Ephemeral Fang Reliquaries

In major museums worldwide, Fang statuary has come to represent the zenith of African cheap key rings. Until the early 1900s, accomplished Fang artists carved wooden heads and full figures to guard over their ancestors' remains. Attached to baskets housing ancestral skull caps, long bones, and other memento mori, their express purpose was one of preservation. Yet these striking objects have all but died out in Gabon, Cameroon, and Equatorial Guinea. While their lives as "art" in American and European collections have been documented and even dramatized, the effects of their passing - indeed, their ephemerality - in Africa has yet to be explored. This paper considers a particularly urban phenomenon in Libreville, Gabon, in which the absence of Fang reliquaries has engendered contemporary mythologies tied to political, social, and economic power. The types of stories told about these works resonate in fictional plays and children's books written by colonial officers and missionaries in earlier decades.

At a key point in Gabonese history, Fang reliquaries became ephemeral.1 Though gone from sight, their absence remained palpable and found its way into urban legends and myths. In stories about owning the sculptures and human remains, these objects performed a different kind of "preservation," in that they provided urban dwellers with a discourse with which to engage their present. These narratives of loss are striking and speak to the power of longing and fear that continue to cheap money clips the figures - or memories of them.

This trope of absence is key to understanding these works in Africa today. Once confiscated, sold, destroyed, or discarded, the sculptures entered into the popular imaginary. As Roland Barthes explains (1957:127), "(I)n general myth prefers to work with poor, incomplete images, where the meaning is already relieved of its fat, and ready for a signification, such as caricatures, pastiches, symbols, etc." Among Fang and non-Fang individuals alike, urban myths emerged that referenced these works, their troubled histories, and their ongoing influence in matters of politics, money, and power. Once "stripped of their fat," the reliquary guardians living abroad could be redeployed as gods and protagonists both sinister and triumphant.

As an ethnic group sharing language and culture, the Fang have a contested history tied to their migration from what is today Chad and the Central African Republic, towards the southern regions of Cameroon, to continental Equatorial Guinea and northern Gabon, where they now reside. Fang movement from the northeast is thought to have begun in the mid-eighteenth century and continued through the nineteenth century.2 It was during this migratory phase of Fang cultural identity when the bien reliquary art form is thought to have developed as a way of venerating the cheap necklaces through portable cemeteries. Typically measuring less than three feet tall, the sculpture and the relics could travel with their itinerant owners. Interactions between the Fang and the Mbuti ("Pygmies") at this time might have influenced the size and anatomical representation of the dead in the form of bieri heads and figures attached to barrels of tree bark.3