Makonde mask

Country: Tanzania

Material: Terracotta

Height: 21 cm

Provenance: Baudouin, Comte de Grunne

The Makonde clay masks found since the 1980s are surrounded in mystery. Clay masks seem to have been used in the initiation of girls . Some are painted, some fitted with hair. There are also clay helmet masks and body masks, one in the Wereldmuseum Rotterdam collection. Stylistically there are great differences between these clay masks. Compare, for example, a pair of masks, Sotheby’s 25-5-1999 no.78, a helmet (?) mask that resembles a lipiko maske, Sotheby’s 19-5-2000 no. 298, a face mask in the Barbier-Mueller collection (Kecskesi 2008 cat.183) and this specimen.

Clay masks made around 500 AD have been found in southern Africa (the Lydenburg finds). However, this does not mean that clay masks are the forerunners of wooden specimens (Schaedler 1994), or that these are a recent development (Kecskeci 2008).