Bovine headrest

A straight-legged bovine figure forms the base of this delicate headrest. Such intimate possessions cradled the owner’s neck during repose. By elevating the head, it protected the user’s labor-intensive coiffure, which could take many hours to create. Wooden “pillows” also served to connect the sleeper’s head with the earth, facilitating a connection with their forebears. Many examples from southern and eastern Africa draw on imagery relating to cattle. By the nineteenth century, cattle were the primary source of wealth in Tsonga, Shona, Swazi, and Zulu communities. In addition to providing milk and meat for sustenance and leather for personal adornment, livestock served as the basic unit of exchange in bride-price negotiations. Kept in circular izibaya (kraals) around which homesteads were typically organized, cattle were understood as the joint property of the living and their predecessors, reinforcing associations with ancestral communication.




By the late nineteenth century, headrests became a focus of Western collecting. Spurred by a fascination with the range and elaboration of coiffures within the African communities that they encountered, Europeans viewed headrests as a “trope for all the other aspects of heads and hair” (Nettleton, 352). Various artists in southern Africa catered to this new market by expanding their creative repertoires to include more representational imagery favored by a Western clientele. This example belongs to a modest corpus of zoomorphic headrests attributed to Shona and Tsonga artists of the Limpopo River region and carved between the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries for sale to foreign audiences. As seen here, those creations are defined by four legs that flare at their bases, a tubular or rectangular body, and two or three columns connecting the back of the animal to the curved platform. This refined example is distinguished by the subtle rendering of the animal’s features as well as the smooth finish to the wood’s surface.