Traditional African Masks: everything you should know (part 2)

New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Several masking traditions documented in this book use a mask’s design to project fear, authority, or ancestral weight. The Bassa of Liberia’s central coastal region built a tradition around the opposite register entirely: 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…