African Art and Architecture

I

Introduction

African Art and Architecture, the art and architecture of the peoples of the African continent, from prehistoric times to the 21st century.

II

Origins and Sources

Art in Africa has found expression in a range of media from architecture, sculpture, and pottery, to music, dance, textiles, body adornment, and epic poetry. Each of these has its own complex and in many cases unresearched local history of stylistic development.

Tracing the history of African art and architecture is made problematic by the fragmentary state of the evidence. Archaeology in Africa has made great strides in recent decades but remains under-financed and often hindered by unauthorized digging at key sites. Until the mid-19th century, most European contact with sub-Saharan Africa was in many areas limited to coastal regions, although the accounts of the kingdoms of Benin and Kongo provided by 16th- and 17th-century traders and missionaries mainly from Portugal are useful exceptions. Arab scholars are also a source of some valuable information, particularly concerning the medieval African empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhay, but also with regard to the East African coast. While a few symbolic writing systems were developed in areas of sub-Saharan Africa in the pre-colonial period, they were not used to preserve historical records. Except in Christian Ethiopia, and a few areas where Arabic chronicles exist, local conceptions of history were preserved by oral transmission, often by a specialized group of griots, or bards. The combination of these various sources, together with inferences drawn from late 19th- and 20th-century data, has allowed scholars to identify what appear to be some of the major building blocks of a history of art in each of the regions of sub-Saharan Africa, but it is clear that many questions remain to be answered.

Although the nature of the complex history of interactions between Egyptian art and architecture and artistic traditions elsewhere on the African continent is controversial and will only be clarified by continuing archaeological research, the development of Nubian civilization is an important aspect of a wider engagement between sub-Saharan Africa and the Mediterranean world that belies the familiar cliché of isolated tribal cultures. The Coptic Christian culture that developed subsequently in both Sudan and Ethiopia struggled to maintain these links, although the Islamic conquest of northern Africa in the 8th century left the Ethiopian Church effectively cut off from the rest of Christendom for long periods. The trans-Saharan trade routes, already centuries old, provided the means for the introduction of Islam to West Africa, beginning a long process of expansion and conversion that still continues. The impact of Islam on the artistic traditions of sub-Saharan Africa has been less profound than might have been expected: African Islam has generally been accommodating to much local practice and indeed in West Africa some Muslim groups treasure and employ images of their holy men.

An African response to the earliest European presence in West Africa is apparent in the depiction of European merchants and soldiers in the cast brass plaques made in the 16th century in Benin, as well as the finely carved ivory salt cellars and hunting horns brought back by sailors from Kongo, Benin, and the coast of Sierra Leone. Increasing European involvement on the African continent over the following centuries has had a far-reaching impact that continues to be felt today. It would, however, be a denial of the creative agency of African artistic responses to changing circumstances to see this impact as wholly negative.

III

Europe and the Art of Africa

Western engagement with the rich variety of African artistic creativity has inevitably been selective, and conditioned by troubled episodes in African history, notably slavery and colonialism. Scholarship dealing with art and artefacts in Africa has often struggled to move beyond the legacy of outdated stereotypes that position Africa as a region of unchanging tradition in contrast to the dynamic modernity of Europe or America.

The appreciation of African sculpture by European artists in the early decades of the 20th century, part of the wider phenomenon of “primitivism” in Western art, led to a reappraisal of selected African artefacts as inherently aesthetic rather than as ethnographic objects. In Paris, artists such as Pablo Picasso, Georges Braque, and Amedeo Modigliani saw the formal solutions to the representation of the human face and figure in certain African masks and sculptures as a means of breaking away from the constraints of European classicism. In Berlin and Munich, Emil Nolde, Néstor Kirchner, and other Expressionists were interested less in African forms than in the romantic idealization of the “primitive” that they read into them. In most cases this interest did not extend to any consideration of local meanings, still less to the artists who had created the works. Nevertheless, the fashion for collecting and displaying African art set at this period continues to influence the activities of collectors, dealers, and to a lesser extent scholars, today.

IV

Interpreting African Art

A contrast is often drawn between the functional nature of African artefacts and the more purely aesthetic nature of Western art. While it is true that relatively little of the output of African artists until recently was intended to be primarily the focus of aesthetic contemplation, an appreciation of aspects of form and design in objects, buildings, poetry, and performance is widespread. A growing number of studies have demonstrated the sophisticated and discriminating vocabulary of aesthetic discourse that exists in many African languages, and concepts of art and creativity are present in virtually all African cultures.

The notion that artists in Africa are anonymous figures reproducing fixed tribal styles is similarly misleading and outdated. As elsewhere, artists work within a social context and as part of a tradition that allows for personal innovation. In some cases, artists have a complex status, often derived from their role in handling and transforming powerful and potentially dangerous entities such as iron and even certain words. Often these ideas are combined with a social structure where artists form distinct groups controlling mythical lore and intermarrying only with members of other craft specialist groups. This is most notable among the widely dispersed Mande-speaking peoples of Mali and neighbouring countries. Craft specialists organized into guilds, primarily for economic reasons, existed elsewhere without similar beliefs. Some artists were full-time specialists of this type, others worked occasionally to fulfil commissions, while among many people, such as the Fang of Gabon and the Tiv of Nigeria, there were few, if any, specialist artists. Where art was a specialist occupation, it was generally transmitted via some form of informal apprenticeship from father to son or from mother to daughter. In most cultures there was an established division of labour by sex, so that blacksmithing and other types of metalwork, woodcarving, and narrow-loom weaving are virtually always male occupations, while pottery, murals on houses and shrines, and broad-loom weaving usually are or were women’s work.

Until recently, the notion of tribal entity was seen as the key to categorizing African people into neatly bounded groups each identified by a common language, belief system, social organization, and art style. This approach ignores the multiple patterns of mutual influence and interaction both within and between linguistic groups. Ethnic identity, moreover, is merely one of a number of identities that individuals and groups have adopted in response to certain situations, particularly in colonial and post-colonial times. Thus, far from reflecting a fixed identity, artefacts and art styles play a role in the ongoing formation of identities. Also, although they may be retained as a form of simplified reference, terms such as “Dogon sculpture” or “Yoruba masquerade” should be understood as indicating areas where particular configurations were clustered rather than as signifying discrete areas unified by a common style.

Masks are often depicted as the classic art form of Africa. The mask as it is normally seen in the West, however, as a museum piece in a glass display case or hanging on a wall, is a single element artificially isolated from the context for which it was intended—namely as part of a costume combining wood with paint, fibre, and a cloth dress, all usually made by different people, and animated by a performer who dances, often with others, interacts with the audience and accompanying musicians, plays out a role, and improvises new variations. The headpiece itself can have a range of greatly different significances depending on the precise local understanding of the spiritual agency involved in its performance. African masquerades are a highly complex and diverse range of cultural practices, few of which correspond closely to ideas associated with mask-wearing in the West.