Tchitcheri (Moba ancestor figure)
Radically minimalist wooden ancestor figure of the Moba of northern Togo, reduced to a featureless columnar post with a smooth domed head, placed on family and lineage shrines.
The tchitcheri (also written tchitchiri) is the central sculptural form of the Moba people of northern Togo and adjacent areas of north-eastern Ghana and southern Burkina Faso. Carved from local hardwood, it distils the human figure to its bare structural minimum: a vertical post or gentle cylinder surmounted by a smooth, unbroken dome with no incised facial features. Arms, where indicated at all, fall as flat parallel strips against the body; in the most reduced examples they vanish entirely. The deliberate absence of any face reflects a specific theological logic — a blank head cannot be occupied by uninvited spirits, so only the correctly invoked ancestor can inhabit the wood. Iron rings, libation crusts and soil-contact erosion on genuine shrine examples are the physical record of the object's active ritual life.
Functionally, tchitcheri exist on a documented scale hierarchy. Large examples (tchitcheri sakwa, roughly 80–160 cm) represent founding clan ancestors and are driven into the earth at the lineage shrine, physically anchoring the living to the ancestral burial ground. Smaller figures serve individual family altars, and the smallest — occasionally carved in ivory for chiefly or priestly clients — function as portable personal amulets. The form has been widely collected since the late 1960s and has subsequently been extensively reproduced for the export market; distinguishing genuinely used shrine pieces from market production requires attention to soil-base erosion, libation crust, grain-level weathering, and, on iron-bound examples, deep rust penetration into the wood grain.