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Maternity: Mothers and Children in the Arts of Africa

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On the African continent, images of mothers and children are found wherever the visual arts are, from early rock-art sites in Egypt and the Sahara to the contemporary arts of South Africa. Defining maternity as a biological and cultural phenomenon, Herbert M. Cole goes beyond obvious notions of fertility to consider the importance of maternity in thought, ritual action, and worldview.

Image courtesy of interviewee. June 6, 2024

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The speaker recounts their journey into the field of African art history, beginning in 1962 at Columbia University and culminating in a field study in Nigeria in 1966. They describe their encounter with the Ari house in Ibo country, which centers around the earth goddess Ala, a crucial deity for the Ibo people symbolizing motherhood and moral guardianship. The segment discusses the significance of mud sculptures and the process of building these houses, which often take over a year to complete and involve the community.

The speaker highlights the symbolism of Ala's white face, which represents purity rather than racial connotations, illustrating cultural color symbolism. They expand on the perception of motherhood as a construct shaped by cultural values, contrasting practices in different regions in Africa, such as Ghana, where queen mothers play an influential role in politics and society.

Furthermore, the speaker discusses variations in depictions of motherhood and its cultural significance within various African communities, highlighting the difference between biological maternity, which is universal, and the culturally shaped practices surrounding it. Examples from ancient Egypt's goddess Isis to Ethiopia's veneration of Mary emphasize how maternal figures serve not only as symbols of fertility but also represent political and social forces.

In conclusion, the speaker reflects on the rich diversity of maternal imagery and its implications across African cultures, emphasizing the importance of community, moral conduct, and the significant roles mothers play in shaping societal structures.

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X-TIMESTAMP-MAP:LOCAL=00:00:00.000,MPEGTS=900000

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I went to Columbia in 1962 to study medieval,

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art history.

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And I took a course on African art, almost by an ex.

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And, that hooked me.

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So I decided in 1964 to go to Africa

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to study it from the people themselves.

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I had been taught by two people.

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I'd been taught African art by two people who had never been

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to the continent of Africa.

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And, this was early in the,

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in art historians studying Africa.

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Anthropologists had done so earlier,

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but art historians,

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only a half a dozen art historians had done field work.

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So I was in that early contingent,

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and I chose to go to IBO country in southeastern Nigeria.

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And I arrived with my wife and two kids in 1966

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and lived in, well, it doesn't matter where I lived.

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Uh, and then on my very first field trip in

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IBO country, I came across an Ari house.

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Uh, this Ari house has at as its center,

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the earth goddess, ala a LA,

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who is the ground of being for Igbo people.

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She is the mother of all of all other deities, of

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animals, of plants, and of human beings.

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And, most embar houses were given

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to, or offered to Allah as a kind of sacrifice,

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as a community effort, an enormous human effort

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and financial, sacrifice for the people.

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And sometimes it took more than a year

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to construct this house, which is filled with mud sculptures

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of local people doing things,

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a couple sitting side by side, as you see on the left,

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of animals of, other human beings

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and holding, a jug of palm wine or,

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or, a, a white man emerging from a hole in the ground,

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which tells a story of, of early,

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Europeans, all kinds of, of things heard about

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and hoped for out of mythology and out of daily life.

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And there can be as many as 200 modeled clay figures in

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Anbar, the one that we're looking at had about

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40 figures in it.

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Um, but the,

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the centerpiece is the goddess Allah.

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And you'll notice that the faces of all the,

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the human beings that we see are white,

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and the people, of course, are dark skinned.

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Um, and I asked why Allah's face is painted white,

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and she said, well, we sometimes refer to Allah

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as dark Allah because she's ambivalent.

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She can, destroy people, she can kill people,

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and she can be beneficent.

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She can, peel yams with the knife

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that she holds in her right hand,

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which we'll see in the closeup of Allah.

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Um, but if you call, if you were

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to paint her, her face, black

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or dark, she would be angered.

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And, this wouldn't be good.

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So white isn't honorific white

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for the Igbo people is a color of purity, of goodness,

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of beauty.

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And so Allah is honored by having a white face.

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Doesn't have anything to do with the white faces

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of Caucasian peoples.

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It's simply a, a, local color symbolism,

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which is fairly widespread in Africa, actually.

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So, this house,

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this architectural complex of sculptures is a sacrifice

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built in a long ritualized process with men

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and women who are initiated into the process

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behind a concealing fence.

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The house is built over a period of months

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and sometimes more than a year.

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And I came to realize that Allah as the centerpiece, as the,

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as the, the deity to whom this, this,

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effort is dedicated,

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that that motherhood in the, in the form

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of Allah is a kind of ramifying

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cultural phenomenon.

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That she is the font of morality.

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She is the guardian of tradition among the IBO people.

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And if you offend her by polluting the earth, for example,

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through bloodshed, she's going to come after you.

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She's going to, to, give you trouble.

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Uh, if you make good, good gestures towards her

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sacrifice, for her, then she will, she will

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repay you by giving you children

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and, abundant fields, yam

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and so forth, researching Allah

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and maari houses over a period of more than a year,

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I realized that, motherhood

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was a cultural cons construct.

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And when I did my second bout of field work in the early

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seventies in southern Ghana,

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I came up upon images

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and shrines of queen mothers

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and ahan society in Southern Ghana.

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The Ashanti peoples and the FTI peoples are matrilineal,

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and they accord great respect to mothers,

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and especially to queen mothers who are

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involved in choosing kings.

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They're not necessarily the actual biological

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mothers of kings.

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They can be the king's aunt,

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but she, she has a role in choosing the king

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and in, serving as a kind of

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counselor for all women.

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And she's an important political force.

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So I realized that maternity images

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of mothers and children,

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can be political instruments as well.

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And so the, the sculpture that you see on the screen is

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of a queen mother with her feet raised on, a footstool.

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And she is wearing sandals to keep her feet from,

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being polluted by the ground in this instance.

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So Earth in

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Ghana is not treated in the same way as it is

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among the Igbo people.

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So that made me realize

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that there are many cultural differences in the images

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of maternity and in how they are visualized

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and how, motherhood is carried on, carried on.

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So my research

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for this book on maternity

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stresses these cultural differences.

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Biological maternity, of course, is the same everywhere.

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Fertilized sperm reaches fertilized egg

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after nine months, a child is born.

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That's it. This is the same everywhere.

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But the cultural, ideas

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and practices around eternities

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are enormously varied from one place to another.

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For example, in ancient Egypt, ISIS was a great

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culture bringer.

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Uh, a a mother goddess who was responsible

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in ancient Egyptian thought

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for the annual flooding of the Nile.

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So it was Isis who brought agriculture

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to the Egyptian people.

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She brought, she introduced marriage,

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she introduced weaving.

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She was a great magician and doctor, a protector of women

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and children of childbirth and so forth.

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So here again, is an example of,

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motherhood and images of mothers, which are

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in great quantities in, the art history

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of Egypt, for example, there are hundreds, probably

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thousands of images of Isis with her son Horace.

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Um, and she was responsible too for,

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Egyptian political life.

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So Isis was a political force,

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as was the queen mother in Ghana.

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And if we were to move to, if we move to the Sun UFO people

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of, northern co Devo, ivory Coast

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and southern Mali, pardon me, west

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of, of Ghana,

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we find ancient mother in this

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stylized image of a suckling child with

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his, mother.

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And ancient mother is the head of the all male,

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the titular head anyway, of the all male initiation society,

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often referred to as Poro, PORO, in,

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in Suno culture.

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And it is said that ancient mother, who is a creator deity

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swallows, initiates male initiates at the beginning

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of their initiations at the age of, 10 or 11

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or 12, and then, gives birth to them

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as adults many years later.

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And it is also said that ancient mother nourishes

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and nurtures her children with the milk

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of knowledge, which is the marvelous phrase in my view

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for what initiation is all about.

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Initiation in all cultures is about schooling, is about,

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learning to, to be an adult, learning,

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responsibility, learning, the, the lessons of morality

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and, and so forth.

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As one passes through grades in, in,

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schooling, which is our initiation, one learns more.

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And hopefully you end up, being a,

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a responsible adult doesn't always happen,

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but that's the ideal.

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Uh, so ancient mother nurtures

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and gives the milk of knowledge

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to her initiates over a very long

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and protracted initiation process

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for sun UFO people.

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Um, then if we were to move to Ethiopia in south

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in, sorry, in northeastern, Africa,

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we have images of Mary

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and her beloved son, Jesus Christ

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and Mary in Ethiopian history,

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which embraced Christianity in by the fourth century, ad

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Mary, became a political force

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under the emperor, Zara Yakob,

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who reigned in the middle of the 15th century,

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Zaria Cobb as emperor institutionalized the cult of Mary

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and Mary became more important as a deity

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for Christian Ethiopians than Christ himself was.

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There was an alt, Zaria Cobb ordered

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that an altar be made to Mary in every church,

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and that the 29th of every month was a feast day

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or a a, a, a day that was

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set aside to celebrate Mary.

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The hundred miracles of Mary were, some of them at least,

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were recited at every church service,

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and thousands upon thousands of images

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or icons of Mary, like the one you see,

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which is a 17th century, image of Mary

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and her beloved son.

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Thousands upon thousands of images were made, they were,

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held in households and of course in the hundreds

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and hundreds of churches.

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So the cult of Mary was used by Zaria Cobb to

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unify his empire in the 15th century.

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And Mary continues to be a critically important

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deity for Ethiopian Christians.

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Then the question arises, often, the image

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of a mother and child is often referred to as a mother,

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as a frail fertility goddess.

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And yes, fertility is certainly involved in images of,

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of mothers

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and with children, they appear ens, shrines that are for,

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childbirth sometimes for they appear in medicine,

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shrines in healing shrines, in ancestral shrines.

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And, yet there are many images of mothers

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and children that are not deities

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and that are not necessarily about fertility

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among the Yoruba people.

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For example, in southwestern Nigeria, about

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250 miles west of the Ebo whom I studied,

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there are thousands, tens of thousands of images

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of mothers with children suckling

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or with children on their backs

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or with children arranged around them in various ways.

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None of those Yoruba m fraternities represent deities.

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They all, according to research, done among the Yoruba,

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they all represent worshipers of the deities,

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and they will be found enshrined to those deities.

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And they're often given by worshipers to

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enhance the shrines of, the various deities,

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whether it's, sh go the god of thunder

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or, any other of,

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the many deities in the pantheon of,

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Yoruba religious thought.

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I want to speak a little bit about the difference between

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our ideas of motherhood in the western world

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and African ones.

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Uh, what we have to realize is that

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young children are with their mothers, both males

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and females, until they undergo in,

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this is in rural Africa, by the way,

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and I should probably have said at the beginning

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that I'm speaking of Africa in,

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50, 60, 70 years ago.

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Africa, today, of course, is often urbanized and,

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and people are educated.

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And, and what I'm speaking of is,

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probably early 20th century Africa up until the,

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sixties in, around the year

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of independence rather than, in the 21st century

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and 2024.

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Uh, my research was in 1966 and, and, and,

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and 67 and through the seventies and early eighties.

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So that's that. Those are the historical benchmarks for,

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for my discussion of motherhood.

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Uh, not so much today,

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but I, I do want to stress the difference

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because children are with their mothers

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until they are initiated as, young women

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or they'll stay with their mothers.

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But young boys will leave their mothers at the ages of,

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between six and 10 or 12,

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but they're with their mothers as infinite infants,

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24 7.

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And the mothers will give birth to a child

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and she'll be back to work, a day or two later,

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and she will carry that child with her, at all times

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and, will feed the child on demand

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and will suckle the child until he

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or she is three, sometimes longer than that.

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Whereas in our world,

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mothers are not with their children to, to

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that extent.

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And, and for that ex extensive period, day

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and night, wherever you see women,

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you're going to see children.

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Um, in, in African villages,

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the children are around everywhere.

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They're on their mother's backs. They're being suckled.

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They're, they're walking around.

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They're, they're, they're part of the

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everyday existence.

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Uh, and of course,

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when they reach school age, they're, they're off to school.

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But Village life

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is, in some respects, child centered

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because children were important

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and large families were important in

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agricultural communities.

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And most of the art producing peoples,

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the sculpture producing peoples are agriculturalists

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rather than nomads.

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So large families were important.

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And, the regeneration of the community

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and, and, the regeneration of the human race

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was critically important.

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Umbari houses, for example, celebrated the goddess

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of the earth, Allah and other local deities, but they all,

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but umbari houses were also recreations

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of the community itself.

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And they were offered in sacrifice

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because of some sort of a disaster

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that visited the community.

19:47.475 --> 19:51.055
It might have been, a high degree number

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of infant mortalities.

19:52.995 --> 19:55.575
It might have been a, a plague of locusts or,

19:55.715 --> 19:59.815
or something of the very, very poor agricultural year.

20:00.875 --> 20:04.895
But that's what, caused Allah

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through divination, through the fortune tellers to demand,

20:10.115 --> 20:14.615
a sacrificial offering, a new house for her to

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dwell in.

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And that is what the Embar house is.

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A sacrifice, a new house for the goddess of the earth

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or an important local river, God, God, or goddess.

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Not always Allah,

20:30.715 --> 20:35.505
but probably 60, 70% of the embar houses

20:35.575 --> 20:40.545
that I saw during my research, were offered

20:40.685 --> 20:43.625
to, to this earth goddess.

00:00 - I went to Columbia in 1962 to study medieval, art history. And I took a course on African art, almost by an ex. And, that hooked me. So I decided in 1964 to go to Africa to study it from the people themselves.

00:24 - I had been taught by two people. I'd been taught African art by two people who had never been to the continent of Africa. And, this was early in the, in art historians studying Africa. Anthropologists had done so earlier, but art historians, only a half a dozen art historians had done field work. So I was in that early contingent, and I chose to go to IBO country in southeastern Nigeria.

00:53 - And I arrived with my wife and two kids in 1966 and lived in, well, it doesn't matter where I lived. and then on my very first field trip in IBO country, I came across an Ari house. this Ari house has at as its center, the earth goddess, ala a LA, who is the ground of being for Igbo people. She is the mother of all of all other deities, of animals, of plants, and of human beings. And, most embar houses were given

01:43 - to, or offered to Allah as a kind of sacrifice, as a community effort, an enormous human effort and financial, sacrifice for the people. And sometimes it took more than a year to construct this house, which is filled with mud sculptures of local people doing things, a couple sitting side by side, as you see on the left, of animals of, other human beings and holding, a jug of palm wine or, or, a, a white man emerging from a hole in the ground,

02:28 - which tells a story of, of early, Europeans, all kinds of, of things heard about and hoped for out of mythology and out of daily life. And there can be as many as 200 modeled clay figures in Anbar, the one that we're looking at had about 40 figures in it. but the, the centerpiece is the goddess Allah. And you'll notice that the faces of all the, the human beings that we see are white,

03:04 - and the people, of course, are dark skinned. and I asked why Allah's face is painted white, and she said, well, we sometimes refer to Allah as dark Allah because she's ambivalent. She can, destroy people, she can kill people, and she can be beneficent. She can, peel yams with the knife that she holds in her right hand, which we'll see in the closeup of Allah. but if you call, if you were

03:37 - to paint her, her face, black or dark, she would be angered. And, this wouldn't be good. So white isn't honorific white for the Igbo people is a color of purity, of goodness, of beauty. And so Allah is honored by having a white face. Doesn't have anything to do with the white faces of Caucasian peoples. It's simply a, a, local color symbolism,

04:06 - which is fairly widespread in Africa, actually. So, this house, this architectural complex of sculptures is a sacrifice built in a long ritualized process with men and women who are initiated into the process behind a concealing fence. The house is built over a period of months and sometimes more than a year. And I came to realize that Allah as the centerpiece, as the, as the, the deity to whom this, this,

04:45 - effort is dedicated, that that motherhood in the, in the form of Allah is a kind of ramifying cultural phenomenon. That she is the font of morality. She is the guardian of tradition among the IBO people. And if you offend her by polluting the earth, for example, through bloodshed, she's going to come after you. She's going to, to, give you trouble. if you make good, good gestures towards her

05:26 - sacrifice, for her, then she will, she will repay you by giving you children and, abundant fields, yam and so forth, researching Allah and maari houses over a period of more than a year, I realized that, motherhood was a cultural cons construct. And when I did my second bout of field work in the early seventies in southern Ghana, I came up upon images

06:04 - and shrines of queen mothers and ahan society in Southern Ghana. The Ashanti peoples and the FTI peoples are matrilineal, and they accord great respect to mothers, and especially to queen mothers who are involved in choosing kings. They're not necessarily the actual biological mothers of kings. They can be the king's aunt, but she, she has a role in choosing the king

06:36 - and in, serving as a kind of counselor for all women. And she's an important political force. So I realized that maternity images of mothers and children, can be political instruments as well. And so the, the sculpture that you see on the screen is of a queen mother with her feet raised on, a footstool. And she is wearing sandals to keep her feet from, being polluted by the ground in this instance.

07:16 - So Earth in Ghana is not treated in the same way as it is among the Igbo people. So that made me realize that there are many cultural differences in the images of maternity and in how they are visualized and how, motherhood is carried on, carried on. So my research for this book on maternity stresses these cultural differences.

07:51 - Biological maternity, of course, is the same everywhere. Fertilized sperm reaches fertilized egg after nine months, a child is born. That's it. This is the same everywhere. But the cultural, ideas and practices around eternities are enormously varied from one place to another. For example, in ancient Egypt, ISIS was a great culture bringer. a a mother goddess who was responsible

08:28 - in ancient Egyptian thought for the annual flooding of the Nile. So it was Isis who brought agriculture to the Egyptian people. She brought, she introduced marriage, she introduced weaving. She was a great magician and doctor, a protector of women and children of childbirth and so forth. So here again, is an example of, motherhood and images of mothers, which are

09:05 - in great quantities in, the art history of Egypt, for example, there are hundreds, probably thousands of images of Isis with her son Horace. and she was responsible too for, Egyptian political life. So Isis was a political force, as was the queen mother in Ghana. And if we were to move to, if we move to the Sun UFO people of, northern co Devo, ivory Coast and southern Mali, pardon me, west

09:47 - of, of Ghana, we find ancient mother in this stylized image of a suckling child with his, mother. And ancient mother is the head of the all male, the titular head anyway, of the all male initiation society, often referred to as Poro, PORO, in, in Suno culture. And it is said that ancient mother, who is a creator deity swallows, initiates male initiates at the beginning

10:28 - of their initiations at the age of, 10 or 11 or 12, and then, gives birth to them as adults many years later. And it is also said that ancient mother nourishes and nurtures her children with the milk of knowledge, which is the marvelous phrase in my view for what initiation is all about. Initiation in all cultures is about schooling, is about, learning to, to be an adult, learning, responsibility, learning, the, the lessons of morality

11:14 - and, and so forth. As one passes through grades in, in, schooling, which is our initiation, one learns more. And hopefully you end up, being a, a responsible adult doesn't always happen, but that's the ideal. so ancient mother nurtures and gives the milk of knowledge to her initiates over a very long and protracted initiation process

11:48 - for sun UFO people. then if we were to move to Ethiopia in south in, sorry, in northeastern, Africa, we have images of Mary and her beloved son, Jesus Christ and Mary in Ethiopian history, which embraced Christianity in by the fourth century, ad Mary, became a political force under the emperor, Zara Yakob, who reigned in the middle of the 15th century,

12:34 - Zaria Cobb as emperor institutionalized the cult of Mary and Mary became more important as a deity for Christian Ethiopians than Christ himself was. There was an alt, Zaria Cobb ordered that an altar be made to Mary in every church, and that the 29th of every month was a feast day or a a, a, a day that was set aside to celebrate Mary. The hundred miracles of Mary were, some of them at least, were recited at every church service,

13:16 - and thousands upon thousands of images or icons of Mary, like the one you see, which is a 17th century, image of Mary and her beloved son. Thousands upon thousands of images were made, they were, held in households and of course in the hundreds and hundreds of churches. So the cult of Mary was used by Zaria Cobb to unify his empire in the 15th century. And Mary continues to be a critically important

13:53 - deity for Ethiopian Christians. Then the question arises, often, the image of a mother and child is often referred to as a mother, as a frail fertility goddess. And yes, fertility is certainly involved in images of, of mothers and with children, they appear ens, shrines that are for, childbirth sometimes for they appear in medicine, shrines in healing shrines, in ancestral shrines. And, yet there are many images of mothers

14:38 - and children that are not deities and that are not necessarily about fertility among the Yoruba people. For example, in southwestern Nigeria, about 250 miles west of the Ebo whom I studied, there are thousands, tens of thousands of images of mothers with children suckling or with children on their backs or with children arranged around them in various ways. None of those Yoruba m fraternities represent deities.

15:15 - They all, according to research, done among the Yoruba, they all represent worshipers of the deities, and they will be found enshrined to those deities. And they're often given by worshipers to enhance the shrines of, the various deities, whether it's, sh go the god of thunder or, any other of, the many deities in the pantheon of, Yoruba religious thought. I want to speak a little bit about the difference between

15:56 - our ideas of motherhood in the western world and African ones. what we have to realize is that young children are with their mothers, both males and females, until they undergo in, this is in rural Africa, by the way, and I should probably have said at the beginning that I'm speaking of Africa in, 50, 60, 70 years ago. Africa, today, of course, is often urbanized and,

16:31 - and people are educated. And, and what I'm speaking of is, probably early 20th century Africa up until the, sixties in, around the year of independence rather than, in the 21st century and 2024. my research was in 1966 and, and, and, and 67 and through the seventies and early eighties. So that's that. Those are the historical benchmarks for, for my discussion of motherhood.

17:09 - not so much today, but I, I do want to stress the difference because children are with their mothers until they are initiated as, young women or they'll stay with their mothers. But young boys will leave their mothers at the ages of, between six and 10 or 12, but they're with their mothers as infinite infants, 24 7. And the mothers will give birth to a child

17:43 - and she'll be back to work, a day or two later, and she will carry that child with her, at all times and, will feed the child on demand and will suckle the child until he or she is three, sometimes longer than that. Whereas in our world, mothers are not with their children to, to that extent. And, and for that ex extensive period, day and night, wherever you see women,

18:21 - you're going to see children. in, in African villages, the children are around everywhere. They're on their mother's backs. They're being suckled. They're, they're walking around. They're, they're, they're part of the everyday existence. and of course, when they reach school age, they're, they're off to school. But Village life

18:52 - is, in some respects, child centered because children were important and large families were important in agricultural communities. And most of the art producing peoples, the sculpture producing peoples are agriculturalists rather than nomads. So large families were important. And, the regeneration of the community and, and, the regeneration of the human race

19:22 - was critically important. Umbari houses, for example, celebrated the goddess of the earth, Allah and other local deities, but they all, but umbari houses were also recreations of the community itself. And they were offered in sacrifice because of some sort of a disaster that visited the community. It might have been, a high degree number of infant mortalities.

19:52 - It might have been a, a plague of locusts or, or something of the very, very poor agricultural year. But that's what, caused Allah through divination, through the fortune tellers to demand, a sacrificial offering, a new house for her to dwell in. And that is what the Embar house is. A sacrifice, a new house for the goddess of the earth or an important local river, God, God, or goddess. Not always Allah,

20:30 - but probably 60, 70% of the embar houses that I saw during my research, were offered to, to this earth goddess.

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