Although it’s one of Africa’s iconic animals, a surprisingly small number of elephants is represented in the art of the continent. The National Museum in Lagos Nigeria holds a small terracotta fragment of an elephant head (inv.J.29.11). Two thousand years old, it might be one of the oldest depictions of the animal. Elephant masks are known among the Igbo in Nigeria and several of Cameroon’s Grasslands cultures represent the animal in their masks. In D.R. Congo it is especially the ivory of the elephant’s tusks that was widely used as a material to sculpt prestigious artworks, yet the animal itself is almost never depicted. Only the Luba culture portrayed the elephant in their art, specifically in a stools, headrests, and a handful of helmet masks. Two of these masks are held by the Royal Museum for Central Africa and were collected in Luba territory in the 1890s at the time of the first explorations of the region. While the use of these masks remains uncertain, the museum’s curator has suggested they were used by brotherhoods of elephant hunters which were once active in the region (Volper, Julien, “Les cornes, la croix et les défenses. Essai sur trois masques du Moero”, in: Afrique Archéologie & Arts - Revue AAA, 7, Paris , 2012). These hunters’ guilds played an important role in the ivory trade, which for many of the region’s chiefdoms was the main source of income. In precolonial times, especially guns and ammunition were traded against ivory elephant tusks. Volper writes that the few old texts describing these brotherhoods do not directly mention the use of masks. However, it is attested that hunting societies very often mimicked the relationship between hunter and game. Captivating elephant masks might have been performed by members of these hunting guilds before and after their expedition to please the spirits of the forest and animals. Moreover, some hunting societies apparently kept the heads of killed elephants as trophies, reminiscent of the blackened and imposing appearance of the few remaining elephant masks. W.F.P. Burton, who studied the Luba in the 1930s, has written that such masks were used by an ‘elephant society’, which was notorious for kidnapping people in exchange for ransom. Burton also gives us some information on the choreography of the elephant masks. He specifies that the wearer of the mask put his hands and feet in old disused drums and covered himself with dried banana leaves (Burton W. F. P., “Luba Religion and Magic in Custom and Belief”, Annales du MRAC, n° 8, Tervuren, 1961, p. 177). This beautiful mask presents an important addition to the small corpus of known Luba masks of this type.