A soft luster and simple, stunning grace mark this Sotho neck ring. Known as lepetu, such rings are status necklaces worn by married women. The width of the ring directly correlates to the prestige of the wearer, and the largest in width were worn by the wives of chiefs. They are quite rare, with only some twenty-four other known examples in public collections.

In the pre-colonial period, from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, brass was a prestige commodity among the peoples of southeast Africa. There is no evidence of extraction of copper and zinc, the components of brass, in the present-day KwaZulu-Natal, or adjacent Cape and Free State, and thus it would have been imported as an alloy, brought to the shores of southern Africa by Portuguese merchants. Brass probably reached the smiths of the South Sotho people through traders travelling from the Cape. The local brass-workers would have fashioned this collar into its distinctive form by hammering it flat once it had been cast in a mould.