Gegon(?) face mask

A long snout-like projection ending in a fringe of dark fiber extends from the face of this mask, below the high smooth dome of its forehead. Its style is highly unusual for the Dan, and two physical features raise doubts that it was ever worn: the face is too small to cover a man’s face, and the crown of raffia around its rim would not have allowed it to be fastened securely to a dancer’s head. Three incised lines run down each side of the face. They reference scarification and mark the mask as belonging to the Diomandé family and its patriarch. Diomandé is a name long associated with the Mau, the northern Mande-speaking neighbors of the Dan (Vandenhoute 1945; Kamara 2018a). That name, together with the unusual carving, suggests that the mask may have been made among the Mau rather than the Dan.

Its form points, tentatively, toward the guégon, a genre of respected masks found along the northern edge of Dan country, where Dan and Mau communities meet (Fischer and Himmelheber 1984, 81). A Mau origin would not set it apart from that genre. The art anthropologist Hans Himmelheber and his son, the ethnologist Eberhard Fischer, worked among the northern Dan in the mid-twentieth century. They proposed that the beaked mask of the Mau helped shape the design of the gegon, as the genre is called in the north. They also recorded that Mau artisans produced the appliquéd leatherwork worn above the gegon’s forehead specifically for Dan buyers (Fischer and Himmelheber 1984, 81). The ethnomusicologist Daniel Reed, who has worked in the Man region since the 1990s, treats Dan and Mau mask spirits as a single field of practice (Reed 2018, 802–3). The boundary between these traditions was never sharp, and masks, materials, and the people who danced them crossed it regularly.

What this object did remains uncertain. In the Man region today the guégon opens ceremonies, blesses those present, and speaks with more authority than any other mask. A face this small, with a crown that could not hold it in place, may never have taken part in such an appearance. Its scale and fittings suggest some purpose other than being worn in a dance, though that purpose was not recorded.

Yann Petit, 2026
Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellow