A Fine and Rare Sherbro Clay Palette, Liberia

Julius Carlebach, New York
Mr. and Mrs. Stanley Marcus, Dallas
Acquired at Christie's New York, May 5, 1995, lot 7

Eliot Elisofon and William Fagg, The Sculpture of Africa, 1958, p. 71, fig. 71

The Clay Palette from the Stanoff Collection

Wojeh is a particular type of white clay used for a great number of medicinal purposes in Sierra Leone. Palettes were once employed to grind and mix powdered clay with water and sometimes herbs to make a paste that could be used as a medicine to relieve a variety of problems, including bee stings, for which the paste was applied to draw out the poisons.

The clay is also used as a sort of “cosmetic.” Girls, for instance, wear the clay while undergoing initiation into the Sande Society. When used in this fashion, the clay is mixed with herbs and animal fat or oil to make it adhere to the body, and is meant to serve as a kind of spiritual protection for the girls during a stressful and demanding period. Another purpose is to identify the girls as being in a spiritual state, so that if men accidentally encounter them the girls can easily be identified as initiates. Men are not allowed to touch initiates or even speak to them while they wear the clay. 

Most palettes were undecorated and fewer than a dozen are known with the carved head decoration seen here. The earliest documented example was collected among the Sherbro (southern Bullom) in Sierra Leone between 1888 and 1898 and is now in the Museum für Völkerkunde, Basel. Most examples seem to have been collected in the first decade of the 20th century. Several have two small horns at the ringed neck. The small horns represent duiker horns, which were commonly used to contain potions meant to protect individuals. The high-ridged hairstyle is indicative of a woman of high status, a style that was fashionable in the late 19th and very early 20th centuries.

William C. Siegmann