An Unusually Large and Fine Tsonga ‘Antelope’ Headrest

Wood, pigment, glass beads
Zimbabwe
19th Century

PROVENANCE:
Ex Private UK collection
Sold through auction and purchased through Finch and Co, March 2012
Ex Private collection

EXHIBITED:
BRUNEAF, Bruxelles, La tête dans les étoiles. Appuis-Nuque d’Afrique de d’ailleurs 6 - 10 June 2012

Among the Tsonga, wood carving was an exclusively male occupation and the types of objects carved, such as meat dishes, milk pails, headrests and staffs, were strongly associated with men, their cattle and the ancestors.
Ancestral spirits were believed to communicate with their living descendants through dreams and thus the ‘support of dreams’ (Falgayrettes 1989), the headrest, manifested this interdependence in a material form. Headrests were often gifts taken by a bride to her new home when she married and this custom symbolically linked her ancestors with her husbands.
Representational animal figures, mostly of antelope and cattle, appear very rarely in the art of South African headrests. The iconography suggests that this headrest probably belonged to a man of status and high rank.