Form is never neutral. It is always charged with meaning. Few objects illustrate this truth more vividly than the ivory mask of Queen Idia, mother of Oba Esigie of Benin, and the iPhone, the global device of our age. At first glance, they appear worlds apart — one, a 16th-century masterpiece carved from elephant tusk, the other, a 21st-century marvel of glass and silicon. Yet both function as more than objects. They are symbols, mediators, archives of identity. They shape how people imagine themselves, their communities, and their place in the world.
The Queen Idia mask, carved with impossible delicacy, embodies dynastic power and maternal wisdom. It is not mere ornament. In Benin, masks such as this functioned as *ugboghodo* — emblems of continuity and legitimacy. Worn by the Oba in ceremonies, it invoked Idia, the queen mother whose political and spiritual guidance secured her son’s reign in the early 1500s. The mask carried within its smooth ivory surface the authority of lineage, the presence of ancestors, and the living memory of a kingdom.
Its form was deliberate. Ivory symbolized purity and immortality. The face, serene yet commanding, was not only likeness but metaphysics: a face made eternal, a presence made portable. Its decorative inlays — iron, copper, and beads — encoded layers of cosmology and status. This mask was not neutral matter. It was charged, sacred, a bridge between visible and invisible worlds.
Centuries later, the iPhone emerged — sleek, glowing, minimal. To call it a phone is reduction. It is a mirror, a companion, a portal. Like Idia’s mask, it transcends utility. It has become an icon of identity, shaping how billions navigate the world. To carry an iPhone is to declare belonging to a certain global culture — of design, connectivity, and aspiration.
Its form, too, is deliberate. Polished glass and aluminum, soft edges, a single button (later erased into gesture) — every detail constructed to communicate elegance, desire, and power. Apple understood what Benin’s carvers knew: design carries philosophy. The iPhone is not neutral. It is a symbol of creativity and continuity in the digital age.
The parallel deepens when we consider function. The Queen Idia mask was a face — a stand-in, a mediator between ruler, people, and ancestors. The iPhone is also a face: a screen through which we present ourselves, connect, and commune with distant others. One carved from ivory, the other glowing with pixels — both mediate human presence.
Like the mask, the phone collapses time and space. Through ritual, the Oba could summon Idia’s spirit, binding past and present. Through apps and networks, the iPhone collapses continents, summoning voices and faces across distance. In both, the material object becomes a gateway — not an end in itself, but a conduit for relationship and meaning.
The Queen Idia mask is archive. It preserves the authority of a queen mother whose counsel shaped history. To see it is to recall lineage, to rehearse belonging. The iPhone, too, is archive. Within it lie photographs, conversations, notes, and searches — the intimate memory of individuals and societies. In our pockets we carry digital shrines, repositories of identity.
But archives are contested. The Benin Bronzes and Idia’s mask were looted in the 1897 British invasion, scattered across museums in London, Berlin, and New York. Their displacement is a rupture — memory torn from place. The iPhone’s archives, too, are contested: data mined, surveilled, and extracted by corporations and states. In both cases, power inscribes itself not only in objects but in who controls their circulation.
To place the mask and the phone together is not to flatten differences, but to reveal continuity in the human impulse to encode meaning in form. The mask is philosophy carved: serenity as power, ivory as eternity, maternal presence as political legitimacy. The phone is philosophy designed: minimalism as elegance, connectivity as freedom, consumption as belonging.
Both show that form is never neutral. Every curve, every material choice, every polish or incision carries worldview. Both are charged with significance — not only in how they function, but in what they signify.
The thread stretches further. Consider the rituals surrounding both. The mask appeared in festivals, processions, and ceremonies — moments of heightened meaning. The iPhone appears in product launches treated like liturgies, unboxings performed with reverence. Both generate aura, both mediate devotion.
Consider also their reach. The mask embodied Benin’s cosmology, while also circulating through global trade — ivory, beads, and copper linked Africa to Portugal and beyond. The iPhone embodies Silicon Valley’s cosmology of innovation, while circulating through a supply chain that stretches from California to China to Nigeria. Both are products of global systems, nodes in networks of power, economy, and imagination.
Why compare Queen Idia’s mask with the iPhone? Because the comparison disrupts assumptions. Too often, African art is placed in the past, while technology is seen as the present and future. But the unBROKEN thread insists otherwise: African creativity has always been part of the global story of innovation. The mask is not relic but precedent. It shows how design has always carried meaning, always shaped identity.
By placing Idia’s mask beside the iPhone, we reclaim continuity. We reveal that objects across centuries — carved ivory and engineered glass — share the same function: to hold memory, mediate presence, embody philosophy.
Form is never neutral: it is always charged with meaning. Queen Idia’s mask and the iPhone both testify to this. They are not inert matter but living forms — archives of identity, mediators of presence, symbols of belonging. One binds a kingdom to its ancestors; the other binds billions to digital networks. Both prove that history is not behind us, but within us.
The unBROKEN thread runs through them: from Benin to Cupertino, from ivory to glass, from ancestral faces to glowing screens. It reminds us that creativity is continuous, that Africa’s past and the world’s future are already intertwined.