Temne Erotic

The Temne are the largest ethnic group in Sierra Leone, concentrated across the country's northern interior — the savanna and forest fringe inland from Freetown, fanning out through Bombali, Tonkolili, Port Loko, and Kambia. Oral tradition traces a migration from the Futa Jallon highlands sometime before the fifteenth century, and the Temne were already well established when Portuguese traders reached the coast. Their language sits inside the small Mel branch of Atlantic, a quiet little corner of Niger–Congo whose closest relative is Kissi; it is not mutually intelligible with Mende, the other major Sierra Leonean language, and the Temne–Mende distinction has structured national politics since independence.

Most Temne are Muslim, and have been for several centuries — Islam arrived through Mande and Fula traders and clerics from the north and was consolidated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, partly under the pressure of the Futa Jallon jihads. But Temne Islam coexists with the older institutional spine of the society: the secret societies. Poro for men and Bondo (sometimes called Bundu) for women remain genuinely powerful, not folkloric. They handle initiation, age-grade transitions, customary law, and a great deal of what outsiders would call civic life; a chief who lacks standing inside Poro is a chief in name only. The Bondo society in particular is the institution through which Temne women organize themselves across the country, and its masked Sowei figure — a polished black helmet mask worn by a senior woman, one of the few masking traditions in the world performed by women — is among the most recognizable objects of West African art.

Politically, the Temne are remembered for Bai Bureh, the warrior-chief who led the 1898 Hut Tax War against the British, one of the more effective armed resistances to colonial taxation anywhere in West Africa; he is now a national figure rather than a strictly Temne one, printed on the thousand-leone note. The chieftaincy system he came out of is still functional. Paramount chiefs preside over chiefdoms, advised by sub-chiefs and section heads, and they negotiate constantly with elected government — a parallel structure that frustrates reformers and outlasts them. Subsistence is rice-based, supplemented by groundnuts, cassava, and palm oil; in the diamond and iron-ore districts of the north, Temne farmers have spent a century moving in and out of mining work as prices rise and fall.