12. FIVE NAMJI DOLLS, CAMEROON wood, beads, metal, shell 24 to 34 cm. high Provenance Sotheby's, Paris, 16 April 2003, lots 145 and 146 (part) Christie's, Paris, 19 June 2013, lot 124 Literature de Heusch, L., et al., Utotombo. L'Art d'Afrique noire dans les collections privées belges, Brussels, 1988, p.88, plate XX (for the one on the far right) Exhibited Brussels, Palais des Beaux-Arts, Utotombo. L'Art d'Afrique noire dans les collections privées belges, 25 March - 5 June 1988 (for the one on the far right) Cf. Loeb, S., Under the Sign of Fecundity: Kirdi Dolls in Northern Cameroon, Paris, 2013, pp.60-61. The author writes: "For the Dowayo or Namji... who live east of the Atlantika mountains, their dead are reputed to be reincarnated in the new born. A cult dedicated to the ancestral skulls accompanies the quest for female fecundity. It is the blacksmith who makes the doll for those women threatened with sterility. He carves it in wood, with an athletic body, voluminous arms and legs, a small head with a big face showing the mouth, eyes and nostrils. The dolls are usually asexual and it is the symbolism of the ornaments or engraved motifs on the wood which indicate the couple hope for a girl or a boy. Without ornaments it is a play-doll for the little girls who, when they grow older and wish to be pregnant, give to it a ritual sense by dressing it with beads, cowries and amulets. The little girl, like the young woman, hangs her doll at her back, around her neck or on her stomach, hanging by a cord or placed in a scrip of cloth which is often beaded. However, during the isolation of the newly circumcised young, no dressed doll can be carried. It is only on their return to the village, purified — coinciding with the new harvest — that the young women will be able to welcome the young men with their wooden dolls embellished with beads and shells."