Bozo Wood Marionette Headdress

Bright red, with a zebra-striped fin and a grin full of small white teeth.

This marionette headdress is Bozo, from Mali, West Africa, and is contemporary, in wood and pigment. Among the Bozo and their neighbors along the Niger, puppet theater is generally performed during seasonal festivals, with carved animals rising above a cloth-covered stage. The fish is long and rounded, carved all over in a crosshatched scale pattern and painted red. A black and white striped fin runs along the back, the tail is dotted in yellow and white, and a blue and yellow zigzag outlines the gill behind a ringed eye. It is 35.5 inches long, 6 high and 5.5 wide.

Nobody is going to miss this one in the river.