African Arts Gallery

The baskets containing the relics of illustrious ancestors, generally surmounted by two reliquaries, were kept in the temples of the village. One of them embodied the founder of the lineage, and the second his descendants. Ancestor worship, the bwete (Northern Kota) was at the heart of the social and religious life of the Kota and has many analogies with that of the Fang. In the exclusive presence of initiates, the major decisions of the clan were taken during ceremonies during which the reliquaries were taken out and used. In order to reactivate the magic charge, the initiates rubbed the relic with sand. Among the Kota, these figures have reached an astonishing degree of stylization and abstraction: reduced to shoulders and "arms" surmounted by a large face, the latter can be concave (feminine) or convex (male). The concave face here offers two cabochon eyes pierced with a metallic pupil and a sharp nose. The copper plates alternate on the surface matted by the sand which was supposed to reactivate the magic power of the reliquary.