African Tetela Wood Carved Tribal Mask. 

Size: 6 3/4 x 12 x 2 1/4 in. 

#4663 . 

The indigenous African people within the Kasai Basin in the Democratic Republic of the Congo are known as the Tetela (or Batetela in the plural). The name was first given to them by missionaries in the 18th Century, and was likely a corruption of the earlier “Watetera,” a term given for the people of the region by Arab slave traders who called the area “Utotera.” The tribe now mainly exists in an area of the eastern Congo which they call Maniema, and their oral history says that they are descendants of AnKutshu or AnKutshu-membele, sub-groups of the larger Mongo people who first entered the area between 1300 and 1500 AD. In the mid to late 19th Century they were under the rulership of the Kilembwe and chief Kasongo Lushie, who openly allowed Arab influences into the tribe. When the Belgians annexed the country they began to categorize and separate tribes by province, in an attempt to prevent collaboration and potential uprisings. This was relatively unsuccessful, as the Batetela initiated rebellions as early as 1893 up through 1908. The relentless cruelty of the Belgian government continued throughout the First and Second World Wars, and eventually a nationalist movement achieved independence in 1960, with a member of the Batetla tribe, Patrice Lumumba, made the first Prime Minister. His assassination by Belgian and CIA-backed Joseph Mobutu, as well as the restructuring of the country into the dictatorship of Zaire in the wake of the death of UN Secretary General Dag Hammarskjöld, led to a rift between the Tetela and the rest of the tribes in the Congo plateau, and they remain one of the most distant and isolated tribes in the heart of Africa into the 21st Century, despite multiple government reforms since Mobutu’s death. They survive by hunting-gathering, fishing, farming, and raising cassava, bananas, and kola nuts, and their tribal activities, which include masked dances and ritualistic body-modification, are rarely witnessed.