New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Most communication technologies documented in this book are built around masks, costumes, and public performance. The Woyo, living along the Atlantic coast where the Democratic Republic of the Congo meets Cabinda in Angola, developed…
New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Many masks in this book exist to be seen, their entire function bound up in public display, in the crowd’s reaction, in being looked at. The Bemba of Zambia and the southeastern Democratic Republic…
Most masking traditions in this book reserve their most demanding, most elaborate objects for senior, initiated men, the people with the most standing to carry them. The Bijago, off the coast of Guinea-Bissau on an archipelago of some thirty islands, built the opposite hierarchy: their heaviest masks are worn by the age group not yet…
Isolation shapes art in ways that are easy to underestimate until you meet a tradition it happened to. The Mumuye, living in the rocky hills and savannas of northeastern Nigeria along the bend of the Benue River, remained in near total isolation until as recently as 1959, and their statuary was not even discovered by…
Most masks in this book appear repeatedly, at funerals, at harvests, at initiations that recur every generation. The Temne of Sierra Leone built one that does the opposite: a mask representing the guardian spirit of a ruling dynasty, seen in public only once, during the enthronement of a new chief, after which it disappears and…
Some masking traditions treat a mask as a permanent object, carved once and kept unchanged for generations. The Nuna of Burkina Faso do something different: they repaint their masks every single year, refreshing the same geometric patterns in red, black, and white on top of forms that never stop representing the same thing, a spirit…
Among the Idoma, roughly 550,000 people living where the Benue and Niger rivers meet, the return of the dead is not a metaphor for memory. It is the central, organizing claim of the entire religious system, the belief from which nearly everything else, which societies exist, what their masks are for, who is allowed to…
Scarification and tattooing look similar to outsiders but come from different roots. See how African cultures read the two traditions differently.
New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Most masks in this book represent a single, coherent idea, an ancestor, a spirit of the bush, a moral category of the dead. The Chamba mask, worn along the Benue River in Cameroon and…
Learn how to identify African masks by region, material, and style, from Yoruba Gelede to Dogon Kanaga masks. A clear starting point for beginners.
New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Some masking traditions sort their spirits by clan, or by animal, or by rank within a secret society. The Ibibio, over two million strong between the Niger Delta and the Cross River in Nigeria,…
See which Benin Bronzes have been returned to Nigeria since 2021, which museums still hold them, and what is left to bring home.