IJELE: ART EJOURNAL OF THE AFRICAN WORLD ISSN: 1525-447X Issue 5 (2002)

Victoria Delaney

In the exhibition, Western Artists/African Art held at the Museum for African Art in New York in 1994, western artists stated their various responses to what they perceived as African art or material culture, in general. The terms used to describe the art were common to that used in describing the spirit:

“ The art is here for us to appreciate intuitively.” — Nancy Graves.

“. . . on some level these objects create in me a profound longing and deep sense of loss for the mystical power that they represent, and for the cultural unity around that mysticism.” — Eric Fischel

A non-pictorial world, “made up of rhythms, perceptions, hopes, fears, a world I respond to and want inside my work.” — Richard Tuttle[1]

These statements imply multiple meanings with regard to the perceptions and ideology of Africa in the West. They speak to the lack of unity and loss found since religion was replaced by science, and the rise of capitalism. As the surrealist and Pan-Africanist, Aimé Césaire wrote of a conversation between M. Gobineau and M. Caillois and in which: Gobineau states, ‘“The only history is white. “Caillois, in turn, observes: “The only ethnography is white.” It is the West that studies the ethnography of the others, not the “others who study the ethnography of the West.”’[2]

There is the conception that African culture lacks dynamism, remains locked in static time - primitive, pre-historic, with uncanny connections to the mysteries of the spiritual/natural world of pre-capitalism.[3] Following World War I when confidence was waning in Europe, Ferdinand Saussure isolated what semioticians call the synchronic system leaving out the diachronic.[4] The result is a theoretical freeze.[5] Africa, considered, “Third World,” and “underdeveloped,” by the West, is metonymic of a global whole, the already developed, industrialized, “First World.” The West claims authority over history, it is committed to ‘progress’, yet, at the same time, it insists on the immobility of other cultures.

Within the context of the philosophy of colonialism, African identity and resistance have been marked by the persistence of this immobility. Disassociated from its historical context, it is spectacularized through exhibition, both in the name of science and the arts. The writing of Aimé Césaire exposes the violence located within this regime of power and difference:

Wouldn’t it be better not to have needed them [the museum]; that Europe would have done better to tolerate the non-European civilizations at its side, leaving them alive, dynamic, prosperous, whole and not mutilated; that it would have been better to let them develop and fulfill themselves than to present for our admiration, duly labeled, their dead and scattered parts; that anyway, the museum by itself is nothing, that it means nothing, that it can say nothing”(71)?

The conceptualization of Africa, symptomatic of a spirituality associated with the ‘other’, is thought of as superstitious - desired and repelled at the same time, ideologically and symbolically connected to nature, earth, versus its oppositional category culture, civilization; subjected to scientific notions of biological difference, unbridled sexuality, animalistic, racially and/or culturally inferior and childlike in the logic of western man.[6]

Nietzche, said superstition, “is actually a symptom of the Enlightenment,” because “whoever is [ethno] superstitious is always, compared with the religious human being, much more of a person.” Yet Nietzche condemns spirituality as a weakness. He argues that, “spiritual enlightenment is an infallible means for making men unsure, weaker in will, so they are more in need of company and support—for developing the herd animal in man. Spirituality in the masses makes them easier to manipulate, making men smaller and more governable is desired as ‘progress’”[7] On the other hand, Rousseau urges man to retire to nature, to the “noble savage” to discover what “we are in order to escape from the society of man as it existed, because that existence was based on the wrong facts and a distortion of man’s real nature.” One could go on and on, but contrasted to Tuttle’s epiphany, “I respond to and want inside my work,” is a reminder of the European and their offspring’s notion of a loss and an ‘other’ within, necessary to complement the inequities of the ‘civilized’ man chained to modernism. Tuttle refuses to use African “objects” in his work because he says, “I am not a collector, nor do I appropriate.” This is a political statement, a refusal, of sorts, to participate in past injustices associated with Africa, but the pervasive impression of Africa - of nature, uncivilized, primitive, anima - still invades his psyche and is still an appropriation. Olufemi Taiwo describes this conception:

Africa is where Nature, a Hegelian category, rules in its blindest fury in the form of the famine, or the continual recredescence or persistence of disease and pestilence of unknown origins and severe repercussions, or the intertribal worlds that on occasion bring genocide in their wake, or in unrestricted breeding, or you may fill in the blank.[8]

Western modernism, is predicated on a paradox, its difference from the past and yet at the same time, its claim on History. The notion of progress, is implicated with social Darwinism, described by Russian sociologist Jakov A. Novikov as, “the doctrine which regards collective homicide as the cause of the progress of mankind.”[9] At the same time capitalism created a need for a spirit that was elsewhere, associated with indigenous peoples, ideologically projected as inferior yet necessary to supplicate and accentuate the whiteness or culture of the bourgeois aristocrat - the Anglo-American, and the European.[10] There is a secrecy, a con, an invisibility, that perpetuates this power, since the spirit/other is not outside in the social political construction of difference and imagined superiority, but is metonymic - a part, hidden, inside in the myth of the ‘civilized’ white male Amero-European. It is symbiotic and symptomatic - violently destructive for both black and white.

The West needs - relies on the construction of an Other in order to exist. Lacan, an expert in the analysis of the European male psyche, repeatedly stresses that the body is the frame within which the subject apprehends both self and other. I would argue that this also true of the body politic. One does not exist without the other. As Albert Memmi said, the colonizer cannot exist without the colonized. This is why there is a crisis surfacing in the West, indicated by the statements, “Is this the end of history, the end of anthropology, the end of art history?” Once this difference is diffused or threatens to dismember, as the subaltern speaks, the West loses its identity as the ultimate civilizing Subject of History.[11]

The conceptualization of race and difference in Africa, and elsewhere, was conveniently justified with the invention - and purification of the new aristocracy of the nineteenth century - at the same time colonialism escalated in 1880. In Germany, Nietzche wrote (in 1885) that the new aristocracy requires a “physiological purification and strengthening . . . a need of an opposite against which it struggles: preservation must be a dreadfully urgent matter”(Will to Power, 500). This type of language by a German philosopher pre-empts the purification of Germany, fascism, nazism all motivated toward racial purity, in this case pure German-ness. Colonialism played into the construction of the European identity. Some German colonialists even believed they were more German than Germans in the fatherland, which was already infected with Jews. This was also a reaction to modernism which was considered too urban, and too materialistic. Colonialism was meant to preserve specific European culture and identity as well as for economic gain.[12]

Colonialism and its representations of justified subjugation, historically, culturally, and politically, is the subject of this analysis. From the notion that Africa is without history, that the African did not resist during colonialism and decolonization, that colonialism actually benefits what would otherwise be primitive, warlike, tribal societies, to the subjective, psychic results of the seen and not seen, in the imagination of the West and its subsequent production of knowledge.[13] As Kadiatu Kanneh said in African Identites,:

Exploring ‘African-ness’ from the late eighteenth century to the present, from the historical moment when ideas and productions of Africa were fomenting in lasting, violent and traumatic ways, reveals the peculiar tensions and fantasies of the modern world. The immense textual and political energies that have produced ‘Africa’ as knowledge and meaning have also inextricably, formed the discourses of race, sexuality, culture and time that dominate contemporary thought.”[14]

The use of anthropology, archaeology, art history and Western theories do not necessarily suffice, except for a self-critical analysis of Europe and America as the sovereign subject. These forms of analysis, known of in art history as form-versus-content, tend to support superficial, narcissistic, racist discourses that ignore the very active and important intellectual, political and cultural works coming out of Africa and the diaspora. Rather, the use of African philosophy needs to be brought into the universities and political language associated with Africa’s history and culture. The African voice needs to counteract the fiction of its colonial past. As Franz Fanon said, “What is often called the black soul is a white man’s artifact.”[15]

I

In Eurocentrism, Samir Amin contends that, “eurocentrism is a specifically modern phenomenon, it constitutes one dimension of the culture and ideology of the modern world . . .” (7). He argues that it is not the intention or the result of capitalism to become a homogeneous system. Rather it is based on opposition; it is a world-wide expansion that has generated a periphery/center polarization that is impossible to overcome, what Amin calls “the major and most explosive contradiction of our times”(7). It is critical though, that capitalism does not recognize this polarization. This would indicate that capitalism has very real historical limitations. It must assume that it is a system based on, “eternal truths.” As Amin posits, capitalist ideology operates on a two-fold mythic construct, “On the one hand, it amplifies the uniqueness of so-called European history, while on the other hand, it endows the history of other peoples with opposing ‘unique’ traits”(76). Capitalism also, I would argue, lives under the threat of being exposed. The recent war in Afghanistan has brought back what was beginning to be a threat to the myth of the necessity of capital superiority in the west. The accentuating of difference and its subsequent annihilation and eventual replacement with corporate power is a trait of capitalism and is inevitable.

If this is so, which I believe it is, it is also one of the causes of the “end of history themes.” The genesis assumed/adopted by Western Europeans developed a history according to the same origin yet was predicated on differences between peoples. This conception is now being challenged. The Hamitic principle states that Egyptians were racially and linguistically different from Semites and Egyptian peoples (Hamitics) brought civilization to sub-Saharan Africa. This scheme, fit well into an ideology of racial and intellectual superiority according to an essential difference, not according to one and the same origin for all peoples. This difference justified slavery, the partition and colonization of Africa that was integral to capitalism. A consul for the Districts of Mozambique, Sambezia, and Manica and Sofala Territories, for only one example of which there are many, said:

The negro was sent into the world for one end, and for one only---namely manual labor. For this purpose he has been absolutely endowed by nature with power of resistance to the effects of climate and fatigue which probably no other race possesses in equal degree. . . . Why then should the machine which runs so smoothly in the field be transferred to the pulpit or the office to undertake work for which it was never designed?[16]

In the latter part of the nineteenth century domination was justified through the philosophy of social Darwinism based on the inequality of races and put into place with notions of progress and war. Karl Pearson said, “The path of progress is strewn with the wreck of nations; traces are everywhere to be seen of the hecatombs of inferior races, and of victims who found not the narrow way to the greater perfection. Yet these dead peoples are in very truth, the stepping-stones on which mankind has arisen to the higher intellectual and deeper emotional life today.”[17] This philosophy was publicly presented through newspapers and magazines and swayed public opinion that laid the groundwork for the politics and imperialism of the first half of the twentieth century.

The exploitation of Africa included the whole continent no matter which European power was responsible. Between 1933 and 1953 the British mined all of the gold out of Chunya and exported out of the country. Chunya is now destitute.[18] As Walter Rodney stated, “If that was modernism, Africa would have been better off in the bush”(218). On the reserves of southern Africa, Africans were crowded into inadequate land, and were forced to engage in intensive farming, using techniques that were suitable only to shifting cultivation. It was a form of “technical retrogression,” because the land yielded less and less and became destroyed in the process. In countries like Senegal, Niger, and Chad, which were already on the desert, this led to soil impoverishment and encroachment of the desert.(219) “France would have been only a little state in Europe if not for the 75 million in overseas colonies. Seen in this light it is ludicrous to think that Africa was termed, ‘The White Man’s Burden’”(218)[19] As Rodney argues, after World War II, it was Africa that pulled Europe out of its rubble. The economics term of backward and forward linkages, meaning that goods produced or cultivated would be returned to the economy did not happen in Africa. Goods were shipped out and all the profits went out with them. Guinea exported bauxite which was used to make aluminum. Besides all of the products made with aluminum it also stimulated North American hydroelectric power. In Guinea, the colonial bauxite mining left huge holes in the ground.[20] In the United States Ford relied on Africa for rubber without which there would have been very little “progress. “

One of the racist traits of the colonizer is the declaration that the colonized is incapable of handling their own affairs. Colonization then appears to be justified - the Africans as children ideology. As Albert Memmi emphatically declared in the voice of the colonizer, “They are not capable of governing themselves, . . . That is why I don’t let them and will never let them, enter the government.”[21] In 1934 in Kenya the white settler took the best land and then expected the Africans to work it, the Out of Africa plot? Yet, the African community outside of the settler property was regulated according to tribes. An historian wrote about one of the many British Royal Commissions:

The Commission’s recommendations, which were accepted by the British government, implied that Kenya was to be partitioned into two racial blocks, African and European. And in the African sector, all economic, social and political developments were to be conducted on tribal lines. Racialism thus became institutionalized.[22]

The ideology of European colonialism presupposed and projected onto the production of knowledge, that is to an African historiography written about Africa, that there was an agreement between those colonized and the colonizer. Colonialism also required a constant and repetitious public justification of the actions of the colonizer, the speculation that colonialism by the West was good for Africa. In 1960 Margery Perham, of the colonial school of African historiography, wrote:

most of the tribes quickly accepted European rule as part of an irresistible order, one which brought many benefits, above all peace, and exciting novelties, railways and roads, lamps, bicycles, ploughs, new foods and crops, and all that could be acquired and experienced in town and city. For the ruling classes, traditional or created, it brought a new strength and security of status and new forms of wealth and power. For many years after annexation, though there was much bewilderment, revolts were very few, and there does not appear to have been much sense of indignity at being ruled.[23]

This misrepresentation is nothing new. Such ideas were also reflected in the use of such terms as ‘pacification’, Pax Britannica and Pax Gallica used to describe the conquest and occupation of Africa between 1880 and 1914.[24] Previous to 1880 Europe had accepted Africans as their equals, according to A. Adu Boahen, due to the pivotal number of years devoted to negotiation and treaty making. The new relations between Africans and Europeans underwent a significant change, “due to the diffusion of the industrial revolution in Europe, and the subsequent technological progress signified by the steamship, the railway, the telegraphy, and, above all, the first machine gun - the Maxim gun.” The Europeans had new political ambitions, economic needs and a relatively advanced technology. “The old era of free trade and informal political control had given way to ‘the era of the new imperialism and rival capitalist monopolies’ therefore that it was not only trade that the Europeans now wanted but also direct political control”(ibid).

According to Asowa-Okwe the occupation of Africa actually took until 1930 with the Karamajong being the last to succumb. Pacification took decades to accomplish. In the case of Uganda and Britain, following the acquisition of slaves for labor, exploitation took the form of resource extraction from the soil in the production of raw materials locally for the manufacture of cheap products in order to compete with other European powers. The “existing self-sustaining and self-perpetuating pre-capitalist economy of most Ugandan societies militated against” the export of crops to feed British industries.[25] Boahen’s series on African history was meant to interpret African history from an African perspective. He states and supports from detailed evidence that the notion that Africans accepted invading soldiers with elation and accepted colonial rule is not historically supportable. Resistance, on the other hand, was severe. To the African the issue was fundamental to their land and sovereignty. (10)

The English historians devoted only one paragraph to what they termed “bitter” resistance by Africans to an otherwise fourteen pages on the European Scramble for African Colonies.[26] There was very little acceptance, if any, of colonial rule, least of all irresistible. Colonialism destroyed any notion or ability at national solidarity because it destroyed the original African states which were the principle agents for achieving regional loyalty.(Rodney 9) This fit well into the divide and rule policy. One strategy of resistance was migration across national boundaries. This was used predominately in the French, Belgian, German, and Portuguese colonies. Boahen states that this was due to “forced labor, direct taxation, mandatory cultivation of crops, and in the case of the French colonies, the indigenat— that is, the arbitrary and cruel way of administering corporal punishment.”[27] In 1916 more than 2,000 people left Togo for Ghana during the period, and in 1910 alone as many as 14,000 migrated from the district of Misahohe into Ghana. This was an effective method because they were able to start new communities out of the reach of colonial rulers.[28] Also, during the period between 1880 and 1919, African kings, queens, lineage and clan heads were all concerned primarily with retaining their sovereignty and reacted with strategies of confrontation and the formation of alliances.[29]

Recently historians have attempted to invert the ideologies of rebellion by colonial apologists, thought to be the result of superstitious peoples content to accept colonial rule, attached to traditional patterns of thought which helped them to come to an effective or practical response to attacks on their way of life, but could only fail.[30] As Walter Rodney argues,

The decisiveness of the short period of colonialism . . . springs mainly from the fact that Africa lost power. . . . During the centuries of pre-colonial trade some control over social, political and economic life was retained in Africa, in spite of the disadvantageous commerce with Europeans. That little control over internal matters disappeared under colonialism. . . . The power to act independently is the guarantee to participate actively and consciously in history. To be colonised is to be removed from history. . . . Overnight, African political states lost their power, independence and meaning.[31]

There was by Africans, the desire to modernize but not at the expense of sovereignty. Chief Makombe Hanga, ruler of Barue in central Mozambique stressed in 1895:

I see how you white men advance more and more in Africa, on all sides of my country companies are at work. . . . My country will also have to take up these reforms and I am quite prepared to open it up. . . . I should also like to have good roads and railways. . . . But I will remain the Makombe my fathers have been (ibid, 49).

II

The debate between Marxism as analysis, one that focuses on the society, versus a psychoanalytic analysis that focuses on the individual in oppressive relationships is a difficult one to resolve as Albert Memmi argues in, The Colonizer and the Colonized. For one, Marxism is rooted in a European model of modes of production that was based on a supposed universal model, “Marxism yielded to the influences of the dominant culture and remained in the bosom of Eurocentrism”(120). The Eurocentric model is indicated by, “the two roads, the European leading to capitalism and the Asian road which is blocked”(ibid). Samir Amin thinks that is possible to escape from the impasse of Eurocentrism but not by a simple negation and not without pain. Should this be a call for the right to cultural specificity, to difference? Psychologically in the search for the subject and for agency, difference has led to various forms of violence. At this point, in order to comply with both sides of the fence, which I think is necessary, I offer the purely subjective analysis of the devastating effects of colonialism on the individual.

This type of analysis is exemplified best in the writings and works of Frantz Fanon. As Homi Bhaba argues, in reference to Fanon’s Black Skin, White Masks, the cultural politics of the colonialized subject, of diaspora and paranoia, of migration and discrimination, of anxiety and appropriation is revealed in the writings of those in the imagined western creation localized as the Other of the Western subject, “To exist is to be called into being in relation to an Otherness, its look or locus. It is a demand that reaches outward to an external object.”[32] The anger resulting from extreme repression has been revealed to result as violence. Kaja Silverman explains this violence as a form of identification or dis-indentification, “At the moment that he or she perceives the “otherness” of the idealizing image, the subject classically responds to it as an enemy and a rival, one whose separate existence is inimical to his or her own. He or she strives desperately to close the gap between it and the sensational body, so as to assert the unity of the self. The result is a negation of either that entity, or the other. To the degree that the subject succeeds in affirming him - or herself as image, the world is in effect annihilated.”[33] Yet in the colonialist situation, differing in location but always a ‘differance’, there remains a gap, a split, that place for the African that is both fetishistic and invisible at the same time. The result is a violence on both sides of the divide.

Both Homi Bhaba’s and Kaja Silverman’s works are remarkably similar. Both draw on Lacan’s, either you or me “logic of corporeal disintegration”:

the object appears in the guise of an object from which man is irremediably separated, [it] . . . Shows him the very figure of his dehiscence within the world. . . . Inversely, when he grasps his unity . . . it is the world which for him becomes decomposed, loses its meaning, and takes on an alienated and discordant aspect.[34]

The use of the body as a site for alienation, resistance and violence as perpetrated on the colonized psyche through the body/image is expressed by Franz Fanon:

I had to meet the white man’s eyes. An unfamiliar weight burdened me. In the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema. . . . I was battered down by tom-toms, cannibalism, intellectual deficiency, fetishism, racial defects . . . I took myself far off from my own presence. . . . What else could it be for me but an amputation, an excision, a haemorrhage that spattered my whole body with black blood.[35]

To compensate for this reconstruction of an image created for the black body from which Fanon cannot hide creates in him a desire to expel himself from his own body that appears as a lack. “It is . . . a mirage preventing the subject from apprehending his or her fundamental nothingness or “‘being-for-death’, a lure encouraging him or her to pursue endlessly that imaginary plenitude whose unavoidable sequel is the fantasy of bodily fragmentation.”[36] Fanon’s loss of the primary identification, the body experienced as real and lacking nothing is subverted to the violence of a lack of identification. Both colonizer and colonized are shocked as they recognize each other as difference. Since the black body is identified with the senses, the spirit, the primitive, it is associated with the Nature versus Culture binarism. One is reminded of the statement by Socrates, a primary source of Western epistemology in the search for the Same, ‘like-ourselves’, after the purging of Nature from ‘ourselves’,[37]

We shall continue closest to knowledge if we avoid as much as we can all contact and association with the body, except when they are absolutely necessary, and instead of allowing ourselves to become infected with its nature, purify ourselves from it. . . . In this way, by keeping ourselves uncontaminated by the follies of the body, we shall probably reach the company of others like ourselves and gain direct knowledge of all that is pure and uncontaminated—that, presumably of truth.[38]

The root of western philosophy, though this perception has gone through many changes, explains the underlying contempt for the body as reduced or minimized in relation, and subordination, to the mind. It also speaks to the notion of identification. In the case of colonized, the desire to be the colonizer, or more likely to be in the position of mastery rather than the other way around creates the desire to be “‘one’ with the ideal image, and a relationship of fatal rivalry with anyone who seemingly occupies the position of that image.”[39] This corresponds to the Judaeo-Christian belief in the body as a location for sin. If the body is black, its referent in the symbolic is evil. All of this supports a justification for exploitation.[40]

By 1996 in South Africa, two years after apartheid the process of differentiation remained very much in place. Okwui Enwezor posits that, “The Negro, in South Africa as part of the experience of apartheid, the primal symptom of whiteness was always in relation to that broad category in which large groups of people were reproduced in the image of the abject.”[41] This moment of ‘differance’ is when, as Frantz Fanon descibes, a white child sees the Negro and shrinks into its mother’s arms and screams, “Look a Negro!” Enwezor explains that , “ It is here that that the Negro becomes an object of fetishistic fascination and disturbance to both the spatial and temporal order. There is a demand both for the representation of his presence and for his objectification, so as to mark out the divide that separates his polluting presence from the stable environment of whiteness: the enclosed suburbia in which he is forever a stranger, a visitor.”(382) I would counteract this argument but only to a degree, he is not a visitor but in the pretense of the colonizer, he appears to be an intruder. He crossed the imaginary border between visible/presence and invisible/imaginary. “In the mind of the colonizer there are two distinctions between the settler and the black and these are ontological and epistemological.(ibid)” They work on two inventions. The native as without history, and as “devoid of knowledge and subjectivity.” As Enwezor states, the result is “an imaginary map drawn between . . . which sets the native in direct competition for resource material, history, representation--which culminates in resistance and sets in motion the process of decolonization” (382)[42] Decolonization has to start with a challenge to the colonizer, to his language, culture, history, forms of accepted knowledge, his authority . This is where African subjectivity and white interests coincide, in direct competition, setting the stage for an ideological struggle (383). “It appears that the struggle for this meaning hinges on who controls the representational intentionality of the body politic, especially its archive of images, both symbolic and literal.”(ibid)[43]

III

Nowhere are forms of resistance more powerful than in cultural production, though this power is either hidden altogether, part of the “invisible” tactic or beneath such terms as ethnic or ‘primitive’ commonly referred to in the arts, and in the disciplines of anthropology and later, ethnography. This just places another form of imperialism onto the culture of Africa and its cultural production, now and in the past. Africa has since colonialism been the object of the ‘look’ in the form of surveillance, so for it to be located in museum for ‘once more the look’ is not unusual. In actuality, anthropology, as in philosophy, tells more about the male western mind than the object of which it studies. Surveillance is no longer an accepted method, neither are methods than include cultural informants.[44] Self-criticism has been particularly difficult in the field of anthropology. Anthropology is the offspring of imperialism, conceived as a science, and as argued by Peter Rigby, “The now castigated dominance of functionalism, for long and in so many forms of anthropology, was an imperative for the intellectual component in the reproduction of bourgeois capitalism, as necessary for the ‘center ‘ as for ‘periphery’.” (African Images, 48)

As for the nature of bourgeois society as exemplified in the U.S., France and Britain, objects selected by museums tend to use “tribal” art which reinforces an ideology of a people frozen in time. “Underdeveloped” versus “developed,” places them in direct opposition to the cultured, modern, and progressive West, which then paves the way for possessive paternalism. There is a difference between African art as it is presented in written texts and African art in reality. Most of what is written or studied is in the context of ethnography for purely aesthetic, that is, form - versus - content methodologies. This is an extremely dangerous perception. It helps to support policies that justify invasion by, in the past, colonial rulers, and in the present corporate colonialism in the form of debilitating loans, interference in production and reverse development strategies. The museum is a particularly effective in distributing these ideologies to large audiences. It provides a public space for expression and viewing. It feeds into the notion of political domination, cultural attaché and pinache (panache?) in the appropriation of objects from distant, exoticized cultures. Contemporary art from Africa very often contains extremely political references and this poses a very real problem to Western powers and the Western psyche. Ibrahim El-Salahi’s revolutionary pen and ink, The Inevitable, 1984, is an excellent case in point. The piece is mural size reminiscent of Mexican mural art by Diego Rivera, or Jose Clemente Orozco’s 1934, Catharsis, intended for a large viewing audience in a public space. The contextual meaning is the same. It is a political piece motivated by a resistance against capitalism. The arm raised in revolutionary stance with fist clenched; a mask located to the right of the frame reveals the location of the piece as Africa, and by an African. The image surrounded by machined forms diagonally push forward and against an outside force, of oppression. This is an unequivocally revolutionary piece, clearly reminiscent of Leger, though not indebted to it. As Salah Hassan argues, the refusal to accept modern African art into major european exhibitions is because the very notion of europeanness is threatened. The 1995, the Venice Biennale and Documenta exhibition’s director, Jean Clair, did not invite African artists because “their art is different than ours.” The acceptance of art from outside Europe is seen to “disrupt the narrative of a superior Western art history.”[45]

Westerners, plagued with the angst of capitalism, are always searching for an ethnic/soul they think “primitivism” can provide, yet on a larger scale the concept of primitivism justifies exploitation, capital accumulation techniques and infiltration on foreign soils already exploited and appearing to be incapable of independence. For these reasons African art of the past has been shown repeatedly from supposed tribal sources, as if Africans were one step away from head hunting and cannibalism. African art that is modern is often considered to be a childish attempt at copying western art. A Western curator commenting on modern African art had this to say, “seems like third-rate art work to us because the art presented here emulated the Western tradition . . . And because it is always lagging behind. . . . It cannot escape the critical eye of the Western art world, thus it is superfluous. . . . It is . . . an open secret that museums have always refused to take over such displays and always managed to find a new excuse to dismiss them courteously.”[46] Africa’s contribution to the arts has been exemplary, in contemporary art, performance, literary production, and film but modernism is thought to be the domain of the West. It would seem particularly ridiculous if this curator really knew his art history since modern art in the West was derived from African art. Without African art there would have been no movement, no cultural artistic “birth,” no avant-garde, no Picasso, no Derain, no Brach, no Emil Nolde and on into the present. How can one emulate what is already theirs? It is Western narcissism and the unfettered accumulation of wealth couched, once more, in terms of paternalism. Modernity is based on African exploitation, the return to primitivism to revitalize itself, a kick if you will, into a new age of resistance to the past while reaching for solace and wisdom in pre-capitalism. The crisis of modernism, has instigated post-modernism. Umberto Echo articulates these events best,

The historic avant-garde. . . . Tries to settle scores with the past. “Down with moonlight”—a futurist slogan—is a platform typical of every avant-garde; you have only to replace “moonlight’ with every noun is suitable. The avant-garde destroys, defaces the past; “Les Demoiselles d’Avignon,” is a typical avant-garde act. Then the avant-garde goes further, destroys the figure, cancels it, arrives at the abstract, the informal, the white canvas, the slashed canvas, the charred canvas. In architecture, and the visual arts, it will be the curtain wall, the building tele, pur parallelipiped, the Burroughs-like collage, silence, the white page; in music, the passage from atonality to noise to absolute silence (in this sense, the early Cage is modern). But the moment comes when the avant-garde (the modern) can go no further. . . . The Postmodern reply . . . Consists of recognizing that the past, since it cannot really be destroyed, because its destruction leads to silence, must be revisited: but with irony, not innocently.”[47]

Africa is being robbed of its artifacts at an alarming rate. Interpol estimates that the illicit trade in cultural property is worth 4.5 billion a year, up from one billion a year ago; and Africa accounts for at least ten percent. Omotoso Eluyemi, director general at Nigeria’s National Commission for Museums and Monuments said, “We ended the slave trade more than a century ago. Now it’s the objects of antiquity that are being carried off to the West.”[48] Museums are not innocent of these thefts claiming the excuse that Africans cannot take care of their own possessions. The museums are dusty, or as a Branly museum official, Germain Viatte stated at a UNESCO conference with regard to the highly prized Nok terra-cottas of Nigeria, “By buying objects like these from private sellers and placing them in public collections the museum is in fact serving a higher purpose”(ibid) The language of earlier colonialists laced in the binarism of culture versus chaos is still very much in effect and places the post-colonial argument in jeopardy. In actuality the desire, and subsequent theft of cultural artifacts, are heavily coded in themes of cultural imperialism. In the past artifacts were very often destroyed, melted down for metal. Africa’s historical and cultural art and artifacts were also stolen as proof of conquest and territorial sovereignty, to the appropriation and incorporation into the body of European culture of the diverse cultures of the whole world and of all of history.[49] It is telling that works considered traditional are more prized than contemporary art of African artists. As Salah Hassan argues, “Africa has always attracted Western explorers, adventurers and thrill seekers - the great white hunters of knowledge and wealth”(218). The attraction for traditional as opposed to contemporary art from Africa was created by the colonizing structure, “and is equally rooted in the epistemological roots of African art scholarship, which is basically Eurocentric”(219).

As Nkiru Nzegwu argued, “In the colonial quest to position Europe at the center of analysis, minimal attention is paid to the creative politics of modern African artists.”[50] Contemporary art in Africa is typically focused on popular representations of Tarzan on wagons and buses, which, as argued by Nzegwu, frequently takes the place of valid, solid artistic works being produced in Africa. Continuing, she argues that objects are “metonymic of a culture, a politics and in the case of Ben Enwonwu, of an honorable heritage that came out of British indirect rule at home and racism in Britain where he eventually lived.” In this creative process, Enwonwu had requested, “the gods of his ancestors to tell what art is and for what purpose it exists”(3).

Ben Enwonwu, an activist contemporary with Pan-Africanist, George Padmore is one of the twentieth century’s most prominent African artists who used his African heritage and anti-colonialist political resistance to meld with modern artistic forms. Ewonwu stated:

We were fighting for the freedom of the black man all over the world including the Black Americans and of the diaspora. We were aware of our responsibilities, not just to our individual countries but to Africa as a whole. . . . We were all so conscious of the struggle against colonialism, and of nothing else. We just wanted the colonial empire to end in Africa. . . . If we painted any picture it was about this freedom. If we sang a song, if like Senghor we wrote or recited poems, we philosophized. You find that in those days, all the leaders of Africa were inspired”(Representational Axis, 173).[51]

As Nzegwu argues, rarely does anticolonial politics reach scholarly journals. Art historical analysis then falls short of accurate accounts of resistance. Oral history, directly from the source, provides the opportunity to refute accounts such as Ulli Beier who described Enwonwu’s work as, “competent works that do not bear the stamp of the artist’s individuality”(173). Beier is projecting a capitalist value onto the works of Enwonwu. Enwonwu’s work reaches into the blood ancestry of his father and his culture, marked by colonialism and resistance. Authenticity is the language of the anthropologist not of the artist. In Enwonwu’s words:

In demonstrating Negritude, we were painting with definite aims in mind and our visions were definite and characteristic of black expression. We were not imitating the white people, nor were we copying ancient African art. That is to say, we were not doing things for the white man to say that we were black. We were doing things which were ‘black’ because we were proud of being black. For the first time the black man wanted to be black, and that erased all feelings of inferiority both in Africa, which was dominated by colonial rule, and in the American continent where the history of slavery and the intimidation of the black man’s spirit had gone on for centuries. That was a dramatic period in the arts”(174).

IV

Last Part of the Twentieth Century . . . Still the Primitive?

The writing of art history, anthropology, ethnography originating in Europe, closely implicated in humanism, the commodification of art, the accumulation of artifacts for profit has of late become an interdisciplinary occupation by anthropologists delving into art history. How does/has the West divide[d] art from artifact? Previously natural history has been preserved for the accumulation of objects/ evidence that presumably explain the world objectively on scientific terms. The inclusion of African peoples as though they are also objects is difficult to explain away. Theoretically the natural history museum can no longer be justified, it never could, to house African artifacts. Now the Museum of Modern Art, the Metropolitan Museum in New York, etc., exhibit African artifacts. The Smithsonian, meant to celebrate the national identity of the United States also houses African artifacts. This is no accident. The political history of exploitation and violence in Africa is the history of the West.

This is particularly difficult considering the Eurocentrism that persists in the discipline of art history. Sidney Littlefield Kasfir’s analysis in, Contemporary African Art, while appearing to be a thorough introduction to African Art, is beneficial and detrimental at the same time. Due to its appeal to popular knowledge, it speaks to a Western audience about African works of which a large portion is popularized tourist art. The notion that African artists are so easily seduced by a Western market can be damaging. Patrons are also critical to the success of Western artists. By focusing on African art in this way it preserves the ideology that Africa is childlike and requires the interference of a paternalistic order. This is a colonialist tactic that apparently has not lost its ideological significance.[52] Kasfir is capable of much more, though still sounds suspiciously ethnographic and eurocentric, “collecting African art is a hegemonic activity, an act of appropriation; seen historically, it is a largely colonial enterprise; and seen anthropologically, it is the logical outcome of a social-evolutionary view of the Other; the collecting of specimens as a corollary of ‘discovery’.”[53] She continues her article with a search for ‘authenticity’ in the African canon revealing the type of search relegated typically in art history to connoisseurship. The article is useful in examining the complex histories of African cultures and art, the melding of cultures, the dynamism of Africa, opposed to the most common interpretations that assume Africa was, before colonization, static.

Susan Hiller, in The Myth of Primitivism, 1989, attempted to come to terms with this dilemma, and the production of knowledge from bourgeois disciplines such as anthropology. She admits in her introduction that the group of works in this publication come from the same cultural situation it examines. The act of representing ‘others’ as fantasies, myths, stereotypes is a powerful method of colonizing the other and its power is perpetuated by its repetition, a necessary trait of capitalism. The publication was organized around a seminar at the Slade School of Art in London, the same school Ben Enwonwu attended more than forty years ago. Fortunately the seminars would not limit themselves to simply consider ,”the history of the tendency of western artists to appropriate tribal art motifs without first examining this in relationship to European intellectual history, the ethics of appropriation, and questions of power and domination.”[54] To Hiller, attempting to be self-critical, argued that this was the result of taking contributors from different disciplines in order to “block the efforts of anthropologists to claim cultural authority on so called ‘scientific’ terms”(ibid). To take this debate further, it is more likely the timing of the seminar. The struggles of the African diaspora, the civil rights movement, and other revolutionary efforts forced new ways of interpreting various cultures from within the dominant West and without. Yet Hiller’s first line pays homage to “the beauty of ethnographic arts” juxtaposed to, in the same introductory sentence, “the great works of modern art that were inspired by them”(my italics, 1). Art from Africa is categorized in ethno-centric terms while western art is hierarchically categorized into terms of greatness. This is not surprising when one learns further on that Susan Hiller is an anthropologist, “intensely moved by” African images during graduate school, and is tasting the waters of art history as so many anthropologists are of late, yet she is still bound by the brain of the ethnographer. There has been a debate between notions of high art and low art, signed and unsigned, trained and untrained, folk and classical art for the past forty years in the West. How is it that African art is outside this debate and considered fair game for an anthropologist and listed under the rubric of ethnic art?

The contributors of this volume are Western and intended for a Western audience indicated at the outset by Hiller’s use of the terms, we, us and our possession s. There is also the all-omnipotent male intellectual Kenneth Coutts-Smith, a contributor to the volume from The International Society of Art Critics, who is extremely critical of art historians and the extra-historicity of art historical scholarship. All art, argues Coutts-Smith is cultural colonialism. Art history itself is a bourgeois discipline created along class lines. In a typical, yet out-dated Panofskian line of thinking (owing to its refusal to recognize the politics in artistic representation), Coutts-Smith argues that art history is a method by which those along class lines recognize each other according to certain codes. This may be true but all Europeans are subjected to codes of class and gender, assuming to come from the same locus of religion, education and culture. Coutts-Smith sets himself above the world in observation as if not to come from anywhere, assuming an all authoritative voice of knowledge. His argument trivialized the issues of ethnicity and Eurocentricity that is a different criticism than white euro-criticism. The issues at stake are not moral, as Coutts-Smith argues, but political. The depolitization of analysis leaves the critic-as-subject “blowing in the wind.” He makes statements against the discipline of art history in general, “The discipline of art history has never until now (except in the work of isolated individuals regarded institutionally, as tangential), been required to submit itself to the historical rigors of social and political fact, but has been nourished in the main of poetic insight and metaphysical speculation. “[55] The statement made previously, that the analysis of African art must be read differently, along moral lines, places him within the discourse that he so vehemently opposes. Art history has always “submitted itself to the rigors” of historical “illusion” as much as any other Western discipline, but suffered under the same Eurocentric scholarship associated with an exclusively Western history. Broad sweeping statements on the history of the West that predominate in the rest of the article tell nothing about African art or the reading of it and there is not one African contributor in his bibliography.

The savior of the volume is Rasheed Araeen whose contribution is invaluable, not only because of its intellectualism, but because it comes from a lived experience, presenting, within the mix, the results of Western domination and its psychological and long term effects as felt by an individual who is an artist living in in the West. Aareen had been invited to perform at the Slade School of the Arts years before but was rejected when it was found out what the content was going to be. The situation was met with silence, he was simply cut from the program without apology. Araeen’s argument is directed toward the official title of Ethnic Arts, provided for incoming African/Asian cultures in western metropolises. The primitive in modernism is admired for what is missing in western culture but is restricted, “. . . as long as the ‘primitive’ does not attempt to become an active subject to define or change the course of (modern) history.”[56] Primitivism is a function of colonial discourse, and it is therefore imperative that we try to look at the nature and complexity of this discourse. It is critical to compare the relationship between primitivism, racism, and the idea of Ethnic Arts. Liberal scholarship, argues Araeen, is part of the colonial discourse. These institutions were formed in the nineteenth century whose ideologies remain fundamental to western domination. Part of this discourse is the accentuating of cultural difference equipped with the ideas of Hegel, progress and World Spirit.

The paradoxes that I have stressed in this paper parallel the questions asked by Araeen, “Do we reduce the works of Western culture only to religious meanings when we look at them or analyze them? Why do we have a different attitude towards the works of non-European cultures? Why do we not accept that African artists were able to transcend the imposed specific function (whatever that may be) of their roles as artists and were able to produce works which were multilayered in terms of concerns, functions, and meanings resulting from their own individual creative imaginations?”[57]

Is it possible for art history to break out of the bondage of classicism, its ties to Western philosophy hailing the majestic works of an imagined origin, pure and superior infected with the mythical assumption of a Western aesthetic? Is it possible for the art historian, anthropologist or archaeologist of Western descent to look self-critically within the scheme of historical domination. The de-colonization of Africa requires the de-colonization of Western productions of knowledge around and about Africa’s intellectual and cultural production. Exhibitions of African culture have always been one of the ways that Africa is represented in highly problematic ways as I have already indicated. The historical ramifications of past colonization cannot be ignored when the disciplines out of that history are still in positions of power in the representations and interpretation of Africa. The affection felt by a Western ethnographer/anthropologist for an African culture is ideologically based in a paternalistic hegemony. As Nkiru Nzegwu argues, “In a geopolitical relational context of inequality, empathy may be symptomatic of paternalism rather than intellectual identification with the subject of interest”(Crossing Boundaries, 3).

The history of African cultural production whether literature, art or performance is a history of violence, theft and subsequent resistance. Contemporary art and exhibitions vary between the early pre-capital artifacts to the works of contemporary African artist’s and their expressions of resistance. More often than not, exhibitions focus on the early history of Africa which plays into the notion that Africa is a cold society locked in history and itself an artifact possessed by the European imagination. For the art historian educated as a high intellectual of Western classicism or the anthropologist educated in the ‘skills’ necessary for “field work” the two remain divided, and confused in the discourse of African artistic production because they are locked within a Eurocentric perspective. Methods of deconstruction help to expose the psyche of the typically Judaeo-Christian, capitalist Western male. What must follow is the replacement of these accepted bi-polar philosophies with African philosophy from Africa. Exhibitions need to be curated by African curators on contemporary African art and ancient artifacts. These exhibitions could include the complicity of the West in the construction of African history and its other, the result of this violence. The poverty in Africa today is a direct result of colonialism in the past and in the present. Complex laws, loans, political interference, agricultural exploitation all place Africa in a state of continual jeopardy.[58]

References

Achebe, Chinua. Hopes and Impediments. New York: Doubleday, 1989.

Adedeji, Adebayo. Africa within the World/ Beyond Dispossession and Dependence. London: Zed Books, 1993.

Amin, Samir. Eurocentrism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1989.

Araeen, Rasheed, “From primitivism to ethnic arts,” in The Myth of Primitivism/ Perspectives on Art. Ed. Susan Hiller. London and New York: Routledge, 1991, pp. 158 -169.

Baumgart, Winfried. Imperialism/ The Idea and Reality of British and French Colonial Expansion 1880 - 1914. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Bettelheim, Judith. “Immigrations of Ideas and People: Whose Reality Now?” in Paris Connections: African and Caribbean Artists in Paris. Ed. Asaki Bomani and Belvie Rooks, San Francisco: Q.E.D. Press, 1992.

Bhaba, Homi K. “Interrogating Identity: the Postcolonial Prerogative,” in Anatomy of Racism. Ed. David Theo Goldberg. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1990.

Boahen, A. Adu. African Perspectives on Colonialism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987.

---------. Ed. Africa Under Colonial Domination, 1880-1935. Berkeley: University of California Press, UNESCO, 1985.

Cesaire, Aime. Discourse on Colonialism. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1962.

Clifford, James. “On Collecting Art and Culture,” in Art and its Significance/ An Anthology of Aesthetic Theory. Albany: State University of New York Press, pp 621-42, 1994.

Coutts-Smith, Kenneth. “Observations of the Problem of Cultural Colonialism,” (pp 14-31) in Myth of Primitivism/Perspectives on Art. London and New York: Routledge, 1991 .

DuBois, Page. Sowing the Body/ Psychoanalysis and Ancient Representations of Women. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1988.

Enwezor, Okwui. “Reframing the Black Subject: Ideology and Fantasy in Contemporary South African Representation,” In Reading the Contemporary/ African Art from Theory to Marketplace, eds. Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor, London and Cambridge: Institute of International Visual Arts and MIT, 1999.

Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. Paris, New York: Grove Press, 1963.

Fland, Jack and Daniel Shapiro. Eds. Western Artists/African Art Exhibition. New York: The Museum for African Art, 1984.

Friedrichsmeyer, Sara, Sara Lennox, and Susanne Zantop, eds. The Imperialist Imagination/ German Colonialism and Its Legacy. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1998.

Hassan, Salah M. “The Modernist Experience in African Art: Toward a Critical Understanding,” in Philip G. Altbach and Salah M. Hassan, eds., The Muse of Modernity: Essays on Culture as Development in Africa. Trenton, N.J. and Asmara, Eritrea: Africa World Press Inc., 1996.

Hiller Susan. Ed. The Myth of Primitivism/ Perspectives on Art. London and New York: Routledge, 1991.

Khadiagala, Gilbert M. And Terrence Lyons, eds. African Foreign Policies/ Power and Process. London: Lynne Rienner Publishers, 2001.

Kanneh, Kadiatu. African Identities/ Race, Nation and Culture in Ethnography, Pan-Africanism and Black Literatures. London, New York: Routledge, 1998.

Kasfir, Sidney Littleton. “African Art and Authenticity: A Text with a Shadow,” In Reading the Contemporary/ African Art from Theory to the Marketplace. eds. Olu Oquibe and Okwui Enwezor London and Cambridge: MIT Press, 1999.

---------. Contemporary African Art. London: Thames and Hudson, 2000.

Kusimba, Chapurukha M. “Changing Perspectives on the Method and Theory of the Archaeology of the East African Coast,” in African Historians and African Voices. Basil: P. Schlettwein Publishing, 2001.

Mahmood, Mamdani and Joe Olaka-Onyango. eds. Uganda/ Studies in Living Conditions, Popular Movements and Constitutionalism. Kampala, Vienna: Jep and Centre for Basic Research. 114.

Mazrui, Ali A. Ed. The General History of Africa VIII Africa Since 1935. Berkeley, Paris: University of California Press, Heinemann UNESCO, 1993.

Memmi, Albert. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Boston: Beacon Press, 1965.

Minh-ha, Trinh T. Woman, Native, Other /Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism. Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1989

Moore, Lucinda. “Communing with Ancestors,” in Smithsonian, June 2001, 36.

Nzegwu, Nkiru. “The Africanized Queen: Metonymic Site of Transformation”, African Studies Quarterly. http:\\www.africa.ufl.edu/asq/v1/4/4.htm

----------. “Colonial Racism: Sweeping Out Africa with Mother Europe’s Broom,” in The Philosophy of Racism. Ed. Susan Babbitt and Sue Campbell. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999.

----------. “Crossing Boundaries: Gender Transmogrification of African Art History”, Ijele: Art eJournal of the African World, Vol. 1,1 (2000) http://www.africaresource.com/ijele/vol1.1/nzegwu1.html

Odhiambo, E. S. Atieno. Ed. African Historians and African Voices. Basil: P. Schlettwein Publishin, 2001.

Padmore, George, ed. History of the Pan-African Congress, Great Britain: Susan Tully,1963.

Rigby, Peter. African Images/ Racism and the End of Anthropology, Oxford, Washington: Berg Publishing, 1996.

Rodney, Walter. How Europe Underdeveloped Africa. Washington: Howard University Press, 1982.

Senghor, Leopold Sedar. The Foundations of “Africanite” or “Negritude” and “Arabite.” Paris: Presence Africaine, 1971.

Shapiro, Daniel. Western Artists/African Art. Art New York: The Museum for African Art, 1994.

Taiwo, Olufemi. “Exorcising Hegel’s Ghost: Africa’s Challenge to Philosophy”. African Studies Quarterly, http://www.africa.ufl.edu/asq/v1/4/2.htm.

Tilley, Christopher Ed. Reading Material Culture/ Structuralism, Hermeneutics and Post-Structuralism, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990.

Young, Robert. White Mythologies/ Writing History and the West. London: Routledge, 1990.

Wiredu, Kwasi. “Toward Decolonizing African Philosophy and Religion,”, African Studies Quarterly, Vol. 1, 4. http://www.africa.ufl.edu/asq/v1/4/3.htm

Notes

Citation Format:

Victoria Delaney. “Still the Primitive?: Myths and Resistance of the Ethno-Spirito in African Representations,” IJELE: Art eJournal of the African World: Issue 5, 2002.

Copyright © 2002 - 2005 Africa Resource Center, Inc.