Africa, on its own terms

SEVICS Africa is a nonprofit. We help young people of African heritage, at home and across the diaspora, become the fullest version of themselves. It starts with rediscovering the culture and the history they came from.

Most of what the world knows about African culture was written down by people who were passing through. They came, they looked, they wrote, and they left. The objects left with them. Today those objects sit in museums in Europe and America, catalogued in somebody else’s language. The young Africans who should have inherited that knowledge meet it as a footnote. Those growing up in the diaspora often do not meet it at all.

We started SEVICS to change that, and to change what it makes possible.

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Think about how development usually arrives in an African community. Somebody else designs it somewhere else. It assumes money nobody has, tools nobody owns, and a way of living nobody recognises. It quietly contradicts what the people already believe. Then everybody stands around wondering why it did not last.

We work the other way round. Build with what is already there. Price it so people can actually pay for it. Shape it so it fits the culture instead of fighting it. Done properly, the work stops looking like an idea pushed on somebody and starts looking like something they would have done anyway. That is what makes it stay standing after the funding stops.

But you cannot build something that fits a culture you have not troubled to understand. So we begin with rediscovery.

And here is what we have found. Rediscovering where you come from is not nostalgia. It is the first honest answer to the question of who you are. It travels with you into your education, into your work, and into what you believe you are permitted to build.

We do this at three levels, and our name is the plan. Individuals, meaning the young people and diaspora Africans who come to us directly. The communities they belong to. And the systems around them, meaning the indigenous organisations, institutions and companies working in African contexts, whom we serve through tailored corporate support.

All of it rests on evidence or it rests on nothing. The database below is what that looks like in practice. Every record carries a grade saying how firm its attribution is. Every record is honest about what is still unknown.

Have a mask? Find out what it is.

Upload a photograph and get a proposed typology, the visible features behind it, and catalogued records of the same tradition to compare against. It is a place to start looking, not a certificate.

Identify a mask

The African mask database

Every object here has its own page, its own attribution and its own stated evidence. Each record says how firm the attribution is and what is known of the object's history, because a mask database that hides its uncertainty is worth less than one that admits it. 63 records published so far, drawn from 3 open access museum collections.

Algeria — no records yetAngola — no records yetBenin — 1 recordBotswana — no records yetBurkina Faso — 7 recordsBurundi — no records yetCameroon — 5 recordsCape Verde — no records yetCentral African Republic — no records yetChad — no records yetComoros — no records yetCongo — no records yetCôte d'Ivoire — 11 recordsDemocratic Republic of the Congo — 12 recordsDjibouti — no records yetEgypt — 1 recordEquatorial Guinea — no records yetEritrea — no records yetEswatini — no records yetEthiopia — no records yetGabon — no records yetGambia — no records yetGhana — 1 recordGuinea — 5 recordsGuinea-Bissau — no records yetKenya — no records yetLesotho — no records yetLiberia — 3 recordsLibya — no records yetMadagascar — no records yetMalawi — no records yetMali — 9 recordsMauritania — no records yetMauritius — no records yetMorocco — no records yetMozambique — no records yetNamibia — no records yetNiger — no records yetNigeria — 13 recordsRwanda — no records yetSenegal — 1 recordSeychelles — no records yetSierra Leone — no records yetSomalia — no records yetSomaliland — no records yetSouth Africa — no records yetSouth Sudan — no records yetSudan — 1 recordTanzania — no records yetTogo — no records yetTunisia — no records yetUganda — no records yetWestern Sahara — no records yetZambia — 1 recordZimbabwe — no records yet

Countries with records

Countries shown in outline have no records here. For many that is a fact about the traditions rather than a gap in the catalogue: a great many African countries have no history of carved ceremonial masks at all.

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Within Carved Lines

The book to buy

Within Carved Lines

The second edition. What the masks mean, who dances them, and why so much of what has been written about them was written by people passing through.

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The channel

How the database is built

Nothing is written from memory

Every record traces to a retrieved catalogue entry from a holding institution. Where a source is silent, the field stays empty rather than being filled with a plausible guess. No record is ever generated from what a language model happens to believe.

Two grades, never merged

How firm the attribution is, and what is known of the object’s history, are recorded separately and shown separately. A museum accession number tells you where an object has been. It does not tell you who carved it, and merging the two would hide exactly the distinction a collector needs.

Nothing publishes itself

Harvested material lands in a review queue as a draft. A person reads it, corrects it or bins it. Of the first 190 candidates, 63 were published and 127 were rejected. The queue is the product.

Licences are checked first

An image is only taken where the holding institution has released it under terms that permit reuse, and the licence and the credit travel with it onto the page. Anything that fails the check is refused rather than quietly used.

Uncertainty is published too

Where a people is contested, a form is unclear or a history is unknown, the record says so. A database that only shows what it is sure of is not a record of the field, it is a highlight reel.

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Work with us

Museums, collectors, researchers and community knowledge holders are all sources this database depends on. If you hold documentation on an object, or want to correct a record, tell us.