Tiv Figure, Nigeria

The present female figure stands solidly and imposingly. Her concave face, observed on many Tiv figures, as well as the crest on the head, the placement of the ears, her simple facial features and rectangular shoulders, all suggest that this sculpture may belong to the corpus of ihambe figures. For stylistically similar examples, see Marla Berns, Richard Fardon, and Sidney Littlefield Kasfir, Central Nigeria Unmasked: Arts of the Benue River Valley, Los Angeles, 2011, pp. 54-55, figs 2.13 and 2.14). Ihambe figures, sometimes called twel after the circular mounds they stood upon, could be both male and female and typically guarded the entrances of the houses of women who had been married through an exchange of daughters by two families. 

Sidney Littlefield Kasfir explains: “A female Ihambe actually represents not the bride herself but the spirit of her husband’s deceased mother, who was thought able to transmit her own fertility to the bride, to domestic animals, and to crops [...]. British disapproval of exchange marriage caused the practice to fade, and the figures ceased to be made in this form. They were replaced by much more abstract male and female symbols, the former pointed at the top and the latter more rounded, resembling the end of a baseball bat” (ibid., p. 56).