Androgynous figure (Teke).

Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Wood, earth, cowries, height: 84.5 cm.

Private collection.

 

 

Mainly found in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, the Teke are farmers and hunters that cohabit based on the bilateral matrilineal principle. Their belief system is based around one god, Nziam, who has tutelary spirits, natural forces, as henchmen and created an invisible world. These spirits receive prayers and supplications through either religious or magical means. Presented as a collection of various items, the intermediaries are often given a material presence, which is either invested with magical powers or assumed to contain a natural spirit or that of a deceased. These objects are preserved in a container which is attached to a sculpture which represents the dead ancestor.

Here, the statue is almost definitely an ancestor, though the reason that it is androgynous would be an interesting answer to know. The bent legs and erect head exhibit a traditional pose; the eyes, made of glass beads, are close to the nose, the brow bulges, and the wide mouth is slightly open to show the teeth. There is a hole in the centre of the teeth which suggests there was a removable piece which gave a physical presence to the ancestor’s words. A high ranking office is implied based on the pattern on the forehead and tattooed cheeks.

 

 

European and Christian Influence

 

On the other hand, the influence of European usages imported by the Portuguese, Dutch, English, German, Belgian, and French colonists and that of the Christian religion preached by Catholic and Protestant missionaries have had more weight on these populations, incompletely formed and remaining foreign to Islamic enterprise, than they had to the north of the Bantu country. Thanks to the great number of Europeans living permanently in southern Africa and to the increasing penetration of the Boers and other “Afrikaaners” into the interior of the country, the primitive civilisation of the Zulu, the Basuto, the Bechuana, the Matabele, and the Hottentots has sometimes been profoundly modified, whilst at the same time veritable populations of hybrids have been formed in the Portuguese and Dutch colonies. Certain native kingdoms have been strongly shaken by religious quarrels in consequence of rivalries between Catholic and Protestant neophytes; thus, under the reign of Mtessa, who was a Catholic, Uganda was bloody with a religious war which continued under Muanga, successor of Mtessa, and which did not come to an end until 1892 with the conversion of Muanga to Protestantism. Here we have, assuredly, something new among the Negroes of Africa, and it can be said that, in a certain measure, the Europeanisation of an important part of southern Africa and the development that has there been given to Christianisation have brought results, certainly not identical, but indeed comparable to those produced by the Islamisation of a part of western and central Sudan.