Yoruba - 200620 - Tribal used African Bamun mask - Cameroon. - Verkocht

African Head mask from the Yoruba, Nigeria.

This type of mask is used at the Yoruba Epa festival where the fertility of the soil and the prosperity of the men are conjured.

and carved from a single piece of wood, with color pigments.

Height: 26 cm.

The Yoruba people, numbering over 12 million, are the largest nation in Africa with an art-producing tradition. Most of them live in southwest Nigeria, with considerable communities further west in the Republic of Benin and in Togo. They are divided into approximately twenty separate subgroups, which were traditionally autonomous kingdoms. Excavation at Ife of life-sized bronze and terracotta heads and full-length figures of royalty and their attendants have startled the world, surpassing in their portrait-like naturalism everything previously known from Africa. The cultural and artistic roots of the Ife masters of the Classical Period (ca. 1050—1500) lie in the more ancient cultural center of Nok to the northeast, though the precise nature of this link remains obscure.