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Spirits
of the Dead and Bush Spirits: the Various Kinds of Kwele Masks
Drawing on
a succinct selection of the specialized literature on the subject
(books on primitive art, exhibition catalogues, museums, and public
auctions in Europe and America) and aided by the records I have
compiled since the 1960s, I have been able to assemble a corpus
of about eighty masks and a dozen miscellaneous items classified
as Kwele to prepare this essay. Siroto, in 1965, used a corpus
of thirty-nine items for his study "BaKwele and American
Esthetic Evaluation Compared." It is clear that, even today,
the corpus of existing Kwele objects is still small compared with
the hundreds of Punu, Fang, or Kota artworks known throughout
the world.
Jacqueline
Delange (1967) commented that "in these masks, Pahouin [Fang]
stylization is taken to the extreme. They show a polyhedral treatment
of the faces which, in addition to human features, uses elements
from antelopes (horns), male gorillas (the crest across the skull,
the visor-shaped brow) and perhaps from a mythical animal."
The author is here referring to masks with a trunk or horns protruding
from the forehead, which will be discussed below. "There
is one constant motif: the 'eyes' are narrow, almond-shaped slits,
joined at one end and diverging, carved inside a concave surface
painted with kaolin which forms a stylized face. This large heart-shaped
motif makes up the greater part of a round mask, or is confounded
with the mask itself, and is also found in the shape of a cowrie,
on the polychrome panels on a chief's couch or on carved poles."
According
to Siroto (1979 and 1995), there are three main types of Kwele
mask:
1 - bush
spirit masks, ekuk, which are divided into white-faced masks that
function as guardian spirits and animal masks, kuk-guu (a flying
squirrel or spiny-tailed squirrel) and kuk-diityak (an owl, also
known as a "witch's chicken");
2 - gong
masks, which resemble male gorillas;
3 - helmet
masks with multiple faces, ngontangang.
This
author believes that the round masks with human faces whitened
with kaolin are not ancestor masks as they are generally called,
but are instead representations of bush spirits, which act as
intermediaries between the world of the bush and that of the village.
White coloring on other masks from Equatorial Africa is associated
with death, but for the Kwele it symbolizes light and clarity,
and hence the clairvoyance needed to combat witchcraft. The symbolic
ambivalence of white coloring is found elsewhere: a white mask
from the Ogooué region represents a spirit with special
clairvoyant powers, which returns to the village from the realm
of the dead through the supernatural world of the forest (ngontang
and ngil masks, for example). There is therefore no symbolic incompatibility
between bush spirit masks and ancestor spirit masks, since the
latter can assume the appearance of the former. This convergence
is realized in masks that combine zoomorphic and anthropomorphic
elements. Some masks seem to be male (the animal masks) while
others are more female (the round masks), but only the former
were used in solo dances.
It also appears
that the houses used for the beete cult or initiation rites, even
if they were temporary structures built specially for the festivities,
were hung with unactivated masks, which resembled the others but
had no eyeholes and therefore did not develop the patina that
comes from being worn. Even discounting these little-handled examples,
it has been observed by various commentators that few Kwele masks
are really ancient (i.e., earlier than 1920). Most of the pieces
known today were collected between 1920 and 1935, a period when
Kwele carvers were still at the height of their technical and
artistic powers. Such artists could respond quickly, and sometimes
well, to the demand from European travellers interested in African
objects. There is little doubt that a number of Kwele objects
in Western collections were not made for ritual use in the nineteenth
century. Ingeborg Bolz (1966), in a study of Gabonese sculpture,
cast serious doubts on the strictly ethnographic authenticity
of many Kwele masks. Without being so severe, it should be recognized
that some recently made objects were used for entertainment outside
a traditional ritual context, or were even commissioned by Europeans.
I have removed from the present corpus all such obviously recent
masks, that is, those made later than the 1940s or 1950s. Some
Kwele sculptors from the Mékambo and Sembé areas
practiced their trade until the 1960s, but, by this late period,
the masks had long ceased to be used.
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