references
53 BYERI ANCESTOR HEAD, EYEMA-BYERI, FANG (FANG BETSI), EQUATORIAL AFRICA, NORTH GABON Wood with dark patina
Publication : - Perrois, L. 1972, La statuaire fañ, Gabon, Orstom, Paris, p. 330 (pl. 161, n° 198). The Fang tribe with animist beliefs from Atlantic equatorial Africa used to worship an age-old religion called byeri which saw them sculpt wooden statues and heads to symbolise the dead. The heads are the rarest and often finished to a high standard. Most of them come from the Southern Fang in North Gabon. These ritual effigies, called eyema-byeri (= “elder’s image”) or nlo-biañ (= “head with magical powers”) had two roles. The first was to magically “guard” human remains kept in large cylindrical woven bark chests passed from generation to generation in the custody of every head of lineage (the skulls proved the genealogical identity of each lineage). The second was to be used as dummies during young people’s initiation ceremonies (wooden sculptures were branded in front of the newly initiated who were in a hypnotic state after absorbing alan bark, a hallucinogenic plant enabling the user to contact dead spirits – see Tessmann, Die Pangwe, 1913). Just like skull fragments, wooden sculptures were periodically honoured by being anointed with palm oil, sacrificial blood and ba powder (a mixture of oil and ground padauk wood, the red coating symbolised the sacred like parrot feathers in the same colour). It hasn’t been proven that the heads were widespread amongst the Fangs. There were forms pre-dating busts and full statues in Cameroon, Gabon and Equatorial Guinea, the nsekh-byeri reliquary chest may have represented the dead person’s body according to an idea developed in the West. The idea of a linear evolution of the Fang statue was developed by an American collector called John McKesson in 1987 (see Arts d'Afrique Noire, n° 63 and n° 64). Personally, having conducted my own research since the 60s into several hundreds of Fang sculptures, I’ve found that heads were only found in one region (the southern Fang Betsi area between Ogooué and the Crystal Mountains). I believe it is very likely that the heads and statuettes have coexisted for a very long time, before the 19th century, with some groups getting into the habit of using the heads (smaller or larger in size) and others using the statuettes. Location of Beti-Fang groups and migrations; right: location of styles and statue variations These statue traditions continued and were influenced by neighbours in each community during migrations (we know the Beti-Fang tribe’s migration took over three centuries and followed many paths in the Equatorial Forest, valleys in central and south Cameroon, valleys in North Congo and Gabon until the 1900s). These events resulted in an abundance of the sub-styles that we see today, a diversity that time has helped uphold in diagrams that are distinct yet aesthetically linked. However, the symbolic and magical roles of the heads, busts and statuettes were exactly the same from the north to the south of the “Pahouin” area. All the Fang heads with known provenance were found among the Southern Fangs, Gabon Estuary Fangs, those from the valleys of Como, Remboué, Okano and Abanga, the Fang Betsi south of Woleu-Ntem and the right bank of the Ogooué. Pastor Fernand Grébert’s remarkable sketchbooks showed the co-existence of heads, busts and statuettes (see Le Gabon de Fernand Grébert, 1913-1932, Geneva, 2003, pp. 95, 143, 146, 197, 222, 256, 306), an ethnographic reality from the 1920s that, fortunately, was saved from oblivion. The magnificent and majestic Fang head at the Musée d'Ethnographie de Neuchâtel in Switzerland (whose wood still oozes a mysterious red resin) was donated to the museum by Father Trilles in 1903 after he found it whilst visiting the Libreville hinterland as detailed in his explorations (see Quinze années au Congo Français, chez les Fang, 1912). We can therefore consider the location of this type of sculpture among the Southern Fangs to be proven. In the 1920s, �
