Further details
The simultaneous presentation of two Punu masks from South Gabon, one black and one white, both ancient and sculpted with great skills, is quite rare. It gives us the opportunity to raise quickly the symbolic of colors in this western region of Equatorial Africa.
White is omnipresent on Gabonese masks, such as the fang, punu-lumbu, tsogo or vuvi. This color is also used for body painting during cultural ceremonies, symbolizing the ancestral spirits, protecting and beneficial for the community. On the contrary, black is associated to evil forces, especially the ones emanating from unsatisfied deceased that people need to be afraid of. As for the red, often used in contrast with other colors, it symbolizes life and the sacred and is found under the form of natural unguent or parrot feathers (Psittacus erithacus) put in the hair.
The okuyi masks, which faces are covered in whitish kaolin and decorated with a high headdress painted in black, are much more numerous than the black ikwara masks. Both of them are made by most tribes of South Gabon, from Ogooué to Congo, including the Punus of the Ngounié valley around Mouila, the Eshiras from Fougamou, the Vungus, the Apidjis, the Lumbus from Tchibanga and Mayumba, and the ancient Mpongwes from the region around Libreville. According to the tribes, those masks have a different name: Okukwé and Mbwanda for the Myéné tribes (Mpongwe, Enenga, Gaola) ; Okuyi, Mukuyi and Mukudj' for the Eshira, Evea, Vungu, Punu, Lumbu, Tsengi ; Mvudi and Oso for the Tsogo and the Ndzebi.
In the lake region of down Ogooué (Lambaréné), the generic term okuyi is sometimes replaced by a metaphorical expression such as: ezogha (which means "secret initiatic society"), tata mpolo (which means the "powerful father"), and ezoma z'anomé ("the men's thing" forbidden to wives and children).
But everywhere they do the same old ritual dance that took some inputs from the western people of Congo during the centuries. This dance was made to invoke spirits from the underworld that were incarnated by a "beautiful young girl" with and ideal modeled face. This face needed to have high cheeks under an arched forehead, marked by scarifications that look like scales, with big half-closed eyes, protuberant eye lid within sunken eye socket, made up with funerary kaolin (pembi or pèmba) or a dark pigment, full lips colored with red ngula, and covered with a beautiful headdress that is always dark which reminds directly of the feminine headdress in Gabon during the XIXth century.
The okuyi dancer, accompanied with his acolytes, went through the village on high stilts provoking people with acrobatic and impressive figures. These codified danced performances, had a great success on people. After having in the past a regulating social role of a justice maker, the okuyi became more and more on the mid XXth century, a communautary entertainement.
In the tradition of the people from the Ngouni, the okuyi dance was organized always in the middle of the day, for important men's funerals and lifts of mourning period. It was also organized for some women such as twins and mothers of twins, or to celebrated the birth or the initiation of young people, or to restore social order after a crisis in the community, or to spell bad fate or again to look for an evil sorcerer etc.
The black punus called ikwara (or ikwara-mokulu, which means "the mask of the night" because it is always used during the night under the light of torches made from burning herbs) is quite particular. Some of our Punu and Galoa informants told us that those black masks were sometimes "white masks" that were occasionally covered with black pigment if an ikwara was lacking (cf. Punu, 2008, pl. 12, p 137 - Sotheby's New York, 17 mai 2007, lot n124). Nevertheless, some black punu masks existed that were kept very carefully by the initiates (which is the case here). These masks are rare in western collections because in-situ, these objects were especially hidden from Europeans which is definitely not the case for the okuyi. The black or brown pigments were made from the calcination of wood. This coal (mbii) was then sprayed and mixed to copal (Guibourtia Demeusii) and palm oil to obtain a kind of painting that could penetrate profoundly in the wood or by application of a natural sap extracted from leaves of Whitfieldia Longifolia. [Raponda-Walker A. & Sillans R. "Les plantes utiles du Gabon", ed. Lechevalier, Paris 1961, p.43 et 229].
If the white color is linked to the world of spirits and ancestors, black is associated with the underworld, sorcery and threatening forces that emanates from it. Black and white are then both chromatic marks of death in its fundamental ambivalence, made of occult forces sometimes well-inclined and sometimes malefic but unavoidably linked to human destiny.
Black and white
The study of these two ancient Punu masks allows us to compare morphological details. On the two pieces, certain details are similar and linked to the style of South Gabon: an oval human face with a naturalistic look, a high and convex forehead, deep arches of the eyebrows and quite concave orbits, a flat nose with marked wings, a small mouth with hemmed and full lips, a smooth philtrum above it, some ears, and some plaits that go around the face and meet under the chin. We shall point out the fact that these plaits are complete which is quite rare. On the okuyi mask, the kaolin powder has disappeared, so as the red pigments, revealing the wood which took, along the years, a nice auburn patina.
Others details distinguish them. On one side, the white mask has the scarifications in "scales" in the middle of the face and on the temples. On the other side, we can see on the black one some incised lines on the forehead, on both side as an extension of the eyes towards the temples and on the cheeks on both sides of the mouth.
Another difference is the headdresses. The white mask is decorated with a high central padded case (buyi) with two voluminous lateral buns that are put behind the ears and then prolonged in plaits that go under the chin. As for the ikwara, the mask arbor a headdress with two cases (mabuda) closely linked with lateral buns both raised on the forehead, with their extremity strangely curled (cf. Punu, 2008, pl. 21, 22 et 23, p. 138 et pl. 47, p. 141).
Finally, we can point out that the okuyi mask is very similar to the face of a feminine figure carrying flasks, softly scarified on the forehead, the torso, the belly, collected in western Gabon before 1889 and exhibited at the Cincinnati Art Museum (39.3 cm, Cincinnati Art Museum, anc. coll. Carl Steckelmann, 19me sicle, in Perrois et Grand-Dufay, 2008, Punu, pl. 42 and p. 142).
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