Ancien African Ritual Mask from the Bobo Tribe.

It was in Valle de Bravo, Mexico, when I acquired this beautiful ritual mask from the "Bobo" tribe.

I was visiting a hotel where I had to create a series of photographs for its virtual tour of the facilities when I came across this piece. I knew something about this tribe because I had an excellent art history class at Beaux-Arts Tournai. The African section in the curriculum was incredible and well-developed by my teacher Viviane Guelfi.

The Bobo ethnic group is located in Africa, specifically on the border between Burkina Faso with 100,000 inhabitants and Mali with about 50,000. The Bobo ethnic group speaks a language called Mandé, primarily spoken in this region of West Africa. The Bobos are farmers, cultivating mainly millet, sorghum, and cotton, from which they make their clothes and generate some sales.

Without a centralized government, they organize into lineages where the elders form a council and make decisions. The idea of a "chief" is profoundly "strange" to them, and they consider it "dangerous."

They have a deity named "Wuro," the creator of the earth and animals. This ethnic group has great respect and admiration for animals, and their representation is always present in ritual dances.

The first man created was a blacksmith, and his companion was a Bobo (cultivator). The masks worn by the Bobos go beyond the role of ritual dance; they embody their aspirations to transcend and manage to articulate a discourse about the strange human form in the cosmos. Not an animal, nor a human being, but rather a mystery that travels through a mysterious fractal originating from the question of origin.

 

I also must to say that the album cover from the "Spiritchaser" Dead Can Dance record is the picture of a Bobo Mask.

The album cover was more a collaboration too, according to Chris Bigg. "Brendan talked at length about African drums, spirits and ritual, sharing some unusual experiences in the Quivvy church studios while recording drums. I sourced a book called The Dance, Art And Ritual Of Africa, and between us, we focused on one particular image. I suggested we try to re-create it, so we tried to find a copy of the mask to give us more options, a pool of images to work with. After searching museums such as Pitt Rivers, the Horniman and the Museum of Mankind without luck, I literally stumbled on a shop in [West London's] Portobello Market that traded in African art, and on the back wall was the mask. We borrowed for the weekend, and shot it for the cover."

As Perry explained, it was a 'butterfly' mask of the Bobo tribe in Burkina Faso, used in dance ceremonies to celebrate the rain after a long period of drought, "and rain triggers butterflies to be born, and everything comes to life. The mask spans out like wings, with big eyes... It's quite Dionysian in spirit. I love what Chris and Kevin did with that cover."