Re: USA Africa Dialogue Series - Ralph Njoku: West African Masking Traditions and Diaspora Masquerade Festivals

Thanks for sharing the link to the important work. The thought provoked by the book is why Africans continued to exclude women from initiation into the mask societies while the African diaspora have generally democratized the practice of 'playing mas' during carnival? Njoku attributed this discrimination to the false belief that women are more dangerous as witches than men who were respected as good wizards and who needed the mask to help them to balance the evil powers of women:

 "For example, among the Yoruba of southwestern Nigeria (who are also found in the present-day Francophone Republic of Niger), the Gélédé masquerade purportedly honors the earth spirits and the ancestors, and celebrates "Mothers" (áwon iyá wá)—chief among them, the earth goddess, female spirits, and elderly women.2 The annual Gélédé (or Èfé) esta highlights the status of women and paci es their hypothetically dangerous mystical powers. As performers ascribe honor to women in a male-controlled society, the Gélédé, "the festival of supplication," e ectively serves a purifying role in society."

This chauvinism may be part of the reasons why women are given less access to formal education in colonial and post-colonial Africa whereas the African Diaspora that democratized the practice of playing mask also recorded the equalization of formal education in gender terms and they are reaping the benefits in Human Development Index reports. 

Missing from the book is Nwando Achebe's excellent work on The Female King of Colonial Nigeria whose downfall during the women's war came about when she went beyond the seizure of the wives of other men like other Warrant Chiefs and started bringing out her own masquerade which was promptly confiscated by the men. She went to court to recover the masquerade and was forced to step down by the colonial officials who would not wait for an opportunity to promote patriarchy in the guise of public order.

Are there African societies that allow women to be initiated into the masquerade societies?

Biko

On Friday, 29 May 2020, 16:42:27 GMT-4, Toyin Falola <toyinfalola@austin.utexas.edu> wrote:

Congratulations to Professor Ralph Njoku for his latest publication on masking traditions and masquerade festivals, an excellent book that appeared in the University of Rochester's Series on Africa and the African Diaspora.

 

Thanks to a generous grant from the Mellon Foundation, it is both an open access book and an inexpensive paper edition. If you are interested in a free copy, the links are supplied below. No code is necessary! It's completely open access.  An inexpensive paperback for sale will be coming out soon--for people who would still like to have a print book. 

 

You can find it here (the digital repository for University of Rochester research):

 

http://hdl.handle.net/1802/35708

 

or here, in a collection showing the other books published through the pilot:

https://archive.org/details/sustainablehistorymonographpilot

or here, on JSTOR:

 

https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctv114c79k

West African Masking Traditions and Diaspora Masquerade Carnivals: History, Memory, and Transnationalism on JSTOR  In the decades following the 1940s, there has been an explosion of scholarly interest in African-styled traditions and the influence of these traditions upon th... www.jstor.org

 

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