GoemaiMasks, figures & African art

1. overview

The Goemai, usually referred to in older ethnographic, linguistic and colonial historical literature under the exonym "Ankwe" (or Ankwai) coined by neighbouring Hausa speakers, form an ethno-linguistic core group within the so-called "Middle Belt" region of Nigeria. Their ancestral settlement area extends primarily across the vast savannahs of the Great Muri Plains in southern Plateau State, with an administrative, cultural and spiritual centre in the present-day Shendam and Qua'an Pan Local Government Areas. Geographically, this zone is characterised by a highly significant liminality: It lies precisely at the interface between the mountainous Jos Plateau in the north and the wide, hydrologically determining Benue river system in the south. This topographical hinge function is not only important for agrarian subsistence, but also forms the fundamental matrix for understanding the cultural and artistic hybridity of the Goemai. Current demographic estimates put the Goemai ethnic population at around 200,000 to 250,000 individuals. Nevertheless, linguistic field research, particularly the profound analyses of linguist Birgit Hellwig, indicate that this raw data masks the actual linguistic and cultural vitality. There is a rapid linguistic and habitual assimilation to the dominant Hausa culture (which functions as a regional lingua franca). While the older generation still speaks a pure variant of Goemai, middle-aged speakers already exhibit considerable lexical and morphosyntactic interference, and younger generations tend towards extensive code-switching strategies or grow up entirely monolingual with Hausa.

Linguistically, Goemai is categorised as a West Chadic language (classification: West Chadic A, Angas-Goemai group) within the expansive Afro-Asian language family. This linguistic localisation is of explosive art-historical relevance insofar as it exists in a territorial area that is massively penetrated by speakers of the Benue-Congo language family (such as the Jukun). The language itself functions here as a historical archive: Hellwig (2011) documents that, through centuries of contact with Plateau and Benue-Congo languages, Goemai has adapted phonological and grammatical characteristics that are absolutely atypical for Chadian languages. This linguistic permeability mirrors exactly the morphological borrowings that manifest themselves in the sculpture and masking of the Goemai.

The socio-political structure of the Goemai has been the subject of profound controversy in ethnological reception regarding the exact classification of their ruling architecture. While many neighbouring groups on the Jos plateau, such as the Tarok or the Ngas, were traditionally organised in a rather acephalous manner or in strongly decentralised, kinship-based networks, the Goemai are characterised by a pronounced hierarchical central authority. At the top of this pyramid is the "Long Goemai" (a sacral king; from Long = sacred/majesty and miskoom = leader), who rules from Shendam. The scholarly controversy centres on the question of the genesis of this kingship. One position (represented by historians of the colonial school such as C.K. Meek in 1931) postulates that this centralisation was an organic, indigenous construct that the Goemai developed from their own Chadian roots in order to defy the warlike expansions of neighbouring emirates. A second position (supported by analyses of Jukun hegemony in Berns/Fardon 2011), on the other hand, argues that this form of rule was a direct structural import from the southern Jukun empire (Wukari), which massively expanded its cultural and political radius to the north in the 17th and 18th centuries. The sources make it clear that the Goemai themselves defined their identity on the basis of these fault lines: The southern factions (Dorok and Kwo) explicitly claim a historical and ritual kinship with the Jukun, while the northern groupings (Du'ut) insist on a lineage from the Ngas. This internal bipolarity is the key to understanding the Goemai art corpus.

The kinship system (locally referred to as mi) is primarily patrilineal in structure, although extremely dense affinal (in-law) networks exist that ensure social cohesion across the clans. This system of cohesion is directly reflected on a microcosmic level in the architectural layout of the traditional Goemai villages. The villages are designed as closed family compounds consisting of round mud huts with a highly specific double-walled structure. The inner cylindrical wall functions as a massive granary, while the space between the inner and outer walls serves as the family's actual living area. This architecture is not just a pragmatic climatic adaptation, but an ideology built in clay: the grain - and thus the survival and wealth of the lineage - forms the physical and spiritual centre around which family life literally and metaphorically revolves.

In terms of subsistence farming, the Goemai act as traditional hoe farmers in an ecosystem characterised by savannah. The agricultural cycle dictates every aspect of profane and sacred life. The primary crops are yams, various types of millet, sorghum (guinea corn), peanuts and ginger, supplemented by hunting and fishing at the foothills of the Benue system. A small number of cattle are not necessarily kept as a primary source of food, but strategically to fertilise the intensively cultivated fields. The socio-political hierarchy manifests itself imperatively in agriculture: a strict ritual protocol prohibits any member of society from cultivating their own fields until the Long Goemai or the responsible Chief-Priest has initiated sowing on the royal lands. This agrarian rhythm requires the use of specific ritual objects and masks, whose performative cycles are inextricably linked to rain and harvest festivals. For museums such as the Musée du quai Branly or the Fowler Museum at UCLA, which maintain excellent collections from the Benue Valley, this understanding of agrarian-centredness is essential, as the patina on the masks and figurines can almost invariably be traced back to agricultural libations.

The relationship with the direct neighbours - the Tarok, Montol, Alago and Mwaghavul - was historically a complex web of alliances, intermarriages and territorial friction. In particular, the interaction with the Jukun led to a profound transfer of material culture. The permeability of ethnic boundaries in the Middle Benue Valley, curated in the exhibition Central Nigeria Unmasked (2011), forces collectors and ethnographers to abandon traditional notions of isolated "tribal art" and instead view Goemai objects as nodes in a regional network of circulation of form and meaning.

2. cultural context

The religious and cosmological system of the Goemai is a highly complex taxonomy based on the fundamental premise that the physical world (especially the soil and agriculture) and the spiritual dimension are inextricably interwoven. At the apex of this cosmological order is Na'an, a primary creator entity that is, however, conceptualised - similar to the classical African paradigm of Deus otiosus - as distant and not directly tangible in everyday human life. The mediation between this distant creative power and the anthropocentric reality is performed by countless intermediary instances: localised natural beings, spirits of the wilderness and, above all, the ancestors, who as "the living dead" (living dead) exercise an active legal and moral control function within the kinship groups.

A specific feature of Goemai ontology is the extreme sacralisation of territory. The land is not merely understood as an agrarian resource, but as a female, birthing force and as a witness to all oaths and contracts. The earth gives the Goemai their identity, and in return the people incarnate the essence of this land. Any disruption of this symbiosis - be it through moral misbehaviour, murder, drought or disease - requires ritual restitution. To overcome such crises, the Goemai rely on a differentiated system of ritual authorities. The chief priests not only act as advisors to the Long Goemai, but also control access to the ancestors and the spiritual powers bound in shrines as supreme diviners and ritual masters. There is a subtle system of checks and balances here: while the king represents the central political power, the ontological and moral final authority lies with the priests and the secret societies they lead, who curb abuses of power through the use of masks (which act as sanctioning entities).

The exact nature of this religious system leads to the most significant research controversy regarding the Goemai. The academic debate revolves around the structural difference between this religion and that of neighbouring peoples. The religious scholar Umar H. D. Danfulani (1995) argues emphatically that the divinatory system of the Goemai (especially the stone divination) is deeply rooted in the Chadian substratum and has fundamental parallels to the highland cults of the Ngas and Mupun. This thesis supports the assumption of an indigenous, northern origin of the central ritual epistemological tools. In contrast, the art historian Marla C. Berns and the ethnologist Arnold Rubin (in Berns/Fardon/Kasfir 2011) emphasise the massive Jukun influences in the Middle Benue Valley. They point out that the complex mask performances, the courtly shrines and the iconography of the symbols of power are clear adaptations (or remodelling) by the Benue-Congo-speaking Jukun. The source situation is ambiguous in that material artefacts often appear Jukunised (masks, ruler's regalia), while the underlying divinatory practices follow Chadian patterns, making the Goemai religion de facto a syncretic hybrid system.

The role of women in the Goemai cult is subject to a strict dichotomy of visibility and spiritual potency. In the public space of the large masked performances held during the dry season, women are mostly excluded as active performers; the masked societies are male-dominated and function as initiation tools that mark the transition of boys into the status of socially active men. These liminal phases include separation, instruction in the bush and incorporation through the revelation of the masked secrets. However, it would be analytically misguided to reduce the female role to that of a mere spectator. On the contrary: in the sphere of earth and healing cults, women, especially in their function as potters, have the highest ritual authority. Similar to the neighbouring Yungur or Cham-Mwana (as documented in the Fowler Museum), Goemai women form anthropomorphic terracotta vessels that do not serve as profane containers, but are deliberately fired as ontological shells to "capture" and fix specific spiritual forces (Berns 1990). These female artefacts are the centre of private healing and fertility rituals in which physical procreation and the reproduction of agricultural yields are ritually secured. In comparison to neighbouring peoples, where wooden sculpture often has sole sacred dominance, the Goemai religion is characterised by this material dichotomy: The wood (masks/men/public sanction) and the fired clay (vessels/women/private healing) form two equal pillars of cosmological interaction.

3. aesthetic features

The canonical Goemai object inventory is extremely rare on the Western art market and in international museum collections. However, the few artefacts that have been secured and documented reveal a strict, abstract formal language based on radical geometrisation and voluminous presence. The Goemai object typology can be divided into three dominant subtypes: the horizontal zoomorphic mask, the small vertical anthropomorphic mask and the female terracotta vessel sculpture.

The most prominent wooden subtype is the horizontal helmet or top mask, which is classified in local terminology as Gugwom or Mongop. Morphologically, this type of mask is characterised by an extremely elongated, crocodile-like jaw section. A distinctive formal feature is the upper oval head plane, which merges smoothly and without a sharp break into the dominant upper jaw. In contrast to vertically worn face masks, the gugwom is balanced by the dancer strictly horizontally on the top of the skull, while the body remains concealed under a voluminous raffia costume. There is a decided iconographic controversy in the art-historical interpretation of this design. The pioneer of Benue research, Roy Sieber (1961), read these elongated, toothy jaws as a clear representation of a crocodile, suggesting an association with deep water spirits and rain rituals. In contrast, contemporary scholars such as Marla C. Berns and Richard Fardon (2011) argue, based on broader regional comparisons, that this abstraction - analogous to the shape-related masks of the neighbouring Chamba - is rather a conceptual reduction of the dwarf forest buffalo (Syncerus caffer nanus) or an intentional hybrid fusion of bush spirit and predator. This polyvalence of meaning is typical of the sculpture of the Benue Valley, in which the focus is not on the mimetic imitation of an animal but on the visual appropriation of its dangerous qualities (speed, deadly strength).

Another, even rarer type of Goemai art is the Zinakani mask. This is a small, vertically orientated anthropomorphic mask object that was documented in detail by ethnographer Arnold Rubin in the village of Kona in 1965. In contrast to the extreme geometry of the Gugwom, the Zinakani shows rudimentary human facial features, but these are barely distinguishable from an immense, pitch-black, encrusted patina.

This patina marks the absolute difference between a purely handcrafted, profane wooden object and a sacredly activated ritual object. In the case of the Goemai, the surface texture is the result of decades of accumulating material offerings. The Zinakani masks have a succulent, resinous and partly blood-crusted surface, which is the result of continuous libations with millet beer, red palm oil, crushed plant extracts and the blood of sacrificial dwarf goats or chickens. This haptic heaviness is often complemented by the pressing in of toxic, bright red Abrus seeds (paternoster peas), which in regional iconography encode ritual danger, spiritual heat and tabooed power.

The identification of a female master in this corpus by name is an art-historical exception. While the woodcarvers remain almost without exception in historical anonymity, the work of the ceramicist Azume von Goemai (died ca. 1951) is excellently documented. Azume was an artist whose mastery in the production of terracotta maternity figures enjoyed great prestige far beyond the borders of Shendam. Her works, which were primarily used as domestic altars and protective sculptures for high-ranking women, display an unmistakable canon of proportions: A resting, self-contained seated posture, the hands flat against the sides, the surface of the skin coloured with intense red pigments and the eyes often succinctly highlighted with white kaolin. One of the most historically relevant pieces of Azume was personally presented to the British colonial official by Long Goemai and is now in the collection of the British Museum in London (inv. no. Af1950,03.1).

In the current art market, especially since the auction successes after 2011, specific forgery criteria for Goemai artworks are highly relevant to the market. Since the abstract forms of the Benue valleys can easily be morphologically imitated by forgery workshops in Cameroon and Nigeria, the authenticity test focusses on the forensics of the patina and the physical signs of ageing of the wood. An authentic Benue mask, ritually activated over decades, shows profound, historical termite erosion on the edges and the unpatinated inner sides - an erosion pattern characterised by naturally rounded channels smoothed by environmental influences and which cannot be simulated by rough, fresh tool holes. In addition, original pieces show characteristic heartwood cracks caused by decades of expansion and contraction in the climatically unregulated, hot and dry clay shrines. Forgeries often attempt to imitate the deep, blood-based sacrificial patina through the superficial application of bitumen, tar, shoe polish or chemical stains - substances that immediately collapse as recent, artificial layers in forensic solvent tests or under UV spectrometry. Only objects whose patina shows molecular bonds of oxidised fats and proteins exist as historical originals.

4. ritual practice

Goemai ritual practice is a choreographed sequence of interactions between the human community, the agrarian cycle and the ontological entities bound in wood and clay. The lifecycle of a sacred object begins long before the sculptor's first cut. The choice of material requires the felling of specific hardwoods in forest patches that are considered liminal zones. The felling of the tree is accompanied by pre-emptive libations to appease the resident nature spirit and request its consent to the material transformation. Once the mask - be it a huge Gugwom or a smaller Zinakani - has been carved, it is initially an empty, profane piece of wood. The ritual existence only begins with the act of activation.

This rite of consecration is the exclusive responsibility of the initiated members of the secret societies and the chief priests. Activation takes place away from the public eye in the bush or in opaque shrines. The wood is rubbed with a highly potent mixture of plant alkaloids, crushed bones, red palm oil and the blood of sacrificial animals. This substance is used to prepare the object as a "magnet" for the targeted ancestor spirit or bush demon. It is only through this initial anointing that the object is transformed from a representation into a presence - it is now activated.

The regular use of the altar is discreet. The activated objects are kept in the earth altars, which are often located in the innermost, darkest area of the cylindrical priestly huts or in sheltered crevices at the foothills of the Jos plateau. In a state of rest, the objects must be kept alive through periodic offerings (sacrifices). At the beginning of the rainy season or during acute social crises (such as epidemic diseases or prolonged drought), the priest makes blood sacrifices of chickens or goats. The blood, which symbolises the essence of life (vis vitalis), is poured directly onto the skull or snout of the mask, often flanked by millet beer (buru) brewed from the local harvest. These continuous cycles of sacrifice lead to the creation of that thick, organic patina which, paradoxically, is often considered a purely aesthetic "beautiful surface" in the Western understanding of art, but which for the Goemai priest represents the material archive of hundreds of successful prayers.

The spectacular mask performance breaks open this hidden altar rhythm. Masks such as the Mongop or Gugwom primarily appear in the dry season, after the harvest, or on highly political occasions such as the enthronement or the elaborate funerals of local chiefs. The performance is a theatrical staging of transcendental power. The dancer, whose identity is completely erased under massive bast and plant fibre costumes, acts not as a representative but as a vessel for the spirit. In Gugwom, the horizontal wearing style is biomechanically demanding: the extremely elongated, crocodile-like jawline protrudes far forward while the dancer navigates blindly through fibres in the neck area. The choreography is often characterised by sudden, aggressive thrusts that mimetically transfer the dangerous, wild characteristics of the bush spirits or water deities to the village order. These performances purify the community, sanction misbehaviour and restabilise the hierarchy around the Long Goemai. There are subtle regional variations in the performances: while the southern Dorok factions (near the Jukun) often organise more opulent, courtly masked processions, the northern Du'ut villages concentrate more on introspective divination rituals in small circles.

The life cycle of a Goemai ritual object does not end in a museum display case, but in a planned process of deactivation and decay. If an object fails structurally due to massive insect infestation (termite infestation) or if the associated cult within the family dies out, it is not restored. Decomposition by termites is understood ontologically as the natural return of sacred matter to the belly of the feminine conceptualised earth. Such objects were moved to special bush groves (discard zones) and left to the elements. Research and inventory analyses by the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren (RMCA) have documented in artefacts from neighbouring peoples that this deliberate renunciation of preservation was a widespread paradigm in the Benue Valley. The death of the wood marks the final release of the spirit; only Western collectors interrupted this natural dying process of the artefacts.

5. historical context

The history of Goemai art production is not a linear chronicle of aesthetic evolution, but a complex narrative of extreme ruptures, violent migrations and a radical erasure of traditional ritual paradigms. Pre-colonial migration history is the subject of scientific dating controversies. Oral history suggests that the ancestors of the Goemai migrated from the mountainous north to the plains in several waves between the 10th and 17th centuries. In these plains they encountered the powerful, expanding Jukun Empire (Wukari), which was consolidated by Aku Katakpa around 1660. While linguists deeply suspect the presence of the Goemai as a Chadic-speaking ethnic group, historical sources suggest that the centralisation of their society under the Long Goemai was a direct response to - or a forced adaptation of - Jukun power structures in the 18th and early 19th centuries.

However, the absolute culmination and break in the ritual art production of the Goemai was marked by the colonial encounter in the 1920s. The British colonial administration installed the system of "Indirect Rule" and concentrated political power unilaterally on the Long Goemai, marginalising the traditional, decentralised centres of power of the local chief-priests. This political reorganisation was accompanied by an even more serious spiritual transformation. In the early 1920s, the Society of African Missions (SMA) sent Catholic priests, most notably Father Mouren, to Shendam. The incumbent Long Goemai, who wanted to strategically utilise European influence for his own consolidation of power, received the missionaries warmly. What followed was an unprecedentedly rapid, mission-driven Christianisation, which was flanked by simultaneous Islamic pressure from the northern emirates.

The consequences for material culture were devastating. From the late 1920s, a rapid erosion of rituals set in. As the power of the chief-priests was broken and Christianity was adapted as a vehicle for social mobility (schools, administrative posts), the masked covenants and earth altars lost their socio-political relevance. Hundreds of shrines were abandoned and the production of large sacred sculptures came to an almost complete standstill. Wooden masterpieces rotted away in the discard zones or were burnt in the course of iconoclastic conversion waves.

The market history of these works of art in the West is characterised by a remarkable phase shift. While ritual practice eroded locally, the Benue Valley remained an ethnographic "blind spot" for Western collectors until the second half of the 20th century. Only the systematic field research of Roy Sieber (from 1958) and Arnold Rubin (from 1965) brought the extremely rare and highly abstract art of the Goemai to the attention of the Western academic world. However, these artefacts actually broke into the international art market under tragic circumstances. The turmoil of the Biafra War (1967-1970) opened up the previously isolated regions to looting as traders exploited the plight of the population to empty remaining shrines. This wave of loss of cultural assets culminated in the 1980s and 1990s, when Plateau State was torn apart by serious, sometimes extremely bloody ethnic-religious conflicts (such as the Bokkos-Mangu conflict in 1992/95 or the Jos Riots in 2001). In the chaos of these decades, the so-called "looted corpus" was created: numerous masks and terracottas seeped through intermediaries in Cameroon to Paris and Brussels - almost without exception without any provenance documentation, which has left huge provenance gaps in the Goemai oeuvre to this day.

The ultimate museum accolade, which also exponentially drove up prices on the art market for these rarified objects, was the groundbreaking exhibition Central Nigeria Unmasked: Arts of the Benue River Valley in 2011. Curated by Marla C. Berns, Richard Fardon and Sidney Kasfir, the show premiered at the Fowler Museum at UCLA and subsequently travelled to the Musée du quai Branly. This academic canonisation meant that Goemai objects are now among the most sought-after artefacts of Central Nigerian art. As a result of this market explosion, however, the problem of forgery also increased enormously. Collectors and auction houses now rely on strict authenticity criteria. In addition to the aforementioned chemical forensics of the patina and the examination of termite feeding marks, it is above all the deep heartwood cracks (heartwood cracks) caused by drought that, in combination with documented provenance (ideally dating back to before the 1980s), define the difference between a worthless tourist imitation and a historically invaluable archive part of the extinguished Goemai cosmology.