Colloquium: Function and Significance of African Negro Art in the Life of the People and for the People: March 30-April 8, 1966

Citation preview

1st. World Festival

of Negro Arts

Colloquium on Negro Art

SOCIETY OF AFRICAN CULTURE

NUNC COCNOSCO EX PARTE

THOMAS J. BATA LIBRARY TRENT UNIVERSITY

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Digitized by the Internet Archive in 2019 with funding from Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/colloquiumfunctiOOOOcoll

Colloquium

1st. World Festival of Negro Arts DAKAR, April 1-24, 1966

Colloquium Function and Significance of African Negro Art in the Life of the People and for the People (March 30 - April 8, 1966)

Organized by the Society of African Culture (S.A.C.) with the co-operation of U.N.E.S.C.O., under the patronage of the Senegalese Government

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© 1968, by Editions

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Contents AFRICAN TRADITION. Engelbert Mveng. — The Function and Significance of Negro Art in the Life of the Peoples of Black Africa .

11

Bernard Fagg. — Archaeology and Negro-African Art

29

Dominique Zahan. — Significance and Function of Art in Bambara Community Life .

39

Harris Memel-Foté. — The Perception of Beauty in Negro-African Culture .

45

Kunz Dittmer. — Medieval Art in the Royal Courts of West Africa .

67

Jean Laude. — From Myth to History : The Methods by which Space is Represented in African Reliefs .

73

Gabre-Medhin Ts'égayé. — Ethiopians : Their Art in Their Life.

87

Mme V. Ravelonanosy-Razafimbelo. — Malagasy Art

95

William Fagg. — « Tribality » .

107

Jacques Maquet. — An Approach to a Sociology of Traditional Sculpture .

121

J.H. Kwabena Nketia. — Music in African Culture

143

Jean-Baptiste Obama. — Traditional African Music ..

187

257099

Herbert Pepper. — The Notion of Unity : The Key to Negro-African Expression ..

223

Mme G. Calame-Griaule. — Oral Literature.

233

John Mbiti. — African Oral Literature .

245

Basile-Juléat Fouda. — Negro-African Oral Literature

269

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Mme G. Dieterlen. — A Contribution to the Study of Traditional Architecture in Negro-Africa _

295

Jean-Paul Lebeuf. — Traditional African Architec¬ ts ..

307

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• *

THE MEETING OF NEGRO ART WITH THE WEST. Michel Leiris. — The Aesthetic Sense Among NeqroAfricans ..

319

Robert Goldwater. — The Western Experience of Negro Art .

337

Louis T. Achille. — Negro Spirituals.

351

Sim Copans. — The African Heritage in the Music of the American Negro .

369

Roger Bastide. — The Function and Significance of Negro Art in the Life of the Brazilian People ..

397

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THE CURRENT SITUATION. THE PROBLEMS OF MODERN AFRICAN ART. Ben Enwonwu. — The African View of Art and Some Problems Facing the African Artist Frank McEwen. — Modern African Painting and Sculpture.

417 427

James A. Porter. — Contemporary Afro-American Art

439

A Study of Modem NegroAfrican Architecture .

457

Mme Katherine Dunham. — The Performing Arts of Africa..

473

Meaning and Function of the Tra¬ ditional Negro-African Theatre .

481

Modern Negro-African Theatre ..

495

Martial

Sodogandji. —

Bakary Traoré. —

Wole Soyinka. —

Langston Hughes. — World .

Black Writers in a Troubled 505

Modern African Poetry .

511

Films Inspired by Africa .

523

Cinematographic Art : In Search of Its African Expression ..

539

Television and the Arts : The African Experience 1959-1966 .

559

Eyo. — Preservation of Works of Art and Handicraft .

577

Alexandre Adandé. — Preservation of Art and Arti¬ sanal Works .

589

Lamine Diakhaté. — Jean Rouch. —

Paulin S. Vieyra. —

Segun Ekpo

Olusola. —

Engelbert MVENG

The Function and Significance of Negro Art in the Life of the Peoples of Black Africa The function of African Negro Art in the life of the people, and its significance for the people: this is the title that we have chosen for the Colloquium which today opens the First World Festival of Negro Arts. The Arts Committee of the Société Africaine de Culture has been asked by the officials of the Festival to prepare this Colloquium, with the close collaboration of UNESCO. For many years we have been in contact with specialists all over the world, who are today represented in this very spot by this learned and honourable gathering. On December the 5th and 6th 1964, a Pre-Colloquium at UNESCO brought together for the first time the views of specialists from all corners of our planet, and the work of the Arts Committee of the Société Africaine de Culture. From this meeting was born the programme which we —

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have before us today. It has been carefully elaborated; every item on it has been sifted and screened; already it is your own work, destined for all: nothing could better fill the scientific requirements of a Colloquium which aims to be the official interpreter of the cultural heritage of an age-old continent, the cradle of man-kind, of cultures and civilizations, a continent which in this very place for the first time welcomes the representatives of all the other continents, of all civilizations and of all cultures. African Negro Art in the life of the people. It certainly is Africa’s role to speak of this subject with authoritv on the occasion of the first World Festival of Negro Arts. ‘ But Africa wishes, above all, to speak objectively. And this is why she has called upon you, authorities from all over the world, so that you may be heard speaking about her. For a very long time—for centuries—you have looked at her ; you have circled round her ; you have sized her up, using your scientific methods; you have analysed her in your laboratories; and, between yourselves,' you have ta“fed of her in a secret language, with learned words which buzz in her ears. Africa knows that you speak of f!er’ kut she finds it hard to hear even her name through the thick forest of strange vocables. Today, she turns towards you ; she asks you : ’’What are you saving about me?” She asks you: ’’Show me mv own face, analysed by snapshots, by sketches, by pictures. Let me find myself in the mirror of your eves; for how can I speak of my own beauty when I have never seen myself from a distance?” J Preparation.

You know that we have spared no pains to make the worids voice heard in this manner when it speaks of Atnca. The Committee which is responsible for the pre¬ paration of the Festival has prospected, if not all, at least the great majority of Museums and collections in everv continent. In the Universities, Research Centres and institutes we have contacted, personallv or by letter all recognised authorities who today can contribute in valid fashion to the assessment of African culture. Doubtless lack of time and our limited means have not allowed us to get m touch with everybody, or with all organisations concerned. You may tell us if certain names have been forgotten. For the future will bring us other rendez-vous —

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and they will spring from the experience gained at this first meeting. But at the First World Festival of Negro Arts, Africa’s duty is to speak of herself; to speak to her own children, as well as to the men of all countries. So first we ought to call on Africa herself to speak. The author of this report has had occasion to visit not only museums, research centres and collections which concern Africa, but also, above all, the villages, towns and ’’fetish-convents” where the official guardians of the cultural heritage of Africa still survive. It is their voice and their testimony that we wish to convey here; and we trust that the delicate foreign language will convey their authentic message. In past times Africa, as you know, was a country rich in centres of culture. These cultures have not been entirely uprooted. We are too conscious of the struggles which have drained the soul of culture from the spirits of the younger generation, and we have no intention of presenting you with a ready—made Africa, an imaginary Africa far removed from reality. But we have held converse with the true Africa: she still stands. In Fadiout, in Senegal, in Dahomey, in Benin, on the high plateaus of the Cameroons, in the Congo, in Uganda, in Kenya, in Ianrania, in Ethiopia—we found her everywhere, the true Africa, still standing and refusing to die out. Her chiefs have spoken to us through the voices of their children of today. Their names are legion: AGOLIAGBO, the king of Abomey; the princes BEHANZIN and AHO AKENZOUA II, the king of Benin ; the NFON of the high plateaus of the Western Cameroons; the ONI of IFE, NJOYA, king of the Bamuns, the people of Bandjoun, of Bafoussam, of Bayangam, Bagam, Bafreng, Baleng, Bamendjou, Bafou, Bafout, Bamboué, and Bali, those of the Tikar country, people from Banso, the Mamibees of Adamawa, and the fabulous court of Kano, of SOKOTO and of VOLA. There are others, too, of high degree, reigning sovereign: His Majesty the Emperor of Ethiopia, the king of Buganda, the king of Burundi, and the venerable shades of the dead kingdoms of the Congo. We have questioned them, by word of mouth and by letter; we have called forth their recol¬ lections, and in this we have one ambition only—to be faithful to their voice. We have questioned, too, the wise men and the learned masters who have inspired our art, and elaborated its techniques and rules. It would be impossible to name them all: but many names, as if in —

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spite of ourselves, come back to our memory: SAGBADJOGLELE at Abomey ; and the six king-makers of Benin ; the chiefs OLIHA, EDOHEM, EZOMO, EBO, EHOLONIBE, and ELOTON; the masters of sculpture such as Mr. IDAH, and the high priest of Olokhoun, the venerable EHIDIADUWA ; the matrons who direct the ''fetish-convents” of Abomey, the convent at Mivede, the convent at Sagbata, or the master of initiations of the rite of the Nkwegbe, those of the Moukanda rites of the Central Congo, or the masters of the dances of the Kikuyu of Kenya, and the priests who guard the treasures of Axoum, of Gondar and of Lalibella in Ethiopia. We have sought to learn from those who today continue the creative action which gave birth to Negro Art. We have seen them at work in Soumhedioune (Senegal), in Abidjan, on the Ivory Coast, in Abomey, in Zagnanando, in Pobe, in Keitou, in Sakete (Dahomey), at Ife and in Bénin City (Nigeria), in Foumban in the Cameroons, in Leopoldville and Elisabethville in the Congo, in Boujoumboura (Burundi), in the capital of the king of Buganda, in Kenya, in Zanzibar, and in the outskirts of Axoum in Ethiopia. We have gazed, too, upon the new face of African art in the great academies and art-schools which thrive in great numbers in our capitals; for we have judged it needful to call both upon the wisdom of yesterday, and that of today, in order that Negro African art mav speak to us with its true voice. Negro Art.

Part of the work of this Colloquium is not so much to define but modestly to explain, before going any further, what we understand by ’ Negro art”. For we see over¬ turned—and let us hope permanently discredited—those arguments of some time ago which sought to question the very existence of African Negro Art. What exactly is this famous Negro Art, which many foreigners have only known through colonial museums, or the art of Vlaminck or Picasso? For the peoples of Africa, and not for their eventual viewers, what is their art? In fact, it is from this point that we must start. And with our peoples we ansver that African Negro art is above all a creative activity in which man transforms himself while transforming the world, by an operation which unite the destiny of man and the destiny of the world, through the actions, signs, words and techniques —

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painstakingly elaborated and handed down by tradition., This is Negro African Art in action. This action creates signs. These signs bear a message: they are a language. Negro Art is thus the language of the; black man who has for his vocabulary the world of things recreated by human genius. Symbolism has as its mission the transformation of the world into a language which, among the great crowd of things, tells man the name of the enemies and the allies of his destiny. Rhythmical art subordinates this transformation to rational laws and recreates the world according to the will of Negro-African genius. This is not the whole story. African Negro Art is the bearer of a message; and this constitutes its specificity. What is the content of this message ? Negro Art tells man of his own destiny. It is the written page of the drama which weaves our existence. It chants the epic of Life at grips with Death, and of Liberty face to face with Determinism. Art in Africa sings of the struggle of life, and of the struggle for liberty; it sings, also, of victory: the victory of life over death. Here, in a few words, is an attempt at a definition of Negro-African Art. Through its many expressions, words, song, dance, music, theatre, sculpture, engraving, painting, architecture, costume, liturgies of agrarian rites or of great initiations — everywhere you will find signs stamped with the genius of our people, the bearers of a single and identical message, written according to laws which are common to the cultures of our country. And, as you may imagine, the expression of styles which bring this message is as manifold and contrasted as is the manifold face of the African peoples. This art is, therefore, the book which tells the story of the creative genius of Africa. Yes; ’’those who have invented nothing”, according to the words of the great Césaire, have contented themselves with creating. The mission of this Colloquium consists in opening this great book to the eyes of all men; to the men of Africa in the first place, and to the men of all continents.

The Deciphering of Signs.

To read this book, it is absolutely necessary to first learn to decipher the alphabet. That this is possible we —

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have shown in our work on Art in Black Africa (published by Maine, Paris, 1964, p. 20 and following). Henceforth, it is an established fact that universal laws exist in the artistic creation of Black Africa. The first law that we defined was the Law of Abstraction and of Synthesis (op. cit., p. 53). Let us call it the Typological Law of African Art. It shows that artistic creation in Black Africa goes through four phases: 1) The objective moment, that of the realism of Nature. 2) The moment of abstraction, which disentangles from the object its essential lines. 3) The moment of thematisation, which, starting from the essential lines, creates a motif, a theme, a character of the alphabet proper to the language of our art. 4) The moment of synthesis or composition which, from the starting point of these characters, writes the work of art as a poem is written. If we represent these four moments by the letters O. L.T.C. we have: 0 L T C

= = = =

The object (the objective moment) ; Its essential line (the moment of abstraction) ; The theme (the moment of thematisation) ; the Composition (the moment of synthesis).

We can affirm that African artistic creation makes the object pass from O to L from L to T from T to C. This amply justifies the enunciation of this law by the formula:

O —L —T —C. But it would not be true to say that the creation of an art form always passes through these four stages. O may become T and pass to C without using L as intermediary The law may therefore he shown as follows: —

16

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L -> T -* C /*

0 Ni

-» T -> C This is the typological law of Negro Art. This law holds good for all plastic arts. All connoisseurs know that the great African sculptures essentially represent personages, who, from the point of view of the analysis which interests us, are ’’types”. The eternal countenance which they owe to art derives, certainly, from their real face ; but it has passed through the demiurgic operation of typological creation. Decorative art, for its part, proceeds uniquely and in universal fashion by the way of abstraction and synthesis. This is why we may speak of an ’’alphabet” of Negro Art. Behind every style we may make an inventory of ’’types”, of motifs which constitute the basis of this alpha¬ bet. We have attempted to do this, on a modest scale, for Bamun art (on. cit.). We have just discovered at NGOBO, in the North of Bafia, in the Central Cameroons, fragments of pottery ornamented with nearly 50 different decorative motifs. R. LECOQ has carried out the same work for Bamiléké art cf. the last pages of his work: An African Civilisation: the Bamilékés. (Présence Afri¬ caine, 1949). Madame G. DIETERLEN has been preparing for years past a similar record for Dogon weaving. We know the decorative alphabet of Tchokwean art, thanks to Mademoiselle Marie-Louise BASTIN (Tchokwé Decor¬ ative Art, Lisbon, 1961. Vol. I, page 63 and following pages). We also have a knowledge of the language of decorative motifs of the drums of the Congo, of Ruanda, of Burundi (Mademoiselle Olgo BOONE: The Drums of the Belgian Congo and of Ruanda-Urundi, Tervuren, 1951, pp. 83-85). The richness of this alphabet is astonishing, and its variety is disconcerting. Thus, we find twenty-five sculp¬ tural ’’types” in the study of Bamilékean art by R. LECOQ, and we are here dealing with a compilation which is not at all exhaustive. Fifty-five different motifs have been noted by Mademoiselle Olga BOONE as appearing on the drums of the Congo, Ruanda and Burundi, while there are forty-four principle motifs in Tchokwean decorative art (M. L. BASTIN : op. cit.). On the site of Ngoro alone, — 17 — 2

though it covers a tiny area, we have counted with astonish¬ ment almost fifty different decorative motifs, while the Abbé J.B. NTAHOKAJA is studying in Burundi seventyfive others which are found in traditional basket-work alone. Now all these motifs have a name, a meaning and a message. Bamilékean sculpture has its fauna of panthers (Nom’n’gwi), buffaloes, (Nia), elephants (Nom’Zo), snakes, dog-faced baboons (Mbe tcho), caméléons, (Tchéyan) toads (Te tuo), tortoises (Tche man kuo) and trap-door spiders. The same Bamilekean style has its typology of personages: the chief (Nfon), the person of standing, (Tchinda) the horseman, the hunter, the couple, and the members of secret societies. Among the Bamuns, we find once more a similar fauna : Nue Pet Tu (double-headed snake); Ngame (the divining spider), Tito (the toad) and Nkuen Ivi (the tortoise). From abstract linear forms, the Negro artist has drawn decorative motifs inspired by all natural elements, and even by the work of man. Their riches are such that volumes would be needed to describe them. We have pointed out in our work on Art in Black Africa (p. 105) how a simple motif such as the cross can take on manv different forms : here, we see it as Mafwo, a Matamba (cassava leaf); there, as Cingelyengelye (a cross-shaped pendant); elsewhere, as Kpa Ntama (the four points of the compass) and there again Congo lya mungwa (saltpans). We can imagine the astonishing capacity of expression of this language of ’’types”, motifs, themes and symbols which makes up Negro Art. This language is, in fact, essentially symbolic. It gives to the world of things the possibility of reaching the same dimension as man’s body. It transforms creation into anthropomorphism, and sees the destiny of things as a prolongation of the destiny of man. This is why symbolism expresses man through its manifold facades. It expresses man’s structure and person through the double dimension man-woman; it expresses him as plan and accomplishment in the triple dimension fathei -mothei -child, (and in this it expresses him in terms of the social structure). It expresses man as Destiny in the drama which within him sets Life against Death. Things in Nature, which become objets d’art, thus are associated with the destiny of man, man in every dimension (personal structure, social structure, and destiny). This, in a few words, is the meaning of the alphabet of the language in which Negro Art tells of the destiny of us men. —

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We have called this art the great book of the expression of the creative genius of Africa. Let us open this hook. What do we read in it? THE HISTORICAL DIMENSION. — This great book in the first place according to our particular historical dimen¬ sion. We know now that culture was horn, as man was, at the heart of the Black Continent. The physicists of Iona, and after them Herodotus, Agatharchide Cnide, Strabon and Diordorus of Sicily had a presentiment of this over two thousand years ago. Professor Leakey is examining the vestiges of this culture in the gorges of Oldway, and on the shores of Lake Eyassi, that is to say in my own country ; in Central Africa, Teilhard de Chardin saw this, and it was with this scene that he closed the great hymn of his life. He writes: ”It is indeed in Africa that one is best placed to see the great wave of peoples, techniques and ideas form, grow, set forth and then fall back upon themselves, until the habitable lands are saturated.” (Africa and Human Origins in the Revue des Questions scientifiques, Louvain, 20 jan¬ vier 1955). The testimony of prehistoric arts, at Dakar, is a prelude in time to the grandiose song of African exploits. The rupestrine paintings and engravings of Kalahari, of the North of Adamuwa, and of the Sahara, as well as the ancient monuments from the centres of Nok, of Ifé, of Bénin, of Ethiopia, of Zimbabwé and of Chad, even if they are not all represented at the Dakar Festival, nevertheless constitute a great body of testimony to our creative pre¬ sence at every juncture of time. But African Negro Art is also a written history. The bas-reliefs of Abomey, the panels of Foumban, the reliefs of Benin, the royal galleries of the Bakuba of the Congo — all these are so many written pages of a history of gran¬ deur, beauty, and suffering: in one word, of human history, and above all African ; and this history is our history. African Negro Art is also a spoken art, and the oral vestiges of this art are incontestably the most precious medium of our history. THE GEOGRAPHICAL DIMENSION. — But our great book tells us about ourselves, too, in accordance with our geographical dimensions. Much has been said about the variety and indeed the multiplicity of Negro-African arts and this variety is the same as that of our peoples them—

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selves. It, like them, comprises an aspect of geographical expansion, throughout the Islands, elsewhere (in America, for example), and today in Europe. It also comprises an enormous number or forms of expression which are not necessarily thrown out in the void, and which, above all, are not the negation of the fundamental unity of our culture, but rather the expression of its astonishing rich¬ ness, its vitality and its capacity to adapt itself to the needs of time and place, to social, political, economic and religious ideas. ASPECTS OF LIFE. — The book of Negro art is a book of wisdom. It contains all aspects of our cultural life. It is our manual of religion, philosophy, of politics and economics, and of social life; it embraces techniques, architecture, furniture, clothing, ornaments, dancing, music and speech. It is the sum total of the wisdom of former times. The art forms which we have under our very eyes are eloquent enough to convince us of this. RELIGION. — In the ancient capital of Benin, the metal-workers, before they poured their bronze into a mould, used to sacrifice a he-goat, a dog, a cock and a tor¬ toise to the Spirits of the forge. With the blood of these victims, they would sprinkle all the implements used in the workshop. The creation of the magnificent bronzes of Benin was a liturgical act, not only a work of skill and patience. Negro masks are frequently covered with symbolical colours which associate the cosmos with the destiny of man. led, the colour of Life; black, the colour of nmht and of trial; white, the colour of ghosts and the colour of Death. We may find on such masks all the decorative motifs and all the symbols, which we have spoken of above. Now, these same motifs and symbols serve to decorate the bodies of the novices of the ’’fetish convents”, and the costumes of their young initiates. This is where they spring from, becoming universal signs for Art; it is useless to try and make an artificial difference between their aesthetic expression and their religious significance : this is a quite arbitrary opposition. SOCIETY. — Negro Art does not onlv speak of the history of our peoples, nor does it simply'celebrate their liturgies. It also shows us their organisation and their social structure. On the panels of Foumban and the reliefs —

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of Abomev or of Benin, we may read about the social hier¬ archy, in all its multiplicity of functions, from the King himself down to the humblest of his servants. There we may see trades, occupations, economic activities and the links in the social chain. It would be impossible to under¬ take a serious sociological study of these ethnic groups without taking into account these social and historical documents which we have cited as being authentic and irreplaceable. DEATH. — The monuments of Madagascar, as well as those found all over the continent, together with the soap-stone praying figures of the Lower Congo, the Kissi tombstones of Guinea and the ancestral monuments of the Bamilékés, all celebrate after their fashion the liturgical drama of Death. LIFE. — The portraits of motherhood of Negro Art are famous. The stone women of the Lower Congo, the ancient wood-carvings of the Baluba of Kasai, of the Bamilékés of the Cameroons and of the Senoufo of West Africa — all these are indeed moving. These Yoruba matrons are magnificent with their vaulted head-dresses, their inex¬ pressible happiness of mothers carrying the fruit of their wombs, their queenly bearing and their majesty. These portraits of motherhood certainly do honour to the dignity of womanhood; but at the same time they celebrate, above all, the victory of Life over Death. The legend has it that, at the very moment when God was about to annihilate rebellious Man, he changed his mind. ”If I annihilate Man, Life will disappear from the Earth”. So God created Woman. ’’Here is your helpmate”, he said to Man. ’’From henceforth you may die; but Life will continue on Earth”. And ever since that day, life has gone on. ARCHITECTURE. — Before he created Woman, says the legend, God made a hut, and he shut Man up in it. God brought him out of the hut in order to show him his wife. The mystical hut, the image of the Cosmos, is found in all the liturgies of initiation throughout Africa; and it also gives a liturgical significance to human habitations, which not only follows the laws of the Cosmic order, but also the individual and social structure of Man. For many people, unfortunately, African architecture stops short at the image of the mystical hut; whereas it is something quite different. —

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In the first place, our architecture is thought out and studied in function of the climate and the physical resistance of the people that dwell in it. The choice of materials is governed by the intemperances of climate and soil resistance. It is invariably social and structural, with a hierarchy of different divisions which corresponds to the hierarchy of persons. It is not confined to a single unit, with one single house which makes for promiscuity. Quite on the contrary, it creates an ordered, selective milieu, and promotes physical and mental health. We are, of course, speaking of that great African architecture which has left us the splendours of Djenné, of Timbuctoo, of Bénin, and the thatched palaces of the country of the Bamilékés, of Ruanda, Burundi and Buganda. To whoever studies the ground-plans of the palaces of Kampala in Uganda, of Abomey or Ktou in Dahomey, of Ifé or of Benin City in Nigeria, this architecture appears as one of those which is the best adapted to man, an archi¬ tecture which makes a human, social and spiritual milieu out of cosmic space. The design of the Benin houses reminds us stronglv of certain aspects of Roman villas; and Le Corbusier, speaking of his convent of Arbresle, said that he drew his inspiration for them from the mud walls of houses in Mali. A house is not only a roof and four walls; it is a home, a garden, a courtyard where friends are received, where people dance, or where palavers are held. Other arts spring to life there; it is there that you learn to speak, to dance, to sing, to cook, and to venerate family rites. Thus, the art of building brings with it a delight in living, and sings of the victory of Life.

Everyday Life.

This life whose triumph Art sings is Life in its entirety. We have already spoken of political and economic life, and of the organisation of society; we have just mentioned religious life, and architecture. We may read in the same way on the walls of the palaces of Buganda, of Toro, of Foumban, of Benin and of Dahomev the military life of the Africa of yesterday. There we find set forth, with simplicity and m lively fashion but always with precision, the organisation of the army and its equipment. Thus our art tells the story of military life. —

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It also speaks of our finances. Among the finest objets d’art of Africa we may count the African coinage, from Axoum in Ethiopia, from West Africa, and the famous weights for measuring gold which come from Ashanti, Akan and Baoulé. And on the trays which come from the Congo, on which are engraved fables, on the masks of Dahomey and the panels of Foumban, the life of everyday is described, with its games, its hunts, its periods of mourning, its celebra¬ tions, its market-davs and its working-days. This art is therefore the open book of the human condition in Black Africa. Therein we may read the structure of human personality in its double and its triple dimensions; we read there too of the condition of the women of Africa, those women who carry life, who give life and who save life.

The Present and the Future.

The message of such art, it is clear, cannot grow old. This is why the art of Africa today ought to write the book of the destiny of the African of todav. In other times and other environments, for example all through the time of exile of our brothers in America, for example, such an art has known how to create a new language to express the nostalgia of the Negro spirit, and the nostalgia of all men at grips with this mechanised centurv. Jazz, blues, negro spirituals, the glowing paintings of Haiti, the spell¬ binding liturgy of the Candomblé people and the dazzling folklore of the Rio Festival were thus born of the osmosis of the Negro soul, which assimilated the surrounding densitv of time and space. In Africa itself in the colonial period the voices of the continent managed to survive. In the quarters of Leopoldville, of Lagos, of Dakar and of Accra, the Ngomo records from the Congo or those of Olotude from Nigeria, the voice of Wendo, of Saie, of Bukassa, of Lassan, of Essono and of Medio sang out, at one and the same time as the sophisticated voices of be¬ wildered young people: and thev sang of the vitality of an Africa which did not wish to die. As indenendence was gradually won, the new African music sang the names of the heroes which are well-known to us : Senghor, Nkrumah, Sékou Touré, Jomo Kenvatta, Ahidjo. At the same time this music tells of the nostalgia of lost youth, and the pains —

23

of an Africa at grips with the anguish of the birth of a new century. What poignancy in that cry that the death of Lumumba tore from Africa: ’’Banationaliste bamona mpasi ô!”—’’Alas, oh nationalists, what a disaster for you! We do not need to be nationalists to sympathise, in the truest sense of the word, with Africa, the stage whereon is fought out the drama between Life and Death. For this, it is enough simply to be a man. The Future.

The self-assigned mission of the creative genius of Africa is therefore to bear the message of the African spirit of the new era. Thus we have the basis of a reply to the question of finding out what is the future of Negro Art in the Africa to come. That technical civilisation in which Africa claims to take her place must be built in our own country, on the rock of Négritude. Negro Art must make it possible that technical civilisation, in Africa, is humanised. Négritude must furnish the basis of a concept of Man, and of a political, economic, and social organisation which respects the peculiar genius of Black Africa. Negro Art must create, in Africa herself, a Universe where Man may feel at his most complete, and where the earth becomes, not a prison where he is stifled, but the natural habitat of man. It is understandable whv we demand the encour¬ agement of an architecture which is faithful to the great traditions of Africa. But what we wish above all else is that the language of our art should remain, throughout the passage of time, a humanism which speaks to the whole world. , •ijeSL^rc^^r’ ,^e§ro Art sang of the African working to build his destiny. The destiny of the African of today rings him together with all men in all the world who are working for the future. The message of Negro Art, then, today is written in the torm of dialogue. This message, this vocation, is, more°7ie\WJ\Üen m the- past No other country has been so attached to communication with other men as Black Africaand among the means of communication, art and culture have been, at all times, the chosen instruments. We must perhaps, once more recall the first stammering utterances of human culture in prehistoric times. Between the Medi¬ terranean and Black Africa, exchanges on both sides have transmitted objets d’art which excavations have brought —

24

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to light in Carthage, Crete and all over Egypt. At the end of the Middle Ages, the art of Benin and of the Congo was enriched by contacts with the merchants and adven¬ turers of Europe. The West, in its turn, bedecked itself with masterpieces which are now only too rare, of which we have a remote idea thanks to the ivories and bronzes of Benin. At the same period, the Congo gave to Christian images a Negro countenance which would be the pride of our modern Surrealists. In the 18th and 19th centuries, Africa’s presence was felt through the new vogue for exoticism ; by this she contributed to a new humanism. With the end of the 19th century and the partition of Africa into colonies, collectors were to introduce into Europe the ’’Negro fetish” revolution. This revolution, before joining that of Cubism, was already revolutionary in the realm of ideas. The first scientific publication of Léo Frobénius, the famous author of the History of African Civilisation, is a mémoire published in 1897 entitled Der Kameruner Schifschnabel : The Ram of a Cameroonian Ship. From this specimen, coming from the dugout canoes used for racing by the Doualas, the author believed he could piece together a learned and complex mythology embracing great areas of our continent.

pDialogue.

Since the beginning of the century, Negro Art has burst upon the Western world, and no-one today scorns to speak of it in connection with Picasso (plastic arts) or Stravinsky (music). Our brothers in America have conquered all continents for us — by their jazz, blues, Negro spirituals and Gospel songs. African ballets, in their turn, constantly reveal to a world-wide audience the irresistible charm of African choreography. The dialogue carried on between Negro Art and the rest of the world is that ’’rendezvous to give and to receive” which is part of the programme of Négritude. The Dakar Festival has no other end in view. Its object is to allow Africa to speak to her own self : for if she is one, she is also many—very many—and extraordinarily varied. Its object is to make it possible for Africa to carry on a dialogue with all men, without distinction of race, colour or ideology. Yes, at Dakar, we are opening a simple, friendly dialogue. Africa, faithful to her tradition to which all ambition of dominating the world is foreign, has never thought that her culture was the only culture, her huma—

25

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nism the only universal one. Africa is the heiress of a large family; and, in her capacity as the mother of all those children, and as mother, in the historical sense, of all men, Africa wishes to share her riches with her family. All men, in her house, are sons of the house. Doubtless it is Africa’s right to speak of herself to the rest of the world, a right and a duty which is dear to her, and which she has not the slightest wish to divest herself of. But Africa wishes too to hear her friends talking about her and above all — and you have a thousand proofs of this—Africa is happy to welcome you, as true friends, under her roof. The carved doors of African houses were by tradition a song of welcome. Their symbols wished the visitor health, riches, happiness, an untroubled home, and many children. At the beginning of this Colloquium, all the doors of Africa are opened for you. They are not the doors of a school, nor of a prison, nor of a palace; for Africa does not claim to teach anybody anything. Wel¬ coming, maternal, she is only too'happy to express her pleasure at your coming to visit her—her pleasure and her pride. Practical Conclusions.

Nevertheless, Negro Art can only continue to exist thanks to those sons of Africa who are the heirs of her genius. The mission of Art, confronted with the new Africa, places before the artists, research-workers of Africa and their friends certain problems which this Colloquium can¬ not avoid. However, when they were brought up at the PreColloquium of UNESCO (December 1964) they met with the unanimous decision of all members. The future growth and renewal of African Art ought to draw its inspiration from the function and significance of that art in the life of the people. It should be the work of the African peoples, and responsibility for it should fall to the African élite and to the governments of our coun¬ tries. The need for Art Schools is felt, not only in each State, but also in the framework of that Institute for African Studies which forms part of the plans of the O. A.U. The protection of African arts and artists calls for legislation specially drawn up for this end, and, where they are not already in existence, of organisations which can ensure that the artist has a dignified status inside his profession, and thus give him his due share in the economic and cultural development of our countries, and in the —

26

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growth of international exchanges. The place of woman, today as in the past, ought to be the object of special attention, particularly since her vocation gives her a pri¬ vileged place in Negro-African Art. The promotion of art and research in the domain of art in Africa would have much more chance of success if through the Société Africaine de Culture and in the frame¬ work of its Arts Commission we could manage to co¬ ordinate the efforts, on one side, of all the artists and craftworkers throughout Africa, and on the other, of all the research-workers and specialists of African Art in all African countries and the whole world. Our heart-felt wish is that the Dakar Festival should be the point of departure of such an organisation. But there is a void which certainly has concerned the members of the Colloquium during the long months of its preparation: and this is the absence at the present time, of an international review of Negro Art. This void, thanks to you, will soon be filled. We consider that it is not too early to open up concrete prospects. This being so, we hope that Negro Art, in the life of the African of today, will keep its function and its significance. This art, in the life of the people, created in the Africa of former days a humanism, if we may presume to say so, of a fittingly unassuming character. For all idea of domination was foreign to it; and the only language it knew how to speak with other peoples was that of encounter and dialogue. When this humanism was master of its destiny, it sang for us the triumph of Life over Death. In slavery, the victim of excess, it spoke only to men of its faith in man, reminding them that life triumphs over death, love over hate, and liberty over oppression. Such must remain the message of Negro Art; such, too, will be the message of our Colloquium. Rigor¬ ously scientific, humanist after the fashion of African humanism, it has as its mission the opening of the great book of our art. Therein we shall all read the message of a humanism which speaks in dialogue with all the world. Note : After some thought, I decided to put African Negro Art rather than Negro-African art. I believe it gives a truer notion of the idea.

P. Engelbert

Mveng,

s.j.,

Université Fédérale de Yaoundé, Cameroun.

(Translated from the French.) —

27

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.

Bernard FAGG

Archaeology and Negro-African Art Organised or established archaeology in Nigeria, if not elsewhere in Africa, owes its very existence to the stimulus provided by the discovery of outstanding examples of the genius of Negro sculptors. And art historians will readily admit that African archaelogy which has been concerned with the whole archaeological record has already done a great deal to repay the debt. For recent archaeology and art history are, at this stage in the writing of Nigeria’s recent history, interdependent, a fact which has been re-emphasised only this week by the announcement from Ibadan of the remarkable radiocar¬ bon date of the ninth century A.D. for the Igbo bronzes, to which I shall be referring later. The discovery of the existence of the vast corpus of Benin scuplture and its publication by Reade and Dalton, Pitt-Rivers, and Ling Roth at the turn of this century, and the publication by Leo Frobenius early in its second decade of the art of Ife (though these had all been anticipated in 1896 by an unknown Lagos journalist, perhaps himself a Yoruba, who modestly but accurately concluded that the splendid quartz thrones he had seen from Ife must be early Yoruba work) stimulated public discussion of the need to explore, preserve and study this exciting evi¬ dence of early African culture. But it was not until late in the last war when the terra¬ cotta head (which one of the oldest groups of sculpture in —

29

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the exhibition arranged for this Festival) was excavated in a remote tin-mine near Jemaa, that the Nigerian Govern¬ ment was at last persuaded to consider creating an ar¬ chaeologist’s post in 1947. Archaeological posts have of course been created before and since in other parts of Africa, but nowhere has ar¬ chaeological research been so oriented towards the history of art as in Nigeria. It may not be out of place, therefore, to give an outline of the contribution of archaeology to the history of art in that country. The discovery of the Nok Culture can be said to have taken place not when the Jemaa head was originally found but when, on comparing it with a small terra-cotta of a monkey’s head which had lain in the obscurity of a packing case for many years, it was noticed at once how close stylis¬ tically these two specimens were. For they had been found about thirty miles apart, the monkey’s head from Nok un¬ der about 5 metres of alluvial deposits, the Jemaa head lying under no less than 7 metres of accumulated sand and gravel in a valley in the pegmatite hills above Jemaa. The Nok Culture was therefore identified on the basis of its sculptural tradition many years before it could begin to be regarded as a culture on the basis of accepted ar¬ chaeological conventions, so elusive were the sites where specimens could be found in situ. For specimens found lying together in alluvial beds, however well-dated, can never finally be proved to be associated. From the first inspection of the mining deposits from which the original Nok specimens were recovered, it seem¬ ed possible that they were dateable to the very beginning of the Iron Age since the deposits contained many polished stone axes and other neolithic material together with ample evidence of iron-working. Iron metallurgy could hardly have penetrated West Africa earlier than about 400 B.C. if it came via Meroe in the Nile Valley, though it could conceiveably have reached West Africa by the trans-Saharan route. A study of the geomorphology of the deposits in the Nok Valley and elsewhere, on which opinions were sought from several different geologists, confirmed that the cul¬ tural horizon containing fragments of Nok sculpture must be older than the latest aggradation phase of the streams m this part of Nigeria. It was therefore thought not un¬ reasonable to equate these deposits very tentatively with the latter part of the Nakuran Wet Phase (of East Africa), 30

—

which had been dated, largely on evidence from the Sahara, to the last 850 years B.C. The aggradation terraces in the valleys which had been eroded during this period would naturally have accumulated towards the end of this wet phase when the power-volume of the streams was dimin¬ ishing. Before the introduction of radiocarbon analysis, there¬ fore, a date late in the first millenium B.C. seemed probable. Fortunately, the deposits in which the sculpture had been found were rich in semi-carbonised tree trunks and a satis¬ factory carbon date, from the clay-bed which overlies the sculpture and would have been laid down after the period of erosion had ended, gave a date of 200 A.D. Later, the search for an occupation site proved success¬ ful where valid conclusions could be drawn from material associated in the same horizon. Preliminary trial trenches were excavated at Taruga in January,* 1961. Charcoal undoubtedly associated with figurine fragments in the main occupation layer proved to be as old as 280 B.C. The figurine material from this horizon compares closely in style with that from the clay-bed at Nok suggesting a remarkable continuity of style lasting almost five centuries. In January and February this year I was able at last to return to Taruga with a party of five to start the excav¬ ation of this most important Nok Culture site. For the first three weeks the party was engaged on a proton magneto¬ meter survey, a method of exploration used for the first time under tropical conditions. Among other finds from this survey are the remains of ten iron-smelting furnaces and the distribution of frag¬ ments of terra-cotta scuplture ends to suggest, as had long been suspected from the alluvial evidence, that the figu¬ rines are associated with these ironworks. It can now be accepted that the Nok Culture is an early Iron Age culture and that it lasted at least from about 280 B.C. to about 200 A.D., though there is every possibility that it originated much earlier and survived much later. The Nok sculpture has a profound unity of treatment which is readily recognisable, the links between sub-styles and individual pieces consisting of certain simple traits. The most consistent of these is the perforation of the pupils of the eyes (present in all but the smallest pieces) and various interpretations of the shape of the eye and its outline, as well as of the eyebrow. The eye is usually given paramount emphasis in the face and this is enhanced

31

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by the pierced pupil set in an inverted triangle or segment of a circle suspended from the supraorbital ridge, which at Jemaa for example, is usually horizontal and at Nok curved slightly upwards. The eyebrows are normally shown as a line of conventionalised hair, sometimes horizontal and broken as in several heads from the Jemaa area, some¬ times sweeping upwards in a semi-circle, as at Nok itself and several other sites. The most striking element in these works, however, is the sculptor’s grasp of solid geometry. Spheres, cones and cylinders —- often decorated with triangular forms — recur separately or in combinations as an interpretation of the volume of the head, the limbs and the torso. This ap¬ preciation of the meaning of volume is evident in most of these terra-cotta works. The Jemaa head is about 23 centimetres high and is very well fired. The lips are everted like the character¬ istic Dan masks of the Ivory Coast. The hairstyle is shown as an arrangement of falling tresses, in tiers,' as in some recent Baluba carving in the Congo, and on some of the early bronze heads from Benin. The large head from Nok is the biggest complete head yet found anywhere and was dug up in alluvial beds in the Nok Valley. It is 37 cms. high. The sphere and cylinder concept mentioned earlier is clearly visible in the neck, the face, the dome of the forehead and again in the buns of hair which are identical with the style used until only about fourteen years ago by the Numana and Kachicheri tribes close to Jemaa. There is represented a plaited fibre strap across the forehead, and the small holes in the buns of hair were evidently for the insertion of feathers. As in the Jemaa head, the ears are of minor importance and are set low down to avoid the hairstyle. The huge eyes and splayed nostrils dominate the face. Especially noteworthy is the fragment of an elaborate beaded collar. 1 he complete figure, of which this head is the only surviving part, would have stood about four feet high. The proportions of the human body used in the con¬ ception of the Nok figurines have in fact been followed with few exceptions by later African styles, including the most sophisticated bronze and terra-cotta sculptures of ancient Ife and Benin, and this has been taken to provide plausible evidence that the naturalistic art at Ife is firmlv in the African tradition. J —

32

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Whereas in nature the proportion of the human head to the whole body is in the ratio of about one to seven, in the ’’African proportion” it is between one to three and one to four. Although there are so few surviving complete figures, except for the small ones in relief on plaque-like back¬ grounds, the proportions shown in the very numerous sur¬ viving fragments of legs, arms and torsos, wherever a com¬ parison can be made, show evidence of this proportional emphasis. The elongated ears of several specimens from Gold Coffer camp have a very close parallel with the ears on some modern Yoruba head-masks for the Egungun play at Abeokuta, as well as with a naturalistic terra-cotta head from Ife whose ears are each as large as the rest of the head. It can be said that the people who made the figurines were certainly of Negro stock, and were almost certainly the ancestors of the present hill people who now inhabit the same area, including the Jaba or Ham, who live in the Nok hills. They were evidently enjoying a settled agricultural way of life, were skilful workers in stone as well as having the use of iron. They were, however, possibly still using pol¬ ished axes, adzes and hoes and very small stone chisels. They made quartz ornaments for use as nose, ear and lip plugs and made perforated quartz beads and hard stone bracelets. There is a striking similarity of subject-matter between the Nok figurines and the scuplture of Ife. In fact, many of the small fragments depicting tassles, pendants or strings of beads from Ife and Nok might, if accidentally mixed together, be difficult to sort out on style alone. The naturalistic figurines of the Ife all demonstrate the same ’’African proportion” as shown in the Nok figurines. On the grounds of oral tradition at Benin, there is a probability that the Ife bronze-casting tradition may have been flourishing in the 14th century. The terra-cotta and stone sculpture may well be contemporary or nearly so. The Nok Culture must have survived, but the dated deposits later than 200 A.D. actually containing figurines, have yet to be found. The phase of idealised naturalism at Ife is more likely to have been short-lived as it is so aty¬ pical of African sculpture. But we must await more ar¬ chaeological evidence. —

33

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3

Before proceeding to a description of the probable transition from the art of Ife to Benin, I would like to mention a group of bronze figures, including the largest ever found in Africa south of the Sahara which, according to legend, were taken up the Niger in a bronze canoe from Idah, the capital of the Igala Kingdon by Tsoede, hero king of the Nupe, early in the 16th century. The most important of these is the sitting figure from Tada, which indoubtedly comes from the same foundry as the Ife heads. The movement of this figure is reminiscent of certain pieces from Nok. The sixth king of Benin, named Oguola, asked the Oni of Ife to send a bronzesmith to Benin to instruct Bini craft¬ smen in the art, and he sent Ighuegha (who is still wor¬ shipped there) with terra-cotta heads to the shrine main¬ tained by the present Chief of the Bronzesmiths, whose title is Ineniguneromwo. It seems highly probable that Ighuegha came to Benin towards the end of the fourteenth century, or about a cen¬ tury before the Portuguese first arrived by sea in 1485. The only work which seems likely to date from the ti¬ me of Ighuegha the bronzesmith is the small figure of an Oni of Ife in full regalia. It was dug up by chance in Benin a few years ago and was instantly recognised by the Court Historian, Chief Jacob Egharevba, as representing an Oni of Ife. The proliferationn of beads, the twin badges on the chest, the plaited hair on the crown, and the scarifications all support this attribution. Among all the works collected from Benin, and pro¬ bably made there, the two which most closely resemble the naturalistic works of Ife, and those of the Middle Niger, are the two dwarfs, probably jesters or tumblers in the Volkerkunde Museum in Vienna. It seems likely that they could date from the fifteenth century, possibly before the arrival of the Portuguese. The next oldest group of bronze works thought to have been made at Benin are the rather small heads cast in verv thin metal. They probably date from about 1500. These early heads are sufficiently naturalistic to be regarded as directly derivative from the Ife style, and the llpse of a century would certainly be consistent with the degree of stylisation. ° —

34

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Among the other tine works of the Early Period, which can be said to have come to an end in the mid-sixteenth century, is the Benin hip-mask which is the most important object in the regalia of the Ata of Igala at Idah. Oba Esigie went to war with the Igala early in this century, and pro¬ bably gave this mask to his son as an emblem of author¬ ity when he put him on the throne at Idah. It has an insert of iron to represent the pupils of the eyes which (when as in this almost unique case the brass is kept highly polished) has a very similar visual effect to the eye perforations of the Nok specimens. The mid-sixteenth century marks the end of the great period of Benin history, politically speaking, and with it, the greatest period of Benin art begins its gradual decline. But for another century and a half there was a period of highly competent if rather uninspired work coming from the bronzesmiths. I will now turn to the enigmatic bronzes of Igbo Ukwn whose place in the archaeological record has always been highly conjectural. These beautifully cast bronze specimens were rescued by an Assistant District Officier in 1940 at Igbo, in Awka Division, soon after they had been accidentally discovered by a householder while digging a cistern. It was twenty years before it was found possible to undertake scientific excavations and once again it was the quality of this sculp¬ ture which played a large, if indirect, part in the creation of a Chair of Archaeology and in bringing the present holder of that Chair, Professor Thurstan Shaw, back into West African archaeology after an absence of nearly twenty years. The style of the Igbo bronzes has only the remotest affinities with the Benin tradition, is closer to Jukun and other Benin Biver styles and even to the brass work of the Grassland of the Cameroons. It also has in the small but beautiul heads, and in some other pieces, clear, if remote, affinities with Ife. This material has been published by Prof. Shaw but the dating has been problematical, there being no indi¬ cations that it need be regarded as earlier than the sev¬ enteenth century. Yet on stylistic grounds it could well be much earlier, perhaps earlier than Ife. Two radiocarbon dates have now been received giving determinations of 850 and 840 A.D., which must be —

35

accepted as the date for this very remarkable culture. The presence of such sophisticated metallurgical work at such an early date in West Africa is going to mean the revision of many text-books. From the slides it has been possible to see in the pro¬ portions and sculptural form of the figures, in the extra¬ ordinary persistence of certain traits like the treatment of the eyes and of other parts of the head and in the use of beaded collars in Nok, Ife, Tada, Jebba and Benin, as well as in many attitudes and gestures, a real continuitv of tradition. This rapid sketch of 2,200 years of Nigerian art (for most of the stages of which the contribution of archaeology has been paramount) does not set out do more than draw attention to some salient points which I believe will eventually be developed into a coherent art history. Perhaps the very splendour of Ife and Benin bronze work somehow crystallised its vitality and led to its decline. Certainly there is no high art to be seen in either Ife or Benin today. Neither the civilised elegance of early Benin nor the refined inspiration of Ife have, in my opinion, really got qualities approaching the power and excitement of the sculptural innovation of the art of Nok. Even if we can trace the evolution of this art through the additive media of pottery and metal-casting, it is through the subtractive medium of wood-carving (where the intervening stages are not, and probably never will be, available for study) that the living tradition can be seen to have survived effectively. It is doubtful whether we have yet found more than one thousandth part (1) of the ancient art of Africa which still lies beneath her soil (nor is what we have already found likely to be in any way representative), although it is gra¬ dually being destroyed by modern industrial development. It cannot be urged too often, as it has long been by those who have been concerned with archaeology in Africa, that efforts must be intensified to train young Africans to do this work. But providing funds is not enough and by no means at the heart of the problem. By the time I retired from Nigeria, the Federal Department of Antiquities alone * recent discovery of a superb ancient stone-head (on exhibition /L -nCaSe at the Musee Dynamique) in the diamond fields of Sierra Leone, in response to a suggestion by correspondence on the basis of Nigerian experience that miners should be alerted to watch for archeo te‘S%Xn^hSseyTohSS.the olwrtuniti« »hK>> still exist, and —

36

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(in addition to several newly-created university posts) had nine professional posts for field research workers of whom four were intended for archaeology, four for ethnography and one for an architect to carry out field studies in the traditional building art, a most important and desperately urgent problem (2). With the Director and Deputy Direc¬ tor (also to be professional officers) there was a perma¬ nent establishment for eleven qualified graduates. This certainly showed an awareness on the part of the Govern¬ ment of the urgency of the problem. But recruitment of young men of the right calibre for this type of training was, and is, exceedingly difficult and the disappointment is most irksome when as sometimes happens they change subjects while at the University. There have unfortunatelv been cases all over Africa of trained and experienced graduates in these subjects being offered much better long-term prospects in the higher civil service and abandoning their careers in cultural research. Happily this was, and is, becoming less common now that the shortage of graduates is not so acute (in West Africa at least) and since there is taking place a noticeable reaction against the positive distaste with which all except the most dedicated men regarded long spells in remote places. But recruitment remains the most intractable problem. Finally, I would make a plea for the right kind of training which should always for archaeologists and ethno¬ graphers contain a substantial element of secondary train¬ ing on the other subjects, and some of these at least should, seek formal training in the discipline of art history. The sooner that such training can be offered by the universities of Africa (the University of Ghana’s diploma course is a good beginning) the better the chance of filling these many posts with African scholars. Bernard Fagg, Curator : Pitt-Rivers Museum, Dept, of Ethnology and Prehistory, Oxford University.

(2) The results of five years’ intensive field work are being prepared for publication.

37

D. ZAHAN

Significance and Function of Art in Bambara Community Life

Introduction In this communication we will only be concerned with carved objects used in initiation societies. These objects are only considered as works of art with reference to the original and literal meaning of the word art. Depending on the initiation society to which they belong, the sculptures of the initiation societies have their own characteristics which allow them to be recognised and prevent confusion between one another. These cha¬ racteristics are in part essential and in part secondary. The initiatory objects provide a base for the concep¬ tions relating to the brotherhoods which show them. It is their function to represent certain basic ideas concern¬ ing the initiatory doctrine in space and in a concrete fash¬ ion. The same objects give life to the nations that they embody, and link them to speech by the movements which they are made to execute. In other words, the function of these ’’art” objects is to constitute a language, a means of communication between the initiation society, seen as an entity, and the adepts. —

39

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„ this context, the Bambara ’’art” object ignores the ’’artistic” personality of its creator. The artist is only important as a manufacturer of signifiers, and as there are plenty of people capable of making the same signifiers, anonymity is the ’’artist’s” best qualification. The symbolism of Bambara ’’art” objects derives from the relationships existing between the signifiers that they are and their significances. These relationships are cha¬ racteristic of each initiation society. Now, the latter are six in number, and the ideas express¬ ed by each initiation level are not easilv grasped with reference to their global economy. The six Bambara societies aim at the intellectual, reli¬ gious and ethical formation of the individual in order to make him into a man so transfigured on the spiritual plane as to lift him to divine level. The first in the order of successive initiations is the n domo, which presents a picture of man as ideal, perfect and beautiful. The last, the kore, presents the picture of this same man raised up to the rank of an immortal god Ihe distance separating these two conditions of the human being is enormous: the n’domo man has practicallv nothing in common with the kore man. Therefore the masks of these two initiation societies carefully avoid meeting. The characteristic features of the masks used by the ndomo and the kore result from the ideas thus expressed, the mask of the first represents man in an unequivocal and realistic fashion. In fact, it is the only mask with human teatures known among the Bambara. It also represents the ideal of masculine beauty, which explains the care with winch the Bambara decorate it with white shell and polish it to make it attractive and lustrous. The n’domo man incites human beings to seek him out, he conceals nimselt in order to make them pursue him. Thus the masked dancer of the n’domo hides himself from the audience completely. The symbolism of the kore masks is more complex for there are classes of initiates in this initiation society, each with its own objects of which the signification relates to the caegory of users. It can be said, however, that the whole of the kore objects grouped together constitutes an illustration of the progress of the human being towards his spiritual rising and his apotheosis. komo initiation society offers to reveal to its adepts the nature of knowledge, conceived as an object—

40

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ive entity bolised by and only animal of

distinct from the thinking subject, and sym¬ the hyena. And so one finds that the essential mask of the komo represents this particular the African bush.

The nama society provides neophytes with the demon¬ stration of the social relationships between men and women; the nature of marriage and its fundamental aim comes under this heading. The three masks of the society illustrate the man (vir) and the woman under the features of a clawed animal which represents the research, the quest for the knowledge destined to cement the union of male and female and thereby that of society. The kono society seeks to provide its adepts with teach¬ ing relative to the nature of the human being, its quality divided between soul and body. The kono mask, on the plane of signification, constitutes a synthesis of these two elements. The first is represented either by the horse or the elephant, and the second by a bird. Finally, the tyiwarci society, of which the activities are strictly limited to the day, gives instruction centred on agriculture. Its two masks, as one might expect, respect¬ ively signify the sun and the earth, by the intermediary of two antelopes: the hippotragus symbolises the sun, and the waterbuck represents the earth. It is agreed that the first embodies the male qualities and that the second should be considered as female. Sometimes, because of its solar symbolism, a third animal, the aardvark, is repre¬ sented on the male mask. Stemming from what has just been said, the masks belonging to the six Bambara initiation societies can be defined as complex objects, representing a central notion or theme, accompanied by a constellation of other notions. The latter are symbolised by the addition of elements which appear heteroclite at first sight. The accumulation of diverse signifiers on the same artefact, in relation to the fundamental significance, leads to the conclusion that these art objects must be considered as words manifested in three-dimensional form. Based on these premises it is possible to catch a glimpse of a few of the guiding lines which govern the initiatory sculpture among the Bambara. 1. The Importance Accorded to the Face and Head.

These parts of the human body constitute the ”summ— 41 —

ing up” of the personality, for, in the end, the senses, by means of which man receives impressions from his outside surroundings and also communicates with these same surroundings, are all contained or represented in this part of the body, according to the Bambara. It is for these reasons that initiation society masks are worn either on top of the head or on the face itself. Furthermore, the composition” of the objects emphasises, according to the initiation category to which they belong, this or that significant element of the head or face. For example, the komo exaggerates the brain-pan and the mouth, the kono exaggerates the bones of the temples, the kore the bones of the forehead and the eyes, and the nama the nose. 2. The Selection of Certain Essential Elements.

These can sometimes exist alone, so that in this way the universal” model appears to have been misrepresent¬ ed. What is there in common between the tyiwara antel°pe, which even an uninformed person can recognise, and that other tyiwara in the Deslouis collection, for example? (Arts Sauvages, pi. xxix). Nothing, if one does not know that any male tyiwara is ’’composed” of an antelope supported on an aardvark, and furthermore that the latter animal is even the nucleus of the representations related to the object. 3. Formal Execution.

Forms are made not in relation to the resemblance to the model represented, but in relation to perceived reality. For example, the eyes of certain masks have a round or rectangular form because the reality which they are sup¬ posed to see is, or ought to be, perceived according to these forms, because of the symbolism attached to them. It could be said, on this subject, that the plastic forms of the Bambara constitute the expression of the aspects under which the reality they refer to is considered. Or to put it m another way: the form of the signifier is joined to that which is signified when considered under a particular

4. The Idea of Beauty Attached to the Balance Between the Signified and the Signifier.

It is not so much the harmony of proportions on the —

42

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formal plane as an adequate relationship between the object and the notions of which it is the bearer, that preoccupies the Bambara. For those who use it, the mask is beautiful insofar as it expresses a balanced relationship between the elements of which it is composed and the realities it symbolised. That is to say that the idea of the beautiful, as appreciated by the Bambara, is combined with understanding that the beautiful mask is the true mask. 5. The Personality of the Artist.

This is expressed at the finishing stage of the objects as well as on the level of abstraction imposed on the formal execution. However, every object has a maximum limit of abstraction beyond which the artist may not go without endangering the characteristics of beauty and truth in his work. In practice, the masks of the Bambara initiation societies are by no means intended to satisfy the aesthetic feelings of those who use them. These objects do not play the role of polarizing a sense of the marvellous in the life of the Bambara. They do, however, constitute creative sources of intense emotions (fear, respect, love) which are the more strongly felt because the objects ’’come to life” during religious festivals and acquire the whole fullness of their meaning with the movements which their wearers impose on them. It is also under such conditions that the quality of beauty becomes apparent in Bambara ’’art” objects, without, however, it being possible to maintain that a separation takes place at this moment, in the consciousness of those using them, between aesthetic and ethical emotions.

Dominique Zahan, Directeur de l’Institut d’Ethnologie, Faculté des Lettres, Université de Strasbourg. (Translated from the French.)

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43

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Harris MEMEL-FOTE

The Perception of Beauty in Negro-African Culture There was a time when to inquire about beauty meant, automatically and exclusively, inquiring into an absolute — an absolute situated somewhere on an Olympus of ideas, far removed from concrete cultures and from living hu¬ manity ; this was the era of speculative aesthetics, of in¬ nate and dogmatic rationalism, of theoretical anthropo¬ logy and of abstract universalism. That era, the one of Platonism, is no longer with us. Already, around 1823, in Germany, Hegel, in the place of aesthetics as a pure science of beauty, substituted, in his teachings, a philosophy of fine arts, the protohistorical stage of contemporary aesthe¬ tic anthropology. Since then, cultural anthropology, as a positive science, has come into being. There was a time when to search for the perception of beauty in Negro-African culture, worse than illigitimate and senseless, would have been forbidden, since the uni¬ verse existed in a division into two clans ; on one side, in the North, the clan of peoples, of historical and cultured societies and, on the other side, that of tribes, in other words, of ahistorical societies, prehistoric and without culture, and since the ’’Negroes”, propotvpes of the latter clan, had, according to the theory, neither culture, nor history nor fine arts. —

45

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That era also, the era of ethnology based on philoso¬ phical postulates and on cultural Naziism, is finished. Scientific ethnology is the order of the day along with the attitude of concrete universalism. It is developing, a post¬ eriori, as a method of demonstration ad absurdum. And the ultimate proof of its wealth in knowledge of the arts is this First World Festival of Negro Arts, in this Collo¬ quium on the meaning of that sacred art, is the scientific quality of the orators who will discuss here all the dimen¬ sions and all the perspectives of that art. So, the subject of Negro-African Perception of the Beau¬ tiful is ligitimate in principle as well as in fact.

In Principle.

Anthropology has contributed to our era one funda¬ mental truth. That truth is that the notion of culture which defines the collective effort of men to dominate and to ma¬ terially and spiritually enrich nature by constantlv givin° more personality and satisfaction to individuals is a tota¬ litarian notion, that it embraces the universality of human activities, that aside from culture, nothing is human and that consequently art is a building block of any given cultural ensemble. Negro-Arican cultures do not escape this law. Artistic activity depends, in fact, on two ontologically interdependent elements ; on an act and a realiz¬ ation ; a method and a conclusion ; a technique and a result , a work and a balance-sheet. This realization, when it is a success, this conclusion, when it is happy, when the result is perfect and the balance is favorable is a work of art, it is a work of beauty, a useful or a de luxe Let us transpose this anthropological axiom into dsvchological terms. It amounts to asserting that all men possess if not an aptitude for art, at least an aesthetic sensibility because everyone is endowed with an affectivitv and with the perceptive organs to which specialized arts correspond as proved by Lalo’s structural classification of he fine arts : for example, to the ear, music ; to the eve painting and to speech, poetry. In the principle of the universality of judgment or of the universality of an aesthe¬ tic sense, Kant, before the written principle and a priori gave one of the possible philosophic formulations for this anthropological truth. —

46

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In Fact.

Whether we look for beauty in an art which is disinter¬ ested, not involved in everyday life, or whether we look upon it as the emanation of a service art, it is always and everywhere possible to fit African aesthetics into it Do we need a voice of authority to prove this ? ”In Black Africa, as everywhere else, there exists a free art as well as a religious art”, said one ethnologist who was most interested in the religious basis of Negro institutions (Mar¬ cel Griaule). So, alongside the statuary, sacred art, there are secular arts, a literature of tales, decorations, a variety of music. But, on considering the service arts historically, we see that an aesthetic has been made of certain of these arts which have many traits in common with Negro arts, the aesthetics, for example, of Greek art which reveals an ana¬ logous tie between beauty and good. How, with the same postulate, can a successful aesthetic be possible in one case and not in another ? If the question thus posed proves justified both in prin¬ ciple and in fact, it is clear that our research method is self-explanatory. Our investigation will not be purely constructive, but also reflective, not purely scientific, but also philosophical. Since the beauty that our investigation intends to elucidate depends, not on an individual psycho¬ logy, but on a collective psychology, our aesthetic reflection will take the ethnological experiment as a starting point. * * *

To the prejudicial question : ’’Does the idea of beauty have a real foundation in Negro-African culture ?” the ethnologist gives an affirmative answer. There are peoples for whom beauty does not exist either in an abstract fashion or in an autonomous manner since it is always linked to good. ’’Linguists note”, observes Claude Roy, ’’that most African languages have no word for beautiful or beauty : this is the case for Swahili, Baya, Batékén Boulou, etc. In this respect the Negroes are in the same boat as the ancient Greeks : just as the African dia¬ lects have, for the most part, only one adjective to mean beautiful and good, so any Greek dictionary will remind us that aghatos meant, at the same time, beautiful, good, 47

brave at war. To assimilate beauty and goodness does not mean denying the former.” „?the^.Pe°Ples’ on the contrary, maintain the concept of a beautiful as such and an ’’ugly” as such. Here are some examples from the three major cultural groups in the Ivory Coast — Akan, Krou and Mande. Klamâ, Klinmâ, Arema are the words for beautiful respectively according to the Agms, the N’Zemas and the Baulés. In the Adiukru language, the term is sakpl ; in Bété, it is Guinanô ; the Bambaras say Tiegna. Correlatively, ugliness bears the following names : êtê ; êtanê, sûw, tiêdjuguya. There are other words to show the nuances of beauty. In Adiukru * Mamn — excellent ; sobo — splendid ; êtru — perfect But beauty here is more than a sign, it is a significance ; more than a word, it is a reality. With respect to the wider meaning, there is one deter¬ mining characteristic, universality. Do not take this to mean an individual universality in which case beauty would be along with reasoning, according to Descartes, the thing best distributed among beings in the whole world. ï>uch a universality would eliminate ugliness from the whht t c at 1S-n0t warranted- Here we are dealing with a sort of generic universality. Beauty, Africans think, is an indescribable something which inhabits all the regions of the universe — in any case, a category which is apphcable and which is applied to all kinds of things, to all sorts of beings in the world. heJov1, A !f/minna-te bTuty in thin§s and beings, natural ^ d thr ? \a beauty in man’s acts and accom¬ plishments, artistic beauty.* Just as we speak of the beauty of a stone, a leaf, a bird, of a domestic animal and of a woman, so we will speak of the beauty of a house a om-cloth a haird-do, a song, a dance. Let us listen to the stories and legends, let us observe life, these are all depo¬ sitories of the aesthetic. Beautiful among stones, the jade Beautiful among trees, the samba, the mahogany, the 6 •Beautlful also are the squirrel, the antelope, the wild guinea, the cock and the bull. In the legendary or the authentic history of men there are also memorable and proverbial beauties. The tales and legends of Senegal celebrate the beauty of Fanta In the Congo, there is Wadikumi : ’’the most beautiful girl

whil/lSl tf while qualiftmg natu.ral works orbeauty’ art as WoIof dyêka prefers yêm ma « in time with », « which is perfect ». y ’ —

48

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term tar and rafet « which covers », is

one has ever seen.” In Chad, the archetype of beauty is the daughter of Am-Sitep, wife of Abakar, the most beautiful girl on earth, hidden under the skin of a slie-ass. In the Ivory Coast, Ahoua is the queen of the stars. The cosmic extension of beauty means, on the level of humanity, and according to the true word of the poet, that no race, no people, no culture has a monopoly of beauty. But, as we shall see, between natural and artistic beauty, the former has primogeniture because, in Negro cosmogony, minerals, plants and animals preceded man in coming to life.

As cosmic as it may appear, beauty is, as far as under¬ standing is concerned, marked by one foremost characte¬ ristic — relativity. Two Bété philosophical tales illustrate this determina¬ tion : the Story of the Chimpanzee and the Antelope and the Story of the Toad. In a village park, two of the men’s captives lament on their misfortunes, then get into an argument. The antelope, a male, sighs at the thought of his mistresses back in the forest crying in his absence. Then, in his turn, the chim¬ panzee, nostalgic, longs for his own sweethearts, and what sweethearts they are ! ’’What ?” says the antelope, ’’you mean you have lovers who adore you enough to miss you ?” ’’And why not ?” asks the chimpanzee, puzzled. ’’Why, your reputation of...” ”Of ugliness ?” hints the chimpanzee. ”Yes. Ugliness is so proverbial in the memory of ani¬ mals that your story sounds like a joke or a lie”, the an¬ telope concludes. ”Yes, I understand,” says the chimpanzee. ’’But remem¬ ber simply that there is no absolute ugliness of chimpanzees except in the village and in the minds of antelopes and other animals”. In the Story of the Toad, the theme is identical. The philosopher denies, with a talking tam-tam, that he is the ugliest of animals and points out that even nature’s most superb beings enjoy the water of the pool where he has taken his bath. Transpose these fictions from zoology to ethnology, from the animal world to the society of men wherein lies their —

49

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4

true significance. We find the idea that justifies our theory that conceptions of beauty and ugliness are relative, that they are truly valid and meaningful only within the civi¬ lization and in relationship to the civilization of a com¬ munity of peoples. But this relativity is not so absolute as to be rendered incompatible with the very conception of the universality of beauty or to render all comparison invalid. In their particular environments, and in spite of these particula¬ rities, animals and men discuss, understand each other and agree with each other ; they speak of the same reality. And that reality has the same ^foundation, the same sup¬ port-nature. Relative and relativistic to a certain degree, the African perception of beauty is also a unitary perception. Here it is not a question of beauty in the strictly physical sense nor of beauty in the strictly moral sense. It is not a ques¬ tion of physical beauty with neither ontological thickness nor moral radiation. And not a moral beauty that offers no carnal outlet. Beauty is one. But it is pluri-dimensional and presents various aspects. There is a physical-mathematical aspect of beauty, there is the ethical aspect, there is the metaphysical and meta¬ moral aspect. Three aspects of the same reality whose analysis and genetics constitute an ontology. Negro aesthe¬ tics is, taken as a whole, that very ontology. Thus, for beauty, we can sketch an aesthetic of sensitivity, an aesthe¬ tic of morality, an aesthetic of being. Is it a matter of physical aesthetics ? It is in the form of criteriology that Negro cultures offer what is elsewhere called canons of beauty. In The Life of a South African Tribe, Junod, using the thonga experiment, suggests the South African conception. But what is their notion of beauty ? Their ideal is a high waist, vigorous limbs and well-developed breasts. A proverb says : "nsati wa mabele ou nga nabele loko ou nge ne boukosi — Do not covet a woman with an opulent bosom f you have no money...” This does not mean that she will cost more, but that her father, knowing that she will not lack suitors, will not give her up unless the ’’lobolo” (the dowry) is paid immediately in full. Also, a young girl iTfarp l00?1S m°r? ?drm.red than one with too round a face. Of he former it is said : ”She is pretty, she looks like an antelope (a kota mhala) ; and of the second : ’’She —

50

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is chubby, she is like a sow.” dark skin...

Light skin is preferred to

Henri Labouret, in The Tribes of the Rameau Lobi, analyzes these peoples, criteriology : ’’The feelings of the people of Lobi toward physical beauty is singularly close to ours... In Samploé, a few years ago, lived a woman, Popia (for poro pla, that white woman), remark¬ able for the light colour of her skin, her firm breasts, her small waist, her well-proportioned limbs ; she was con¬ sidered, not without good reason, as the most beautiful person in the region. Abusing the powers of her charms, she divorced several times a year”. Court hearings also permit us to study the ideas of in¬ digenous peoples on physical beauty. Such-and-such a mature man explains in court his disillusionment with a companion too young for him and the companion does not hide her disgust for a husband whose beard and hair are sprinkled with grey, whose limbs are flabby and whose ribs stick out. With just a little clever insistence, she will ex¬ pound, not without pleasure, on the qualities of the lover who has seduced her ; he is a good dancer, he plays the xylophone, hunts with a bow and arrow better than anyone ; he has the most beautiful eyes bordered by long lashes, a small mouth and all his teeth ; his arms are firm as is his chest and are well attached to his shoulders. He is a handsome man while the other one is... The Lobis, Birifors and Teguessiés of both sexes like also to apply, to their torsos and limbs, a powdered metal which gives them a much-appreciated red colouring. In ad¬ dition, the men who take part in merry-making or who get together to dance, cover their chests, stomachs and legs with clay or with brown mud that becomes lighter as it dries and produces a quite beautiful effect.” Here is a summary and comparative table offered by the canons of several cultural groups. The Akan group (Agni, N’Zema etc.) hair : plentiful, ’’fine like silk” ; eyes : ’’fire”, veiny or red ; nose : more or less straight ; teeth : white with a space in the centre ; black gums (for women) ; neck : wrinkled and long ; fin¬ gers and toes : slim, tapering ; legs : parallel with full calves ; body hair : on the chest and the rest of the body (for men), on the back and thighs (for women) ; weight : heavy (for men) ; colour : light ; voice : soft sweet, in ge¬ neral (for women); size : slender, medium, neither a giraffe nor a pygmy. —

51

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The Krou group (Bété) : hair : abundant, black ; fore¬ head : high ; eyes : neither white, the colour of morbidity, nor red, the colour of cruelty, but shaded, smiling ; nose : neither too snubbed nor too aquiline ; mouth : small, re¬ sembling neither a cat nor a dog, without excessively thick lips; teeth : not prominent, well-aligned, straight,'white, not too large, separation in the centre ; neck : long, wrin¬ kled ; ears : neither too large nor too small, nor too far apart, with slightly developed lobes ; chest : neither too bulging nor too flat ; arms : neither too long nor too short, in proportion to the body, supple, round for women ; fingers : neither too slim nor too fat, neither too short nor too long, tapered, round, unbitten ; legs : neither too long nor too short, parallel, (for women), without veins which are the expression of manly strength ; colour : light ; voi¬ ce : clear. The Bantu group : size : tall ; limbs : vigorous ; breasts • developed (in women) ; long antelope face (for women) • light skin. The Lobi group : circles under the eyes ; mouth : small ; chest . firm ; limbs : in proportion to the body ; waist * small ; light skin. From this table it is apparent that, apart from obvious particularities belonging to each ethnic group, and which must be explained, there are elements which constitute an African criteriology of beauty. Objective, these ele¬ ments are psycho-physical or psycho-physiological real¬ ities. It is, first of all, the material mass or volume that is called abundance of hair, fullness of calves, roundness of buttocks ; then comes colour, either of skin (light) or of hair and gums (black) ; it is also line — waistline, line of fingers parallel line of the legs and feet ; it is strength and tone and rhythm. For each of these elements, normally it would be ne¬ cessary to devote a special study, a study whose under¬ taking is not permitted within the framework of this ar¬ ticle. Let us, however, retain a few essential facts con¬ cerning them. The first fact is that formal beauty is based on a physico-mathematical structure : a measurement a relationship, a proportion. Beauty as a quality seems'to emerge from a certain quantitative threshold. You see mea¬ surement in dimension : that of a man’s size, for example. Neither a giraffe nor a pygmy, says the African. Measure¬ ment in form : for example, the nose or the mouth etc lhe immanent relationship to this objectively determi—

52

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nable measurement would be an interesting study for psycho-physicists. But indeterminate in the case of natural beauty, this structure has been partially studied in the fine arts. Since the artistic marvels of Benin and of Nok, the originality of the African canon is recognized for statuary. Although, in fact, the relationship between the head and the body is estimated in Greek art as one-to-six or one-to-seven, it turns out to be one-to-three or one-to-four in African sculp¬ ture. Let us refer to the recent exhibition of African Art or to Mr. William Fagg’s anthology entitled : Africa, One Hundred Tribes, One Hundred Masterpieces. Most of the works confirm the generality of this relationship : those of the Afos, the Yaundes, the Batékés, the Baris, the Makondes, the Bakoubas, just to name these few. The same original structure is the basis of music. In Muntu, Janheinz Jahn gives a succinct analysis of it : ’’The rhythmical in African percussion is either polymetric or polyrhythmical. Polymetry consists of the simultaneous uniting of several fundamental meters, each one different from the others. Polvrhythm amounts to accentuating, in different ways, a single fundamental meter, notably by varying it through various syncopation procedures. In a polymetric structure, we will find several basic meters superimposed upon each other : for example, three drums entering successively, one at 4/4 times, the second at 3/4 and the third at 2/4. Consequently, distribution of the arsis and the thesis is different in each part of the poly¬ phony : if we score the instrumental ensemble thus ob¬ tained, the initial tempi for the measure in each of the parts will not coincide. But the total order of the rhythmic structure will be assured through periodic repetition of the complex rhythmic total obtained through the superimposition of three different measures whose initial time is phased for each one in relation to the other two. Dauer called this total complex ’’resultant” or ’’sequence of ac¬ cents”. On the contrary, in a polyrhythmic structure, the bars always correspond among themselves for all the parts of the polyphony, but different presentations of an identical meter combine in a uniform scheme of distribution of strong beats. These two schemes have in common the principle of crossed rhythm by which the principal accents, far from concurring through their meeting in the tempo, reinforce —

53

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themselves by opposing each other, somewhat in the man¬ ner of reciprocally perpendicular diagonals ; so that, in the example of the polymetric, the basic meters command, each one independently of the others, in the part of the poly¬ phony which concerns it, the periodic return of the strong beat at regular intervals that are equal, but different, from part to part. It is in this manner,” Dauer explains, ’’that Negroes produce their fascinating suites of accents, bv rhythmically crossing basic forms which, on analysis, turn out to be among the simplest. These sequences of accents are actually the purpose of the rhythmic combinations which African musicians like”. The ecstatic percussion formulas that result from these rhythmic combinations are, in a manner of speaking, the equivalent of the nommo in Voodoo : the nommo is the word of the Loas which, by the simple fact of his call¬ ing on him, transforms a dancer into choual, the incar¬ nation of a given Loa. The drums ”say” nommo, expresing the magic word which names a given human being and calls him to the function of ’’image” of a given Loa. Since these rhythmic forms belong to African culture and do not appear in Western music, their presence is an irrefutable criterion of the Africanitv of any cultural ma¬ nifestation of a musical nature in which they appear. In the West Indies and in Latin America, polymetry and polyrhythm have survived, as is shown by Dauer, while in the L.b.A. only polvrhythm has remained in use by the Ne¬ groes , there it is obviously a question of survival of a fundamentally African sensitivity trait. We know, fur¬ thermore, that jazz uses polvrhythm as a rule for the swing” style. . subject of literature, no one has done a better job than the great specialist Senghor in defining the laws which make for its poetic beauty : ’’Rhythm”, he says does not come from alternating long syllables and sh6rt syllables, but solely from alternating accentuated syllables and unacccentuated syllables, strong beats and soft beats It is a matter of rhythmic versification”. Verse exists and’ by the same token, poem, when, in the same time interval’ an accentuated syllable is repeated. But the essential rhythm is not that of the word, but of the percussion instru¬ ments that accompany the human voice, or more preciselv those instruments that beat out the basic rhythm We are dealing with a polyrhythm, with a kind of rhythmic coun¬ terpoint. This prevents the word, that mechanical re—

54

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gularity, from breeding monotony. The poem appears thus as an architecture, a mathematical formula based on unity within diversity. Here is the rhythm of words in two Wolof poems taken at random. A)

B)

24 24

00 00

44 44

00 00

43 43

00 00

32 32

31 31

22 32

31 21

32 32

31 21

32 32

31 31

22

31

As one might guess, the basic rhythm is, in the first case, 4444 and, in the second, 3333. In both cases, the verse is a tetrameter. But the public often takes part in the poem. So we have two groups of rhythms, which permit the two chorus leaders — one for the reciters and one for the tam¬ tams — to give themselves completely to their inspira¬ tion and to multiply contra tempo and syncopation with solid support from the bass rhythm. For the monotonous basic rhythm, far from being a hindrance to inspiration, is a necessary condition for it. Nevertheless, the elements of rhythm are not limited to what I have described. In addition to the public’s handclapping, the steps and ges¬ tures of the reciters and the drummers, we should note certain figures of speech — alliterations, paranomasia, ana¬ phora which, based on the repetition of sound phenomena, form secondary rhythms and strengthen the effect of the —

55

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ensemble. The poet makes abundant use of those descrip¬ tive words whose importance has been described by Mr. de la Verghe de Tressan. He shows us that these words, for¬ med by onomatopoeia, sometimes constitute up to a third of the vocabulary of a Negro-African language. The ’’prose recital” has some of the grace of rhythm. This mathematical structure is not the only constant one can point out in the various ingredients of sensitive beauty. There is another one. Far from being purely ob¬ jective elements, elements of a purely physical or physio¬ logical nature, these ingredients comprise a socio-cultural sense as a dimension of their own being. Condidered from the standpoint of their internal dynamism, they are for the Negro the expression, the manifestation of a profound na¬ ture. Seen, on the other hand, from the outside, they ap¬ pear as symbols of the indivisible. Mass and volume are the manifestation and the symbol of strength and of fertility. To the Bété, redness of eyes symbolizes cruelty just as whiteness expresses and symbolizes morbidity. When the Negro artist accentuates, gives prominence, hypertrophizes some part of his plastic art, literature, or music, one would say it is precisely to reveal the significance of that parti¬ cular aspect and to impose it. Inequality of significance explains and justifies the characteristic and notorious dis¬ proportion of works of African art. In other words, beauty has not only a sensitive di¬ mension, it has also an ethical dimension That beauty is related to good in Negro-African culture is a commonplace echoed by most authors. A comparative table of aesthetic categories in a few cultural groups con¬ firms the general character of this fact. Ethnic Groups

Agni N’Zéma Adj ukru Bété (Daloa) (Gagnoa) Bambara Attié

Aesthethic Categories

Moral Categories

beautiful

ugly

good

bad

Klâmâ Klinmâ Akpl Mamn Nane o nêni ku Ivagni leudjâ

été êtané ûw lugnn

kpa kpalè Akpl Mamn Nanigba Omri nêni

ete êtané ûw lugnn

—

Djugu gnignâ 56

—

leu

A g A

Djugu Gnignâ

But, on the whole, the authors do not seem to have gone beyond the level of a simple statement of fact. Yet, the relationship of beauty to the idea of good, in its most immediate, its most concrete, its widest sense, indeed takes on an aspect of the pragmatic. It is com¬ monly acknowledged that Negro Art is an art that is inte¬ grated into everyday life, it is a social art, a service art. This means, first of all, according to a fair observation by Camille Schuwer, that this art ”is not at the original centre of values, but rather on their periphery ; it is adjectival and not substantive, qualifying and not constituent. At a lower level, that of customs and everyday life, the same is true. The desired result is given at the beginning, social habits and the discipline of customs rule the artist, the craftsman. No matter how important its artistic content may be, the making of a garment, a uniform, an ornament, a piece of jewelry or a tool is subordinated to its function, its efficacity. Any adjunctions whose only purpose would be beauty are excluded insofar as it would overburden or hamper proper utilization of the object. This means also and above all that beauty, if indeed there is any, is required to aid, it is called upon to participate and is a participant to the efficacity of the object, to the realization of its func¬ tion. This means, if you will, that beauty has its own effi¬ cacity. The more beautiful the object, the better it accom¬ plishes its affectively desired, imaginatively dreamed, tech¬ nically hoped for effect. In statuary, the image of an an¬ cestor, waguem (logon ou mma agni, must appear as beau¬ tiful as possible in order to seduce and trap the spirit of the deceased. So, beauty plays a role in religious, political and economic activity. But the strict ethical relationship helps best in showing the specificity of the Negro-African perception of beauty. In this respect, two factors stand out in the comparative table. First, that the same root — kpa kp — designates good in the Agni-Baulé cultures and beauty in the Adjukru culture — all cultures of the same Akan group. Secondly, that the same term means ugly and bad for all the abovementioned peoples. To fully understand this situation, let us examine, for example, the Adjukru culture. There are two revealing factors. When an Adjukru wants to speak of the beauty of an individual, he will say of that individual, in absolute and personal terms : that man is handsome, that woman is beautiful, Vakpl. That beauty, sakpl, has to do with the 57

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sensitive ego of the person considered ; it may refer to the entire body or to a part, any part at all, of the body. On the other hand, if he wants to refer to the person’s good¬ ness also sakpl — the Adjukru will localize it to two internal and central organs of the body : the stomach or the heart. The heart is a source of life in that it is the literal headquarters of respiration or breath, thought, sen¬ timents, will — for here will and affectivity constitute one single, vital act. The stomach is another source of life because it is the place of conception and development of living beings. In other words, a person’s sensitive, pheno¬ menal, formal, organic accomplishment is beauty. Good¬ ness is an accomplishment by the spirit, in the“etymolo¬ gical sense, a gesture of vital impulse since it comes from the root of life where breathing, feeling, wishing and loving constitute a single movement by the person. The second indication that we see in Adjukru culture confirms the first. When an Adjukru wants to evoke the beauty of an individual, he specifies the sex of that person. Ignn Mamn (vir). Yow mamn. This is speaking very concretely. On the other hand, when he wants to call at¬ tention to a person’s goodness, he is obliged to add a ge¬ neric description along with his sexual determinant. Yow na, Egn mamn. This (that) woman ; there is a good man. This means two things : that goodness, because it comes from the heart and the stomach, is an internal rea¬ lization, absti act up to the time it comes forth in concrete effects ; and that its basis is that which is necessary and universal in all men, that which characterizes man. As for beauty, it appears to be based completely in space. Let us go one step further, let us penetrate into the heart and stomach, those centres where, along with life itself, good and evil are elaborated. When he sees good emanating from them, the Negro attributes to those sources cleanliness and whiteness, the colour of clay which is itself a symbol of purity and innocence. If they happen to invent evil they will be called black heart or black stomach, black, the colour of coal which symbolizes impuritv and evil, the colour also of night which harbours witchcraft So we have good related to the light of day, to whiteness’ and evil attached to blackness. f Tïf rf^tloI^s.hlP °f good to beauty stands out in the fact that tins ethical symbolism turns up again in the Afri¬ cans aesthetic perception. In fact, every major exhibition of beauty comes forth in terms of lightness — stellar, vege—

58

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table or animal lightness. We see Attova and Fanta com¬ pared to a star, a being and a source of light. Here we have the daughter of Am-Silep : she is sometimes aurora, a bright blossoming of day ; sometimes a water-lily, a ve¬ getable form of light resting on the greenish epidermis of water. And modern poets exalt the beauty of Negro women for its light and warmth. In a beauty contest between equally black and equally beautiful women in a black country, the jury’s votes will go to the woman whose black¬ ness seems brilliant ; if one candidate is brilliantly black and another is light-skinned, the prize will go to the latter. Even a beautiful voice comprises, among other qualities, lightness. These facts prove that for these people the ideal colour for beauty lies in the opposite direction from the colour of the dominant anthropological type. They show also the eminence of light in the conception of philo¬ sophical values and especially the privileged position of the eye in aesthetic perception. For the Bété, beauty — guinànô de gui — is a visual magnificence. Even beautiful music is described by the eye as though beauty could only be conceived by reinterpretation and translation into vi¬ sual terms. But beauty does not have just two dimensions — a physico-mathematical dimension and an ethical dimension — it has also a third dimension, the ontological dimension. A coloured and rhythmical form, goodness is also strength. Strength can be perceived in the world by at least three capacities : by its vitality, by its activity and by its efficacity. Beauty seems imperishably linked to the existence and to the development of the world. In nature, with the death and the recurrence of minerals, plants, animals and men, beauty dies and is resuscitated. In the same way, beauty is constantly revived in man’s activities and gestures. But it is not simply an element acted upon by the world — it is active. It stirs the world around it. And while the effect of ugliness is repulsive and negative, the effect of beauty is attractive and positive. It is, first of all, a moral effect. Beauty confers personality and independence upon its possessor : and Fanta can say ”no” to chiefs and their caravans of gold. In the soul of admirers, beauty awakens and nourishes love and peace. Of Wadikumi, ’’her smile brings to the hearts of old men joyful peace and magnanimity.” When Abakar’s father, furious at the news that his son had married a she-ass and having taken up arms against him, comes across the splen—

59

did Am-Silep, his arm, which he willed murderous, drop¬ ped Ps weapon.” And this same relationship of cause and effect between beauty and love, beauty and life, is described by Amos Tutuola in The Palm-Wine Drinkard, when he approves the young girl’s having followed the perfect gent¬ leman. ”1 could really not blame the girl for having fol¬ lowed Crâne who is a complete gentleman because, if I were a young lady, no doubt, I would have followed him anywhere he wanted to go. And what’s more, as a man I envied him even more because if this gentleman should i mi °n ^he battlefield surely the enemy would not kill him or make him a prisoner and if the airplanes saw him in a city that was to be bombed they would not release their bombs. If he were there and they happened to drop one, the bomb itself would refuse to explode until the gent¬ leman had left the city because of his beauty. As soon as 1 saw the gentleman that day, all I could do was to follow him around the market. After having looked at him for all that time, I ran to a corner of the market and cried for a few minutes, thinking to myself that I had not been created so beautiful as that gentleman.” We must say that the effect of beauty goes beyond the moral : it is social, economic and political at the same time. ”To be ugly is one claim to fame,” said the owl, ”to be beautiful is an altogether different one”. This means that beauty causes waves of favourable opinion, of apti¬ tudes of rivalry and of conquest. It even brings about dis¬ placements of populations, of riches and of fortune. Such was the case with Fanta. Better still, as the story of Attoua proves, these social effects can assume cosmic proportions. Yesterday, a girl with spoiled teeth, an object of sarcasm. Today, she reco¬ vers her star-like teeth through the kindness of an old woman. Thus : ’’The news of the marvel spread like a stream of powder and for days, months, years, entire populations went to see the event for themselves. One could see along the roadways thousands of pilgrims of all ages and all conditions, passing, passing, passing without slackening, violating borders, jostling the most heavily-armed troops, tearing down the most impreg¬ nable fortresses, trampling old people and children Animals ran away, shocked, preceding the fantastic pilgrims announced by a persistent stream of dust covering afhousand-mde radius. They wondered what had caused men to march together for once in a block toward a common —

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objective. The parrot spouted until he was breathless, trying to explain the phenomenon to fearful and distraught birds while the elephant lost himself in his vast domain. With the aid of the exodus, extortions and crime got com¬ pletely out of hand and the angels, at the end of their daily round, drew up terrifying balance-sheets. And the holiday still continued and the people kept passing.”

* * *

A fundamental question comes to mind at this point. What is the source of this strength which we have just ana¬ lyzed ? Or what is the indescribable something which ac¬ complishes and assures the unity of beauty and good ? To this question, there is just one answer, a philosophical answer. Philosophy fulfils its mission only by proposing and by imposing a theory. In the actual state of ethnolo¬ gical research, only one possible theory offers a solution to the problem : the theory of being as a vital force as it was understood by the South Africans and by R.P. Tempels and the Ruandan Kagamé. We will take only the portion which pertains to the problem at hand. ’’For the Bantu.” Tempels writes, ’’strength is not an accident, it is even more than a necessary accident, it is the very essence of being itself. For vital force is being itself as it exists in its true totality, actually realized and actually capable of more intense realization.” The percep¬ tion found in this theory is shared by many other African peoples. Vital force is the nyama of the Mandingos, the Touras and the Dogons ; it is the zili of the Mossis, the adoubey of the Kouroumbas, the moyo of the Balubas and the Luluas. And it has been seen with the Adjuhrus that the sto¬ mach and the heart, structurally solidary, are the source of life at two different levels : the heart because it is the organic starting point of vital breath ; the stomach because it is the laboratory for bringing forth new beings. So, one thing unites heart and stomach, beauty and goodness. In short, one thing is the basis for beauty ; that thing is life. But that is another vague and insufficient determination. The universe is a hierarchical and dialectic system of forces. A primary structural law would have all forcebeings necessarily and universally linked. According to

61

the second law, there is an interaction between beings so that reciprocal influences take place in all directions, ver¬ tically fom higher beings to lower beings ; in the other direction by mediations and horizontally between equal forces. In the law of anthropocentrism, the universe is oriented toward man, finalized by him. The deceased are in the service of the living who confer upon them vital and social presence. In the same vein, all inferior forces -_ minerals, plants and animals — exist to serve the life and the power of men. But the key to our problem lies in the hierarchy of beings. The forces of the world are, in fact well ordered. Starting at the bottom of the scale and moving upward are minerals plants, animals. In the mid¬ dle are men, living and dead, including the founders of tribes. Men are personal forces, active wills, vivifying in that they can decide in favour of good and realize that choice, destructive also and a centre of relationship bet¬ ween forces. At the summit of the universal hierarchy is God NvaMurunga, Tan Bwandi, Amma, Nvamien. A primordial vital force, grand muntu, he is, at once creator of the world and first begetter, the first to sow a seed and give birth the first father. ’ Creator. What does this mean ? Most of the images which, through myths, show us the cosmogonical theories ot black peoples, assimilate creation with a kind of eco¬ nomic activity and make of God a great producer. Potter architect of the cosmic storehouse, that is God for the Dogons. t or the Yorubas, the world is like a gourd We can deduce from this that the finality of the world is the well¬ being of God and of men. For the Bambaras, already the desire to create is born in Massa Dambali in the form of a need for duplication, for community ; as a craving bv man, as a generosity. If this is true, consequently there is at the source af creation, at the root of life, taken from mans point of view, an original goodness which still manifests itself today in the heart (I was about to sav in

li.amymaCh> °f 'he W°rId in ‘he f°™ of

i^eUaustibi"

The ontological relationship between goodness and beauty is now becoming evident. God did not distinguish aHhfh0"81"3 y aS being an artist He appeared, rather at the beginning as a producer and master of the world’s economy aiming strictly for well-being and better-being Nevertheless the world resulting from his act mantt —

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among other properties, the property of beauty. Beauty is beside the point, it is that which has not been expressly desired and systematically sought, but that which, in fact, accompanied creation in its fulfilment, it is the peripheral element in the world’s perfection, it is the auxiliary of good. Here we have the order of purposes. In the order of the act, it follows from all this that God is nevertheless the primordial artist who founded in his creative gesture all the future branches of art. In actual fact, it is possible to count the art foundations which are immanent in the devine creation, from the spoken word to rhythm. The human artist has obtained from life the gift of creating, of awakening and of constantly and collectively bringing up to date God’s gesture. He has received from Him also — Dogon myths prove it — practical art ins¬ truction. But God not only gives a metaphysical explanation of art, he also explains the ontological history of beauty and its utility. Natural beauty is genetically first in relation to artistic beauty, as is the work of God compared to the work of man. The unity of the one beauty with the other finds its basis in the unity of man, nature and God. * * *

An essay on a perception of beauty, specifically on the Negro-African perception, would be incomplete if it limited itself to a simple descriptive analysis of ethnological fac¬ tors. One would be justified in seeking an explanation. An essay on a perception of beauty, specifically on the Negro-African perception, even though its task of des¬ cription and explanation has been completed, presents an interest other than the interest in knowledge of the object in itself and for itself : it can serve as an introduction to an aesthetic anthropology. An essay on the Negro-African perception of beauty has not only a theoretical interest ; it has an eminent practical interest. It is not a pure and simple speculation. Beauty here does not have the transcending nature that we have seen in the ancient Greeks’ and Plato’s ideas of beauty. It is, rather, immanent, very concrete, adherent to things, to 63

nature, to activity or to work. And its perception, exeperlenced by Africans, far from being a contemplation, is, tor Negro-Afncan culture, an active perception. It works theoretically toward a philosophy of action. It comprises a religious conception, it comprises an ethic and it implies also a policy touching on art. But, better still, the percep¬ tion of beauty practically pledges action — it is liberating. Let us conclude by stressing this point. That objective and universal recognition of beauty is an act of justice and , ecfulty’ science is on hand to demonstrate it and ethnology to prove it in the African case. Justice rendered to African Art has been useful to humanity in two senses, hirst, it has liberated Africa’s contemplating peoples from moral prejudice, lrom scientific subjectivism and, in precisely this respect, from cultural imperialism. Secondly, it has been for actors, I mean Africans and their overseas brothers, a decisive factor of cultural renaissance which is itself preparatory to the political emancipation now under way. Liberation, yes — one which has meant an increase in personality on all sides. Is 11 not true that the revelation of African sculpture has revitalized Europe’s modern art ? And what confi¬ dence, what authority the comparative perception of cul¬ tures and of arts has given to Negro artists today i But beyond the cultural benefits, the thing that people have wh.lch 1S of even greater value — since, as an effect of this reciprocal cultural recognition, it becomes in its turn the condition for preservation of this gain — is the recorehitionship^nS6 °f friendship’ an improvement in human Here we have the First Festival of Negro Arts a nerblacl° n °f jbe?Uty ?rganized on a world-wide seal/ by black people for white and yellow men, their brothers 1 comprises an act of truth and a solemn testimony of justice which is this Colloquium. Then will come the spectacidars, the realizations of artists and the ovations of admirers. I like to believe that from all that will be done seen and felt of beauty, there will result for black people among themselves, for black, white and yellow people together, more reciprocal understand™» morl bfarckmaer^,snofre fri“dshiPt„-d that thfoutcLe™? to intensify ,heir°”sea”h a'nd ttir invemTonf'* vision o?ybeaauty ™Xd 'byVeVoÏfrican^uhure, mo^ —

64

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than a perception and a passion, is an option, a determi¬ nation, an action in favour of liberty, justice, universal fraternity and joy.

Harris Memel-Fotê, Assistant à l’Université d’Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire. (Translated from the French.)

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5

Kunz DITTMER

Medieval Art in the Royal Courts of West Africa Art in the royal courts must be distinguished from popular art in Africa. Executed by professional artists and artisans, it merits a special examination because of its wide influence on popular art, an influence that has been exercised for centuries. Popular art serves narrow, spar¬ sely populated communities, or villages, lineages, or simple families, by producing liturgical objects for cults in com¬ mon (ancestor-worship, communal brotherhoods, secret societies, etc.) and even, for individuals, ornamental and decorated objects whether magic (amulets, fetishes) or profane. Court art, on the other hand, has the function of serving the prosperity of a State. This it accomplishes by producing liturgical objects also, but for the religious cults of the whole State. In addition, it glorifies the power of the king, and furnishes insignia for dignitaries. Hence there results another difference from popular art: a divergent choice of the subjects represented. The sacred king, being either ”God on earth” or (insofar as he is the decendant of a god) his representative or, at least, the possessor of divine forces, guarantees the prosperity of his subjects, both while alive and after his death. Consequently he must be venerated through a cult, and for this, effigies of his person—often of his —

67

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entourage also—are necessary. Since the ancestors of the king are of divine origin, it is important to also repre¬ sent his ancestors, actual or mythical, especially the founder oi the dynasty or kingdom, as well as the divin¬ ities who have mythical connections with them, in order to venerate them through the cult. Because each king must prove himself as a hero or benefactor (civilising hero, forever Augustus”), he must be represented in his uni¬ que individuality, that is, by an exact portrait. Often his exploits should also he represented. To this end a naturalistic style is necessary. Popular art, on the contra¬ ry, tends to abstract the essential from the accidental and by this means to arrive at a cubist or ornamentist style of fashioning. This tendency even won out over styles created by court artisans farther away (in space or in time) from originating centres of court art where he artists work. This can be shown by the example of the development of the style of Ife into the primitive and backward style of Benin. P The

stylistic

consequences.

The material and the techniques of the court can also be distinguished from those of popular art: a particularly p ecmus and durable material (corresponding to the eter¬ nity of the kingdom) is used as much as possible. Besides ivory and the precious metals, bronze and stone especially are used, terra-cotta works, equivalent to stone sculptuies, are produced These have a connection with the casting of bronze, because they form the core of the cast for the lost-wax process, and act, as well, as quickly and as easily formed models. When the materials are lacking, terra-cotta replaces works in bronze Heads in bronze or terra-cotta were made to be attached to the funerary figurines of the dead king. Besides these heads lusts 01 groups of statuettes were placed on the altars of he r°ya cult of ancestors, or on tombs, destined to ete?mty. Bi onze-casting especially, as well as sculpture in stone, requires a long education to form the professional artisan. This had the effect of ensuring an extraord^narv quality and perseverance in stylistic tradition wn remains of this art, having surWd wars and JE^ gives us the possibility of penetrating more deeply ink/tfie historical past of African art. p y ° tlîe A few historical dates offer criteria and points of —

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reference, allowing us to grasp the evolution and chrono¬ logy of the royal courts of West Africa, materials, tech¬ niques, and particularities of style. Stone statues are very rare in Negro Africa. Except for a few statuettes in the form of birds in the kingdom of Monomotapa (Zimbabwe) in Southern Rhodesia, and rough steles in Abyssinia, they are found only in isolated occurrences in the kingdoms of West Africa. However, they characterized the art of the superior civilisations of the Ancient Orient, including Egypt. Bronze-casting by the lost-wax process requires a degree of skill and experience such that it cannot be re¬ invented over and over. Nigeria cannot be the place of origin, since copper and other metals for alloys are lack¬ ing and must be imported. The regions closest to the welldeveloped bronze foundries were Egypt from the 25th dynasty (the Nubian) to the Hellenistic Age, and the king¬ doms of Meroë and Aksum. Also, terra-cotta works were produced in great number in Hellenistic and Coptic Egypt. Particularities of style show :

1) The primordial unity of the art of the royal courts. It is common knowledge that the art of Benin is derived from the art of Ife, and the art of Grassland in the Cameroons from the art of Nigeria ; that the circle of Nigerian art included not only the art of the Yoruba and the Bini, but also the areas of the Lower and Middle Niger and the Lower Benin. The terra-cottas for funerary uses are found in the royal civilisations from Lake Chad across the region of Nok as far as Ife and extend farther: to Ghana, the Upper Niger and the Fouta Djabu. There exist relations between the art of Nok and the art of Yoruba as well as between the latter and the stone sta¬ tuettes (nomolli) of the kingdoms of the Boulom-Temne and of the Mani in Sierra Leone. 2) Relations with the ancient African high civilisations : a) with Egypt: bronze-casting and statues in stone;

relationship between portraits of Ife and portraits of the 25th dynasty; axes; the cult of Ammon - Chango; b) with the Cushite kingdom of Nubia: relationship between the crowns of Ife and Mero'itic crowns; the king’s going to the elephant; chequered patterns of ornamenta¬ tion; —

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c) with Hellenistic Egypt ; ornamentation in spiralling meanders; the subjects of Abraxes and the stuggle of the animals, cuirass with Medusa’s head; terra-cotta; d) with Coptic art: terra-cottas; subjects of angels, the Maltese cross, the cross of Jerusalem ; e) with India: the rosette design; relief engraving on copper; statuettes of men and of animals, also groups, in bronze or copper; the subject of a man half-sitting, halfsquattmg; the subject of a woman with crossed legscrowns with garlands of pearls, with points or notches’, with frontal discs; collars of precious metals in repouss work, combined with a special collar of pearls.

Cultural analogies between West Africa and Ancient been noticed ; however, it is quite un¬ likely that the influence of the ancient kingdoms of Egvnt penetrated directly into West Africa. But many cultuial elements of Egyptian origin had survived in Nubia as late as the sixth century A.D. The veneer of Hellenism over the Meioitic and Aksumite civilisations during the first centuries A.D is well known. At the same time, a great number of Indians immigrated into Egypt and Nubia as merchants, traders, artisans (introduction of weaving and indigo-dyeing of cotton, of a number of arms, and jewelh.mlP the,In,dian form’ eîc-)> griots, dancers, jugglers and umblers, but also as missionaries and scientists. And NllCnlaï missionaries, Coptic art penetrated into Nubm T herefore it is in Nubia alone that the influences noticed in West African art could have come together and mingled a certain time (third to sixth centuries A.D ) «dy¬ ing birth to a new eclectic style. ’ rPiPt iaye*i°ft-eii.

Ihe historical cause for the emigration of Nubian artists and artisans towards the West and the South is also known. The defeat of the Meroi'tic Kingdom, alreadv weakened under the raids of the Blemmyes and the Nobades, at the hand of Ezana, king of Aksum, at the middle of . e fourth century A.D., had forced the Meroïtic dynasty eat a retreat, abandon the devastated centre of its 6 B I" the interi°r,t0 try *° ««ate ™ emp‘iof the Sudan’t»n gITn,g arOUnd this lime’ ,he traditions ot the Sudan tell us that conquerors coming from the East ounded new kingdoms. Pliny passes on to us the report of a Greek trader, a longtime resident of Meroë in the first century A.D., in which it is said that the Queen of Meroë rldMStlIlCO?ma;d 4’000 Brians, at the moment when he Meroitic kingdom was completely ruined following — 70 —

the savage wars against the Blemmyes and the Romans, who had just taken away from that kingdom the northern provinces and Napata. This suggests to us that the fleeing Meroïtic princes had taken with them not only their warriors, priests, griots and so on, but also a quantity of artisans sufficient to introduce into West Africa the arts of bonze-casting, sculpture in stone, and the making of terra-cotta. Some time after this exodus of the Meroïtic dynasty, new kingdoms on the Meroïtic model, very probably ruled by branches of the dynasty, were founded in a semi-circle to the North, West, and South of the region of the former centre of Meroë. A second emigration from Nubia was the result of the conquest of Egypt and then of Nubia itself by the armies of Moslem Arabs. In order to date the arrival of princes of the Meroïtic line, or their descendants, in West Africa, we can make use of certain historical dates. The point of departure for dating Nigerian art is the introduction of bronze¬ casting in Benin at the beginning of the 14th century. Comparing the stylistic development of Benin art from its beginnings up to the 18th century, with the stylistic development of the art of Ife up to the state of the begin¬ ning of Benin art, we find that the difference between the portraits of the kings of Ife, naturalistic and catching the ’’life” of the model, and the heads of the ’’queens” of Benin, already very stylised and ornamentalised, is much greater than the difference between 14th- or 15th-century Benin art and 18th-century Benin art. As a result we must attribute to the heads and busts of the Kings of Ife a similar difference of some three to four centuries, and place them roughly in the tenth or eleventh centuries A.D. This date is confirmed bv the fact of the founding ot empires in Noupé and Borgou, at the same time, by conquer¬ ors on horseback. From there came the founders, also mounted, of the kingdom of Oyo under the dynasty ot Chango, which had gained domination over the Yoruba. But the facial scarification of the Ife bronzes attributes these Kings of Ife to the preceding dynasty. If we allow several centuries for the first Yoruba kingdom to consolidate and take firm root, with Ife as its centre, we arrive at the period between the seventh and ninth centuries A.D. as the pro¬ bable date of the foundation of this kingdom. There re¬ mains a period of about two or three centuries between the departure and arrival of the sacred kings of the Meroïtic —

71

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line with their suite of artisans ; this corresponds nicelv to historical events.

Kunz Dittmer, Directeur du Musée de l’Homme, Hamburg.

(Translated from the French.)

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Jean LAUDE

From Myth to History : The Methods by which Space is represented in African Reliefs Side by side with strictly so-called statuary art, other works exist which are not religious objects and which manifest a certain autonomy with regard to religious life. They are placed solely on altars, unlike the heads of Ifé and of Bénin, and they are not, either, sculptures in the round. They are carved doors and shutters, basreliefs and bronze plaques which we find among the Dogons, the Senoufo and the Baoulé, in Dahomey and in Bénin. These works of art not of an architectural cha¬ racter; but nevertheless they are associated with a spe¬ cial type of architecture, that of the palace of the sove¬ reign. Their aim is to call to mind or to relate mythical or historical events. The sculptor was obliged to relate a narrative and to tell a story composed of several episodes. The narrative character of these works is due to this, which cannot have the formal simplicity of sculpture. In order to draw up in a satisfactory manner the elements of the narrative, the artist was led to choose a flat surface, and therefore to deal with problems of space. But here too, he finds different solutions, according to the nature —

73

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of the society pictured, and also because of his attachment to mythology, or his presentiment of history. Carved Doors and Shutters. Our first example is a Dogon shutter. It is a unique speci¬ men, and it was used either in the house of a Hogon or, which is more likely, in a totemic sanctuary. All over its surface are carved personages and animals which make up the mythological genealogy of the Dogon, some of which call to mind the chief events of the creation of the world. The shutter is in a single piece (Fig. 176) for there is only a single altar. It comports, on the upper and lower borders, eight Nommo, standing up, with their arms stret¬ ched downwards close to their bodies (2 X 4) ; on the median line, four personages kneel and cover their faces with two hands: they are an allusion to the incest committ¬ ed by the first created being (Dyougou Serou), an incest which gave rise to serious disorders, which were righted by the Nommo. In the centre a crocodile is represented, on whose back a smaller crocodile is cut away in the' wood: this is the totem and its companion, whose function moreover, is difficult to define. This shutter sums up one of the myths of creation; it also reveals that the edifice on which it is placed is dedi¬ cated to a Nommo: it thus places the sanctuary and those who take care of it, perhaps even the village or a quarter of the village, in the classificatory and analogical system which we have specified in Chapter V. The" account of the myth is not followed in chonological order of events, and the events themselves are only brought to mind by the presence of characters who play a role "therein. In order to relate the myth and to inscribe in a line of descent the persons who belong to the sanctuary, the sculptor has placed m juxtaposition figures whose sense does not seem clear individually but who stand out from it viewed as a whoJe because of their relative position on the surface of the shutter. Let us now consider a carved door of a Senoufo sanc¬ tuary (Fig. 177) from a Tawara village. At its centre it is carved with a ringed disk towards which two tangents converge. Around this disk are placed two horsemen a personage wearing a horned mask, a bird with a long beak (or a masked man), a mask with a human figure, a big crocodile, a tortoise, a snake, another snake associated —

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with a bird (a secretary-bird?) and a leopard (?) On the upper border above a bar, six personages are cut away in relief, one of whom is on horseback. On the lower edge are pictured a man, a leopard (?) a horse (?) a bird stretching out its wings, and a snake in the position of attack. The central disk may well be supposed to represent the navel of the world: its signification would be analogous to that of the omphalos of ancient Greece. The door which separates the sacred place the sanctuary from the profane world turns towards the living an account of the creation, a cosmogony. The personages pictured would he images of men of genius, which the Senoufo statuary also repre¬ sents: ’’Intermediary between the invisible world (with at their head the supreme divinity Koulou Tyéléo, the Mother of the Universe), these statuettes intervene in sacrifices, and also particularly during divination”. (B. Holas, op. cit.) In order to relate the events which presided over the creation of the universe, the Senoufan artist has kept a radiating form of composition (around the navel) but he has reserved the upper and lower borders for a method of narration which is linear: either we have a succession of elements which from one personage to another mark out a succession in time, or—which is more likely—the meaning of the narrative only can be seen through the juxtaposition of elements. The corresponding dimensions of beings and things represented are not respected. The mask with a human face kpeiyegué) is bigger than the horseman placed above it. Has the artist remained faithful to a symbolical hierrarchy of the elements expressed? Or was he anxious to deal plastically to the best advantage with his surface by avoiding too apparent blank spaces? It is difficult to say. But the universe is, here, conceived of as developing out of a central kernel from which beings and things ema¬ nate, spreading outwards. The projection of this uni¬ verse on a plane leads to the representation of certain personages with their heads downwards. It might be expected that the head, the seat of vital force, should be placed nearest to the source from which that force spreads outwards. So here we are witnessing, not an artifice like that which children use when they draw a circle of people, but rather what Panofskv call would call ”a symbolic force”. Let us now examine a third type which consists of a — 75 —

Baoulé royal dwelling (Fig. 178). In its upper part, an elephant (female?) is carved in relief against a background of striated losenges. In the middle section we find trian¬ gular motifs in black and white, a male elephant with its tusks turned back, and a black rectangle placed inside a white rectangle which bears 9 white dots. The lower part of the panel is covered with losenges and triangles. This door belonged to Kouakou Anougbélé, the tradi¬ tional chief ot Baoulé and grandson of the Queen Aura Pakou. According to Baoulé religious beliefs, the elephant is the symbol of strength, prosperity, and longivity. If the upper animal is a female, these qualities would probably be attributed to the reign of Aura Pokou, whose memory is still very much alive. The two elephants thus refer to two reigns—that of Aura Pokou and of Kouakou Anougélé. The carved door is thus not a part of a cosmological sys¬ tem, nor does it refer to mythological events; it refers, rather, to historical events. The system of triangles, losenges and alternating bands has very probably a symbolic value: the triangle is a sign of the divine triade and the losenge brings femininity to mmd. The spacing out of these motifs could also have reference to the system of land-holding, and be a map of the clans. But however concrete these objects may be, they are expressed and motivated by abstract signs; and they make less allusion to events, and much more to ideas. Moreover the figurative elements themselves accentuate given qualities rather than attributing them to mythical beings. The ensemble can be interpreted as a coat of arms ol the clan of Ouarébo or of the familv of Koukoua Anougbele. & This door places the grandson of the Queen in his genealogical context by referring to the important attri¬ butes of her reign, and inserts him into the social fabric of the clan of which he is the chief. Historic dimensions are hinged once more here upon mythical dimensions. But in this example there appears a clear break between the world of gem and of gods (referred to in symbolical faslnon by geometrical figures) and that of living beings Ihe process whereby the person of royalty is indi¬ vidualised under the types coat of arms corresponds cate¬ gorically to the process in which the myth tends to give way to allegory It is true, this Baoulé door is still in very slight relief, hardly carved out at all: and the design is ieally in fact the natural framework of the mythical —

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representation. The myths are outside time and space and the artist whose task it is to represent them does not take pains to seek depth or to imagine any kind of pers¬ pective. The discovery of perspective, at the Renaissance, coincides with the discovei’y of the individual, mortal yet all-powerful, who looks at and organises a world of which he claims to be the end and the centre. Africa has never, perhaps, made this discovery; but already we remark here an accentuation of the psychic distance which separates Man from the natural world, and which tends to make of that world a spectacle rather than a communion. It is from this point of view that we are now going to examine a double series of works of art, equally associated with political, social and religious values of which the sovereign is the prop or the incarnation. The first is constituted by the bas-reliefs in earthenware of the Palaces of Abomey (Dahomey). The second group consists of the bronze plaques of Benin. The Dahomey Bas-reliefs. Dahomean craftsmen worked under the control of the king and were grouped in the quarters in the neigh¬ bourhood of the palace. Their task was to exalt the sovereign and his warlike exploits. Each new king (Ghézo: 1819-1858; Gléglé: 1858-1889; Béhanzin: 1889-1894) had a palace built on the walls of which were modelled, in unbaked earth, polychrome reliefs placed in a framework of approximately 0.75 metres square. The background upon which the figures are modelled is recessed in relation to the wall, and the solution adopted is one that Egypto¬ logists have named hollow relief. These bas-reliefs are of very different species. They relate historical events (a battle, for example); they repro¬ duce coats of arms or represent allegories, sometimes picturing mythical beings. They seem to be concerned with attributes attached "to royalty and with the unity of the kingdom (Fig. 179). A vessel, pierced with many holes, which is held up by two hands, shows the necessity of a union of all the Fons in order to safeguard the realm. A shark represents the king Béhanzin who, when the French invaded, his country declared: ”1 am the shark which disturbs the harbour bar”, thus proclaming that he would prevent the troops from landing (Fig. 180). A monkey holding an ear of maize in one hand, while with —

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the other it tries to seize hold of a second, evokes the refusal of King Adanzan (1797-1818) given to the Nagoes (Nigeiians of Abeokuta) when they came to demand the tribute levied by their king: a reply which signified that the claims of the Nago were exaggerated. A Dahomean warrior cuts off the leg of a Nago who is trying to run away : (Fig. 181). The tale of a battle is told The representation of the Nagoes by the monkey tribe calls to mind the reply of King Adanzan to the messages of the king of Abéokuta. These bas-reliefs individualise each royal personnage in his words, his acts, and his deeds of daring, expressed by an art which is emblematical, allegorical and almost essentially turned towards the national and political values which the sovereigns incarnate. We are here doubtless in the presence of a phenomenon similar to that which may be observed in the Ba Kuba statues. But while most likely the latter were not carved from a living model and are more or less associated with funeral carvings it It during their own lifetime that the kings of Dahomev had themselves celebrated and exalted by name. Taking into account the sacred attributes attached to the person of the king, these bas-reliefs do not stem from a profane or secular art. But these works have their roots in historic time, and refer back to words, situations and events which are dated, effective, and real. Indeed all epic colouring seems to be singularly lacking. The marvellous is only skin-deep; the representation of a king under the traits of a lion or a shark does not go any further than the level of metaphor. The heavy black draperies on which (Pig. 182) cut-outs from brightly-coloured mate¬ rials were sewn form part of the same system of thought: they serve to establish the words of songs composed in honour of a dead person by his dearest friend The matifs which figure on the material correspond 'to the words of the text which they illustrate, sometimes with the help of a picture puzzle (the proper name ”Huha” is re¬ presented by a butcher’s hook (”hu”) and a razor (’’ha’’). In this art, we particularly note the effort made to p cture scenes or devices in historical order. This ore occupation with temporality corresponds entirely with^he ambitions and political aspects of the kingdom, particularly with the strong individualisation of the king’sPperson. most clearly™ “ *

Bl or confined to the evidence that if one sculpts, one has wood : if one uses an adze, one can get iron; if a statue is used for dhdnaUon one ,s trying to foretell the future. Obviousl” \urthermore, these two aspects of sculpture not beim? specific to them considered as works of artfone miriit well question their relevance to the sociolog^ of roSïnturé Whethei a novel has been distributed in manuscriptPform or has been printed, published as a paperback or as ^ ei .ll!°" are important facts since they measure its possible influence on different levels of societt ft,

üonships which it is most difficult to establish.^ ^ rda" Style.

tute^thew^Fk1 ofi0n,°f f°rms and il is form which consti-

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which we are referring are gratuitous: they are not needed for the object to function efticiently. One can of course say that every object has a form: this wooden bowl is circular, its edge is rounded and its bottom is flat. But those formal characteristics are utili¬ tarian: carved out of the trunk of a tree, the circular form was the easiest to execute; the flat bottom avoids the dan¬ ger of this food container being upset; the rounded edge makes for easier upkeep. These forms only express the desire to make a good container, nothing gratuitous ap¬ pears in it. But should the bowl be ornamented by an interlacing engraving, an aesthetic intention is introduced. There is a desire to please the eye which goes beyond the functional shape: the borderline of art has been crossed. This criterion allows an art object to be distinguished without an appeal to the subjective appreciation or the observer being invoked. ^Vhether he finds the decoration of the bowl ’’beautiful” or ugly is not important. The intention once having been objectively inscribed in the gratuitous form, the object is to be considered as belonging to the domain of art. But, one may ask, can one always be sure that the torm is gratuitous? These loops which we assume to have been engraved for our pleasure may in fact be a magic sign destined to protect the food against harmful influences. No doubt there is a danger of a false interpretation, but the usual techniques employed in anthropological research allow for this question being answered with some degree of assurance: informers are questioned, decorative themes are examined, series of bowls are compared, etc. Suppos¬ ing that the result of these investigations shows that the motif has in fact a magic function : it is a sign. It does not necessarily thrust the object out of the domain of art: it is worthy of remaining in it, if, on comparing it with others, an aesthetic research is demonstrated by harmonious cur¬ ves, the symmetrical arrangement of the parts to the whole and the addition of lines which are not essential to understanding. Think of the symbol of the cross embroidered on Christian liturgical vestments, those signs which are the letters of our alphabet when they have been reproduced in the headings of Irish manuscripts. The aesthetic inten¬ tion is obvious in the lay-out of these signs. For the cross to show the sacred character of the vestments, and for e legibility of the letter, it sufficed to mark the lines on the cloth and a simple outline of the letter on the parchment. Everything added is there to please the eye. —

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9

This criterion of gratuitous form is simple, but, as the example of the bowl shows, it can demand a long analysis. It is a common trait of social phenomena that they must always be interpreted. Its application is not limited to decorated articles of furniture: head-rests, make-up boxes, cups, seats, sticks, weaving spools, containers, etc. It extends to statues and masks. As they are human or animal representations, all African statues or masks are generally considered to be works of art. It would seem, therefore, that there are privileged contents—man, woman, antilope, etc.—which inevitably make an object into a work of art. But that is ?n unjustified projection of recent occidental conceptions mto Africa. Since the Renaissance, our statuary has an exclusively aesthetic significance (with the possible excep¬ tion of religious and popular sculptures). For us any human or animal representation can only have the function ot pleasing the eye. Which explains our assumption that any statue is a work of art. A legitimate assumption in Furope but not m Africa. It has often been emphasised that art for art’s sake is not practised in Africa. A statue is not carved as an orna¬ ment for a dwelling or garden, but because a human repre¬ sentation is necessary for a ritual or a cult, for a ceremonv or therapy. It is therefore possible that a craftsman will only cârve a statuette to be placed on a grave until the spirit of the deceased, appeased, will stop tormenting his sick son. As a utilitarian object, this statuette will not incarnate any aesthetic intention. Of course, formal research is often added, on which, going beyond ritual or magical efficiency, the statuette will be a work of art as well. rrrThlf’ aS ^lth decorated furniture, statues and masks dit 1er fiom other manufactured objects by gratuitous form, which, transmitted within a sculptural tradition, becomes a style. Constituting the specific quality of art objects

shoidd.i?e.

Sny emVhe ?SFe?t °f them which’ more than all others’ related to cultural variables. It is also the one most difficult to reconcile to them. In certain cases the search for a relationship seems quite useless. Denise Paulme has demonstrated one of these well The Fang and Kota keep the bones of their dead in baskets which feature at commemoration ceremomes presided over by a guardian statue. The style of these statues is completely different in each case. Ne—

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vertheless, the Fang and Kota are neighbours, living in the same natural surroundings, and having very similar social heritages (9). Another case is that of masks of the Dan on the Ivory Coast. P. Vandenhoute has demonstrated that the sub-styles of these masks and their various different social significations could not he related. The absence of correlation, or the difficulty of discern¬ ing it, can perhaps be explained by a sort of universality of forms. When a sculptor seeks a relationship of lines or a proportion of masses, is he not obscurely trying to express himself in a ’’language” or ’’system of signification , to employ the terms used by Roland Barthes in his Ele¬ ments of Semiology” (11) ? Now this language seems to be rooted not in the idiosyncratic part of the sculptor (since it is above all a matter of communication symbolism), nor in the social groups (like Barthes’ ’’writings” or Goldmann s structures) but in a human depth unaffected by socio-cultural heterogeneity (or unaffected by certain socio-cultural variations). Different psychological studies of visual per¬ ception in art demonstrate very well that certain curves, angles, repetitions of lines, certain contours of surfacessand masses have a communicative significance (12). Destined either to supply principles for the analysis of Western painting, or to teach composition to would-be draftsmen and painters, or to train research workers for visual studies” (13), these works are not concerned with the pos¬ sible universality of these significant elements. It does, however, seem to me that they suggest that the significa¬ tions of forms are perceived transculturally as such. Should this hypothesis be confirmed, African styles wou d scarcely be connected to social conditions, since they would speak the universal language of form. Another explanation, also to be verified, and comple¬ mentary to the first rather than an alternative, of the absence of correlation between the formal and social mamtestations might be sought tor in the borrowings between different artistic traditions on the formal level. Let u imagine a sculptor working in a society acertain stylistic tradition who by chance sees a statue made elsewhere

(9) Paulme, 1956 : 89. (10) Vandenhoute, 1948

6-7.

(12) Seer Arnhlim tor example, 1954, and Sausmarez 1964. branch of (131 One of the most advanced institutions in this new research is the Visual Studies Center of Harvard University.

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cording to other standards. He might easily adopt certain forms and reproduce them in his own work: a very ordi¬ nary case of political institutions, marriage customs, ideo¬ logies, etc.—in that obstacles to the spread of forms seem to be slighter than those opposed to the borrowing of other cultural traits. In the rich society A of the southern grasslands, a strong monarchic organisation has been built up.on the ?ne hand, and on the other, objects are carved in it of which the surfaces are entirelv covered with ornamentation. This decorative abundance is a formal element which seems to reflect very well the richness of the produc¬ tive system of this society, just as the royal court with its numerous dignitaries also manifests the prosperity of the group In society B, in the equatorial forest, with a res¬ tricted and poor population, the oldest family chiefs direct village affairs, and the sculptural style is plain. If a few men from B stay at A, on their return to their village in *forest they could introduce the furnishing decoration which seduced them whereas they could not adopt the political institutions of A, their agricultural system not producing a sufficient surplus to provide for a central government. The style, even if it corresponds better to the opulence of A than to the penury of B, can be imitated by the sculptors of B. This schematised example, which historicallv must often have been repeated, can explain how it is that in the 19th century, at the end of the traditional period, it fre¬ quently happens that one cannot discern the relationship between a given stylistic tradition and the society in which it existed at the time. So much formal borrowing had taken place during the preceding centuries.

Contents. African sculpture being figurative, it is easy to recogmse the contents of each work : it is a man, a woman or such and such an animal. The decorative themes which appear to us to be merely geometrical often have a name -“7SiUS dlsceîn the contents: on this Tara gourd t is the tortoise on that Bwanda basketwork it is ’’the potent lover’s knee”. To relate contents to beliefs, political institutions family structure, etc., is not generally very difficult. But it is not therefore an undertaking devoid of interest. In choos¬ ing from among a limited number of themes the sculptors —

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underline the important points in a culture. The statues of ancestors show the value attached to the principle of des¬ cendance; the statuettes of pregnant women, the value of fecundity; the royal effigies, the importance of dynastic succession. We learn how a society sees itself by the contents of its statuary.

Variables and Relationships. We could try to synthétisé the different variables bet¬ ween which a sociological study would endeavour to disco¬ ver possible relationships, by the use of a table. Sculptural Variables:

Cultural Variables:

Sculptural traditions each represented by one or more series of statues, masks, decorations. Each series having aspects common to all manufactured objects: 1. Material. 2. Function. And specifically for art objects: 3. Contents. 4. Style (formal tradition).

Other elements of the same cultural unit (concrete cul¬ ture, cultural trend, civilisa¬ tion, ’’continent”) placed on one of these three levels: 1. Systems of acquiring or producing goods. 2. Systems of organisation of social relationships. 3. Systems of collective re¬ presentations.

The relationships must naturally be looked for among variables not in the same column. If they are relation¬ ships of conditioning, the cultural variable will be most frequently independent and the sculptural variable depen¬ dent- however, the inverse direction cannot be excluded a priori If thev are relationships of coherence, they can correspond without it being possible to ascribe the priority to either variable. . „ , . ,_ This a very summary analytical schema which we pro¬ duced in our studies of the sociology of knowledge (14).

Sculptural Traditions of African Civilisations. We are going to trv to apply this schema of variables and their correlations to much bigger cultural units than (14) See Maquet, 1951 and 1962a.

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the concrete cultures and the cultural trends, and which we have proposed elsewhere to call civilizations (15). Each of these eight hundred and fifty to a thousand global societies in Black Africa—we understand here by society an organised group of individuals living and work¬ ing together—has its own social inheritance, its concrete culture. These numerous cultures can be regrouped into a few units according to the fundamental similarities which we can see in them. A civilisation is an abstract structure which resumes what we believe to be common and essential to the different cultures thus assembled (16). We have distinguished five of them in traditional Afri¬ ca, which had existed from the time of the neolithic revolution (marked by the invention of agriculture and cattle raising) until the time when the colonisation of the interior of the continent in the 19th century introduced the germs of a sixth civilisation, that of industrialisation. Although one can localise them on the map of Africa, the civilisations are not to be explained only by the dif¬ ferent natural surrounding where they flowered. To the natural phenomena, surroundings, must be added the cul¬ tural phenomena, technique. Together they direct the acquisition or production of goods which is "the basis of every cultural unit. For in order that a group should live and a culture develop, the subsistence of men must first be ensured. It is within the framework of these five great civilisa¬ tions that we can attempt to perceive the relationships existing between sculptural variables and cultural vari¬ ables. It will only be a very summary sketch.

Civilisation of the Bow. Some tens of thousands of Bushmen in the grasslands and steppes of Southern Africa and less than two hundred thousand pygmies in the equatorial forests lived off Nature without modifying it: they hunted, picked and gathered food. By the end of the 19th century this mode of life had become marginal for several hundreds of years But for thousands of years it had been that of all Africans and all men. So although it now only concerns a tiny minoritv it must be counted among the great African civilisations. (15) See Maquet, 1962b. (16) Maquet, 1962b : 18.

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This subsistence technique, not being a very efficient method of exploiting the environment, sets a narrow limit on possible social and cultural forms. The co-operating unit is of necessity a small number of hunters, for the hunting grounds near the camp would soon be exhausted if they had to assure the subsistence of more than a dozen families The camp, temporary residence of the band and its dependants, is the centre of its social life: sharing out the game, educating the children, regulating behaviour, ritual and ceremonies. , ,, Like all men, the hunters conceive the world and the sods in the light of their own experience. In their daily hunt for food, clothing and shelter they aPPreh’ °r studying the ancestry of the Hambas of Kasai through the medium of the film (’’Fête chez les —

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Hambas”).

It was here that the ethnographer became a film-maker unawares. These two films, with no claim except a scientific one, will certainly remain the only two authentic records of Congo culture before the indepen¬ dence troubles. Today, when one compares these films with the expen¬ sive and complex Belgian productions in the Congo (’’Congo, Splendeur Sauvage”, for example) the latter seem bungled, insipid, and hackneyed. Professor Gabus, director of the Neuchâtel Ethnogra¬ phic Museum, commissioned the Swiss director Henry Brandt to film the Bororo nomad shepherds of the Nigerian savannas. Brandt spent a year there on his own, and the exigencies of his mission turned his attention to ethno¬ graphy. Brandt brought back a 16 mm documentary, ’’Les Noma¬ des du Soleil”. The plastic values of the colours is extra¬ ordinary, and the film has since become a classic. It has never been shown in commercial programmes. These pioneering attempts were not always well received by the scientific world; supercilious ethnologists accused us of subordinating true research to our pursuit of the picture. In spite of this, the scenario-writers who had studied African races and languages formed a veritable school, and their productions are among the most valuable film records of changing cultures. It is very likely that the following film programmes on the cultural patterns of Africa will soon be released: ’’Noces d’Eau” and ”Bobo-Oulé” by Capron and Ricci. ’’Gourouna, Bergers Sacrés” by Igor de Garine. ’’Les Hommes du Logone”, ’’Rites de la Circoncision chez les Momgom” by Claude Millet. ’’Masques de Feuilles” by Guy de Moal. ”Le Temps du Caméléon”, ’’Les Enfants du Caméléon” and ’’Document Bassari” by Monique and Robert Gessaiti. ’’Bienvenue a Boum-Kebir” by Claude Perault. ’’Les Bouchers de l’Arewa” and ’’Aderdoutchi” by Marc Piault. ’’Fastes et Rituels des Kabré” by R. Verdier. ’’Pays Mandingue” and ’’Saison Sèche” by Jacques Daribehaude. ’’Forgerons du Désert’ by Georges Bourdelon. ”En regardant passer le Tchad” by Pierre Ichac. ’’Batteries Dogon” by Gilbert Rouget, Germaine Dieterlen and Jean Rouch. —

531

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”Moro Naba” by Dominique Zahan and Jean Rouch. Such a programme could comprise some thirty film titles, if one added the dozen shorts I filmed in the loop of the Niger, in Ghana and in the Ivory Coast. Even the professionals began to make ethnographic films. Jacques Dupont after ’’Paysans Noirs” directed ’’La Grande Case” in West Cameroon in 1951. The latter is a remarkable film document on the Bamiléké, Peul and Bamoun chiefdoms. In Lower Guinea, Pierre-Dominique Gaisseau (also a member of the Ogooué-Congo mission) shot a series of documentaries on the Toma, the Bassari and the Nalou—’’Forêt Sacrée” (1953 version), ’’Naloutai”, and ’’Pays Bassari”. After editing these first three films, Pierre-Dominique Gaisseau went back with two European colleagues to try t® himself initiated into the Toma secret societies. Foret Sacrée” (full-length) is a simple account of this attempt and its failure. For a long time it was attacked by certain puristical ethnologists on the ground that there was no better way of losing one’s objectivity than bv ini¬ tiation. Forêt Sacrée”, nevertheless, is a serious contribution to documentary history. For the first time a foreign spectator participates in a reverential, if hopeless, search after an African culture. And the very rebuff is a tribute to the lorest religions which repudiate strangers, however sincere the same sympathetic attitude, the same striving for a true interpretation, took place in every part of Africa as shown in ’’Man of Africa” shot by Grierson’s unit in East Africa, or Mandara” directed by Gardi in the Cameroon mountains. It is regrettable that Robert Flaherty should have died just when he was about to add an African film to the list of his masterpieces. But, through these faithful experts ”Mthe ]P,fi;tlclPating camera”, the spirit of the creator of Nanouk has spread through Africa.

c) The evolution of Africa.

. “riCa °^.1950 was astir with a movement parallel to the ethnographic one, and borrowing from its substance Certain foreign scenario-writers believed that only an identification with the modern world should be encouraged In their eyes, ethnography was a dead letter, a museum —

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piece, a pretext for conservatism. In order to cut a digni¬ fied figure in the concert of nations, Africa was to forget, if not deny, her traditional culture. Films so inspired met with the same obstacles as those encountered by certain schools of African sociology, whose main stumbling-block had been a wanton ignorance of changing traditional cultures. This defect is again met with in the majority of the propaganda films which ridi¬ culed African culture for the sake of ’’spectacular produc¬ tions”. Apart from ’’Coulibaly à l’Aventure”, already mention¬ ed, it was not until 1950 that colonial repression was brought to the screen by René Vautier, a young student of the I.D.H.E.C. Directed clandestinely on the Ivory Coast, ’’Afrique 50” dealt with colonial obstruction of the young R.D.A. party. This 16 mm black and white film, with sound effects added by means of such materials as were to hand, was banned in Africa and France, and limited to the filmlibrary circuit. It was at the same period that ”Les Statues meurent aussi” was produced. Alain Resnais and Chris Marker combined shots taken in European Museums specializing in Africana, with a brilliant montage of sequences taken from films of colonial records. The argument of the film is the debasing of Negro Art. What it represents is losing its meaning, and the new African art, child of a mediocre Western influence, is already thoroughly decadent. A great and passionate film, it was banned, and can be seen only by a privileged few. It was later allowed to be shown in a mutilated form. At the same time the first African pupils of the I.D.H. E.C., finding it impossible to get permission from the admi¬ nistration to make films in Africa, by-passed the problem by producing African films in Europe. Mamami Touré’s ’’Mouramani” (a short folk tale of Guinea, shot in the Vallée de Chevreuse) is of rather slight interest. But ”Afrique-sur-Seine” is certainly the first black film. An interesting sketch of the life of Africans in Paris, it is, unfortunately, only a sketch. It was made by Paulin Vieyra, Mamadou Sarr, Jacques Mélokane and the oper¬ ator Caristan—the two latter are now dead. Sound effects have never been added to this film, nor has it been cut. These more or less ill-fated films were not the only ones made in 1950. A great number of films on the evolution —

533

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of Africa were produced in every country of Black Africa. In most of them, African culture was regarded as anti¬ quated and unworthy of surviving the culture of the West, which was generally identified with progress. I shall cite only Sean Graham’s ’’The Boy Kumasenu” filmed in Ghana (at that time the Gold Coast) in 1952. It tells how a young fisherman, on leaving the lagoon for the corrupt city, has a hairbreadth escape from delinquency. I shall also single out for mention those films of an opposite trend : Claude Vermorel’s ’’Les Conquérants Soli¬ taires and La plus belle des Vies”, and Bobert Darenne’s ’’La Cage”. These deal with Europeans, seduced by trad¬ itional cultural patterns. The political struggles for independence also inspired a certain number of films, none of which seem satisfactory today. Strangely enough, it is the Mau-Mau struggle in Kenya that provided a subject for the best productions. In ’Car¬ naval des Dieux” (’’Something of Value”), Peter Brooks depicts the drama of two young friends, one White the other Black, at the time of this great tragedy. Its great success cannot be attributed to the violence or the topical interest of the film. Today, when all these struggles are forgotten, the film appears both fearless and outspoken. But it is hard to swallow that an African Nationalist leader would betray his fellow countrymen because he is afraid of thunder. In 1955 Brian Desmond Hurst directed ’’Simba”, the incredibly violent drama of an African doctor whose father it ^ j a Mau-Mau group. The only way out for the doctor is death. On the other hand ’’Liberté” (”Freedom”) produced at great expense by the Moral Rearma¬ ment Society, avoids all violence. It is an orthodox paean: the redemption of past errors by confession makes it possible for the wicked governor to become the African leaders foremost assistant. Unfortunately, all the productions dealing with the independence of the African countries fall into this cate¬ gory Sean Graham’s ’’Freedom for Ghana” (on the inde¬ pendence of Ghana, March 6, 1957) remains the bestperhaps because of the talented way in which Graham imbued this film on the first African independence with a hectic excitement, unimaginable today. It remains incontestable, however, that these troubled years inspired no great epic. —

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d) The beginnings of a true African cinema. The three types of film examined above can be classi¬ fied under the same heading. In all three cases, foreigners, drawing their inspiration from Africa, have attempted to make an impressionist film (exotic), a research film (ethno¬ graphy) or a film of conflict (acculturation). But, in every case, these films were subjective, domi¬ nated by the personality or attitude of their creator, who remained a stranger to the real Africa. Some of them wanted to go further. They tried to go beyond the exotic stage, to introduce the spectator outright into the black world, whether traditional or changing. These rare attempts I believe to be the true beginnings of an African cinema. They were like the baton in a relay race, handed on by foreign technicians to young African scenario-writers, impatient to enter the race in their turn. It is certain that these three stages along the film road provide valuable pointers to the young African cinema of today. The first venture came from South Africa. In his 16 mm satire, ’’Civilization on Trial in South Africa”, the Reverent Father Smith made a direct attack on racial segregation. While recording a street song (by Ralph Trewhela) in these same miserable outskirts of Sophiatown (a suburb of Johannesburg), Donald Swanson, an unknown British director, got the idea of basing a film on its simple theme. This was certainly how the first African story ’’Magic Garden” came to be filmed. It is a fantastic account of a thief, who spreads happiness during his pursuit of forty pounds sterling. It was a failure in France when distri¬ buted under the title ”La Soupe à la Citrouille”. Sean Graham’s ’’Jaguar” (’’High Life”) directed in Ghana is in rather the same spirit. It is a ballet in Cinema-Scope, shot in the streets, with a simple theme based on a popular song of Accra. It ridicules the ’’been tos”, educated in Great Britain. Lionel Rogosin, the American, was following along the same lines when he went to the Union of South Africa in 1959. His message in ’’Come Back, Africa” (produced clan¬ destinely in the Union) is a very much graver one; it is the cry of despair of the victims of racialism. It is, of course, open to discussion whether the film is not the expression of Lionel Rogosin’s anti-racialism rather than the echo of a —

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strictly African revolt. But whatever his role as author there are certain very poignant sequences where Rogosin ceases to be in control of his creation—those sequences are the voice of Africa. 1 haTfTLbMen yorking on similar lines for the last few years. While still engaged on strictly ethnographic films, 1 had already concluded that the application of Flahertv’s golden rule was an essential preliminary. When filming reai life the director should arrange and interpret its elements by detaching them from their unfamiliar setting wodd

brmg them WÜhin rCaCh °f 6Very audience in the

’’Nanook the Eskimo” aroused friendly feelings in people who had never seen an Eskimo. I drew inspiration from this wonderful achievement of Fraherty’s when I was LeS Maitres Fous”> a very difficult production I wanted to prove in this film that the dedicated men of T fCrîf (posses!*ed by the deity) are men just like others I further wanted to show how these simple men saw our civilization and were able to express it. LfteTr on’ ] tbought tbat tbe °nly solution was to let the people I wanted to film, speak for themselves. When for example, I was confronted with the desperate state of the ei working classes in big towns such as A hid i an T thought it more effective and honest to get one of its victims menXts°nto “uatlon than *° ™ke my personal indictlifpIalf7 1 took silent shots of the main incidents in the T hadf tPmr A.bldJan docker. A few months later after I had put the pictures together, I showed them to him on projector and asked him to improvise a commentary Robinson the docker, was stimulated by the projection ?f his own life into improvising an extraordinar^ monoWue He not only recreated dialogues for the action but explahi fellowTcke”68 g0‘ng S° far SS *° Cri‘iCize himself or Ms

Conclusion. nthThe above'mentioned experiments can go no further Leacock Flahertv’s1^1118 thC Sf016 hazardous direction Leacock, t laherty s former assistant, filmed directlv in the white ghost and” of Kenya; Ostenberger shot ”Cina Rnt°nnes & if Une, nght in tbe heart of the Angola maqu^ But no matter what we do, neither Rogosin, no? Sean —

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Graham, nor I can ever become Africans; and our films will always be the films of foreigners inspired by Africa. It is true that this is no defect, that it will not stop us from continuing to make films about this country and about its people. But the time has come for the relief shift to take over, ’’the time when Africans will make films with African money for Africans” (Georges Sadoul). To mention only film-makers of French-speaking Africa, the following are either working on a film or about to do so: Paulin Viyera, Blaise Senghor, Timité Bassori, Thomas Coulibaly, Sembene Ousmane, Jean-Paul N’Gassa, Abubakar Samb and Mustapha Alassane. Several of us are eagerly waiting for their productions.

Jean Bouch. Ethnologist and film-director. (Translated from the French.)

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Paulin Soumanou VIEYRA

Cinematographic Art : In Search of Its African Expression Although a universal vocation, art is determined, to begin with, by particularities, civilization and an ideology peculiar to a country. And, if in the second place, the social, political, and cultural context in which it is developed render it note¬ worthy by a given tendency, then it is man to whom it owes its existence in the final analysis. If a certain sculpture, or a certain form of dance or music can claim as a qualification, ’’Negro”, then some¬ thing specifically Negro issues from an ensemble of values of a civilization peculiar to Africa. Whence their originality which distinguishes them from art forms of other countries and of other civilizations. The cinema is one of the arts which is still in search of its African expression, which would permit a certain film to be recognized immediately as a Negro artwork. The reasons for the delay of this new art’s integrating itself totally into African life come from a situation which has been created for it in Africa, and from problems which it must continue to face. The cinema is certainly a social phenomenum which at first astonished the world, then amused it. It is assuredly one of the great discoveries of modern times. The only obstacle it encountered at its development was the economic barrier which has limited its expression in underveloped countries. Nevertheless, in these countries, it occupies a preponderant place among the means of expression and communication which compete for the —

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education of the greatest number. If at the time one was able to justly recognize that the spoken word was ’’man’s most impressive invention in communication material”, then cinema has been able to put to lie this predominance, since it joins the image to the spoken word. The only thing lacking is that the 3rd dimension is not used more generally, and the possibility to issue from a unique source to project images into the air, in order to establish itself without context as a means of total communication. One cannot naturally dissociate cinema as an indus¬ try» from cinema considered as an art. Its two aspects are so intimately linked that the search for uniquely cinemato¬ graphic artistic expression has caused the industry of the film to develop. Likewise, technical and scientific dis¬ coveries have influenced the artistic aspect of cinemato¬ graphic realizations in the formulation of creative thought. It is less necessary now for cinema to utilize elaborate effects in honour of the theatre, as in the time of Melies in order to render the significance of certain language quests accessible to the spectators. Cinema is now equip¬ ped with a number of proper means to render the intentions of authors comprehensible. These are technical acquisitions which all film makers of the world utilize generally and which belong to a cine¬ matographic inheritance. And if the majority of nations have obliged themselves to set up an industrial organization of cinema, it is that that proved absolutely necessary for a rational production of films and in order for a national cinema to exist. Africa is the only continent not to possess such an industrial organization (1). And as long as an industrial complex does not exist in Africa in this domain, one will never be able to speak of veritable African cinema. Cinema has never anywhere caused one to doubt the fact of its industrial reality. Its technical components, in order to be efficiently utilized, necessitate organic laws peculiar to all entreprises and which are research, fa¬ brication, and commercialization. Research supplies firstly the technical data which will translate itself, through perfection of a group of necessarv mechanism, to the recording of an image and sound. Next e commercial and industrial organization which present the scientific and technical discoveries and the capital, as (1) With the exception of South Africa.

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a means to the end, the realization of the last phase of the operation, of which the result will be delivered to the public and which will pass through the production, the distri¬ bution and the exploitation of the film. Europe only spoke of esthetics once the cinematograhic industry had been established. While in Africa, one would already like to assign a function to, and establish the artis¬ tic norms of, the cinema before the conditions of its indus¬ trial organization have been established. Undoubtedly one is anxious to acquire the cinematographic technique which is after all the same in every country. Certain people ask that the cinema be for Africa, as all Arican arts have been in the past, a functional art in the service of education. That is certainly a praiseworthy option, but one which would singularly limit the inspiration of creative Africans in the 20th century. It is true that at the same time that one asks African scenario-writers to emphasize the educational side of their creation, one would like to see them realize films with an artistic value and capable of entering in a happy way into competition with accomplishments of other nations. The will to affirm the African personality requires a total free¬ dom of expression which is not always controlled by goverment request. But is it not essentially important that work ac¬ complished by Africans be valuable in every category in which they choose to work ? Because if the cinema is an art, it is only due to the talent of its creators. Besides, in the case of France, for instance, we see that only in 1955, that is, 60 years after its invention, was the cinema officially recognized as an art with its admission to the Museum of Modern Art in Paris. Certainly, some aware minds had predicted ever since its silent period, that the cinema would be included in the great artistic family by qualifying it as the 7th art : In fact, in 1911, Ricciotto Canudo published his Manifesto of the Seven Arts, giving to cinema number seven. And if, at the present time, many people know that it is the seventh art, it is probable that few people would be able to say what is in the first, third, or sixth place, and in which place one must put music. For the public, cinema was at first a curiosity, and then became a distraction. With the evolution of technique came the seeking of the aesthetic. Then scenario-writers leaned toward the artistic aspect of the cinema. From

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there were born the different movements and schools which in renewing themselves, proved the vitality of this new art. Whether they were realists, expressionists, impres¬ sionists, neo-realists, or became ’’the new wave”, these schools were encouraged in their search for a new expres¬ sion by the most conscious part of the public. This new art could not live without a new public ; the independent critic, which Louis Delluc, Leon Moussinac, and Lucien Wahl are going to animate, is going to strive towards the formation and education of the spectator. From that time onwards, the cinema clubs become veri¬ table clubs for patrons of the cinema, whence the film has acquired its letters patent of nobility in winning the same title as the other arts : creator of humanism. The civilization of the image began springing to life with the cinema to assert itself 30 years later with the tele¬ vision, and in social life, as the indispensable auxiliary of knowledge. Since then, a certain number of films have been esta¬ blished, with the help of the critics, as works of incom¬ parable artistic value. Of course, in the beginning it was difficult to judge these films according to esthetic criteria peculiar to the cinema, without reference to artistic laws inherited from the theatre and from painting. Besides, there was a tendency to compare these films to books, because, many undoubtedly came from adaptations of literary works. Critics nourished on traditional culture applied the same norms of judgment to these films which they applied to literary works, while cinema followed from a totally different mode of expression. It must be recognized that the silent film was handi¬ capped in its expression bv the absence of the sonorous dimension, which obliged it to have recourse to an essen¬ tially symbolic writing. One can understand the reticence of men of European cultures from that time onwards to admit that the cinema is a means of noble expression, since all evidence of artis¬ tic success did not succeed in convincing them. Little by little cinema liberated itself from literary and theatrical traditions in order to establish its own writing and its own syntax. If it has become a means of expression capable of bearing the same title as other means of ex¬ pression, of translating the most subtle nuances of thought, —

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its power of suggestion surpasses them all. By its universitality and its relative simplicity of comprehension, the cinema has penetrated every country and social milieu. Organized the first time by the west, the cinema at its beginnings imposed a Western view of life on the world. And throughout the evolution of the cinema, the evolution of Western European and American artistic concepts were in evidence. Through its cinematographic manifestations, Western culture has revealed a form of existence which has upset African social structures. In their artistic expressions, African civilizations have found themselves penetrated by the most diverse and com¬ posite influences which the cinema could convey. As is normal under the circumstances, interdependence produced an interaction. And if cinema has permitted Africa to have a new overture to the world, then Africa has introduced a new form of exotism to the cinema. But the African influence on world-wide cinema has only been superficial. It has been limited to the utilization of Africa as a decor for actions not belonging to Africa and according to the Western view of the operators who have come there to film. The African Continent continues to be a consumer of Western films, and it is not the few films produced by Afri¬ cans which have changed the situation. The influence of the cinema in Africa is certainly im¬ portant, but it does not yet have the scope of a revolution¬ ary phenomenum which would upset the foundations of the African civilization, in expression and from the interior, as it did for the West, by imposing the image on civili¬ zation. For Africa, the cinema is still, in all of its aspects, a non-integrated foreign reality and a bearer of Western humanism exclusively. African judgement has a need for Arican films in order to appreciate the conceptual and singular originality of the cinema in comparison to other means of expression. The exclusive view of Western films, which inevitably puts into play only aspects of life in Europe, cannot touch African sensibility ; at least of those Africans, and they are the majority, who do not have a tangible knowledge of the West. From then on, in order for them to judge a Western film, they are lacking in criteria of reference or an aes¬ thetic or artistic level.

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Besides, this is at present one of the weaknesses of Afri¬ can film critics who, in addition to their insufficient tech¬ nical formation, find themselves handicapped by the edu¬ cation they have received. This is not particular to Afri¬ cans, of course. The French critics and the public in turn had little taste for Japanese films at the outset, which they found strange. For want of knowledge of the Japanese civilization, it was difficult for them to grasp the meaning of the ensemble of values of this country’s civilization ; because the latter were expressed differently than their own. The Japanese, a commercially minded people, them¬ selves educated the Western public, in order to be more certain of placing their productions on the world market, by introducing them to Japanese artistic and cultural realities. They introduced into their productions, films such as ’’Rashomon”, a Western factor which rendered the film comprehensive to every public, at the same time maintaining what made the originality of their civilization. Once the Western public was accustomed to Japanese esthetic, the Nippon production delivered films, without concessions, which truly answered to the Japanese spirit and cultural concepts. Naturally, one cannot say that every public can assi¬ milate Japanese films. It remains to say that a work of value is universal, and that if from the outset, it only touches the category of the cultivated public, it is prompted to have a great radiation progressively as the taste of the public is formed, and as the latter accustoms itself to other forms of civilization than its own. Besides, as far as national productions are concerned, one does not proceed otherwise. The critic attracts the* public s attention to the film which he judges worthy while presenting it by its different aspects. That is one way of forming the public’s taste. Cinema clubs are going even more deeply in this action of educating the public. They are the cultural centres and somewhat the ante¬ chambers of future film technicians. Africa will also have to utilize without a doubt this route for the for¬ mation of a certain number of its cinema personnel. It would have seemed that with the current develop¬ ment of the cinema, a larger public, due to its greater awareness, would have frequented the obscure cinema houses. The contrary has happened ; the cinema loses its public to the advantage of television and the outdoor shows in Europe. —

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Therefore, instead of the general value of films increa¬ sing, it is declining. Before the competition of tele¬ vision, as a matter of fact, the West began accom¬ plishing a greater number of works which, as far as taste was concerned, referred to the smallest common denomi¬ nator. Naturally, this was done to rewin the lost specta¬ tors to the cause, and if possible, increase their number. It is said that in Japan, to combat the competition of television, film producers are making films which cannot he projected on the television screen, because of their licenscious character. In a more normal way, in this attempt to find a public, new attractions to the cinema have been established, the process of which has been known for several years : cine¬ mascope, and the general use of colour. The cinema is making progress in the technical domain, indeed, artistically, but is losing in thematic research. For some time, originality is going to found in the making of films with great staging. Effort is being concentrated as well on the confort of auditoriums, at least, in the West. In order to hold and attract a greater audience, he auditoriums were renovated, artistically decorated and technically perfected to complet¬ ely adapt to all formats with stereophonic sound. After a new balance between the cinema and other forms of entertainment had been established, as far as the public’s participation was concerned, cinema took up the offensive again, but this time, not by introducing new techniques, but on the contrary, by accentuating the origin¬ ality of the subject’s treatment. ’’The new wave’ in France, then in Europe, and finally throughout the world, upset traditions and used a new writing to express itself. Cinema is undergoing a veritable revolution in style with the apparance of this school. But in fact, it is certainly necessary to recognize that in 1958, ’’the new wave” had invented nothing that Dziga Vertov hadn’t already used in the time of the silent film. Only, one must give credit to this school, in that at a critical moment, it showed were the cinema in Europe was stagnating, and that it was possible to make films with other methods than those which had been util¬ ized until then. The public became interested in experi¬ mentation ; and producers followed the movement of this renovation which permitted them to make money while realizing films for two or three times less the expense than before. Proceeding from France, this ’’new wave’ mo—

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35

yement won the world. Only the African Continent found itself outside the movement once again for lack of a cinematographic industry. Since the cinema’s situation in the world becomes the situation of the cinema in Africa, and since Africa remains a market for the entire world’s productions, the ’’new wave” films have also invaded the African Continent without, as ever, dethroning Westerns and classic Indian and Egyptian films from the public’s taste. The African market is made up of a public which is called upon to take on an important role. There are several reasons for that. Education is being developed and is contributing to making young people turn more and more towards manifestations of modern life. The economic development which is introducing progress into the coun¬ tryside is going to permit the birth of new activities The consequence of the birth of the African film will be that cinema will no longer be a totally foreign element in Afri¬ ca s cultural life, because some of its themes are going to become national and are going to borrow a form which will bring out an aesthetic particular to Africa. African cinema is naturally going to benefit from re¬ search, works, and experiences of the previously developed cinema. But we are above all interested in knowing the situation in underdeveloped countries which possess a rather flourishing industry in this domain, such as Egypt, India, and China. On the organization level he cinema has established technical norms which are valid for every country and applied in every country. One must not look for the particularly nationalistic aspects of ci¬ nema productions in the technical realm, but rather in the organization and the object of their research. What can we retain from these films - in those of India, China, and Egypt, for instance. The relatively great number of films fUC!M m+ Pr