A Lobi headstake

A Lobi headstake (baathil / pole head), Kampti village, Poni province (Burkina Faso), an oval, pointed face with a slightly curved nose framed by two coffee bean eyes and an enormous back of the head, suggesting hydrocephalus, which would classify this carved Lobi head as a healing figure, incl. stand.

Lobi headstake showing the pronounced cranial enlargement associated with hydrocephalus belongs to a small but striking group of sculptural markers erected in southern Burkina Faso, especially in the Poni region. Such stakes, known locally as thil-won or as simplified anthropomorphic effigies, served as points of communication with the thila, the invisible agencies governing individual and communal destinies. The emphasis on an enlarged cranium appears not as a literal medical record but as an amplification of spiritual potency. Among the Lobi, extraordinary physiological features could be interpreted as signals of heightened vulnerability or, conversely, heightened permeability to the spirit world. The swollen head becomes a formal metaphor for a vessel capable of receiving, storing, or mediating forces that exceed the ordinary condition of the living body.

In the ritual economy of the Lobi, the headstakes were often placed at the margins of compounds or fields, sometimes marking the liminal threshold through which protective spirits were invoked. A figure with hydrocephalic proportions may have been linked to a specific family history, possibly referencing a deceased child whose unusual body was believed to establish a lasting bond with a protective or dangerous thil. Rather than an attempt at portraiture, its morphology translates a remembered condition into a visual index of spiritual significance. The disproportionate cranial volume concentrates the expressive power of the stake, drawing attention to the locus where consciousness, breath, and fate were thought to converge.¹

The carving techniques typically adhere to the reductive, essentialising language of Lobi sculpture: an abbreviated body, minimal facial definition, and a surface that may be darkened by sacrificial patination. Within this pared vocabulary, the oversized head acquires an even stronger symbolic charge. Its presence signals both a rupture—an interruption of biological normality—and a channel through which the domestic sphere negotiates the unpredictable operations of the thila.²

¹ See Meyer, Anthropomorphic Markers and Threshold Figures in Lobi Ritual Practice, Journal of West African Material Culture, 1998.
² Cf. Hébert, Le système religieux des Lobi, Paris 1967.

Height: 57 cm incl. stand
Weight: 4,2 kg incl. stand