How Masks Travel: Aesthetics, Trade, War, and Authority in Eastern Nigeria, an Introduction

In the area described by the Lower Niger, the Benue, and the Cross Rivers, a unique combination of circumstances made possible the mobility of masquerades between 1700 and the present. Behind this mobility lay, in the Cross River region and near it, the sophisticated trade networks in (at various times) slaves, palm oil, salt, cloth and ivory developed and managed by both the Calabar and Niger Delta traders, and inland, the Arochukwu. Between the Imo and Anambra Rivers lay the highest rural population density in sub-Saharan Africa. Throughout the much larger eastern region, masquerades were used to impose (and sometimes depose) authority, oil the wheels of trade, and give material substance to spiritual belief. Therefore in a region where masking served political, aesthetic, and economic ends and the density of both population and trade networks made almost everything commodifiable, masks traveled. Much of the way in which these exchanges took...