Makishi — Returning An… | Bestiary of Cryptids and Legendary Creatures

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Names & Creature Profile

A likishi is an ancestral character embodied in mask and costume. Victoria Phiri Chitungu describes makishi returning from the dead to protect and guide boys during mukanda, their initiation into adult responsibilities. [1]

Makishi have different temperaments. Anthropologist Sónia Silva, reviewing Manuel Jordán’s study, describes his categories of sociable, ambiguous, aggressive and royal characters. Conduct matters as much as a recognisable face. A character may command respect, charm an audience or threaten it; these are different ways of entering a gathering. [2]

Nature & Powers

Sachihongo commonly represents an ancestral hunter, but can also be addressed as chief or diviner. LaGamma describes a rapid-tempo dance, sometimes with a flywhisk or ceremonial axe. The figure evokes skill, seniority and authority. [4]

Artist and scholar Aaron Samuel Mulenga gives Mwana Pwo another rhythm. In his Chokwe account, the young woman character combines graceful manners with decisive action: she starts songs, guides drummers and engages the audience through gestures. A whistle, adze or flywhisk may help her direct the encounter. Her beauty does not make her passive; the music follows her leadership. Mulenga also describes a bustle containing cloth and rattling objects, tied at her hips. Movement changes what the audience hears as well as what it sees. [5]

Tales & Encounters

At the public conclusion of mukanda, the whole village gathers. UNESCO describes masked dancing and pantomime continuing until the graduates emerge from their separation and rejoin the community as adult men. The performance leads toward a reunion with changed obligations. Families receive the returning young people, while ancestral characters help make the transition a shared event. [7]

One museum mask has a very different recorded beginning. In 1971 or 1972, Robert Reis visited the Zambian National Dance Troupe’s office in Lusaka. Robert had seen a dance in Livingstone and wanted something to read about it. His inquiry became a question about the makers of the troupe’s masks. A clerk arranged for Robert and Ninette Reis to meet an artist, who agreed to make several masks for them. Among them was the Chikunza now in the Smithsonian. The donors remembered the introduction and commission; the published account does not give the artist’s name. [6]

Appearance & Signs

The Smithsonian’s Chikunza rises in a towering tapered cone above a small dark face. White lines and rings articulate the headpiece, and orange-brown fibre spreads around it in a dense ruff. At 110.5 centimetres high including its fringe, the headpiece is built from bark cloth and raffia, its surface coloured with pigment. The museum explains the elongated head through an association with a similarly shaped grasshopper. Its silhouette makes an immediate contrast with the rounded wooden Sachihongo in the Met. [6]

Sachihongo concentrates its force in the face. Curves frame narrow eyes; the forehead and cheeks project above an open, rectangular mouth. LaGamma traces the Mbunda sculptors’ exaggerated features partly to neighbouring Chokwe artistry. The face in a collection is only part of the presence: most surviving examples have lost their costume elements. [4]

Homeland & Tradition

UNESCO’s Zambian account names the Vaka Chiyama Cha Mukwamayi communities: Luvale, Chokwe, Luchazi and Mbunda peoples of the northwestern and western provinces. The collective designation brings related traditions together, while the community names remain necessary for identifying particular characters and performances. [7]

Those relationships cross national borders. The Fowler Museum’s 2007 exhibition placed its twenty-four masks within the Three Corners region: northwestern Zambia, northeastern Angola and southwestern Democratic Republic of the Congo. Chokwe, Mbunda, Lunda, Luvale/Lwena and Luchazi peoples all appear in its description. A map drawn around Zambia alone would leave part of that cultural geography outside the frame. [11]

Landscape & Associations

The Zambezi provides a public gathering place for Likumbi Lya Mize. The Zambia Tourism Agency describes this Luvale celebration on both sides of the river, customarily on the last weekend of August. Makishi are a prominent part of the occasion. Chitungu calls this Mize Day: Luvale communities gather with Chief Ndungu, and the makishi pay homage. [10][1]

In Livingstone, Chitungu found a difficulty that a festival description could easily miss. Initiation needed secluded space close enough for families to remain in communication, yet town growth made suitable places scarce. Distance could protect privacy and obstruct contact at the same time. Her account also follows changes in costume materials as urban performers adapted to available resources. [1]

Variants & Kindred Beings

The female repertoire includes Pwevo, the idealised woman; Mwana Pwevo, the young woman; Chiwigi, the vain woman; and Kashinakaji, the old woman. Silva’s discussion shows age and manner changing a character’s place among the others. She also stresses intermarriage and shared villages: a mask’s style does not always map neatly onto one ethnicity or territory. [2]

Mulenga’s Mwana Pwo is performed by a man at mukanda events. The represented woman and the performer have different roles. Her dances honour women’s social importance and mothers’ contributions to the initiates’ well-being. Fibre coiffure and attachments join the carved face to a larger costume, so that the ancestor appears through a moving body, rather than through the face alone. [5]

Historical Record

In October 1964, as Zambia celebrated independence, Makishi masks appeared in a Lusaka exhibition beside musical instruments, carvings and beadwork. Historian Friday Mufuzi describes a display intended for citizens and foreign guests alike. Most objects had been gathered through the Livingstone Museum. The masks now helped present the arts of a newly independent country, entering a public occasion far removed from a village graduation. Mufuzi cites independence leader Simon M. Kapwepwe’s argument that political and economic identity should be accompanied by cultural expression. Older works could inspire new contributions to art. For the exhibition’s advocates, the objects were resources for a future, not simply remnants of a past. [9]

Mufuzi follows the museum’s later movement away from displays divided into separate ethnic categories toward an Ethnography and Art Gallery that made comparisons across Zambia. Masks and costumes appeared among objects of material and spiritual life. The change offered connections across communities, but also changed the company a mask kept: a character once encountered among dancers could be understood beside other national arts. [9]

International recognition followed another route. Makishi was proclaimed by UNESCO in 2005 and inscribed on the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity in 2008. The recognized heritage was the practice, with its participants and transmission, rather than one museum’s possession of a mask. [7]

Meaning & Belief

Zambia’s submitted account of Samahongo gives a named association to the hunter figure. It identifies Samahongo with Sachihongo and honours Sachihongo Machaka, a Mbunda ruler, hunter and medicine man. Wisdom and knowledge accompany the stern authority of the character. This museum explanation connects ancestral presence with a remembered person; LaGamma’s broader description emphasises the ancestral hunter as a cultural type. The two accounts give different degrees of specificity to the figure. The submitted description also allows the mask to pass between participants over time while keeping its significance. A changing wearer need not mean a different ancestral identity. [8]

For Samba Yonga of the Women’s History Museum of Zambia, a mask can hold an archive of knowledge. Dance, rhythm, music and oral transmission activate what a shelf preserves only in material form. Her 2024 essay describes work with a Swedish museum on digital surrogates of Makishi masks. She found a catalogue attribution to the wrong community and a brief ceremony label that omitted the knowledge carried by the object. Correctly preserving a face had not, in her account, preserved its identity. Her criticism also reaches institutions in Zambia. She describes returned objects stored in Lusaka without adequate knowledge of their names or provenance. Returning material to the country had not automatically restored the relationships that gave it meaning. [3]

Later Retellings & Reception

New experience also enters the repertoire. Silva records airplane, helicopter and VCR characters, as well as urban clubs hired for political rallies. The unfamiliar machine can become a recognizable masquerade character. Ancestral authority and contemporary invention meet within a tradition whose performers and audiences also live with changing technology. [2]

That change can provoke disagreement. At a mini Likumbi Lya Mize in Livingstone in 2005, Chitungu records a female character dancing to rumba. Some community members objected that her usual music carried moral instruction. The musicians answered that she belonged to the people and should dance to music familiar to them. The dispute turned on what the performance owed its audience: inherited lessons, present enjoyment, or a way of holding the two together. [1]

Evidence & Open Questions

The Samahongo listed in UNESCO’s Virtual Museum of Stolen Cultural Objects has a developed character description but no known date or dimensions. Its image is credited to the Livingstone Museum. The inventory preserves a name and ancestral associations without supplying a complete material biography. Knowing whom a mask represents does not establish when this particular carving was made, who first performed it or how it passed between owners. Those are separate questions about an individual object. [8]

Yonga ends her essay with a comparison borrowed from the writer Teju Cole: studying a musical score cannot replace hearing the composition. For her, looking at a mask without its performance creates a similar loss. The carved face survives, but the gesture, the drum’s answer and the audience’s response belong to an encounter that storage alone cannot preserve. Her work asks how those relationships might be recovered alongside the object. [3]

Sources & Manuscript Notes

Chitungu supplies the Livingstone field accounts. Silva discusses Jordán’s book; LaGamma and Mulenga explain particular characters. Yonga addresses knowledge lost through collecting. Mufuzi follows national display, while museum and public heritage records document the objects, communities and ceremonies named here. [1][2][4][5][3][9]

Makishi Masquerade and Activities: The Reformulation of Visual and Performance Genres of the Mukanda School of Zambia ↗
Victoria Phiri Chitungu · CODESRIA, Contemporary African Cultural Productions, 2012, chapter 4
Complete chapter and notes, printed pp. 67–81, actual PDF pp. 83–97
Checked 2026-10-11
Review of Makishi: Mask Characters of Zambia, by Manuel Jordán ↗
Sónia Silva · Museum Anthropology Review 4(1), Spring 2010, pp. 137–138
Entire two-page review, especially typology, cultural attribution and technological characters
Jordán’s classification and examples are presented through Silva’s review.
Checked 2026-10-11
↗

Artwork

Illuminated folios

Select a folio to enlarge it. Its caption describes the account, landscape or artistic choices behind the image.

An original Sachihongo-type rounded wooden mask with curved brows and cheeks, narrow eyes and a rectangular carved mouth rests against charcoal and plum, within a subdued copper celestial frame. — Original interpretive Sachihongo-type carving informed by the public description of Mbunda ancestral hunter masks in Alisa LaGamma’s Met essay; the mask design, still-life setting and frame are artistic choices.

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