African Mende Sowei Helmet Ritual Mask. The Mende initiation rite for young women is the only known masquerade tradition where the mask-wearers are female. Sowei refers most specifically to the kind of medicine that female healers/herbalists utilize. Embodied in this idea of medicine is a spiritual force. The mask, called Sowei and worn when dancing, is a visual expression of this spirit. The term also refers to the custodian of the medicine, a Sande official. 

Size: 11 1/2 x 7 1/2 x 13 1/2 in. 

#16 #8114 . 

The Mende are one of the two largest ethnic groups in Sierra Leone after their neighbors, the Temne people. The Mende are predominantly found in the Southern Province and the Eastern Province, and are mostly farmers and hunters. The Mende people speak the Mende language (also called Boumpe, Hulo, Kossa, or Kosso), which belongs to the Mande language branch of the overarching Niger-Congo language family. In the 1930s African-American linguist Lorenzo Dow Turner found a Gullah family in coastal Georgia that had preserved an ancient song in the Mende language (“A waka”), passing it down for 200 years. In the 1990s three modern researchers located a Mende village in Sierra Leone where the same song is still sung today. The Mende oral tradition explains their history as a mixture of two people: original members who were peaceful, nomadic fishermen, and their leaders who came later, bringing the art of war and permanent villages. The plight of their people who were sold into slavery is best known from the Amistad incident, which was a crucial step towards the abolition of slavery in the United States. Even in the modern day, the Mende fiercely protect their privacy and ancient traditions, including their secret societies, the Poro for the men, and the unique Sande society for the women, one of the only female-centric secret societies of the African continent. Their art, mostly in the form of jewelry and carvings, are highly sought by collectors, both for their importance to the rituals of the secret societies, and for their representations of Mende culture, mythology, and history.