Provenance

Totem Meneghelli Gallery, Johannesburg

Notes

The Senufo champion cultivator staffs—known as daleu or tefalipitya (“hoe-work-girl”)—are among the most emblematic ritual sculptures of the Senufo people of northern Côte d’Ivoire and Mali. Each staff consists of a tall, slender shaft surmounted by a finely carved female figure, hewn from a single piece of wood—a technical and aesthetic feat. The seated figure, always representing a young unmarried woman at the height of her beauty, embodies fertility, abundance, and social prestige. Ornamented and poised in serene dignity, she symbolizes the promise of fecundity and prosperity for her lineage, contrasting with the exertion of the male cultivators she honours.

These staffs were awarded as insignia to champion cultivators—men celebrated for strength, endurance, and mastery in agricultural contests central to Senufo village life. Carried in processions, dances, and funerary rites, the staffs served as both personal trophies and ancestral emblems, preserving the prestige of successive generations of titleholders. In life they proclaimed valour; in death they stood sentinel beside the deceased, marking continuity of kinship and land.

Stylistically, they span the spectrum of Senufo carving. Some exhibit geometric austerity and simplified forms; others display supple modelling, defined hands, and elaborate coiffures.
Expressive yet restrained, these staffs exemplify Senufo artistry’s fusion of symbolic meaning, kinship identity, and dynamic movement—sculpture created to be danced, displayed, and lived with, animating both ritual and community life.

Extract from Senufo Champion Cultivator Staffs
Bernard de Grunne