Songye ancestor figure - Songye - DR Congo

This imposing standing male figure, about half life size, is the joint creation of a skilled carver and a trained ritual practitioner, or nganga (pl. banganga). Across Central Africa, such ritual specialists are major patrons of such power objects. The sculptor has divided the body evenly in sections that define the head, torso, and legs. Each of these remains clearly visible despite the materials added by the nganga to the wooden sculpture, whether attached to its surface, or embedded within.

The face has sensitively rendered features, with semi-circular eyes closed under arched eyebrows that extend on either side towards the jaw lines. These give the face its distinctive V-shape, interrupted by the short horizontal line of the chin. A brass plate covers the length of the nose, and organic matter fills the mouth, obscuring details of the carving. An ensemble of feathers, hide, fur, and rope, forming an elaborate hairdo that cascades down to the shoulder at the back of the neck, conceals the top and back of the head. A heavy iron pendant in the shape of an agricultural tool, or hoe, adorns the long ringed neck. The body is a succession of articulated angular shapes, from the squared off shoulders and tubular arms to the side of the torso, to the protruding abdomen on either side of which the hands rest, and the telescoping cones forming the thighs and calves. The prominent navel is topped with fur and brass studs. The figure’s feet and circular base, carved from the same piece of wood as the rest of the figure, are wrapped in hide. Completing the figure’s visible paraphernalia are snakeskins that encircle the torso and pieces of rope attached at both wrists. The head, arms and torso show a dark and shiny patina while the legs’ tone is closer to the wood’s natural surface. This discrepancy in the sculpture’s overall surface treatment signals the loss of a skirt that would have originally covered the lower half of the body. When compared with the extant corpus of community-owned Songye power figures, or mankishi (sing. nkishi), to which this example belongs, it is unusually slender. Its fully-defined legs stand out in a corpus where stocky lower limbs predominate. In absence of collecting data for this example, and based on specialist François Neyt’s 2009 survey of regional styles based on visual analysis, this example relates stylistically to the Songye central region, located around and south of Kalebwe.

Provenance: old french collection