Unit 9 · Orders Around the World

In Sierra Leone, Liberia and Guinea, in West Africa, many communities have two old and respected groups. Poro is the society for men. Sande is the society for women. Britannica notes that they also reach into Côte d’Ivoire. In some places the women’s society is called Bondo. No one knows exactly when these societies began.

English speakers often call each of these groups a secret society. That label came from outsiders. It can make a group sound mysterious or dangerous. Scholars today often use a different term: initiation society. Initiation is the set of teachings and ceremonies that make someone a full member of a group. In Poro and Sande, it also marks the change from child to adult.

Much of what these societies do is public. Everyone sees the celebrations. Everyone knows who has joined. What stays private is some of the knowledge taught inside, which only members share. That private knowledge is part of why the societies are respected. Some European visitors and officials called these groups cults. Most scholars today say that label is unfair and inaccurate.

Picture a group of boys walking out of their town with older men of the Poro society. They will live apart for a time, in a special place outside the town, often in the forest. People in the region often call this the bush school. The girls of Sande have their own school, run by older women. Each school has its own teachers, rules and ceremonies.

What do students learn there? Scholars who studied Sande, such as the art historian Ruth Phillips, describe lessons in crafts, songs and dance, healing plants, law and good behavior. Poro teaches young men the duties they will carry as adult men. Students learn to work together and to respect their elders. The length of the stay has varied a great deal from place to place and over time.

When the students come home, the whole community celebrates. The ceremony is a rite of passage, a ritual that marks a move from one stage of life to the next. Many cultures have rites of passage. A graduation, a quinceañera and a bar or bat mitzvah are examples. Poro and Sande make this change a shared event for the whole town.

Imagine two families arguing over who may farm a certain field. In many towns of the Poro region, a quarrel like this did not have to end in a fight. Respected elders could hear both sides and make a ruling. In the past, the Poro society often had a strong voice in such decisions. A dispute is a disagreement that needs to be settled.

The anthropologist Kenneth Little studied this in the 1960s. He wrote about what he called the political function of the Poro. Little described Poro taking part in law, trade rules and even matters of war. He also stressed that Poro worked alongside chiefs. It could act as a check on a chief who misused power.

Scholars still debate how much power Poro held, and the answer changed from place to place. The idea of authority helps here. Authority is power that people accept as rightful. Poro’s authority came partly from respect for elders. It also came from the knowledge only members held. Today, national courts and governments handle much of this work.

Across much of Africa, masks are danced mostly by men. The Sande society is a famous exception. Its helmet mask is called the sowei. A senior Sande woman wears it and dances in it. The mask fits over the whole head like a helmet. It is carved from wood and colored a deep, shining black.

Men who are skilled carvers make the masks. But the women of Sande own them, wear them and decide how they are used. The Art Institute of Chicago says senior Sande officials danced such masks at initiations, at funerals and for visiting guests. The museum calls this one of the rare cases in Africa when women danced with carved masks.

When the sowei appears, Sande members do not treat her as a woman in a costume. She is a masquerade: a spirit made present through mask, costume and dance. The dancer is fully covered. The art historian Ruth Phillips wrote a 1995 book on Sande masquerades. Its title, Representing Woman, points to her main idea: the mask stands for the ideal Sande woman.

Look closely at a photo of a sowei mask. On top sits a tall, carefully carved hairstyle. Below it is a small, calm face with narrow eyes. Around the neck are thick rings or folds. The whole surface shines, as if it were wet. Nothing about it looks careless. Every part was planned.

The art historian Sylvia Ardyn Boone studied these details. Her 1986 book, Radiance from the Waters, is about ideals of feminine beauty in Mende art. Scholars such as Boone and Phillips read the neat hairstyle, the neck rings and the shining surface as signs of beauty, health and dignity. Each part is a symbol, a thing that stands for an idea.

So a sowei is not a portrait of one woman. It is an ideal, a picture of the best qualities a community hopes for. Like a flag or a trophy, it shows what people value. Learners who look carefully at the carving can read many of these ideas. They can do it without knowing any private Sande teaching.

In Chicago, the Art Institute holds a Sande helmet mask. A Mende or Sherbro carver in Sierra Leone made it, sometime in the early to middle 1900s. Its object number is 146941. When this course was written, it was not on display. It rests in storage with other works from the museum’s Arts of Africa collection.

The museum’s label also notes something painful. From 1991 to 2002, Sierra Leone went through a long civil war. A civil war is a war between groups inside one country. The label says the war disrupted the dancing of Sande masks. For years, many communities could not hold their ceremonies in the usual way.

Many museums in Europe and North America hold sowei masks. Princeton University, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston and the British Museum are a few. A collection is a group of objects a museum owns and cares for. Each mask in a collection once belonged to women who danced it. Asking how it left home is part of studying it.

Far to the east of Sierra Leone lies the Cross River region. Today it is split between southeastern Nigeria and western Cameroon. Here lives another famous society, called Ekpe. The name means leopard, an animal that stands for strength. Ekpe grew among the Ejagham people. It spread to the Efik of Old Calabar, a busy trading port. Scholars place this in the 1700s, though the exact date is debated.

Ekpe acted like a town government. Its members judged disputes and made rules. It also enforced debts, money or goods that someone owed. If a trader did not pay, Ekpe could fine him or stop others from trading with him. Historians say this pressure even reached some European ship captains who traded at Calabar.

That trade has a hard side. Old Calabar was a port in the Atlantic slave trade. Ekpe members took part in selling captive Africans to European ships. We know this partly from Antera Duke, an Efik trader and Ekpe member. He kept a diary in trade English from 1785 to 1788. Honest history includes both Ekpe’s role in keeping order and its members’ part in this trade.

Think of a simple sign that everyone in your town understands, like the arrow on a street sign. Now imagine other signs that only trained members may read. That is how nsibidi works. It is a system of signs from the Cross River region. Some nsibidi signs are public and used in everyday life. Others are sacred, and they belong to Ekpe members.

Outsiders wrote nsibidi down only about a century ago. A British official reported it in 1904. A Scottish missionary, J. K. Macgregor, published a list of signs in 1909. A colonial officer, Elphinstone Dayrell, published a longer list in 1911. They could print only the signs that local people chose to show them.

Scholars still debate one big question. Is nsibidi full writing, or a set of signs for ideas? Full writing records the words of a spoken language. Some websites claim nsibidi is thousands of years old. No firm evidence supports that date. The earliest written records we have come from 1904 to 1911.

The slave trade carried many people from the Cross River region across the Atlantic Ocean. Many ended up in Cuba, an island then ruled by Spain. They lost their homes and families. But they did not lose everything they knew. Some carried the memory of Ekpe with them.

In 1836, in the town of Regla, across the bay from Havana, Africans from the Cross River region and their descendants founded the first lodge of a society called Abakuá. A lodge is a local branch of a society. Abakuá was modeled on Ekpe. It gave members brotherhood, mutual help and a shared faith in a land that treated them harshly. The society is still active in Cuba today.

For many years, Cuban police treated Abakuá members as criminals. Members and scholars describe something different: a religious brotherhood that helps its members. The scholar Ivor Miller studied Abakuá and Ekpe for his 2009 book, Voice of the Leopard. His work shows how one African society survived an ocean crossing and slavery.

Poro, Sande and Ekpe are not only history. They are living traditions. Members still take part in them today. Their private teachings are not a puzzle for outsiders to crack. They belong to the people who keep them. This course follows a simple rule: we study what communities share openly, and we leave private knowledge alone.

Here is what that means in practice. We do not describe sacred songs, secret words or medicines. We do not copy sacred nsibidi signs. Some Poro masks are not meant to be seen by women or by people who are not members. So we do not show them. We never act out an initiation in class.

Careful scholars work in a similar way. Writers such as Ruth Phillips and Sylvia Ardyn Boone wrote mainly about what Sande masks show in public. Researchers who study living traditions ask for consent. They share only what members allow. Asking ’Is this mine to share?’ is a skill every historian can practice.

In 1950, Harvard’s Peabody Museum published a study by George W. Harley, who worked in Liberia. It was called Masks as Agents of Social Control in Northeast Liberia. Harley described how masks helped keep order in towns there. His notes are valuable. But he was an outsider, and he wrote mainly for outsiders.

Many masks left West Africa during colonial rule. Colonial rule means one country governing another people’s land. Britain ruled Sierra Leone for many years. Some objects were sold or given as gifts. Others were taken without fair permission. For many museum pieces, the object’s provenance is incomplete. Provenance is the record of where an object came from and who has owned it.

Today, museums and communities are sharing the work of explaining these objects. A digital project called Sierra Leone Heritage gathers records of Sierra Leonean objects. Some are held in Sierra Leone’s national museum and some in British museums. When learners read a museum label, they can ask two questions. Whose voice is this? Whose voice is missing?

In the late 1800s and early 1900s, British officials in Sierra Leone reported a series of murders. The killers were small groups who disguised themselves as leopards. Officials called them human leopard societies. People in the affected areas feared these groups. The victims and their families suffered real harm.

In 1913, a special colonial court, the Special Commission Court, heard many cases about these killings. In 1915, K. J. Beatty published a book about the trials, called Human Leopards. Historians point out a problem. Colonial officials often blurred the killings together with Poro and other respected societies. This conflation made whole societies look criminal.

Two things can share a symbol and still be very different. Ekpe, far away in the Cross River region, is also called the Leopard society. It is a respected community institution. The human leopard killings were crimes by a few people. Careful historians keep them apart, and so can we.

In the 1700s, China was ruled by the Qing dynasty. A dynasty is a line of rulers from one family. The Qing emperors came from the Manchu people of the northeast. They ruled China from 1644 until 1912. The 1700s were a time of peace and growth under strong emperors such as Qianlong.

During that century, China’s population grew very quickly. There was not enough good farmland for every family. Many young men left their villages to find work. They became peddlers, boatmen, porters and laborers. A migrant is a person who moves from one place to another to find work or a better life.

Life on the road was hard and lonely. A migrant in a strange town had no family nearby. If he got sick, lost his job or was robbed, he might have no one to turn to. In southern provinces such as Fujian, on China’s southeast coast, many men faced this problem. Some decided to make new families of their own, bound by promises.

Around 1761 or 1762, men gathered at a small Buddhist pavilion in the township of Gaoxi, in Zhangpu county, Fujian. The pavilion honored Guanyin, a figure of mercy in Chinese Buddhism. A monk called Wan Tixi, also known as Tixi, was linked to the founding. Their group became known as the Tiandihui, which means the Heaven and Earth Society.

The members were bound by an oath, a solemn promise made before witnesses. They promised to treat each other as brothers. This is called a sworn brotherhood. Sworn brotherhood was an old custom in China. The famous novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms tells of three heroes who swore to be brothers in a peach garden.

Why join? The historian Dian Murray, working with the Chinese scholar Qin Baoqi, studied Qing government records. Their 1994 book argues that the society began as a mutual aid brotherhood. Mutual aid means members help each other with money, shelter, protection and support in hard times. In their view, politics came later.

Picture a peddler walking from town to town with his goods hanging from a pole. Roads could be dangerous. Bandits robbed travelers. Local bullies pushed newcomers around. A man alone had little protection. A man with sworn brothers in the next town had help waiting.

The historian David Ownby studied brotherhoods like this in his 1996 book on early and mid-Qing China. He and Murray found that members were mostly poor, mobile men: peddlers, boatmen, laborers and others far from their families. The society gave them a network, a set of people linked together who can help one another.

Was the society a rebel group from the start? This question is still debated. Murray, Qin and Ownby argue that it began mainly for mutual aid and protection. In their view, slogans against the Qing grew later and varied from group to group. Other writers, especially after 1900, described it as revolutionary from its very first day, meaning it aimed to overthrow the government.

Members of the society lived in many towns, and most had never met. So how could a stranger prove he was a brother? The society used recognition signs. These were secret ways of showing membership that outsiders would not notice. They worked like a password you could say with your hands.

Sources from the 1800s describe several kinds of signs. Members held their fingers in certain positions. They arranged teacups on a table in special patterns. They recited lines of poetry. They also used split characters. A split character is a Chinese written character broken into pieces, so only insiders could read the hidden word.

Some care is needed with this evidence. Most of what we know comes from papers that police seized, or from outsiders who studied them. Historians are not sure how often ordinary members really used these signs in daily life. This course describes the kinds of signs but does not teach real ones.

In the 1860s, the island of Java was ruled by the Netherlands. Its main city, Batavia, is today’s Jakarta, in Indonesia. Many Chinese migrants lived there. A young Dutch interpreter named Gustaaf Schlegel worked for the colonial government. An interpreter translates between languages. Schlegel worked from society papers that Dutch colonial police had seized.

Schlegel translated the papers into English. He published them in 1866 as Thian Ti Hwui: The Hung-League or Heaven-Earth-League. The book shows membership certificates, oaths, flags, poems and signs, with folded plates of drawings. It was the first full study of the society by a Western scholar.

The book has two sides. It preserved documents that might otherwise have been lost. It also helped colonial governments, Dutch and British, watch and police the society. Members saw a sworn brotherhood with a proud history. Colonial officials saw a network of rebels and criminals. Both views sit inside Schlegel’s pages.

In the 1800s and early 1900s, some Western writers who studied the society were Freemasons. Freemasons are members of a brotherhood that began in Europe, with its own signs, oaths and lodges. When these writers read about Chinese hand signs and oaths, they saw something familiar. Some called the society Chinese Freemasonry.

In 1925 and 1926, J. S. M. Ward and W. G. Stirling published a three-volume study called The Hung Society. It compared the society’s rituals with Masonic ones. Historians today find books like this useful as records. They also warn that such writers over-read the links between the two traditions.

This shows a common pattern. When people meet something new, they compare it to what they already know. That can help, but it can also mislead. A shared feature is a parallel, not proof of a shared origin. The Heaven and Earth Society grew from Chinese customs of sworn brotherhood, not from European lodges.

Members of the society learned a founding story. In it, monks of the Shaolin Temple help the Kangxi emperor defeat his enemies in the 1670s. Instead of rewarding them, officials betray them and burn their temple. Only five monks escape. They become the Five Ancestors, and they found the brotherhood.

In the legend, the survivors swear to overthrow the Qing and restore the Ming. The Ming was the Chinese dynasty that the Qing had replaced in 1644. The story gave members a noble past. It made their brotherhood part of a heroic fight for loyalty and justice. It also gave them a shared enemy.

A legend is a traditional story about the past that may not be true, but that people value. A founding legend explains where a group came from and what it stands for. Legends matter even when they are not accurate. They tell us what members believed about themselves and hoped to be.

The Qing government first took serious notice of the society in Taiwan in the 1780s. A cloth peddler from Fujian named Yan Yan had brought the brotherhood across the sea. In 1786, officials banned the society and arrested members, including uncles of a local leader named Lin Shuangwen. In 1787, Lin and his followers rose up against the government.

The uprising, an armed revolt against a government, lasted into 1788. The Qianlong emperor sent a large army to crush it. He later celebrated the victory with a set of engravings showing the campaign. Then his officials asked a hard question: where did this society come from? They questioned arrested members and followed the trail back to Fujian.

The questioning produced confessions, statements in which arrested people admitted what they knew or did. These records are kept today in archives in Beijing and Taipei. Historians Dian Murray and Qin Baoqi studied them. They found no evidence of the society before about 1761. The Shaolin story of the 1670s appears in no record from that time.

Historians sort sources into kinds. A primary source is made at the time by people involved, such as a letter, a diary or a government report. A secondary source is written later by someone studying the past. The Qing confessions are primary sources. Murray and Qin’s book is a secondary source built on them.

Government records are strong evidence for dates, places and names. Officials wrote them close to the events. But they have limits. People questioned under arrest may say what officials want to hear, or hide what they know. Officials also had a bias. They saw the society as a danger, so they described it that way. A careful historian reads such records with those limits in mind.

The legend has limits too. No record from the 1670s mentions it. The goal of restoring the Ming does not appear in the society’s own writings until around 1800. In the early 1900s, revolutionaries around Sun Yat-sen retold the legend to win support against the Qing. Still, the legend is real evidence of what members believed and valued. Weighing both kinds of sources gives the fullest picture.

The society went by many names. One of the most common was Hongmen, often put in English as the Hong League. As Chinese people moved abroad in the 1800s, to Southeast Asia, Hawaii, the Americas and beyond, many brought the brotherhood with them. Each new place shaped the groups in its own way.

Overseas, Hongmen groups did many jobs. They helped newcomers find work and housing. They settled quarrels, cared for the sick and made sure the dead were buried. In North America, one large branch was the Chee Kung Tong. In English it often called itself the Chinese Freemasons, though it had no link of origin with European Freemasonry.

Some Hongmen groups turned to politics. In 1904, in Honolulu, the revolutionary leader Sun Yat-sen joined the Hongmen. He hoped to win the support of overseas Chinese for a revolution against the Qing. In 1911 and 1912, the Qing dynasty fell. China became a republic, a country led by elected leaders instead of an emperor.

Not every branch kept to mutual aid. Over time, some groups that traced their roots to the Hongmen became criminal gangs. Outsiders came to call them triads. The English name is usually traced to a triangle symbol the societies used. Triad gangs made money through crimes such as illegal gambling and extortion, which means getting money from people by threats.

Their victims were mostly ordinary people in their own communities: shopkeepers, workers and families. Governments fought back. In Singapore, colonial law banned secret societies in 1890. Police in Hong Kong and other cities worked against the gangs for many years. Shopkeepers who refused to pay, or who spoke up, took real risks.

Historians use careful words here. Modern triads are descended from the Heaven and Earth Society, not identical to it. The Hongmen split into many groups. Some became political, some stayed fraternal and some became criminal. Most Chinese people, at home and abroad, never had anything to do with triads.

In 1882, the United States passed the Chinese Exclusion Act. It barred most new Chinese workers from entering the country. Chinese immigrants already here faced unfair laws and violence. Many could not get help from courts, banks or city officials. So they built their own associations, organized groups that serve their members.

Some associations were based on family names or home districts. Others were called tongs, from a Chinese word meaning hall or meeting place. They helped members find jobs, settle disputes, get legal help and give the dead a proper burial. A few tongs also ran gambling. In New York in the early 1900s, rival tongs fought violent tong wars. Neighbors who had no part in them often suffered.

Chicago has its own story. In 1926 and 1927, the On Leong Merchants Association built a grand hall at 2216 South Wentworth Avenue in Chinatown. It served as a meeting place for the community. In 1988, federal agents and Chicago police raided an illegal casino inside. The government took the building. In 1993 a church bought it, and since 1994 it has been the Pui Tak Center, a community center. Most people in Chinatown were never part of any crime.