African Masks

KMcD sends me a photo of four African masks purchased in Tanzania and Kenya, originally from Zaire (the Congo). I love these masks because I had a two-year tour in the VSO, the British version of the U.S. Peace Corps, in upper Nigeria and the Ivory Coast. I have a treasured mask from the Ivory Coast, a wisdom mask, worn by young men at puberty rites. The mask has a female spirit on the forehead in the shape of a bird that faces downward to the bridge of the nose. Since I raised a male, I can relate to this mask – acquired in my early 20s before I was a mother.

There is only one art form in three dimensions that contains many worlds within its shape, color, and design; that is the mask. Particularly in Africa, it holds specific symbolic meaning associated with a specific geographical culture. Before I tell you about the four masks KMcD sent, which date from the 1920s–1930s, I offer my thoughts on their importance. 

The mask in Africa is the connection to one’s ancestors, both in a cultural and spiritual dimension. Communication and guidance are given via the mask. Masks were worn as part of the human body (and body politic) at festivals, initiations, funerals, marriages, and in rites of passage such as coming into manhood or womanhood. Masks expressed society’s myths, building a common language. Masks “danced” stories and offered protection against evil, bad luck, and illness, and they would frighten and shame. Masks signaled one’s position in a community’s hierarchy, and distinguished one cultural group from another.

In the Eurocentric history of the world we ‘demoted’ masks to the department of cultural anthropology, and it is only comparatively recently – through 20^th century artists like Picasso and Klee, who loved African masks – that we understand masks to be the finest of fine art. Without understanding their ritual role, we do not understand these masks. It is difficult to describe a “static” mask in a glass museum case, as it is NOT being “danced” or moved as part of a ritual in action. 

For KMcD, I describe the origin of these four masks; from the Eastern BaPende Tribe (Zaire), called “Songye” painted wood masks. Some bear dark patinas, and some have the white accents of kaolin clay molded into facial features, and one has the original fiber head and chin surround. At least one is recognizable as a mask from the association called “Kifwebe,” which is a select and high-ranking men’s group in the BaPende community, a group in charge of the community hierarchy and the distribution of its wealth. One mask is ‘two color,’ which is symbolic and distinctive to the BaPende people of today’s Democratic Republic of the Congo. The Pende people, which number 250,000 today, speak a language called Kipende, and they have a cultural division in the communities between the Western and Eastern Pende. They are related to the Bantu Peoples. 

As differing from other masking communities, present-day Pende are organized around extended family groups that descend from the matriarchal ancestors. They do not venerate a leader, for example, and otherwise have no centralized political authority – though in the 17^th century they lived in Angola and were ruled by the benevolent and highly respected Queen Nzinga of Ndongo and Matamba. Nzinga was a forceful freedom fighter in her time, principally against Portuguese rule.

Today most Pende live in the Democratic Republic of Congo, having followed their Queen to the Congo in 1620 where, over time, the Pende culture decentralized authority. By 1885 European colonists had renamed the region the Congo Free State, and in 1931 the Pende people rebelled against their Belgian colonial oppressors. So if these masks could speak (and I imagine they do) they would tell a story of strife from the 1920s-1930s.

The masks of the Zaire region were known traditionally for their inclusion in initiation rituals. They were also worn to honor ancestors, and shaped in male and female forms. Some of these masks were not “danced,” but honored in static, sculptural (statue-style), paired forms in a sacred common area of the village. 

Because the artists who shaped these ancestor masks were so close to the spirit of the community’s ancestors, the anonymous artists were honored by being the first to receive food from the harvest. 

Thus spirits were embodied in art. The art was a product of a collective endeavor, and then a collective ‘performance’ – such that when ”danced,” the mask enabled the community to focus on a universal and communal message. The community, their ancestors, their past, was celebrated for thousands of years in ritual. Sadly, the masks’ future after 1930s was not the future these masks would have welcomed; they were traded as souvenirs. The value of the four masks combined is $2,000-$3,000 with the possibility of a much higher value in the right market.