#landai

TOMA LANDAI MASKS

The Toma tribe of Equatorial Guinea (and known as the Loma in neighboring Liberia) maintains social order through a secret society called Poro. This group conducts a month-long initiation ritual in the forest admitting boys to manhood. To hide their identity during the initiation, Poro members wear hand-carved masks. These masks, which combine the jaws of a crocodile, human eyes and nose, and horns, represent landai—the spirits of deceased ancestors. At the completion of the month, the landai symbolically devour the boys and spit them out as men. The severe abstraction and sinister blank stare of the landai masks surely made them an effective means of social control.