Royal vessel

Double-sided cups carved in the shape of a human head served central roles in Luba enthronement between the late 19th and early 20th century. According to Albert Maesen, who conducted research in the region in the 1950s, the cups were called musenge and used during royal investiture rites and in ceremonies to honor ancestors. A chief counselor would drink from one side, then would pass the cup to participants who drank from the other. Such cups were stored within the royal compound alongside other insignia of office such as staffs, bowstands, axes, and the king’s lupona (royal seat).

This cup displays a beautifully carved coiffure, with braids swooping back from the broad forehead. While the gender depicted on this cup is not immediately evident, Luba chiefs and kings were known to wear women’s hairstyles during their investiture ceremonies. This underscores that when a Luba man becomes a bulopwe—usually translated as king—he both unites genders and transcends them. Bulopwe and the concept of royalty are not gendered terms or ideas in Kiluba, the Luba language. Female figures are of central importance in Luba arts of kingship, as their bodies are understood to contain the spiritual force that safeguards and sustains the royal line. We see this, for example, in the Ceremonial Bowstand with Female Figure in which a female figure frames her navel with both hands. She is referencing the umbilical cord, symbolizing the fundamental role of a woman in kingship’s continuity.

It is not known why such cups are carved in the shape of human heads, though anthropomorphic cups are commonly found in the arts of the nearby Kuba Kingdom. Mary Nooter Roberts, who conducted field research in the Luba region in the 1980s, proposed that the wooden cups referred to an earlier investiture ritual during which the previous ruler’s skull was used to symbolize continuity across generations and may have even been used as a cup. When a deceased ruler’s body was buried, the skull would remain with the new ruler, creating a chain of relationships through which power, blessings, and wisdom are passed down over generations. Roberts made this interpretation based on very early colonial sources—contemporaneous with when some of these objects were collected—by Belgian missionaries and colonial administrators such as Th. Theuws, R.P.F. Verbeke, and Ernest Van Avermaet. W.F.P. Burton, an English Protestant missionary who lived in the Luba region from 1915 to 1930, reported that the top of a skull would be used as a cup for the sacred ritual in which a new ruler becomes divine, and suggested that these wooden cups may have replaced that practice.

Cups such as this one are very rare, with only twelve known examples in museums and private collections. Based on stylistic comparisons, they most likely came from the area to the west of the Luba heartland, perhaps among the Kanyok and Kalundwe chiefdoms, in the present-day eastern Kasai region near the Lomami or Sankuru rivers. As a cultural and art historical label, “Luba” can be amorphous, referring to a specific kingdom or a broader zone of influence. It can expand to include communities which might not share the same language or customs, but which participate in an exchange of arts and ideas that is nevertheless dominated by Luba influence, which include the Kanyok and Kalundwe.

Elaine Ericksen Sullivan, 2026
Assistant Professor of African Cultural Studies and Art History, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Curatorial Fellow, Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2020-22