Baule Ndoma

Tribe: Baule Country: Ghana Material: Wood. Condition: Good
This type of mask, explicitly depicting a specific person, is exceedingly rare in Africa. These ndoma, which in Baule language means "double", "replica", "equivalence" or "copy", are designed as true portraits of real people living in the village and are given names. Which people have been thus honored? Social status is the deciding factor, whether in the case of a beautiful woman from a family with means, or an old man with a magnificent beard, whose prestige is acquired through a series of valorous hunting expeditions. A mask of this kind is not commissioned by the person it represents, but rather by a group of admirers, who pay the sculptor to make an effigy of the "beautiful woman" or the old man to honor them. The dancer who wears the mask and who on occasion wears clothes supplied by the person depicted, is accompanied in the dances by the actual subject, who pirouettes around him dressed in his best attire, sprinkling him with perfume, covering the ground as he dances with pieces of fabric, beating away flies which are irritating him and generally behaving towards his double as if he were his child