Art & Photography - Bold Mask Powerful Features Authentic Large Hand Carved African Early Tribal Use Great Mask Songye Kikashi

Bold Mask Powerful Features Authentic Large Hand Carved African Early Tribal Use. Great Mask Songye Kikashi. Shipped with UPS Ground. 25” long 12” wide please look at pics closely for all measurements. This is an outstanding artifact that saw actual tribal use and is from a large Dallas Estate Collection The Songye people, sometimes written Songe, are a Bantu ethnic group from the central Democratic Republic of the Congo. They inhabit a vast territory between the Sankuru and Lubilash rivers in the west and the Lualaba River in the east. Many Songye villages can be found in present-day East Kasai province, parts of Katanga and Kivu Province. The people of Songye are divided into thirty-four conglomerate societies; each society is led by a single chief with a Judiciary Council of elders and nobles (bilolo). Smaller kingdoms east of the Lomami River refer to themselves as Songye, other kingdoms in the west, refer to themselves as Kalebwe, Eki, Ilande, Bala, Chofwe, Sanga and Tempa. As a society, the people of Songye are mainly known as a farming community; they do, however, take part in hunting and trading with other neighboring communities.