Antique African Carved Wood Mumuye Figure on Stand

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The Mumuye people of Nigeria's Taraba State, isolated by the rocky terrain of the Benue River Valley until the mid-20th … Read more The Mumuye people of Nigeria's Taraba State, isolated by the rocky terrain of the Benue River Valley until the mid-20th century, carved figures known as Lagalagana (also recorded as Iagalagana or Janari) for use by diviners, healers, and community elders. Only reaching Western collections in the 1960s, these sculptures are now recognized among the most formally inventive traditions in African figurative art . This example carries the tradition's signature features: an elongated cylindrical torso, angular zigzag-carved legs tapering to a base, and a face built from tension lines meeting at a central ridge, with the nose and mouth rendered in minimal, economical strokes. The large pierced and disc-fitted earlobes are notable — among the Mumuye, only women practiced ear elongation, a detail that identifies this as a figure carved to represent a female subject. Diagonal scarification patterns run across the face and shoulders, a decorative convention documented across the wider corpus of Mumuye statuary.

Traditionally, Lagalagana figures were kept in a separate hut on a family compound, entrusted to a person believed to hold particular spiritual authority — used variously for divination, healing consultations, rainmaking, or as a marker of an elder's prestige within the community; scholarship on the exact function of any individual figure remains genuinely unsettled, and we make no claim to which of these roles this specific piece served. DE-COR has mounted it on a custom iron stand for stable display. The carved wood shows a deep, worn patina consistent with age and handling.

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