African Arts Gallery

Ex-collection of French African tribal art.
Asaned in order to present the hollowed-out gourd mboko which was filled with kaolin whose visitors to the king were silently symbolizing purity and the spiritual world, this female figure offers a delicately modeled face. According to P.Nooter these figures represented the soothsayer's wife, which underlines its importance in the process of divination bilumbu
The healers of the society Buhabo and the soothsayers Mbudye also used it.
On some Luba though a woman, she would represent the first soothsayer Luba, and would also be an allegory of royalty linked to the powerful society of the Mbudye associated with royal power. Patine mate.

Luba (Baluba in Tchiluba) are a people of Central Africa. Their cradle is the Katanga, specifically the region of the Lubu River, so the name (Baluba, which means the Lubas). They were born from a secession of the Songhoy ethnic group, under the leadership of Ilunga Kalala who killed the old king Kongolo, who has since been revered as a python. In the 16th century they created a state, organized in a decentralized chiefdom, which stretched from the Kasai River to Lake Tanganyika. The chiefdoms cover a small territory without a real border that includes no more than three villages.
Ref.: Luba Roberts Luba F. Neyt, ed. Dapper Museum.)