82 first to specify not only a collection date for each textile but the name of the village where it was acquired, the name of the woman who made it, and the clan to which she belonged (fig. 4). While the Sheppard Collection has been published and is well known to scholars, the exhibition features two significant textiles from it that are being exhibited here for the first time (fig. 5). One ncák from the Brooklyn Museum also has a collector’s name and acquisition date range associated with it (fig. 6). Collected by Baron Charles Henri-Marie Ernest Tombeur de Tabora, an army officer stationed in the former Belgian Congo at various times between 1902 and 1909,1 it remained in his family until it was sold in 1981 and acquired by the museum. As Tabora was not stationed in the Kasai region, it is unclear where and how he acquired the textile. Several examples in the exhibition have been attributed on solely stylistic grounds to the late eighteenth, early nineteenth, or twentieth centuries (fig. 7), and these are compared to the documented historical cloths from the MRAC and Hampton University (fig. 8). Thus, although Kuba textiles with an established date are rare, it is now possible to start to lay the foundation for a standard of comparison and to provide the basis for a historical trajectory by considering the undocumented group in light of the early textiles with certain provenance. The Kuba are particularly renowned for their cut-pile raffia cloths. When sewn together these textiles form skirts layered over much longer skirts that are wrapped around the body several times. Remarkable not only for
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