Toma Masks: The Landai, a Forest Spirit That Devours Boys to Make Them Men

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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 for a month, and the mask’s declared purpose in doing so was blunt: to devour them, symbolically, at the end of their initiation, so that they could be given back to the village reborn as men. A wooden object, however large, obviously cannot eat anyone. What matters is that landai was built, staged, and believed in as if it could, and that belief is what actually did the work of turning boys into men in Toma society.

That is the throughline worth carrying through this piece. Landai is not simply a large, dramatic mask. It is a piece of ritual machinery built around the idea of consumption and rebirth, and understanding it means taking seriously a claim that sounds, on its face, like myth: that the mask’s job was to eat its own initiates.

Who Are the Toma?

Around 200,000 Toma live scattered across the high-altitude rain forest where the northwest of Liberia, western Sierra Leone, and eastern Guinea meet, forest cover dense enough that it shaped both the practical geography of initiation and the imagery of the masks built to preside over it. Toma political and religious life was organized almost entirely around a single institution, the poro association, which handled, among its many responsibilities, the initiation of young boys in ceremonies that took place deep in the surrounding forest.

Poro in the Deep Forest

Poro shows up across a wide swath of Upper Guinea Coast societies, and the Toma version of it leaned hard into the literal, physical forest as the setting for its most important work. When it was time for a new group of boys to be initiated, the future initiates were called forth by landai and would leave the village “on retreat,” disappearing into the dense rain forest for a full month. That combination, a genuinely secluded physical location and a genuinely long absence, gave the Toma poro’s initiation period a weight that a shorter or more visible ceremony would not have carried. The boys were, in a very real sense, gone, and it was landai’s job to be the visible reason why.

Landai: The Mask That Called Boys Into the Bush

Landai, also rendered landa, is a large, horizontal, unusually free and abstract wooden mask built around the mouth of a crocodile, onto which human features, a straight nose beneath arched eyebrows, have been carved. The jaw is sometimes built to articulate and sometimes rendered as a simple horizontal line creating a second volume perpendicular to the first, and the whole form is topped with a headdress of feathers. The wearer looks out through the snout rather than through eyeholes set into a face, a detail that says something important about how the mask was meant to be experienced: not as a face confronting the viewer, but as a mouth. The largest documented landai mask measured 1.82 meters in height, an object built to be seen as overwhelming rather than merely large, and only men were permitted to wear it, fitted horizontally over the wearer’s head rather than worn upright like a helmet mask.

A Mouth Built to Swallow and a Body Built to Give Back

Landai’s frightening presence was understood to represent the major spirit of the forest itself, and its declared role inside poro initiation was direct: to make manifest the power of poro by symbolically devouring the boys at the end of their initiation period, in order to give them back to the community reborn as men. That single image, a forest spirit that eats children and returns adults, is doing real conceptual work rather than simply providing theater. It gives Toma boys a concrete, embodied story for what initiation actually changes in them: not an incremental accumulation of knowledge, but a complete undoing of the child they were, followed by a genuine remaking. The crocodile-mouthed form of the mask itself, an animal whose signature attribute is precisely the ability to seize and swallow, was not an arbitrary stylistic choice. It was the visual argument for the ritual’s entire premise.

Bakrogui: The Smaller, More Frequent Mask

Alongside landai, a second, smaller Toma mask type, bakrogui, appeared in pairs and was considerably more common and less secret than its towering counterpart. Bakrogui takes the form of a vertical panel bearing carved human features, a bulging nose and forehead, a beard, and tubular eyes sometimes heightened with metal disks. Where landai was reserved specifically for the climax of male initiation, bakrogui could be seen more often, though even it remained restricted to members of the poro society. Each bakrogui mask was understood as the spiritual dwelling place of a specific ancestor, giving the smaller, paired mask a more personal, lineage-anchored role that complemented rather than competed with landai’s singular, society-wide function. Toma carvers extended the same visual vocabulary beyond masks entirely: household figures kept within individual homes were carved with facial features closely matching landai’s own, extending the mask’s visual language into the everyday domestic sphere.

One Forest, Two Kinds of Absence

Read together, landai and bakrogui describe two different relationships to absence and presence that ran through Toma spiritual life. Landai’s absence was total and temporary: a month spent physically gone from the village, staged around a single overwhelming mask most people would see only rarely, marking a genuine break between one stage of life and the next. Bakrogui’s presence was smaller, more frequent, and more intimate, each mask standing in for a specific ancestor who was never entirely gone from the community at all, available in a way landai deliberately was not. A masking tradition built around a once-in-a-lifetime devouring and a routinely present ancestor dwelling in the same broad institution says something about how the Toma balanced dramatic, rare transformation against the steadier, ongoing presence of the dead among the living.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is the landai mask used for?
Landai calls Toma boys into the forest for a month-long poro initiation retreat and is said to symbolically devour them at its conclusion, giving them back to the community reborn as men.

Why does the landai mask have a crocodile’s mouth?
The crocodile’s mouth visually represents the mask’s core function, seizing and swallowing, which reinforces the ritual claim that landai devours initiates in order to remake them as adults.

What is the difference between landai and bakrogui?
Landai is a massive, rare, secret mask reserved for the climax of male initiation. Bakrogui is smaller, appears in pairs, is seen more often, and represents the spiritual dwelling place of a specific ancestor.

Who was allowed to see or wear these masks?
Only men could wear landai, and only members of the poro society, the institution governing Toma political and religious life, were permitted to see either landai or bakrogui.

See also: African Masks by Region and Tribe · African Coming-of-Age Ceremonies: How Different Cultures Mark the Transition to Adulthood · West African Mask Styles: A Visual Guide to Regional Differences · Every Traditional African Mask You Should Know

Raccolte Extraeuropee del Castello Sforzesco. Licensed CC BY-SA 3.0. Source: Wikimedia Commons