Explaining masks: The Magritte effect

A standard riddle of the Cameroonian Dìì questions whether the mask is an animal or a man. The correct answer is that it is neither: ‘Below it is a man as an animal, but the upper part is a spirit.’ One could just as well answer that it is both, but the Dìì choice is that it is neither: so its own category. This particular Dìì mask covers only the upper part of the body, and the legs are naked; in some performances, the genitals of the dancer should be in sight, to prove he is a man, a circumcised one, and thus authorised to dance. Such a riddle illustrates a kind of ‘Magritte effect’ that masks produce, using the felicitous expression of Jean-Pierre Warnier: the masking apparition blends the thing and its representation, finding both its essence and its source of power in exactly that semantic confusion.

What do we mean by a ‘mask’? In Western culture, what is called a ‘mask’ in a museum exhibition or art gallery is in fact a face covering. In this book we call these ‘headpieces’, ‘tops’, or ‘face covers’, for we follow another definition of a mask, namely the African one. What informants call a mask is the entire costumed appearance, including the headpiece, the clothing or body cover, and the adornment on arms, legs, and feet, as well as the paraphernalia it holds in its hands: whips, whisks, sticks, adzes, or spears. In some cases, the same costume and headpiece may even become a different mask by simply changing the accessories and attributes. So we use the emic African definition: a ‘mask’ means costume + top + paraphernalia, coupled with, evidently, an invisible dancer inside; dance and music may be added to this definition. There are some cases where not all criteria apply, but together they cover the great majority of masks in Africa. Though the hidden face is essential, in some instances the face is, very pointedly, in sight, while the apparition is still considered a mask; those exceptions occur within specific settings, depending on the occasion, and above all on the presence or absence of a non-initiated audience. In all our ethnographic cases there is a vernacular term for mask, and in all masking societies masks are defined as a total apparition characterised by anonymity.

Masks for father

In a suburb of Abeokuta, in Yorubaland, the sound of drums heralds the approach of a masquerade. From all houses people emerge to see the parade, and children start dancing in anticipation of the spectacle. When the procession turns the corner, the mask comes into full view, surrounded by a host of excited people. Jumping to the rhythm of the drums, the mask with its finely carved wooden headpiece swings its long robes so that the layers of cloth become visible, layer upon layer. During the procession the mask is in the thick of things, surrounded by people and with drummers following it closely, and among the many attendants one elderly man is dressed in his finest gown. He is Ade, the pater familias of the Akinyode family, and clearly in charge of the whole feast. Women from his household sing in praise of the egungun, thus honouring also Ade Akinyode's late father, in whose remembrance the masquerade is being organised. They halt at the house of Chief Biobaku, where special songs are intoned to honour Akinyode's daughter, who is married to the chief. But it is Ade Akinyode himself who is central, for all people relate to him: the divining priest, the carver and the tailors, the herbalist, and finally the leader of the egungun cult. As a successful businessman in town and a prominent member of the egungun association, Ade is grateful to his late father for assisting him in setting up shop, and thus he has every reason to organise this masquerade.

Masks and the history of the patriline

The masking model that we have adopted implies that mask rituals find a favourite niche in societies where the power balances between men are under periodic redefinition and rely upon competing power bases. In such an open arena mask, rituals constitute a power source on their own that in principle is accessible to all males, so the core question is this: Who controls the masks and their rituals?

In this oro egungun performance of the Nigerian Yoruba, it is not the bush that enters the town; this full-cloth mask is quite urban, predominantly human, and points at relations between humans much more than it points at the wilderness.

Singing at the mask

Silently gazing at the compound entrance, a dozen men sit in one corner of the courtyard, one of them with a drum. They are tired, as they have just finished over two hours of singing in front of the house of Balugo Say, whose funeral this is. Together they have sung the twelve mask songs, each to its own melody and drum rhythm, each repeated six times. None of the singers was allowed to move, stand up, or talk during the perfor-mance, which went on for hours; but now they are finished. Content after a job well done, they wait for the last phase of the complicated liturgy of the Dogon funeral, for with their singing they have set the stage for the appearance of the mask, to round off the farewell to the deceased. Silently and almost surreptitiously, an ajagai mask walks into the compound, led by an elder. The headpiece of this all-fibre mask consists of a plaited hood with eyes on all sides, its costume a thick flurry of red fibres over black trousers. The two climb the forked ladder onto the roof of Balugo's house. Down in the yard, all watch the mask and its attendant dance alongside all the corners of the roof; nobody utters a word as this mask operates in absolute silence. After dancing, the mask climbs down, enters the house, and takes a few personal belongings from the chest of the deceased. As quietly as it performed, the mask emerges from the house, looks around seemingly without noticing anyone, and then runs to a nearby cavern where it throws Balugo's belongings into a deep crevasse. As a red shadow it disappears between the rocks and houses of the village and never comes back to the house. One by one the singers slowly take to their feet, speak in hushed voices, and go home. Balugo has left now – he has really, truly left; and the long wait for the second funeral is on, to take place in the next years.

In Africa funerals are core rituals. ‘Your funeral is the most beautiful day of your life’, is an expression often heard about African funerals.

The first mask

Before they became known among people, a group of dye, spiritual beings living in the bush, left the savannah and moved south to the forested area. On their sojourn in what is now Ivory Coast, or so the story goes among the Guro, they met women who were collecting water.

‘Please give us water; we are thirsty.’

The women deliberated among themselves, discussing this normal request from these strange beings. In the end they refused:

‘We have barely enough for ourselves; we will not give you any.’ Disappointed and thirsty, the dye moved on and encountered men who were drinking palm wine.

‘Please give us to drink; we are thirsty.’

Immediately the men cut down a number of palm trees and served them drinks. As they were satisfied, the grateful spirits taught the men how to sing and drum, how to make the costumes of the mask, and how to dance as dye masks. They explained: ‘When we asked the women for a drink, they did not give it, but you, the men, served us drinks. That is why women are forbidden to see us dance. Now we are for you, the men.’

In a dream a sculptor received instructions how to carve the headpiece, and thus the mask was complete – for the men, not for the women.

This Guro myth is typical, for throughout the Mask Crescent stories explaining the appearance of masks are remarkably similar. Origin myths among the Bobo, Senufo, Dogon, Dan, Baule, Guro and many other ethnic groups, relate parallel stories. Almost to a fault it is a woman or a child who first encounters the mask somewhere in the bush, and brings it into the village, and then the men appropriate control over these ‘bush-beings’, excluding the women and children. In fact, two parties are crucial in these tales: women and the bush – two elements that usually are separated, for the bush is male territory. In some cases the bush as such is enough to generate the masks. The initiates of the Dìì in Cameroon learn that a man saw a hedgehog in the bush that rolled up in defence and used the skin of its back to cover its head.

The cultural niche for masquerades

A long book needs a short conclusion. Reviewing the dynamics of the masquerades in the various fields and overviewing the concluding sections in each chapter, we come back to the first part of our theory test: what is the socio-cultural niche for masking?

The answer resides in a network of related factors. The population density should be above a certain threshold, because the cultures housing mask rituals must have a socio-ecological basis with a certain permanence, not continuously moving, and of sufficient complexity. People have a definite pronatal attitude, children are welcome. In the horticultural system, root crops have an important place, and women shoulder a large responsibility for food production, a crucial role in subsistence that offers them a strong social position relative to men. This position is reinforced through lasting bonds with their kinsmen, while society also tends to matrilineal kinship reckoning and has a high local endogamy; bride wealth is relatively low. In these societies men do not form strong corporate groups, have little inheritable wealth, and must negotiate for their socio-political positions. Kinship lines are shallow and tend to be limited to the village. Cattle are absent – at least the cattle complex is not there – and the same holds largely for camels and horses.

Thus, the position of the men is to a high degree defined by what they do not have – wealth, power, and authority over women – while the women's position is painted in what they do have – fertility, production, and family. The male power base is one of indeterminacy, open to constant debate and negotiation, while the female power base is solidly inside the domestic unit, plus in her body. In the economy labour forms the main capital, one reason for the desire for children, which fits in with the horticultural food production. That, in short, is the common element inside the Mask Crescent, and when overviewing profiles the societies housing masquerades are shown to comply with this profile, even with the leeway that can be expected from a probabilistic theory. So we can conclude that this gender-cum-power factor is the first step in the explanation for the highly peculiar distribution of masquerades on the continent.

The second phase of explanation concerns how masquerades address these two basic arenas.

Chewing the mask

The rains have passed and the harvest is ripening in the fields. A group of young boys, aged ten to fifteen years, sit down on the ground somewhere in a wooded spot around a Bobo village in the west of Burkina Faso. The youngsters are not alone, for older boys with scowling faces and a threatening demeanour surround them, instructing the smaller ones on what they should do. The older boys form the age-set just senior to the youngsters, who in fact are in the process of forming the new set. What the young boys are doing is highly significant: they cut branches from a tree species considered sacred throughout the region, and put together a mask costume made solely out of those leaves: the sahasahala (the quick one). The boys are excited, as they have finally come out in the open, here in the bush where everything is going to happen. This is the year when they should start their long initiatory trajectory, and they welcome it. In order to arrive here, they had to ask for the rituals themselves in a propitiation to the elders that forms part of the ceremony. No less than three times they had to submit a formal, ritual demand for initiation, through the intermediary services of the smith. Reluctantly, consent was finally granted after gifts of beer and chicken, and yesterday night the initiation had begun. In the pitch-dark they had been taken from their homes and placed inside a dark room, naked, cold, and frightened, surrounded by – judging from the sounds that came from the outside – a battle raging between people and beings uttering high-pitched cries. Food was offered to them, but it was food suited for an orphan's funeral. Their only contact with the outside was through a few smiths who came into their hut – nobody else; it had been a long, hungry, and scary night.

This morning they had awakened with the loud, shrill cries of a mask posted right at their door.

Arrest that mask!

The scene is the Basse Casamance in Senegal, south of The Gambia, a region dominated by two ethnic groups, the Manding and Jola; the setting, surprisingly, is a court room. The case involves a confrontation between the state and a mask and occurred in 1988 in Sédhiou, a town on the Casamance River. A kankurang mask that accompanied a dancing crowd happened to annoy the Assistant Prefect – it actually annoyed him quite seriously. The official was vexed to the point that he had the police arrest the mask and take it to the police station, where the police, as the anthropologist Ferdinand de Jong put it, ‘took the unprecedented step of undressing him’. Word got around and the next morning an angry crowd gathered at the football stadium and decided to send a delegation to the police station, demanding the immediate release of the mask. As fate would have it, the Assistant Prefect arrived with his car at that time, and a riot ensued; the car was set on fire, police officers were stoned, guns were fired, and the crowd attacked the homes of the policemen.

The story was also that, adding insult to injury, the police asked two girls to identify the masker […] girls! The meeting in the stadium was for initiates only, and many showed up bare-chested, as if in the sacred forest. In the ensuing debates among the many Manding involved, one policeman who was Wolof gradually became the scapegoat; after all, the Assistant Prefect was a fellow Manding and initiated. The case was tried quickly, to appease a thoroughly incensed populace, and the rioters who stood trial received light suspended sentences. The officials in question were transferred to other towns, a clear measure to defuse the situation. So in the end the cultural obligation to defend the secrecy of the mask was more or less confirmed and sustained by the state.

This clash shows the power of a local group with masks vis-à-vis the state, through a series of factors. One major issue is secrecy, a discourse shared to some extent by the government. Another point is the value of masks as a self-regulating force for order, but such a local order does not always run parallel to public priorities, at least as defined by national functionaries.

Playful sharks in the Delta

The Ijo group in the Niger Delta have a masking myth that tells of Kperighada, a fisherman. He wanted to explore new fishing waters far from home, so he joined other fishermen in an expedition all the way to Cameroon. There, suddenly, he disappeared, and his colleagues were unable to trace him. After seven days he reappeared. Asked about his experiences, Kperighada told them that he had been kidnapped by water spirits and taken to their underwater world, where he was taught how to dance a masquerade. Back home in his village he called all the elders of his town together and told them he would die if they did not accept the masquerade called ofurumo (shark). The elders agreed and since then the shark masquerade is performed in all Ijo towns.

In this origin story the usual female protagonist is lacking, but also the ritual itself has special characteristics. A mask with a mullet headpiece runs through the village as his assistants sing: ‘Sharks are coming! Run and hide!’ Villagers hasten to the riverside to watch a canoe tow a raft with the shark mask upriver, while crew members and supporters sing and drum his praise. The mask carries a large horizontal headpiece in the form of a shark, and has a costume made of head ties, wrappers, and trousers. A man and his wife circle the raft in a canoe as if they are stalking their prey. When the man throws his spear, the canoe capsizes and the pair end up in the water. This refers to a well-known song: ‘Anyone who spears this fish will upset his canoe.’ On land all start to dance, and the drummers accompany the mask with songs, such as ‘Force someone to give him food’ and ‘To remove all the fish and give fishless soup to one's husband’, songs criticising antisocial behaviour. The masquerade ends with a pantomime in which the fishing couple reappear, dragging their canoe around as if they are still paddling and chasing their prey, even occasionally pretending to capsize. Finally, the fisherman spears ofurumo and hauls him into his canoe, where he ‘kills’ the spirit.

What is special here is the light tone of the performance.