Word.ws English Dictionary

sowei

sowei noun: a guardian spirit of a Sande society of the Mende, who is represented by a special helmet-like mask.

Noun

sowei (plural soweis)

  1. A guardian spirit of a Sande society of the Mende, who is represented by a special helmet-like mask.
    • Snakes are quite frequently depicted on sowei masks and it is possible that they are related to Sande lore or ritual practices, since snakes are found in rivers where the Sande spirit lives and where a number of important ceremonies take place.1980, Ethnologische Zeitschrift Zurich, page 123
    • Like the men's society, the corporate consciousness of women and their respected place in the political body is represented by a masked spirit. This sowei (masker), like all the officials of the society, represents the corporate body of women and retains the authority to levy fines and punish women...2012, L. Day, Gender and Power in Sierra Leone: Women Chiefs of the Last Two Centuries, →ISBN
  2. (broadly) A woman who represents a sowei by wearing a sowei mask.
    • Like the men's society, the corporate consciousness of women and their respected place in the political body is represented by a masked spirit. This sowei (masker), like all the officials of the society, represents the corporate body of women and retains the authority to levy fines and punish women...2012, L. Day, Gender and Power in Sierra Leone: Women Chiefs of the Last Two Centuries, →ISBN

Examples of sowei in a sentence

  • This sowei (masker), like all the officials of the society, represents the corporate body of women and retains the authority to levy fines and punish women and men or the community as a whole.2012, L. Day, Gender and Power in Sierra Leone: Women Chiefs of the Last Two Centuries, →ISBN:
  • Each Sande group is led by one or more Soweisia who have custody of the sande 'medicine' and the sowei masks.2013, Frances Harding, The Performance Arts in Africa: A Reader, →ISBN, page 140:
  • The ndoli Jowei (dancing sowei) is a masker whose figure is completely covered with black raffia, topped by the sowei mask.2012, L. Day, Gender and Power in Sierra Leone: Women Chiefs of the Last Two Centuries, →ISBN:

Forms of sowei

pluralsoweis

Questions about sowei

What does sowei mean?
Sowei means a guardian spirit of a Sande society of the Mende, who is represented by a special helmet-like mask.
How do you use sowei in a sentence?
This sowei (masker), like all the officials of the society, represents the corporate body of women and retains the authority to levy fines and punish women and men or the community as a whole.
What part of speech is sowei?
Sowei is a noun.
What is the plural of sowei?
The plural of sowei is soweis.

Words near sowei in the dictionary

  1. sowed dragon's teeth
  2. sowed one's oats
  3. sowed one's wild oats
  4. sowed the seeds of
  5. sowedst
  6. sowei
  7. soweis
  8. Sowell
  9. Sowellian
  10. Sowells
  11. sowen

Source and license

Adapted from Wiktionary: sowei (page history and authors). Text available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license. Word.ws reformatted the entry and added links. Wiktionary data of 2026-09-02.

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