The Bozo are a Mande people speaking a language closely related to Soninke, while the Marka another Mande group, and the Somono, a Mande group of the Bambara subgroup, are both Manding speaking peoples. They have been living together in towns and villages along the banks of the Niger River and the many branches of the Inland Niger Delta for centuries, harking back to the days of the Mali Empire. The Bozo and Somono are agro-pastoralist cattle herders and rice farmers, but specialize most of all in fishing, while the Marka are known for their mercantile activities.
These 3 peoples share a unique institution, known as the “saho”. Saho’s are sleeping places and community and socialization centres for boys from their teens until they get married around their mid-twenties. This was once a defining institution for the villages and towns of the Inland Delta of the Niger River, though it is now a dying tradition. In the past, each saho belonged to a single lineage, but these days, a saho can belong to a number of families, and a town can have multiple different saho’s. Boys who sleep there are part of an age association, and are slowly initiated through the stages of adolescence and ultimately adulthood. “There they acquire the moral qualities and the sense of mutual aid necessary for the maintenance of ancestral traditions: help for the elderly or for the parents-in-law of a comrade, providing gifts for the newlyweds and performing at festivals.”
From a certain age, girls are allowed to visit boys in their saho’s during the evenings, but are not permitted to stay the night there. These female visits may have a sensual character, and romantic relationships are permitted, but elders will insist that there is a limit on how far they are allowed go.
In their most basic form, a saho can be little more than a large conical grass hut of the same type used by the fishermen, who become semi-nomadic during the fishing season. But the saho’s of the sedentary towns were traditionally highly ornamental expressions of Sudano-Sahelian earthen architecture, one, two or even three storeys in height, housing as many as 40 boys or more. The finest examples are characterized by galleries, pillars, windows featuring brick latticework, bas-reliefs, symbolic patterns, geometric shapes and animal forms, projecting wooden beams and openwork balustrades with conical elements, and phallic forms that underline the masculine pride of the residents of the saho.
The chronology of the architectural development of the saho is not well understood. We find the earliest known depiction of a saho in the accounts of the travels of Eugène Mage (“Voyage dans le Soudan occidental”), published in 1868, and depicts an ornamental one-storey saho in a Somono village, described as a communal home. A similar one-storey structure was photographed in the early 1900’s by François-Edmond Fortier, who misidentified the structure as a mosque. In general terms, the saho didn’t receive much attention from outsiders until the mid-1900’s, considered the highpoint of monumental Sudano-Sahelian saho construction, when even a single small town like Kolenzé could be home to as many as 7 saho’s, competing to dominate the landscape around them with their imposing size and beautifications.
When exactly these multistoried edifices started being constructed is not known. Their monumentalism and general architectural features were inspired by the centuries old stately residences of regional centres like Djenné, Bandiagara and Timbuktu, and developments in their unique aesthetic and ornamental nature were driven by the imagination of the masons who built them as well as the constant insistence of the specific group of boys who commissioned the saho and aid in its construction, that their saho must be bigger and more beautiful than all the other saho’s in town. This was of the utmost importance, not only for bragging rights, but to attract girls as well.
Saho’s were often constructed by master masons from the ancient city of Djenné and other regional centres, trained in the classical building techniques of the region and using traditional materials like mud brick and wood, while on the other hand, the competitive drive between the different boys age associations for ever more impressive and original saho’s, resulted in aesthetic and architectural innovations that make the saho’s straddle a curious middle ground between classical Sudano-Sahelian architecture and Neo-Sudanic architecture. Although all of these features already existed in the precolonial architectural landscape of the region, nowhere were they applied with such originality and variety as in the saho’s.
This is living architecture. Saho’s are made from perishable materials, and without seasonal maintenance, the annual rains quickly strip away exterior decorations and can even compromise the integrity of the structure, potentially leading to collapse. But the annual replastering process also continually changes the character of a saho, from year to year, and generation to generation. Once celebrated monumental structures that dominated an otherwise humble skyline, they may be reduced to little more than glorified piles of rubble in a matter of years, and once neglected and crumbling saho’s may be renovated, or rebuilt entirely, to retake their place among the most imposing structures of a village. A continual process of birth, decay and rebirth.
The institution of the saho faces considerable challenges in modern times. The spicy premarital practices are at odds with stricter interpretations of Islam, and a series of droughts, poverty, rural-urban migration, changing social norms and the transition to modern construction materials have all contributed to the decline of what were once among the most intriguing expressions of Sudano Sahelian architecture. They now lie largely abandoned, crumbling due to a lack of seasonal maintenance, though a series of restoration projects over the past few decades have helped preserve at least a handful of saho’s, such as those at Kolenzé and Kouakourou, now popular with tourists.
If you enjoy this type of content, please consider supporting The African History Channel at: https://www.patreon.com/TheAfricanHistoryChannel
No comments:
Post a Comment