West Africa

• Guinea-Bissau

West Africa’s only archipelago, the Bijagos Islands of Guinea­Bissau, harbours a unique culture that has remained relatively intact, thanks to limited transport options from the mainland. On these islands football shirts, miniskirts and flip-flops may now be favoured over grass skirts, but the people still hold their animist beliefs, perform ceremonies and traditional dances and attach special significance to creatures such as the hammerhead shark and the sawfish.

The culture of the Bijogo people includes numerous ceremonies to mark important life stages and events for the islanders. As part of the ceremony for male circumcision, sawfish were caught and brought to the village elders as an offering or sign of respect. In ceremonial dances, men used to wear headdresses topped with the saw of a small sawfish and perform a dance mimicking the sawfish’s movements – motions the young initiates reportedly learned while hunting from wooden fishing platforms, below which they could observe sawfishes feeding. Nowadays, sawfish rostra (saws) are so difficult to find that the great triangular headdresses bear carved wooden representations of saws instead of the real thing.

• Ghana

‘When a sawfish attacks another fish, the victim never escapes.’ Akan proverb | Ghana

The Akan people of western Ghana are renowned for making a strong connection between visual and verbal expressions and for how they blend art and philosophy. Proverbs and sayings featured prominently in their culture and had political, economic and social significance. The many beautiful weights they made from 1400 AD onwards were used as counter-weights for measuring out gold dust (their traditional currency until replaced by coins and paper money). These weights, made from brass, often had forms that were linked to specific proverbs.

The sawfish was sacred to the Akan people, symbolising individuals who held power in coastal communities. The proverb associated with the weight depicting a sawfish is ‘When a sawfish attacks another fish, the victim never escapes’. This was meant to convey the indisputable authority of the king. More generally, fishes symbolised abundance in West African cultures. The sawfish symbol, which linked prosperity and leadership, was so important for Akan societies that the West African Monetary Union chose it, in the stylised form of the sawfish weight, to adorn all the coins and notes of the West African franc (the currency of Senegal, Guinea-Bissau and Guinea-Conakry).

Around the Volta Estuary in eastern Ghana, the Ewe people revered sawfishes as spiritually powerful entities, classed as tro, of a divinity between humans and God. The Ewe had formal sawfish propitiation rites to dispel the danger presented when a sawfish became entangled in a fishing net. The powerful spirit was appeased with offerings of corn meal, alcohol and palm oil. If this ceremony was not performed, fishers who caught sawfishes were believed to have bad luck – illness might strike them or one of their family members, or they might be involved in accidents, for example.

Papua New Guinea

Among the many tribes that live along the Sepik River and its tributaries, sawfishes were viewed as supernatural creatures that commanded respect. Numerous stories warned of torrential rainstorms and danger to fishers if sawfishes were mistreated. For some of the clans inhabiting villages along the Sepik, certain ancestors originally took the form of sawfishes and these ancestors were thought to have created particular land estates for those clans. For initiation rituals, a ceremonial wand was fashioned from the saw of a sawfish; as initiates pass from childhood to adulthood in the ceremony, the saw was used to scratch their bodies, symbolically killing and devouring them so that they would be reborn in their new role as men.

Sawfish still inhabit the murky waters of the Sepik River, the longest river on the island of New Guinea. Winding its way eastward across Papua New Guinea to the Bismarck Sea, the Sepik passes through districts with numerous distinct languages and cultures. Many of these cultures feature the unique wildlife of the region, including crocodiles, cockatoos and large flightless cassowaries – and sawfishes. Within a village, each clan has ‘totem’ animals that represent the suite of supernatural creators that founded the clan and images of these totems were, in the past, carved onto shields and the prows of canoes by clan members. Stories featuring totem animals were a part of local culture, a connection between the people, their traditional practices and the natural world around them.

Australia

Groote Eylandt, Australia’s fourth largest island, lies some 45 kilometres (28 miles) from the coast of Arnhem Land in the remote tropical north of the country and is one of the most pristine islands off the Northern Territory coast. The sawfish is a central figure in the creation story of certain clans of the Anindilyakwa people of Groote Eylandt. Indeed, sawfishes are still relatively abundant in this area, and the northern and north-western coasts of Australia are one of the last strongholds for four of the five species of sawfish.

Indonesia

In Indonesia, the teacher who brought Islam to the Hindu kingdom of Borneo arrived atop a huge sawfish, one of several miracles he performed to prove the power and righteousness of the new faith. This pioneering teacher is therefore now known by the nickname ‘Tuan Tunggang Parangan’, which translates as ‘Mr Sawfish Rider’. Sawfish imagery appears in Islamic art throughout the Indonesian archipelago.

Some reverse-glass paintings made on Java feature the story of how the mighty King Solomon achieved humility before his creator. The story goes that when King Solomon took over from his father David, the angel Gabriel appeared and granted Solomon a divine ring from Paradise that gave him dominion over humans, the animal kingdom and the supernatural jinn spirits. Solomon employed his jinn to build a miraculous flying palace and to equip his kingdom with innumerable goods and treasures. In time, he became emboldened by his vast dominion over the earth, its inhabitants and even the winds. To prove his might, he asked God if he might feed all the animals of the world for a day, a task God usually undertook. God warned Solomon that he lacked such power, so Solomon agreed to attempt his wish for just an hour. He used his magic to gather a mountain of grain – enough to feed his entire army for a month – commanding divine winds to transport the sustenance to the seashore. Solomon then called for all sea creatures to assemble to be fed. The first ocean denizen to open its massive maw for food was a whale, which at once engulfed the king’s entire stockpile of food. Aghast, Solomon asked the ravenous whale, ‘Are there other creatures as enormous as you?’, to which the whale replied, ‘O prophet of God, in the sea there are fish so large that if they ate me, I would be as a seed in the desert!’ Solomon then realised that, even wielding the vast powers bestowed upon him by God, he was nothing compared to the greatness of the Creator. So he departed, content with his place in the cosmos.

Panama

The indigenous Guna of Panama occupy the San Blas archipelago and the adjacent mainland along the Caribbean coast. For this people, the sawfish held a special position as an important and beneficial species that, according to their folklore, had been placed in the world to safeguard the coasts and the humans who inhabited them from dangerous sea creatures, including sharks and crocodiles. In this way, the Guna attitude towards sawfishes was similar to the attitude towards dolphins found in much of the modern Western world: sawfishes were protectors and friends of humankind.

Remarkably, the protective role of sawfishes also extended into the supernatural realm. When Guna shamans (a healer or someone with access to the spirit world) entered the watery spirit realm to battle the evil spirits that caused sickness and death, they called upon golden sawfish spirits. Those spirits would appear and repel the titanic crocodiles that the sickness spirits rode, thereby assisting the shaman healers. Molas – the colourful, elaborate panels embroidered by Guna women – often depict scenes and characters from the natural landscape and Guna folklore, including sawfish, crocodiles and sharks. Molas were originally incorporated into blouses and shirts worn by the Guna and are now also sold to tourists as decorative pieces.