Male figure effigy vessel

African artists have supplied the European expatriate and export markets with merchandise for at least five centuries. Such artistic production began in the fifteenth century on Africa's west coast, where Portuguese explorers and seamen first encountered Africans. Europeans' curiosity about the voyagers' exotic souvenirs from Africa may have encouraged trade. Whatever the catalyst, in the late fifteenth and the sixteenth century, Portuguese merchants commissioned Sapi and Bini (Edo) ivory carvers in present-day Sierra Leone and present-day Nigeria, respectively, to produce objects to sell in Europe. These objects included elaborately decorated ivory spoons, shoehorns, saltcellars, hunting horns, and other objects that found homes in the curiosity cabinets and on the banquet tables of the European nobility.(33)

During the late nineteenth century, when the European presence was constant, a Woyo potter named Voania (Voanya) Muba made figurative vessels exclusively for the European market. Voania was the chief of Muba, a village on the Atlantic Coast and a three-day walk from the towns of Boma and Banana.(34) He became a potter although he lived in a village where pottery had not previously been made.

Men in Muba carved wooden lids with high-relief figures to cover the bowls imported from pottery-making villages. Although the Muba villagers believed Voania had lieya liambu, or talent, and was self-taught because he never left the village to become an apprentice, Voania probably learned how to model clay and make pots from men (who customarily worked in isolation) in a pottery-making village. Whatever the source of his knowledge,

Voania created his own formula for the clay body and perfected his skills. Voania's only assistant was a nephew who neither helped to mix the materials or to form the vessels. He served instead as the middleman in selling Voania's vessels. Voania's pottery typically depicts Europeans alone, as a couple, as equestrians, or as a family group standing or sitting on top of a globular vessel. He occasionally portrayed an African male or a female figure. Some pots have only a human head for decoration. The hollow vessels have an opening, usually in the head of a figure. The figures' hats sometimes have two parts-the hat with an opening and a lid to cover it. None of Voania's vessels ever functioned as pitchers.

The Dallas vessel depicts a seated European male wearing a hat and jacket with carefully detailed buttons and buttonholes. There is an opening in the top of the hat. The figure holds a flask for liquor in one hand and a drinking cup or glass in the other. During the nineteenth century, Europeans imported alcoholic beverages that became African symbols of prestige; their consumption was a privilege of rulers, who were the first to be introduced to the foreign imports.(35)

The Woyo use proverbs to offer a compliment, appeal to principle, or settle an argument. Carved pot lids that visually illustrate proverbs can silently convey messages when covering bowls containing food. Voania's vessels, on which the imagery on pot lids was not duplicated, were clearly not intended for this kind of communication nor were they sold to Muba villagers. They were meant for European customers, who probably found them amusing. Still the one and only male potter from Muba village, Voania died in 1928.

During the late nineteenth century, European explorers penetrated far inland to Mangbetu country in the northeastern part of the former Belgian Congo (the present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo). The Mangbetu vessel (1995.20) depicts a woman with an elongated head (the result of binding the forehead at infancy) wearing a classic, fanlike coiffure that identifies her as royal (fig. 62). European taste for figurative art encouraged Mangbetu sculptors to create objects in this style.(36) The figure's hairstyle, which in real life required an armature to stand upright, serves as the spout of the vessel.

This particular type of Mangbetu vessel, of which only a few are known,(37) is unusual because it is double-chambered and is buff colored instead of black. In Mangbetu society, male artists made terracotta "head" vessels as well as vessels of carved wood and cast or forged metal. Women traditionally made nonfigurative pottery strictly for domestic purposes. In addition to European influence on artistic production, interethnic marriages between peoples who observed gender-specific rules in making pottery may have also resulted in men and women working together to make these vessels.

The Arts of Africa at the Dallas Museum of Art, cat. 107, pp. 286-287.

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NOTES:

33. Plass, Margaret. “Above the Salt.” Expedition 5, no. 3 (Spring 1963): 38–41. pp. 38-41.

For a survey of the first works to reach Europe, see Bassani, Ezio, and William Fagg. Africa and the Renaissance: Art in Ivory. Edited by Susan Vogel. New York: Museum for African Art, 1988.

34. Volavka, Zadenka. “Vonia Muba: Contribution to the History of Central African Pottery.” African Arts 10, no. 2 (January 1977): 59–66, 92. pp. 61-62.

35. For a similar vessel, see Smet, Peter A. G. M. de. Herbs, Health, Healers: Africa as Ethnopharmacological Treasury. Berg en Dal, Netherlands: Afrika Museum, 1999. p. 107.

36. Schildkrout, Enid, and Curtis A. Keim. African Reflections: Art from Northeast Zaire. Seattle: University of Washington Press for the American Museum of Natural History, New York, 1990. pp. 109-112, 247.

37. For similar figural terracotta vessels in the Tartu Museum in Estonia, see Olderogge, D. A., and Werner Forman. The Art of Africa: Negro Art from the Institute of Ethnography, Leningrad. London and New York: Hamlyn, 1969. pp. 19, 155.
These were collected in the 1920s and 1930s by I. P. and D. P. Solomentsevs.