Gegon face mask

A long curving nose, a fur-covered jaw that opens and closes, and narrow eyes framed in metal give this mask a forceful presence. It belongs to the gegon, or guégon, a genre distinguished by a projection from the face and found among the northern Dan of Côte d’Ivoire and Liberia (Fischer and Himmelheber 1984, 81). The face is a long oval with sharply arched brows in relief, and the eyes are rectangular slits bordered with incised strips of copper alloy. Monkey fur covers the lower half, held with nails and strips of cane over a serrated edge along the upper jaw. Forged nails project from each side of the face and from the center of the forehead. These additions, made after carving, speak of a long working life.

The defining activity of this mask is speech. The hinged lower jaw, with a tongue carved in relief on its inner surface, let the mask appear to speak as it addressed an audience. In the past, such masks spoke in sounds rather than words—twittering, croaking, and growling—while an attendant translated for the listeners (Fischer 1978, 19). In the Man region today, a guégon addresses audiences directly in local languages to perform libations, bless, and judge conflicts.

Scholars have read the projecting nose in different ways. The art anthropologist Hans Himmelheber and his son, the ethnologist Eberhard Fischer, worked among the Dan in the mid-twentieth century. They classified the nose as a beak and the masquerade as a bird. Because the name gegon makes no reference to birds, they argued that the genre had been borrowed from a neighboring people (Fischer and Himmelheber 1984, 81). The ethnomusicologist Daniel Reed, working near Man in the 1990s, found no such association (Reed 2003, 89). The metal around the eyes offers a rough guide to date. In the 1960s, the carver Jean Don Gba of Petit-Gbapleu told Himmelheber that masks in his area once had round eyes ringed with white lizard droppings. Imported metal replaced that white during the years when colonial pacification allowed carvers to travel and see Guro, Baule, and Senufo sculpture, which inspired slit eyes (Himmelheber 2016, 359–60). Jean spoke of white metal rather than the copper alloy used here. His account still suggests that this mask postdates that shift, and it shows that Dan carvers tracked the history of their own style.

Masks of masculine types are adorned with materials from the forest, such as fur, feathers, leaves, and cord (Fischer 1978, 19). The circular holes around the edge of this one once secured the crest and raffia that completed the figure. Each of these elements told those who knew the mask which spirit had come. Most Dan masks also carry individual proper names (Fischer and Himmelheber 1984, 23, 67). The name of this one was not recorded when it left the region, and neither were the names of the initiated men who fitted its fur and nails. It is unfortunately impossible to know when it was produced solely based on its physical attributes especially as this genre is still being danced and celebrated today.

Yann Petit, 2026
Jane and Morgan Whitney Fellow