A highlight of Tennants’ militaria and ethnographic sale in Leyburn, North Yorkshire, on October 5, is this early 19th century ‘ancestor head’, made by the Fang people of modern Gabon.
An itinerant people, migrating from area to area throughout the regions around modern Gabon, Cameroon and Equatorial Guinea, the Fang were unable to build permanent grave shrines. Instead, each family kept a portable bark box filled with skulls and bones of important ancestors and a carved head or figure placed on top to guard them.