Reggie: My name is Reginald Hodges. This is my wife Celeste Hodges. We lived in Africa for two decades and we collected a number of items that are currently in the Nasher Museum. I want to tell you a little about an item called a Rakatak-tak. Throughout West and North Africa, music is an integral part of all lifestyle and practices; music is used in everything. When women are washing clothes, when people are farming, when they are building their houses—you always hear music, especially when festivities and celebrations take place. And the percussion instruments, the rhythm made by the instrument, is what all the music, the dance, is built around. One of the main percussion instruments is an instrument called a Rakatak-tak. It is an instrument made of gourds that have been carved into little circles, holes bored into them and then a stick that looks like a wishbone is placed in it and a little piece is put in to hold it. Performers normally preform with the Rakatak-tak with two, with one in each hand, and they make a very rhythmic sound and they can be found all over West Africa, beginning in Mauritania coming down through Senegal, Guinea, Sierra Leone. These instruments are not necessarily associated with any secret society but they are associated with entertainment and performances.

Reggie: I want to tell you a little bit about a mask called the Goli Mask.  This mask comes from Côte d’Ivoire, which people in America refer to as the Ivory Coast, but in the country the people do not like their name being translated into English. This mask comes from the farming region between Yamoussoukro and Baule, extending east towards the Guinean border. These people are very prominent farmers; they grow a lot of peanuts, coco, corn and [other] products. And the Goli Mask is associated with the harvest system season and the celebrations which take place. This particular mask was collected in Baule up in the middle of the country. It is a round, circular mask and the circular mask indicates the importance of the sun and the impact it has on all things growing. These masks come in different colors. This one has an ochre type color around the edges and ochre around the eyes. It’s only eyes and mouth [are] shown. The reddish color indicates it’s a female mask instead of a male mask (which would be black around the sides) and it has horns on the top. The Goli Mask preforms for entertainment, for celebrations, and especially at the times of harvest. This mask can be found in museums can be found all over the world because they're very prolific in producing them. This is not a mask that people preserve one year to the next. They make the mask one year and they use it and it’s finished and they make another for the next year. The Goli spirit is believed to be able to communicate with ancestors and the spirits that have a bearing on the crops that are growing and since the crops are essential for life the Goli spirit has the potential to do both—to have a bad crop and a good crop. And if it’s bad crop they throw the devil away quickly, thankfully.  

Reggie: *Mende Greeting* This is a common greeting in the Mende Language in West Africa. This is where I am going to talk about the masks that we have on display or in the possession of the Nasher Museum. First, African masks are normally produced by men, owned by men, worn by men and preserved by men. There are 600 ethnic groups in Africa; however, there is one group where the masks are associated with women. They are owned by the women, they're worn by the women and they are associated with everything that this female and it is the mask that we have here called Bundu Mask. They're associated with Sierra Leone, which is on the West coast of Africa with the Mende tribe. The word Bundu is the name of the society and this is why the people call it Bundu Mask but if you actually talk to people in the society, they will refer to the mask as "Sowei.” So if anyone wants to look the mask, you can use both words, you can look up Bundu or Sowei. This mask is associated with the initiation of women from young girls to women. It is the rite of passage and the Bundu society is the group within the local community, society, that oversees the process of initiating the women. It’s a ceremony that probably takes anywhere from six weeks to two months and it involves taking young girls around the ages of 11 and 12 into the society bush and teaching them the things that they would need to become full women. And when they emerge from the bush they are considered women. And they are ready for marriage and they know all they need to know about taking care of children, cooking, taking care of children, and medicine, and so forth.     Reggie: The Bundu Mask embodies the spirit of the Bundu society and it also embodies the ideals of female beauty associated with the Mende tribe. The Mask is made of wood, different types of wood. One type is called cottonwood. It's a very soft wood that resembles balsa wood. The carvers cut it and they carve it using measurements that they take from their arm, hand. They know it must be from their fingertips to the elbow and the dimensions between the eyes would be one joint of the fingersThe mask is actually broken into three different specific regions: the top of the mask, the hair part, they call the "korfor" is always an elaborate display of the hair because the Mende associate hair with beauty, strength, and fertility. And good-looking women have good-looking hair and it’s always woven in certain ways. Sometimes there are things woven into the hair such as amulets that have little Muslim prayers in it, or you see little horns that are the horns off of a small antelope called "diger.” The hairstyles normally have an even number of lobes or strings going through it and very often beads are placed on the hair. The second part of the mask would be the facial part and the facial part is normally diamond shaped. And it has all of the facial features in a small part, probably the size of your fist but if you look at the mask overall it exemplifies what Mende people see as being ideal within a good-looking, a perfect woman, as they would say. The forehead is always large and smooth and a smooth forehead indicates that women are intelligent. After that they have a very small mouth and the mouth indicates that the women do not gossip. And the ears indicate that the people are not listening for things that would be bad, that could cause trouble within the community. The eyes always have small slits. The person who dances with the mask is called the indo-joey which means the dancer of the mask. The person never speaks and there are people that accompany the mask that keep people away from the mask. And there is a black raffia dressing that is worn around the neck that goes through the small holes around the mask. And the complete body of the dancer will be covered, even the hands and feet, and the spirit never says anything but it exemplifies what a perfect person should be. During the initiation ceremony, the initiates and the people in the town will probably see this devil preform multiple times. There is a long history associated with this mask. Missionaries have written about them and over the past 150 years there have been some changes in the way they're made but the basic ideals of the small mouth, the small nose, and ears, the large forehead—they have continued. So, in a way, this is not a primitive type of art. It is highly sophisticated and they have been able to maintain these ideals of beauty over centuries. 

Reggie : As you look at these masks, there are actually differences between them that are very subtle. And you have to look very closely to see them. On some of the masks the rings around the neck are actually items such as a snake or maybe a rope. Occasionally you will see things woven into the hair. I have seen combs woven into the hair. You can see small animals, you can see beads. Items also appear on the mask that associated with the name of the mask. Each mask has a name and a mask that is known for its grace might have a bird associated with it, while one is known for its fear will have the bird associated with it. There are tribal markings on the mask and in the olden days going back to the 1800s the Sherbroke tribe, the Bulon who were the first group to occupy this area in West Africa, used three little marks next to the eye as beauty marks and they were known as the chicken foot because the chicken has three little lines on it so the Sherbroke people had the chicken foot. Some of the masks will have crossings on their foreheads and these are not intended to make the forehead look bad, there was magic within the markings within the markings, which would prevent the women from making a bad decision or touching something that may cause harm to their body. And those were the markings they put across their heads. 

The society in a way resembles a sorority and they have these stories. And if you go to Africa as a stranger and you see a mask and you have the opportunity to ask the mask, ask the people, where they come from they will all give you the same story, which I will call a lie. And they all know it a lie too, But they will tell you that the mask rose from the river and the sun shined down on the them and the women went to the river and they pulled the mask out and they come from the spirits that live below the waters. The spirit that they call "Mommy Water" had provided them the mask and "Mommy Water" has spirits below the water that help them produce it. 

Reggie: It takes a carver approximately a week to carve a mask, 40 to 50 hours of work, which will be equivalent to our work week. However, a carver is unable to do all the work within one week because the wood has to dry out and has to wait until certain points until the next thing can be done to it. So it may take a carver up to a month to actually produce a mask but in that month he could produce four depending on where he is at one time. The tools used are all locally made by blacksmith. Everything in the mask is local, people—after you cut the round piece of wood—people usually bury it a little bit into the ground so that you can chisel down into it and get the wood out. And it’s a tool. You scrape the wood out of the inside before you begin cutting the outside and they use measurements. When we would probably use a micrometer for measurement, they actually use their body parts, their hands, to measure the length of it. When the mask reaches a state where it is nearly finished and all the scraping that is possibly done they use the ficas leaf to sandpaper the mask to get it smooth. And then they use a leaf called jewey, which when is wet turns black and you constantly wipe the mask with jewey leaf and the jewey leaf turns the wood into black, a black finish. But before the mask performs, they always wipe over the mask with palm oil, which is a red oil and this makes the mask shine. The women own the mask and when they are not being preformed they wrap them up in a bag, a burlap type sack, and they tie it. And they always put them over their kitchen because this enables the fire in the kitchen with the smoke to keep any insects from ever getting into the wood and preserves it. 

Reggie: The Mende society is basically a society made up of agriculturalists and they live in a very rural area and because they live in a rural area they do not have access to modern medicine. But they have developed their own system of medicine for treating various illnesses. This particular small statue here that looks like a baby doll is called a Minsereh. Looking back through records and history and the things been written, the name originated in the Bulan Sherbro tribe. It was a word called Mencilative related to women. And the particular doll does not provide medicine but it is the doll the society that deal with healing use to protect their medicine. There are different societies, one called the Yasay, one called the Jaiyay, one called the Hunwe these societies are female healing societies and I would say 95% of what they do related to female healing but they do have somethings that they. Do that relate to hilling and they make their medicine from various herbs and roots. Medicines they get from trees and they treat everything from what would called infections to infertility in women to various women’s diseases and they have these little bowls that they make the medicine in and where you have these bowls in the Yasay society house, you always have these small dolls that are next to the bowls and that protect the medicine. They will occasionally drop pieces of medicine onto the dolls and the doll is supposed to be able to communicate with the spirits that govern healing within people. The dolls are always black in color and they exhibit the same features that you see within Bundu mask. One notable exception, since these are not helmet masks, they are dolls, the neck is much smaller but will also have the rings around the neck and they will have an elaborate hair style. The arms are normally held below the breast or hanging straight down and the dolls very often have markings across their stomach, chest or forehead and these geometrical markings are considered as medicine also to help heal people. These dolls are very common, they are not only in the medicine houses, the people that carve the dolls also carve them for people of stature who may keep these dolls in their houses as an indication of nobility or something. Some of the dolls are also given from the medicine society to people like chiefs or dignitaries in the communities so you will find them all over the communities.  They are not as common in museums as the Bundu masks are but they do play a vital role in the Mende society.

Reggie: Thank you for listening to me talk about masks. “Maloway Mupacoway Wesay”