Bobo Bwa Sunrise Mask to Promote Healthy Harvest

Designed with traditional ancestral patterns, this sun mask is used in ceremonies to promote fertility and a fruitful, abundant harvest. Created by the Bobo tribes of central Burkina Faso, West Africa. Using a circular geometric pattern, it depicts a familiar vision of the radiating light of the sun.

The Bobo Bwa are predominately farmers and their main cash crop is grain, especially millet, sorghum and corn. They believe in maintaining balance in nature with ritual purification ceremonies where they dance with traditional masks and bush spirits to purify the land and chase away evil. This sun mask, produced using the conventional cultural artistic style, was probably made to help support the village as an additional cash product dating back to the 1980s.

This intriguing mask has a circumference of 10 inches, the length is 12 inches including the short stem. It is 3 inches deep.