Last week we sat at the ornamental court of the Kuba. This week we travel south, to the Chokwe of eastern Angola and the southern D.R. Congo, and the tone changes at once. Chokwe art is not the art of a single fixed capital but of chiefly courts, hunting and, in the nineteenth century, of spectacular commercial expansion. The Chokwe trace their chiefly lines to the Lunda empire, and their founding story is a marriage: the Luba hunter prince Chibinda Ilunga arrived with new hunting skills and won the Lunda queen Lweji. From that story grows the whole court art. The hunter-hero becomes the model of the ideal chief, the mwanangana, and the sculptors of the Chokwe heartland carved him with a realism and muscular presence that stands apart from almost everything around it. This edition reads the hero figure, then the pwo mask and its five red flags, then the chief's chair, the market, the AfroCheck framework and a reader question.

A classic Chibinda Ilunga figure is unmistakable once you have seen one. The hero stands with knees slightly bent, feet and hands carved far beyond natural size, because power sits in what a hunter grips and where he stands. On his head sweeps the great chiefly headdress with its rolled side wings, a form taken from the actual bark and fibre headdress of Chokwe rulers. In his hands he often carries the tools of his myth, a staff or flintlock and a medicine horn, and his beard marks the elder's authority. The face is not a mask-like abstraction but modelled, alert, with the tension of a man who listens to the forest. The finest figures come from the Chokwe heartland in the Moxico region and are attributed to court workshops carving for chiefs, and the scholar who mapped this field, Marie-Louise Bastin, treated them as the summit of Chokwe sculpture.

Two things follow from that. First, a genuine court-style Chibinda Ilunga is rare in the same way an ndop is rare: the documented examples sit in museum collections, the Kimbell in Fort Worth holds a celebrated one, and the museums of Portugal and Tervuren hold others collected early in the colonial period. Second, the type is copied endlessly, because a standing hero with big hands and a dramatic headdress is exactly what a workshop can produce for the trade. The copies give themselves away in the sameness of their surfaces and the emptiness of the face. The original was carved around a presence. The copy is carved around a silhouette.

The pwo mask is a woman danced by a man. Pwo, or mwana pwo, the young woman, honours the female ancestor and the ideal of womanhood, and the dancer wore a full knotted fibre costume with wooden breasts, moving with the small controlled steps young women were praised for. The half-closed eyes are not sleepiness but composure, and the tear lines under them are read in the tradition as marks of mourning and endurance, beauty that has known grief. When that is what the mask means, the market's version, grinning, hasty, hollow, is not a cheaper copy of the same thing. It is a different object altogether that happens to share a shape.

Nothing shows the Chokwe genius for absorption better than the chief's chair, the ngundja. Its skeleton is European: the high-backed leather chair with brass tacks that Portuguese traders carried inland from the seventeenth century onward. Chokwe carvers took the frame and made it a throne. The back panel carries the chief's face or a scene, and the rungs between the legs fill up with small carved figures: mukanda initiation scenes, drummers, hunters, women pounding grain, mating couples, funerals. A single chair can carry a village's whole year in its woodwork. The chair spoke power precisely because it mastered the foreign form, the way the court also absorbed flintlocks and trade cloth.

The nineteenth century made the Chokwe rich and mobile. Ivory, wax and rubber pulled their caravans deep across central Africa, and by the 1880s Chokwe lineages had pushed north and overrun the old Lunda heartland they once served. Expansion spread the style thin: the court sculpture of the Moxico heartland, muscular, modelled, burnished, gives way in the diaspora to lighter, quicker work. That is why provenance and style region matter so much in this field, and why Bastin's regional mapping is still the collector's compass. The documentation is again largely European, in Tervuren, in the Portuguese museums, in the Dundo museum collections formed in Angola itself, and it comes with the same weight we name every week: colonial-era acquisition is under active research and debate, and a responsible buyer knows the difference between authenticating an object and closing the conversation about where it came from.

Read the bands as orientation, not a price list. The base of the market is decorative carving, pwo-type masks and hero-type figures made for sale in the twentieth century and today, honest objects at a few tens to a few hundred euro as long as nobody pretends they danced. Above that sit older pieces with genuine age and quality but thin history, from a few hundred into the low thousands, the ceiling set by the missing documentation. A pwo mask with convincing use, good style and some provenance moves higher, and documented examples from known collections reach five figures at the specialist sales.

The summit is thin air. Court-style Chibinda Ilunga figures and the great chairs with documented history are museum material, and when a piece of that rank appears at Christie's or Sotheby's in Paris it makes six figures and news. Bonhams and Drouot carry the middle, the strong Belgian houses handle Chokwe regularly, Bernaerts among them, and Catawiki moves the base of the pyramid at volume, where attributions are often hopeful. No hallmark settles anything here. There is only the object, its wear, its style region and its history, and the more dramatic the piece looks, the more sceptical the first question should be.

Our AfroCheck analysis reads a Chokwe object along the same disciplined tracks. The first is use against surface: attachment holes, interior contact wear and costume abrasion on a mask, seat and arm wear on a chair, handling polish on a figure, all weighed against the uniform coating and artificial distressing of trade work. A dramatic surface earns no free pass. The second track is style: the modelling of hands and face on a hero figure, the composure of a pwo, the construction of the headdress, read against the documented regional styles Bastin mapped, with the Moxico court style as the reference point.

The third track is provenance and reference: early Portuguese and Belgian collections, the Dundo and Tervuren holdings, the published corpus. History counts as a strong positive signal, and its absence shifts the burden onto the object. Red flags are never offset by positive arguments elsewhere; if the signs of fabrication are present, the verdict moves. The result comes in the same five tiers we use across every module, from AUTHENTIC to NOT AUTHENTIC, with the reasoning attached and the limits stated. What a photo cannot show, we say we cannot see, and we ask for it: the back rim of the mask, the inside, the base of the figure, the underside of the chair seat.

"At a brocante I bought a dark wooden mask with a cross on the forehead and lines under the eyes, sold to me as an old Chokwe dance mask. It cost forty euro. Did I do well?"

For forty euro you did no harm, and the honest starting point is that the great majority of pwo-type masks in the brocante and online trade are decorative pieces, because this face is among the most reproduced in African art. Whether yours is more than that is decided in three places. Turn it over first: the rim and the attachment holes should show polish and string wear, and the inside should carry the smoothness and darkening of a face, not fresh tool marks under a dark coat. Look then at the marks: a cut cingelyengelye and masoji have depth and small irregularities, stencilled ones sit flat on the surface. Look finally at the eyes and mouth: openings a dancer needed are finished and worn, fake ones are sharp and raw.

Then do it properly. Photograph the mask in even daylight, front, profile, back and inside, with close-ups of the forehead mark, the eyes and the rim with its holes. Note anything you know of its history. Then run it through AntiqBot's AfroCheck: we read the wear logic and the style against the documented corpus and give a verdict on the five-tier scale, with the reasoning and the limits attached. Send your question to info@antiqbot.com.

Next week in AntiqBot Weekly #22 we change worlds entirely: mid-century modern. Teak and rosewood, Scandinavian and Belgian makers, the labels and stamps under seats and inside drawers, what separates an original from the replica flood, and why the sixties sideboard from grandmother's living room deserves a second look before it goes to the container park.

And something new from Tuesday: alongside the weekly, we launch Design & Vintage of the Week, a short Tuesday mail on one designer or factory at a time, from Aldo Tura to Boch Freres Keramis, with three checks and honest price bands. First edition Tuesday 7 July.