In the late-19th century—amidst the upheaval caused by Belgian colonization—a prominent man from eastern Congo commissioned this small portrait figure. On it are sculpted signs of this unique historical moment. The gun, an import from Europe, symbolizes his status as a contemporary man of means while the scarification patterns on his torso demonstrate his allegiance to traditional Beembe ways of life. Whitten was interested in this merging of the ancestral and the modern. He saw African scarification practices, which signal social status through permanent marks on the skin, as a kind of information-bearing system, not unlike the circuit boards and disk drives, seen on his nearby Technological Totem Pole.