Mbun textiles are found only in some of the earliest collections of Central African Art, including the collections of the Africa Museum--Tervuren (Belgium) and the British Museum (London). Documentation of Mbun textile traditions by the Hungarian ethnographer Emil Torday, who was employed first by the Congo Free State and later by the British Museum to obtain a representative collection of Congolese material culture, resulted in two important monographs on his collecting trips (1905-1906 & 1908-1909) for the Musee Royal de l'Afrique Centrale. The publications are the earlies reports on Congolese people in this region. In Torday's opinion the Mbun textiles and woodcarving were among the most artistically accomplished in the region. This assessment was based primarily on the quality of surface decoration found on Mbun woodcarvings and textiles.
Torday photographed and published several images of Mbun women wearing textiles similar to this. He notes that the designs on Mbun textiles and woodcarving correspond exactly to scarification patterns found on Mbun women. A dominant motif in Mbun surface design repertoire is the lozenge, which according to Mbun informants is derived from the representation of the lizard.
The Mbun produced three types of raffia textiles. Plain woven cloth called bunubum; cloth woven with a damask-like lozenge pattern called lubawa; and cloth that was embroidered with black raffia fiber called lobabasa. In all cases, Torday notes that Mbun men both wove and embroidered textiles.
All of the virtuoso qualities that impressed Emil Torday are found in this textile. Mbun textiles appear to be an important stylistic prototype for later related Kuba kingdon textile innovations. Torday's work and later research by the central African historian, Jan Vansina, support Kuba oral traditions that speak of the important paramount ruler and innovator Shyaam aMbul aNgoong (founder of the Matoon clan that rules the Kuba region to this day) who traveled to the Mbun region in the late 16th or early 17th centuries and borrowed a number of Mbun innovations such as their precolonial royal palace architectural design and textile design before returning to the Kasai and Sankuru region and founding the Kuba confederacy. Later trade between the coastal Kongo and the Mbun region and farther west into the Kuba region also included expensive raffia cloth, nzimbu shells and possibly European cloth and brass. Exports from the Kuba included ivory and camwood.
Description:
Raffia rectangular panel textile composed of nine parts: five central panels with damask-woven lozenge pattern and two narrow borders decorated with black lozenge patterned embroidery.
Provenance:
Colette Ghysels, Brussels, Belgium, ca. 2003
Exhibition History:
TxtStyles: Fashioning Identity, National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., June 11-December 7, 2008
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