African “art” makes little sense in a glass box on a museum plinth, but can be understood only in its social context of use, as Bob Thompson taught us in African Art in Motion (1974: xii). Wherever we encounter public processions of African body-masks, the performance displays “open secrets” of ritual (procedural) knowledge trans-mitted among initiates, as Wándé Abímbọ́ lá (1973: 43) observed regarding the Ifá cult.1 In each context recorded in this paper, the rituals of masked performance are expressed in different ideolog-ical categories, depending on the status of the respective subaltern groups within the political economy that rules their territories. The first case is the Ékpè “leopard” society for community justice in Calabar, Nigeria; the second is the historically related Abakuá society for mutual aid in Havana, Cuba; the third is the Jengu “water spirit” society for healing in Kribi, Cameroon.
Despite their differences,...