This book has been in the making for a total of fifteen years. The research started with my PhD on the traditional woodcarving of the Shona- and Venda-speaking peoples of Zimbabwe and South Africa (Nettleton 1985). Among the artefacts made by Southern African peoples, headrests were the best known, and they formed the centre of what I was to write about the art of the Shona. I spent a year in Europe in 1975-1976 researching all forms of woodcarving among Southern African peoples and discovered museum stores full of unacknowledged ‘masterpieces’ made by speakers of numerous Southern African languages. Many of these were headrests. In investigating headrests closely, I became aware of contexts of use and distributions of form which allowed me to use headrests to investigate a number of problems that face anyone who wishes to use art-historical methodologies to understand form, style and content in African art objects. A Council Fellowship from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1990 to 1991 enabled me to hunt down more headrests from across the African continent held in museum collections across Europe, and to develop an archive in the form of notes on, and photographs and sketches of each headrest I encountered. Where I was permitted, I also consulted museum registers for histories of these objects and made notes on that material in order to establish a particular context for each.

Armed with this research I returned home to begin its compilation, and began the process of drawing every headrest which I intended to illustrate in the book. Some of the drawings were made between 1980 and 1983, as illustrations for my PhD thesis, but the vast majority were executed between 1992 and 2005. Many examples from South African collections were added at this time, expanding the field vastly. Initially I started the drawings because I was obstructed from taking photographs in two museums, once in Zimbabwe in 1981, and once in Belgium in 1991. However, I soon discovered that drawings enabled me to present information that would have been completely impossible with single views of each object such as those offered by the conventional face-view photograph. The process of drawing then became a tool of analysis as much as it was a means of presenting visual information.