A Baga female torso headcrest

tiyambo, the encircled waist tapering and leading to the prominent bust, an amulet around the elongated neck beneath the stylized head with delicate jawline, sagittate nose bisecting the large, expressive and heavily outlined eyes framed by protruding C-shaped ears and wearing a striated cap-like coiffure with pointed horns at the crown; '97' in white pigment at the waist; deep red pigmented surface overall with areas of black and white pigment.

Acquired from Galerie Kamer, New York, December 29, 1964

Milwaukee, Milwaukee Public Museum, Selections from the William W. Brill Colllection of African Art, May 5 - August 31, 1969 (for additional venues see bibliography, Milwaukee 1969)
New York, Museum of African Art, Art of the Baga: A Drama of Cultural Reinvention, October 4, 1996 - January 5, 1997 (for additional venues see bibliography, Lamp 1996)

Milwaukee 1969: 9, figure 6
Duluth Sunday News-Tribune, February 8, 1970: 6
Gillon 1979: 54
Lamp 1996: 213, figure 203

Tiyambo is an ancestral spirit. Her representation in dance is said to have come through a young man who saw the female spirit at a forbidden event for the elders. The young man described the spirit to his artist friend, who created a headdress in her likeness, in effect stealing the spirit from the elders, which was then danced impudently in public.

Lamp describes the advent of Tiyambo in colonial times and links its origin to the Islamization of the Baga. During this period, accorrding to Lamp, the carving of ancestral spirits became more common, in keeping with Islamic teaching as opposed to godlike ephemeral spirits linked to past teachings among the Baga (1996: 214). For other examples cf. ibid.: 200-221.