Human Rights, the Dozos’ Qur’an, and the Hunting Songs of Dramane Coulibaly: ISM Fellows Lunch Talk with Joseph Hellweg

Over the past two decades, scholars in Guinea, Mali, France, and the US have debated the possibility that West African hunters proposed the first coherent declarations of human rights, even before the Magna Carta. The focus has been on “oral traditions” allegedly dating from the thirteenth-century Malian state, founded by the hunter-king, Sunjata Keita.

However, these debates ignore the song texts of living hunters who have played important roles in the political life of the contemporary Ivory Coast. Here, since the early 1990s, hunters have become unofficial police and rebels under three successive regimes of Islamophobic and xenophobic presidents. In these contexts, their songs featured at organizational and strategizing meetings.

Such songs most commonly appear, though, at hunters’ all-night funeral performances. Dramane Coulibaly, until his death in 2024, was one of the Ivory Coast’s most outstanding singers of these songs. This talk explores his performances for insights that echo but also enrich human-rights-related claims made about ancient hunters’ texts.

His songs, and their performance contexts, embody an ethos of relational personhood and defy easy dichotomies between orality and literacy in ways that make them a compelling counterpoint to human rights discourse and practice in the Global North.

This event is free, but registration is required. Lunch will be provided.

Open to Yale Community only.

Contact: Katya Vetrov

Speaker bio:

Joseph Hellweg is a cultural anthropologist in the Department of Religion at Florida State University. At the ISM, he is writing a book on the songs of Dramane Coulibaly, his host in northwestern Côte d’Ivoire. Dramane sang to calm the “shadows” of deceased dozo hunters after their deaths, enabling them to transition peacefully to the afterlife. Hellweg reads these songs as reflections on ancient dozo “oral” texts that scholars have interpreted as alternative sources of human rights. Together, Dramane’s songs, and the dances they inspired, performed a relational model of human capability that expands human rights discourse.

In addition to accompanying dozo hunters in Côte d’Ivoire (Hunting the Ethical State, 2011), Hellweg has done research with N’ko healers in Guinea and Mali (Living the City in Africa, eds. Obrist, Arlt & Macamo, 2013), and with LGBTQI+ activists in Côte d’Ivoire (Public Religion and the Politics of Homosexuality in Africa, eds. van Klinken and Chitando, 2016).