Case file · Folklore / legend
Guinea's 'demystification' campaign
From 1959, Sékou Touré's government in newly independent Guinea ran a 'demystification' campaign against masks, initiation societies and shrines, which hit the coastal Baga especially hard.
1959 CE · 10.40, -14.40 · status: official
The account
Sacred objects such as Baga masks were burned or seized, and secret initiations banned as backward. Some practices went underground and reappeared after 1984; anthropologists such as Ramon Sarró have studied the aftermath. The plotted point on the Baga coast is approximate.