A West African Masquerade in 1815

Descriptions of African masquerades are rare from the period before the establishment of colonies by the European powers in the late nineteenth century. The letter, printed below, which the C.M.S. missionary Nylander wrote in 1815 describing the Kolloh masquerade of the Bullom people of Sierra Leone, is therefore of considerable interest. Extracts from it with editorial interpolations appeared in the Missionary Register in 1815 and 1816 including a wood-cut based on a drawing Nylander had made of the masker. But the letter has never been published in full and Nylander's original drawing is here reproduced for the first time. The masquerade he describes has long since been discontinued and is known about from no other source. The letter is therefore a unique historical document and one which deserves to be more widely available to scholars in ethnography and the history of religion in Africa. The writer, Gustav Reinhold Nylander, was born in 1775 or 1776 in the town of Reval, now Tallin the capital of Estonia. He studied for the ministry at the seminary of the Evangelical Church in Berlin where, along with other of his fellow students, he was

African studies · Anthropology of religion · Archaeology · Christian ministry · Ethnography · Ethnology · History of religions · Sierra leone · Sociology · Theology · Anthropology · Classics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Global Maritime and Colonial Histories · History · Philosophy

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