Black and white lantern slide showing two Congo slave women. The women sit facing one another on a wooden bench in wrap dresses. One woman wears an ornament through her ear, whilst her companion wears a thin bracelet. Scarification marks can be seen on the arm of each woman. In the Congo, marking the body through scarring in patterns then controlling the healing process was an important cultural signifier, often carried out to indicate life stages or cultural belonging, with peoples of the Congo having some of the most complex designs in Africa. In women, scarification marks were added to intenisfy beauty, or to mark stages in life, such as childbirth - bearing the pain involved in the process was believed to be a path to adulthood and a sign of strength that would be needed in childbearing. The heads of the women are slightly elongated, as a likely result of the practice of headbinding. The malleable skulls of babies would be wrapped tightly in cloth in order to produce an elongated head shape, mostly as a sign of cultural belonging and beauty. The Mangbetu people of the Congo practised head binding, and it is to this group that these women may belong. In the memoir of the work of her husband and herself for the Congo Balolo Mission, Lily Ruskin also speaks of head binding for babies of the Yamongo people, whom Edward Algernon Ruskin first encountered in 1895. This slide comes from a collection generated by missionaries working for the Congo Balolo Mission, a mission begun in 1889 under the supervision of the East London Training Institute for Home and Foreign Missions that developed into the interdenominational evangelical mission Regions Beyond Missionary Union after 1900.
Format
lantern slides 8.2 x 8.2cm lantern slides photographs
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