Nuna Masks: Animal Spirits Repainted Every Year to Keep the Wilderness Close

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 of the wilderness, whether that spirit takes the shape of a buffalo, a crocodile, or an abstract pole crowned with a protruding mouth.

That annual repainting is a small ritual habit with a large implication, and it is the throughline worth carrying through the rest of this piece. A Nuna mask is not a static artifact frozen at the moment of carving. It is a living object maintained, generation after generation, through a yearly act of renewal that keeps its color, and by extension its spirit, from ever going dull.

Who Are the Nuna?

The Nuna are one of several related peoples collectively known as Gurunsi, a group that also includes the Winiama, the Lela, the Sisala, and others living across Burkina Faso and Ghana. Estimated at around 100,000 people, the Nuna live in village communities where a large number of dwellings cluster closely together, the village itself surrounded by farm fields. The Nuna have no system of chiefs or other centralized political leaders, a structural fact that held even after the French colonial administration attempted to impose centralized power during the colonial period. Instead, each community is organized by a council of the eldest representatives of every family, convened when a decision needs to be made on the community’s behalf.

A Community Without Chiefs

That absence of chiefly authority is worth pausing on, because so many of the masking traditions documented on this site are organized precisely around a chief, a king, or a centralized court. The Nuna represent a genuinely different model: a community governed entirely through consensus among family elders, with no single figure holding ongoing executive power. Nuna religious life follows a parallel logic. The Nuna believe in a creator god named Yi, but their communities form around the worship of natural spirits, and it is those spirits, not any human authority, that establish the religious laws controlling moral and ethical conduct across Nuna life.

A Bestiary Repainted Every Year

Nuna masks represent the spirits of the wilderness directly, and they take two broad forms. Some are shaped as poles, colored red, black, and white. Others take the form of animals, buffalo, crocodiles, antelopes, warthogs, hyenas, calaos, and serpents among them, distinguished from one another largely by the shape of their horns and ears rather than by any more elaborate variation. The eyes protrude, ringed by concentric circles; animal masks carry a comparatively short snout, while the more abstract pole masks feature a large, protuberant mouth instead. Decorated throughout with geometric motifs, the masks are repainted every year and are found across the wider Gurunsi region rather than confined to a single Nuna locality.

Becoming the Animal

Underneath the fiber skirt that conceals him, the wearer of a Nuna mask may be effectively invisible, and he is expected to behave as the animal his mask represents, imitating its particular gait and manner rather than dancing in a generic style. When the ritual is properly executed, the community is understood to receive fertility and prosperity in return, a direct exchange between correct performance and communal wellbeing. A Nuna mask is treated as personal property: upon its owner’s death, it passes to his son or is kept in the hut belonging to the lineage’s ancestors, an inheritance structure that lets a single mask, repainted annually, continue in active use across multiple generations of the same family. The mask’s role concentrates around specific occasions: ceremonies marking the end of initiation, the funerals of notable community members, and, in a considerably lighter register, entertainment on certain market days.

Diviners and the Same Spirits in Another Form

Alongside the masks, Nuna diviners kept large figures representing a spirit of the wilderness with which the diviner could personally communicate, and whose supernatural power he could then direct on behalf of his clients. These figures were stored together with non-figurative ritual objects, jars, bottles, stones, in the dark corners of a diviner’s home, where repeated offerings of millet porridge, beer, and chicken blood built up a thick crust on their surface over time. Functionally, these figures serve the same underlying purpose as the far more visible, far more theatrical masks described above: they make the invisible nature spirits concrete and tangible, giving the community a physical point of contact through which to offer prayers and material offerings. Mask and diviner’s figure, in other words, are two different technologies built to solve the same problem, how to reach a spirit that cannot otherwise be seen or touched.

Frequently Asked Questions

Why do the Nuna repaint their masks every year?

The masks are living ritual objects rather than static artifacts, and annual repainting in red, black, and white keeps their geometric patterns, and by extension the spirit they represent, visually refreshed rather than allowed to fade.

What animals do Nuna masks represent?

Buffalo, crocodiles, antelopes, warthogs, hyenas, calaos, and serpents, distinguished mainly by the shape of their horns and ears, alongside abstract pole-shaped masks with large protuberant mouths.

Who is allowed to lead the Nuna community?

The Nuna have no system of chiefs. Each community is instead governed by a council of the eldest representatives from every family, who convene to make decisions when needed.

What happens to a Nuna mask after its owner dies?

It passes to the owner’s son or is kept in the hut of the lineage’s ancestors, allowing a single mask, repainted each year, to remain in active use across multiple generations.

See also: African Masks by Region and Tribe · Bwa Plank Mask of Burkina Faso: Insects, Spirits, and Geometric Art · Mossi Masks: What the Conquered People Kept When the Rulers Took the Statues · West African Mask Styles: A Visual Guide to Regional Differences