Fertility Couple

Origin: Mossi Tribe, Burkina Faso
Composition: wood, leather, cowrie shells, vegetable fiber, pigment dye

Influential with Picasso and other contemporary artists for their imaginative form and unusual linear construction, these very traditional Mossi fertility dolls function to bring fertility to couples who need a spiritual push to have children while also being symbols of tribal progress, wealth, and crop fertility. They were purchased from two young Mossi dealers in Burkina Faso in May, 2006 and are the only complete pair we have seen to date, hence their somewhat higher price than a more common, production piece one may find elsewhere in the Western tribal art market. Sold as a pair.

The Mossi states were created about 1500 A.D., when bands of horsemen rode north from what is now northern Ghana into the basin of the Volta River and conquered several less powerful peoples, including Dogon, Lela, Nuna, and Kurumba. These were integrated into a new society call Mossi, with the invaders as chiefs and the conquered as commoners. The emperor of the Mossi is the Moro Naba, who lives in the ancient and contemporary capital, Ouagadougou.

In the centuries between 1500 and 1900 the Mossi were a major political and military force in the bend of the Niger River and were effective in resisting the movements of Muslim Fulani armies across the Sudan area of west Africa. In 1897 the first French military explorers arrived in the area and staked French colonial claims. During the sixty years of French colonial rule the Mossi population was exploited as a source of human labor for French plantations in Côte d'Ivoire. In 1960 Burkina Faso gained its independence from the French (C. Roy, African Peoples online, University of Iowa).