The beauty of African masks isn't just how they were used spiritually, but how they've influenced our textiles, dress, art and psychiatry.
CENTER TWP. — His fingertips gently caress grooves and ridges chiseled into the hard, mahogany wood. He gazes reverently at the intricately carved mask.
To Larry Tyson, it’s more than artwork. It connects him to his African culture and reaffirms his purpose in the community.
The Aliquippa man spoke last week at a presentation — “African Masks: The History and Mystique” — hosted by Community College of Beaver County in celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Tyson, also a CCBC staff member, was joined by Cynthia Marshall, English professor and antiquities specialist, who also collects masks.
An existential moment drove Tyson to explore his roots.
“Back in 1990, I was in despair,” he said. “I was trying to learn about my culture. I was concerned about the condition of our black community.”
Tyson was invited to participate in the National Rites of Passage Institute program, which promotes cultural identity, character building and leadership development.
The institute, based near Cleveland, gave Tyson “knowledge of my culture and more on what I can do to help the community.”
Part of the experience was participating in ceremonies — journeys that recognize self to be able to appreciate differences in others.
He spoke of one ceremony common to the Akan people of Ghana, where children are named after the day they were born. Tyson, born on a Sunday, received the name Kwasi and all of the positive attributes attached.
“The idea is to bring positivity to the community and fulfill those attributes associated with the name,” he said. “That’s what got me to masks — learning about my culture.”
His collection includes beautiful masks from Senegal and Kenya and Maasai and Fang tribes.
Masks — round-, oval- or oblong-shaped — usually are made of various woods, often embellished with rope, hair, beads, feathers or cowry shells.
Paint tends to be naturally made dyes – henna, ocher, mustard seed.
Some feature carvings of animals to emphasize oneness with nature; some are adorned with cowry shells, a symbol of womanhood to celebrate the “goddess,” Tyson said; others have fierce expressions to fend off evil spirits.
“There are thousands of tribal units in Africa,” Marshall said, “but there are only about 100 that carve masks. It’s cultural to Africa, but not necessarily to all the different nations.”
One of the primary uses of masks was storytelling, she said. People lived communally in villages sharing the same language and spiritual beliefs. After supper, everyone gathered around a fire.
“That’s where the village also tells people how to be good people. That’s where you learn things. … That’s when storytelling starts,” she said.
The person who donned a mask to tell a story of how the antelope tricked the lion so as not to be eaten, for example, also wore an outfit to lose his human identity and take on the persona of the animal or spirit he’s portraying, said Marshall.
Stories all had a moral — like “Aesop’s Fables” — and became “cultural overlays and you learn things about your world and how you should act in your world,” she said.
Storytelling masks had holes for seeing and breathing because they were used, as opposed to “tourist masks,” she said — those with artistic merit, but not used in African culture.
Spiritual masks were worn by a village’s adviser, usually an experienced elder. Ritual masks were worn during initiation or rites-of-passage ceremonies — when a girl menstruates for the first time or a young man becomes a hunter, said Marshall.
African masks greatly influenced Western European art and expression, especially artists like Pablo Picasso. And rather than assigning negative connotations — “uncivilized, barbaric, pagan” — to masks and the culture, “all of a sudden you see masks becoming part of Western European culture as something of beauty — this is the most important part — and beginning to respect, beginning to show other cultures the respect that was never shown before,” she said.
Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung embraced the American Indian and African idea of totems, she said, the concept of “having an animal spirit that is somehow connected to you.”
They adorned their office walls with masks, Marshall said, “because they thought this was important cultural overlay when you study peoples’ minds.”
Both men looked at totems “as something that we should really think about — that all of us have symbols that we recognize and are part of our dream world and our psychological mind.”
The beauty of African masks, she said, “is not just how they were used in the village, how they were used spiritually, but how then they became part of our world and including our textiles, our dress, our art, our psychiatry. It’s amazing how important masks have become.”
Masks, she said, “have energy, and I think that’s one of the reasons I like them. There’s a spiritual feeling to them and yet they’re also so beautiful in terms of artistry.”