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 "s