"African Dream Machines has been in the making for fifteen wars, starting with research on the traditional wood-carving of the Shona- and Venda-speaking peoples of Zimbabwe and South Africa. Among the artefacts made by Southern African peoples, headrests were the best known and daring a year spent in Europe in 1975-1976, Anitra Nettleton discovered museum stores full of unacknowledged masterpieces made by speakers of numerous Southern African languages. Her subsequent study of the uses, and forms of headrests opened up a number of art-historical methodologies in the attempt to gain University of the Witwatersrand in 1990 enabled African art objects. A Council Fellowship from the University of the Witwatersrand in 1990 enabled the write to develop an archive in the form of nates, photographs and stretches of each headrest she encountered. Many examples from South African collections were added from the early 1990s onwards, expanding the field vastly. Nettleton executed drawings of each and every headrest encountered, which become a major part of the project in their own right."--Jacket.