Kabiye Iron Gong

The Kabiye live on the northern plains of Togo east into the hills that form the border with Benin and in the countryside immediately across the frontier. They are Togo’s second largest ethnic group after the Ewe and related to the Gurunsi of Burkina Faso. Iron ore deposits in the region such as in Banjeli in the neighboring Bassar ethnic region provided early material for the development of black smithing skills. Every five years the Kabiye celebrate Habye, an intense male dominated exhibition of magical power involving dance, demonstrations of deliberately strange behavior and intense percussive music involving gongs of this type accompanied by flutes and horns. This rare gong, with its original striker was collected by the art dealer Ibrahim Kao, himself a Kabiye by birth, in the 1990’s. 12.5″ long.

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