[Kevin Tervala] My name is Kevin Tervala, and I'm a curatorial fellow in African art here at the BMA. Somebody would wear this fairly far back on their head. It's very much focused on the back. There's beautiful, vibrant oranges and purples and greens that would make the person stand out, but it's designed to sort of blend in with a natural, sort of, pattern of one's head. The Karamojong, who are the people who would make this and wear this, live in the northeastern part of Uganda in eastern Africa. The society is divided into what we call age grades. Each age grade is associated with a different sort of look. This is primarily a senior male headdress. Women also decorate their hair, but they don't wear headdresses like this. The dark feathers come from an ostrich. I think there's a nice connotation between the senior elderly men wearing ostrich feathers because they're so large and because they run so quickly and because they're actually dangerous animals if you get too close to them. The ostrich is a symbol of power. I think it's one of the most beautiful objects that we have on display here at the BMA. Because it's so associated with one's own self and one's own being, you can really get a sense of the humanity of the other person. I mean, the colors are phenomenal.

[Kevin Tervala] Senior Karamojong men would grow their hair out incredibly long and they would cover it in mud. So you can see that sort of sweeping back pattern here, repeated in these lines that you can see moving back towards the back of the head. The dictator Idi Amin who comes to power right after colonialism starts to really push back against these more sort of traditional hairstyles and starts to really focus a lot of his wrath on the Karamojong, which were seen and are seen sometimes as sort of a troublesome population in the region. So he starts to outlaw all of these hairstyles. So in order for men to be able to sort of function ritually and to have the same sort of status, because one's status is very much connected to the way one dresses, they start creating these removable headdresses.