In the rock art of what is now the Sahara Desert, images of dancers in zoomorphic masks were painted from 6,000 to 4,000 BC at Tassili n Ajjer and Hoggar. In Egypt, from 2,200 BC through 400 AD, gilded mummy masks honoring Osiris were deployed as a stay against the death's seeming finality, and masks seem to have also been used to portray theriomorphic goods such as jackal-headed Anubis and falcon-headed Horus. The Kingdom of Nok in Nigeria left behind mask-like terra-cotta heads from about 200 AD that humorously reshape individuals as comic types. A copper portrait mask said to represent the Oni Obalufon has survived from the 11th-12th Century court of Ife-Ife, and beautifully carved ivory mask cinctures from Benin in the 16th Century.

Though masking in Africa today takes place in such far flung sites as the Atlas mountains of Morocco and Makonde region of Tanzania, most of the active traditions are found among the Sub-Saharan agricultural peoples in the savannas, forests, and jungles stretching from coastal West African to the Congo River basin. Stylistically, masks range from the abstract traditions of the frequently Islamic communities on the edge of the Sahara, to more "realistic" ones of the West African forests, to the "expressionistic" styles of the Congo Basin. Across this band of interlocking cultures, miniature masks are used as commemorative objects or gold weights, "passport masks" identify cultural membership, and some especially powerful or oversized masks are honored as sacred objects without being worn. Most frequently, though, masks are worn in conjunction with specific songs, dances, narratives, and costumes in "masquerades" that radically alter human form and action in order to commemorate life passages, placate the forces of nature, restore the community's health and fertility, and settle differences within families and villages.

While deeply rooted in socio-religious mythologies and practices, African masquerades are also highly charged social events-eliciting energy and evoking laughter and wonder in a fluid exchange of onlookers and participants. Some African masks provide idealized or burlesqued images of human beings, while many others give form to spiritual forces, manifesting spirits from the wild or figures from an ancestral time. African terms for "mask" usually refer to this spirit world, and the mask is commonly regarded not so much as a representation of the natural world as the conduit for and manifestation of a powerful spirit that may inspire fear or reverence, hilarity or revulsion.

Masked figures are often invoked to mediate between village and bush, beauty and ferocity, harmony and disharmony, women and men, the living and the dead, the animal and human, the initiated and the uninitiated, humankind and the supernatural. Agile antelope spirits, lumbering bush buffaloes, benign water spirits, and vengeful ghosts all have their characteristic masks, and human and zoomorphic images are frequently combined. Modification of the human wearer's identity may facilitate an altered state of consciousness. Often, masks have two or more images, or function in pairs, providing a sense of equilibrium or a doubling of energy. Masks with multiple images or appearing in groups may give form to structures of social hierarchy, validating social order by grounding it in a natural and cosmological one. Thus, world views and social values are given striking visual forms that, in performance, are at once entertaining, spiritually powerful, and crucial to the continuity and equilibrium of life.

Masks are used as agents of social control by African secret societies such as the Poro of the Senufo and Manjong of the Bamileke. Though the legal sanctions for these masked societies have ebbed, their moral authority remains. Spirit dancers, through the power vested in their masks, may intervene forcefully and anonymously in human affairs: redirecting social action, punishing wrongdoers, educating the young, or helping to raise an individual to higher status. Masked figures may command villagers to meet ceremonial obligations, promote proper conduct to protect against brush fires and faulty sanitation, or even judge and punish criminals. Maintaining traditions in ways designed to promote group identity and minimize social strains, African masks, then, have functioned as instruments of collectivity, providing expressions of identity across a network of cultural interrelationships.

Masks are frequently deployed in complex negotiations with gender and power in African communities as in Yoruba Gelede ceremonies, in which males mask as females: seeking to obtain goodwill of the "mothers" associated with occult powers, while affirming social traditions and deriding through satire those who upset them. Functional, recreational, and interpretive aspects are intertwined within such ceremonial frames, and the mask is a vital tool in their enactment.