Chibinda Ilunga (Chokwe culture-hero)
Founding culture-hero of Chokwe dynastic identity — a Luba hunter-prince who married the Lunda queen Lueji; rendered as a chief figure with oversized headdress, hands and feet.
Chibinda Ilunga is the founding culture-hero of Chokwe dynastic identity: a Luba hunter-prince who, according to oral tradition, married the Lunda queen Lueji, received her bracelet of office (lukano), and introduced Chokwe political and ritual authority. In sculptural form he appears as a standing male figure with an oversized headdress replicating the royal coiffure, deliberately enlarged hands and feet, and attributes of the hunt — a staff and a medicine horn.
The figure is not a portrait of any historical ruler but an idealised founding ancestor with prescribed iconographic attributes. Only about a dozen fully canonical examples are known. Auction descriptions routinely label any standing Chokwe male figure with a staff as a generic "chief figure" — the misidentification both inflates the generic and misvalues the canonical (Bastin 1982; Jordán 1998).