Bongo Headrest

The Bongo are today a vanishing ethnic group in the Tonj district of South Sudan. Small seats similar in form to this example were collected amongst the Bongo in the mid 1800’s. According to Schweinfurth in, Artes Africanae (1875) the Bongo made such seats ‘of the beautiful chestnut-brown wood of the ‘G�l’ tree … which is susceptible of a splendid polish’. In Heart of Africa (1873) he claimed they were called hegba and only used by women, but this is contradicted by Evans-Pritchard in “The Bongo” (1929) who reported that although the Bongo had by then ceased making these stools, both sexes of one clan were still using them as headrests. As the Bongo were farmers and not herdsmen and did not organize bride-wealth in cattle, the apparently zoomorphic form may reference a totemic or origin-myth animal if not the household, milk-providing goat rather than an ox or cow. Ex Pace Primitive. 4″ in height; price on request. References thanks to the Pitt-Rivers, Sudan Project, Oxford.

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