Mafa Dagger

[Pertinax]

Originally Posted by TVV

Merry Christmas! Really nice dagger. Wente-Lukas shows a very similar one, number 298 in her book, which she attributes to the Ndjeny, while mentioning the Daba use similar daggers. In the map of the region, the Ndjeny are shown in the Southern Mandara mountains (and so are the Daba), just north of the Fulbe.

On his site, Wolf-Dieter Miersch shows a couple of similar daggers as Ndjeny/Mafa, and posts a link to a 1910-1912 drawing of such daggers:

http://bildarchiv.frobenius-katalog....rpos=98439.png

Ultimately, your dagger is a really nice, complete example from the early 20th or late 19th century, and it does not get better than that.

Thank you very much!

This is very valuable information. Based on the catalog, I can truly confirm the authenticity of my copy.

I've reviewed numerous sources, but unfortunately, I couldn't find any information about the Ndjeny tribe. Perhaps we're dealing with a confusion of tribal names, which is common in Africa. In the accounts of 19th-century travelers, it's very difficult to decipher the names; each one called the tribe by their own name.

Sincerely,
Yuri