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Comments
The gilded one is really unusual - I like it a lot!
I love the simple one on the bottom right that shows a bit of wear on the top.
Many thanx.
The wear is absolutely gorgeous... i personally fell that a piece of jewl starts living and acquires a soul when it gets wear and patina
can you tell me more about the centre one please ...very unusual piece ...
Well Sarah, that is a good question.
I guess these pendants belongs to a very large variety of mysterious pendants often labelled as tuareg but my understanding is that these are peculiar to the traditions of the mixed and cosmopolitan people living in the river Niger inner delta in Mali as well as immediately to the south and east in Niger and Burkina faso.
These people which are widely known as Bella and whom the tuareg consider as slaves or former slaves!!
These pendants are obviously loaded with animistic believes much more than the "classical" tuareg crosses which have evolved into clanic and tribal totems and lost their initial significance!
The two central pendants in each row may be considered in the same way.
My thoughts
The Bella in Mali are officially free, but many still call themselves "slaves". They are extremely submissive - at least this was my experience some years back. There are some who even declare "je suis ésclave" (with pride). Officially they are free, but depend financially on their "owners", who are or were the Tuareg. The worst were the salt workers in Taoudeni, most of them were slaves for reasons of poverty (they took loans for their families to survive and then had to work in the salt mines in order to repay the loans and interests). I do not know whether this situation has improved recently or not. These salt miners were something like economic slaves due to poverty. The work in the salt mines is extremely hazardous to health and extremely hard, therefore the miners there were all more or less Bella or similar ethnies, and caught in a System that could be called "free slaves", a System that was nourished by poverty. But not only the Bella are poor, there are also many other ethnies living in or around Timbuktu and beyond, who are extremely poor (e.g. some Sonrai, Peul, even Tuareg who are considered a "higher" position). it is astonishing that the Bella nevertheless have something like their own culture and jewellery.