In Chewa masquerade, one mask portrays a sunburnt Englishman in rags
Among the hundreds of masks of the Nyau, the Chewa people's secret society, is Simoni: red-faced, dressed in a ragged suit, probably lampooning a British colonial officer. Others depict a greedy man, a philanderer, even a helicopter. When the dancers wear them, they are understood not as men but as spirits of the dead.
Nyau, a word meaning mask or initiation, names a society of initiated Chewa men and women, their indigenous religion, their dances and the masks themselves. It works village by village but forms a network across central and southern Malawi, eastern Zambia, western Mozambique and Malawian communities in Zimbabwe. Only initiates count as mature adults, and men and women learn different knowledge and play different ritual parts. A cave painting of a mask type called Kasiya Maliro may date to 992 CE, and local tradition places Nyau's origin at Malomba, in today's Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Secrecy was enforced hard; revealing who danced behind a mask could once cost a person's life, which is why early missionaries never pinned down the society's origins. Missionaries arriving in the 1920s banned it, yet it survived British rule by absorbing some Christian elements, and many Chewa now belong to both a church and the Nyau. Naming the man under a mask is considered deeply disrespectful, comparable, in one analogy, to calling the Eucharist a biscuit.
The central performance is Gule Wamkulu, the big dance, held mainly at funerals, memorials and initiations and possibly dating to the Chewa Empire of the 17th century. Dancers with nimble footwork kick dust into the air, answering specific drumbeats. Some wear face masks representing ancestors; others vanish inside huge basketwork animals such as antelope, lions or elephants, spinning in place while members brush away their footprints. UNESCO listed Gule Wamkulu among its Masterpieces of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2005.
The masks double as social commentary and keep changing. One began as a mouse hunter, turned into a man from a copper mining town and later became a figure afflicted with gonorrhoea. Chewa belief holds that God is male in the sky and female in the earth, and that the living share existence with ancestors and the unborn. More than 400 Nyau masks are displayed at the Chamare Museum in Malawi's Dedza District.
Source: Nyau
