Bamenda Ceramic Shield, Cameroon

A circle of vertical lines sits at the waist, holding the horizontal stripes apart.

This shield is Bamenda, from Cameroon, Central Africa, and is contemporary, in wood and kaolin. In the Bamenda Grassfields, white kaolin is often applied to carved wood and is widely understood to signify purity and ancestral favor. This shield is tall and narrow, pinched slightly at the middle and flaring toward each squared end. Horizontal ridges, white against black, run across most of its length, bending around a central oval filled with vertical lines. The edges are dark and the white is lightly worn.

Stripes that politely make room for a circle.