FOR MORE THAN a century, observers have noted that Komo and Kono power associations prohibit women from seeing their performances and assemblages. Yet in western Burkina Faso today, some Komo and Kono chapters authorize certain women to view their arts, and women not authorized to do so still interact with performers during events or appeal to the organizations’ leaders at other times for help in resolving problems in their lives. Select women work for the organizations, maintaining yards around Komo and Kono houses or preparing food and beer necessary for performances.¹

Whereas Komo and Kono exclude women from seeing their arts, other power associations in western Burkina Faso, including the popular organization Wara, allow and even encourage women to attend their performances. The gendered prohibition thus serves as a defining feature of Komo, Kono, and the organizations’ arts. Throughout the twentieth century, authors underscored the male orientation of Komo, characterizing it as a “grand brotherhood” (Monteil 1924, 269–270), “the secret of men” (Travélé 1929, 129), or “men’s initiation association” (McNaughton 1979a, 2). But focusing on all-male membership and male-only activities of Komo and Kono disregards gendered complexities recorded in even the earliest published accounts of the organizations. French colonial administrator Louis Tauxier writes that while Komo and Kono are often characterized as “secret,” they are actually “not very secret because they comprise almost all the men in a village” (1927, 272). Highlighting the gendered nature of secrecy surrounding the “not very secret” organizations, Tauxier explains that the organizations are secret for women, children, and strangers. However, he still acknowledges women’s engagement with Komo, adding that rather than refer to Komo by name, women call it Tyéko. The term means “male,” he writes, but also refers to a woman’s passion for a man (Tauxier 1927, 274).

Nearly forty years before Tauxier published his text, French military officer Joseph-Simon Gallieni had already written about Komo. A gendered complexity can be observed in Gallieni’s description of the Komo events he witnessed during a mission from 1879 to 1881 through what is now Mali. Historian Jonathan E. (Akare) Aden asserts that references to women in Gallieni’s account “[stand] in contradiction to the Western assumptions about Komo as a strict domain of men in perpetuity” (2003, 55). As Aden goes on to suggest, “considerable evidence supports a pivotal and powerful place for women in [Komo] that has not yet been discussed by scholars.” Other, mostly male, observers have focused on the organizations’ male orientation. Women and men I interviewed in western Burkina Faso led me to reconsider characterizations of Komo and Kono as male institutions. They repeatedly told me that Komo and Kono leaders prohibit most—but not all—women and children from watching the associations’ performances. In fact, I uncovered story after story of women engaging with local chapters as well as the arts the organizations sponsor. Many women reported that they stayed inside during Komo and Kono performances, and they described experiencing fear. They also relayed stories of eager participation in and keen consideration of the organizations’ activities. Their accounts suggest respect rather than resentment or feelings of oppression.

Research that focuses on individuals’ accounts of single performances yields more nuanced pictures of those events (cf. Drewal 1989, 39). Similarly, the gathering of various but particular experiences of a certain kind of performance allows for a fuller but less streamlined understanding of the range of possibilities for that kind of event. This approach, which characterizes my work, coincides with how Bruno Latour (2005) understands the term social. According to Latour, social does not describe an entity or essence that exists separately from individual actors but rather denotes the accumulation of their various interpersonal connections. Latour asks, “Does this [understanding] mean that we have to take seriously the real and sometimes exquisitely small differences between [sic] the many ways in which people ‘achieve the social’?” He answers, “I am afraid so” (Latour 2005, 36–37). Because most reports of women’s experiences of Komo and Kono reduce women’s participation to fear, it is especially important to examine individual women’s stories. By attending to the overlaps and variances in their descriptions of a single masquerade or different instances of a particular kind of event, I recognize women among the many actors who create the social rather than posit a “social” norm imposed on them or any group.

In the previous chapter, I examined ways in which performer-audience interactions yield dynamic events that are not simply predetermined by set practices, but rather respond to and are shaped by specific individuals acting within certain contexts (cf. Drewal 1989, 1992). Indeed, power association leaders involved in performances seemed not just aware of but attentive to their different audiences, including women prohibited from seeing certain events. We have seen that Komo and Kono performers assess their audiences in order to calibrate their engagement with the crowds they attract. The crowds include both literal spectators and unseeing participants. Shifting focus to how different people experience power association performances reveals that women constitute important audiences for Komo and Kono. Consequently, it is impossible to abide by descriptors of Komo and Kono that discount women’s involvement in and contributions to the organizations.

The unseeing but ever-present audiences of Komo and Kono force a reassessment of audiences for masquerades in Africa. Not only must we examine how audiences have an impact on the design and execution of masquerades, but we must also consider how a single performance may entail different kinds of audiences (cf. Barber 2007). Scholars and critics at times use spectators as a synonym for audience, implying a group of people who are physically present for an event and can see it (e.g., Bennett 1997; Lancaster 1997; Nield 2008; Freshwater 2011; Goode 2011). Drawing on the Greek etymology of the term theater and its relation to Greek words meaning “to see,” “to behold,” and “a view,” Erika Fischer-Lichte explains that theater “is first and foremost a medium based on sight” (2008, 60). She and other scholars have considered what it means for performers to see their audiences (Freshwater 2009, 50; see also Wagner 2000; Fischer-Lichte 2008). Other scholars have examined various kinds of audiences: a ghostly audience is one that performers imagine when preparing for live performances (e.g., Goode 2011, 468); a lack or near lack of human spectators at an event characterizes an absent audience (e.g., Blackburn 1996; Nair 2009); an invisible audience comprises people not physically present for a live performance (such as a radio broadcast) but still implicated in it (e.g., Black 2012). My study of Komo and Kono performances reveals yet another kind of audience—the unseeing audience. The unseeing audience consists of people who are physically present at a live performance and who interact with performers but are prohibited from actually seeing the event other people can see.

Komo and Kono Refracted through Gender

Kono leader Ibrahim Traoré told me he wished women could see Kono arts, as the organization’s leaders would then pull larger audiences to their performances.² But the prohibition seems to have crossed time and space. From the late nineteenth to the early twenty-first century, observers have described Komo’s and Kono’s restrictions on women’s viewing of their performances and the risk of untimely death a woman courts if she violates the prohibition.³ Gallieni (1885, 324–334) describes an absence of women in the crowd gathered to participate in the Komo activities he witnessed. He claims that death awaited women and children who did not stay in their houses during the events (Gallieni 1885, 327, 328, 329). Other observers of Komo and Kono in different places and moments write that sounds alert women and children to masqueraders’ emergence.⁴ They state that women become filled with fear and seek shelter.

When I first considered studying Komo, Kono, and their arts, I knew I was choosing a topic my gender would likely disqualify me from observing with my eyes. For an art historian, this decision may seem unusual, but some female scholars have noted that their status as foreign researchers afforded them opportunities not available to local women, suggesting one possibility for gaining access to performances. In her analysis of Komo helmet masks in communities of Mali identified as Bamana, Sarah Brett-Smith explains that “a foreign female researcher is often regarded as having a male persona and is therefore permitted access to information that might not be available to Bamana women” (Brett-Smith 1997, 71n2; see also Brett-Smith 1994, 4–5). My pursuit of interviews with men about topics considered the purview of men and with the assistance of a male research associate has in some ways aligned me with the male sphere. Yet rather than accord me a male-equivalent or third-gender status, power association leaders and other community members in western Burkina Faso have insisted on my inherent femaleness. I have joked that I do not do women’s things—prepare meals, carry water, or take care of children—and so am not one like the women around me. Nobody has accepted the alternative position I have proposed, indicating that neither my comportment nor my foreign status overrides my femaleness. When men unfamiliar with me referred to me as male due to the slacks I wore, they were quickly corrected by people who did know me. Avoiding specific reference to my anatomy, my research associate, Dahaba Ouattara, hinted on multiple occasions that people’s insistence on my femaleness reflects their assumptions about my biology and, more specifically, my presumed capability to conceive and bear children.

In fact, my own subject position as well as attention to my interactions with different women and men led me to identify and assess complexities in women’s and men’s roles in organizations often framed as exclusively male. As anthropologist Kirin Narayan explains, “frankness about actual interactions means that [the researcher] cannot hide superficial understandings behind sweeping statements and is forced to present the grounds of understanding” (1993, 680). When Gnatio Traoré and Tchiwolo Traoré, daughter and wife, respectively, of the since deceased Kono leader Moukanitien Traoré, said that women and children enter their houses after children shout to announce the imminent start of a Kono performance in their town, I probed for more information. They explained that Kono activities often last for several days, but women and children do not stay inside continually for the duration of the activities. The Traoré women said that when an overnight performance takes place in the town, women and children stay in their houses. They sleep less well when Kono events take place in their neighborhood than when the activities occur elsewhere in the town. Following an overnight performance, Kono events often relocate to an area beyond the town’s limits. When Kono activities take place outside the town, women emerge from their houses to work until Kono members return to the town for additional performances or sacrifices that require women to shut themselves in their houses for shorter periods of time.⁵

The details that the Kono leader’s daughter and wife shared with me stand out because women’s voices are largely absent from accounts of Komo and Kono recorded from the late nineteenth century to the present. In her study of bogolan cloth in communities of present-day Mali, where power associations have also been prevalent, Brett-Smith (2014, 26–30) observes a tendency toward silence among women. But a lack of women’s voices in written records as well as women’s decisions to remain quiet do not mean that women do not have their own experiences of, responses to, or understandings of Komo and Kono.⁶ As I developed relationships with women and men in western Burkina Faso, I sought opportunities to hear what women were willing to tell me about Komo and Kono. Before I recorded any information, I informed the women of my plans to share what they told me, and they decided whether or not they would talk with me. I honor the women’s names and accounts I gathered by relaying them here.

When I interviewed elder women during the annual marriage festivities in Sokouraba in July 2007, I asked them about Komo and Kono performances they had encountered.⁷ At first, they seemed reticent to respond with detailed accounts, and they brought cloths to their eyes to emphasize their point that women do not have permission to see Komo and Kono performances. I asked the women whether they had any stories about experiences with the performances to tell, such as a time when one of them might have been at a well or elsewhere when she heard the warning sounds. Tchipé Traoré said an alarm sounded as she fetched water from a well, perhaps a direct response to the example I provided, a memory of an actual event, or a story for the foreign researcher. She added that she let the cord holding a water bucket fall, presumably into the well, and ran for shelter. After Traoré shared her story, the women’s initial quietness in response to my question seemed to turn into an eagerness for each woman to offer a story. Their accounts resonate with each other but also allow for acknowledgment that women’s stories are individual. Subtle differences in the accounts indicate that each woman encounters Komo or Kono events in her own way.

A woman named Tiblé Traoré offered the next account. Once, while she pounded dried okra and another woman collected mangoes, she heard sounds heralding a performance. Gesturing as she talked, she recalled covering her eyes with a cloth upon hearing the noise and trying to find her way back to her house with the cloth blocking her vision. Upon arriving at the house, she stumbled inside and fell to the floor in a fetal position. She stayed on the floor because she was scared to die and wanted to avoid death. After Tiblé Traoré told her story, Tchipé Traoré described another instance when, while carrying a child on her back, she heard sounds signaling that members of a power association chapter were traveling to a nearby town. As soon as she heard the noise, Tchipé Traoré removed the child from her back and pulled a cloth over their heads until a man told her that the entourage had passed and she and the child could continue safely on their way. Naliyere Coulibaly then added her own story, recounting a time when she and her companions heard the alarm as they returned to town from the fields. They covered their eyes and hit the ground. Prompted by my question, the women became animated in telling stories about encounters with Komo or Kono. They also engaged their audience, a single foreign researcher and her research assistant, a woman who had grown up in the town and whom they knew.⁸ Even if I could not cross-check any single report, the accounts suggest women share or retain vivid stories about Komo and Kono.

Women’s interactions with Komo and Kono chapters during the annual marriages further reflect their engagement with—rather than exclusion from—the organizations. At the public opening of marriage festivities in the towns of Sokouraba and Kangala in 2006 and 2007, young brides and their entourages stopped in front of Komo, Kono, and other power association houses to honor local chapters (fig. 4.1). Dahaba Ouattara’s mother, who is also named Tiblé Traoré, told me that near the end of the multiday marriages, married and widowed women often gather in the evening at neighborhood entrances to sing songs insulting men.⁹ During an interview the day after women sang such insults, Traoré laughed when she recalled a previous occasion when she heard sounds warning of Komo or Kono activities as women mocked men in song. She implied that men, tired of listening to women’s insults, found a quick way to send women into their houses and end the singing.¹⁰

The study of masquerade in and beyond Africa has long distorted gender dynamics surrounding the art. In 1982, as a matter of fact, Henry Pernet called for more nuanced analyses of masquerade and gender. He writes, “We can only be struck by the male complicity which emerges from some accounts in which the anthropologist (male) does not for a second question the information given by his informants (male as well), according to which the men know all about masks but the women are fooled by them” (Pernet 1982, 57). Indeed, much of the distortion in studies of masquerade may reflect male researchers’ gendered bias.

Inspired by Anita Glaze’s study of gender and male initiation association performances in northern Côte d’Ivoire in the late 1960s and 1970s, Elizabeth Tonkin focused on women’s experiences of masquerade. Tonkin asserts, “It is possible—who knows—that women [in communities across West Africa] do not always cower in their houses when the Masks [or masquerade performers] go by outside, even though the men would like to think so” (1983, 171; see also Glaze 1975, 1976, 1981). Margaret Thompson Drewal describes women from certain Yoruba performers’ families who considered sitting inside during a performance a “[demonstration of] solidarity with their father or husband” (1989, 207; 1992, 119). Drewal adds, “These women seemed to enjoy the excitement of the event and sat inside either joking among themselves or chanting along with the men parading by outside.” When she studied masquerades in Dogon communities of Mali, Polly Richards (2006, 101–105) found that women talked inside homes about the performances of particular individuals, including their husbands and friends, even though men claimed women did not recognize the specific identities of the men dancing masks. Pernet, Tonkin, Drewal, and Richards each point at women’s complex experiences of masquerade performances, including events that women cannot see. Their insights indicate that women’s engagement with and contributions to Komo and Kono necessitate analysis (see also Aden 2003, 45n37, 51–56, 79–87, 116–117).

FIGURE 4.1. Procession of women in front of Komo power association house during annual marriage festivities. Sokouraba, Burkina Faso, July 20, 2007. Fieldwork image: 2007–10099.

Children, men from communities without Komo or Kono chapters, local men who engage in certain occupations, or even foreign male researchers may at times be excluded from Komo and Kono events. When Philippe Jespers (2001, 56; 2013, 41) first heard sounds of a Komo performance from within a completely dark room, he had not yet received permission to see the activities. He writes that as someone who was initially prohibited from seeing Komo performances, he first experienced them from within a confined space filled with darkness and terrifying sounds.

Not all women are excluded. Some women and girls reported to me that they were born under the protection of a Komo or Kono chapter and consequently are permitted to see certain performances (see also Diamitani 1999, 47n15; Bangali 2002, 29n6, 248). Wonou Traoré told me she was born under the protection of her father’s Kono chapter and thus allowed to see the chapter’s performances. At the time, Wonou Traoré’s father, Mélégué Traoré, was a prominent politician and international diplomat. She had spent most of the ten years of her life in Burkina Faso’s capital, Ouagadougou, and had also traveled internationally. Despite her urban upbringing and foreign travels, she said she eagerly anticipated visits with her father to his rural hometown to attend the family’s annual Kono festivities. Traoré confidently asserted that she knows what Kono is, is authorized to see it, and has. However, she did not have the right to talk about Kono with me or anybody else, including her mother, who was not sanctioned to see it.

During the same interview and on subsequent occasions, Wonou Traoré’s mother, Anne-Marie Traoré, told me that she does not believe in Kono. A devout Roman Catholic, Anne-Marie Traoré stressed her belief that Kono must absolutely be the work of the devil. The older Traoré preferred to attend Mass every morning at five, praying for everybody in her family, including her husband, who, she said, dismissed Catholicism as white people’s business. Catholicism and Kono coexist in the Traoré family, but neither appears to eclipse the other (cf. Reed 2003, 40–46). Anne-Marie Traoré also respected the family’s annual Kono festivities. She said that when the masqueraders come out, she stays inside because, unlike her daughter, she is not allowed to see Kono. When Kono masqueraders have greeted her at the house, she has remained inside and conversed with performers on the other side of the wall. When responding to the performers, Anne-Marie Traoré closed her eyes in order to ensure she did not see something she was not allowed to see.¹¹ A daughter and mother in the same family experience Kono in dramatically, intentionally different ways.

Despite her claims that Kono must be the devil’s work and that she did not believe in it, Anne-Marie Traoré maintained that people not permitted to see Kono should seriously heed the proscription.¹² She reported that a sneak peek of a Kono performance provoked the misshapen mouth of one of the wives of her husband’s brother, the renowned Kono leader Drissa Traoré. Anne-Marie Traoré relayed that people familiar with the Traoré Kono chapter said that the morning after Drissa Traoré’s wife hid to see a Kono performance, her face became lopsided. Concerned about the possibility of graver misfortune or death caused by the wife’s sight of something she was not supposed to see, people who cared about her did everything they could to save her from falling ill and dying. The interventions averted the woman’s death, but her disfigurement continued to bear witness to the transgression.¹³ When women see Komo or Kono performances they are not authorized to see, death does not necessarily immediately follow by execution or other speedy means. Transgression may result in disfigurement or disability, or it may precipitate an untimely death at a future moment.¹⁴

Stories of women breaching the prohibition to see Komo and Kono performances also indicate that even though women at times told me that they should not discuss Komo and Kono, both women and men talk about the organizations, their activities, and their arts.¹⁵ Less than a week after a May 2007 performance hosted by the Bangali Komo chapter in Sokouraba, Dahaba Ouattara and I saw people gathered outside the house of the chapter. Ouattara later told me that the people had assembled to intervene on behalf of a woman who had seen the performance even though she was not authorized to see it. Ouattara said he gathered information about the incident through a conversation with the former leader of another Komo chapter and by overhearing a group of women talk about it as they braided each other’s hair.¹⁶ Ouattara relayed that the woman who saw the Komo performance hailed from elsewhere but had moved to Sokouraba after marrying a man from the town. Despite the injunction against her or other women seeing the performance, she viewed part of the event after an argument with her husband. The woman reportedly liked to listen to music, and she thought her husband had warned her not to go to the performance because of their argument. She was also unfamiliar with Komo because she came from a town without an active Komo chapter. When she heard the music, she followed the sounds and arrived at the performance, where her husband’s brother saw her. Ouattara reported that when the woman learned she had seen something she was not supposed to see, she asked whether an object covered with horns and feathers was in fact the thing she was not supposed to see. The family consequently sought the costly intervention that Dahaba Ouattara and I saw taking place. The reparations could bring uncertain results, as future illness, misfortune, or even the eventual death that everyone faces might later be attributed to the violation of viewing restrictions.

The Unseeing Audience

As I shifted my focus to women as an unseeing audience integral to Komo and Kono performances, I began to identify women’s other contributions to the organizations. My findings challenge the idea that the institutions operate squarely within men’s domains. When I first discussed my research with power association leaders and other community members, they often responded immediately to tell me that women are not allowed to see Komo and Kono assemblages and performances. I was familiar with the prohibition, and I assumed people wanted me to know that as a woman, I could not see what I had traveled a great distance to study. Then, in September 2006, I offered power association leader Karfa Coulibaly a wooden helmet mask base. I had commissioned the carving from the now-deceased blacksmith-sculptor Bè Coulibaly (see fig. 2.11). When Dahaba Ouattara and I delivered the wooden helmet mask base to Karfa Coulibaly’s house, the power association leader indicated that accoutrements for Kono are more important when they come from a woman.¹⁷

Coulibaly’s statement prompted me to consider another dimension of women’s importance to Komo and Kono—namely, women’s procreative potential. In an article on power association arts and process, Brett-Smith writes, “The female sex is, for women, the single sacred object whose power exactly balances that of the ritual objects [such as Komo and Kono assemblages] artificially constructed by men” (Brett-Smith 2001, 134).¹⁸ She also argues that Komo helmet masks visually reference female genitalia (Brett-Smith 1997). Power association leaders and other men I interviewed did not explain helmet masks in the same terms, but they did connect Komo and Kono to women’s procreative potential in other ways. For example, power association leader Karfa Coulibaly compared Komo and Kono to cikonre, the yearly event that elder women lead to prepare young women to become wives and mothers, roles the young women begin to assume at the end of cikonre.¹⁹ Inhabitants of Sokouraba and nearby towns often referred to the event as the annual marriages. In the past, cikonre began with clitoral excision, now declared illegal in Burkina Faso, and many cikonre activities exclude men.²⁰ By the early 2000s, the event no longer encompassed women’s surgeries. But in Karfa Coulibaly’s hometown, cikonre still began at a location identified as the “place of excision,” suggesting that excision as a concept remained an important part of the event. Women, but not men, were permitted to approach the place, a location imbued with the potent capacity for human reproduction (see also Bangali 2002, 77–80).²¹

The power or energy to effect change, including the giving or taking of life, is known as nyama in Mande languages or as nyàmbe in the Senufo language Sìcìté.²² It is this power or energy that Brett-Smith references when she compares the female sex to Komo and Kono objects. When managed capably, nyama can help individuals and communities. It can also cause great harm. Thus, leaders of cikonre events, like Komo and Kono leaders, limit access to activities that involve enormous concentrations of nyama (cf. Picton 1988).

Material concentrations of nyama in Komo and Kono arts made visible during masquerades distinguish the organizations’ performances from other power association events. Wara chapters draw crowds to their fire-wielding performances. Yet, as I noted in the previous chapter, men in western Burkina Faso indicated that Komo, Kono, and Wara events are alike in that they provide specialists with opportunities to identify and comment on individuals’ or communities’ actual or potential problems. Performers address crowds, pull certain audience members to the side to offer private counsel, and move through towns to speak with cloistered listeners. Performers vie for prestige and recognition, and they earn distinction through stories that circulate about their abilities to manage potent materials and energies as well as capture audiences’ attention, provide keen insights, and suggest impactful solutions.

The phenomenon of staged power association performances is so widespread that the events and contexts surrounding them vary in significant ways. But the events require audiences, even absent ones, and audiences do not just passively receive activities happening around them (see also Cole 1985, 22; McNaughton 2008, 53; cf. Bennett 1997, 1). Women’s and children’s reception of performances they are prohibited from seeing may contribute to the design, execution, and impact of the events, meaning people not allowed to see the event constitute a distinct audience. And the unseeing audience is integral to Komo and Kono performances. Similarly, Susan Vogel argues that when women “[keep] themselves invisible and submissive . . . they enact part of the explicit purpose of the bo nun amuin dance” in communities of central Côte d’Ivoire identified as Baule (Baoulé) (1997, 193).²³ If unseeing audiences were not important to Komo and Kono events, the associations’ leaders might stage them in venues less proximate to spaces that women and children commonly inhabit. Instead, Komo and Kono leaders orchestrate events within towns, sending women and children into their houses to witness the performances without seeing them.

Proximity to the sounds of a Komo or Kono performance rather than to its sights creates a select audience for the event. Women reported to me that they look forward to and seek opportunities for hearing performers’ pronouncements. Some women may travel long distances to festivities they know they will not be able to see and find shelter with friends or relatives to experience the events, even though they do not witness them by sight. Citing personal communication with Kassim Koné, McNaughton (2001, 178) relays that the singing of particular Komo performers has at times appealed to women. He refers to women who decided to spin cotton or do other work during overnight performances in order to listen to the events (see also Aden 2003, 88). Women’s eagerness to attend performances so they can hear the pronouncements and music underscores the importance of the auditory dimension of the events.²⁴

On May 19, 2007, Komo leader Yaya Bangali worked with other specialists to prepare for an overnight performance of his family’s Komo chapter in his hometown of Sokouraba. His older cousin, Lamissa Bangali, traveled from Ouagadougou to Sokouraba for the event. Yaya and Lamissa Bangali maintained that I could not see the performance nor record its sound. However, Yaya Bangali offered to let me spend the night in his son’s vacant one-room house with Dahaba Ouattara’s wife, Massoun Traoré, their eight-month-old daughter, Susan, and Traoré’s friend, Noumousso Sangare. The four of us experienced the event, even though we could not see it, from inside the house.

Around ten that night, with flashlight, mat, and bucket in hand, Dahaba Ouattara accompanied the four of us to Yaya Bangali’s courtyard. I entered the house with Traoré, baby Susan, and Sangare. Traoré, her daughter, and Sangare took the bed. I set my mat on the floor and placed the bucket nearby. Once we found our places, we firmly closed the wooden window shutters and door. Traoré and Sangare insisted we turn off our flashlights and keep them turned off in order to avoid any accusations that we tried covertly to view the performance. I had anticipated that we would need to shut the windows and door, but the mandate to turn off our flashlights inside the room surprised me. I had not considered the possibility that someone might see light emanating from inside our room and think we were trying to see the event happening beyond the walls enclosing us.²⁵

In telling me to turn off my flashlight and keep it turned off, Traoré and Sangare were instructing me on how to experience a Komo performance as a woman who cannot see it. Their recognition of appropriate behavior reflects self-awareness and ways of being part of the unseeing audience that were not immediately obvious to me. In her study of women’s religious movements in Egypt in the 1990s, anthropologist Saba Mahmood distinguishes between “unconscious enactment of tradition” and “critical reflection upon tradition.” She explains, “insomuch as the capacity to perform a task well requires one to be able to stand back and judge the correctness and virtuosity of one’s performance, a certain amount of self-reflection is internal to such labor” (Mahmood [2005] 2012, 54). Traoré and Sangare’s instructions for me suggest that women respond intentionally to performances they cannot see. They consciously recognize and define expectations for unseeing audiences.

After we took our places in Yaya Bangali’s son’s room and turned off our flashlights, we said little to each other. I soon heard sounds I assumed came from the performance, including unfamiliar music and indistinguishable voices, perhaps the disguised voices of people I knew. The four of us experienced the performance aurally and through a shared absence of sight, aspects integral to the event’s design. Women learn to recognize sounds indicating an impending performance, and over time, they listen with experience to performances from inside dark rooms. According to Boureima Tiékoroni Diamitani, Komo performers use whistles to render their voices unrecognizable to women and children. He asserts, “It is difficult to imagine the Komo only by the voice” (Diamitani 1999, 98–99). But for many women, the sound of a Komo performance may dominate their sensory experience of the event. They may or may not imagine people they know performing.

As I listened to unfamiliar sounds and muffled voices in the distance, I found myself thinking about visual aspects of the multisensory performance and wishing an ethnomusicologist were experiencing the event with me. I imagined Komo helmet masks and full-body outfits I had seen in museums or reproduced in books worn by performers, some likely men I knew and had interviewed. My companions and other women and children witnessing the performance from inside dark rooms probably did not have identical visual points of reference. I wondered what, if any, images of the activities outside came to any of their minds and how, if at all, the women variously understood the sounds they heard.

We emerged from the room around six the next morning. Later that morning, I asked Massoun Traoré if she had ever imagined what the things she is not allowed to see look like. She told me that she listens to the performance but does not envision it.²⁶ Throughout the night, she remained attentive to performers’ suggestions or insights related to our lives and well-being. She remembered one performer who, from somewhere outside, addressed women witnessing the performance from behind closed doors. The performer said that women not greeted should not feel slighted, because there were too many women in the courtyard for performers to greet individually.

Months before attending the Bangali Komo performance, I asked Komo leader Yaya Bangali about women’s interactions with masqueraders they are advised not to see. He said a masquerader might pass by a house and request that a woman inside sing while the performer outside the house dances.²⁷ During a separate interview, Tiédourougo Marie Ouattara told me that even though she was born under the protection of the Ouattara Komo in Sokouraba and was authorized to see the chapter’s performances, Komo activities scared her when she was a child. She remembered that as a child, she joined other children and women who ran for cover and fell asleep inside during the performances. Ouattara also recalled that the Komo performers at times came to the door without opening it and talked to women inside. She recounted a particular event when a Komo performer reprimanded her mother. Ouattara and her mother were inside when the performer asked the mother why she had insulted her daughter. The performer gave Ouattara’s mother instructions to make amends for the misdeed.²⁸

When a performance begins, a woman may respond to it with separate concerns in mind. Dahaba Ouattara’s mother, Tiblé Traoré, told me that after her brother, Kono leader Moukanitien Traoré, had died, she sat next to his cadaver in the old stand-alone kitchen of his late first wife in the siblings’ hometown of Kangala. She and women sitting with her heard sounds announcing the arrival of Kono performers from the nearby town of Bama. According to Traoré, the other women vacated the kitchen. Traoré preferred to stay next to the cadaver to keep mice from nibbling it. Kono performers from Kangala then came out near the house where Traoré sat, but she remained next to the cadaver. She reported that several performers even greeted her as she kept vigil. The door to the kitchen was closed, and someone had filled the windows with sacks so that she could not peer outside. But Traoré said that she would have stayed in the kitchen even if the windows had not been filled. She added that in order to protect herself from seeing the things she was not allowed to see, she would have wrapped a cloth around her head.²⁹

Western Burkinabe women’s descriptions of their own experiences may not align neatly with academic assessments of women’s agency in terms of either men’s oppression of women or women’s opposition to men’s power. According to Tiblé Traoré, if women lost Komo or Kono after it fell into a well and men retrieved it as people claim, then women cannot complain about men’s maintenance of Komo or Kono.³⁰ Komo’s and Kono’s directives prohibiting women and children from seeing certain performances also do not translate into women’s and children’s exclusion from such events. As I have demonstrated, women and children hear and otherwise experience the activities. They listen carefully to performances that power association leaders insist women and children not see while accepting the unseeing audience’s nearby presence. Women also sometimes engage, from behind closed doors, with performers who greet them or offer advice.³¹ And women attend to other concerns even when present for a performance they are barred from seeing.

The idea that many women seemingly accepted and willingly contributed to Komo and Kono at first puzzled me, because I had imagined that women might resent the organizations and their arts. But then I realized multiple possibilities for women’s agency. Mahmood ([2005] 2012) demonstrates that European and Euro-American scholarship has tended to equate women’s agency with resistance and liberal politics and that these formulations may result in scholarly blindness to the range of women’s experiences in diverse cultural and historical contexts (see also Oyěwùmí 2002, 2003a, 2003b). Thus, according to Mahmood, analysis of women’s experience “remains encumbered by the binary terms of resistance and subordination [pervasive in poststructuralist feminist theory]” ([2005] 2012, 15; cf. Butler 1993, 1999). Drawing on the data she collected among women in Egypt in the 1990s, Mahmood shows that women at times choose to embody—rather than challenge—norms. Women who engage with Komo or Kono may also choose to accept certain gendered practices and even contribute to their reinforcement (see also Aden 2003, 87). Women do not have to resist male oppression to have agency, and across the three-corner region, they may maintain and advance their own individual and collective knowledge of Komo and Kono, even if they cannot see the organizations’ performances.³²

Women’s Power

As we saw in the previous chapter, stories that circulate about individual specialists, performances, and their outcomes contribute to seeing and unseeing audiences’ understandings and expectations. During one interview, Lamissa Bangali emphasized the power of a renowned expert, recently deceased at the time, when Bangali told me that the man had collected a jar of clitorises during his lifetime.³³ I never saw the jar. However, if the specialist actually collected a jar of clitorises, then he likely did so at considerable risk and with significant skill. According to Brett-Smith, the clitoris is “the most glaringly anomalous source of female nyámà [potent energy]” (2001, 133; see also Brett-Smith 1994, 208–209; 2014, 40–41, 204). The organs the man reportedly gathered also likely constituted an important ingredient in his work. Whatever the case, the fact that people told stories about the power-packed materials he acquired and kept at his disposal underscores their understandings of the specialist’s abilities to heal or to cause harm as well as the potency of female organs.

The idea that expressions of women’s sexual and reproductive potency would bolster a specialist’s reputation seems to coincide with Karfa Coulibaly’s suggestion that cikonre events operate as a counterpart to Komo and Kono. It also resonates with stories that credit women with the founding of Komo and Kono. Notes from the 1907–1909 Deutsche Inner-Afrikanische Forschungs-Expedition (German Inner-African Research Expedition) led by Leo Frobenius through western West Africa refer to an older female mask and younger male mask for Kono, and the notes also suggest the team thought women may have been the first owners of Kono masks.³⁴ During separate interviews, western Burkinabe power association leaders Yaya Bangali, Karfa Coulibaly, N’gartina Coulibaly, and Moukanitien Traoré asserted that women originally owned Komo or Kono but relinquished the organization and its arts to men at some unspecified moment in the past.³⁵ Each power association leader explained that a long time ago, women accidentally dropped Komo or Kono power objects into a well, the depths of which they could not overcome to retrieve the objects. Men rescued the objects from the well and decided to keep the objects for themselves, thereby supplanting women as owners of the objects and thus as leaders (cf. Diamitani 1999, 88–92; Aden 2003, 76). N’gartina Coulibaly added that, during Kono performances, men sing, “Women gave birth to Kono, but they cannot see it.” This verse clearly signals that without women, Komo and Kono would not exist (cf. McNaughton 1979a, 37–38, 50n45; Koné 2022, 247).

Such a foundational narrative for Komo and Kono is not specific to the two organizations. Observers elsewhere in West Africa and in the world have documented similar stories of men taking over masks from women along with the institutions that sponsor the masks.³⁶ In a rare analysis of myths of “a former Rule by Women,” Joan Bamberger (1974) argues that the accounts do not necessarily reflect specific historical events, but rather serve to distinguish women from men and establish male authority. Bamberger asserts that “the final version of woman that emerges from these myths is that she represents chaos and misrule through trickery and unbridled sexuality.” Bamberger advocates for eradicating the myths to liberate women (1974, 280). Her assessment of such myths as oppressive may reflect twentieth-century feminist discourses instead of aligning with the experiences or opinions of women in places where such myths are prevalent. Other versions of Komo’s and Kono’s origins also circulate. As we have seen in chapter 1, some accounts foreground Islam as well as Mecca or other distant locales. Such variation may reflect different personalities involved in and local circumstances surrounding each telling, an observation that Jack Goody (2000, 26–47; 2002) made with respect to the narration of myths in northern Ghana. References to distant locales may also signal desires to incorporate objects and knowledge from afar into power associations.

In addition to identifying women as foundational owners of Komo and Kono, western Burkinabe power association leaders and other community members recognize women who have helped establish or sustain individual Komo and Kono chapters in their towns. Do Ouattara, son of a deceased Komo leader with enduring renown in the area, recalled that a woman financed the founding of his family’s Komo chapter in Sokouraba. He identified the woman as Djeleni Ouattara and explained that she sent men in her family with money she had earned from spinning cotton to obtain Komo, even though she was not permitted to see it. The fact that he remembered her name but not the names of the men she had entrusted with obtaining and installing the chapter suggests that women’s contributions are in at least some instances indispensable to installing Komo, a process that people in the three-corner region often describe as a marriage between chapters (see also Colleyn 2001, 191; 2009a, 26; 2009b, 53–55).³⁷

The idea that a new power association chapter marries an established chapter reflects understandings of marriage in the three-corner region. According to sociologist Oyèrónkè. Oyěwùmí (2002, 2003b), for more than a century, European and Euro-American conceptions of marriage have regarded women as wives within male-dominated nuclear families. Such framing fueled European and Euro-American feminist discourses throughout the twentieth century. Drawing on her own research in southern Nigeria as well as comparative examples from elsewhere in West Africa, Oyěwùmí explains that in many West African contexts, family groupings are not limited to the nuclear family, that women are defined more by their roles as mothers than as wives, and that marriage constitutes an agreement two extended families negotiate over a period of time. Oyěwùmí’s assessment of marriage in West Africa appears to apply to marriages in western Burkina Faso that people in the area described to me.

Even though details of each marriage varied, people I interviewed described certain ideals. They told me that the process often required a man’s family to amass significant resources, offer them to the family of the woman being married, and wait for the woman’s family to accept the offer. The woman might participate in the annual marriage festivities at the same time. If the two families agreed to proceed, the man’s family would eventually construct a stand-alone kitchen for the woman. Completion of the building marked the end of the marriage process. If the woman subsequently gave birth to a child, a trusted elder woman would bury the child’s placenta in the kitchen or bedroom of the baby’s mother.³⁸

The installation of a new power association chapter entails an analogous sequence of events. In general, to install a new chapter, an aspiring chapter leader forges relationships with other experts in order to secure their trust, acquire restricted knowledge, and gather difficult-to-obtain flora, fauna, minerals, and other matter. Once the aspiring leader procures the resources he needs to open the new chapter, he and other power association members, including members of the established chapter, work overnight to erect a building for the new chapter.³⁹ Ouagadougou-based power association leader and musician Konomba Traoré added that the construction process includes the burying of important materials somewhere in the new chapter’s building.⁴⁰ Traoré did not specify the type of materials that are buried in the building, and they may or may not include a placenta. But Do Ouattara reported that Komo leaders who seek fame use placentas in other ways.⁴¹

While people at times refer to the installation of a chapter as a marriage between chapters, they also employ other metaphors to characterize the rapport between the new chapter and the established one (see also Colleyn 2001, 185–191; 2009a, 26). Some scholars have likened the relationship to the one between a child and mother (Zobel 1996, 637–638; Colleyn 2009a, 26) or one between a son-in-law and father-in-law (Colleyn 2009a, 26). A new power association chapter, like a child or a person married into another family, gains knowledge from and is expected to defer to people in more senior positions (see also Brett-Smith 2014, 39, 215–216). However, one’s position within a dynamic network of power association chapters, like one’s position within an extended family, does not remain static; rather, it changes as the network or family evolves. A power association chapter that stems from a parent chapter may one day become the parent to another new chapter.

Power association chapters depend on other interactions with women, further demonstrating the importance of women to the organizations. Women and men in western Burkina Faso told me that women serve as bamusow (pl.; bamuso, sg.), titled positions within power association chapters (see also Aden 2003, 80–87). Male power association leaders and a female bamuso I interviewed explained that guidelines for selecting a bamuso and her specific responsibilities vary depending on the chapter she serves and other circumstances. A bamuso may inherit the position or be nominated for it. She may or may not be born under the protection of the Komo or Kono chapter she serves. When she becomes a bamuso, she may or may not gain authorization to see objects or performances. Bamusow commonly maintain grounds around houses of the power association chapters they serve. During performances and other chapter gatherings, bamusow and other women at times provide offerings or prepare food and drink for power association members and distinguished guests.⁴²

Tiotio Ouattara told me she became the bamuso of the Bangali Komo chapter in Sokouraba after the death of her mother, the chapter’s former bamuso. As the chapter’s bamuso, she prepared rice for events the chapter hosts and swept around the Bangali Komo house. Tiotio Ouattara explained that she was not born under the protection of the Bangali Komo chapter and had not been allowed to see Komo prior to becoming the chapter’s bamuso. After receiving an invitation to undertake the position, she prepared offerings for the Bangali Komo chapter. On the night that she presented the offerings to the chapter, the thing she had not been allowed to see—presumably the masquerader—emerged. Tiotio Ouattara reported that she stopped, looked at it, and wondered what would happen to her.⁴³ She did not say more about what exactly she witnessed or what happened.

Women at times hold other titled positions. Men usually lead Komo and Kono chapters. But between 2005 and 2007, several western Burkinabe power association leaders identified Koutié Barro and Sita Traoré as female leaders of Komo chapters in the area. The women acknowledged the titles when I visited them but declined to talk with me in greater detail about their roles.⁴⁴ Clearly, female leadership exists in Komo, but the reticence of Koutié Barro and Sita Traoré further suggests that power associations in western Burkina Faso do not operate simplistically with respect to gender. Perhaps the two women have been fully integrated into the association and earnestly embrace its practices of secrecy, or perhaps they grasp the tenuousness of their involvement and desire not to draw attention to their positions.

The Sénagali and the Chicken

One of the songs for Komo that Tauxier recorded in print in 1927 states, “The little sénagali bird drinks in the courtyard of the house from the same water pot as the chicken.” The song continues, “Why? It’s because he does not have his own water pot” (Tauxier 1927, 285). Apparently offering a gloss for the song, Tauxier writes, “This [song] means that women must sing Komo songs, the songs of their husbands, because they do not have their own Komo” (1927, 286). The French colonial administrator’s interpretation signals women’s participation in Komo: women (as the sénagali) sing because they do not have Komo (a water pot) for themselves. But could his explanation have reversed the order? If the song is indeed about men and women sharing a container filled with a life-giving substance, then could the song point to men (as the sénagali) who recognize the life-giving potential of women (as the chicken at home) and men’s efforts to access similar energies? In either case, the song suggests that rather than dividing them, the shared water pot requires the sénagali and the chicken to come together and negotiate access to a life-giving substance.

Komo and Kono leaders are often men who overtly manage potent matter and energies. The notion that the organizations exclude women may reflect observations that have, for more than a century, focused on limits the organizations place on women’s visual access to the organizations’ arts. The prohibition itself seems indisputable, and women in western Burkina Faso I interviewed reported experiencing it. Their statements about feeling fear at announcements of impending performances and then taking cover to avoid seeing arts they were not authorized to see resonate with other observers’ characterizations. Yet women’s experiences of the organizations and their arts were not limited to fear. Women offered distinct accounts of where they were and what they were doing when performances interrupted their activities. They declared interest in listening to and experiencing Komo and Kono performances in order to gain insight into their own lives and well-being. They recalled exchanges with performers from behind closed doors. Women also reported engaging with and supporting the organizations’ activities in other ways—for example, by assisting with preparations for performances or seeking private consultations with Komo or Kono experts to address problems in their lives. Women allow power association leaders to enact power, demonstrating agency that neither resists that power nor is oppressed by it.

Focusing on individual women’s accounts, as I have done here, allows me to “reassemble the social” (Latour 2005) and recognize women as part of a critical audience for Komo and Kono. Women constitute unseeing but ever-present audiences for Komo and Kono. Performers engage with rather than disregard their unseeing audiences, people who are physically present at an event and who interact with performers but are prohibited from actually seeing the event that other people can see. I have thus offered a new frame of analysis. Indeed, in each chapter, I have investigated power associations and their arts through meaningful but often overlooked perspectives. In the next and final chapter, we will turn our attention to yet another viewpoint, one of Malian filmmaker Souleymane Cissé. The filmmaker develops his own understandings of Komo in his award-winning film, Yeelen (1987). In the film, Cissé, who is not a Komo leader, develops a distinctive perspective for presentation to a global audience. He also investigates tensions between seeing and not seeing, features of power association arts examined throughout this book.