(gentle piano music) - [Zucker] We're in the
Metropolitan Museum of Art, in their African galleries, looking at this extraordinary
terracotta figure. - [Van Dyke] We have a seated
figure who's pulling one knee up and wraps his upper
body around that knee, turning his head in this uncomfortable way to the side on his knee. - [Zucker] And the way
that the clay was shaped creates this snakelike quality that allows the body to turn and move in a way that seems to defy any kind of internal skeletal structure. - [Van Dyke] I think that this object could represent somebody who is ill. When I first started
studying these objects I was very drawn to,
frankly, how weird they are. - [Zucker] And expressive. - [Van Dyke] There's something
fantastical about them. What I saw as very highly imaginative but the longer that I've studied them the more questions I've developed around what exactly is being represented here. - [Zucker] We should say at the outset that we know very little
about these figures. This is one of approximately 1000 objects that have been found. Most have been looted and
so we have very little firm archeological
context for these objects. - [Van Dyke] They are a
perplexing group of objects. We have a very wide date range for them because we have very few objects
that were found in context. But they pose a tough question to us because lacking context,
we can never really fully understand how they were used. However, they constitute an
incredible resource for us because they're one of the
few large corpuses we have of objects before the colonial period. So they absolutely demand study. - [Zucker] If these are figures
with a kind of affliction, if this is an expression
of pain or perhaps sorrow, it stands in such contrast
to so much sculpture where the ideal figure is represented. - [Van Dyke] And even within
this corpus of 1000 objects there are objects that are very strong. There are horse and riders, for example, the paragon of strength during this period of the trans-Saharan trade. - [Zucker] And by trans-Saharan
trade you're talking about kingdoms that
developed trade networks that crossed the desert, that
moved from Sub-Saharan Africa through to the Mediterranean coast. - [Van Dyke] We think that these figures emerged in the context of the collapse of the first major empire,
the empire of Ghana. We know that there was a
big population movement into the inland Niger delta and that there was a lot
of population pressure around this period when these objects seem to emerge in the historical record. The next empire to emerge
is the Empire of Mali and the founder of that
empire, Sundiata Keita, is born lame and has to learn to walk and overcome this in order to
become this powerful leader who unites the kingdom of Mali. - [Zucker] This is such
a complicated moment because you have the
introduction of Islam, you have older traditional religions, you have the building and
collapsing of empires. - [Van Dyke] And you also
have an incredible movement of goods and people. You have traders coming down to Timbuktu, you have another group of traders coming up to the city of Djenné and you have the Niger river
which is the super highway of the trans-Saharan trade. I would argue it's also a disease factor. - [Zucker] And so these
could be representations of disease, either those
that have contracted disease or perhaps those that are
trying to ward it off. In this particular sculpture we have the most elaborate back. We see these forms that stand off the back that almost look like soft buttons and we also see these circles
that have been incised in rows in between the button forms. And it's all so regular and decorative that they could be pustules,
perhaps a kind of abstract representation of a pustule or of a buboe, of a blister of some sort
but they also could be some kind of scarification,
they could be deliberate. - [Van Dyke] Are we seeing
a number of symptoms loaded onto a figure, that kind of representation of
illness in a big sense? Is this a depiction of
various particular symptoms of a particular illness and could this kind of stylization on the back, could that be a kind of response, an attempt to ward off illness? It's almost impossible to know. But people who overcome illness, we can imagine might also be seen as very spiritually powerful. - [Zucker] If we look at the
torso there is this flaring from the narrowness of the neck into this very large belly
and very strong legs. - [Van Dyke] I think other
scholars might even argue that they don't see illness here and that just see a very expressive and very creative representation
of the human body. But I would go back to the
point that you're making about looking at the body swelling
and the way that the torso swells and we move down into
these very substantial thighs but as you move down the rest of the leg you really see a kind
of shrinking in the calf and then these very tiny feet. This is the value of having put together a very large corpus. We've a lot of comparative material and I frequently see this
kind of shriveled lower limb and even have see it to the
point of great elasticity where the limb becomes very plastic and is even thrown over the shoulders which, to me, looks like
something very much akin to polio. Again, raising the question,
are we seeing a representation of arrival of particular diseases that may have come through
the trans-Saharan trade. - [Zucker] The fact that
we have so few find spots, that we have so little
archeological eveidence to go with these figures
makes interpretation difficult in and of itself. So this is a real conundrum. When these figures were first discovered they were being excavated using scientific archeological methods but
very soon, looters took over and the vast majority of
objects in museums today are coming from looted
sites which means we don't have a find spot and we don't
have archeological evidence. There's another layer
though, which is that in order to reduce further looting there's been a kind of a
moratorium on scholarship about these objects to help
reduce their attractiveness to the market and to private collectors. - [Van Dyke] It's an
understandable position and as you say, rightly, it's a conundrum. However, the objects that are out are out and I would argue that we must find a way to make these objects speak. We have to ask them
different kinds of questions than the kinds of questions we would ask if they were in an archeological context. - [Zucker] We can't pretend
that they don't exist. (piano music)