Part I mapped Africa, Papua New Guinea, Celtic Ireland, North America, and Asia. Part II went into India, Aotearoa New Zealand, Fiji, South America, and the Caribbean. Part III closes this chapter of the series with three of the most consequential mask traditions in the world — the Benin Kingdom’s royal bronze tradition, the Poro and Sande secret societies of West Africa, and the living mask revivals of the Pacific Northwest. Three stories about what was taken, what survived, and what is being actively reclaimed.
“They called it looting when Benin did it to protect sacred objects from colonial forces. They called it collecting when Europe did it to strip them from their homes. Language is the first mask colonization wears.”
The Benin Kingdom: The Royal Face That Changed the World
In 1897, British colonial forces sacked the Kingdom of Benin — present-day southern Nigeria — in what they called a “punitive expedition.” They burned the royal palace, killed thousands, sent the Oba (king) into exile, and looted approximately three thousand sacred objects. These objects — now known globally as the Benin Bronzes — were distributed to museums across Europe and the United States, where they have remained for over a century.
What Europe took was not primitive art. It was one of the most sophisticated and historically significant bodies of sacred work ever produced by human hands.
The Benin Kingdom began its tradition of brass and bronze casting in the 13th century, under the reign of Oba Oguola, who brought the igun eronmwon (brass-casting guild) from Ife — the spiritual capital of the Yoruba world. From that point forward, the royal court of Benin produced commemorative heads, plaques, figures, and masks of extraordinary technical and spiritual sophistication for over six hundred years. These were not decorative objects. They were living archives — three-dimensional records of dynastic history, spiritual authority, and ancestral power.
The Iyoba Idia mask — carved in ivory and brass in the early 16th century to honor Idia, the first Queen Mother of Benin and the woman who raised an army to restore her son Esigie to the throne — is among the most recognizable objects in African art history. Idia’s face, calm and regal, is surrounded by a crown of Portuguese soldier heads — a record of Benin’s diplomatic and military relationships with Europe encoded into the ancestor’s own crown. The Oba wore it at his hip during the most sacred annual ceremony of the Benin calendar, the Igue festival, to invoke Idia’s protective power for the kingdom.
When the British took it, they did not take a cultural artifact. They took the Queen Mother’s face. They took the kingdom’s living connection to one of its most powerful ancestors.
The brass commemorative heads produced for the altar of the hand (ikegobo) and the ancestral altar (ukhurhe) were not portraits in the Western sense. They were spiritual technology — vessels through which the power of deceased Obas remained present and active in the palace, accessible through prayer and ceremony. Each head encoded specific information about the Oba’s reign, spiritual status, and relationship to the divine. The accumulation of heads on the ancestral altar was not decoration. It was the court’s living relationship with every king who had ever ruled, maintained and renewed through ritual.
The repatriation movement for the Benin Bronzes is one of the most significant cultural justice struggles of the 21st century. Germany, the Netherlands, and several American universities have begun returning objects. The British Museum — which holds the largest collection — has resisted. The Oba of Benin and the Edo State Government have built the Edo Museum of West African Art (EMOWAA) in preparation for the objects’ return. The conversation is not over. The ancestors are waiting.
The Poro and Sande Societies: Masks as Governance
We touched on the Sande Society in Part I — the rare tradition in which women wear the primary ritual mask. Here we go deeper, into the full political and spiritual structure of which the Sande mask is only the visible face.
The Poro Society (men) and the Sande Society (women) are parallel secret societies found across a wide swath of West Africa — Sierra Leone, Liberia, Guinea, Côte d’Ivoire — among the Mende, Temne, Kpelle, Loma, Vai, and related peoples. They are not social clubs. They are the governing structure of these societies, operating alongside and often above formal political authority.
The Poro Society governs male initiation, law, war, and the spiritual relationship between the living community and the male ancestral forces of the forest. Its masked figure — the Gbetu or Great Mask, depending on the specific people — represents the all-consuming forest spirit that “swallows” initiates and “births” them again as men. During Poro ceremonies, the masked figure’s appearance signals that the society is in session. Civil authority suspends. Markets close. Women and uninitiated people go indoors. The forest has entered the town.
The Sande Society governs female initiation, women’s medicine, law, and the spiritual relationship between the community and the water spirits. The Sande helmet mask — the Sowei — is one of the most extraordinary objects in the world’s masking traditions. It is carved from a single piece of wood, painted black with a preparation that includes palm oil and soot, and worn by senior Sande women called Sowei during initiation ceremonies. The face is serene, idealized, inhuman in its perfection — the face not of a woman but of the water spirit herself. The rings at the neck are not fat folds. They are rings of water — the surface of the river the spirit has just emerged from.
What makes the Sande mask tradition structurally unique in the global history of masking is not just that women wear the mask — it is that the mask belongs to a female institution with genuine governing power. The Sande Society could declare war. It could override male political decisions on matters within its jurisdiction. Senior Sande women were among the most powerful people in their communities. The Sowei mask was not a ceremonial accessory. It was a badge of institutional authority backed by ancestral force.
Colonial administrations — British in Sierra Leone and American in Liberia — systematically attacked both Poro and Sande, correctly identifying them as competing sources of authority. Missionaries banned initiations. Colonial courts refused to recognize society rulings. The sustained assault weakened but did not destroy either institution. Both continue to operate today, in adapted forms, as living governance structures in communities across the region.
The Pacific Northwest: The Reclamation
We end this chapter of the series not with loss but with return — because the Pacific Northwest Coast is the site of one of the most powerful and sustained Indigenous cultural reclamation movements in the world, and masks are at its center.
The peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast — the Kwakwaka’wakw, Haida, Ts’msyen, Tlingit, Heiltsuk, Nisga’a, Nuu-chah-nulth, and others — produced what are widely considered the most technically and conceptually sophisticated masks in the Western Hemisphere. We introduced the transformation mask in Part I — the hinged mask that opens during dance to reveal a second face within. Here we go into what happened to those masks, and what is being done to bring them home.
Between roughly 1885 and 1951, the Canadian government banned the potlatch — the ceremonial feast system that is the structural center of Northwest Coast social, spiritual, and economic life. At potlatches, masks were danced. Hereditary rights were transferred. Ancestral histories were recited and validated. Debts were settled. The ban on potlatch was explicitly designed to destroy the cultural infrastructure of these nations. In the 1920s, when the Kwakwaka’wakw held a potlatch in defiance of the law, Canadian authorities arrested the participants and seized approximately 450 ceremonial objects — masks, coppers, regalia — and sent them to museums in Ottawa, Toronto, and New York.
The U’mista Cultural Centre, founded in Alert Bay, British Columbia in 1980 by the Kwakwaka’wakw, was built specifically to receive the return of these objects. The name u’mista means the return of something important — specifically, it refers to the return of people taken captive in raids, brought home by their community. The choice of this word for the repatriation project was deliberate. The masks were not artifacts that had been misplaced. They were people who had been taken. Their return was a rescue.
The Haida Gwaii repatriation has been similarly transformative. The Haida people have spent decades working to bring ancestral remains and sacred objects home from museums across North America and Europe. In 2003, the Haida received 40 ancestors’ remains from the Field Museum in Chicago. In 2010, Harvard’s Peabody Museum returned additional remains. Each return is accompanied by ceremony — the ancestors received, honored, and laid to rest on their own land, in their own way. The mask-making tradition of the Haida — Bill Reid, Robert Davidson, and the generations of carvers who followed them — has been inseparable from this process of cultural reclamation. You cannot carve what you do not know. The revival of the carving tradition required the revival of the language, the ceremony, the genealogical knowledge, the protocol. Each mask carved is an act of research and of resistance simultaneously.
The Ts’msyen, Tlingit, and Nisga’a nations have pursued similar paths — treaty negotiations, museum partnerships, language revival programs, and the rebuilding of ceremonial life that was suppressed for nearly a century. Young carvers are trained by master artists. Children learn their clan crests — the animal and supernatural beings whose faces appear on their families’ masks — as part of their identity formation. The masks being made now in these communities are not replicas of the past. They are the tradition continuing, in the present, on its own terms.
What This Series Has Been Saying
Three installments. Dozens of peoples. Every inhabited continent. And one through-line that has never broken:
The ancestors do not leave. They change form. They move into wood, into brass, into painted skin, into the body of a dancer, into the voice of a spirit medium, into the face of a child who carries a lineage forward. The mask is the technology through which human communities have always maintained that relationship — making the invisible visible, making the past present, making the dead available to the living.
What colonization attacked, in every case, was not primarily the object. It was the relationship. The Benin bronzes were taken not because they were valuable as art — though they are — but because they were the structural mechanism through which the Benin Kingdom maintained its relationship with its royal ancestors and therefore with its own authority. The Poro and Sande were suppressed not because they were dangerous as social clubs but because they were governing institutions whose authority competed with colonial control. The potlatch was banned not because it was wasteful — the colonial excuse — but because it was the mechanism through which Northwest Coast nations maintained their sovereignty, their law, and their living relationship with the ancestors who authorized both.
The reclamation work being done by the U’mista Cultural Centre, by the Haida carvers, by the Edo Museum project, by the Sande women keeping ceremony in Sierra Leone and Liberia — is not nostalgia. It is structural repair. It is the rebuilding of the infrastructure of ancestral relationship that colonization tried to destroy.
At Livity Tree Art, this is the work we are in conversation with every time we make something. Not to replicate these traditions — they belong to the peoples who hold them — but to stand in the same current. To understand that making art from ancestral knowledge is not decorative. It is functional. It maintains something. It transmits something. It keeps a relationship alive that the world needs kept alive.
The face behind the face is always the ancestor. And the ancestor is always speaking.
Stay tuned, family. One love. 🌳
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