Historical Overview: from the 1600s to the present
by Dr. Christa Clarke
Figure: Seated Portuguese Male, 18th century (Edo peoples, Court of Benin, Nigeria), brass, 12.7 x 5.1 x 6 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
Enslavement in the Americas
Western trade with Africa was not limited to material goods such as copper, cloth, and beads. By the 16th century, the transatlantic slave trade had already begun, forcibly bringing Africans to the newly colonized Americas. While some forms of enslavement had existed in Africa, the sheer number of enslaved people traded across the Atlantic was unprecedented, as over 11 million Africans were brought to the Americas and the Caribbean over a period of four centuries. Driven by commercial interests, the slave trade peaked in the 18th century with the expansion of American plantation production, and continued until the mid-19th century. By the late 18th century, the slave trade began to wane as the abolitionist movement grew. Those who survived the forced migration and the notorious Middle Passage brought their beliefs and cultural practices to the Americas.
Within this far-flung diaspora, certain cultures—such as the Yoruba and Igbo of today’s Nigeria and the Kongo from present-day Democratic Republic of Congo—were especially targeted. Enslaved Africans brought few, if any, personal items with them, although recent archaeological investigations have yielded early African artifacts, like the beads and shells found at the African burial grounds in New York’s lower Manhattan, which date to the 17th and 18th centuries.
The influence of Africans in the Americas can be seen in diverse forms of cultural expression, such as open-front porches and sloped hip-roofs. The religious practices of Haitian Vodou have roots in the spiritual beliefs of Dahomean, Yoruba, and Kongo peoples. Some elements of cuisine in the American South, such as gumbo and jambalaya, derive from African food traditions. Certain musical forms, such as jazz and the blues, reflect the convergence of African musical practices and European-based traditions.
Figurative Harp (Domu), 19th–20th century (Mangbetu peoples, Democratic Republic of the Congo), wood, hide, twine, brass ring, 67.3 x 21.6 x 30.5 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
European colonization of Africa
Although the slave trade was banned entirely by the late 19th century, European involvement in Africa did not end. Instead, the desire for greater control over Africa’s resources resulted in the colonization of the majority of the continent by seven European countries. The Berlin Conference of 1884–85, attended by representatives of fourteen different European powers, resulted in the regulation of European colonization and trade in Africa. Over the next twenty years, the continent was occupied by France, Belgium, Germany, Britain, Spain, Italy, and Portugal. By 1914, the entire continent, with the exception of Ethiopia and Liberia, was colonized by European nations.
The colonial period in Africa brought radical changes, disrupting local political institutions, patterns of trade, and religious and social beliefs. The colonial era also impacted cultural practices in Africa, as artists responded to new forms of patronage and the introduction of new technologies as well as to their changing social and political situations. In some cases, European patronage of local artists resulted in stylistic change (for example this Mangbetu Figurative Harp) or new forms of expression. At the same time, many artistic traditions were characterized as “primitive” by Westerners and discouraged or even banned.
Although African artifacts were brought to Europe as early as the 16th century, it was during the colonial period that such works entered Western collections in significant quantities, forming the basis of many museum collections today. African artifacts were collected as personal souvenirs or ethnographic specimens by military officers, colonial administrators, missionaries, scientists, merchants, and others to the continent.
Plaque: Equestrian Oba and Attendants, c. 1550–1680 (Edo peoples, Court of Benin, Nigeria), brass, 49.5 x 41.9 x 11.4 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
In an act of war initiated by Britain against one of its colonies, thousands of royal art objects were stolen from the kingdom of Benin following its defeat by a British military expedition in 1897. European nations with colonies in Africa established ethnographic museums with extensive collections, such as the Royal Museum for Central Africa in Tervuren, Belgium, the Völkerkunde museums in Germany, the British Museum in London, and the Musée de l’Homme in Paris (now housed at the Musée du Quai Branly). In the United States, which had no colonial ties to Africa, the nascent study of ethnography motivated the formation of collections at the American Museum of Natural History in New York and the Field Museum in Chicago. In 1923, the Brooklyn Museum became the first American museum to present African works as art.
African independence
Independence movements in Africa began with the liberation of Ghana in 1957 and ended with the dismantling of apartheid in South Africa during the 1990s. The postcolonial period has been challenging, as many countries struggle to regain stability in the aftermath of colonialism. Yet while the media often focuses on political instability, civil unrest, and economic and health crises, these represent only part of the story of Africa today.
Martin Rakotoarimanana, Mantle (Lamba Mpanjakas), 1998 (Merina peoples, Imerina village, Antananarivo or Arivonimamo, Madagascar), silk, 274.3 x 178.1 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
Contemporary art in Africa
In spite of Africa’s political, economic, and environmental challenges, the postcolonial period has been a time of tremendous vigor in the realm of artistic production. Many tradition-based artistic practices continue to thrive or have been revitalized. In Guinea, the revival of D’mba performances in the 1990s, after decades of censorship by the Marxist government, is one example of cultural reinvention. Similarly, in recent years, Merina weavers in the highlands of Madagascar have begun to create brilliantly hued silk cloth known as akotofahana, a textile tradition abandoned a century ago.
Photography, introduced on the continent in the late 19th century, has become a popular medium, particularly in urban areas. Artists like Seydou Keïta, who operated a portrait studio in Bamako, Mali, in the colonial period, set the stage for later generations of photographers who captured the faces of newly independent African countries. It is also important to mention developments in modern and contemporary African art. During the colonial period, art schools were established that provided training, often based on Western models, to local artists. Many schools were initiated by Europeans, such as the Congolese Académie des Arts, established by Pierre Romain-Desfossé in 1944 in Elisabethville, whose program was based on those of art schools in Europe. Less frequently, the teaching of modern art was initiated by Indigenous Africans, such as Chief Aina Onabolu, who is credited with introducing modern art in Nigeria beginning in the 1920s. Since the mid-20th century, increasing numbers of African artists have engaged local traditions in new ways or embraced a national identity through their visual expression.
Artists in today’s Africa are the products of diverse forms of artistic training, work in a variety of mediums, and engage local as well as global audiences with their work. In recent decades, contemporary artists from Africa, both self-taught and academically trained, have received international recognition. Kenyan-born Magdalene Odundo, for example, was trained as an artist in schools in Kenya and in England, where she now lives. The burnished ceramic vessels she creates, which are purely artistic, embody her diverse sources, including traditional Nigerian and Kenyan vessels as well as Puebloan pottery traditions of New Mexico. The work of contemporary African artists like Odundo reveals the complex realities of artistic practice in today’s increasingly global society.
How does one learn about history? In my case, I have learned about the histories of the United States and other countries through history classes and lectures, history books, novels, period dramas, museums, monuments, and visiting historical landmarks. People also learn about history from family stories passed down from generation to generation, from oral histories, online discussion threads, documentaries, television shows, and videos posted on platforms like YouTube.
Congolese painter Tshibumba Kanda Matulu envisioned creating the history of Zaïre (present-day Democratic Republic of the Congo) in a series of one hundred paintings in an effort to educate his people about the history of their country. While his series starts with life before European contact in the 15th century, it focuses largely on Belgian colonization and the decade following independence from Belgium in 1960. He realized his vision after befriending the expatriate anthropologist, Johannes Fabian, who provided financial support and encouragement to the artist to paint this series. In 1973–74, Tshibumba brought to Fabian paintings that portrayed his version of the country’s history. [1] After Tshibumba laid down the paintings in Fabian’s living room, he narrated each scene, and then conversed with Fabian.
The paintings from Tshibumba’s History of Zaïre were published in 1996 by Fabian in the book, Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire. Each painting is accompanied by Tshibumba’s narration, fragments of conversations between Tshibumba and Fabian, and clarifying information from Fabian. Sadly, Tshibumba likely did not live to see the publication of the book. In the preface, Fabian notes that the two kept in contact after he left Zaïre in 1974. However, after 1981, Tshibumba’s whereabouts were unknown and he has not been heard from since. Fabian and one of his colleagues attempted to locate him in the 1980s, but with no success.
Official Congo government portrait of the Prime Minister of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, Patrice Lumumba, 1960
A prime minister and a king
One of the most reproduced paintings from Tshibumba’s History of Zaïre is Le 30 juin 1960, Zaïre indépendant (June 30, 1960, Independent Zaïre). [2] The painting portrays a significant historical event: in the capital city of Kinshasa (formerly called Léopoldville), the first democratically elected prime minister, Patrice Émery Lumumba, delivered a speech in front of a crowd and in front of the Belgian king, Baudouin (who is to the right), during the celebration of Zaïre’s independence from Belgium. In his speech, Lumumba openly condemned and criticized the Belgians for the atrocities they committed under their colonial authority. The title of the painting appears in the upper right corner as a banner. The choice to include the name “Zaïre” for the title is anachronistic, as the country was still known as the Belgian Congo. In 1971, Mobutu Sese Seko changed the names of the country and its largest river to Zaïre in an effort to replace names given by the colonizers with indigenous names. [3]
In the center we see Lumumba, addressing the smiling crowd of men and women. Deep in the background, a blue flag with a large, central yellow star and six smaller stars on the left represents the flag of Zaïre from independence day in 1960 to 1963. Outfitted in a striped suit, white button-down shirt, patterned tie, and handkerchief in his chest pocket, Lumumba raises his right arm and points towards the sky with his index finger. His left hand touches a globe that depicts a stylized image of the African continent. At the bottom of the globe, and to the left, a chain is represented. Since the subject of the painting is about independence from Belgium, it is likely that the broken chain (cropped by the edge of the painting) signifies the break with Belgium.
To the right and behind Lumumba is King Baudouin of Belgium, outfitted in a khaki suit, red sash, white button-down shirt, black tie, and other accessories. Holding a hat and sword in his hands, the king smiles widely and tilts his head slightly forward. Tshibumba points out that in reality, Baudouin was angry as he listened to Lumumba. He notes, “A king has to smile when it is difficult. He must put on a little smile.” [4] Behind him is a cloth backdrop reminiscent of the national flag at the time Tshibumba painted this work in the early 1970s: a background of blue and two vertical bands of red outlined in yellow. In the bottom right corner of the painting, we see the painter’s signature, Tshibumba K.M.
Tshibumba’s history: fact or fiction?
Tshibumba noted that the point of his history series “is to help one another so that we learn the history of our country correctly.” [5] While the majority of his paintings in his history series are based on historical events, Fabian points out that Tshibumba is “an interpreter of his country,” and what he “shows and tells is impressive; it is often amusing, shocking, incredible, and plainly erroneous. Above all, his History is not just a story but an argument and a plea.” [6] Fabian notes that there are discrepancies between the histories portrayed in Tshibumba’s paintings and histories produced by Congolese and outsider journalists and scholars, but Tshibumba’s voice is valuable and should not be dismissed. Indeed, his perspective is evident in many of his paintings.
For example, in La Mort historique de Lumumba, Mpolo et Okito (The historical Death of Lumumba, Mpolo and Okito), Tshibumba depicts the assassinations of Lumumba and his associates, Maurice Mpolo, and Joseph Okito. They were murdered on January 17, 1961, but their deaths were only announced publicly three weeks later (on February 13). At the time, the details of their assassinations were disputed. For La Mort historique, Tshibumba takes creative license and imagines their deaths in his painting. We see Lumumba wearing a white tank top, striped dress pants, a gold watch, and belt, lying on the ground. His eyes are closed, his arms are outstretched in front of him (with untied rope, perhaps showing that he was bound). Behind him are Mpolo and Okito, who are obscured by Lumumba’s body.
Tshibumba Kanda Matulu, La Mort historique de Lumumba, Mpolo et Okito (detail), c. 1970–73, acrylic on flour sack, 44.93 x 71.12 cm
Tshibumba clearly saw Lumumba as a martyr and national hero. In the painting, he draws a connection between the deaths of Lumumba and Jesus Christ. In the background to the right, we see Golgotha, where Jesus and two thieves were crucified. Golgotha is represented by three crucifixes encircled by a crown of thorns (which was placed on Jesus’ head), and an eye floating above them. Tshibumba depicts Lumumba with a bleeding wound on the right side of his torso, paralleling the wound on Jesus’ side, where he was pierced during his crucifixion. The presence of Mpolo and Okito echoes the presence of the two thieves that are crucified alongside Jesus. Tshibumba said, “…in my view, Lumumba was the Lord Jesus of Zaïre. Above, I painted six [small] stars, because he died for unity [of Zaïre].” [7] In the upper left of the background, we see the national flag from 1960–63: a large yellow star with six small stars arranged vertically to the left.
Tshibumba’s view that Lumumba was a national hero was not uncommon at the time he painted his series. Although Mobutu led a coup d’état against Lumumba in September 1960, ordered Lumumba’s arrest in December 1960, and was involved in his assassination, Mobutu declared in a speech that Lumumba was a national hero. This was a strategic move meant to unify the country’s people and to legitimize Mobutu as the rightful successor of Lumumba. [8]
Tshibumba’s work is often regarded as exemplary of Congolese popular painting, which emerged during the 1960s and 1970s in urban cities (such as Lubumbashi, where Tshibumba was born) following Belgian colonial rule. Congolese popular painting is “generally understood to refer to nonacademic paintings produced for both local and international audiences … comprising mostly figurative paintings that provide some form of social and/or political commentary on past and present.” [9] The phrase “nonacademic paintings” points to the training of their creators—mainly, painters who have not had formal training in school and produce and sell their paintings on the street, as opposed to galleries or museums. These painters tend to create paintings with the same themes repeatedly (with modifications) and make their living selling these works to local clients, expatriate patrons, or tourists. The themes and subject matter (such as landscapes and flora and fauna) that painters portray vary and depend on the expectations or tastes of their clients. Generally, buyers would have a preference for certain subjects and would buy one or two works from one particular painter. These paintings would be hung in domestic spaces and act as conversation pieces.
While Tshibumba’s History of Zaïre stems from Congolese popular painting, it is exceptional because he was at liberty to paint what he believed to be the significant events in his country’s history thus far. Moreover, due to the publication of Remembering the Present, Tshibumba’s paintings were not just viewed locally; they were made available to international audiences.
Notes:
[1] While it is conventional to refer to an artist by their last name, I refer to Tshibumba Kanda Matulu by his first name in this essay. This follows the scholarship on Tshibumba produced by the main expatriate anthropologists who worked with him: Johannes Fabian and Bogumil Jewsiewicki. Other scholarship on Congolese popular painting generally refers to Tshibumba by his first name.
[2] It should be noted that the version of this painting reproduced in this essay is slightly different from the version reproduced in Johannes Fabian’s Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire. Instead of the 1960–63 national flag, the version reprinted in Remembering the Present is replaced with the building of Kinshasa’s post office. According to Tshibumba, people organized in the square in front of the post office for public gatherings. See Fabian, Remembering the Present, p. 92.
[3] Ironically, the name “Zaïre” came from the Portuguese misunderstanding of the KiKongo word for river, which is N’zadi. Kevin Dunn points out that the choice to use Zaïre instead of N’zadi is not clear. See Dunn, Imagining the Congo: The International Relations of Identity, pp. 110–111.
[4] Tshibumba Kanda Matulu, quoted in Johannes Fabian, Remembering the Present, p. 92.
[5] Tshibumba Kanda Matulu, quoted in Johannes Fabian, Remembering the Present, p. 15.
[6] Johannes Fabian, Remembering the Present, p. xi.
[7] Tshibumba Kanda Matulu, quoted in Johannes Fabian, Remembering the Present, p. 122.
[8] Kevin Dunn, Imagining the Congo, p. 114. For a succinct retelling of Lumumba’s arrest and assassination, see Gabriella Nugent, “From camera to canvas: The case of Patrice Lumumba and Congolese popular painting,” p. 84.
[9] Sarah Van Beurden, “Congo Art Works: Popular Painting ed. by Bambi Ceuppens and Sammy Baloji (review),” p. 94.
Artist and master craftsman Joseph Tetteh-Ashong (Ghanaian, born 1947), also known as Paa Joe, is the most celebrated figurative coffin maker of his generation. In the tradition of figurative coffins—or abeduu adekai (which means “proverb boxes”)—the structures represent the unique lives of the dead. This exhibition comprises a series of large-scale, painted wood sculptures commissioned in 2004 and 2005 that represent architectural models of Gold Coast castles and forts, which served as way stations for more than six million Africans sold into slavery and sent to the Americas and the Caribbean between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Once they were forced through the “Gates of No Return,” these enslaved people started an irreversible and perilous journey during which many died. Relying on traditional techniques and materials, Joe crafts his sculptures to represent vessels ferrying the dead into the afterlife that speak to spirits separated from bodies in trauma. In addition to the seven architectural models, the exhibition features archival documents and recordings, including photographs and short films by award-winning filmmaker Benjamin Wigley and art historian Nana Oforiatta Ayim, curator of Ghana’s 58th Pavilion for the 2019 Venice Biennale.
Have you ever taken public transportation, such as the train or subway? If so, perhaps you have experienced the dilemma of selecting which empty seat to take before all the good ones are unavailable. Or on the flipside, you might have experienced the rush of passengers trying to find an empty seat, and you have had to stand since it was so crowded. And maybe you have encountered people at the stations who are not commuting or traveling, instead selling foodstuffs and drinks, handing out pamphlets to advertise services or businesses, or entertaining passengers by playing musical instruments or singing songs.
Perhaps when you were on the train or subway, you have had the experience of seeing a passenger preach from the Bible or pray. And you might have heard other passengers worship by singing and clapping in unison, or by using instruments or the walls of the train or subway car as a drum to make music. These latter situations were part of train travel in South Africa in 1970s–80s for Black passengers, and captured in the black-and-white photographs of Santu Mofokeng’s photo-essay, Train Churches. [1] Mofokeng was one of the passengers who traveled by train to get to work and witnessed other passengers engaged in worship. As the title suggests, his photo-essay shows people preaching, praying, healing, dancing, and making music while commuting, turning the train cars into churches.
In one photograph, Opening Song, Hands Clapping and Bells, the viewer sees six passengers seated along one side of the train. [2] Although there is light coming from the windows of the train car, the light seems to conceal, rather than reveal, the details in the photograph. Largely obscured by shadows, the foreground is difficult to discern, save for the woman at the far right. In the middle of the photograph, the viewer sees two women singing; one is in the process of clapping her hands, while the other is ringing a handheld bell. To the left of these women are four other passengers: a woman whose face is obscured by shadows, another woman wearing glasses who appears to be singing, and two other passengers whose faces the viewer cannot see. One of these passengers is blocked by the woman wearing glasses, while the other passenger is standing, but cropped out of the frame of the picture except for her long skirt and jacket. The closeness of the seated passengers and cropped figure of the standing passenger give us a sense of how crowded it was inside the train car.
Train travel during apartheid
Comprised of ten photographs, Train Churches documents the commute of Black South African passengers taking the train during apartheid in South Africa. They are commuting from their homes in the township of Soweto to work in the urban center of Johannesburg, which was set apart for white South Africans. Under apartheid, Black South Africans were forced to live in townships or Bantustans so that they would be separated and excluded from white South African spaces. However, major urban areas set aside for white South Africans relied on the labor provided by Black South Africans, allowing the latter to work in these areas in the day but requiring them to leave at night. Trains enabled Black South African passengers to commute daily to work, but they served to segregate them from other South Africans.
Traveling by train was tiring, stressful, and unsafe. Train cars were packed and overcrowded, and spaces where criminal activity and violence occurred. In spite of the difficulties and dangers associated with train travel, the train cars were places where some passengers engaged in worship activities, as we can see in the women singing and making music in Opening Song, Hands Clapping and Bells. As these passengers worship together, rather than individually, they create a sense of community in the space of the train car.
Trains contributed to the apartheid regime’s aim to segregate Black South Africans from white South Africans, and so the act of engaging in religious or spiritual activities on the train has been interpreted as a form of resistance. Although Mofokeng himself has admitted that he is ambivalent towards religion and spirituality, he recognized that maintaining and practicing one’s faith helped people to cope during apartheid. The apartheid government endeavored to relegate Black South Africans to second-class status by stripping them of their freedoms and rights. However, Black South Africans protested implicitly by asserting their humanity through worship. In Train Churches, Mofokeng records slices of township life that are neither out of the ordinary nor sensational, as worship in the space of the train had been occurring since the 1970s.
Documenting life under apartheid
In the 1950s-60s, the South African magazine, Drum, featured the work of Black South African photographers who documented township life under apartheid. These Drum photographers, such as Peter Magubane influenced Mofokeng when he was growing up in Soweto. When he got a camera at the age of 17, Mofokeng started practicing as a street-photographer. He got a job as a darkroom assistant at a pro-government newspaper, which followed governmental policies closely and did not promote Black South Africans to higher positions such as technician and photographer. He also learned about photography by reading books on the subject that were available to him. After leaving his job as a darkroom assistant, he became a photographer’s assistant at an advertising firm. He was mentored by white South African photographer, David Goldblatt, who took documentary photography. Mofokeng has mentioned that Goldblatt’s mentorship was invaluable to him and that he enjoyed his style of photography. On the surface, Goldblatt’s photographs seem objective and apolitical, but they show how apartheid impacted life for South Africans.
In 1985, Mofokeng joined the Afrapix Collective, a group of Black and white South African photographers that documented the struggle against apartheid in conjunction with anti-apartheid organizations. The distribution of their photographs helped elicit local and international responses against the apartheid regime’s oppression of Black South Africans. However, Mofokeng has pointed out that he was more interested in documenting mundane, ordinary life in the township rather than taking struggle photography, which was more common for members of the Afrapix Collective. For Mofokeng, struggle photography was limited and did not reflect the fullness of township life—portraying Black South Africans as perpetual victims.
After quitting his job as a photojournalist for an alternative newspaper, Mofokeng joined African Studies Institute (now called Institute for Advanced Social Research, or I.A.S.R.) in the Oral History Project at the University of Witwatersrand, which gave him specific photographic assignments (that were not the struggle photography that he became critical and wary of) and encouraged him to explore his own photographic projects. Among these personal projects was Train Churches.
When it was published, Mofokeng introduced it with a brief text:
Early-morning, late afternoon and evening commuters preach the gos-
pel in trains en route to and from work.
The train ride is no longer a means to an end, but an end in itself as
people from different townships congregate in coaches—two to three per
train—to sing to the accompaniment of improvised drums (banging the
sides of the train) and bells.
Foot stomping and gyrating—a packed train is turned into a church.
This is a daily ritual.[3]
Apart from this text, Mofokeng does not give the viewer many additional details about the photo-essay, the people photographed, and his relationship to them. Furthermore, it is unclear if these photographs were taken during a single commute or several. However, the content of the photo-essay reflects a departure from struggle photography, as Mofokeng aimed to show the viewer a different and fuller picture of township life apart from distress and despair.
It is a humorously discordant image: a man in a pinstriped suit sits on a deck chair at the beach, ignoring the overcast vista by reading a newspaper. The figure’s balding head and newspaper are the brightest highlights against the smooth, rippling surf. South African artist William Kentridge has said the inspiration for this scene was a photograph of his grandfather similarly dressed at a beach near Capetown. The contrast of formal dress and beach setting—while whimsical—also suggests class distinctions and the disconnect between experiencing one’s environment and codification as control: rather than watch the tide, the figure (as we come to find out) reads the newspaper’s tide table (a chart that shows water heights over time for a particular location). The gulf separating understanding and experience in this drawing resonates in much of Kentridge’s imagery and process.
“Successful failures”
Kentridge was raised by two progressive lawyers in Johannesburg who actively helped disenfranchised South Africans navigate the legal system during the systemic inequalities of apartheid. The harsh racial and socioeconomic conditions in South Africa marked the earliest work Kentridge produced after studying visual art at the Johannesburg Art Foundation and theater at the L’École Internationale de Théâtre Jacques Lecoq in Paris.
Kentridge’s earliest passions were theater and opera (and he has continued working in these areas throughout his career), yet after realizing he was not cut out as an actor, he was “reduced to being an artist.” As he has described it,
Every clear decision I have made was wrong. And the only thing that saved me was what I hadn’t decided.
This deceptively self-deprecating remark adequately describes the intentional openness and mutability of meaning Kentridge has built into his approach.
Process as performance
The drawing above is the result of a film, Tide Table, the ninth film in the series “Drawings For Projection” begun in 1989. These films utilize a unique stop-motion technique: using a 16mm camera, Kentridge photographs each stage of a drawing on one sheet of paper as he continually modifies it through additions and erasures, often leaving ghostly remnants of previous marks on the page. He even periodically appears within the frame, such as by placing a new sheet in front of the camera when the previous drawing/scene is finished.
The resulting work of art is generally comprised of two elements: an animated film and a series of drawings. Unlike traditional animation, which is painstakingly planned and comprised of thousands of single images, each denoting a fraction of a second, Kentridge’s films develop organically without any preparatory planning like storyboards, relying more on a stream-of-consciousness approach that strives for something between random chance and conscious premeditation. Kentridge associates this with the concept of “fortuna,” in which his imagery and narrative are influenced by objects in his environment or ideas and motions that seem intrinsically related to—but independent of—the themes and narrative being tackled at the time. The relationship might be comparable to that of authors noting how their characters do something unexpected in the course of writing a novel. There is a performative quality to Kentridge’s process, predicated by the spontaneity he fosters, his own appearances in the frame, and the film itself as a time-based record of his drawing process.
The traces always remain
Kentridge’s drawings for his films are often regarded as palimpsests. A palimpsest is the word for a manuscript where the original text has been erased and overwritten (a practice common before paper was available and when parchment was expensive). In Kentridge’s work, the sheet of paper becomes the locus for layer upon layer of images that evolve and shift, where the earlier states of the drawing exist only through traces intentionally left on the paper. In the film, these traces help intensify the movement of his figures, but also visually remark upon the process as a physical interaction of charcoal and eraser on paper.
The palimpsest quality to Kentridge’s approach is one that many critics and historians have associated with his reaction to growing up during a turbulent and shifting period in South African history. Apartheid, legalized racial discrimination, dominated South African governance and society from 1948 until 1994. One way Kentridge has made overt reference to the atrocities of apartheid in his “Drawings for Projection” series is through the one pre-determined facet of these narratives: an established “cast” featuring the wealthy white real-estate developer and industrialist Soho Eckstein. Eckstein represents the authoritative oppressors ruling over Black South Africans.
In the 1990 film Monument, for example, Eckstein unveils a heroic monument showing a Black worker struggling to carry a load of pristine marble objects. An ostensibly commemorative sculpture to the efforts of South Africans is revealed later to be an actual living person, not a sculpture. Racial discrimination is starkly reduced to the contrast between the “sculpted” worker’s body and the white classically styled load he bears.
In the 1991 film, Mine, a similar contrast is presented between Eckstein’s white bed coverings and tray as he enjoys coffee, and the grueling, dank conditions of the mines that Eckstein owns. The two are linked visually by the downward action of the French-press coffee maker that becomes the elevator within the mines. Such contrasts seem intentionally provocative, both formally and thematically. Yet Kentridge admits that the decision to have the coffee plunger become the elevator shaft was another example of fortuna, inspired simply from the fact he had that type of coffee maker in his studio that day.
A critical event linked to the legal dissolution of apartheid in the 1990s was the establishment of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Chaired by Archbishop Desmond Tutu, the Commission was a five year investigation into the crimes and human rights abuses committed under apartheid from 1960 until May 10, 1994. The results of the investigation, broadcast on South African television, were intended to bring to light crimes committed and the breadth of the structure of racism and disenfranchisement.
Although Kentridge’s process was established several years before the Commission, scholars like Jessica Dubow and Ruth Rosengarten have linked the palimpsest quality of Kentridge’s “Drawings for Projection” with the contradictory nature of the Commission: although the broadcasts intended to reveal atrocities, they also established that the harrowing acts revealed were firmly “in the past” and therefore not reflective of the dawn of a post-apartheid South Africa. Dubow and Rosengarten suggest that Kentridge’s palimpsest technique is reminiscent of the Commission’s attempts to show—but also remove—traces of apartheid and that Kentridge’s “finished” drawings similarly do not fully reveal everything that went into making them. The documentation of every stage of the drawing is only seen in the animated film, hence the reason the drawings and the films are intrinsically related and should not be separated.
Tide Table
The disconnect between documentation and direct experience seen in the hearings of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission is also central to the drawing of Soho Eckstein sitting at the beach in a business suit. In the films he created after 1994, Kentridge presents Soho as a man whose life has fallen apart: between inexplicable health issues, violent nightmares, and the loss of his fortune, Kentridge portrays Eckstein’s struggles in post-apartheid South Africa. Throughout Tide Table the artist provides a subtext that reflects upon youth, as a choir on the beach sings and a young boy dances and leaps in the surf. Often this occurs around Eckstein, as he sits in the deck chair, seeming to prefer the analytical table of tide flows in the newspaper and, in a later scene, pointedly placing the newspaper over his head to sleep (see above).
These images reinforce Eckstein’s character as one who is more comfortable at a remove from human connection and the natural world, a portrayal that is common to many of the films in the series.
Eckstein’s actions in Tide Table evoke a sense of loss for the comforts and advantages the character had during apartheid. Still, there is a glimmer of hope. Ultimately Eckstein observes those around him; he gets up, and playfully throws a rock into the water.
Seated (Dogon) Couple, 18th-early 19th century (Dogon peoples), Mali, wood and metal, 73 x 23.7 (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Traditional religions in Africa
Most traditional religions in Africa have developed at the local level and are unique to a particular society. Common elements include a belief in a creator god, who is rarely if ever represented in art and directly approached by worshipers. Instead, the supreme deity is petitioned through intermediaries, or lesser spirits. These spirits may be related to the natural world and have control over powerful natural phenomena. For instance, Nwantantay masks used by the Bwa of Burkina Faso represent various flying spirits that inhabit the natural world and can offer protection. These flying spirits are believed to take physical form as insects or water fowl. In Guinea, Baga beliefs describe local water spirits, called Niniganné, associated with both wealth and danger that take symbolic form as snakes. Nature spirits, appealed to by Baule diviners in Côte d’Ivoire for spiritual insights, are conceived of as grotesque beings associated with untamed wilderness.
Ci wara kun (Male and Female Antelope Headdresses), 19th – 20th century, Bamana peoples, wood, 90.7 x 40 x 8.5 cm, Segou region, Mali (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Male and Female Poro Altar Figures (Ndeo), 19th–mid-20th century, Senufo peoples, Korhogo region, Bandama River region, Côte d’Ivoire, wood, pigment, 60.2 x 14 x 11.8cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Other spirits represent founding ancestors, whose activities are described in stories about the creation of the world and the beginnings of human life and agriculture. The Dogon of Mali recount their genesis story with reference to Nommo, a primordial being who guided an ark with the eight original ancestors from heaven to populate the earth (top of page). Also in Mali, Bamana agricultural ceremonies invoke Ci Wara, the half man and half antelope credited with introducing agriculture to humanity (above). The original ancestors in Senufo (Côte d’Ivoire) belief are represented by a monumental pair of male and female figures exemplifying an ideal social unit (example left).
The category of spirits believed to be most accessible to humans is that of recently deceased ancestors, who can intercede on behalf of the living community. Among the Akan in Ghana, ancestors are commemorated by terracotta sculptures that, when placed in a sacred grove near the cemetery, serve as a focal point for funeral rites and a point of contact with the deceased. Fang societies preserved the bones of important deceased individuals in bark containers in the belief that their relics held great spiritual power. In many large states, a living king and leader may be regarded as divine as well. In the kingdom of Benin, in today’s Nigeria, the Oba historically was considered semi-divine and therefore constituted the political and spiritual focus of the kingdom.
Christianity in Africa
In addition to indigenous religions at a local level, other religions are also practiced throughout Africa. Christianity has existed in Egypt and northern Africa since the second century. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church was established in the fourth century by King Ezana, who adopted Christianity as the state religion. In the late fifteenth century, Christianity was introduced into sub- Saharan Africa by Portuguese explorers and traders. Although most African cultures did not adopt the religion, the Kongo king Afonso Mvemba a Nzinga established Christianity as the state religion in the early sixteenth century.. During the colonial period, Christianity gained converts throughout the continent.
Crucifix, 16th-17th century, Democratic Republic of the Congo; Angola; Republic of the Congo, solid cast brass, 27.3 cm high (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Islam came to Egypt after 640, then spread below the Sahara in the eighth and ninth centuries through traders and scholars. On the east coast, Arab and Persian colonizers introduced Islam beginning in the eighth century. Although the acceptance of Islam or Christianity sometimes precluded the practice of traditional religions, in many cases they coexisted or were incorporated into preexisting beliefs. The adoption of Islam and Christianity also led to the abandonment of many earlier forms of artistic expression.
Religious practice in Africa centers on a desire to engage the spiritual world in the interests of social stability and well-being. Annual rites of renewal among the Bwa, for example, are designed to seek the continued goodwill of nature spirits. Political leaders also seek religious guidance to ensure the success of their reign. Fon kings, for example, referenced a divination process known as fa, which predicted the nature and character of their reign. Personal misfortune, such as illness, death, or barrenness, or community crises, including war or drought, are also cause to petition the spirits for guidance and assistance. Art objects are employed as vehicles for spiritual communication in diverse ways. Some are created for use in an altar or shrine and may receive sacrificial offerings. The Dogon of Mali, for example, show gratitude to the ancestors by offering pieces of meat in a monumental container presented to the family altar (below). In the kingdom of Benin (Nigeria), cast brass heads commemorating deceased kings are placed on royal ancestral altars, where they serve as a point of contact with the king’s royal ancestors (above).
Other objects are used by diviners to attract and tap into spiritual forces. The dazzling beauty of an expertly carved Baule figure sculpture lures a nature spirit into inhabiting the sculpture, thereby aiding a diviner’s work. Such objects themselves are often not inherently powerful but must be activated through ritual offerings or by a knowledgeable religious specialist.
Ritual Vessel (Aduno Koro): Horse, 19th–20th century, Mali, Dogon peoples, wood, 18.4 x 56.9 x 10.8 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Bocio, 19th–early 20th century, Fon peoples, Republic of Benin, wood, bone, metal wire, sacrificial materials (including dog skull), 49.5 x 14.6 x 14.3 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Fon diviners empower figurative sculptures called bocio with organic substances that ensure their client’s health and well-being (left). Similarly, Kongo ritual objects known as nkisi derive their potency from various substances, both organic and man-made, added to a carved figure by a ritual specialist. The unseen forces of nature or the spiritual world are called upon to serve a variety of purposes, including communicating with the spirits, honoring ancestors, healing sickness, or reinforcing societal standards, through masked performances. Masquerades involve the active participation of dancers, musicians, and even the audience, in addition to the masked dancer, who serves as the vehicle through which these invisible powers become manifest. By donning a mask and its associated costume, the dancer transcends his own identity and is transformed into a powerful spiritual being. Among the Dogon, masks are worn at dama, a collective funerary rite for men whose goal is to ensure safe passage of the deceased’s spirit to the world of the ancestors. Masked performances by members of the Bamana Komo association convey knowledge of their history, beliefs, and rituals to initiated members.. The massive sculpted headdress known as D’mba among the Baga is seen as a symbol of cultural reinvention and appears on various occasions marking personal and communal growth. Among the Mende and their neighbors, masquerades of the Sande society encourage and celebrate young female initiates and offer a model of feminine beauty and spiritual power.
Male and Female Poro Altar Figures (Ndeo), 19th–mid-20th century, Senufo peoples, Korhogo region, Bandama River region, Côte d’Ivoire, wood, pigment, 60.2 x 14 x 11.8cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
In many African societies, art plays an important role in various rites of passage throughout the cycle of life. These rituals mark an individual’s transition from one stage of life to another. The birth of a child, a youth’s coming of age, and the funeral of a respected elder are all events in which an individual undergoes a change of status. During these transitional periods, individuals are considered to be especially vulnerable to spiritual forces. Art objects are therefore created and employed to assist in the rite of passage and to reinforce community values.
The birth of a child is an important event, not only for a family but for society as well. Children ensure the continuity of a community, and therefore a woman’s ability to bear children inspires awe. Ideals of motherhood and nurturance are often expressed visually through figurative sculpture. Among the Senufo, for example, female figures pay homage to the important roles women play as founders of lineages and guardians of male initiates (example above). The importance of motherhood is symbolized by a gently swelling belly and lines of scarification radiating from the navel, considered the source of life. In other societies, such as the Bamana, figural sculptures are employed in ceremonies designed to assist women having difficulty conceiving (example below). They serve simultaneously as a point of contact for spiritual intercession and as a visual reminder of physical and moral ideals.
Mother and Child, 15th–20th century, Mali, Bougouni or Dioila region, Bamana peoples, wood, 123.5 x 36.6 x 36.5 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Initiation, or the coming of age of a boy or girl, is a transition frequently marked by ceremony and celebration. The education of youths in preparation for the responsibilities of adulthood is often a long and arduous process. Initiation rites usually begin at the onset of puberty.
Boys, and to a lesser extent girls, are separated from their families and taken to a secluded area on the outskirts of the community where they undergo a sustained period of instruction and, more typically in the past than now, circumcision. At the conclusion of this mentally and physically rigorous period, they are reintroduced to society as fully initiated adults and given the responsibilities and privileges that accompany their new status.During initiation, artworks protect and impart moral lessons to the youths. The spiritual forces associated with this period of transformation are often given visual expression in the form of masked performances.
During the initiation of boys, male dancers wearing wooden masks may make several appearances. Their performances can serve diverse purposes—to educate boys about their future social role, to bolster morale, to impress upon them respect for authority, or simply to entertain and relieve stress. The initiation of girls rarely includes the use of wooden masks, focusing more on transforming the body through the application of pigment.
Headdress, 19th–20th century, Democratic Republic of the Congo, Yaka peoples, wood, cane, raffia, pigment, 45.1 x 61 x 54.6 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
The women’s Sande society, found among the Mende and their neighbors, is one of the few organizations in which women wear wooden masks as part of initiation ceremonies. Many initiation organizations continue in today’s Africa, often adapting to contemporary lifestyles. For example, in the past, the Sande society’s initiation process could take months to complete; now, Sande sessions have adapted to the calendars of secondary schools and initiation may be completed during vacation and holiday periods.
In many African societies, death is not considered an end but rather another transition. The passing of a respected elder is a time of grief and lamentation but also celebration. In this final rite of passage, the deceased joins the realm of the honored ancestors. While the dead are buried soon after death, a formal funeral often takes place at a later time. Funeral ceremonies with masked performances serve to celebrate the life of an individual and to assist the soul of the deceased in his or her passage from the human realm to that of the spirits (example here). Such ceremonies generally mark the end of a period of mourning and may be collective, honoring the lives of the deceased over a number of years.
Figure from a Reliquary Ensemble: Seated Female, 19th–early 20th century, Fang peoples, Okak group, Gabon or Equatorial Guinea, wood, metal, 64 x 20 x 16.5 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Figurative sculpture is also employed to commemorate important ancestors. Representations of the deceased, individualized through details of hairstyle, dress, and scarification, serve not only as memorials but also as a focal point for rituals communicating with ancestors. In some central African societies, certain bones of the deceased are believed to contain great power and are preserved in a reliquary. In such cases, figurative sculpture attached to the reliquary does not represent the ancestor but honors and amplifies the power of the sacred relics (example above).
Pair of Diviner’s Figures, Côte d’Ivoire, central Côte d’Ivoire, Baule peoples, wood, pigment, beads and iron, 55.4 x 10.2 x 10.5 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
The Role of Visual Expression in Africa
Because many tradition-based African artifacts serve a specific function, Westerners sometimes have not regarded them as art. We need to recognize, however, that the concept of “art for art’s sake” is a relatively recent invention of the Western world. Prior to the Renaissance, most art traditions around the world were considered functional as well as aesthetic. The objects African artists create, while useful, also embody aesthetic preferences and may be admired for their form and composition.
Aesthetics
Male face (detail), Pair of Diviner’s Figures, Côte d’Ivoire, central Côte d’Ivoire, Baule peoples, wood, pigment, beads and iron, 55.4 x 10.2 x 10.5 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Artists and patrons in many African societies express well-defined aesthetic preferences and value skillful work. Studies of aesthetics in some African societies have led to the identification of certain artistic criteria for evaluating visual arts. Among the Baule in Côte d’Ivoire, for example, a sculpture of the human figure should emphasize a strong muscular body, refined facial features, and elaborate hairstyle and scarification patterns, all of which reflect cultural ideals of civilized beauty (above and detail left). Scholars of aesthetics in Yoruba (Nigeria) visual expression have identified criteria based on both formal elements, such as a smooth surface, symmetrical composition, and a moderate resemblance to the subject, as well as abstract cultural concepts, such as ase (inner power or life force) and iwa (character or essential nature). Many African societies associate such smooth, finished surfaces with cultivated refinement.
African aesthetics generally have an ethical or religious basis. An artwork considered “beautiful” is often also believed to be “good,” in the sense that it exemplifies and upholds moral values. The fact that, in many societies, the words for beautiful and good are the same suggests a strong correspondence between these two ideas. The ability of an artifact to work effectively, whether that means connecting with the spiritual realm or imparting a lesson to initiates, may also be a standard for determining the “beauty” of an artifact.
Although in the Western world, aesthetics is often equated with beauty, artists in some African cultures create works that are not intended to be beautiful. Such works are deliberately horrific in order to convey their fearsome powers and thereby elicit a strong reaction in the viewer (above).
Source: Dr. Christa Clarke, “Aesthetics and African art,” in Smarthistory, October 9, 2016, accessed January 9, 2025, https://smarthistory.org/aesthetics/.
Pair of Diviner’s Figures (Baule peoples)
by Dr. Christa Clarke
Pair of Diviner’s Figures, 19th–mid-20th century (Baule peoples, Côte d’Ivoire), wood, pigment, beads and iron, 55.4 x 10.2 x 10.5 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Carved by the same hand, these figures reflect and embody Baule ideals of civilized beauty. In Baule society, diviners commission such figures from artists to attract the attention of asye usu, or nature spirits. Asye usu are considered to be grotesque and volatile beings associated with the untamed elements of nature. The spirits are seduced from the wilderness by the figures’ dazzling beauty and lured into inhabiting the sculptures, which embody the civilized values the asye usu lack and therefore find so desirable. The asye usu are then induced into sharing spiritual insights, conveyed through the medium of the diviner.
Such figures are prominently displayed during ritual sessions with clients who seek clarification about their difficulties, which can range from poor harvests to physical illness. The presence of the sculptures and the sacrificial material applied to their feet (never to the smooth surfaces of their bodies), along with repeated striking of a gong, help to induce the trance state that allows the diviner to communicate with the asye usu. The diviner can then gain insights and revelations regarding the source of the client’s problems. The ownership of such extraordinary works also serves to further the professional standing of the diviner, who must impress potential clients with the caliber and sophistication of the instruments used in his or her practice.
Faces (detail), Pair of Diviner’s Figures, 19th–mid-20th century (Baule peoples, Côte d’Ivoire), wood, pigment, beads and iron, 55.4 x 10.2 x 10.5 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Although depicted separately, the male and female figures are perfectly harmonized through their matched forms, gestures, stances, and expressions. Their elaborate coiffures, intricate scarification, and beaded accoutrements signify cultural refinement and status. Their erect, balanced pose and partially closed eyes imply respect, self-control, and serenity. The fully rounded muscles of their flexed legs suggest physical strength, youthful energy, and the potential for action. White kaolin accentuates the elegant arches of their eyebrows, reflecting the practice of diviners, who apply the fine clay around their eyes to facilitate communication with the spirits.
Male and Female Poro altar figures (Senufo peoples)
by Dr. Christa Clarke
Male and Female Poro Altar Figures (Ndeo), 19th–mid-20th century, Senufo peoples, Korhogo region, Bandama River region, Côte d’Ivoire, wood, pigment, 60.2 x 14 x 11.8cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
The Senufo are diverse people who have varied cultural backgrounds and speak different dialects. Nonetheless, they share a central social institution—Poro—to which all men belong. Within a Senufo community, each occupational group—farmers, traders, artisans—has its own Poro chapter. Poro supervises the initiation of adolescent boys and provides continuing social and political guidance to its members. Members of its female counterpart, the Sandogo association, are diviners whose responsibilities include the maintenance of good relations with the spiritual world. Together, the men’s and women’s societies work to ensure the physical and spiritual well-being of the community.
Male and Female Poro Altar Figures (Ndeo), 19th–mid-20th century, Senufo peoples, Korhogo region, Bandama River region, Côte d’Ivoire, wood, pigment, 60.2 x 14 x 11.8cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Male Poro Altar Figure (Ndeo), 19th–mid-20th century, Senufo peoples, Korhogo region, Bandama River region, Côte d’Ivoire, wood, pigment, 60.2 x 14 x 11.8 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
This male and female pair, representing an ideal Senufo man and woman, commemorates the original ancestors of the Senufo account of creation. Poro’s leadership commissions such figural pairs for a display to reinforce social teachings during initiation ceremonies. The figures are also displayed at funerals of important Poro elders, a time of community grief and loss. Embodying Senufo beliefs concerning order and continuity, the figures remind the living of the importance of preserving connections with past generations.
Similar in form, the figures stand erect, legs slightly flexed and facing forward, with large ears cocked forward and jutting chin. Their elongated columnar torsos are framed by broad curving shoulders from which attenuated arms extend fluidly, swelling into blocky hands. Both the frontal poses and the exaggerations of human anatomy visualize ideas about power, determination, and vitality. The extended navels refer to an awareness of the wisdom of the ancestors and, in the case of the female figure, also stress the role of women in the continuity of human life. The figures’ eyes are nearly closed as if in meditation, a reference to the inner strength they possess.
The male figure carries a scythe, a symbol that he is the farmer and provider. The woman’s exaggerated conical breasts and swelling belly indicate that she bears and nurtures children. The man’s extraordinary headdress, the woman’s equally impressive coiffure, their facial scarification, and body adornments signify their high status. Together, they reflect the complementary social roles of men and women in Senufo culture.
Is this a couple, or could this pair relate to a story from Dogon cosmology?
Dogon Couple, 18th-early 19th century (Dogon peoples), Mali, wood and metal, 73 x 23.7 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art) Speakers: Dr. Peri Klemm and Dr. Steven Zucker
Source: Dr. Steven Zucker and Dr. Peri Klemm, “Dogon Couple (Dogon peoples),” in Smarthistory, September 16, 2016, accessed August 24, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/dogon-couple/.
“Mami Wata” figure, Igbo artist
by High Museum
This large sculpture was made for Mami Wata, pidgin English for “Mother of Water,” a charismatic being of great spiritual power celebrated in West and Central Africa and reimagined as deities such as La Sirene (Haitian Vodou) and Yemanjá (Candomblé and Umbanda) in Afro-Atlantic spiritual traditions. Mami Wata is often associated with water’s sacred, healing power and with love, wealth, and good fortune. This sculpture’s silver high-heeled shoes were restored following the design of a closely related sculpture photographed in a shrine in eastern Nigeria in the 1990s. Lauren Tate Baeza, the Fred and Rita Richman Curator of African Art, discusses Mami Wata in the film.
Buffalo (Bocio), 19th century, Republic of Benin, Fon peoples, silver, iron, and wood, 30.5 cm high (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Royal works of art, like this silver buffalo, were made by members of the Huntondji family, who served Fon kings as jewelers and smiths since the eighteenth century. Though small in size, this shimmering silver creature radiates strength and determination. Bulging eyes, bared teeth, black curved horns, cocked ears, and swishing tail create this effect. Its eyes, horns, and tail are made from iron, a material associated with the Fon war god, Gu. The forest buffalo was an emblem of the Fon king Guezo, who ruled Dahomey (modern Republic of Benin) from 1818 until 1858. The qualities associated with a ruler’s emblem—in the case of the buffalo, strength, enduring memory, and royal legacy—were seen as defining a king’s reign. Although he came to power by usurping the throne of his older brother, Guezo is recalled as an important leader who unified the diverse constituencies of the kingdom.
Symbols of Fon kings were determined in a divination ceremony known as fa, which predicted the nature and character of each king’s reign. The buffalo emblem is one of 256 different fa divination signs, which were represented in a variety of artistic media created to support and enhance the king’s authority. Sculptural forms, like this example, in addition to functioning as royal symbols, also served as bocio, empowered objects that provided protection to the king. Placed in palace shrines where they served as the focus of prayer, these works were given potency through the presence of powerful substances in their interiors. Royal bocio were also displayed during ceremonial processions and transported to battlefields during times of war.
Detail, Buffalo (Bocio), 19th century, Republic of Benin, Fon people, silver, iron, and wood, 30.5 cm high (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
To create this buffalo figure, the sculptor sheathed a solid wooden core with very thin pieces of silver. He tacked these pieces to the surface in individual sheets, creating a patchwork effect. Then he finished the surface with hatching marks to simulate hide and incised vertical lines for the large, bared teeth. The sculptor’s technique was a clever one, because silver was a luxury material derived primarily from European coins. The artist’s technique of encasing wood in sheet metal maximized the visual effects of a costly material without using the large quantities of metal required for lost-wax casting.
Source: Dr. Christa Clarke, “Buffalo (Bocio) (Fon peoples),” in Smarthistory, October 9, 2016, accessed August 24, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/buffalo-bocio/.
Bocio (Fon peoples)
by Dr. Christa Clarke
Bocio, 19th–early 20th century, Fon peoples, Republic of Benin, wood, bone, metal wire, sacrificial materials (including dog skull), 49.5 x 14.6 x 14.3 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
This bust once served as a protective device, or bocio, ensuring its owner’s health and well-being, and safeguarding against potential harm. Ending in a pointed stake, it was hammered into the ground. Unlike the sumptuous bocio made for Fon kings, this kind of art is prescribed by diviners for use by nonroyal individuals. The carvings are most often made by nonspecialists for their family members and then empowered by a diviner who adds various organic substances. The most powerful bocio are made by ritual specialists such as diviners, called bokonon, and priests associated with the deities known as vodun.
The unrefined carving style and the rough surfaces combine to create an aesthetic of raw energy. The massive head is carved with faces on either side. The larger, more dominant head faces front, its inscrutable gaze and pursed lips suggesting intense concentration. On the other side is a smaller, skull-like face whose otherworldly gaze is accentuated by its asymmetrical, empty eye sockets. The disproportionately large head underscores the centrality of physical perception, while the presence of two sets of eyes suggests a state of heightened vision and watchfulness.
Plant and animal materials give the work supernatural powers. A dog’s skull crowns the head, and a garland of serpent bones encircles the neck. Such materials have symbolic significance. The presence of the skull of a dog, an animal praised for its protective skills, reinforces notions of guardianship and surveillance central to the efficacy of this object. Snakes call to mind poisonous attacks.
The resulting work functions proactively as a defense mechanism, responding to the varied needs of its owner. Uses may include the detection of thieves, protection from sorcery, and the manipulation of weather. As a surrogate for the individual who commissioned it, a bocio serves as a decoy, drawing harmful forces away from its owner. Operating at the intersection of the spiritual and human realms, bocio are strategically situated along paths, roadways, agricultural fields, and near family compounds, or placed inside homes and shrines.
Female Figure from a Reliquary Ensemble (Fang peoples)
by Dr. Christa Clarke
Figure from a Reliquary Ensemble: Seated Female, 19th–early 20th century (Fang peoples, Okak group, Gabon or Equatorial Guinea), wood, metal, 64 x 20 x 16.5 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
Figure from a Reliquary Ensemble: Seated Female, 19th–early 20th century (Fang peoples, Okak group, Gabon or Equatorial Guinea), wood, metal, 64 x 20 x 16.5 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Figure from a Reliquary Ensemble: Seated Female, 19th–early 20th century (Fang peoples, Okak group, Gabon or Equatorial Guinea), wood, metal, 64 x 20 x 16.5 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
The Fang peoples of Gabon believed that ancestral relics held great spiritual power. Byeri was a Fang association devoted to the veneration of lineage ancestors and founders, leaders, and fertile women who made significant contributions to society during their lifetime. After death, their relics, particularly the skull, were conserved in cylindrical bark containers and guarded by carved wooden heads or figures mounted atop the receptacles.
The lustrous black surface of this carved female figure still glistens from repeated applications of palm oil used for ritual purification. The sculptor shaped this figure to illustrate the ability to hold opposites in balance, a quality admired by the Fang. He juxtaposed the large head of an infant with the developed body of an adult. The static pose and expressionless face contrast with the palpable tension of the bulging muscles and the projecting forms of the arms, legs, and breasts. These reliquary sculptures may be male or female and are not considered portraits of the deceased. They were often decorated with gifts of jewelry or feathers and received ritual offerings of libations, such as palm oil.
On the occasion of initiation into Byeri, the figures were removed from their containers and manipulated like puppets in performances that dramatized the raising of the dead for didactic purposes. During the early twentieth century, Fang reliquary sculpture began to be acquired by Western collectors, who admired the inspired interpretation of the human form. This particular work was formerly in the collections of two well-known modernist artists, the painter André Derain and the sculptor Jacob Epstein.
Source: Dr. Christa Clarke, “Female Figure from a Reliquary Ensemble (Fang peoples),” in Smarthistory, October 10, 2016, accessed August 19, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/seated-female-reliquary/.
Male Reliquary Guardian Figure (Fang peoples)
by Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Peri Klemm
These figures look calm and contemplative, but also display real strength and vitality in their muscular forms.
Reliquary Guardian Figure (Eyema-o-Byeri), Gabon, Fang peoples, mid 18th to mid 19th century, wood and iron, 58.4 cm high (Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York)
Dr. Beth Harris and Dr. Peri Klemm, “Male Reliquary Guardian Figure (Fang peoples),” in Smarthistory, August 9, 2015, accessed August 23, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/fang-reliquary-figure/.
African religious culture in the Atlantic world
by Dr. Cécile Fromont
Bernardino d’Asti, The Missionary Gives his Blessing to the Local Ruler during Sangamento, c. 1750, watercolor on paper, 19.5 x 28 cm (Biblioteca Civica Centrale, Turin, MS 457, folio 12 recto)
A watercolor painted around 1750 features an elite man from the Kingdom of Kongo, dressed with a red cloak and loincloth kneeling in front of a Christian church as a European friar performs a gesture of blessing. Behind him, warriors dance and people play music with a marimba (a percussion instrument made of gourd and thin wood planks), drums, and ivory trumpets made from elephant tusks, bringing sound to the event. The watercolor, painted by a Christian (Franciscan) missionary, showcases one of the Kingdom’s most important political ceremonies, called sangamento.
During sangamento, the elite of the Kingdom of Kongo, who, together with their kings had voluntarily converted to Catholicism around 1500 (after being introduced to the religion by Portuguese explorers), demonstrated in a danced ritual their allegiance to both their king and to the Catholic Church. Sangamento was performed on special occasions, such as on feast days or before going into battle. The choreography, clothing, and symbolism of sangamento mixed European and Kongo elements together in a unique Afro-Catholic performance. There, objects as well as political and spiritual practices that were once solely European and once solely central African, came together into a new whole: Kongo Christianity.
Syncretism
Scholars have called this process of combining two (or more) different religious traditions “syncretism.” [1] Through the trans-Atlantic slave trade (begun in the 15th century by the Portuguese), elements of central African syncretic religions, such as Kongo Christianity, were brought to places like Brazil, which received nearly half of all of the enslaved Africans abducted and transported across the Atlantic. Many enslaved Africans who were brought to the western hemisphere were taken from communities in the Kingdom of Kongo or neighboring areas such as Angola in west-central Africa and would have been familiar with Kongo Christianity. Other syncretic religions developed as a result of the slave trade, such as Haitian vaudou, and scholars now recognize that more modes of Afro-Atlantic spirituality developed and continue to exist in the Americas and in Europe today.
Carlos Julião, “Black King Festival,” last quarter of the 18th century (Brazil), watercolor on paper, in Riscos illuminados de figurinhos de brancos e negros dos uzos do Rio de Janeiro e Serro do Frio, Iconografia (C.I.2.8 in the collections of the Fundação Biblioteca Nacional, Rio de Janeiro)
Brazilian Congadas
Just a few decades after the watercolor of sangamento being performed in Kongo was painted, an officer in the Portuguese army named Carlos Julião created a series of images depicting men, women, and children of African origins or descent participating in a festival in Brazil. Julião had worked in many areas that were at the time under the colonial control of Portugal. In this painting, Julião pictures a Black king wearing a European-style crown, splendid clothes, and holding a golden scepter in his hand. He walks under a large umbrella to the sound of musical instruments, attended by two servants in uniforms. Though Julião did not give titles to his painting, scholars have recognized the event as part of celebrations within a community of Africans and Afro-descendants surrounding the coronation of their elected king and queen. These celebrations, called Congadas or Congados in Brazil, hark back to sangamento in the Kingdom of Kongo, and continue to take place in 21st-century Brazil. The colorful wraps around the lower bodies of the male figures, the feathered headdresses, the flags, and the instruments, such as the marimba and box scratcher held high by the man in blue cloth in Julião’s image, are all elements with parallels in the Kongo, pointing to the specific Central African dimension of this performance.
At the time Julião made this work, the men, women, and children depicted lived in Brazil within a slave society, an environment in which their African origins placed them at the bottom of the social hierarchies, whether they were enslaved or free. Yet, even in this social position, they planned and staged elaborate celebrations through which they claimed small but resonant spaces of freedom and resistance to enslavement and disenfranchisement through the coronation of their own kings and queens. Other regions of the Americas practiced (and some continue to practice) similar ceremonies, though with different names, including San Juan Congo in Venezuela, and Pinkster in 19th-century North America. [2]
This 18th-century watercolor therefore illustrates one version of an event with deep historical roots and broad geographic reach. Situated in areas under the control of different European colonial empires and in varied linguistic environments, the Black kings festivals share common origins in the desire from members of Afro-descendant populations to organize festive occasions and to create communities on their own terms.
Black confraternities and Black saints
Beginning in the 15th century, other Black communities came together for common purpose. A dozen years after the Portuguese arrived in the Kingdom of Kongo and two years after ships sailing under the patronage of the Spanish crown landed in the Caribbean, the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas sanctioned Spain and Portugal’s claims over lands they “discovered” beyond Europe with the support of the Pope in Rome (“discovered” is used here with quotation marks because while it was the term Europeans long used to characterize their arrival in the Americas, the word does not accurately describe the event from the perspective of the region’s Indigenous populations). The Treaty of Tordesillas mandated that the Spanish and Portuguese convert the inhabitants of those lands to Catholicism. This would include the Indigenous populations as well as the enslaved Africans who would soon arrive in the Americas chiefly through the Atlantic slave trade.
Under these conditions, African men and women living free or enslaved in Europe and the Americas organized into religious communities known as confraternities or sodalities. [3] Members of these associations adhered to a set of rules, paid dues, and obeyed internal hierarchies. The principal aim of the confraternities was to organize members’ worship within the Church and their social life outside of it with a special emphasis given on burial rites considered of crucial importance for the deceased’s ability to secure the eternal life Christianity promised to the devout. The organizations could be exclusive to a particular gender, racial identity, or enslavement status.
Unidentified Afro-Brazilian artists, St. Antonio de Catagerona, 18th century (Brazil), watercolor, “Compromiso da Irmandade de S. Antonio de Catagerona” (Oliveira Lima Library, Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C.)
The confraternities also commissioned artworks dedicated to saints which they displayed on the altars or in the churches they built through the sometimes considerable donations collected by and from their members. [4] Images of Black saints featured prominently in such spaces, as saints would be called upon to assist in both earthly and heavenly matters. For example, one of the brothers of the Brazilian Black Confraternity dedicated to Saint Antonio de Catagerona, (sometimes called Saint Antonio da Noto), illustrated the most important document of the association (its compromisso, or set of rules), with a watercolor image of the saint. [5] Here, Saint Antonio de Catagerona, who was born in North Africa and enslaved as a youth, is shown cradling the Christ child in his right arm. The vibrant depiction displays the intimate bond between a Black saint, in whose likeness the brothers could easily recognize themselves, and Jesus. It also serves as an image for the closeness between the brothers of the confraternity, God, and the Catholic Church. Other popular patron saints of Black confraternities in the era of trans-Atlantic slave trade were the Virgin Mary or saints associated through their biographies to Africa such as Saint Benedict of Palermo, born in Sicily of enslaved African parents, and Saint Iphigenia, an Ethiopian princess. [6]
Haitian Vodun
Elsewhere in the Black Atlantic, images of Catholic saints played a very different role in the spiritual practices of African and Afro-descendant devotees. Vodun, also known as vaudou, is a religion with roots in the Bay of Benin in west Africa in today’s countries of Benin and Togo (a region which also saw large numbers of people enslaved and transported to the Americas). Initiates of Vodun, which has branches stretching all around the Atlantic world, including in Haiti, also uses images of Catholic saints in their devotions, but recognize in those images non-Christian spirits and deities.
For example, Haitian vaudou devotees have found their deity Ezili Freda, the patroness of love and the fine things in life, in images of the Catholic Virgin of Sorrows, where Mary, the mother of Christ, is richly dressed as the queen of Heaven and dramatically holds her chest which is pierced with a sword (a symbol of the pain she suffered with the death of her son, Jesus, on the cross). [7] The brilliant crown, jewels, and flowing textiles of the dramatically pictured, beautiful woman in Catholic imagery lead vaudou devotees to recognize her as Ezili Freda, and vaudou artists to recreate the image in materials enhancing further her divine brilliance, such as the shimmering sequins and beads of a contemporary vaudou flag made by a Haitian artist from the city of Jacmel.
Artist from Jacmel (Haitian, 1950–85), Vaudou Flag, 1975–85, sequins and beads on burlap, satin backed, 81.28 x 80.01 cm (Accession Number 1999.031.002, previously Snite Museum of Art, now in the collection of the Raclin Murphy Museum of Art, Notre Dame)
Afro-Atlantic spirituality
The golden crown and scepter catching the light in the grand gestures of a Black king in 18th-century Brazil or the brilliant sequins manifesting the presence of a vaudou goddess in the guise of the Virgin Mary in 20th-century Haiti are two among the myriad visual testaments to the endurance and dynamism of Afro-Atlantic spirituality in its many forms. Syncretic religions, like Haitian vaudou, and Afro-Catholic rituals, such as Brazilian Congadas, are two parallel paths through which African spirituality found new expressions in the Americas, on the other side of the Middle Passage and despite the enduring, multivalent violence of enslavement and its aftermaths.
Even in the context of forced migration, life in enslavement, forced spiritual and cultural conversion, the history of African American religiosity is one of resilience, resistance, and creativity, as evidenced in Black confraternities on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean. These examples are eloquent witnesses to the prismatic creativity of Afro-Atlantic spirituality from the era of the Atlantic slave trade to today.
PERFORMING ARTS
Photographic postcards of West African masquerade
by Dr. Hilary Whitham Sánchez
On the back of a postcard from early 20th-century Mali, a pair of performers in the center of the composition are flanked on one side by young men and musicians, and on the other by older men bending down with adzes in their hands. The group stands in an empty, gently sloping field close to the camera, enabling us to examine the scene. The performers wear wooden sculptures on their heads like hats, while their bodies are covered in raffia and cloth. The photograph, known as Danseurs “Miniankas,” depicts a reenactment of a Ci wara masquerade, named for the powerful force identified by communities in southern Mali as the source of all life. The circumstances surrounding the photograph’s creation and its global distribution exemplify how photography was utilized by a variety of people—from colonial ethnographers to Indigenous entrepreneurs—to achieve their different but related aims.
Early photography in Africa
Unlike any other artistic medium, photography spread globally almost all at once in the 19th century. Only ten months after the invention was presented in France in 1839, artists began documenting Egypt’s wondrous monuments (like the Great Pyramids) with their cameras. In West Africa, European colonial officials (by this period, France, Portugal, and Spain had colonies in Africa) such as Jules Itier were among the first to employ this technology to record their impressions as they journeyed along the Atlantic coast in the early 1840s. However, the medium was not the monopoly of Europeans.
African patrons and entrepreneurs quickly picked up the new technology, such as the Sierra Leonean Francis W. Joaque, who was active in the 1870s. Photographers, clients, and images spread across the region rapidly, and by the early 1900s, most West African capitals had established photographic studios. While artists photographed a variety of subjects from the natural landscape to scenes of urban life, portraits have been the most frequently preserved. Postcards featuring photographic images created by both foreign and native photographers became popular commodities during the first two decades of the 20th century. Entrepreneurs maximized their income by selling images not only to the sitter of a portrait, but to a wider audience both locally and internationally. Recent scholarship has demonstrated that studios often reprinted and distributed portraits originally commissioned by private clients in commercial formats such as postcards—with or without the patrons’ consent.
Left: Louis Hostalier, Joueur de Cora, published by A.B. & Co., early 20th century, photomechanical reproduction (postcard), 13.3 x 8.3 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York); right: Louis Hostalier, Afrique Occidentale (Sénégal) Dakar—Griot indigène avec sa guitare, published by Metharam Brothers et Cie, c. 1900, photomechanical reproduction (postcard), 14 x 8.9 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York)
For example, Louis Hostalier’s image of a Senegalese griot (historian) was printed on postcards by two different publishers (A.B. & Co. and Metharam Brothers & Cie). While A.B. & Co. cropped Hostalier’s photograph into an ovular format and gave it the simplified title of Kora Player (Joueur de Cora), the Dakar-based Metharam Brothers firm reproduced Hostelier’s photograph at full bleed and gave it a longer and more descriptive title of West Africa (Senegal) Dakar—Native griot with his Guitar. Despite these formal differences, both publishers transform what may have been a portrait to share with friends and family into a generalized type of person. Commonly referred to as “ethnographic types” or “ethnographic scenes,” this genre of images was widely disseminated and preserved through both private postcard sales and the utilization of these images in the burgeoning academic field of ethnography.
Ethnographic photography and Ci wara masquerade
In addition to the appropriation of portraits, photographers would stage scenes specifically for these same circuits of commerce as well as for the new field of scientific study termed ethnography. Ethnography as an academic discipline developed alongside European imperial projects: colonial officers studied African cultures in order to facilitate the exploitation of human and natural resources with greater ease and efficiency. Photography was understood to be an objective tool that could be used to record information about so-called “primitive peoples.” Fortier sold this image to several publishers for reproduction in several early 20th-century French anthropological publications. But is this image an accurate portrayal of Ci wara?
Malian religious practices—including a genre of masquerade similar to Ci wara—were first documented in the 1300s by the Moroccan cartographer and cultural historian Ibn-Battuta. His observations, published in Arabic in 1355 and translated into French five hundred years later, continue to provide historians with valuable information about the longevity of cultural forms in Bamana-speaking communities.
Closer examination of Fortier’s photograph demonstrates that this scene in fact depicts a re-enactment or staging of Ci wara performance. All the people in the photograph are nearly motionless, evidenced in the fact that you can see their outlines clearly. While Ci wara were typically performed for the entire community in the central square, this group is gathered in an empty field outside the town that can be seen in the upper left corner of the image, further underscoring the staged nature of the photograph.
Fortier and the publishers utilize the term “fètiche” or “fetish” in the caption for this photograph. European merchants in the 16th century created this word to refer to technologies—like Ci wara—deployed by West Africans to maintain their effectiveness as conduits of both spiritual and material resources for their communities. The term gradually took on a derogatory connotation associated with irrationality, and by the early 20th century had become associated exclusively with Afro-Atlantic and Pacific peoples subject to European imperialism.
While we have no records of whether Fortier paid these Ci wara practicioners for their time and expertise, the image demonstrates that Africans actively participated in creating images of their culture for non-local audiences, even as those images were operationalized for colonial ends. François-Edmond Fortier’s image of Ci wara masquerade underscores the complexity of this global process of image production, circulation, and consumption. Through the itinerancy of these entrepreneurs, clients, and images, photography inserted Africans into a global visual economy, as consumers, producers, and patrons.
Previously under British colonial control, Ghana has been an independent country since 1957 and currently (as of 2020) has a population of just over 31 million people. As is true of much of the rest of Africa, where borders were drawn as a result of colonialism, there are numerous ethnic groups within the country. While almost half of the population are of the Akan ethnic group, in total there are over 100 different ethnicities with eleven government-sponsored languages. As no indigenous language is universally spoken, English is the official language. Over the past century several different popular styles have developed, mixing traditional indigenous styles with European ones.
One of the national musical styles of Ghana, Highlife developed in the late 19th and early 20th centuries and later spread to other countries in West Africa, particularly Nigeria. Early on the music was associated with the aristocracy and performed at exclusive clubs. These associations with “high society” resulted in the name “highlife” for the style. Performed largely with European instruments, the style mixed together many local and foreign influences. It particularly thrived from the 1930s to the 1960s.
Initially highlife was built upon the instrumentation of European brass bands, but smaller guitar bands later emerged. Ensembles also frequently included Latin American percussion instruments, such as claves and castanets. The melodic and rhythmic foundation of highlife was derived from indigenous styles, particularly from the Akan people, though it was also strongly influenced by contemporary styles. After World War II, the style was particularly influenced by jazz brought by American soldiers. Highlife is sung in a variety of African languages, though English is also common. Highlife lyrics address a variety of different themes, including national and political topics. During the period before and after Ghanaian independence many highlife band’s lyrics included nationalist ideals, such as “Ghana Freedom” by E.T. Mensah.
HIPLIFE
Developed in the 1990s, hiplife mixes traditional Ghanaian music styles, particularly highlife, with hip hop, a musical form that had been, and continues to be, globalized. The creation of the style has been credited to Reggie Rockstone and is largely performed in the Akan language of Twi.
Zimbabwe since Western contact has been a site of much conflict, aggression, and corruption. From 1896 to 1897 there was an uprising against the British colonial rule referred to as the first Chimurenga, a Shona word for liberation or revolutionary struggle. The first Chimurenga ended with the assassination of one of the uprising’s leaders and was followed by a period of colonial rule until 1965. In that year, the colonial period ended with the white minority declaring their independence from the United Kingdom and establishing the independent sovereign state of Rhodesia. The second Chimurenga was initiated soon thereafter by black nationalists aiming to overthrow the apartheid white government through guerrilla warfare. The black nationalists succeeded, and the Republic of Zimbabwe was formed in 1980.
During the period of the second Chimurenga, a new style of music, also called Chimurenga, was established by Thomas Mapfumo. Similar to other styles in areas impacted by colonialism, Chimurenga music is a mixture of traditional elements and Western popular styles. The music protested the apartheid rule, though the nature of its commentary shifted after the establishment of the Republic of Zimbabwe.
THOMAS MAPFUMO
“Thomas Mapfumo at the Cedar collage” by Ernesto de Quesada is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0
Born in 1945, Mapfumo, also referred to as the “Lion of Zimbabwe,” began his music career as a teenager in bands playing covers of American rock and roll and R&B. During the 1970s Mapfumo began incorporating more elements of traditional Shona music into his own while searching for an original sound. In the early 1970s he played a style of Afro-rock music with the Halelujah Chicken Run Band that mixed Shona music with Western popular styles using standard rock band instrumentation. Working with his guitarist, Mapfumo adapted the playing style and sound of the Shona’s signature instrument, the mbira, to the electric guitar. The guitarist plays with the palm dampening the plucked strings to create a similar timbre to the mbira, which can be heard in the song “Pfumuvhu Parizevha.” Mapfumo would later include the mbira itself in his music starting in the mid-1980s (without the buzzy timbre provided by the bottlecaps). The nature of Mapfumo’s lyrics, now in the Shona language instead of English and including more vocables and yodeling, took on a more political and revolutionary tone. Mapfumo’s music also displayed influences from other foreign styles, such reggae, jazz, and South African mbaqanga.
Mapfumo formed a new group, the Acid Band, in 1976 and as his music grew in popularity it drew the ire of the government. Mapfumo’s music was banned on the state-controlled radio stations and he was imprisoned in 1977. After his release, Mapfumo formed his signature band, the Blacks Unlimited, in 1978 and continued composing his chimurenga songs. His music is credited with promoting and supporting the nationalist movement, particularly with songs like “Tumira Vana Kuhondo” (“Mothers Send Your Children to War”). After independence Mapfumo contributed to the burgeoning worldbeat and world music scene, eventually turning his attention to critiquing the Mugabe-led government in Zimbabwe.
Robert Mugabe was one of the leaders of the black nationalist movement during the second Chimurenga and was first Prime Minister of Zimbabwe from 1980 – 1987 and then President from 1987 – 2017. A coup in 2017 ultimately led to his resignation. While Mapfumo’s music was supportive of the effort Mugabe helped lead during the second Chimurenga, after independence Mugabe and his government became a new target as their corruption became apparent. With increasing tensions continuing to grow, Mapfumo left Zimbabwe for the United States in 2000, not to return to his home country for a performance until 2018, after the ouster of Mugabe. Mapfumo’s song “Disaster” is a pointed critique of the Mugabe regime, released shortly before he left for the US.
Isicathamiya is a performative vocal style in South Africa that is primarily associated with Zulu migrant works. ‘Isicathamiya’ translates roughly as ‘on tip toe’ or to stalk/walk carefully, which is reflected in some of the signature dance moves used in performances. As with many styles, it is a synthesis of various indigenous and foreign styles. Indigenous traditions include the Ingoma dance, a stomping dance of the Zulu people, and choral singing found amongst many of the Indigenous people in eastern South Africa. Isicathamiya was also influenced by minstrelsy and the various musical traditions brought by minstrel groups, particularly ragtime, along with the hymnody spread by Christian missionaries.
Blackface Minstrelsy
Developed and popularized during the 19th century, the minstrel show was one of the earliest forms of theatrical entertainment within the United States. In the decades preceding the American Civil War white performers used burnt cork on their face to portray black characters. Performances included a variety of acts including songs, dances, and comic skits that drew heavily on music produced by blacks and reinforced racial stereotypes. After the Civil War black minstrel show tropes emerged, including a group led by African American singer and impresario Orpheus McAdoo. McAdoo toured South African during the 1890s and his group is credited with influencing the creation of isicathamiya.
Isicathamiya contrasts with, but also was influenced by, an earlier South African vocal style called “Mbube.” Translating as “lion,” Mbube was more forceful in its sound than the harmonious blend desired in Isicathamiya. Similar to Isicathamiya, it was typically performed a cappella by Zulu migrant workers who used the style to create a sense of community and held weekly competitions. The most well-known song in this style, which also helped give the genre its name, was “Mbube” by Solomon Linda and his group the Evening Birds (1939). While the recording includes some light instrumental accompaniment, the emphasis is on the vocals, particularly the soaring male falsetto of the lead singer and the powerful accompaniment provided by the lower singers. A recording of the song was found by American ethnomusicologist and folklorist Alan Lomax and given to his friend, American folk musician Pete Seeger. Seeger created his own version of the song, “Wimoweh,” a transliteration of the Zulu phrase repeated in the accompanying vocals, with his folk group The Weavers. A live version recorded in 1955 in Carnegie Hall served as the inspiration for The Tokens’ 1961 song “The Lion Sleeps Tonight,” the most commercially successful version of the song.
Groups for isicathamiya range in size from four to over twenty members arranged in parts partially inspired by the four-part homophonic textures of Christian hymns. Ensembles mostly consist of bass singers with a fewer number of higher singers, including the tenor lead. The singers frequently perform in a call-and-response pattern between the lead singer and the accompanying larger ensemble. Performances also emphasize the group’s visual presentation, as they typically perform in coordinated elegant attire, which may include matching suits, white gloves, and two-toned shoes. The dance moves are stylized and synchronized as well, frequently performed up on the toes while also incorporating the stomping movement of the Zulu Ingoma dance.
While the style has been disseminated through recordings and concert performances, it was initially fostered during weekend competitions held in major urban centers such as Durban and Johannesburg. During competitions groups performed for a designated judge, with the ultimate prize usually being rather nominal. The competitions served as a point of pride and dignity and helped establish ‘homeboy’ networks between people from similar areas.
Formed in the early 1960s by Joseph Shabalala, Ladysmith Black Mambazo is one of the most renown Isicathamiya groups. Ladysmith is the hometown of Shabalala while ‘Black’ references the black ox which is considered the strongest farm animal and connects to Shabalala’s early life on his family’s farm. ‘Mambazo’ means axe in Zulu and serves as a symbol for the group’s vocal strength.
The group achieved international recognition after collaborating with Paul Simon on his 1986 album Graceland. Simon initially gained prominence as part of the folk duo Simon & Garfunkel in the 1960s before embarking on a solo career in 1970. Graceland was released following a period of personal and professional issues for Simon. Inspired by recordings of South African music, Simon collaborated and recorded with South African musicians in Johannesburg. These actions were in violation of a United Nations’ cultural boycott of South Africa due to their apartheid government. The album was commercially and critically successful, garnering international attention for Ladysmith Black Mambazo.
One of the songs on Graceland, “Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes,” begins with the first 58 seconds performed by Ladysmith Black Mambazo. It starts with the vocal group alone singing the Zulu text “o kodwa you zo-nge li-sa namhlange, (A-wa a-wa) si-bona kwenze ka kanjani, (A-wa a-wa) amanto mbazane ayeza.” Simon enters at 0:15, sometimes singing in call-and-response patterns and at other times harmonizing with the singers. The group returns at 4:32 with some backing vocals, though in the music video for the song they are featured throughout. Positioned behind Simon, they perform many of the signature Isicathamiya dance moves, frequently dancing up on their toes and incorporating some kicks and stomp-like motions.
The Shona people are the majority ethnic group in the land-locked country of Zimbabwe and are also found in small numbers in the surrounding neighboring countries. Before colonial contact the Shona people lived in independent, patrilineal chiefdoms and largely traded in agricultural products. Though, as with the rest of Africa, Zimbabwe, and its people, have been impacted by colonialism. Zimbabwe was previously under British rule as the colony of South Rhodesia, which became Rhodesia in 1965. From 1965 – 1979 the area was under an apartheid government where the minority white population ruled over the largely Shona population. After a period of warfare and struggle by black nationalist forces, the nation of Zimbabwe was formed in 1980 under the leadership of the elected Robert Mugabe. Mugabe ruled from 1980 to 2017, a period of further unrest in Zimbabwe with governmental corruption, massive inflation, and human rights abuses.
“Zimbabwe in Africa” by TUBS is licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0
Location of Zimbabwe within Africa
While Christianity was introduced during the colonial period and today it is the majority religion in Zimbabwe, most continue some of the practices of the traditional Shona religion. The Shona religion is monotheistic with a high god, though the religion focuses on the relationship with ancestral spirits. The deceased ancestors do not inhabit a separate afterlife, they instead remain as spirits to look over their family members. Thus, the physical and spirit worlds are closely connected, with someone’s successes and failures tied to spiritual forces. For example, if someone is experiencing great misfortune, it could be attributed to a neglected spirit.
One of the most important ceremonies within the traditional Shona religion is the Bira ceremony. During the ceremony an ancestral spirit is summoned to take possession of a medium and, once doing so, those participating are able to speak with the spirit and solicit advice and guidance. Music plays a key role in the ceremony, which may go on for several hours throughout the night, as each spirit is perceived to have a favorite song that is used to put the medium into a trance. Once the medium goes into a trance they put on special clothing and the music stops temporarily to converse before the music resumes so the spirit and attendees can sing and dance. The ensemble for the bira ceremony includes singers, hosho (a gourd shaker), and at least two mbiras, the signature instrument of the Shona people.
Sometimes referred to as a ‘thumb piano’, the mbira is a lamellophone (a category of plucked idiophones in the Hornbostel-Sachs system) that consists of 22 to 28 metal tongs or keys that are played with both thumbs and the forefinger of the right hand. Strips of metal with other metallic objects attached, such as bottlecaps, frequently are included on the base of the instrument and provide a buzzy sound that complements the bright sound of the plucked keys. The instrument is frequently placed in a deze, a hollowed half-gourd that may also have shells or bottle caps around its perimeter opening, to amplify its sound. The history of the instrument can be traced back over a thousand years and similar, smaller instruments called kalimbas or karimbas can be found in other parts of Africa.
The mbira is frequently performed together in pairs that interweave and interlock with each other. One mbira, the kushaura, plays the lead part while a second mbira, the kutsinhira, interlocks with the first and emphasizes the bass notes more. Performers can also create three or more interlocking parts on a single mbira. The mbira is closely associated with its ceremonial use but can also be used for social gatherings.
“Nhemamusasa”
“Nhemamusasa” means ‘temporary shelter’ or ‘to build a shelter’ in the Shona language and is a standard song in the mbira repertoire. There is a Google Doodle on the mbira that allows you to play one line of the song. Note how it interlocks with the other recorded parts.
Usmanou Nsangou, a native Cameroonian from the Bamum Kingdom now living in Boston, shares his personal encounters with the Bamum king and the life at the royal court in the kingdom’s capital Foumban. He tells us about the vibrant annual ngoun celebrations and remembers the deep impressions some masks used in these gatherings left in him.
Source: Fowler Museum at UCLA, “Pageantry in the Palace—Bamum Kingdom, Cameroon,” in Smarthistory, March 16, 2021, accessed August 24, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/masks-bamum-kingdom/.
Headdress: Female Bust (D’mba)
by Dr. Christa Clarke
D’mba mask (Baga peoples, Guinea), 19th–20th century, wood, 118.1 x 35.3 x 67.5 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art) Speakers: Dr. Peri Klemm and Dr. Beth Harris
Headdress: Female Bust (D’mba), 19th–20th century, Guinea, Niger River region, Baga peoples, wood, 181.1 x 35.3 x 67.5 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
This massive headdress is an example of a regional artistic tradition that dates to at least 1886 and possibly to the early seventeenth century. Among Baga subgroups the headdress is referred to variously as D’mba or Yamban, an abstract concept personifying local ideals of female power, goodness, and social comportment.
Carved from a single piece of wood, this work takes the form of a large head and slender neck supported by a yoke with four projecting legs. Flat, pendulous breasts signify that the subject is a mature woman who has nursed many children. She is distinguished from ordinary Baga by her intricately braided coiffure with high central crest, a hairstyle associated with Fulbe women, who are renowned for their physical beauty. This coiffure is also a reminder of cultural origins, as the Fulbe live in the Futa Jallon mountains, the ancestral homeland of the Baga people.
Incised linear patterns representing scarification marks decorate her face, neck, and breasts. Such monumental structures, carried on the shoulders of the performer, often weigh more than eighty pounds. In its original context, the headdress would have had a thick raffia skirt attached to the bottom of the yoke. A shawl of dark cotton cloth, imported from Europe, would be tied around the shoulders, hiding the legs of the yoke.
The ideals of womanhood expressed symbolically by the strong forms of the headdress are reinforced by the movement of the male dancer, who communicates a model of virtuous behavior for Baga women. Performances documented in the 1990s describe the dramatic entrance of the masquerader in a central plaza, preceded by a processional line of drummers. Despite its unwieldy size, the headdress is manipulated skillfully by the dancer, whose movements are alternately composed and vigorous. As the dancer twirls to the accompaniment of drums, the assembled audience of male and female onlookers participates actively. Some reach to touch the breasts of the headdress, affirming its blessings of fertility, while others throw rice, symbolizing agricultural bounty. Songs prescribing proper social behavior are led by women who are joined in the chorus by men. Beginning at sunrise, the celebration continues through sundown and sometimes over the course of many days.
Detail, Headdress: Female Bust (D’mba), 19th–20th century, Guinea, Niger River region, Baga peoples, wood, 181.1 x 35.3 x 67.5 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Historically, such masks were used in dances held at planting times and harvest celebrations, as well as at marriages, funerals, and ceremonies in honor of special guests. Following Guinea’s independence from France in 1958 and its adoption of a Marxist government, the tradition was suppressed by Muslim leaders and state officials. In the 1990s, the lifting of decades of censorship was followed by a popular revival of earlier art forms. In Baga society, D’mba (or Yamban) now appears publicly on occasions marking personal and communal growth, including marriages, births, and harvest festivals, as well as celebratory occasions such as soccer tournaments.
by Dr. Peri Klemm, Dr. Steven Zucker and Dr. Christa Clarke
The Mende initiation rite for young women is the only known masquerade tradition where the mask-wearers are female. Sowei refers most specifically to medicine—the kind of medicine that female healers/herbalists utilize. Embodied in this idea of medicine is a spiritual force. The mask, when danced, is a visual expression of this spirit. The term also refers to the custodian of the medicine—a Sande official. Helmet Mask for Sande Society (Ndoli Jowei), Mende peoples, Nguabu Master (Moyamba district, Sierra Leone), late 19th-early 20th century, wood and pigment, 39.4 x 23.5 x 26 cm (Brooklyn Museum, Brooklyn, New York)
Helmet Mask, 19th-20th century, Sierra Leone, Moyamba region, Mende or Sherbro peoples, wood, metal, 47.9 x 22.2 x 23.5cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
This helmet mask reveals the hand of a master through its refined carving, harmonious design, and innovative elements. Within Mende and Sherbro culture, helmet masks are carved with symbolic features intended to endow the wearer with spiritual power. Senior members of two distinct initiation societies, Sande and Humui, may have worn this work in performances.
Sande is a powerful pan-ethnic women’s association responsible for the education and moral development of young girls. Helmet masks of this kind represent its guardian spirit and allude to an idealized female beauty. Historically, the Sande initiation process took months to complete, yet today sessions are coordinated with the calendars of secondary schools and may be completed during vacations and holidays. Such masks are worn by initiated Sande women at performances that celebrate the completion of the young initiates’ training period.
Detail, Helmet Mask, 19th-20th century, Sierra Leone, Moyamba region, Mende or Sherbro peoples, wood, metal, 47.9 x 22.2 x 23.5cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
The masks are finely carved to convey admired feminine features: an elaborate coiffure, a smooth, broad forehead, narrowly slit eyes, a small, composed mouth, and a sensuously ringed neck. This composition of forms and symmetry creates a serene facial expression that implies self-control. The presence of a beard, a symbol synonymous with the wisdom men achieve with age and experience, may suggest that, through Sande, women attain knowledge equal to men. Directly below the curve of the beard are two slots through which the performer can see.
The mask’s glossy black patina evokes the beauty of clean, healthy, oiled skin. It may also refer to the blackness of the river bottom, where the Sande spirit is believed to reside. In this interpretation, the ringed neck may refer to the circular ripples of water that are formed as the Sande spirit emerges from her watery realm.
In Humui, a medicine society for men and women, this type of helmet mask has been used to address curative needs, especially mental illness. The four projecting animal-horn amulets that rise from the perimeter may be a reference to the animal horns filled with protective medicinal ingredients worn by Humui members.
Source: Dr. Peri Klemm, Dr. Steven Zucker and Dr. Christa Clarke, “Bundu / Sowei Helmet Mask (Mende peoples),” in Smarthistory, November 12, 2015, accessed August 17, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/bundu-sowei-helmet-mask/.
The Qur’an manuscript in the Fowler Museum in Los Angeles is a rare example of illuminated Qur’an produced in coastal East Africa on Pate Island made between the second half of the 18th century and first half of the 19th century. It is the only known example of a complete, single-volume Qur’an from the region. [1] Its materials, calligraphy, and decorations tell us many stories about the Muslims in this region of Africa: how they expressed their faith, their traditions of religious teaching and learning, their aesthetic inclinations and artistic production, and their connections to other parts of the world.
Muslims consider the Qur’an to be Divine Revelation conveyed by God (Allah) to the Prophet Muhammad through the Archangel Gabriel in exquisite Arabic. The Qur’an is believed to be God’s final message to humankind and the verbatim Word of God. Hence, each utterance and written form of the Qur’an’s letters and words is considered sacred. Ever since the Prophet’s time, Muslims have safeguarded God’s Word and highlighted its sacred character through rich and diverse traditions of recitation, inscription, translation, and interpretation. Inscribing the Qur’an using beautiful calligraphy on surfaces such as stone, parchment, and paper developed over many centuries.
A Qur’an manuscript from East Africa
Muslims from different regions developed many styles of Qur’an manuscripts, including Qur’ans with elaborate decoration.
Coastal East Africa, also known as the Swahili Coast, stretches from southern Somalia to northern Mozambique and includes islands such as Zanzibar, the Comoros, and Madagascar. It has been home to a diversity of Muslim communities since the 8th century C.E. Its peoples have also had centuries-long interactions through trade and migration with Muslim communities from other parts of Eastern Africa, as well around the Indian Ocean from Arabia, to Iran, South Asia, and China. Despite the well-established nature of Muslim communities on the Swahili Coast, manuscripts of the Qur’an are remarkably rare. Only a small corpus of twelve illuminated Qur’an manuscripts from the Swahili coast survives, including the one in the Fowler Museum in Los Angeles. [2] These were produced between about 1750 and 1850 in modern-day Kenya, specifically in the historical Muslim city-states of Pate, Siyu, and Faza on Pate Island in the Lamu Archipelago. The manuscripts are notable for their scripts and distinctive style of illuminations, as well as their use of paper that was likely produced in northern Italy.
But why have so few Qur’ans from the region come to light? So far scholars have no convincing explanation for this. Some suggest that the region’s humidity and salty ocean air may have contributed to the rapid decay of manuscripts (which are typically made of fragile organic materials such as parchment, paper, cloth, and leather). Another factor may be that art historians and other scholars have paid limited attention to the region’s written traditions, particularly in Arabic, the language of the Qur’an. This may be particularly true of Islamic art historians who have often regarded the art and material culture produced in African contexts as less important than the art produced in other parts of the Islamic world. It is also worth noting that much of coastal East Africa has seen regular and sustained political upheaval owing to local power struggles as well as conquest and occupation on the part of European and Omani powers. Such turmoil may also have contributed to the destruction or dispersal of portable items such as manuscripts to other parts of the world.
A Qur’an manuscript from the Lamu Archipelago in Los Angeles
The Fowler Museum illuminated Qur’an is bound in a dark brown leather cover with raised floral and foliate designs that were made by impressing with metal stamps or dies.
In the illuminated two-page frontispiece that opens the manuscript, multiple decorative rectilinear frames surround the Qur’anic text with motifs in red, yellow-brown, and black. Starting from the outermost frame, there is: 1) a repeated single knot; 2) a continuous undulating floral and vine motif; and 3) an “s”–shaped cable pattern.
On each page, curvilinear cartouches located above and below the Qur’anic text contain chapter titles (in this case sura al-fatiha (1) and sura al-baqara (2)), the places where God revealed the verses to the Prophet Muhammad—Mecca or Medina, and the number of verses. The text of these titles is rendered in white reserved on a black ground. Their script style is cursive with some letters stacked above others and other letters overlapping.
The Qur’anic text (all letters and vowels) occupies the central panels of the pages and is written in black ink with the exception of the word Allah (God) which is written, or rubricated, in red. Red ink is also used for vocalization marks and the three dots in a triangular shape that indicate the end of each verse. The Qur’anic script is cursive, meaning that the letters are joined up rather than written out separately. It resembles a fairly common style of Arabic calligraphy used widely by scribes since the early period of Islam called naskh but has some distinctive features, especially the tails of some letters which swoop under others. At present, it appears that the script style used in this Qur’an was locally developed as almost no other comparable examples exist outside the region.
In the margins, outside the decorative frames, are annotations placed in rectangular boxes. These contain information concerning the standard variant readings or recitations of the verses as well as commentary about the verses written by authoritative Islamic scholars. The cursive script of the annotations is written in black and red inks. While smaller than the Qur’anic text, the calligrapher’s hand displays similar characteristics—suggesting the possibility that the same person was responsible for copying out the manuscript and annotating it.
Other pages in the manuscript contain many different decorative features and stylized text. These include: decorated prostration (sajda) markers that indicate to the reader where to bow in prostration when they are reading the Qur’an; a division (juz) marker that is used to divide the Qur’an into parts or sections to ease memorization or reading, chapter titles; and, highly stylized basmalas, the Arabic incipit “in the name of God the Most Beneficent the Most Merciful” (“bismillāh al-raḥmān al-raḥīm”).
After the end of the Qur’anic text, the manuscript has two sections with decorations that contain supplicatory prayers meant to be read after completing the reading of the Qur’an. The beginning of the first prayer is marked with a roundel framed within several patterned bands (image above, left). Rendered in reserved white lettering against a black ground, the Arabic text in the roundel reads: “This is the al-fusuliyya prayer to be read after completing the reading of the Magnificent Qur’an” (“hādhā du’ā al-fusūliyya yuqra’ ba’da khitmat al-Qur’ān al-azīm”). The beginning of the second supplicatory section is marked by a roundel with calligraphic panels above and below. (image above, right) These panels include the Arabic text of the Muslim proclamation of faith (shahada): “There is no God but God, Muhammad is the Messenger of God.” Composed of three concentric sections, the roundel’s innermost section contains the invocation “Oh God” (“Ya Allāh”) written in red, black, and brown inks. The middle section is inscribed with a continuous pattern in red. The outermost section has the shahada inscribed around the circle in red, running counter-clockwise.
A patron, place, and date of production
The manuscript contains no date. [3] However, based on the paper’s ribbed texture, made by a paper mold, and watermarks detected on some of the sheets, it is likely that the manuscript’s paper was produced in northern Italy sometime after around 1750 C.E. Such paper was shipped from Europe to Africa through Egypt and Sudan in the 18th and 19th centuries, but it is not known how and when this paper made its way from north-eastern Africa to the Lamu Archipelago.
The time period in which the manuscript was produced, c. 1750–1850, is regarded by scholars as an era of cultural efflorescence on the Swahili Coast. Pate, the Island’s largest city-state, was ruled by the Nabahani dynasty who oversaw the growth of independent maritime trade between coastal East Africa and the Indian Ocean coast, particularly Gujarat. Ivory and textiles were some of the prized commodities that transited through Pate’s harbor alongside migrants and travelers from various parts of Africa and the Western Indian Ocean. Up to now, there is very limited historical evidence of the transit of enslaved people through the port. In 1800, Pate Island’s main city-states of Pate, Siyu, and Faza had a combined population of some forty-thousand people and boasted urban settlements comprised of stone houses, districts, and numerous mosques. The island’s population was diverse, comprising of Muslims and non-Muslims of different ethnic backgrounds, Indigenous groups, mainland migrants as well as people from other parts of the Swahili Coast, Eastern Africa, and the Western Indian Ocean littoral including Arabia and India.
A distinct Pate Island style
The decorative features of the illuminated Qur’an manuscripts produced on Pate Island share many features with other types of material culture from the Swahili coast. For example, patterns and motifs on the manuscripts’ frontispieces closely correspond to those found on the stucco decorations of wall niches and wooden-carved door surrounds of the coast’s 18th- and 19th-century houses.
Swahili artist, Tombstone, 1462 (Kilindini, Mombasa County, Kenya), Coral rag (limestone) (Mombasa Fort Jesus Museum, National Museums of Kenya)
The same knot motif found on the Qur’an frontispieces also appear on objects such as a tombstone from Kenya dating to the 15th century. Such tombstones also contain inscriptions with stacked and overlapping letters similar to the script used in some of the Qur’ans’ chapter titles. These and many other examples suggest that the manuscripts’ copyists were working with other local artists and sharing or borrowing from each other. This also suggests that the copyists were working within an established aesthetic tradition that utilized a series of known motifs and patterns that suited local tastes and that manuscript producers were creating a distinctive local style by using local motifs and patterns well-known in other media.
Opening pages, Qur’ān manuscript, completed on šawwāl 1162/September or October 1749 (Harar, Ethiopia), copied by ḥāğğ Sa‘d ibn Adish Umar Din (Khalili Collection, London)
There are also correspondences between Pate Island’s corpus and Qur’an manuscripts produced in other parts of the Indian Ocean littoral. For example, Qur’ans from Harar, Ethiopia use inks in colors similar to those produced on Pate Island, while Indian Qur’ans of the 14th and 15th centuries are copied in a bihariscript that has comparable letter forms and the word Allah rendered in red or gold.
Boné Qur’an, copied by: Ismail b. `Abdullah of Makassar, 1804 (Indonesia), ink, opaque watercolor, and gold on paper (Aga Khan Museum, Toronto, AKM488)
Qur’an manuscripts from the Malay Archipelago in Southeast Asia also show resemblances. For example, the Boné Qur’an from South Sulawesi, Indonesia, has chapter titles with white lettering against a black background contained within curvilinear cartouches. The Boné Qur’an manuscript’s opening pages also contain a frontispiece with a series of layered and decorated rectilinear frames. Despite such similarities, however, these various manuscript traditions appear to be distinct, and the histories of how these traditions came to share some stylistic feature remains to be understood.
View of zidaka (wall niches) in ndani (harem) in the McCrindle House in Lamu, Kenya, from the collection James de Vere Allen: Swahili Kingdoms (MIT Library, Boston)
The place of the Qur’an in the life of historical Swahili communities
The text of the Qur’an appears to have been central to the life of the historical Swahili Muslim communities of Coastal East Africa. Qur’anic ideas were incorporated into Swahili-language poetic texts and Qur’anic verses were inscribed on the prayer niches (mihrabs) of mosques.
The illuminated Qur’an manuscripts of Pate Island were probably used for worship or study in local mosques. The effort taken by copyists to mark vowels, highlight particular phrases, and provide commentary on readings suggests that they were concerned that Qur’anic text be properly recited. In addition to mosques, Qur’ans may also have been stored inside the homes of local patrons, particularly in elaborately stucco-decorated wall niches known as vidaka/zidaka that were also used for storing and displaying other precious and luxury items such as imported ceramics and glass.
Notes:
[1] The Fowler illuminated Qur’an is the only single-volume Qur’an known to survive and the only manuscript that contains the entire Qur’an (the others are divided into two or four volumes, and are only partially preserved).
[2] A number remain with families and museums in the Lamu region, but others are found in private and public collections in Oman, England, and America.
[3] The manuscript does not contain a colophon, a statement containing information about the name of the scribe who copied it out or the date and place of its completion. However, some clues about these aspects of the manuscript and the broader socio-cultural context in which it was produced can be found in its endowment (waqf) inscriptions that appear in the manuscript. These state that the Qur’an was bequeathed to a mosque (masjid) by “Mwana Aqibibi bint Shaykh Dumayl [or Dumila] b. Yunus al-Siwi.” Aspects of the endower’s name including the Swahili title “Mwana,” meaning Mrs.; a first name containing the Swahili word bibi, meaning “lady” or “wife;” and the Arabic patronym “bint” meaning “daughter of” indicate that the manuscript’s endower or patron was a woman who lived in a Swahili context that was infused with Arabic norms and practices such as naming conventions. Additionally, her family name, al-Siwi, a geographical adjective (nisba) for Siyu, suggests that her family was from the town. Given that two other Qur’an manuscripts in the corpus are signed by a scribe whose last name is al-Siwi, it is likely that the manuscript itself was produced in Siyu, a town on Pate Island which is known to be have been Swahili city-state that was an historical centre of Swahili crafts and manuscript production.
Additional resources
Ann Bierstecker, “The Textures and Textuality of Writing in Eastern Africa,” World on the Horizon: Swahili arts across the Indian Ocean, edited by Prita Meier and Allyson Purpura (Champaign, Illinois: Krannert Art Museum and Kinkead Pavilion, 2018), pp. 310–36.
Simon Digby, “A Qur’an from the East African Coast,” Art and Archaeology Research Papers, volume 7 (1975), pp. 49–55.
Annabel Teh Gallop, “‘The Boné Qur’an from South Sulawesi,” Treasures of the Aga Khan Museum: Arts of the Book and Calligraphy, edited by Margaret S. Graves and Benoît Junod (Istanbul: Sakıp Sabancı Müzesi, 2010), pp. 162–73.
Zulfikar Hirji, “A Corpus of Illuminated Qur’ans from Coastal East Africa,” Journal of Islamic Manuscripts, volume 14, numbers 2–4 (2023), pp. 356–97.
Zulfikar Hirji, “The Faza Qur’an: Three Nineteenth-century Illuminated Manuscripts from Coastal East Africa,” Journal of Qur’anic Studies, volume 24, number 2 (2022), pp. 21–47.
Zulfikar Hirji, “The Siyu Qur’ans: Illuminated Qur’an Manuscripts from Coastal East Africa,” Approaches to the Qur’an in Sub-Saharan Africa, edited by Zulfikar Hirji (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019), pp. 431–72.
Mark C. Horton and John Middleton, The Swahili: The social landscape of a mercantile society (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), pp. 47–52.
Eloïse Brac de la Perrière “Manuscripts in Bihari Calligraphy: preliminary remarks on a little-known corpus,” Muqarnas, volume 33, number 1 (2016), pp. 63–90.
James de Vere Allen, “Swahili Book Production,” Kenya Past and Present, volume 13, number 1 (1981), pp. 17–22.
As one of the wonders of Africa, and one of the most unique religious buildings in the world, the Great Mosque of Djenné, in present-day Mali, is also the greatest achievement of Sudano-Sahelian architecture. It is also the largest mud-built structure in the world. We experience its monumentality from afar as it dwarfs the city of Djenné. Imagine arriving at the towering mosque from the neighborhoods of low-rise adobe houses that comprise the city.
Djenné was founded between 800 and 1250 C.E., and it flourished as a great center of commerce, learning, and Islam, which had been practiced from the beginning of the 13th century. Soon thereafter, the Great Mosque became one of the most important buildings in town primarily because it became a political symbolfor local residents and for colonial powers like the French, who took control of Mali in 1892. Over the centuries, the Great Mosque has become the epicenter of the religious and cultural life of Mali, and the community of Djenné. It is also the site of a unique annual festival called the Crépissage de la Grand Mosquée (Plastering of the Great Mosque).
Great Mosque of Djenné, Mali, 1907 (photo: Martha de Jong-Lantink, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
The Great Mosque that we see today is its third reconstruction, completed in 1907. According to legend, the original Great Mosque was probably erected in the 13th century, when King Koi Konboro—Djenné’s twenty-sixth ruler and its first Muslim sultan (king)—decided to use local materials and traditional design techniques to build a place of Muslim worship in town. King Konboro’s successors and the town’s rulers added two towers to the mosque and surrounded the main building with a wall. The mosque compound continued to expand over the centuries, and by the 16th century, popular accounts claimed half of Djenné’s population could fit in the mosque’s galleries.
The first Great Mosque and its reconstructions
Some of the earliest European writings on the first Great Mosque came from the French explorer René Caillié who wrote in detail about the structure in his travelogue Journal d’un voyage a Temboctou et à Jenné (Journal of a Voyage to Timbuktu and Djenné). Caillié traveled to Djenné in 1827, and he was the only European to see the monument before it fell into ruin. In his travelogue, he wrote that the building was already in bad repair from the lack of upkeep. In the Sahel—the transitional zone between the Sahara and the humid savannas to the south—adobe and mud buildings such as the Great Mosque require periodic and often annual re-plastering. If re-plastering does not occur, the exteriors of the structures melt in the rainy season. Based on Caillié’s description, his visit likely coincided with a period when the mosque had not been re-plastered for several years, and multiple rainy seasons had probably washed away all the plaster and worn the mud-brick.
“The Old Mosque Restored,” from Félix Dubois, Timbuctoo the Mysterious (London: William Heinemann, 1897), pp. 157 (Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.)
A second mosque built between 1834 and 1836 replaced the original and damaged building described by Caillié. We can see evidence of this construction in drawings by the French journalist Félix Dubois. In 1896, three years after the French conquest of the city, Dubois published a plan of the mosque based on his survey of the ruins. The structure drawn by Dubois was more compact than the one that is seen today. Based on the drawings, the second construction of the Great Mosque was more massive than the first and defined by its weightiness. It also featured a series of low minaret towers and equidistant pillar supports.
The present and third iteration of the Great Mosque was completed in 1907, and some scholars argue that the French constructed it during their period of occupation of the city starting in 1892. However, no colonial documents support this theory. New scholarshipsupports the idea that the mason’s guild of Djenné built the current mosque along with the labor of enslaved people from villages of adjacent regions, brought in by French colonial authorities. To accompany and motivate the enslaved laborers, musicians were provided who played drums and flutes. Enslaved laborers included masons who mixed tons of mud, sand, rice-husks, and water and formed the bricks that shape the current structure.
Roof (detail), Great Mosque of Djenné, Mali, 1907 (photo: United Nations Photo, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
The Great Mosque today
Ostrich egg at the top of the Great Mosque of Djenné, Mali, 1907 (photo: BluesyPete, CC BY-SA 3.0)
The Great Mosque that we see today is rectilinear in plan and is partly enclosed by an exterior wall. An earthen roof covers the building, which is supported by monumental pillars. The roof has several holes covered by terra-cotta lids, which provide its interior spaces with fresh air even during the hottest days. The façade of the Great Mosque includes three minarets and a series of engaged columns that together create a rhythmic effect.
At the top of the pillars are conical extensions with ostrich eggs placed at the very top—symbol of fertility and purity in the Malian region. Timber beams throughout the exterior are both decorative and structural. These elements also function as scaffolding for the re-plastering of the mosque during the annual festival of the Crépissage. Compared to images and descriptions of the previous buildings, the present Great Mosque includes several innovations such as a special court reserved for women and a principal entrance with earthen pillars that signal the graves of two local religious leaders.
Façade (detail), Great Mosque of Djenné, Mali, 1907 (photo: Gilles MAIRET, CC BY-SA 3.0)
Re-plastering the mosque
Interior view, Great Mosque of Djenné, Mali, 1907 (photo: UN Mission in Mali, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
During the annual festival of the Crépissage de la Grand Mosquée, the entire city contributes to the re-plastering of the mosque’s exterior by kneading into it a mud plaster made from a mixture of butter and fine clay from the alluvial soil of the nearby Niger and Bani Rivers. The men of the community usually take up the task of mixing the construction material. As in the past, musicians entertain them during their labors, while women provide water for the mixture. Elders also contribute through their presence on site, by sitting on terrace walls and giving advice. Mixing work and play, young boys sing, run, and dash everywhere.
Over the years, Djenné’s inhabitants have withstood repeated attempts to change the character of their exceptional mosque and the nature of the annual festival. For instance, some have tried to suppress the playing of music during the Crépissage, and foreign Muslim investors have also offered to rebuild the mosque in concrete and tile its current sand floor. Djenné’s community has unrelentingly striven to maintain its cultural heritage and the unique character of the Great Mosque. In 1988, the tenacious effort led to the designation of the site and the entire town of Djenné as a World Heritage Site by UNESCO.
Backstory
The Great Mosque of Djenné is only one of many important monuments in the area known as the Djenné Circle, which also includes the archaeological sites of Djenné-Djeno, Hambarketolo, Tonomba, and Kaniana. The region is known especially for its characteristic earthen architecture, which, as noted above, requires continuous upkeep by the local community.
Djenné’s unique form of architecture also makes it particularly susceptible to environmental threats, especially flooding. The town is situated along a river, and in 2016, torrential rains led to massive floods that caused one historic 16th-century palace to collapse, and left the Great Mosque with significant cracks its pillars. Construction of new buildings on the archaeological sites and inadequate waste disposal infrastructure also present continual problems.
UNESCO and other agencies have supported the restoration of the riverbanks in Djenné to help prevent flooding, and the four archaeological sites have now gained official status as properties of the state, which shields them from urban development. However, the conservation situation in Djenné remains fragile. Since the civil war in Northern Mali in 2012, the government has had limited bandwidth to deal with all of the various measures necessary to successfully protect, maintain, and monitor these sites. UNESCO has also noted a lack of funding from outside partners, who, according to the agency, have shown greater interest in Timbuktu, where terrorists vandalized several historic mausoleums and a mosque in 2012.
The current state of Djenné highlights the complex network of factors that affect world heritage: armed conflict and civil unrest, environmental threats, urban development, and lack of cooperation between agencies can all undermine the fate of monuments like the Great Mosque. Such circumstances remind us of the importance and the difficulty of conservation efforts not just in Djenné, but around the globe.
African arts played a central role in their communities, whether to communicate royalty, sacrality, inner virtues, aesthetic interests, genealogy or other central concerns
by Dr. Peri Klemm
Traditional African art, which generally refers to tangible forms and practices that were created by Africans for Africans, played a central role in the communities where it was created. The late African art historian Robert Farris Thompson has argued that art in Africa is used to make things happen. For example, the performance of the Ci Wara antelope mask inspires farmers and reminds viewers of the importance of community. African art can communicate royalty, sacrality, aesthetic interests, genealogy, morality, popular trends, and other significant concerns. It is also efficacious and necessary for events like rituals, masquerades, and life-cycle transitions to successfully occur.
Africa is a large and wildly diverse continent with vast differences in climate, geography, flora and fauna, and cultures. There exist over 1,000 ethnic groups with distinct languages, belief systems, and artistic traditions. In the early 1800s, following the end of the transatlantic slave trade, European interest turned to Africa’s natural resources, particularly mineral wealth and forests. This led to colonization from roughly 1880–1914. In some cases, art created during this time period was a means of making sense of this time marked which was by violence and coercion. This period was followed by struggles for liberation from colonial rule in the mid-20th century and art began to express a nationalist identity and the ideologies of the postcolonial state—ideologies that focused on self-governance and nation building, economic development, and cultural identity after European imperialism.
Africa today is divided into 53 independent countries but the boundaries that separate these countries were drawn by 13 European powers at the Berlin Conference in 1884–85 without a single African present. They did not divide the continent along cultural lines but based these borders on European interests. The problems this created—separating families, language groups, trading partners, pastoralists from watering holes, etc.—are still felt throughout the continent today.
This chapter begins by considering the importance of seeing art in its cultural context and explores how museum displays have shaped the Western understanding of African art. It then explores African artworks that communicate social status, evoke memory and secrecy, help individuals interact with the spiritual realm, and move though specific life-cycle stages.
Peoples and cultures of Africa: an introduction
African Art and Cultural Context
When European travelers first reached the coast of West Africa in the 15th century, they found a whole host of new objects and practices that they were unfamiliar with and often misinterpreted. As an Ewe proverb states, “The strangers eyes are wide, but they are blind.” To begin to really “see” African art, we start with the premise that all art communicates. Understanding how it communicates and what it says is the role of the art historian and requires an understanding of the art’s cultural context. This is particularly important for works of art that may not be familiar to us.
As an example, what conclusions might someone outside of Ethiopia draw regarding this woman in the photograph above?
If you grew up in or are familiar with Oromo culture, just looking at this woman’s dress you might be able to determine the wearers’ approximate age, her economic background or that of her family, her religion, her political affiliation, and her regional identity. But if you weren’t familiar with her culture, what would you know about this woman based on her dress? Without speaking to her, little is communicated to those not familiar with Oromo culture. It is therefore critical to study cultural context to make sense of African art.
Studying African art outside of Africa can be challenging for at least three reasons. When you visit a museum in the West to see African art, you often find objects hanging on a wall or placed behind glass cases. Most African art discussed in this chapter, however, was made to be used, whether in a sacred or a secular context, and communicated a whole host of information. It is important to consider why and how artworks were meaningful to the communities where they were created and used—as well as how the objects got into the museum in the first place. All of the artworks in this chapter are located in Western museums.
We also have to keep in mind that we often don’t have input from the artist who made the work. Most art historians think of African art as a dialogue, a mode of communication between the audience, the artist/culture, and the object. Without information on the artist and their concerns, we are missing part of that conversation and this can make a sound analysis difficult.
Further, how the material and expressive cultures of Africa have been studied and portrayed by non-Africans requires critical awareness, such as this statement below from the British Museum notes.
Who defines African art?
As far as culture and art is concerned, “African” so often seems to be defined by people who are not African, including museum curators and art historians who identify themselves and their own cultural heritage as unambiguously European. This includes people from far beyond Europe, and some of the finest collections, publications and scholars of African art are to be found in North America. Peoples and cultures do indeed travel, and many African art schools share a Western cultural and artistic tradition which traces its origins to Europe or the Middle East. Africa is a diverse continent of many cultures, but one experience shared by the vast majority of its people and emigrants, is life under political and economic systems developed by Europeans and still dominated by them.
This excerpt from the British Museum, a largely white institution embroiled in a debate about restitution and repatriation of their African holdings, demonstrates how African art and culture has been historically understood within art historical scholarship and the EuroAmerican popular imagination.
It is our job to learn as much as we can about the cultural contexts of objects. Two common characteristics of African objects are useful for us to consider when looking at the art discussed in this chapter:
the connection between cultural values and how an object looks (aesthetics)
the abstract and idealized style of many of the objects of this time period
The importance of these two key issues is clearly illustrated in the sculpture of twins known as Ire Ibeji, made by the Yoruba in present day Nigeria. The Ire Ibeji twin figures visually communicate key ideals in Yoruba society: the emphasis on the head (the site of wisdom), the depiction of the prime of life (ideal time in life), and the need to remember and honor the deceased.
The Reception of African Art in the West: Learn more about how African art and culture has been historically understood within art scholarship and the EuroAmerican popular imagination.
Aesthetics: Objects created by African artists often express, aesthetic, functional, and moral values all at once.
Form and meaning: Many forms of African art are characterized by visual abstraction or departure from representational accuracy.
Ere ibeji carvings: These reveal not only the importance of twins and a strong belief in the afterlife, but what Yoruba regard as beautiful and correct.
Art and Social Status
Throughout Africa, art can communicate the social status of individuals and groups. While the examples discussed here, from Ghana and Nigeria, don’t literally speak, those who understand their aesthetic language know their meaning.
Asante art in Ghana
To examine the role of art in communicating an individual or group’s identity, we begin in West Africa among the Asante in Ghana. Prior to independence in 1957, Ghana was a British colony in West Africa, known as the Gold Coast. Ghana is the second largest producer of gold in West Africa, and European powers took an interest in Ghana for the monetary value of its gold.
For the Asante, one of more than 70 ethnic groups in Ghana, gold was a symbol of aristocracy. The Asante are a kingship with the palace and capital in Kumasi. The Asante, part of a larger linguistic family known as the Akan, rose to power as a nation in the early eighteenth century when a chief named Osei Tutu united a vast series of principalities under one throne. The Asante nation was strengthened through its control of the trade in gold, textiles, and enslaved people. This wealth allowed artistic traditions, especially those for royal patrons, to flourish. The king, or paramount chief, is called the Asantehene in the Twi language. The Asantehene remains an important patron of the arts today.
During funerals in Ghana, an Asante dancer taps his fists together in a vertical motion to signify the glory of the Asantehene, who is believed to symbolically bridge heaven and earth. This notion is further enhanced by the Asantehene’s dress. He is visually sandwiched between bulky sandals decorated with gold ornaments and a large, multi-colored umbrella overhead.
Asante men and women of royal stature wear gold threads, gold filigree beads, and gold dust sprinkled on the face. Here, gold shows the royal status of the wearer and the opulence of the palace through the decoration of household objects such as sword hilts, fly whisks, and linguist staffs.
Stools have a special significance in Asante culture. Those made by carvers and given to young men and women around puberty by their parents have at their center particular patterns that represent proverbs. These stools are cherished and used for everyday activities including eating, socializing and playing games.
The stools tipped on their side are the stools of past chiefs and housed in the stool room of the Asante palace in Kumasi. The Golden Stool, on the other hand, is considered the most sacred relic of the Asante nation and is never actually used as a seat. It is a wooden stool covered in gold leaf.
To help us make sense of the importance of gold for the Asante and the Golden Stool, we can also turn to brass weights. These weights, used during the gold trade by the Asante since the 14th century, were first created by goldsmiths as standard measurements to weigh gold. Gradually these brass bars were fashioned into hundreds of fanciful images that connected to verbal sayings. Some of the weights show recognizable forms; others are a system of patterns. Scholars believe these may have developed into a written language system over time if it were not for the disruption of the slave trade and colonization.
Important members of the Asantehene’s court are his linguists. These men are oral historians, orators, politicians, language specialists, and advisors. At many public occasions, however, the linguist does not talk at all but lets a staff speak for him.
These wooden staffs are covered in gold and topped with a carving, representing an Asante proverb: “One who climbs a good tree, gets a push,” meaning right intention and action receive support.
Another art form that is associated with royalty is Kente cloth. Kente is a strip-woven cloth woven on a loom by male weavers. It was traditionally the cloth of royalty with new patterns and proverbs created for each Asantehene and his family. Today, the cloth has become “democratized” and commodified. This means that anyone who can afford it may wear it.
Golden Stool (Sika dwa kofi), Asante peoples: In this video you’ll learn more about the Asante Golden Stool through a closer look at brass weights that were used to weigh gold.
Linguist Staff (Okyeamepoma) (Asante peoples): This magnificent gold-covered staff was created to serve as an insignia of office for an ȯkyeame, a high-ranking advisor to an Asante ruler.
Kente cloth: This cloth—first woven by a wise spider—sends social messages through a system of specific patterns.
Royal and personal art in Nigeria
In neighboring Nigeria, royal status is communicated in palace architecture. For example, in a veranda post made by the well-known sculptor Olowe of Ise, a male figure on horseback is supported by a kneeling female figure.
Olowe of Ise represented the figures with large heads, protruding almond shaped eyes, and breasts. These forms all related to the leadership qualities of the king to provide for his community. This post would have held up the porch of the palace. Olowe of Ise is Yoruba, and his figures stylistically resemble the Yoruba Ere Ibeji twin figures mentioned earlier. With their idealized heads, eyes, and breasts, neither resembles an exact likeness of a human face or body.
Besides art that marks royal status, we can look at art, such as a figure known as an “ikenga” from the Igbo in Nigeria, to consider a more personal marker of status. This figure represents the achievements of a title holder of high rank. It suggests an individual’s mastery in his discipline and perseverance in achieving his title.
Olowe of Ise, veranda post (Yoruba peoples): This equestrian king is clearly powerful, but he rests on a nude female figure from whom his power is derived.
Ikenga (Igbo peoples): These carved wooden figures have human faces but animal attributes, and reflected the achievements of their owners.
Masquerade
In West and Central Africa where hardwood forests grow, we find many cultures that created and utilized carved wooden masks and some continue the practice today. For most of these cultures, a mask is not only a structure or costume that conceals the face and body but an idea and an action. The idea behind masking is for the person wearing and performing the mask to conceal his or her identity and take on a new one. Sometimes the masker “becomes” an ancestor, a spirit, or a supernatural animal.
Unlike the idea of masking at Halloween or Carnival, a masquerade requires more than just a facial cover—it involves a costume, an ensemble of actors, and a performance. A masquerade usually includes: a wooden mask, raffia or cloth costume, mask attendants, dancers, musicians, a performer, and often a spirit who animates the male or female performer/wearer. Masks are used throughout Africa at many different occasions, like life cycle ceremonies, religious events, and political rallies. They can instruct, discipline, warn, honor, and entertain.
Male and Female Antelope Headdresses (Ci wara) (Bamana peoples): These headdresses celebrate the divine Ci Wara, half man and half antelope, who introduced humans to agriculture.
Female (pwo) Mask: This mask was made and worn by men, but its purpose is to honor women who have bravely survived childbirth.
Owie Kimou, Portrait Mask (Mblo) of Moya Yanso (Baule peoples): This mask is a portrait of a particular woman, but was worn and danced by her male relatives.
Elephant Mask (Bamileke Peoples): The austere display of this powerful object masks the complexity of its original context.
Initiation and art as life cycle markers
Masking during Initiation
Masquerades can also help an individual navigate the physical transformations of life. As a person moves from childhood to adolescence to old age, African societies often mark these transitions through life-cycle rituals that involve masquerades. Some of the most important rituals happen during puberty when initiates may be taken away from their families and educated by older, wiser men or women about how to be good parents, spouses, and society members and how to take care of their families. They may also be taught history, genealogy, farming, medicine, and sacred knowledge. (Think of how youth around the world might benefit from such a class!)
Sande
Young women who live in Guinea, Sierra Leone, and Liberia practice an exclusively female initiation ceremony called Sande. It is a complementary social organization to the young men’s Poro society where men learn farming, hunting, tribal history, and secret knowledge. Sande is comparable to female initiation in other regions of Africa, yet it is unique in that it is the only society where women completely cover their bodies in a black costume and wear a mask in performance.
The Sande mask is called Sowei and it is worn and danced by an older woman to instruct young female initiates while in seclusion outside the village. It represents the ideal beauty of a Sande woman with a high broad forehead, small facial features, a hairstyle composed of tufts and braids, neck creases, and a shiny black finish. The Sowei mask is used to initiate Mende girls into the Sande society and to oversee their rite of passage to adulthood.
Bundu / Sowei Helmet Mask (Mende peoples): The Mende initiation rite for young women is the only known masquerade tradition where the mask-wearers are female.
Ndebele art in the lifecycle
For Ndebele women, beadwork plays an important marker of one’s stage in life and is a way for women to show off their artistic talents, decorate themselves and their daughters, and communicate their positions in society through their dress and materials. Beadwork, such as we see on an ijocolo, began to flourish under incredibly difficult circumstances.
The Ndebele were semi-nomadic herders until the 1870s when they ran into conflict with the Afrikaner population, also known as the Boers—those of Dutch descent who had settled in southern Africa as farmers. The Afrikaners were either demanding land from the Ndebele or requiring that they pay taxes on land use. The Ndebele initially refused. By 1882, the Afrikaners cut off the Ndebele supply to food, burned their villages and killed many of their herds until they surrendered. Those that still refused were made indentured laborers for five years, creating tremendous upheaval.
In 1923, the government allowed the Ndebele to purchase limited farmlands but no other provisions. While the Ndebele had been used to living on their ancestral grazing land, they were now limited to faraway farmland. By 1975, under the apartheid regime, the KwaNdebele homeland was established by the government as a place for the Ndebele to reside. It was very far from their indigenous home.
The government promised to provide running water and electricity and a factory so the Ndebele could earn a living. They received none of these things. Yet, beadwork and muralwork began to flourish. Why would art flourish at a time when the Ndebele could scarcely access the basic necessities to live?
During this time of forced racial segregation, one of the most popular symbols painted on walls and beaded into unmarried girl’s skirts was lights. One Ndebele painter was asked why she had painted abstract lights in the form of triangles on the mud walls of her compound. She replied “I give my home lights as it has no lights.”
Images of modernity like electricity provided Ndebele women access to the things they were promised but never received. In this sense, the depiction of electricity was seen as an empowering way to claim modern amenities, at least symbolically, during the harsh rule under the apartheid system.
A girl’s apron (isephephetu) is beaded by her mother and gifted when she completes her initiation. The images, like lights, houses, and airplanes, demonstrates her mother’s hopes and dreams for her daughter even under the oppressive apartheid regime.
After marriage, the woman adopts an ijocolo, an apron she beads herself. She is no longer beading her dreams but rather she depicts what she has and what she’s proud of. In one example, the artist has beaded a view of her compound, a place that she built and presides over. A typical compound is made of mud, white washed and painted with murals and holds sleeping quarters, a kitchen, corrals for animals, and a common area.
Married Woman’s Apron (itjogolo or ijogolo), Ndebele peoples: These decorated aprons were gifts from the groom’s family to his wife, and signified her new role in society.
Secrecy, Security, and Memory
The power of many artworks comes from their perceived ability to protect or guard an individual and to jog a memory or memorialize an individual. While museum displays usually privilege the visual and visible, for some African objects, what is not seen is often the most powerful or significant. That which is concealed, like the inside of an amulet, evokes mystery.
Throughout the Horn of Africa and North Africa, the most potent objects are often located centrally on the body, yet concealed. The power of the amulet comes from the fact that its casing is visible at the neck but its contents are hidden. The viewer is not privy to the particular amuletic abilities inside the leather case and therefore, must keep himself/herself on guard.
In Ethiopia, amulets made of square leather cases are used by a number of different ethnic groups, including the Argobba, the Oromo, the Amhara, and the Tigrean and are worn around the neck by Muslims, Christians, and traditional practitioners alike. In Ethiopia, like in many regions of North Africa, amulets play a major role in protecting their wearers from the evil eye. Those that possess the ability to inflict harm through the gaze are known by the Amharic term buda. Historically, buda referred to an artisan class who engaged full-time in metalsmithing, tanning, or pottery. Buda are regarded with suspicion because they usually do not own land, they do not work the land as farmers, and they do not participate in animal husbandry.
An amulet tied on a piece of string is often the first adornment that a newborn receives. In later childhood, amulets may be tied around the neck when someone enters the marketplace, a place fraught with strangers. Young women are thought to be more susceptible to the attention of buda because their youth and their use of beauty aids (like perfumes, nail polish, and an array of jewelry) make them excessively beautiful and cause jealousy in those with the evil eye.
Among the Muslim Argobba, stitched leather pouches filled with Qur’anic formulas written on parchment are designed to arrest destructive supernatural power by reflecting the evil eye of foreigners, metal workers, or evil spirits. Among the Christian Amhara, leather cases filled with medicinal herbs and made for them by low class priests of the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, are used in order to ward off the gaze of buda.
In a similar sense, some art forms also conceal powerful substances or medicines. Among the Yoruba, a cloth masquerade called Egungun, for example, has a medicine bundle tied up under its folds that activates the spirits of ancestors when it is danced. This bundle would be removed before an Egungun costume would be sold or traded.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, the Kongo diviners used figurative sculptures called Nkisi to act as supernatural witnesses, judges, and vindicators. Sacred unseen substances placed in a cavity in the abdomen functioned as the activating and animating materials of the sculpture’s spirit.
Power Figure (Nkisi Nkondi), Kongo peoples:Nkisi nkondi figures are highly recognizable through an accumulation of pegs, blades, nails or other sharp objects inserted into its surface.
Male Reliquary Guardian Figure (Fang peoples): These figures look calm and contemplative, but also display real strength and vitality in their muscular forms.
Remembering
Many cultures in Africa also employ objects to remember and interpret the past. With limited writing systems on the continent prior to colonial rule, objects could act as historical documents used by oral historians. Just as history books present a particular perspective, oral interpretations should also be thought of as fluid and dynamic.
In the Luba Kingdom of the Democratic Republic of Congo, oral historians and diviners touch a memory board called “lukasa” to help them recount the history of the royal lineage. History was traditionally performed—not read.
Among the Kuba in the Democratic Republic of Congo we have an actual portrait sculpted some time after the king’s reign in the late 18th century. This figure, called an ndop, depicts king Mishe miShyaang maMbul with the specific pattern and drum affiliated with his rule. This memorialization of the king was used by court historians to interpret events from the past associated with his rule.
A more modern means of memorialization is the photograph, a form of portraiture that became popular in urban centers throughout Africa by the mid-twentieth century. The photographer, Seydou Keita for instance, created black and white images of the middle class in his portrait photography studio in Bamako Mali.
The colonial period had a profound effect on the arts of Africa. With the introduction of Christianity and the further spread of Islam in the nineteenth and twentieth century, many traditional art practices associated with indigenous religion declined. Also, as new trade items entered the local economy, handmade objects like ceramic vessels and fiber baskets were replaced by commercial containers. As African artists began catering to a new market of middle-class urban Africans and foreigners, many new art-making practices took their place. Self-taught and academically trained painters, for example, began depicting their experiences with colonialism and independence. As fine artists, their work is largely secular in content and meant to be displayed in galleries or modern homes. Today, many contemporary artists are influenced by tradition-based African art forms just as European avant-garde artists like Pablo Picasso, André Derain, and Georges Braque looked to abstract African sculpture as a source of inspiration for their artwork in the late 1880s.
See also:
Documentary film by Christopher Roy: “Art as Verb in Africa: The Masks of the Bwa Village of Boni, Burkina Faso.”
African art and the effects of European contact and colonization
by Dr. Peri Klemm
Queen Mother Pendant Mask (Iyoba), 16th century, Edo peoples, Court of Benin, Nigeria, ivory, iron, copper, 23.8 x 12.7 x 8.3 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Portuguese explorers with beards and hats flanked by mudfish (detail), Queen Mother Pendant Mask (Iyoba), 16th century, Edo peoples, Court of Benin, Nigeria, ivory, iron, copper, 23.8 x 12.7 x 8.3 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Early encounters with Europeans were often recorded in African art. Look closely at the top of the mask above (and detail, left). Do you see faces? These represent Portuguese explorers with beards and hats (flanked by mudfish) who visited the Benin Kingdom along the west coast of Africa in the late 1400s. These explorers began to collect ivory which they referred to as “white gold.”
Saltcellars like the one below, commissioned by Portuguese officers and exquisitely produced by West African carvers, held precious table salt. They would have been taken back to Portugal to be displayed in curiosity cabinets. Today their carvings serve as a record of the introduction of guns, Christianity, and European commodities to West Africa.
By the 1880s European powers were interested in Africa’s resources, particularly mineral wealth and forests. Today, Africa is divided into 53 independent countries but many scholars argue that the boundaries that separate these countries are really artificial. They were drawn by Europeans at the Berlin Conference in 1884-85 without a single African present. They did not divide the continent by cultural or tribal region, but instead created borders based on their own interests. The problems this created—separating families, language groups, trading partners, pastoralists from watering holes, etc.—are still very much at issue today.
Lidded Saltcellar, Sierra Leone, Sapi-Portuguese, 15th-16th century, ivory, 29.8 cm high (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Movements in African History and Art
African cultures never existed in isolation—there was always movement, trade, and the exchange of ideas. And logically African art is dynamic and has changed in form, function, and meaning over time. Nevertheless, in the Western art market and in academia, there exists the concept of “traditional” African art. Usually this refers to “indigenous art traditions that were viable and active prior to the colonization of Africa by European powers in the late nineteenth century. Implicit in the use of the word traditional is the assumption that the art which it describes is static and unchanging.”[1] Many collectors and museum professionals place far greater value on African objects created prior to colonization. For them, pre-colonial objects have an aura of an untainted, timeless past when artists only made artworks for their own communities unaffected by the outside world. These objects are too often seen in opposition to work produced today using Western materials and conventions by artists who are engaged in a global discourse and who make works of art to be sold.
Lidded Saltcellar (detail), Sierra Leone, Sapi-Portuguese, 15th-16th century, ivory, 29.8 cm high (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
In reality, some African art has always functioned as a commodity and artists have always drawn inspiration and materials from outside sources. While many auction houses and art museums clearly differentiate between “traditional” African art created prior to the colonial period and artwork created during and after colonization, African art historians are beginning to dispel this simplistic division and instead, ask their audiences to recognize the continuity and dynamism of African art. Looking closer, scholars find that specific historical moments had a profound affect on African communities and their art. During the slave trade and colonization, for example, some artists created work to come to terms with these horrific events—experiences that often stripped people of their cultural, religious and political identities.
The Transatlantic Slave Trade
One of the most damaging experiences for many ethnic groups in Africa was the transatlantic slave trade. While slavery had long existed in Africa, the transatlantic slave trade constituted a mass movement of peoples over four and a half centuries to colonies in North and South America. Ten million people were taken to labor on cotton, rum, and sugar plantations in the new world. Slavery coupled with the colonial experience had a profound effect on Africa and still causes strife. For example, Ghana has over 80 ethnic groups and during slave raids, different groups were pitted against one another—those living near the coast were involved in slave raiding in the interior in exchange for Portuguese and Dutch guns. Territorial disputes, poverty, famine, corruption, and disease increased as a result of the brutality of the slave trade and European colonization.
The Colonial Period
With the collapse of the Atlantic slave trade in the 19th century, European imperialism continued to focus on Africa as a source for raw materials and markets for the goods produced by industrialized nations. Africa was partitioned by the European powers during the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, a meeting where not a single African was present. The result was a continent defined by artificial borders with little concern for existing ethnic, linguistic, or geographic realities.
Colonial Africa in 1913
European nations claimed land in order to secure access to the natural resources they needed to support rapidly growing industrial economies. Once European nations secured African territories, they embarked on a system of governance that enforced the provision of natural resources— with dire consequences for people and the environment.
Resistance to colonial rule grew steadily and between 1950 and 1980, 47 nations achieved independence; but even with independence the problems associated with the slave trade and colonialism remained. The introduction of Christianity and the spread of Islam in the 19th and 20th century also transformed many African societies and many traditional art practices associated with indigenous religions declined. In addition, as imported manufactured goods entered local economies, hand-made objects like ceramic vessels and fiber baskets were replaced by factory-made containers. Nevertheless, one way people made sense of these changes was through art and performance. Art plays a central role, particularly in oral societies, as a way to remember and heal. As African artists began catering to a new market of middle-class urban Africans and foreigners, new art-making practices developed. Self-taught and academically trained painters, for example, began depicting their experiences with colonialism and independence; as fine artists, their work is largely secular in content and meant to be displayed in galleries or modern homes (for example, see the work of Cheri Samba, Jane Alexander, and Tshibumba Kanda-Matulu).
Globalization Today
The diverse and complex systems now at play as a result of globalization are having a profound impact on Africa. Some scholars argue that globalization will have even greater consequences than the slave trade and colonization in terms of population movement, environmental impact, and economic, social and political changes. Whatever the result, these stresses will be chronicled by the continent’s many brilliant artists.
[1] Judith Perani and Fred T. Smith, The Visual Arts of Africa: Gender, Power, and Life Cycle Rituals (Prentice Hall, 1998) p. xvii.
View of archaeological and ethnographic collections (Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford) (photo: Jorge Royan, CC: BY-SA 3.0)
When early European explorers brought back souvenirs from their trips to the African continent they were regarded as curiosities and they didn’t find a home in art museums for centuries. Instead, these objects became part of natural history museums—along with fossilized remains, flora and fauna, and purely utilitarian objects. They were considered the man-made material remains of a culture. Clouded by the framework of Social Darwinism in the 19th century and other beliefs that justified racial hierarchies, peoples of African, Pacific, and Native American descent were regarded as less civilized, even less human. Attitudes about their art were also determined by pre-conceived ideas about race and therefore, their creations were not categorized as “Art” in Euro-American sense.
Plank Mask (Nwantantay), 19th-20th century, Bwa peoples, wood, pigment, fiber, 182.9 x 28.2 x 26 cm, Burkina Faso (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
By the early 1900s however, these same objects that were initially regarded as artifacts of material culture, began to be exhibited in Western art museums and galleries as “art.” The objects themselves had not changed, but there was a shift in the attitudes and assumptions about what constituted a work of art.
To historicize this issue more, we can divide the history of the display and reception of African art into four periods. In the eighteenth century, objects like the ones illustrated here would likely be housed in a “curiosity cabinet”—in a private family parlor where trinkets and novelties acquired over generations, often while traveling, were displayed. The artist, culture, and function of these objects was not usually recorded or regarded as significant. By the nineteenth century, many of these curiosity cabinet collections were donated first to natural history museums where they were categorized and classified in the name of science along with flora, fauna, and skeletal remains. By the twentieth century, some of these same works were exhibited in fine art galleries and museums. Over time, African art has become widely collected and ever more popular.
Seated Figure, terracotta, 13th century, Mali, Inland Niger Delta region, Djenné peoples, 25/4 x 29.9 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Some of the assumptions about what constitutes art is still very much a part of the Western aesthetic system. For example, “high art” is still thought of as painting and sculpture. Because many African artworks served a specific function, Westerners have sometimes not regarded these as art. It is worth remembering, however, that the concept of “art” divorced from ritual and political function, is a relatively recent development in the West. Prior to the 18th century, most artistic traditions around the world were functional as well as aesthetic, and arguments can be made that all art serves social and economic functions. The objects that African artists create—while useful—embody aesthetic preferences and may be admired for their form, composition and invention.
Detail, Man’s Prestige Cloth, early 20th century, Akan peoples, Asante group, silk and cotton, 289.6 x 172.7 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
Eighteenth-century theories
In Eighteenth-century Europe, philosophers and critics constructed a definition of “art” in which the object was unique, complex, irreplaceable, inspired by the natural world, and with the exception of architecture, non-functional. In contrast, non-Western art was viewed as not unique, simply produced, replaceable, abstract, and utilitarian. Therefore, Non-Western art was not considered to be art.
Nineteenth-century theories
Nineteenth century notions of art were redefined by theories of cultural evolution. Social Darwinism was used to support the claim that all cultures progress along an evolutionary ladder. Western culture was seen as the most advanced and inherently superior. Societies in Africa were viewed as more primitive, a state of being from which modern Western society evolved. Franz Boas in 1927 in his book Primitive Art shows that cultural evolutionism is seriously flawed. He argued that contemporary societies cannot be arranged on a ladder of “least evolved” or “most advanced.” Nor can their art.
Twentieth-century-cultural relativism and Pablo Picasso
Pablo Picasso, Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, 1907, oil on canvas, 243.9 x 233.7 cm (The Museum of Modern Art)
Anthropologists and art historians came to realize that non-Western cultures should not be judged according to the values of the West, leading to a reevaluation of the nature of “art.” However, it was modern Western artists who brought non-Western objects into the popular imagination as works of art worthy of aesthetic consideration. Looking for a new way to represent modernity, artists such as Andre Derain, Amedeo Modigliani, and Pablo Picasso turned to non-Western art for stylistic inspiration. We see this in Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (above). The women’s faces on the right of the canvas have been painted as masks inspired by African artworks Picasso observed on his trip to the Trocadero Museum in Paris in 1907:
All alone in that awful museum with masks, dolls made by the redskins, dusty manikins. Les Demoiselles d’Avignon must have come to me that very day, but not at all because of the forms; because it was my first exorcism painting — yes absolutely!…The masks weren’t just like any other pieces of sculpture. Not at all. They were magic things. But why weren’t the Egyptian pieces or the Chaldean? We hadn’t realized it. ‘Those were primitive, not magic things. The Negro pieces were mediators. They were against everything — against unknown, threatening spirits. I always looked at fetishes. I understood; I too am against everything. I understood what the Negroes used their sculpture for. Why sculpt like that and not some other way? After all, they weren’t Cubists! Since Cubism didn’t exist.
In the quote above, Picasso recognized that the African and Amerindian artists whose work he saw at the museum in Paris were deliberately using abstraction. He doesn’t focus on why they chose this style but he adopts it, none-the-less, to pursue his own expressive interests. For contemporary avant-garde artists, African art offered abstraction as a strategy for the representation of modernity. The quote also tells us that Picasso, like many Western collectors, didn’t know much about the function, culture, or history of African objects and he seems to have focused on their purely formal properties. Picasso, Piet Mondrian, Constantin Brancusi, Georges Braque and other modernists helped Western viewers to see these objects as “art” but the cultural meanings of these works remained opaque. However, over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, scholars began to question social Darwinism and seek out indigenous interpretations of the form and function of objects.
Today, many contemporary African artists are influenced by tradition-based African art (see for example, El Anatsui). African arts played a central role in their communities, whether to communicate royalty, sacrality, inner virtues, aesthetic interests, genealogy, or other concerns. As the art historian Robert Farris Thompson has argued for the Yoruba, African art is used to make things happen, it is efficacious and necessary for events like rituals, masquerades, and life cycle transitions to successfully occur.
Figure from a Reliquary Ensemble: Seated Female, 19th–early 20th century, Fang peoples, Okak group, Gabon or Equatorial Guinea, wood, metal, 64 x 20 x 16.5 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
The appreciation of African art in the Western world has had an enormous impact not only on the development of modern art in Europe and the United States, but also on the way African art is presented in a Western museum setting. Although objects from Africa were brought to Europe as early as the fifteenth century, it was during the colonial period that a greater awareness of African art developed. The cultural and aesthetic milieu of late-nineteenth-century Europe fostered an atmosphere in which African artifacts, once regarded as mere curios, became admired for their artistic qualities.
African sculpture, in particular, served as a catalyst for the innovations of modernist artists. Seeking alternatives to realistic representation, Western artists admired African sculpture for its abstract conceptual approach to the human form. For example, the powerfully carved Fang reliquary figure (right), with its bulbous and fluid forms, attracted the attention of the painter André Derain and the sculptor Jacob Epstein, both of whom once owned the sculpture.
Increasing interest among artists and their patrons gradually brought African art to prominence in the Western art world. Along with this growing admiration for African art, the aesthetic preferences of collectors and dealers resulted in the development of distinctions between art and artifact. Masks and figurative statuary in wood and metal—genres and media most readily assimilated into established categories of fine art in the West—were preferred over more overtly utilitarian objects, such as vessels or staffs. Masks and figurative statuary are more commonly found in western and central Africa. The legacy of early Western taste, with its emphasis on sculptural forms such as masks and figures, continues to inform most museum collections of African art.
As African art became more widely appreciated in the West, scholars began to study both its stylistic diversity and the meanings that African artifacts hold for their makers. Our understanding of African art has been shaped by the work of anthropologists and art historians, many of whom have spent considerable time doing research in Africa on specific cultural traditions. African scholars are also undertaking research into their own heritage. Their sustained commentaries have led to new information and insights, providing a better understanding of the complex cultural meanings embodied in art. At the same time, scholars today recognize that interpreting the creation, form, and use of African art is an inexact science, as meanings and functions shift over time and across regions.
The Benin “Bronzes”: a story of violence, theft, and artistry
by Dr. Kristen Laciste
Plaques from Benin City on display at the British Museum (photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
In Ryan Coogler’s 2018 film, Black Panther, the supervillain Erik Killmonger goes to a fictional museum—The Museum of Great Britain. While there, he meets with the curator of African art. Killmonger challenges the curator on her introduction of one of the African objects, asserting that “it was taken by British soldiers in Benin, but it’s from Wakanda [a fictional African nation in the film], and it’s made of vibranium [a fictional metal].” He further astonishes the curator when he casually says that he will “take it off [her] hands.” The curator declares, “These items aren’t for sale.” Killmonger then asks: “How do you think your ancestors got these? You think they paid a fair price? Or did they take it, like they took everything else?”
This exchange points to an actual moment in Britain’s colonization of West Africa: the violent destruction and looting of Benin City, the capital of the Kingdom of Benin (currently, Benin City is the capital of Edo State in present-day southern Nigeria).
During the 1897 attack, the British stole an estimated 10,000 objects made of copper alloy (plaques and other artworks), carved and uncarved ivory, works made of wood and coral, and human remains (such as skulls and teeth). Today, these objects are known collectively and loosely as the Benin “Bronzes,” and are displayed or stored globally in museums and galleries, private and family collections, and other institutions. [1] Originally, the plaques were displayed in the audience courtyard of the Oba’s (king’s) palace. The plaques were commissioned and created during the reign of two kings, Oba Esigie and his son, Oba Orhogbua. Sometime during the 17th century, the plaques were taken down. The British found them in an otherwise empty building in the Oba’s compound during the invasion of the city.
The violent sacking and pillaging of Benin City, (usually referred to as the Benin Expedition or the Punitive Expedition of 1897), had been framed in British newspaper articles of the time as a justified act of retaliation in response to another episode: the Phillips Expedition.
In June 1896, the Niger Coast Protectorate (NCP) appointed James Robert Phillips as its Deputy Commissioner and Consul. The British claimed Benin City was within the NCP’s domain, and tried multiple times (beginning in 1862) to get the reigning Oba (king) to sign a trade treaty that would give the British access to commodities in the area. In March 1892, the king at the time, Oba Ovonramwen, signed a trade treaty with the British. Marking the treaty with an ‘X’, it is unclear to what extent Oba Ovonramwen understood the conditions of the treaty, as multiple individuals served as translators.
Ultimately, NCP officials regarded Oba Ovonramwen as an obstacle to British access to trade commodities such as palm kernels, as they perceived that the king was not fulfilling his part of the agreement. To force Oba Ovonramwen to comply with the conditions of the trade treaty (which were far more advantageous to the British), Phillips requested permission from the British government to send an armed force to Benin City. In an effort to have his request fulfilled, he added that the vast amounts of ivory in Benin City would help to pay for the costs of the armed force.
After this request was denied by the Foreign Office, Phillips led (without permission) an expedition of nine British men and an estimated 200–250 carriers in January 1897. [2] When Phillips’ party reached Gwato, they received warnings that any white man who approached Benin City would be killed. Phillips’ party was on their way to Benin City during the Ague festival, or festival of yams. Since the Ague festival required that the Oba refrain from certain practices, such as meeting with foreigners, he was restricted from receiving the Phillips’ party. [3] Not heeding the warnings, the Phillips’ expedition continued with their mission. All of the British participants, except for two, were killed. It is unclear how many carriers were also killed. [4]
This incident, known as the Phillips Expedition, has been framed as the main impetus for the violence perpetrated by the British soon after. However, a few months after Oba Ovonramwen signed the trade treaty in 1892, NCP officials had expressed their desire to depose him. Accusing the king of hindering trade with the British, NCP officials wanted to be rid of Oba Ovonramwen nearly five years before the Phillips Expedition. NCP officials perceived that the Oba’s authorization of human sacrifices and other practices (which the British referred to as “fetishes” or “juju”) caused certain commodities to be taxed heavily or to be restricted from being traded. The British would use the existence of human sacrifice as another reason to justify their attack on Benin City. [5] The ambush of Phillips and his party (it is unclear how many non-British participants were injured and killed) gave the British a justification to finally remove Oba Ovonramwen and to destroy Benin City.
Reginald Kerr Granville, Interior of King’s compound burnt during fire in the siege of Benin City, with three British officers of the Punitive Expedition [from left, Captain C.H.P. Carter 42nd, F.P. Hill, unknown], seated with bronzes laid out in foreground, 1897, photograph, 16.5 x 11.5 cm (Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford University)
The Punitive Expedition at Benin City
Newspapers informed the British public about the Phillips Expedition days after it occurred, and reported that a punitive expedition was a likely response. On January 13, 1897, Vice Admiral Harry Rawson was appointed to lead an immense force to Benin City: an estimated 1,400 soldiers and 2,500 carriers, along with NCP staff, medics, and scouts. [6]
The Punitive Expedition of 1897 took place between February 9 to 27. During this 3-week campaign, the British machine-gunned, bombarded, and torched villages and towns, and indiscriminately massacred countless Edo people, the inhabitants of the Kingdom of Benin (and present-day Edo State). It is unknown what the death toll was. On February 18, the British took Benin City. They destroyed buildings, homes, and palaces, desecrated sacred sites, and blew up a sacred tree. The British believed that they were cleansing the city and breaking the power associated with “fetishes” or “juju” through these acts of demolition and vandalization. During their attack, the British also looted the wide range of objects referred to as the Benin “Bronzes.”
Dan Hicks, Curator of World Archaeology at the Pitt Rivers Museum, reminds us that besides taking objects from Benin City, the British also took photographs. In one of the most well-known and circulated photographs from this expedition, we see six white men sitting among a massive array of looted objects. In the foreground, we see a pile of elephant tusks (uncarved ivory), a bowl, bells, statues of leopards and people, and other objects (likely a stool and jugs or jars). In the middle ground, the men sit comfortably (several look at the camera). The man to the far right holds a statue of a head against his right leg. Behind the men is a large pile of loot (numerous elephant tusks) and perhaps debris from the destruction of the city. The background is blurry, but people can be seen underneath the roof of a building. Slightly towards the right of the roof, a copper alloy-casted snake appears to slither down.
Oba Ovonramwen escaped during the invasion of Benin City, but surrendered himself to the British in August 1897. He was put on trial for the killing of Phillips and his party, but was not found guilty. However, six other chiefs were convicted. [7] Oba Ovonramwen was exiled to Calabar, where he lived until his death in 1914.
The Punitive Expedition at Benin City was not an isolated incident, as other punitive expeditions were led by the British in present-day Nigeria (Brohemie, 1894; Brass, 1895; Ediba, 1896; Agbor, 1896; and Cross River, 1896). These expeditions were also characterized by the burning of villages and towns, the desecration of sacred spaces, the displacement and murder of Indigenous peoples, and overthrow or murder of local chiefs or kings seen as impediments to British control. The Punitive Expedition at Benin City should be understood not as an anomaly, but as part of a recurring pattern in which the British used violent means to conquer lands that they claimed for themselves and to terrorize and subdue their inhabitants.
Display and interpretation of Benin “Bronzes”
Within months of the Punitive Expedition at Benin City, some of the stolen loot was displayed in various museums in London. For example, 300 plaques were loaned to the British Museum and exhibited. Charles Hercules Read and Ormonde Maddock Dalton, the Keeper and Senior Assistant in the British Museum’s Department of British and Medieval Antiquities and Ethnography respectively, praised the beauty and sophistication of the plaques. Regarding them as works of art, Read and Dalton acknowledged that their makers possessed remarkable experience, knowledge, and technical skill on par with Italian Renaissance artists. Similarly, Felix von Luschan, Assistant Director at the Königliches Museum für Völkerkunde in Berlin, promoted the metalwork and ivory as art. He invoked the highly-esteemed, skilled craftsmanship associated with the Italian Renaissance sculptor and goldsmith, Benvenuto Cellini, to describe the casting employed. However, in spite of their great admiration for the Benin art and material culture, Read and Dalton posited that the fabrication of the plaques could not have been made by the contemporary Edo people, whom they described as “barbarous.” [8] Like other British contemporaries, Read and Dalton perceived Benin City to be in a state of “degeneration.” [9]
Based on the representations of Europeans (including their manner of dress and weapons) on the plaques, Read and Dalton asserted that they were made in the middle of the 16th century, and speculated (incorrectly) that the Portuguese taught or helped the Edo to create these works. [10] Attributing the Benin works to the Portuguese reflects racist attitudes that deny the Edo as the rightful creators of their own art and material culture. Ese Vivian Odiahi, who has conducted interviews with members of the guild of casters, reminds us that casting is an “indigenous art” of the Kingdom of Benin, and the earliest guild of casters can be traced back to the reign of Oba Oguola in the 13th century. [11]
Returning the Benin “Bronzes”
Calls for the return of the Benin “Bronzes” have been issued since 1936, when Oba Akenzua II made the first formal request to the British Museum. G.M. Miller instructed the British Museum to return to Oba Akenzua II three items that he had loaned previously: “two coral crowns and a coral bead garment.” [12] Today, museums, galleries, and other institutions that have Benin “Bronzes” in their collections are grappling with what to do with them in the face of mounting diplomatic pressures, especially within the last decade, to repatriate or restitute them. Dan Hicks, who is working to return the Benin “Bronzes” in the Pitt Rivers Museum, makes clear, “the arrival of loot into the hands of western curators, its continued display in our museums and its hiding-away in private collections, is not some art-historical incident of ‘reception’, but an enduring brutality that is refreshed every day that an anthropology museum like the Pitt Rivers opens its doors.” [13]
Prince Gregory Akenzua, one of the great-grandsons of Oba Ovonramwen, asserts, “[the] artwork can be said to represent the history of the Benin people for centuries. It was taken from us. It was like ripping pages out of our history.” [14]
Footnotes
[1] The Benin “Bronzes” is a misnomer, as the items said to be created from bronze are actually copper alloy, made with varying amounts of copper, tin, and zinc. Bronze is an alloy of copper and tin, while brass is an alloy of copper and zinc.
[2] While Phillips’ request to lead an armed expedition to Benin City was rejected, Paddy Docherty points out that the officers in the party still carried revolvers with them. However, Phillips instructed them to conceal these weapons. See Docherty, Blood and Bronze: the British Empire and the Sack of Benin (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2022), pp. 147.
[3] For more on the Ague festival, see Kathy Curnow, “The art of fasting: Benin’s Ague ceremony,” African Arts, volume 30 (1997), pp. 46–53. Also see Barnaby Phillips, Loot: Britain and the Benin Bronzes (London: Oneworld Publications, 2021), pp. 52–53.
[4] Dan Hicks states that “initial press reports stated that all nine white men had been killed, along with 250 carriers,” but points out that “claims that ‘more than 200 carriers were killed’ are not clearly substantiated by documentary record.” See Hicks, The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution (London: Pluto Press, 2020), pp. 92.
[5] Barnaby Phillips notes that the first mention of human sacrifice in Benin City comes from a Portuguese account in 1538, and that succeeding European accounts take a morbid interest in it or do not mention it at all. See Phillips (2021), pp. 28–31, 35–37. Prince Edun Akenzua, one of the great grandsons of Oba Ovonramwen, wrote in an article in 1960 that the practice of human sacrifice was “indeed reprehensible, but because it was so much a part of the religion of old Benin, it could not be so easily dismissed.” Akenzua, quoted in Phillips (2021), p. 37. Originally published as Edun Akenzua, “Benin, 1897; A Bini’s View,” Nigeria Magazine, volume 65 (1960), pp. 177–90.
[6] Hicks (2020), p. 110.
[7] Dan Hicks states that all six chiefs were executed. See Hicks (2020), p. 131. However, Paddy Doherty says that three were executed, two committed suicide, and one died before the trial. See Docherty (2022), p. 197.
[8] Charles Hercules Read and Ormonde Maddock Dalton, “Works of art from Benin City,” The Journal of the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain and Ireland, volume 27 (1898), p. 371.
[9] Read and Dalton (1898), p. 366. For more on the concept of degeneration in relation to the interpretation of the Benin “Bronzes,” see Annie E. Combes, “Ethnography, popular culture and institutional power: narratives of Benin culture in the British Museum, 1897–1992,” Studies in the History ofArt, volume 47 (1996), pp. 142–57.
[10] Read and Dalton (1898), pp. 373. Dan Hicks also notes that other people, including Felix von Luschan, proposed “Egyptian, Arab, or even Etruscan connections.” See Hicks (2020), p. 187.
[11] Ese Vivian Odiahi, “The Origin and Development of the Guild of Bronze Casters of Benin Kingdom up to 1914,” AFRREV IJAH: An International Journal of Arts and Humanities, volume 6, number 1 (2017), pp. 178–79.
[12] Hicks (2020), p. 196.
[13] Hicks (2020), p. 137.
[14] Prince Gregory Akenzua, quoted in an interview in 2019 with Barnaby Phillips. See Phillips (2021), p. 159.
Benin art: patrons, artists, and current controversies
by Dr. Kathryn Wysocki Gunsch
States of the Bight of Benin Interior c. 1580, courtesy of Henry B. Lovejoy, African Diaspora Maps Ltd., (CC BY 4.0)
In the age of social media, nearly everyone can present an idealized version of their real lives to the world. In the past, however, only the wealthiest and most powerful could afford to shape their image for the public. During the sixteenth century, the kings of Benin (in present-day Nigeria), reigned over nearly two million subjects and commanded a feared military force, but they also faced internal political problems that threatened the throne.
The Kingdom of Benin was founded around the year 900, but it reached the height of its power in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries as a result of the conquests of new territories by two kings —Oba Ewuare and his son Oba Ozolua (Oba means “king”).
The Obas of Benin amassed great wealth by controlling trade routes reaching from the river Niger in the East to the western border with the kingdom of Dahomey. Taxes on pepper, ivory, and enslaved persons, and annual tribute payments from conquered lands in their expanding empire, also increased the wealth of the Kingdom.
Royal art from this period (and from a slightly later time of renewed wealth and power in the eighteenth century), was designed to broadcast and strengthen dynastic power. Benin court art celebrates the prestige of the monarchy to outsiders (like traders and ambassadors), as well as to courtiers who might try to wrest power from the king.
In the early sixteenth century, Oba Esigie successfully consolidated Benin’s power over conquered territories. He took the throne after a civil war with his older brother and soon after defended Benin City from an attack from a neighboring kingdom (Idah). His commissions were designed to address the turmoil of his early reign. Esigie was a brilliant politician, and he commissioned great works of art and new festivals to assert the legitimacy of his reign.
The festival of Ugie Oro
Esigie instituted the festival of Ugie Oro, where high-ranking courtiers process around Benin City striking bronze staffs with a bird on top. The festival refers to the Idah war, when leading courtiers refused to support Esigie in his defense of the city. A bird in a tree en route to the battle prophesied that Esigie and his troops would be defeated. Esigie shot the bird and carried it as his battle standard. When he won the war against the Idah, he instituted the festival to point out that the advice of the courtiers—and the bird—had been nothing more than the empty noise produced by clanging the bronze staffs, pointing out that courtiers’ should defer to the wisdom of the king.
Artist Unidentified, Staff showing a bird of prophesy, 19th century, Copper alloy (Robert Owen Lehman Collection, Courtesy Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)
In the plaques he commissioned to ornament his audience hall, Esigie surrounded himself with images of courtiers in processions, including the festival of Ugie Oro, or engaging in other acts of service and praise—reminding them to honor and obey his authority. Today, artworks from the period of Esigie’s reign are among the most celebrated in African art history, combining fascinating narratives on the majesty of the kingdom, luxurious materials, and fine workmanship.
Royal patronage in the 18th and 19th centuries
Throne stool of Oba Eresoyen, 1735-50, Kingdom of Benin, Nigeria, brass, 40 x 40.5 cm (Ethnological Museum of the National Museums in Berlin – Preußischer Kulturbesitz)
Changes in Benin art are tightly intertwined with the changing fortunes of the kingdom, because the Oba was historically the primary patron for all artwork in bronze and ivory. In the beginning of the eighteenth century, Benin recovered from a series of succession struggles and wars that weakened the court and devastated its finances. Oba Akenzua I and his successor, Oba Eresoyen, strengthened the king’s role and instituted new traditions and art forms to signal their regained power.
Akenzua and Eresoyen ushered in a period of renewed wealth and political power for the kingdom that continued into the 19th century. Akenzua and Eresoyen compared themselves to Ozolua and Esigie, starting the tradition of viewing Ozolua and Esigie as two of the most important kings in Benin history.
Oba Eresoyen was a major patron of the bronze-casting guild, and commissioned an elaborate copy of a bronze state stool owned by Oba Esigie—metaphorically connecting the two reigns. Eresoyen is also known as a patron of the ivory guild, and may have introduced the intricately carved tusk for memorial altars that first appear in the eighteenth century.
On memorial altars, ten to sixty tusks were displayed on top of brass commemorative heads. The tusk held in the Berlin Ethnographic Museum, is one of the oldest known. We see an Oba, his arms supported by attendants, placed in the center of the tusk, the most visible position. Surrounding this central triad are figures relating to the dynasty of great Obas—including two Portuguese men on horseback that refer to the reigns of Ozolua and Esigie—and motifs representing leading courtiers and priests serving the king.
Benin ancestral altars (left), photographed in 1936 (Etnografiska museet, Stockholm) and an altar tusk (right) 1888 – 97, Kingdom of Benin, Nigeria, ivory, 111.8 x 31.5 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
The artists
The Igun Eronmwon (brass-caster’s guild), and the Igbesanmwan (ivory and wood carvers’ guild), are responsible for all the art made for the Oba. Until the 20th century, royal artists were not allowed to make pieces for other clients without special permission. Membership in the royal artists’ guilds is hereditary—even today. The head of each guild inherits his position from his father. He is responsible for receiving commissions from the king, overseeing the design of the work, and assigning parts of the project to different artists. For this reason, nearly all historical Benin art is made in a workshop style, with individual artists contributing pieces of the whole.
While the Igun Eronmwon and Igbesanmwan guilds are separate, they often make artworks that are displayed together. Commemorative heads made for the memorial altar of a king (see ancestral altars above), for example, combine a cast-bronze head with a carved ivory tusk rising from the top, just as an ivory leopard may be finished with inlaid bronze spots.
Like other artworks taken from their place of origin by colonial occupiers, artworks from Benin are part of a public conversation on cultural patrimony and the ethics of collecting. The provenance (ownership history), of Benin artworks in Europe and America usually includes a moment in 1897 when Benin City was invaded by British soldiers and a part of the royal treasury was claimed by the British state as spoils of war. In the following years, other artworks were taken from Benin by individual soldiers, or pillaged from the palace and sold.
Today, the palace in Benin City and the Nigerian government both claim ownership of Benin art held in foreign collections. Museums and private owners have provided a spectrum of responses. In 2014, British citizen Mark Walker returned two Benin artworks he inherited from his grandfather, a soldier in the 1897 invasion, to reigning Oba Erediauwa, because he felt that the Oba was the only rightful owner. The Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) Museum is working to determine how to return a commemorative head to Nigeria, given the competing claims of the palace and the government.
A coalition of European museums that hold the largest collections of Benin art have been meeting with representatives of the palace and the Nigerian government since 2007, and at present plan to collaborate by sharing their collections through loans to a new Nigerian museum built on palace grounds. The public conversation on Benin art weighs the competing ownership claims of the palace and the government, the ethical obligation to respect communities’ rights regarding their cultural patrimony, and the belief that museum collections should present world art to foster cross-cultural understanding.
Dr. Kathryn Wysocki Gunsch, “Benin art: patrons, artists, and current controversies,” in Smarthistory, January 28, 2020, accessed August 23, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/benin-art-patrons/.
Olowe of Ise, veranda post (Yoruba peoples)
by Dr. Christa Clarke
Olowe of Ise, Veranda Post, before 1938, Nigeria, Yoruba peoples, wood, pigment, 180.3 x 28.6 x 35.6 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City). Speakers: Dr. Peri Klemm and Dr. Steven Zucker
In the early twentieth century, a Yoruba ruler commissioned this architectural column from one of the most renowned sculptors in the history of Yoruba art, Olowe of Ise. Born in the nineteenth century in Efon-Alaaye, a famed carving center, Olowe moved as a youth southeast to Ise. There, his artistic reputation was established when he carved a program of architectural sculptures for its king, the Arinjale. Subsequent commissions of architectural sculpture for the palaces of other regional leaders brought Olowe even greater recognition as a master sculptor. Admired by his contemporaries, Olowe’s artistic talent is recalled in oriki, or praise poems, composed in his honor. His accomplishments were also recognized in the West. In 1924, a pair of his palace doors was exhibited in London and acquired for The British Museum.
Olowe created this veranda post, one of several, for the exterior courtyard of a Yoruba palace. Carved from one piece of wood, the composition combines two classic Yoruba icons of power and leadership. The most prominent of these is the equestrian warrior, who is depicted frontally sitting regally on a diminutive horse. He holds a spear and a revolver. The image of the mounted warrior symbolizes the military might needed to form kingdoms. Local leaders adopted this image to validate their rule. At the base of the post, the kneeling female figure is depicted as the dominant form. In Yoruba culture, women are honored as the source of human life and embody ideas of spiritual, political, and economic power. These allegorical representations underscore the wealth and power of the ruler who commissioned the work.
Detail, Olowe of Ise, Veranda Post, before 1938 (Yoruba people, Nigeria), wood, pigment, 180.3 x 28.6 x 35.6 cm (photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Here, as in other examples of African sculpture, proportion and scale are altered and exaggerated to symbolize ideas. The disproportionately large heads represent character, self-control, and motivation. Eyes are large to suggest awareness. Among the Yoruba, the most beautiful people have a gap between their upper front teeth. The woman’s exaggerated breasts symbolize her ability to have children and to nurture them. The woman is represented slightly larger than the warrior, suggesting that she is the essential support. The warrior’s horse, less important than its rider, is depicted as smaller. The subordinate role of the two youths by the woman’s side is suggested by their small scale.
Detail, Olowe of Ise, Veranda Post, before 1938 (Yoruba peoples, Nigeria), wood, pigment, 180.3 x 28.6 x 35.6 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Stylistically, Olowe was very innovative in his composition. He is especially known for the manner in which figures project beyond the immediate boundaries of the sculptural space. Here, instead of the usual Yoruba practice of depicting figures in frontal poses, he sculpted the female figure turning toward the left with the two smaller attendants radiating outward at oblique angles. The compressed style of the upper portion of the column, with its weighty and self-contained equestrian figure, contrasts with the sense of kinetic energy created by the dynamic composition of multiple figures below. The sculpture’s formal complexity is enhanced by its textured surface, with details originally painted in black, white, and royal blue. The deep carving style was well suited to the intense raking sunlight of its original setting just inside an exterior veranda.
Detail, Olowe of Ise, Veranda Post, before 1938 (Yoruba people, Nigeria), wood, pigment, 180.3 x 28.6 x 35.6 cm (photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
The Yoruba, who live in southwestern Nigeria and southern Benin, are a diverse people with a rich cultural and artistic heritage of considerable antiquity. Although they number over 15 million people, the Yoruba embrace an overarching common identity through shared language and history. They trace the origins of both life and civilization to their founding city of Ile-Ife, which was a thriving urban center by the eleventh century. In the centuries that followed, numerous autonomous city-states developed, related through professed descent from Ile-Ife. In general, each city-state was governed by a sacred ruler, whose power was balanced by a council of elders. Artists working for these regional leaders produced a wide range of art forms designed to glorify the status of the king and his court.textured surface, with details originally painted in black, white, and royal blue. The deep carving style was well suited to the intense raking sunlight of its original setting just inside an exterior veranda.
Olowe of Ise, Veranda Post of Enthroned King and Senior Wife
by Deborah Stokes
Olowe of Ise, Veranda Post of Enthroned King and Senior Wife, early 20th century, wood and pigment (Art Institute of Chicago; photo: Dr. Delinda Collier, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
Like sculpture in Medieval Europe often created to embellish architecture, this magnificent work was commissioned for a principal entryway, originally one in a suite of five veranda posts. Hand carved from one sizeable piece of high-density hardwood timber, this work by the renowned Yoruba artist Olowe of Ise originally measured more than five feet high.
He has skillfully created a complex composition comprised of five figural elements on a circular base: the crowned king, his senior wife, and three smaller attendants (one now missing) in the royal household. Portrayals of rulers and their privileged power of earthly and divine authority unite the many global art traditions across time and space.
Master carver
Similar to the systems of Medieval European guilds of craftsmen, 19th and early 20th century Yoruba artistic traditions were maintained by artists working in specialized carving centers throughout the southwest area of Nigeria. “Master carver” designated a person who attained the skills through training and advanced from apprentice to master within a locally established carving center or compound. A carver with exceptional talent often set up a studio on his own, accepted apprentices and assistants, and was commissioned directly.
One great master carver, Olowe of Ise, became a widely celebrated artist for his virtuosity of invention and design developed through the production of a range of notable and important royal commissions in the early 20th century. Born in the town of Ise, according to published accounts, most of his life was spent working in the court center of Ise though he took commissions from other royal patrons over a wide area in the Ekiti region.
Profile (detail), Olowe of Ise, Veranda Post of Enthroned King and Senior Wife (Art Institute of Chicago; photo: Dr. Delinda Collier, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
Signature style
Olowe’s highly original and unique style results from the variety of elements and details that he has made his own and that can be found in many of his published works. His remarkable ability to free the figures from the dense hardwood is unlike any other Yoruba carver. His virtuosity can be seen in the elegant balance of the fully three-dimensional figures in a tiered composition and placed in a variety of poses on a single base.
He treats the heads as a single ovoid form leading the eye to the crowned head of the king (Ogoga) and his attendant queen. The heads project at a diagonal angle that are mounted on highly elongated and slightly forward-bending necks, creating a distinct line down to their squared shoulders. The convention of elongating the figure, head, and neck can be seen in many of Olowe’s carvings, creating a solid “mounting” to visually highlight the importance of the head that holds ase, or the inner spiritual power, dignity, strength, and sacredness of one’s destiny.
Yoruba traditional thought and belief is often made manifest through hieratic proportions. The status of the king’s consort is visually relayed by her physical size. However, it is balanced by the location of the seated king at the center of the post. His crowned head has been positioned so that it would be viewed at eye level in the original veranda setting. His feet are not allowed to touch the earth, a symbol of his transcendent position. His eyes are downcast, introspective, and attentive to the world beyond. He wears a conical beaded crown, signifying the legitimacy of his reign. The crown is decorated with four carved ancestral faces or ‘heads’ with open eyes, a reference to the divine line of descent and spiritual wisdom (ase) it contains.
Conical beaded crown (detail), Olowe of Ise, Veranda Post of Enthroned King and Senior Wife (Art Institute of Chicago; photo: Dr. Delinda Collier, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
The style of the hats with serrated lines can be found in many of Olowe’s works. In traditional Yoruba religious belief, the crown is the key emblem of the power of a sanctified reign, signaling the transformation of the human wearing it into a conduit to the spiritual, ancestral realm. Three small figures, scaled according to culturally-specific status, are at the base: a female who kneels in a gesture of humility and reverence; a standing court messenger identified by his half-shaved head playing a flute announcing the king’s presence; and a third, now missing, standing while holding a large circular fan, emblem of royalty and Osun, the river deity.
Standing court messenger and kneeling female (detail), Olowe of Ise, Veranda Post of Enthroned King and Senior Wife (Art Institute of Chicago; photo: Dr. Delinda Collier, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
Bird at the summit of king’s crown (detail) Olowe of Ise, Veranda Post of Enthroned King and Senior Wife (Art Institute of Chicago; photo: Dr. Delinda Collier, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
The king sits poised, leaning slightly forward, his weight held by his hands on his knees. A bird at the summit of his crown, a sign of transformational abilities and the protection of ancestral mothers, is rendered with an elongated beak that extends down to touch the very center of the beaded crown. Its tail points upward to the head of the standing consort who wears three vertical parallel facial marks with a line running from the left side of the bridge of the nose, identifying lineage to a principal Yoruba family, the Egbas.
She displays a once common practice in the Ekiti area of filing the front teeth as a sign of beauty and rank. Her elaborate hairstyle would reflect one worn for a festival honoring a deity (orisha) or during a chieftaincy installation. On her back, Olowe has replicated the queen’s striking scarification patterns that are associated with her community and high status.
The formidable queen stands erect behind and towering over the king, yet they are visually connected by her hands gently resting on the back of the throne. Beaded coral adornments worn by the king and queen echo the form of their squared shoulders, and other beaded adornments are included, worn by entitlement as a member of the royal household. Traces of blue, red, and white pigments can be seen. They were once most likely prominent, but the colors have faded over time as the work was exposed to the outdoors.
A suite of five architectural posts commissioned from Olowe by the crowned king (Ogoga) of the town of Ikere, in Ekiti state, could be found situated in the principal entry to the local palace veranda and reception courtyard. Three of the major carvings appear to be functional supports, extending to the top of the veranda roof. Two multi-tiered figural posts flank a central geometric form, while two others facing outward represent a senior mother presenting her twins and a royal equestrian. A smaller freestanding equestrian figural group is at the center.
Face and back of the senior wife (detail), Olowe of Ise, Veranda Post of Enthroned King and Senior Wife (Art Institute of Chicago; photo: Dr. Delinda Collier, CC BY-NC-ND 4.0)
Photographed in situ more than two decades later (1958 and 1964), three of the original works had been reinstalled under a newly replaced palace veranda. The enthroned king with his senior wife is repositioned at the center and facing outward toward visiting guests, flanked by the senior mother with twins and the royal equestrian. All three appear to be structural supports. All three are now in American collections.
Olowe of Ise, Veranda Posts in situ, inner courtyard, palace of the Ogoga, king of Ikere. Photos by William Flagg, from John Pemberton, “Art and Rituals for Yoruba Sacred Kings,” Art Institute of Chicago Museum Studies, volume 15, number 2 (1989), pp. 97–174
Global connections
Olowe of Ise was flourishing in southwest Nigeria in the early 20th century, coinciding with the time when early modernism was emerging in the avant-garde circles in Paris studios. African art was displayed in the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris, arriving in the late 19th century as a result of scientific expeditions and colonial conquest.
Constantin Brancusi, King of Kings, c. 1938, wood, 300.7 x 48.3 x 46 cm (The Guggenheim Museum, New York)
Constantin Brancusi would have been inspired by works from francophone colonies, as King of Kings demonstrates. Similar to Olowe’s veranda posts, this work was originally intended to stand in an architectural space, Temple of Meditation, a private sanctuary commissioned in 1933 by the Maharaja Yeshwant Rao Holkar of Indore.
Left: David Adjaye Associates, National Museum of African American History and Culture (photo: Mondoo59, CC BY-SA 4.0); right: upper half (detail), Olowe of Ise, Equestrian veranda post (National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C.; photo: B, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Architect David Adjaye was inspired by the top element of another of Olowe’s veranda posts for his design of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Washington, D.C. Smithsonian Institution. Depicting a notable equestrian leader, the multi-figural veranda post is on long term loan from the Museum of Five Continents, Munich, Germany and installed on the 4th floor.
Commemorative Figure (Lefem), 19th–early 20th century, Bangwa, wood, organic matter, fiber, Cameroon, Grassfields region, 102.2 x 30.2 x 26.4 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
In the various Bangwa chiefdoms of western Cameroon, figurative sculptures, known as lefem, are created to commemorate royal ancestors. These monumental portraits depict the chief, or Fon, as well as other members of the royal family. Commissioned during the lifetime of the chief, the sculptures would be presented publicly after his death, during funeral ceremonies honoring the Fon and marking the installation of his successor. They were displayed in the palace courtyard along with other commemorative portraits of rulers from previous generations. Viewed together, these sculptures document dynastic lines of leadership and serve as visual reminders of the Fon’s legacy.
Details, Commemorative Figure (Lefem), 19th–early 20th century, Bangwa, wood, organic matter, fiber, Cameroon, Grassfields region, 102.2 x 30.2 x 26.4 cm (The Metropolitan Museum of Art)
This dynamic figure of a Bangwa Fon emphasizes the power, wealth, and privilege of his position. The cap he wears represents a type of prestige hat that is woven and decorated with knotted tufts of yarn. Around his neck is an elaborate collar of leopard’s claws, a symbol of the ruler’s strength. The Fon is depicted holding other official insignia of ritual importance. In his right hand is a beaded calabash, a container for palm wine; in his left is a long-stemmed pipe for smoking tobacco. Palm wine and tobacco were believed to have life-giving properties whose consumption reinforced the Fon’s power. The figure’s dynamic stance, with his head turning one way and the lower body another, is unusual in African sculpture. His bent legs, flexed arms, large bulging eyes, and open mouth further suggest that the potent energy of the Fon remains even after his death.
Chair: Rungs with Figurative Scenes (Ngundja), Chokwe peoples, 19th–20th century, wood, brass tacks, and leather, 99.1 x 43.2 x 61.6 cm, Angola (The Metropolitan Museum of Art; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
This chair or throne was one of the principal symbols of the authority of a Chokwe chief. The Chokwe state was founded in the sixteenth century, when nobles from the neighboring Lunda empire migrated to northern Angola and asserted their rule over local peoples. As the state grew in wealth and power, so too did the Chokwe chiefs, who emphasized the divine nature of their ancestry. The political and religious importance of the chiefs was underscored through the creation of lavishly carved utilitarian objects, including staffs, tobacco mortars, combs, and chairs, that served as insignia of rank and prestige.
This chair was modeled on a type of European chair that was imported into the area by Portuguese officials beginning in the seventeenth century. Having previously used caryatid stools as seats of office, Chokwe chiefs adopted the chair as a symbol of their authority because the form was associated with powerful foreigners. Like its European prototype, the Chokwe chair was made from several pieces of wood joined together, rather than a single block of wood typical of African carving traditions.
Detail, Chair: Rungs with Figurative Scenes (Ngundja), Chokwe peoples, 19th–20th century, wood, brass tacks, and leather, 99.1 x 43.2 x 61.6 cm, Angola (The Metropolitan Museum of Art; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Detail, Chair: Rungs with Figurative Scenes (Ngundja), Chokwe peoples, 19th–20th century, wood, brass tacks, and leather, 99.1 x 43.2 x 61.6 cm, Angola (The Metropolitan Museum of Art; photo: Steven Zucker, CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)
Aspects of the chair are European in derivation, such as the leather-covered seat and decorative brass tacks, an imported luxury. However, Chokwe artisans incorporated the style and iconography of their established sculptural traditions. On this example, the backrest is topped on either side by a carved head wearing a chief’s headdress, while in the center, two birds drink from a shared vessel. Rows of figures along the rungs and back splats depict characters and scenes from both everyday and ceremonial life. Here, images of hunting, trade, and domestic activities are juxtaposed with representations of ritual events, such as initiation and masquerades. Together, the scenes describe an ordered and harmonious society over which the chief presides.
Source: Dr. Christa Clarke, “Chair or throne (Chokwe peoples),” in Smarthistory, July 6, 2016, accessed August 17, 2024, https://smarthistory.org/chair-chokwe/.