Three light colored columns, balanced on the back of an arc of darkened wood, seem to brace themselves to the work of holding up the sleeping platform of this headrest. Together, the arc and the columns comprise an unusual central panel. The arc spans the distance between the outer edges of the double-lobed base. The two lobes themselves feel splayed out by the force of the load above with their spreading chamfered sides and, in connecting with each other, create a definite indent on either side of the base. In fact, the gestalt of the headrest seems like a zany ideogram for a person carrying a load – a caryatid.  

This headrest resembles an example in the Musée  d’Ethnographie de la Ville Neuchatel, collected by Henri Junod in the late 19th century. He had identified it as ‘Ronga’, a group that lived around the Delagoa Bay area. Its museum accession date is 1892 and it is also illustrated in his The Life of an African Tribe. Junod’s example has strings of animal teeth, birds’s claws, metal and glass beads draped about its ‘torso’ in much the same way as the previous example (No. 6) has.

This headrest also bears a strong similarity to two examples in the Johannesburg Art Gallery collection, which are documented as having been collected by the Rev. AA Jaques for the Suisse Romand mission school at Lemana in modern-day Limpopo, about 100 km south of Zimbabwe and 100 km west of the Mozambican border.

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