Bongo Figural Funerary Marker, Based

The grasslands south of Sudan. A warrior or a hunter is remembered in stone.

The Bongo people lived, in the recent past, in the southern part of Bahr-el-Ghazal province. They honored heroic warriors or hunters with sculpted forms known as Ngya, so that the dead would be well received in the village of the ancestors. The markers range from fully naturalistic bodies to abstracted figures. This one is of stone, mounted on a base, twenty-six inches tall.

Ngya remind the living that those who went before can still inspire, help and motivate. The age is indeterminate. The purpose, plainly, is not.