yatenga. Their political world was also a world of ancestors, lineage and ceremony. The past was not simply remembered; it remained involved in the life of the community.

Mossi sculpture developed within that world.

Female figures could have different functions. Some were associated with royalty and ancestry, others with commemoration or protection. We should therefore be careful when looking at an individual sculpture whose original context has been lost: its precise function cannot automatically be reconstructed from its appearance alone.

But we do have remarkable evidence for the importance that some Mossi female figures could acquire.

And this is where another sculpture enters our story.

Not this one — but one now standing in New York.

The ninana

The Metropolitan Museum of Art has a Mossi female figure identified as a ninana, a Mooré word meaning simply “modeled figure.” The sculpture belongs to the Yatenga tradition and was made by a Nakomsé-Mossi blacksmith, probably sometime between the nineteenth and the middle of the twentieth century.

Its appearance is striking. The body is long and cylindrical, the arms rigid, and a tall crest rises from the head. That crest reproduces the elaborate gyonfo coiffure associated with high-status women.

The sculpture could therefore communicate something much larger than the image of an individual woman. In the royal context described by The Met, such a female effigy expressed fertility, dignity and the continuity of the dynasty.

And then comes the remarkable part.

At the annual na-poosum harvest festival, clan elders would approach the seated chief and arrange such figures before him. The sculptures were dressed in fresh cloth, decorated with beads and accompanied by the first heads of sorghum. Libations and grain were offered, calling upon the royal ancestors to provide peace and prosperity for the community in the coming season.

Imagine that for a moment.

A wooden figure standing before a Mossi ruler. Fresh harvests at its feet. Beads and cloth around it. Millet beer poured over the wood. The presence of generations of royal ancestors invoked in a ceremony concerned with the future of the living.

That is quite a different way of looking at a sculpture.

What the surface can tell us

The dark surface of the Met’s ninana is not simply an attractive colour.

According to the museum, repeated ceremonial anointings with millet beer, vegetable butter and sacrificial blood gradually darkened the wood and produced its deep, lustrous patina. The surface itself therefore became a record of repeated ritual use and generations of devotion.

This is one reason I find old African sculpture so difficult to photograph adequately.

A photograph can show the silhouette.

It can show the carving.

It can show the colour.

But it struggles to show time.

On an old surface, light catches a worn edge differently from a freshly cut one. Small variations in texture suddenly become important. What appears almost black in one photograph may reveal brown, reddish or amber tones when the sculpture is moved into different light.

And that is very much the case with the Mossi figure shown here.

Its surface is not there merely to make the sculpture look old. It is part of the sculpture’s character.

The figure in front of us

Of course, we cannot say that this particular 47 cm figure once stood before a Mossi chief during a na-poosum ceremony.

Its original function is not documented, and it would be wrong to invent a biography for it.

But knowing what happened to comparable Mossi figures changes the way we look at it.

The elongated female body, the restraint of the carving and the accumulated surface suddenly belong to a much larger artistic and cultural landscape. We begin to see the sculpture not as an isolated object, but as something that emerged from a society in which lineage, authority and the presence of ancestors were deeply intertwined.

And perhaps that is enough.

A good sculpture does not always need its entire biography to remain powerful.

Sometimes what survives is the most interesting part: the figure itself, the wood, the proportions, the surface — and the questions that remain unanswered.

This Mossi woman has already travelled a considerable distance. She came from a New York collection, appeared at Bonhams in New York in 2011 as Lot 2077, and later entered my collection through a well-known anthropologist and collector with a longstanding knowledge of African art.

Now she is looking for another place to stand.

And perhaps that is the final part of the story.

After the royal courts, the ceremonies, the collectors, the auction room and all the people who have looked at her before us, there is still a 47-centimetre wooden figure standing quietly in front of us.

Still holding the room.

Could this Mossi female figure be the next piece in your collection? 

Mossi Female Figure — Burkina Faso