New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Most African helmet masks are carved, painted, and left as wood. Ejagham carvers, working in the Cross River region straddling southeastern Nigeria and Cameroon, took an additional and genuinely unusual step: they stretched real…
Ask enough people who have watched a masquerade move through a village square and you will hear the same question, asked half as a joke and half seriously. Do African masks choose their wearer? It sounds like the premise of a horror film, the kind where a wooden face picks its next victim off a…
New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → If you have already read this site’s piece on Suku masking, you may remember a mask called hemba, worn far to the west along the Kwango River, that has nothing to do with the…
Type dinka scar patterns into a search bar and you will mostly find photographs. Rows of parallel lines cut into a forehead, sometimes dots near the temple, dropped into a feed with no context at all, as if the marks explain themselves. They do not. Every line on a Dinka forehead was placed there on…
New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Most masks on this site are built to communicate with ancestors, spirits, or the dead. Vili masks did that too, but they were also handed a much more immediate, secular job: keeping order at…
New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Attribution in Central African art history is rarely as tidy as a museum label makes it look, and the Binji are one of the clearest examples of that on this site. Their carvers produced…
New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Some of the most famous objects to come out of Central Africa are not, strictly speaking, masks at all. The Kota of Gabon are best known worldwide for a flat, shining, copper-covered guardian figure…
New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Not every masking tradition on this site comes with a settled explanation. The Mbagani are a useful reminder of that, and being honest about it is more useful than pretending otherwise. Their masks are…
New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Most masking traditions on this site are built around one recurring event: an initiation, a funeral, an installation of a chief. Lwalwa masking is built around a recurring failure. When hunters came home from…
New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Most masks are built to move an audience through performance, through dance, through song. The most feared Suku mask was built to do the opposite. Kakuungu was not supposed to dance at all. Its…
New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → “Lulua” is not really the name of one people. It is an umbrella term for a large number of heterogeneous groups who settled near the Lulua River, between the Kasai and Sankuru rivers in…
New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Yaka or yakala means “males,” “the strong ones.” Bayaka, the name the roughly 300,000 Yaka people of the southwestern Democratic Republic of the Congo call themselves, means “the strong people.” It is not a…