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…
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,…
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….