Nomoli and the Sapi Carvers

Farmers in the south and east of Sierra Leone sometimes turn up small carved stone figures in their fields. They are called nomoli. Most are soapstone, some limestone or granite, and they are among the earliest works of art from the country. Portuguese visitors recorded them as early as the fifteenth century.

The people who made them are remembered mostly through what they left behind. The Mende and Kissi, who find nomoli on their land today, place them near homes and in crop fields for good health and a good harvest, and consult them as oracles.

The Portuguese called the coastal peoples of this region the Sapi. They were known carvers before any European arrived, and travellers took their ivory horns home as treasures. In the late fifteenth century Portuguese traders began to commission Sapi artists to carve ivory for export: salt cellars, spoons and horns.

One lidded salt cellar, now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, is carved with three snakes, a Sapi symbol of wealth, confronted by four snarling dogs. Around its base stand four figures in local dress, two of them warriors with swords and shields. It was carved in the late fifteenth or the sixteenth century.

These objects are some of the oldest surviving art from West Africa's Atlantic coast. Most of them now live outside Sierra Leone.