African Wooden Mask

It was a hot summer’s day on Table Mountain, South Africa, and people were working hard. The ground was hot like burning coal. Nobody wanted to work but they had to because it was their life earning money for their children.

The next day a couple of South Africans sneaked out of work because they were so tired of working their hardest and they wanted to be rebels for once! So they cautiously sneaked out of work and started wandering around to go on a little adventure to the flat-topped mountain which has withstood six million years of erosion. It hosts the richest, yet smallest, floral kingdom on earth with over 1,470 floral species…

As they journeyed, they carefully stepped over humps, potholes and dry stone riverbeds, bashing through some bushes, when suddenly they found a big rugged rock was blocking their path. They tried moving it but it was so heavy! So they travelled back down their path to see if there was a massive tree branch they could use to lift it out of the way.

When they eventually found something that was big enough to move it they both tried their hardest and put the branch under the rock and pushed down as hard as they could. The rock flipped over! There was nothing there. They were intrigued, though, because it looked like someone had dug the ground there recently so they wanted to investigate further.

They knelt down on their hands and knees and started to re-dig the pothole. They wanted to work out why the rock was blocking them for some reason. After digging for a while they had a break for a few hours because they were exhausted. The hour was up and they started digging again because they really wanted to know why the rock was blocking them.

By nightfall they eventually found something. Carefully they picked it up and put it on the ground. By looking at it they could tell it was like a wooden head with spikes coming out of it that looked a bit like ears; it had two eyes, a nose, a mouth, and a really long beard. The face had some sort of pattern on it like triangles, dots, and stripes. When they touched it, the face was all smooth but when it came to the eyes they were indented and when it came to the nose, it stuck out a bit and was rough like sand. The mouth was open and had tiny little sharp teeth in it. Finally the gingery beard felt like horse hair and was straw-like.

Afterwards they walked back to work and their boss was right in front of them when they arrived and looked very annoyed.

“Why on earth would you leave work?” he asked in frustration.

“We wanted a break and we wandered around and dug this up!” the workers said in excitement.

They picked up the mask and showed it to the boss. He looked at it in shock. He had no idea what on earth it was. So he strolled into his tent and wanted to sell it online. One of the South Africans knew an Englishmen next door who worked at the Pitt Rivers Museum. So the Englishmen got in contact with the owner of the Pitt Rivers and they had a discussion. He wanted to invest lots of money in the mask so the South Africans became rich and the Pitt Rivers Museum gained a new object.    

by Ellie Hull