Exceptionally Large African Toma Landai Headdress. Tall, hand-carved and decorated, with enormous horns, eyeholes, and a barred mouth. The Landai mask is a central ritual object of the Toma (or Loma) people, who live in the rainforest regions across Guinea, Liberia, and Sierra Leone. It represents a powerful forest spirit and is deeply tied to the Poro Society, a male secret society that governs the political and religious life of the community. They are characterized by a flat, horizontal snout, human-like features, and often incorporate raffia or feathers, exactly as this piece does. 

Size: 17 1/2 x 16 x 61 In. 

The Loma people (also referred to variously by outsiders and factions within the people themselves as Loghoma, Looma, Lorma, Buzi, Buzzi, Toale, Toali, Toa, Tooma, or Toma) are a West African ethnic group living primarily in mountainous, sparsely populated regions near the border between Guinea and Liberia. Their population was estimated at 330,000 in the two countries in 2010, and they are closely related to the Mende people through their language, belonging to the Mende division of the Niger-Congo family of languages. The language, only preserved in oral form until the 20th Century, faced the possibility of extinction in the 1930s, and a Loma elder named Wido Zobo teamed up with a weaver named Moriba to develop a written script, which contains at least 185 characters. For many centuries prior to the colonial period the primary enemies of the Loma were the Mandinka people, who had converted to Islam and sought to convert them as well, and their ongoing conflict even during their subjugation by the French led to a syncretic religion that merged animal and human motifs into their masks, rituals, and even eating habits. They are exogamous people, with patrilineal social organization in matters related to inheritance, succession and lineage affiliations with one-marriage rule, and joint families or virilocal communities are common, wherein families of brothers settle close to each other, which began in an effort to preserve and solidify their traditions in the face of invasions on many fronts. Today, they make up a majority population of Liberia, with a small population in the Republic of Guinea, and they remain somewhat isolationist, although they have begun to depend on tourism to survive in the modern economy and political climate of the greater North and West African region. 

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