CC BY-NC-SA 4.0
Doll | Ikoku
1950 - 1970
About the object
Dark-coloured wooden doll with decorated leather aprons and whiskers. The doll has long, slightly thickened legs, a long neck and a small head. The hands and feet have not been worked out in detail. Mouth, nose and ears are represented by notches or bulges. The eyes are small pearl inlays. The hair has been made from reddish-brown coloured string, and has been styled – cut short at the front and long at the back. The doll is wearing an apron over the chest, and loin cloths over the genitals and the buttocks, all made of leather and decorated with beads and/or inlayed. The chest apron has also been adorned with cowrie shells. Around the neck and the nape of the neck are wide rows of black and red, green and red pearl necklaces. A pearl plait has been woven into the hair on the right and left.
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The Turkana, who live in northern Kenya, make ritual dolls and also dolls for play. Both have the function of increasing the receptivity to conception in girls and young women. The most famous type of Turkana doll are wooden dolls dyed black that wear goatskin strings decorated with pearls, strings of pearl and bracelets. Small girls, but also unmarried, as yet childless women play with these dolls in larger groups, because it is said that playing together also stimulates fertility in women. At the same time, there are ritual fertility dolls whose bodies are formed from the tripartite seed capsules of palm nuts. The nuts represent a man's penis and testicles, but the figures are dressed in women's clothing, such as aprons and chains. They are made by the mothers as fertility talismans for their daughters who are still childless. After the birth of the first child, a woman gives her doll to her younger sister.