African Folklore: An Encyclopedia - Marshalls University

African Americans 259
Robert Gessain in Senegal, shows Bassari masks brought out during farming rites.
Women dance with masks called Gwangwuran and Odener. The same anthropologists
also filmed rituals of Bassari initiation, including a dance that had already been filmed by
Dittmer for the IWF of Göttingen (The Children of the Chameleon, 1969; The Time of the
Chameleon, 1969).
The famous antiwitch Gelede festival of the Yoruba in Nigeria is shown in a film by
Peggy Harper (Gelede: a Yorulea Masquerade, 1970). The festival culminates in the
midnight appearance of the Efe mask in the market place of Ijio, near the Benin border.
The film Owu: Chidi Joins the Okoroshi Secret Society (1994), by the German
anthropologist Sabine Jell-Bahlsen, focuses on the initiation of a young boy into a men’s
secret society. Several masks (notably Owu, Icharra, and Nono) appear along the ritual
process. The aforementioned black-and-white Disumba (1969), made by the
ethnomusicologist Pierre Salée in Gabon, reconstitutes the initiation ceremonies of the
Bwiti, the Mitsogho male brotherhood. During the ritual, the initiates take a
hallucinogenic substance called iboga, so as to encourage seeing the deities appearing
under the form of masked dancers. A Japanese filmmaker, Susumo Noro, has shot a film
called Jungle Gods (1973) on the same subject for the NAV Man TV series. Sequences
with dance and masks may also be shown in films dealing with other topics, as Maama
Tseembu (1992).
For fifty years, the treasures of African folklore and art have been acquired, sometimes
by force, sometimes with the consent of African peoples in question, and sold in Western
markets. The process has been documented in The Statues Also Die (1953); The African
King (1991); and In and Out of Africa (1992).
Spirit Possession
Cults in which divinities express themselves through the voices of the dancers they have
chosen and “taken” flourish all over Africa. Spirit possession has found some cinematic
coverage, although in less detail and abundance than in literature. In books, the emotional
aspect of the experience has often been undermined, but in films, this dimension is better
expressed. Many films dealing with trance and possession, such as Rouch’s Les maîtres
fous (1955), conform to the psychoanalytical position that fantasy life translates an
attempt to gain psychic mastery over traumatic experiences. However, in other contexts
(in Togo, Mali, Bijago Islands) those possessed appear to be very quiet persons, fulfilling
their duty as officials of a cult. Filming a rainmaking ceremony that Rouch has also
filmed several times, Olivier de Sardan focuses on relations between Islam and
possession dances and on the way religious attitudes face vital problems affecting the
community (The Old Woman and the Rain, 1972). The moving pictures convincingly
restitute the different attitudes—not only of the possessed people, but also of the
filmmakers—implied by such an abstract phrase as “possession crisis.” Jean Rouch
dedicated many films to this topic as it occurs among the Zerma-Songhaï in Niger.
Initiation to the Dance of Possession, shot in Tillabery in 1948, was probably the first
film on the subject to be shown in a movie theater (during the Biarritz Festival). Rouch’s
material is especially interesting because he filmed the same ritual several times over the