Lukasa Memory Board
The lukasa is a wooden memory board of the Luba peoples of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, its surface covered with beads, shells, and metal pins arranged in clusters that encode historical and ritual knowledge. A member of the Mbudye association, the court's body of historians, reads the board by touch, tracing the beads as a mnemonic that calls forth genealogies, royal protocol, migration legends, and the esoteric teachings of the kingdom. Because each board belonged to a particular specialist and was arranged to fit his memory, no two lukasa are identical, and the objects were kept se