Sande, known as Bundu in parts of Sierra Leone, is the women's counterpart to Poro among the Mende and neighboring peoples of Sierra Leone and Liberia. Where Poro governs the initiation and moral education of men, Sande performs the equivalent role for women, inducting girls into a period of seclusion presided over by senior female officials called sowei. During this time initiates receive instruction that historically included herbal medicine, domestic and craft skill, dispute mediation, dance and the society's own ritual language, alongside the marking that identifies a completed initiate and the moral instruction that marks her transition to adult womanhood.
Sande is unusual among African masking traditions for the sowei mask, a carved wooden helmet mask blackened and polished, which is danced exclusively by women, a rarity in a continent where masking performance is overwhelmingly a male domain. The sowei who dances the mask is understood to embody a female water spirit, and her public appearances mark the major transitions of the initiation calendar. Carol MacCormack's ethnographic study of Sande, based on fieldwork among Sherbro and Mende communities, remains a central account of how the society balances a genuinely secret ritual curriculum against the highly public role its officials play in town life.
Sande and Poro operate in close coordination in the same towns, often drawing on the same bush sites at different points in the ritual calendar and jointly shaping a community's rites of passage from childhood into adulthood. Sande lodges remain active across rural Sierra Leone and Liberia today, continuing to run initiation cycles alongside, rather than instead of, state schooling and government.