By nature and purpose, African ritual festivals are mythic and religious. They encapsulate the totality of the people's history, beliefs, values, mores, behaviours, idiosyncrasies and practices. Like the African Festivals under which they are subsumed, Yoruba festival performances are reflections of the people's recent and past histories and also the religious nature of the people. Masks and masques are important feature of most African ritual festivals. Likewise, among Yoruba, there is hardly any ritual festival that does not involve the use of masks and masques to recall their historical watersheds. The thrust of this paper, among other things, is to examine the use of masks and masques especially for historical purposes among the Yoruba during their ritual festivities. This study, to accomplish this task, traces the origin of masks and masques in Yoruba ritual festivals. It probes the purposes these masks and masques serve and highlight instances of their references to the people s history through illustrative pictorials via panoramic survey of ritual festivals that dot the Yoruba geo-cultural landscape. It also projects in the future of this art listing out the threats to its continuity, and proposes how these threats can be circumvented to ensure continuity and sustainability.