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 are worn the way you would expect a mask to be worn, over the face, or as a helmet enclosing the head. The Baga, roughly 60,000 people on the…
New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Some peoples name themselves. The Guro, roughly 200,000 strong on the Côte d’Ivoire, did not choose their own name at all. They originally called themselves Kweni, until French colonial forces, having violently subdued them…
New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Among the Bobo, a mask is not primarily a portrait, a costume, or even a spirit’s dwelling place. It is closer to an instrument of debt repayment. The Bobo believe that human beings are…
When people talk about how African kings led the resistance against colonization, they usually go straight to the battles. The guns, the sieges, the defeats. But the real story is what happened before the first shot was fired. It is the alliances built in secret. The armies rebuilt after loss. The decision to negotiate instead…
New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Some masks announce a ceremony. The Toma built one that announced a disappearance. When the massive landai mask called, the boys of the community left the village and went “on retreat” into the forest…
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…
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…