18th-Century Kuba King Figures

Abstract

The arts of large sub-Saharan African courts fit more readily into the familiar categories of European art history with regard to subject, purpose, and applicable method of investigation than the arts of small village polities do. In African courts, such as Dahomey, Asante, Benin, and Kuba, images, ceremonial insignia, and costume were displayed prominently to enhance the appearance of power. Such works share characteristics that distinguish arts of leadership elsewhere; they appear in more precious materials, more complex techniques, and more elaborate compositions than the arts outside the elite sphere. As in Europe, African court arts indicate the locus of authority, identify officials, and convey messages about the rights and powers of the elite to a wider public. The emblems worn or figures represented are meant to be recognized and understood. Oral traditions preserved by court archivists, combined with descriptions by European explorers, colonizers, and ethnographers of their encounters with African courts in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, provide references to art of the past. As a result, the arts of these large courts are to a considerable degree accessible to familiar methods of iconographical and historical investigation. This can be demonstrated by a description of the steps taken by scholars to identify and date five wooden figures from the Kuba court. This example is of exceptional interest because of the quantity of twentieth-century documentation on Kuba court culture that permits the scholar to move beyond identification and dating to an interpretation of style in terms of cultural values. The Kuba kingdom, which occupied the territory between the Kasai and Sankuru rivers in Zaire (see map), became well known in Europe because the