The Headdress on the Kalabari ancestral screen depicts the masquerade, in which the dead head of a trade house excelled and was the public face of the house at festivals. The leader sits, surrounded by two supporters and heads symbolizing members of the house.
What is the Kalabari Ancestral Screen?
Kalabari Ijo live on Nigeria's southern coast and the islands near Port Harcourt. Ijo participated actively in Atlantic commerce with Europeans, which helped them entirely recreate themselves by the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
They took and reinterpreted many of their Western trading partners' emblems as signs of their new Kalabariness when they absorbed slaves into their own society and transmuted into Kalabari.
The British navy drill became a dance among the Kalabari, and top hats became symbols of chiefship. Another example is the funeral screens, such as the one on display here, which were made for deceased chiefs of trade firms.
Learn more about headdresses:
https://brainly.com/question/17020445
#SPJ1
