important agricultural people. They are rice grow-
ers who have occupied the coastal area for many
centuries. In fact, the low coast, named for the
fact that one cannot tell from the air where the
water ends and the land begins, is a region of palm
groves, salt ponds, and rice fields.
Although the Baga culture has been in flux for
many years because of the inroads being made on
their land by Fula and Susu cultures, as well as by
Christian and Moslem missionaries, there are still
elders who retain an attachment to the rich cul-
ture of the people. In the 21st century, the rapid-
ity with which the young Baga have given up their
language to speak Susu, to convert to Islam and
Christianity, and to turn their backs on their own
customs means that there will soon be a majority
of Baga who do not knowSimo, a secret society
written about more than 100 years ago.
TheSimowas a society that came alive during
the ancient rice harvests. The Baga people keep
shrines of their ancestors and carveeleksymbols
to protect the family and represent the lineage.
When people gathered to thresh the grain, it was
a religious occasion when masked initiates would
dance the ancestral dances around theelek, the
head of a bird with a long beak or a horned ani-
mal, to celebrate the ancestors in the presence of
the family relic.
The largest and most well-known mask of the
Baga people is called theNimba, goddess of fer-
tility. The great tragedy of this culture is that
this mask, the largest in the African world, has
few adherents in Guinea. Almost all the sculp-
tures have disappeared from the villages, taken
by missionaries, broken by votarists of new reli-
gions, or simply abandoned by the descendants.
Because the Baga no longer celebrate the rituals
of their ancestors, some of which have been
taken up in the Americas, the authenticNimbas
are difficult to find.
These magnificent sculptures are made of one
solid piece of wood. The face is carved quite nar-
row with a hooked nose and a thin, almost nonex-
istent chin. The huge head is held by a
proportional sized neck that is then joined to two
enormous breasts with a hole, for eye holes, in the
center. When the dancer wears this mask as a head
piece, he is able to see through the hole in the
breast. Raffia covers the sides of the mask con-
cealing the identity of the dancer who wears it.
This is important because the person who wears
the mask is not the spirit of the mask; the mask
has its own spirit, and the wearer of the mask is
merely a conveyer for the spirit of the mask.
To know the mask wearer in his ordinary state
is to know something about the human person,
but it confuses the religious situation. Hence, the
African tradition of concealing the identity of the
wearer is to provide the viewer with the opportu-
nity to suspend the ordinary sense and experience
the spiritual sense of the mask spirit. One does not
need to know the carrier of the mask; this is not
the most important element in the religious sense.
A second mask is the hugebansonyiused during
male initiations. This mask is made with a painted
pole, decorated with colors, and culminating into a
triangular human face, with a calico flag. Most of
these poles and the artwork on them reach to
nearly 20 feet tall. Because theNimbamask is large
in bulk, thebasonyiis tall and colorful. The dance
of this mask is ritualized by the dancing of two
people, each with a pole mask, to represent the
necessity of a husband and wife to champion their
half of the village. Each one represents half. The
women and the men are represented. It is a form of
teaching gender complementarity.
There is a profound philosophical idea in the
gender positions of the Baga. They respect both
genders and believe that a community is without
direction if one part of the community is unrepre-
sented. Africans have practiced these types of rit-
ual dances for thousands of years, and the Baga
are some of the most storied people in West
Africa. Even among the Baga, however, one sees
the invasion of Western or Islamic cultural forms
to the degree that neither the Nimba nor the
Bansonyiare regularly practiced because of the
cultural inroads into their religion and culture.
Among the Baga people, the kinship lineage is
important because it dictates the religious life of
the people. For example, the creator-god is Kanu,
but the most significant deity for the male lineage
is Somtup, the founder and spirit of the male ini-
tiation society. His wife is a-Bol, who governs the
female initiation society and who is the most
important deity for the female lineage of the eth-
nic group. Thus, each sex has its own allegiance to
a deity for that particular sex.Molefi Kete AsanteSee alsoKa; Nkwa88 Baga