マスク - Pende - Congo - マスク Mbuya

Initiation mask of the African Mbuya, with large slit eyelids, a rounded tip on the nose and a pouty mouth. Matte ochre patina.
Height without base: 32 cm.
The western Pende live on the Kwilu banks, while the eastern Pende established themselves on the Kasai rivers downstream of Tshikapa. The influence of neighboring ethnic groups—Mbla, Suku, Wongo, Leele, Kuba, and Salempasu—has left its imprint on their broad sculpture of tribal art. Within this diversity, the Mbuya masks, realistic and produced every ten years, serve a festive function and embody different characters that are hard to distinguish without their costume, including the chief fumu or ufumu, the diviner and his wife, the prostitute, the clown, tundu, the possessed, etc.
The initiation masks Mbuya related to the mukanda initiation and those of power, the minganji, represent the ancestors and are performed in sequence during the same ceremonies, agricultural festivals, initiation rites and mukanda circumcision, the coronation of the chief.
(Art and Life in Africa, C.D. Roy; “Pende” Strother).

Provenance: former collection of Professor Jacques LAFFONT, from the cohort of Bordeaux Naval School of Health. Between 1949 and 1966, he spent a long period in Africa where he practiced and taught, notably as holder of the chair of anatomy and operative medicine at the French Faculty of Medicine in Dakar.