Reliquary Guardian Figure with Side Lugs, in its Basket, Bakota

Carved in wood and sheathed in hammered copper and brass, sheet and wire, each guardian transforms a human face into a radiant geometry. Metal was precious and charged with meaning; its brilliance was believed to ward off harm and honour the dead.

These forms later captivated the artists of early twentieth-century Paris, and they remain icons of African art today.

Here the guardian is set into a woven basket, as such figures once sat over the bundles that held the ancestors’ relics — the way they were meant to be seen.

A tall, rectangular head sheathed in cross-hatched brass, with short lugs at the sides, copper bosses for eyes and a sharp brass nose above a copper plate at the mouth. The long neck is ringed in copper and brass and studded, and the open lozenge legs, sheathed and studded in turn, sink into a round woven basket packed with fibre.