31 result was that they, along with their courtiers, commissioned increasing numbers of prestige and ceremonial objects. Most of these relate to Lunda traditions and, generationally, to those of the Luba, but royal commemorative figures, of which the sculpture in question is a particularly fine example, are uniquely Tshokwe. In 1934 or 1935, a young Portuguese man named Manuel Fuscini VillasBoas, who had recently finished his university studies in engineering, visited Angola with some friends. In the course of their travels, they stopped at a Catholic mission (figs. 6a & b), which had collected some Tshokwe art. He negotiated with the missionaries to buy two statues, one of which was this figure, and brought them back to Portugal. The figures stayed in his family for almost three-quarters of a century, occasionally appearing in the background of family photos (fig. 8). When the three antique dealers acquired the piece, the family member they were talking to told them that the children used to play with the statue. As with many toys, it had been subjected to some rough treatment. The fingers of the left hand had been cracked sometime in the past and the figure had a few small holes in its surface, which the current owners surmise were the result of the children using it as a target for darts. Some very minor cosmetic restoration brought the piece back to a condition appropriate for being the showpiece of a Tshokwe court, as well as for the several museums to which it has been generously lent over the course of the last decade. NOTES 1. Thanks to Alain de Monbrison for his initial documentation and follow-up notes, without which this article would not have been possible. 2. Such figures sometimes wear the cipenya mutwe headdress, which has vertically oriented, backward-bent side sections (fig. 5). While this is rendered quite similarly to the mutwe wa kayanda in wood carving, in reality these were two quite different head adornments.
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