Moča is a dialect of the Kafa cluster, in the south-west of Ethiopia. It is spoken in the province of Ilubabor, to the west of Kafa, extending north across the river Baro. The language is called Šäkka by the Moča themselves; the term Moča is used by the Galla and by the Europeans.

The dialects of the Kafa cluster are: Kafa spoken in the province of Kafa, between the rivers Omo and Goǧeb to the north and the Gimira tribes to the south; Boša (or Garo) spoken to the north of the river Goǧeb, and west of Omo; and Moča.

Diverses études, publiées dans Africa au cours des dernières années, ont signalé combien la nourriture des populations vivant sous les tropiques était parfois insuffisante, irrégulière, peu variée, mal équilibrée, et quelles conséquences graves en résultaient pour celles qui sont soumises à un semblable régime. Cet article a pour but de résumer les principales mesures qui ont été prises par les États colonisateurs dans leurs diverses possessions afin de combattre un pareil état de choses.

Towns and cities throughout modern Africa have witnessed the emergence of prestige and status groups, principally as consequence of newly developing wage earning opportunities for educated Africans. Like African townsmen almost everywhere, urban Ethiopians now engage in, or aspire to occupations as skilled specialists which carry altogether new social prestige. Old values associated with traditional labour undertakings have undergone adjustment and modification. Because changing patterns of urban social relationships develop in large measure from the diverse ways Ethiopians, or other Africans, make a living, studies of the ranking of occupations by their social prestige value have been suggested as a useful approach to understanding the nature of the urban system of social stratification, on the one hand, and to providing a baseline for determining indices of social change, on the other.

In this article, I describe the belief system at the centre of Mau and Dan mask spirit performances and some implications of these beliefs in practice, and I suggest an ontological framework for interpreting the ambiguous agency embodied in such performances. I ground my discussion of this ontological framework by juxtaposing ethnographic material about non-commercial, community-based mask spirit belief and practice with details of the career of an international ‘star’ mask spirit performer, Vado Diomande. I propose that the ambiguous agency at the heart of these performances is best understood using a performance framework that locates being in process. My interlocutors’ discourse about and practices of these performances suggest that, rather than looking for ontology in performance, we understand ontology as performance – or perhaps better yet, performance as ontology. Such a framework illuminates both the challenges and the strategic advantages that ontological ambiguity presents to mask spirit performers in immigrant settings in the US. This framework also provides a philosophical grounding for theories positing African art as process, and sheds light on the ways in which mask spirit performers manoeuvre in the interstices of display and disguise, addressing both belief and market demand.