Babanki Nkem mask, Cameroon

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Lot: 514

Babanki Nkem mask, Cameroon

Nkem "basket" mask. Babanki culture, Cameroon. 75 x 42 x 27 cm.

Industrial society has left behind the manufacture of everyday objects, underestimated and relegated to a residual role because they are insignificant. We have forgotten that this was not always the case, in a rural world, the "Nkem" mask represents the work a man or woman can do when carrying a basket on their head. This simple gesture, inconsequential in our culture, contains great symbolic value, no less valuable for the inhabitants of the Babanki kingdom. The basket is used to collect the harvest and transport it to the market to trade.

The iconic metaphor of the "basket" is ideal to understand the importance of intertwining the workforce, in which we find a well-organized social network that greatly facilitates undertaking difficult or impossible jobs to perform individually.

Every symbolic object has several levels of interpretation. The structure of this mask also evokes the permanent rebirth of the kingdom through numerous fertility images carved in the "basket", a whole admirable frieze of successive intertwined motifs of human bodies and stylized batrachians that are a symbol of fertility due to their prolific offspring and the aquatic environment in which they live. Although its most esoteric meaning is the representation of the sexual order linked to the notion of fertility that we notice when we see the swollen cheeks resembling two large breasts full of milk attached to a pregnant belly (the basket) in allusion to the sacred act of procreation that simulates the "phallus" nose penetrating "mount of Venus" under the forehead.

This monumental mask represents the power, nobility and the permanence of the kingdom of Babanki during the successive reigns, only shown in public during the funerals of the king or distinguished members of the nobility and during agricultural rites favoring fertilizing rain as the maximum symbol of fertility.

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Object

Nkem Babanki Mask

Country

Cameroon