In the spring of 1935, a wooden mask carved by a Baule artisan in what is now Côte d’Ivoire was placed behind a glass panel in a Paris museum. The room was quiet, with high ceilings and ornate crown molding, features that had nothing to do with the environment the mask was born from. The display label beside it read “Masque Tribal, Afrique de l’Ouest.” There was no mention of the annual harvest ceremony it had once presided over, or the sacred songs that accompanied its appearance, or the village elder who had blessed it with libations. It was pinned to a wall like an insect, the context of its life scraped off and replaced with the vocabulary of European anthropology.
In galleries across Europe and North America, similar transformations were taking place. Artifacts carved by hand and consecrated through ritual were now framed as curiosities, anonymous fragments of a continent too often described in collective terms. They were removed from their creators and rebranded as tribal art, a term that collapsed entire civilizations into something primitive. By the time African art appeared in mainstream Western consciousness, its meaning had already been rewritten.
The roots of this process stretch back to the late 19th century, when colonial expeditions swept through the African continent under banners of exploration and empire. Soldiers, missionaries, and administrators collected masks, sculptures, and ceremonial items, not as students of culture but as agents of possession. These objects were often seized without permission or bought for negligible sums. Once they arrived in Europe, they were cataloged in colonial archives and displayed in natural history museums alongside fossils and taxidermied animals, not as expressions of sophisticated artistic traditions but as evidence of cultural evolution—a visual argument for the perceived superiority of the colonizers.
African art had never been separate from life. Among the Dogon of Mali, wood carvings served as vessels of spiritual communication. Among the Yoruba, brass heads honored dynastic memory. Among the Fang of Gabon, reliquary figures guarded the bones of ancestors, their stylized features expressing not physical likeness but sacred presence. In these communities, art was not a product but a process, one deeply tied to rites of passage, social hierarchy, and cosmology. Yet in the West, these items were increasingly seen through the lens of form alone. Their materials, symmetry, and abstraction were analyzed without regard for meaning. They were praised for their aesthetic value while their cultural relevance was stripped away.
In the early twentieth century, European artists began to take notice. Pablo Picasso, after visiting the ethnographic museum at the Palais du Trocadéro in Paris, became fascinated by African masks. He later recalled the encounter as a revelation, one that would shape the direction of modernist art. The angular forms and expressive distortion found in masks from the Congo and Ivory Coast offered a way out of the representational traditions of Western painting. But this inspiration came at a cost. The masks were admired as art but not understood as artifact. They were mined for form but detached from function. The spiritual urgency that had animated them in their places of origin was lost.
Museums were central to this recontextualization. The British Museum, the Musée du quai Branly, the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Belgium—all amassed extensive collections of African art during the colonial period. Their curators described the works using language drawn from evolutionary theory and comparative anatomy. They spoke of “primitive creativity” and “tribal expression,” terms that flattened the complexities of the cultures they described. Pieces were displayed without attribution, their creators listed as “unknown,” a designation that obscured not just names but systems of knowledge, apprenticeship, and aesthetic judgment that had shaped the work.
This framework persisted into the postcolonial era. In academic circles, African art was still often treated as ethnographic evidence rather than as independent cultural achievement. Western institutions remained gatekeepers, deciding which pieces were worthy of display and how they should be interpreted. African voices, when included, were frequently relegated to the background. The people who knew these objects best—the elders, the carvers, the ritual specialists—were rarely invited to speak.
In recent decades, this approach has come under increasing scrutiny. Calls for restitution have grown louder, led by activists, scholars, and governments across the continent. The Benin Bronzes, looted by British forces in 1897 from what is now Nigeria, have become a focal point in the debate over colonial plunder and cultural ownership. Germany has returned hundreds of pieces to Nigeria. France has begun to transfer items from its national museums back to their countries of origin. These acts, while significant, address only part of the damage. Beyond physical return lies a larger question: how can meaning be restored?
Some institutions are beginning to change. In Dakar, Lagos, and Accra, new museums are reclaiming the narrative. They are not only housing returned objects but also presenting them within the frameworks from which they were taken. In these spaces, art is again part of life. A mask is not just an object of admiration but a symbol of community, history, and belief. Its display is accompanied by explanation, not simplification. It is not exotic. It is known.
The effects of the Western rebranding of African art are not just historical. They echo in the global art market, where African pieces are still frequently sold without full provenance, and in academic syllabi where African art is sometimes treated as a side note. They persist in tourist shops where mass-produced masks mimic sacred forms without reference to their meaning. They surface in language, in the way the word “tribal” is still used to evoke something raw or instinctive, never refined or reasoned.
For artists working in Africa today, the legacy is double-edged. They inherit a visual language rich in symbolism and layered with tradition, but they also face an audience trained to see that language as decoration. Some challenge these assumptions directly. Others reclaim traditional forms while reshaping them for contemporary use. But in all cases, the question of context remains. Who decides what an object means? And what is lost when that meaning is ignored?
The Baule mask from 1935 still exists. It has traveled across continents, weathered changing curatorial tastes, and been studied by generations of art historians. Its features—symmetrical, stylized, serene—remain unchanged. But its silence has deepened. In its original setting, it was never silent. It spoke in movement, music, and voice. It carried stories. It marked time. It belonged.
In the museum, it rests on a shelf under artificial light. The label is cleaner now, perhaps more accurate in geography, maybe even accompanied by a note on its cultural origin. But the ceremony is missing. The elder’s prayer is missing. The drumbeat is missing. The mask remains, but the moment is gone.