Head

The object on display is a clay head on a long massive neck, with two faces facing upwards, foreheads and noses touching, with a characteristic wide-open mouth. One arm has also survived, on which an unspecified decoration has been marked. The whole thing was made of unfired clay of earthy colour, with an admixture of sand and small stones. The figure was donated to the National Museum in Szczecin by Oleńka Darkowska-Nidzgorski, an expert on African puppet theatre, who, together with her husband Denis Nidzgorski-Gordier, spent several years in Gabon, Benin, Togo, Rwanda and Niger. Oleńka Darkowska-Nidzgorski was born in Warsaw in 1933. She completed her theatre studies in Poland and then moved to Paris in the 1960s, where she wrote her doctoral thesis on “Théâtre populaire de marionnettes en Afrique subsaharienne” under the supervision of Denise Paulme-Schaeffner, a prominent French Africanist professor. In the 1970s, she travelled to Africa for the first time, where she spent several years. During their sojourns in many African countries, Olenska and Denis amassed a vast collection of African art, comprising over 1,200 objects. The collection is very diverse not only in terms of the origin of the objects (Mali, Niger, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Togo, Ghana, Benin, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Congo, Gabon, Cameroon, Tanzania, Rwanda, Tunisia, Senegal, Burkina Faso, Madagascar, Angola, South Africa) but also the role they played in African societies.

Katarzyna Findlik-Gawron