The Masked Snap, The Snapped Mask: Mask, Power, and Betrayal in African Cultures

Abstract

The mask, an interesting artifact, and a profound cultural relic have very weighty implications for historical and contemporary experiences. Humanity deploys it in many ways to convey simple to very complex ideas. Apart from its use for play and display, mask or masking express nuances and idiosyncrasies of persons and communities, connections and dissonance. In this essay, I explore the literal and metaphorical ideas about mask and masking traditions in African locations, unite knowledge about them with historical and contemporary personalities to explain phenomena and circumstances that are both stunning and instructive. I will argue that the mask as artifact and as a metaphor offers a veneer for sinister behavior, a concealment for dysfunctional, mental health, and ominous intentions and that understanding the many layers and configurations help humans to calibrate and negotiate social contracts. The human face, in and of itself, is a mask—a repository for the multitude of intentions both good and bad that lurks behind it. Intentions are hard to decode just as the masked person in a masquerade spectacle becomes inscrutable to the observer. Underneath the beautiful façade that appears in public lurks layers of mysteries. Just as one is encouraged not to take masquerading and masqueraders in traditional spaces on mere face value but to approach them with restraints because they essentialize capriciousness and embody the inscrutable metaphysical other, one must also approach humanity with caution and calibrate human relationships with attentiveness. This does not call for excessive paranoia, rather a measured vigilance necessary to avert grave circumstances like those that befell historical and contemporary figures in proximate societies. Case studies on the transcendental notion of the mask and its interface with politics, power, treachery, and other layers of human interactions are drawn from two African locations—Nigeria and Burkina Faso. For illustrative purposes, I will reference the masks, masking, and oral traditions of the Yoruba, the Mossi of Burkina Faso, and some of the post-modern Gèlèdé portrait paintings of Wole Lagunju, a New African Diaspora Artist (NADA).