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,…
New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → A people squeezed between two much larger, much more famous neighbors could easily end up as a footnote to both. The roughly 20,000 Yohure of central Côte d’Ivoire sit exactly in that geographic position,…
New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Color carries specific, deliberate meaning across many of the masking traditions on this site, but few peoples built an entire mask type around a single color the way the Punu did. Punu masks are…
New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Most ancestor figures in this book commemorate someone worth remembering fondly, a chief, a founder, a mother of the lineage. The Mbole carved figures meant to commemorate the opposite kind of person entirely: men…
New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Some peoples in this book are documented through pages of ritual detail, named ceremonies, and recorded myth. The Biombo are documented mostly through resemblance. Their masks carry surface decoration close to that of the…
New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Most of the masking traditions covered on this site emerged from societies without a strong central government, villages, clans, and secret societies filling the gap a king or a unified state might otherwise occupy….
Before the mask ever touches a face, something else happens first. A man stops eating. He sits alone in a room for days. An elder speaks words over cloth and wood that no outsider is allowed to hear. This is the part most people miss when they picture african ceremonial masks. They imagine the dance,…
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…
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…
What is an African mask? People ask this question more often than you would think, and most of the answers they find online are thin. A single photo. A caption that says “tribal mask.” Nothing about who carved it, who wore it, or what it was for. That is the gap this piece is here…