Fang Anthropomorphic Harp, Gabon or Equatorial Guinea

Acquired in Madrid by Mauricio Lasansky in 1953-54
Mauricio and Emilia Lasansky, Iowa City
By descent to the present owners

State University of Iowa, Iowa City, African Sculpture, June 12 - July 31, 1956
The Toledo Museum of Art, Toledo, The African Image:  A New Selection of Tribal Art, Feburary 1 - February 22, 1959
The University of Iowa Museum of Art, Iowa City, African Art from Iowa Private Collections, November 13, 1981 - January 10, 1982
The National Museum of African Art, Washington, D.C., Sounding Forms: African Musical Instruments, April 26 - June 18, 1989; additional venues:
Virginia Museum of Fine Arts, Richmond, Virginia, July 16 - September 10, 1989
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, Kansas City, Missouri, October 7-December 3, 1989
Musée des arts africains et océaniens, Paris, January 25-March 20, 1990
Musée Dapper, Paris, Fang, November 21, 1991 - April 15, 1992

Roy Sieber, African Sculpture, Iowa City, 1956, p. 10, cat. 96
Margaret Plass, The African Image: A New Selection of Tribal Art, Toledo, 1959, p. 22, cat. 108
Warren M. Robbins, African Art in American Collections/L'Art African dans les Collections Americaines, New York, 1966,  fig. 131
Christopher D. Roy, African Art from Iowa Private Collections, Iowa City, 1981, pp. 32-33, cat. 22
Kate Ezra, "Recent Exhibitions: African Art from Iowa Private Collections", African Arts, Vol. XV, No. 15, 1982, p. 77
Marie-Thérèse Brincard, Sounding Forms: African Musical Instruments, New York, 1989, pp. 52 and 93, cat. 14
Phillippe Laburthe-Tolra and Christine Falgayrettes-Leveau, Fang, Paris, 1991, p. 46
Doran Ross, "Interview with Roy Sieber," African Arts, Vol. XXV, No. 4, October 1992, p. 46
Warren M. Robbins, African Sculpture, Atglen, 2005, p. 179, fig. 231

The Lasansky Fang Harp
Louis Perrois, March 2014

Early Fang harps are extraordinarily rare.  The Fang Harp from the collection of the artist Mauricio Lasansky is one of the most iconic examples of the type and one of the most beautiful known, and as such has been frequently published in scholarly literature and shown in museum exhibitions.

The design of the instrument is composed of a tall, narrow wooden resonating box, of rectangular form with open front, covered with an animal hide which is sewn together on the reverse.  The hide covering is pierced with two round openings, one at top right and the other at bottom left, in order to optimize the sound of the instrument.

Below the body is an integrally-carved tenon-form foot, which allowed the instrument to rest on the top of the musician’s thigh, as seen in a circa 1899 photograph of a related harp held by a Fang musician published by Trilles in 1912 (see fig. 1).  The presence of such a foot is an important indication of the instrument’s great age, as indeed this feature disappeared from Fang harp design after 1914-1920 (see Grébert, 2003, folio 59).  The long, thin arching neck interlocks with the body and is held in place with rattan bindings.

Surmounting the instrument is a magnificent head of an ancestor carved in the round, of classic Fang design and with a brilliant deep brown patina, a reminder that the melody played upon the eight strings was the “voice” that permitted contact with another world, that of the spirits and the deceased.  This type of figural harp is called ñgomi among the Fang.

This type of object was of equal ritual importance to the widely-celebrated Fang eyema byeri statues and heads. It is curious that so few of these instruments are known in the West, as they were used throughout Fang communities of the 19th century until the early 20^th century. The relative scarcity of Fang harps, and especially those of the early type bearing a tenon-form foot, as compared to the relative multitude of eyema byeri effigies (which exist in some hundreds of different variants), suggests that their original owners carefully concealed these sacred instruments from outsiders. They are in fact the equivalent of a byeri staff, which allowed the bearer to enter into a special relationship with the deceased.

It should be noted that some of the stand-alone Fang byeri heads in Western collections are actually harp finials that have been separated from the rest of the instrument (see for example Kjersmeier 1935: fig. 16 and Perrois 1972:  318).

The superb quality of the construction of these instruments, which incorporate finely carved elements and bear a deep, glossy patina from handling and use, attests to the fact that their construction was  entrusted to the most experienced master carvers, who applied the same level of skill and attention to the figural harps as byeri statuary.

The head of the Lasansky harp, in a hieratic pose, presents a stylized, heart-shaped face, with a large rounded forehead under which the arched eyebrows are carved on either side of a nose flattened at the base.  Carved in relief are wide, slightly-opened almond-shaped eyes. The cheeks gently curve to a wide mouth with thin lips forming the characteristic Fang "pout" (especially prevalent in the Southern Fang Betsi, Meke, and Ntumu styles). Under the chin, a short beard suggests that this represents a male ancestor.

The form of the crested coiffure is a detail which suggests that this harp comes from the Fang Ntumu of northern Rio Muni, the group studied by Gunter Tessmann between 1904 and 1909.  It should also be noted, however, that the Okak and Meke/Betsi subgroups were very closely related neighbors of the Ntumu.

The coiffure is of a type once worn by Fang men and women alike, a sort of stylized wig-cap called nlo-o-ngo (see Tessmann 1913: vol. I, Abb. 2, p. 5).   Two braids hang down over the temples, adorned with metal rings and framing the face.  In their original context, Fang sculptures were invariably adorned with pendants, necklaces and feathers, like the villagers themselves, who were lovers of ornament as seen in the photographs of the 1900s (see Trilles, Tessmann, Cottes). This desire to decorate the body was linked to wealth and social prestige, and was applied also to representations of the body in wood (eyema).

The coiffure sits tightly on the back of the head and hangs down on the neck.  A thick sagittal ridge surmounts the head, with a transverse hole once used to attach a feather ornament.  The patina is darker and thicker on the anterior part of the head, which is explained by the position of the instrument when played, in which the top reverse part of the coiffure leaned against the chest of the musician, over time developing a rubbed, darkened patina.

Only a small group of comparable objects are known.  Several beautiful, early examples which are today in Spanish and French collections including the Museo nacional de Antropología, Madrid and the Folch Foundation, Barcelona, are published by Bruguiere and Speranza (1999: 291-294 and 365-366, nos. 141, 142, 143, 144).  See also Martinez-Jacquet and Serra Ester (2008: 80-81) for another harp formerly in the collection of Georges de Miré.

The grand harp previously in the collection of the artist Alberto Magnelli, today in the Musée National d’Art Moderne du Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris, is of classic shape, with a refined face in Ntumu style; it is unique in that the neck of the harp is placed behind the head.   Another masterpiece of the genre is in the Musée Dapper, Paris, of another type with several small heads placed atop of the soundboard.

The portable, eight-stringed harp is an ancient form of instrument among the peoples of Equatorial Africa, including Gabon.  Michael Praetorius illustrated an example of the type in his famous Syntagma Musicum , first published from 1619; this instrument was reported to originate from the coast of "Lower Guinea", or what is today the coast of Gabon (see Perrois 2008: 80). The late French ethnomusicologist Pierre Sallée indicated in his doctoral dissertation on musicology in 1985 that "The Kele, ubiquitous around the trade routes that linked the coastal region to the Chaillu Massif [...]  undoubtedly exerted a catalytic effect on the development of the musical civilization of Western Gabon” (Sallée 1985: 416) . Thus Sallée hypothesizes a Kele origin for the Gabonese harp tradition (see for example a harp in the Berlin Museum, inv. no. “III C 33223”), with the peoples settled on the middle Ogooué river having been probably the circumstantial repository of much older music tradition from the eastern Gabon and the Congo basin.

This type of instrument, called ñgomi by the fang, developed from the ancient practice of using a primitive bow-shaped instrument, consisting of a simple flexible hardwood arch, whose sound was made by plucking a single string, held in teeth of the player and thus resonating in the mouth (see for example the mbeñy of the Ogooué Fang or the mongongo of the Tsogo people).  Multi-arched instruments with a resonating body would gradually develop over three centuries among the Kele of Ogooué, Tsogo and Ndzèbi  of Central Gabon, then the Myene of Northwest Gabon and indeed also among the Fang Betsi then Meke / Okak Ntumu and North Gabon and Rio Muni.

With its elegant overall form and superbly detailed sculptural quality, the Lasansky Fang Harp has been rightly admired for decades by all of those lucky enough to have had the opportunity to view it.  In perfectly classic Fang style, it evokes both the ideal ancestor seen in the byeri heads, and, despite having been now silent for a long time, the primordial reverberations that linked the mbôm ñgomi musician to the spirit world.  This extraordinarily rare object, at once an ancient sculpture and a musical instrument, honors the highest creativity of Fang arts.