Comfort Mtotha — A Mother Carved in Wood: Nearly a Century Out of Africa | A Yombe Phemba Figure at the Detroit Institute of Arts
In February 2025, I found myself standing still in the African art gallery of the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA). The space, with its dim brown walls and soft lighting, felt like a place meant for quiet reflection. I remember being drawn to the South-Central African masks, especially a Gule Wamkulu (Nyau) mask from Malawi modeled after Elvis Presley, and a fantasy coffin shaped like a Ford Model T. The galleries had changed since I last walked through them, but it was not the layout or lighting that stopped me.
It was her.
A mother, carved in wood, cradling a child. She sat calmly on her pedestal yet felt impossibly far from home. She was a Phemba figure created by a Yombe artist from Central Africa. Barefoot and composed, she held her child with steady grace. Her chest was adorned with finely patterned raised scarifications. Her arms curved with intention, testimony to a maker’s craftsmanship. Her mouth was slightly open, revealing filed incisors, a cultural practice once common among some Central African Kongo peoples, particularly the Yombe, now largely discontinued. Her face was naturalistic, with a well-defined nose. Visible cracks marked her surface, signs of age or perhaps time passing in exile.
It was not only her beauty that held me. It was the question she seemed to pose: How did I get here?
From a European Gallery to the DIA’s Registry
I first encountered her not on display but in the DIA’s object registry during a 2024 graduate internship, part of the University of Michigan’s Museum Studies Program (MSP). I assisted with documentation, provenance research, and curation at the DIA, part of a growing effort to confront the silences and absences in African collections. The project aimed to uncover object histories and engage with the layered, often complex stories behind museum holdings. Around the world, museums are facing growing scrutiny as they reckon with the origins of their collections.
The DIA has joined this conversation, particularly around its holdings of Benin bronzes, among the most well-documented cases of colonial looting, violently seized by British soldiers during the 1897 invasion of Benin. British soldiers razed Edo (present-day Benin City), destroyed its royal palace, and looted thousands of sacred and royal objects. The Museum acquired Benin works through purchases and donations between 1926 and 1992. Today, the DIA acknowledges the brutality. In its gallery focused on Africa, curators added a highlight panel noting the Museum’s commitment to curatorial transparency through digitizing collections, providing open access to records and images, and participating in collaborative working groups on the restitution and potential repatriation of the Benin Bronzes.
It was in this atmosphere of reflection and repair that I met the Phemba figure. She was not yet on display. She had recently entered the Museum’s collection, acquired from Entwistle Gallery in Paris through the Ernest and Rosemarie Kanzier Foundation Fund. Entwistle is one of several European galleries specializing in what they term “tribal art.” Her paper trail traced back to European collectors and dealers; records suggested she had circulated since the 1930s, but no further. No named artist. No concrete details of her departure. Only traces remained of a powerful object, severed from the world that once gave her meaning.
Her presence at the DIA marked nearly a century since she left Central Africa—a journey through private hands, across oceans, and into the opaque corridors of the European art market.
Her anonymity and the archival silence surrounding her spoke volumes.
More Than Generalities: Beauty, Power, and Displacement
Phemba figures are not merely decorative. Among the Yombe, they embody ideals of womanhood, fertility, and ancestral authority. Some kneel. Some breastfeed. Some, like the one I encountered, cradle children. Each gesture carries significance. Seated with her legs crossed, this figure held a child with a similar coiffure, invoking lineage and continuity. Her scarifications, posture, filed teeth, each detail spoke of status, power, and spiritual presence.
She was to be exhibited under the gallery theme “Channeling Powerful Forces” alongside objects like a Nkisi (Nkonde) figure, a male, nail-studded, aggressive form used to invoke protection or resolve conflict. The Phemba, maternal and steady, offered contrast. She embodied another kind of power: generative, enduring, and calm.
Nkisi male figure, (Nkonde), Kongo culture, Democratic Republic of Congo, Unknown artist, circa. 19th-20th century, Detroit Institute of Arts (Accession number: 76.79) – Photo: Author.
Her acquisition was intentional. She was chosen to address the gender imbalance in the African gallery, to diversify representation, and to shift how African art is perceived. Even in this act of care, however, silences remained. How do we read her without knowing the hands that made her? Or the rituals she once anchored? Or the family she may have protected? Visitors will admire her form. Will they ask: What ceremonies surrounded her? Who commissioned her? What rupture tore her away?
Museums excel at celebrating aesthetic brilliance, yet they often fall silent on the violence of displacement. The Phemba figure, like many African works, carries both beauty and wound.
She reminds us that objects are not just things. They are vessels. They carry memory, longing, and loss. And if we listen, they can speak.
Unsettled Provenance, Unfinished Stories
The DIA’s work around the Benin bronzes sets a commendable example of transparency. Yet beyond those high-profile objects, hundreds of African pieces remain with uncertain or incomplete histories. Who made them? What did they mean? And what are the consequences of detachment? Provenance research is not a mere bureaucratic exercise. It is restorative. It reanimates what has been obscured. It reminds museum audiences that these were not simply “artworks,” but living participants in spiritual, social, and political life. It also places ethical responsibility on museums for the objects they hold.
This includes reconsidering the 1970 UNESCO Convention on the Means of Prohibiting and Preventing the Illicit Import, Export and Transfer of Ownership of Cultural Property. While this international agreement created a much-needed legal framework to curb the illicit trade in cultural property, many museums have treated it as an ethical line in the sand. Objects acquired before 1970 are often seen as exempt from the same scrutiny applied to more recent acquisitions. Provenance research should not be confined by this legal cutoff. Objects that left Africa in the 1930s or earlier are no less entangled in histories of colonialism, dispossession, or missionary intervention. They, too, can open conversations about power, memory, and entanglement, not only about repatriation but also about the people, rituals, and meanings that have been severed and forgotten. These inquiries are not just about where an object came from. They are about who it was with, what it witnessed, and what it still carries.
Reframing African Art: Toward Living History
The Phemba maternity figure is not a static relic. She is a witness. Her very presence traces the contours of colonial networks, missionary endeavors, and the changing appetites of collectors in the West. She challenges the idea that African art is “timeless” or frozen in tradition. In fact, the Yombe continued carving Phemba figures well into the twentieth century, even as missionaries labeled them “fetishes.” These figures endured, encoded with meaning, in form and gesture.
At the DIA, curators like Dr. Nii Quarcoopome are working to reframe African art not as something locked in the past but as a vibrant story, intersecting with questions of gender, power, environmental justice, and postcolonial identity. This vision echoes scholars like Ciraj Rassool, Leslie Witz, and Sylvester Ogbechie, who call for centering African agency in museum narratives.
Beyond Possession: Listening Differently
Museums today face growing pressure to reckon with colonial legacies. Repatriation is one necessary response, though it is not the only one. As provenance remains incomplete for many objects, museums must also ask: How do we make space for listening? For holding silence and honoring complexity where there was once erasure? My time at the DIA taught me that the Phemba figure offers such an opening. She does not speak in words.
Yet she challenges her audience to listen differently, to imagine the ceremonies that ensured the survival of local clans, the hands she passed through, the ruptures she witnessed.
She invites not only mourning for what has been lost but dwelling in what endures.
She sits quietly, still.
If her audience truly listens, she can speak.
