Comb with seated figure

Artists use great skill and imagination when fashioning African combs in materials such as wood, bone, or ivory. The spines, or handles, are decorated with carved motifs and precious metals, including locally mined gold and imported brass. The earliest extant African combs were found in ancient Egyptian tombs and are thousands of years old. Several combs excavated at Dawu in Ghana date to the seventeenth century, which also corresponds to the earliest European accounts of African combs. Most wooden combs that have survived tropical climate conditions date from the nineteenth century.(22)

While both men and women use combs, women's combs are usually the most elaborately decorated. This is especially true among the Asante peoples. Although an Asante woman may commission a sculptor to carve combs for her, she usually receives them as gifts from family, male admirers, or her husband to mark important events in her life such as coming of age, getting married, or giving birth. The carved decorations on Asante combs refer to Asante proverbs or other traditional sayings, a few of which can be identified on the Asante comb (cat. 83, 1981.174).

The spine is divided into two parts consisting of a rectangle with openwork motifs surmounted by a medallion with openwork motifs. Reading upward from the lower part of the rectangle, there is an incised drawing of a ceremonial state sword with a dumbbell-shaped hilt and curved blade that is associated with the proverb "No one challenges a lion unarmed," which means one should be prepared. The stool flanked by a pair of knots at the center of the comb has great significance. The Golden Stool is the most important religious and political symbol of the Asante nation. According to Asante oral tradition, the Golden Stool descended from the heavens to land gently on the knees of Osei Tutu, the founder and first king of the Asante empire. This stool is the repository for the entire Asante nation. A personal stool is the repository of an individual's soul in life and after death. Its significance is embodied in the Asante saying "There are no secrets between a man and his stool."(23) The two square knots are a symbol of intelligence and refer to the proverb "Only a wise man can untie a wisdom knot."(24) The hairstyle with upright plaits on the female bust in the medallion has been documented on a Fante woman photographed in the early twentieth century.(25) The crosses projecting from either side of the comb are Christian symbols. This comb is as carefully detailed on the back as it is on the front.

Combs were emblems of status among the Chokwe peoples. Those made of wood or ivory with spines decorated with carved figures and abstract patterns were more valuable than unadorned wooden combs or those made from cane or wires. Like Asante and Fante combs, elaborately decorated Chokwe combs were heirlooms handed down through the generations in the belief that the spirit of the original owner inhabited the object.

The Chokwe comb (cat. 84 and see detail, below) is decorated with a figure, of undetermined sex, seated with its elbows resting on its knees.(26) Although the comb may have originated among either the Chokwe or Lwena peoples, the hairstyle is similar to those on Lwena face masks representing females.(27)

The Arts of Africa at the Dallas Museum of Art, cat. 84, pp. 232, 234-235.

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NOTES:

22. Cole, Herbert M., and Doran H. Ross. The Arts of Ghana. Los Angeles: University of California, Museum of Cultural History, 1977. pp. 48-51.

23. Fraser, Douglas. African Art and Leadership. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1972. pp. 140-144.

24. Cole and Ross, 1977. pp. 140-144.

25. Photograph reproduced in Sieber, Roy, and Frank Herreman, eds. Hair in African Art and Culture. Munich: Prestel, for the Museum for African Art, 2000. p. 12, as fig. 4.

26. It is similar to the one in in the Corice and Armand P. Arman Collection; reproduced in Sieber and Herreman, 2000. p. 139, cat. no. 133.

27. Ibid. p. 140, cat. no. 136.