Does anyone have any thoughts for shields used by Congo Cannibals and in particular painting schemes for them?
I went for this simple white-dots-on-black-shields design, loosely based on Mangbetu shield designs and applied to those shields I happened to have as best I could. The Mangbetu of today affirm their cannibal heritage, though many anthropologists disagree with them. There's much debate about who were real cannibals and to what degree the tales are exaggerated (either by hysterical Europeans or by the tribes themselves to put the wind up their rivals), but we don't need to get into that here.
Here's what the real ones which inspired them looked like:
Not very exciting perhaps, but historical at least.