From the July/August 2024 issue of Apollo. Preview and subscribe here . Kevin Dumouchelle of the National Museum of African Art explains what a fearsome 19th-century ceremonial mask meant to its makers in Cote D’Ivoire.
This Bété mask dates to the late 19th century and is a remnant of a larger performative ensemble or masquerade that would have served a regulatory and martial function, embodying spirits of the natural world and representing elders. The Bété people are an ethnic group located in the south-west of Côte d’Ivoire. A patriarchal and patrilineal society, their communities are guided by the heads of each individual lineage, though spiritual and ancestral authority plays a crucial role in maintaining social order.
The largely agreed upon anthropological interpretation is that each community would have had their own versions of masks, known as gre or nyabwa , that were called upon to help bring structure to society. There is not a great depth of research in this area, so we have to make assumptions based on conditions observed by ethnographers in the 1920s and ’30s and apply this knowledge retrospectively to objects from the 1870s, ’80s and ’90s. Face mask, late 19th century, unknown Bété artist.
National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C. The mask has a very aggressive, startling, garish quality.
It is meant to stop you in your tracks – to intimidate, frighten – giving a sense that the mask and the performer a.
