Fang Ngil Judicial Mask

This light mask (late 1800s) represents the spirit of an ancestor and was used for social control by Ngil, the judiciary association. The facial markings, abstract features, and strong, elegant lines are typical of Fang masks, which were among the most influential. carved of wood and embellished with its well-preserved original fiber collar. With its particularly elongated structure made up of pure geometric forms, this mask displays the classic traits of the traditional Fang sculptural canon of equatorial Africa. In this mask, volumes project into space from a vertical plane with a gentle forward tilt, from the rounded relief of the forehead to the elongated concave sweep of the eyes and cheeks.The ornamentation on the mask is minimal and consists of eyebrows rendered as rounded arches, and an axial line down the center of the forehead, incised with hot metal and recalling the traditional scarifications characteristic of the Fang in the 19th century.

The early Ngil masks of the Fang people of Gabon are among the rarest and most highly celebrated of all African artworks. By comparison with the other more deeply modeled examples, such as the Vérité Mask, with its accentuated concave and convex forms, these older masks seem almost like relief sculptures, certainly conceived to be seen from the front, emerging from darkness. All Ngil masks were once coated with kaolin, sometimes thickly encrusted, but usually lost. This white color is the emblem of the spirit world.

The principle anatomical element in these representations is the nose, which is rendered in a thin and dramatically elongated form. This hypertrophied deformation evokes the mask’s subject, a monstrous and terrifying entity, Ngil: an inquisitor-spirit that administered justice in the Fang community. On either side of this aquiline nose, small eyes with fine eyelids project a stern gaze. Another feature of this mask is the rendering of the cheeks, which terminate in obliquely canted cheekbones, angular and symmetrical, beside the end of the nose. The mouth forms a kind of stylized, angularly-rendered muzzle.

One must acknowledge that the Fang Ngil Masks, today keenly sought after as indispensable keystones of the best collections of African art, were anything but mundane ritual accessories, despite their astonishingly pure forms, minimalist ornament, and sublime, majestic expressions. These were integral emblems of a belief system that feared the power of spirits of the beyond, and promoted a hope to defeat death and evil, especially those caused by malicious sorcery. These ancient masks evoke Ngil as the keeper of the balance between the living and the dead. The Aga Khan Fang Ngil Mask is an extremely rare and beautiful example.

The people that are called “Fang” in the geographic or ethnographic literature number 800,000 and constitute a vast mosaic of village communities, established in a large zone of Atlantic equatorial Africa comprising Cameroon, continental equatorial Guinea, and nearly the whole north of Gabon, on the right bank of the Ogowe River.

Historically, the Fang were itinerant, and it is relatively recently that they have settled in this broad area. The migratory existence of the Fang prohibited the creation of ancestral shrines at gravesites. Instead, the remains of the important dead, in the form of the skull and other bones, were carried from place to place in a cylindrical bark box.