The lower portion of this Tsonga headrest resembles a tiny table with four sturdy columns for legs. From the tabletop with its fluted edges, three cylindrical columns emerge to support the curved upper sleeping platform. Its warm honey-colored shape is adorned with the two neatly decorated lugs at either end. The flat, figure-of-eight base is unusually broad, wide enough to accommodate the four legs. When taken as a whole, the complex superstructure with its columns and bases has a definite architectural quality to it, and yet it also has an animal-like quality on account of the four legs and the downward pointing lugs.

While not identical, this example bears some resemblance to a headrest, illustrated by Distant in his book, A Naturalist in the Transvaal (p 103), which he classified as Magwamba, a Tsonga-speaking community living in the Spelonken area of Limpopo Province. Two examples in the Musée d’Ethnographie de la Ville Neuchatel, are similar. One, documented as BaKhosa, was collected by the Swiss missionary Phillipe Jeanneret around Antioka near Lourenco Marques, and the other is said to come from the BaHlengwe, which Junod notes as being the largest group amongst the Tsonga, living north and east of the Limpopo River. Both headrests were accessioned in 1894. A headrest with a very similar configuration also appears in Art and Ambiguity but varies in its detailing.

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