240932 - African Bobo BWA animal head mask - Burkina Faso.

Burkina Faso: African animal headmask from the BOBO.

Size: 45 cm long.

This Bobo head mask is dated from the mid 20th century and comes with a certificate of authenticity.

The Bobo believe in a god Wuro, creator of the earth and animals. The first man created was a blacksmith who asked for a companion. This is how the Bobo or cultivator is designed. Then Wuro retreated, leaving the men with three sons: Dwo, responsible for helping man, Soxo, the spirit of the wild and the bush, and Kwere, a figure of his power who punishes with lightning. altars were erected to them in every village.

Blacksmiths were the priests of the cult of Dwo. The spirits of the bush and the ancestors, especially the founder of the village, received offerings. Dwo was the intermediary between man and the creator.

Living in a land of dry savannah where harvests depend on the arrival of rain, the Bobo have instituted a series of purification rituals to atone for nature, which is fundamentally good for them, in contrast to the ambivalence it possesses for other ethnic groups . Since it is appropriate to correct people's mistakes, masks have the essential function of erasing evil and restoring the God-given balance between the sun, the earth and the rain. At the end of the dry season and before the resumption of agricultural work, purification ceremonies take place with the sheet masks that embody Dwo, the fiber masks and those made of wood that represent the protective spirits of the village: warthog, male buffalo with flat horns, rooster whose crest perpendicular to the face, toucan, fish, antelope, snake and hawk. They all embody the powers of fecundity, fecundity and growth.

The highly geometric solar masks have different reading levels, accessible depending on the level of the initiate.