Traditional African Masks: everything you should know part 1

New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Many masking traditions documented in this book carry ritual, initiatory, or entertainment functions. The Mau, northern neighbors of the Dan in Côte d’Ivoire, carve one whose purpose is closer to a courtroom than a…

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 → A number of masking traditions documented in this book use color to mark rank, age, or spiritual category. The Lumbo of southern and southwestern Gabon went further, building an entire moral division into a…