Sierra Leone Stone Pregnant Mother and Child Figure, Nomoli Style

West Africa, Sierra Leone, Sherbro or Mende peoples. A squat, powerfully compressed figure carved from pale soft stone, standing on flexed legs with a heavy pregnant belly thrust forward and a deeply drilled navel at its center. The oversized head dominates, its features cut in the bulging-eyed, broad-nosed idiom of the nomoli tradition: a wide grimacing mouth bares two rows of hatched teeth beneath a striated coiffure and pierced ears. A ridged collar or beaded band crosses the chest. The right hand grips a slender implement, perhaps a hoe or blade, while the left cradles a small infant tucked against the shoulder. Nomoli are unearthed and reused across southern Sierra Leone as guardians of rice fields and household prosperity; a maternity subject of this kind was likely intended to invoke fertility and increase. Nomoli (also nomorisia) are steatite and calcite figures turned up by farmers working the soil of southern Sierra Leone and adjacent Guinea, most densely in Sherbro and Mende territory. The earliest are generally assigned to the fifteenth to seventeenth centuries and connected to the same lapidary tradition that produced the Sapi-Portuguese ivories, but the finds were absorbed into a living religious practice: recovered figures were installed in rice fields or shrine huts, fed with offerings, and occasionally beaten if the harvest disappointed. Because that demand never ceased, carvers have continued to produce nomoli in the old manner into the twentieth century, and the genre is best understood as continuous rather than strictly archaeological. The maternity subject sits within a wider West African iconographic vocabulary in which the woman bearing a child is a statement about lineage and abundance rather than a portrait. Here the pregnancy and the infant appear together, doubling the message, while the implement in the right hand ties the figure directly to the agricultural fortune the nomoli were kept to secure. Item # 204661

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