New: the 2nd edition of Within Carved Lines: The Secret Meanings of African Masks is out now. Get the book → Some peoples name themselves. The Guro, roughly 200,000 strong on the Côte d’Ivoire, did not choose their own name at all. They originally called themselves Kweni, until French colonial forces, having violently subdued them…
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…
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…
Somewhere in a living room in Berlin, or Brooklyn, or a quiet suburb in Surrey, an African mask hangs on a wall. The owner walks past it every morning. They bought it at an estate sale, or inherited it from a relative who did volunteer work in West Africa in the 1970s. They think it…