97 MASQUES GALWA Young Museum (San Francisco), and the Musée des Arts et Traditions (Libreville), they have never been the subject of a comprehensive study. Related as they are to the white Punu-Lumbu masks and located on the periphery of that culture area, Galwa masks have often been erroneously attributed to the Fang, the Vili, or the Aduma. Known among the Mpongwe as okukkwe, they were used in various rituals associated with funerary customs, the lifting of mourning, and judicial ceremonies relating to theft, among other crimes, and the practice of sorcery. As an extension of Les masques blancs du Sud-Gabon (The White Masks of Southern Gabon),2 this article strives to relate Galwa history with their masks. The known corpus includes about fi fty examples in both public and private international collections, largely in the United States, Switzerland, Gabon, and France. We will present here the most noteworthy among them using the comparative method, which is based on morphological analysis of form and decoration. HISTORY OF THE GALWA PEOPLE In 1815, British explorer and natural scientist T. E. Bowdich became the fi rst to identify the Galwa in the Ogooué in relation to their immediate neighbors, the Enenga and the Adjumba. In 1862, then French Lieutenant Paul Augustin Serval and Navy physician Marie-Théophile Griffon du Bellay explored the Ogooué and spent several days among the Galwa. In the course of their trip to Lake Onangue and the sacred islands, they were the fi rst Europeans to document the Ngounié River, a tributary of the Ogooué.3 In 1866, Robert Bruce Walker, an English agent for Hatton & Cookson of Liverpool, reached Enenga territory and set up the fi rst trading post there. His account tells of the trade in slaves from the interior and of the diffi culties he encountered in pushing up the Ogooué toward the Okande area. In 1870 French Navy Lieutenant Antoine Aymès arrived in Lambaréné, where Rempole and Ranoke, the kings of the Enenga, resided. He signed the fi rst treaty with them recognizing the representative of France as the chief. In 1873 and 1882, Alfred Marche and the Marquis of Compiègne, both explorers and naturalists, stayed in Adolinanongo as guests of Nkombe, king of the Galwa. They drew his portrait and gave an account of his relations with the kings of the Enenga.4 Annie Merlet, librarian at the Saint-Exupéry French FIG. 4 (facing page): “Masques galoa.” From Le Gabon de Fernand Grébert, 1913–1932, Musée d’Ethnographie Genève, Geneva, Édition D, 2003, p. 132. FIG. 5 (above): Mask. Galwa, Gabon. Collected in 1897. Wood, kaolin, red ocher. H: 27.5 cm. Ex Hélène and Philippe Leloup. Sotheby’s New York, 17 May 2002, lot 9. Private collection. Photo courtesy of Sotheby’s. FIG. 6 (left): “‘Féticheur’ Fang de la société initiatique du Ngil.” Photo by R. P. Trilles. 1903. Archives of the Musée d’Ethnographie de Neuchâtel.
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