Masks on the Move: Defying Genres, Styles, and Traditions in the Cameroonian Grassfields

In the realm of African art, masks are some of the most exemplary and iconic artworks. Whether displayed to be admired for their shape, form, and volumes, or presented in dialogue with ethnographic information and contextual images, masks are omnipresent in collections and displays of African art. As aesthetic and ethnographic objects, masks are used as gateways to the understanding and appreciation of “cultural styles” as well as the formal and creative solutions adopted by artists and workshops. Yet the appeal of masks also relies on their perceived irreducible difference and mysterious spiritual aura. Even when isolated and stripped of their fiber costumes and attachments, there is always a reference to the body of an absent wearer, thus evoking a situated and embodied history of production, performance, and social meaning that often does not accompany the mask into the museum. Yet even when isolated and stripped of their embodied meaning, masks are still perceived as affecting.

The meaning constrictions of masks in museum displays often extend to many other African art objects which, in their aesthetic and function, known or imagined, suggest different forms of conceptual and geographical displacement. Many galleries and museums in Europe and North America contain large numbers of religious and performative objects, collected as Europeans expanded their control over territory and over the minds and bodies of people throughout the continent. While these were often seized, stolen, or acquired as people “converted” to new beliefs and cultural practices, others were purchased in rather straightforward market interactions. Indeed, the fascination shown by foreigners towards these “mysterious” and “sacred” artworks also gave birth, almost immediately, to a rather secular, market-oriented production of masklike objects meant for display rather than performance.

This article investigates the longstanding history of commercial practices and stylistic experimentation that characterize the production of masks and other artworks in the Grassfields of Western Cameroon. While I acknowledge the importance of long-distance and international trade as an important stimulus for creativity and artistic production, my intention is to highlight the significance of contemporary artistic inventions in shaping local understanding of aesthetics and material displays. Collections, museums, eco-museological itineraries and, more recently, experimentations and artistic interventions by contemporary artists Hervé Youmbi and Hervé Yamguen (Fig. 1) have produced a complex and intriguing regional and national artistic scene. Here the taxonomies distinguishing commercial productions from “authentic artworks” have been blurred and subverted in local practices, where masks are now moving between spheres of practice and understanding that defy canonical strictures.

NOT JUST FOR TOURISTS: ART AND MARKETS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

In a 1910 postcard, published in 2014 on Bruno Claessens’s blog, four young men stand by an artfully arranged display of decorative masks and figures carved in Kongo style (Fig. 2).¹ This early Loango market stall, featuring “fetishes” for sale, was strikingly similar to more contemporary commercial displays of comparable objects found in rural and urban centers across Africa and beyond. While postcards documenting early tourist markets are not very common, the practice of creating objects for sale to merchants, travelers, and colonial administrators is as old as contact itself. The classic examples of the Afro-Portuguese ivories (Fagg 1959, Bassani et al. 1988) or Loango carved tusks and figurines (Bridges 2013) are well-known cases. Yet many travelers’ and collectors’ accounts testified to the entrepreneurship of local artists and middlemen, fast to grasp and cater to the tastes and preferences of new customers. Scholars have highlighted the importance of commerce in shaping artistic production since early contact times and likely even earlier.² A paradigmatic example is found in Enid Schildkrout’s essay on Fredrick Starr and Herbert Lang’s collecting in the Congo. In one of the pages of his diary from 1905, Starr wrote:

Fetishes were too plenty and too fresh to be entirely satisfactory … Yesterday a well carved wooden figure was offered. I refused it because it was rather new and empty in its stomach hole. Today it appeared again, this time with a fat round belly neatly sewed up and well smeared with cam and oil. I agreed...