Janus Senufo Heddle Pulley

The Senufo are an ethnolinguistic group made up of diverse subgroups living astride the confluence of Mali, Bukina Faso and Cote d’Ivoire. Even by West African standards, their material culture is particularly rich. The Senufo are justly famous for their wood carving, lostwax casting and weaving. Heddle pulleys, such as this delightful Janus example, are a critical part of the weaving apparatus, easing the action of the heddle as the weaver alternates between sets of weft threads. Weaving pulleys sit roughly at eye level with the weaver working on a West African-style loom. Pulleys with figurative elements were most common in Cote d’Ivoire, Burkina Faso, Mali and Ghana, but increasingly rare in the west towards Guinea and Liberia, and east of the Akan. Their furthest extent to the east are among the Grassfields people of Cameroon, although examples from that region are very rare. However, when it comes to rarity, Janus Senufo pulleys are exceedingly scarce. Of the 777 Senufo heddle pulleys registered on the AHDRC database, less than 4% are Janus images.

This beautiful example comes from the estate of Thomas G. B. Wheeck, the inveterate collector of art and artifacts from Burkina Faso. Tom was a friend of mine. He set his mind to collecting the art of the Burkinabe in 1972, living in the country on and off into the early 1980s. His catalog number for this piece suggests that he acquired it relatively early on in his time there. Later in his collecting days, he bought from runners, dealers, fellow collectors and at auctions. $700

7″

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