Gongoli

Gongoli, also spelled Kongoli, is the individuated clown character of Mende masquerade in Sierra Leone. His huge, intentionally ugly wooden face mask is often too unwieldy to stay on without a supporting hand, and he appears in rags with a stick that serves by turns as crutch, whip, and lewd prop. Unlike the masked spirits of the Poro and Sande societies, Gongoli is regarded as the least sacred and most secular of Mende maskers, free to crash any festivity, beg, and lampoon chiefs, elders, and onlookers alike; Siegmann and Perani describe him as a vehicle for the ritualized reduction of social tensions through social commentary and criticism. Samuel Mark Anderson's study documents Gongoli's continuing, even growing, fame in contemporary Sierra Leone as a shameless public satirist whose license depends precisely on his exclusion from the sacred masking hierarchy.

Domains

• satire and social criticism

Powers

• to mock chiefs, elders, and social pretensions with licensed impunity, relieving tensions through ridicule
• to barge uninvited into any village festivity, begging, clowning, and breaking the rules of masked decorum

Sources

• Gongoli (Kongoli) is the grotesque licensed clown of Mende masquerade, an oversized ugly face mask whose ragged, rule-breaking performer satirizes authority and social pretension outside the sacred hierarchy of the secret societies.: Samuel Mark Anderson, 'Letting the Mask Slip: The Shameless Fame of Sierra Leone's Gongoli', Africa 88(4), 2018 (secondary); William Siegmann & Judith Perani, 'Men's Masquerades of Sierra Leone and Liberia', African Arts 9(3), 1976, pp. 42-47, 92 (secondary)