Grebo
The people of Liberia's south-eastern corner — early converts and early rebels, who produced the country's first indigenous Episcopal bishop and also its most serious nineteenth-century risings against settler rule.
Grebo people
Couple Grebo-1906.jpg · Wikimedia Commons
Identity
Population: Several hundred thousand in Maryland and Grand Kru counties and adjacent Côte d'Ivoire
Location: Cape Palmas, Harper and the south-eastern coast and hinterland
Language: Grebo (a cluster of closely related varieties)
Language family: Niger-Congo → Kru
Traditional governance: Town and clan councils with age grades and the bodio ritual office; the Grebo Reunited Kingdom formed in the nineteenth century to resist settler expansion; Liberian county administration today.
Clans, Sections & Sub-groups (3)
Most African peoples are federations of named sub-groups — clans, sections, chiefdoms or sub-tribes — each with its own dialect, territory and traditions.
Seaside Grebo
Coastal communities around Cape Palmas and Harper.
Interior Grebo
Farming communities of the forested hinterland.
Ivorian Grebo
Related communities across the border, sometimes called Krumen locally.
Gallery
1 images
Culture
Clothing: Country cloth and imported fabric; mask costume of fibre and cloth; nineteenth-century Grebo converts adopted settler dress, which itself became a marker in the conflicts.
Food: Rice with palm butter and cassava leaf, fish, bushmeat, palm wine.
Ceremonies: Masked appearances of the abstract Grebo war masks; funerals with days of drumming; age-grade transitions; the installation of the bodio, a ritual office whose holder is confined by taboo.
Marriage customs: Bridewealth in cloth, livestock and cash; clan exogamy; polygyny historically common.
Initiation rites: Age-grade progression with instruction and public recognition; society membership in some communities.
Stories & Oral Literature
The Grebo WarsHistorical account
Grebo communities formed a Reunited Kingdom in 1875 to resist the Liberian state's expansion inland from Harper, and fought a series of wars against it into the 1910s. The Liberian government eventually prevailed with help including American naval support. The conflicts fixed the settler-indigenous divide in the south-east for a century.
The Mask That Changed European ArtArt history
Grebo masks, with their flat plank faces, cylindrical projecting eyes and radical abstraction, were in Paris collections by the early twentieth century. Picasso owned one and later said it taught him that a form could stand for a feature without resembling it. The history of Cubism runs partly through the south-eastern Liberian coast.
Proverbs
“The town that argues in daylight sleeps at night.”
Open dispute settlement prevents worse.
“A mask sees what the face cannot.”
Ritual perspective.
“The sea brought the strangers; the bush kept the town.”
Coast and interior in the settler period.
Mythology & Spiritual Beliefs
Creation: A high creator with earth and water powers beneath; the bodio's ritual confinement expresses the relationship between the town's welfare and a single consecrated person.
Beliefs: Ancestor veneration; masked spirits; the bodio office with its taboos; Episcopal and other Christianity established since the 1830s and now general.
Ancestors: Lineage dead honoured; the graves of leaders of the Grebo wars are political as well as family memory.
Gods, Goddesses & Spirits
The creator
Distant high god
Mask spirits
Powers embodied in the war and funerary masks
Ancestors
Consulted in town affairs and honoured at funerals
Architecture
Traditional settlements: Coastal and forest towns with palaver huts; Harper's nineteenth-century settler architecture of brick and verandas nearby.
Building techniques: Wattle and daub with thatch; the palaver hut; settler-era brick and timber building at Harper, now largely ruined.
Village layout: Town around the meeting ground and chief's compound; farms in the bush beyond; canoe beach for coastal communities.
Artifacts
Grebo plank mask
Performance
Radically abstract mask with cylindrical eyes, influential on European modernism.
Country cloth
Textile
Strip-woven cloth of the region.
Harper's settler architecture
Heritage site
Nineteenth-century Americo-Liberian buildings at Cape Palmas.
Bodio regalia
Ritual
Objects of the ritual office whose holder lives under strict taboo.
Historical Timeline
Pre-1800
Grebo communities established around Cape Palmas.
1834
Maryland in Africa founded at Cape Palmas by American colonists.
1875–1910s
The Grebo Reunited Kingdom fights a series of wars against the Liberian state.
1900s–1910s
Grebo masks reach Paris and influence Cubist experiment.
1989–2003
Civil wars devastate the south-east; Harper's historic buildings are largely destroyed.
Sources & Further Reading
Open sources
- Britannica: GreboEncyclopaedia Britannica
- Grebo masks and modernism — art historical scholarshipMuseum of Modern Art
Premium & scholarly sources