Bongo people (South Sudan)
The Bongo are a
Since the 1970s, large size wooden Bongo funerary sculptures of male figures have been collected in Europe and described as important examples of African tribal art.
History
In the late 1920s, British anthropologist Evans-Pritchard visited and later described the lifestyle and history of the Bongo people.[4] In 1963, Catholic missionary Stefano Santandrea of the Comboni Mission published his Concise grammar outline of the Bongo language.[5]
Bongo ethnic sculpture
The African Art collection of the Pacific Lutheran University in Washington State in the US holds a rare wooden Bongo grave post in the shape of a male figure. Such sculptures and their cultural use were described by Stefano Santandrea after his extended stay with the Bongo community in the mid-1960s.[6][7]
Further, the catalogue "Bongo - Monumental statuary from Southern Sudan" presents pictures and art historical descriptions of a number of life-size statues. These were erected at the graves of important members of the Bongo communities and constitute a specific artistic tradition of this ethnic group. Starting in the 1970s, these sculptures have been collected by European travellers and were later sold to museums or private collections in Europe and other Western countries.[8] One of these grave posts, measuring 240 cm in height, is exhibited in the section of African artefacts at the Musée du quai Branly in Paris.[9]
In August 2018, the Metropolitan Museum of Art exhibited a commemorative male sculpture of the late 19th century in its section of African Arts. According to Christian Duponcheel, the person who had collected the work in southern Sudan, this sculpture had been placed "since before 1914 in a market in the town of Tonj where commercial transactions between Bongo and Nuer populations took place. There, it was said to help keep trade relations harmonious."[10]
References
- ISBN 978-0-313-27918-8.
- ^ "Bongo | people". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 2021-06-16.
- ^ a b public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). "Bongo". Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 4 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. pp. 204–205. One or more of the preceding sentences incorporates text from a publication now in the
- JSTOR 41719404– via JSTOR.
- OCLC 197049.
- ^ "Learn More: Bongo Grave Post | African Art Collection". Pacific Lutheran University. Retrieved 2021-06-16.
- ^ A Catholic priest in the Comboni Mission, Santandrea is the author of approximately twenty books and shorter texts on linguistics, anthropology, geography, and history. Their common link was the Bahr el-Ghazal region, where he dedicated himself for the most part to the mission of being a priest. In A Popular History of Wau, he recalled that the old city of Wau, which he described as a modest village, had been noted since the 1860s in a number of accounts (von Heuglin 1869; Schweinfurth 1984) but that it had disappeared following a Mahdist attack in the spring of 1884 (Santandrea 1964, 17).
- ^ de Grunne, Bernard (2011). "Bongo - Monumental statuary from Southern Sudan". Issuu. Archived from the original on 2014-10-19. Retrieved 2021-06-16.
- ^ Musée du quai Branly. "Bongo - Search". quaibranly.fr. Archived from the original on 2021-10-26. Retrieved 2021-10-26.
- ^ The Metropolitan Museum of Art (2018). "Identity, Meaning, Function: Reclaiming the Histories of The Met's Bongo Ngya". www.metmuseum.org. Archived from the original on 2020-01-01. Retrieved 2021-10-26.
Further reading
- Evans-Pritchard, E. E. (1929). The Bongo, Sudan Notes and Records, Vol. 12, pp. 1-61.
- Fath, Sébastien (2013). Christian Missions and the Construction of South Sudan. Evangelization, Humanitarian Work, and International Activism in Wau. In Afrique contemporaine, vol. 246, issue 2, pp. 99 to 110
- de Grunne, Bernard (2011). Bongo - Monumental statuary from Southern Sudan. Brussels, Belgium
- Kronenberg, Andreas; Kronenberg, Waltraud. (1960) Wooden carvings in the South Western Sudan. Kush: Journal of the Sudan Antiquities Service VIII, pp. 275-281
- Kronenberg, Andreas; Kronenberg, Waltraud; Schweinfurth, Georg. (1981) Die Bongo. Bauern und Jäger im Südsudan. Wiesbaden OCLC 924862935
- Krüger, Klaus-Jochen (1999). The arts of Bahr-el-Ghazal. Funerary sculpture of the Bongo and Belanda. Tribal Arts, 22 - Winter-Spring 1999-2000, pp. 82-100
- Santandrea, Stefano (1964). A tribal history of the western Bahr el Ghazal. Bologna: Editrice Nigrizia. OCLC 466459667.