Always a favorite of mine is a stool from the Mambila people of Cameroon.
The stool was used when a woman was having difficulty in childbirth, and it
was believed that perhaps there were things that were done in the past that
ought not to have been done that they ought to be confessed before God in
order to purify the situation so that a birth would be possible. It was upon
this very stool that the woman would confess her sins, and the stool is supported
by ancestors with spectral heads staring like skulls from the other worlds.
When she confessed, the release of tension after the admission of guilt would
unlock a difficult delivery. When the woman in labor confessed and told exactly
what she had done, figurations on the stool were like witnesses to her actions,
witnesses to something that is powerful in any of the religions of the world-
Muslim, Jewish, or Christian-that there is nothing more healing, nothing more
efficacious, than the truth.
