Mask of Africa exhibition shines at London's Tate Modern

Rather, the colonial period is viewed in counterpoint to the art and the spirituality that survived it. In this way, these exhibits manage to shake off the miserabilist habit of mind that sees Africa as hopelessly despoiled.

The impression is of a deeper past ready to speak for itself. 

Chapters of art

The curator described the various rooms as 'chapters.' Nowadays, visiting art exhibitions is probably a little bit too much like reading a book, and a thick tome at that.

The sheer volume of information he rattled off as we toured the 'chapters' boggled the mind. So, I shall narrow things down to the core of the exhibition: its subversion (the word 'worrying' is used) of the single most distinctive art form to come out of Africa – the mask.

Picasso has been criticised lately for appropriating this object. Actually, he may have been onto something when he showed one of the demoiselles wearing a mask in his seminal painting, Les Demoiselles d'Avignon.

According to the patriarchal traditions of masquerade, women were discouraged from wearing masks altogether. As part of a ritual that communicated with the dead or the realm of the ancestors, women were considered unworthy.

They were even discouraged from representing women. This attitude is preserved in a poem by Leopold Sedhar Senghor, at one time Senegal's president, who wrote in A Prayer to Masks that the sacral place created by masquerade was 'closed to any feminine laughter, to any mortal smile.'

Masked self-portraits

In the third room, in large photographs and a panoramic video installation, we encounter the subversion of this tradition by Zina Saro-Wiwa, who uses masked self-portraits to 'go within and open up emotional terrains.'

Exiled from Nigeria, Saro-Wiwa is engaged in a rediscovery of the healing function of the mask, its honouring of the land – in her particular case, the disastrously polluted Niger delta.

"I, as an Ogoni, albeit one that grew up in the UK and lived in America, wanted to see if this practice could heal me too. I feel that through this mask, I have re-inscribed myself into the landscape and asked the invisible to dance for me. Death is not silence, and it is not an end. Spirit remains active through living culture."

In the video of her huddled on a giant palm leaf, she is not wearing a mask but a blindfold of a similar colour and design to her dress. Cheerful voices of women (of the very kind Senghor would have deplored) accompany her awkward movements, then suddenly cease with a crash.

It is unclear how this relates to the pictures of her in the same dress, this time with a cumbersome mask – these objects were considered too heavy for women to wear – concealing her features. Perhaps over time, the masks have replaced the blindfold, perhaps they came before it.

African philosophers have questioned whether the mask has any meaning, now that the original context of beliefs has been replaced.

The danger is that these artefacts become as detached from their ritualistic meaning as they are when seen in an ethnographic museum. The wearing of them begins to look like appropriation, a sort of cosplay.

One is reminded of the strenuous efforts made by modern druids to wear the robes, grow the beards and chant the gibberish as a midsummer sun rises over Stonehenge. And yet, even when separated from the belief system and the masquerade that created them, these objects can have immense power.

Bantu masks

Further into the room we see a fantastic series of Bantu masks shot by Edson Chagas, an Angolan photographer. The people who wear them are otherwise dressed in completely modern clothing.

The title of this work – Tipo Passe, which is Portuguese for passport – sums up the jarring effect of the old masks and the modern apparel. Chagas gives each of his figures an invented European/African name to highlight the role of migration and colonialism in the formation of identity.

There is also the implication that these ancestors can pass into the modern world and across the territorial borders created by the living, just as ghosts are known to pass through walls.

In a world where the lack of a visa can force people to travel in great numbers across perilous seas, these ancestors are masters of bureaucratic disguise. 

The absence of definable emotion happens to fulfil the requirements of passport photography, which include:

• Face forward and look directly into the camera lens.
• Have your eyes open.
• Do not have any hair dangling in front of your eyes.
• Do not wear a head covering (an exception applies if it is for medical or religious reasons).
• Do not have anything covering your face.
• Do not have shadows over your face or behind you.
• Most importantly of all, though:
• Have a neutral expression on your face.

That is to say, no smiling. Though they are too stylised to be convincing likenesses, these masks nonetheless communicate personality. It's unsettling, though, as all masks tend to be – one thinks of the drama in ancient Greece and here, too, there is a hint of tragedy.

The emotional terrain, as Saro-Wiwa calls it, is heightened, formal, irreducibly supernatural.

'They did not smile'

I remember seeing masks in Ecuador, still being carved by the descendants of escaped slaves. Their creators had landed in a pestilential valley no one else wanted to inhabit.

On the more temperate hills above lived a community of indigenous people who wore the thick woven garments of the region and rarely ventured down. The valley was hot and humid. The air was abuzz with clouds of flies which bit with remarkable frequency and sadism.

In this little bit of Angola, the people walked about half-naked. Kids with sleek black bodies ran about, oblivious to the flies, and the masks the villagers made were not much bigger than the palm of one's hand, with holes where the eyes would be, and with the same unsettling abstraction about them.

The expression was neutral. They did not smile. Instead, they seemed affronted, even surprised, as if these ancestral faces had yet to understand where they had been transported to, or why.   

Masks like these, separated from their purpose, inevitably have a forlorn look. Five pictures of the Yoruba masquerade by Leonce Raphael Agbodjelou demonstrate how the mask should appear.

Every inch of the dancers' bodies has to be covered, in order to efface the individual and allow the ancestors to manifest themselves.

This is not the case, however, in the most striking installation here, by Wura-Natasha Ogunji. Called Will I still carry water when I am a dead woman?, the video shows the artist and six other women wandering through the streets of Lagos, dressed in matching jumpsuits and face coverings.

Though their faces are concealed, their legs are exposed. Behind them, they drag the kind of jerry cans used to carry water great distances.

One of the first things you notice on arrival in Africa is the amount of heavy labour the women do: they bend double to sweep yards, carry babies on their backs, mash cereal crops in massive mortars with heavy pestles, and balance just about everything on their heads.

They transport these objects with incredible ease. I remember seeing one woman in Guinea electioneering with just such a bundle on her head and a loudspeaker on top of the bundle. She held a microphone to her mouth and moved among the crowd with perfect poise, orating and smiling as she went. 

Ogunji's title suggests a combination of masquerade with protest over the lot of African women. But this is a very unusual form of protest transposed onto the plain of eternity as if a female Sisyphus were to step off the hillside and roll her stone through the streets of Hades, agitating as she went.

Even in this subverted state – with its forbidden elements of femininity, bare limbs, and the arduous movement that embodies dissent – the participants manage to draw on the mysterious power of the mask, its ability to transcend the here and now, and to say something deeper. In this case, it is about women's existence as a perpetual struggle against inequality.  

A room of joy

After the startling images of the mask, the next room is easier on the eye. It is devoted to portraiture of various kinds, mostly of family members and groups of friends, some of them the ancestors in person, though here relieved of the resentful stare of the dead.

There are enough smiles here to make you forget the prohibition on smiling in the previous room. Joy is the thing that outlasts them.

On the floor is a large installation by Ndidi Dike called History of a City in a Box. Using the files from Independence House in Lagos, she has stacked the bureaucratic containers to mimic an urban skyline and sprinkled red African earth between them.

The files are a people reduced to information and stats, ripe for surveillance. It's in stark contrast to the humanity gazing contentedly down from the surrounding walls.

One of the last people to leave the gallery, I was still a little dizzy from the stairs and surprised by the cool London air as I exited, but I had to adapt quickly. Wherever you walk in the metropolis, you have to dodge the oncoming mass of members of the public.

Veering quickly away from the gallery entrance, I found a statue that pretty much embodied my sense of alienation. On the plinth, the words (in Latin) said something like don't applaud, just throw money. As I looked at this thing, I suddenly saw its clothing flutter in the breeze.

It turns out this thing is an automaton, and a hidden camera picks up your movements, upon which the statue imitates the onlooker.

It made me jump. But then, art is mostly a static thing in the Western world – you don't expect it to start dancing.  

A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography is at Tate Modern in London till 14 January 2024.