African Art and Architecture

C

Great Zimbabwe

Great Zimbabwe, today a large complex of stone walls and ruins, was once thought to be isolated evidence of Arabian or Egyptian presence in the African interior. It is now understood to be the capital of a large indigenous state centred on the high plateau between the Limpopo and Zambezi rivers. More than 50 smaller madzimbahwe, towns with stone walls thought to be regional centres, are known. Great Zimbabwe is believed to have been the major court and ritual centre, occupied for about 200 years after the construction of the earliest plaster houses in about ad 1130. Drystone walls linked now-vanished houses and demarcated internal boundaries, rather than serving any defensive role. Among the objects excavated from the site were eight grey-green soapstone birds and a number of fragments of decorated soapstone dishes, as well as quantities of ceramics and imported beads.

Owing to the early activities of treasure hunters in some key areas, archaeological evidence to assist in the interpretation of the site is limited, but efforts have been made to apply insights drawn from the later ethnography of the Shona people, in particular aspects of their mythology and spatial organization. Thomas Huffman, the leading proponent of this approach, has argued that the circular Great Enclosure was probably an initiation centre for young women, while the whole layout of the town, with its towers, stone pillars, and stone walls with vertical grooves, can be understood as a symbolic arrangement of male and female space.

The reasons for the decline of the Zimbabwe polity remain unclear. However, the tradition of stone architecture and similar approaches to ritual appear to have been maintained by its successors to the north, the Mutapa, and the Torwa. The capital of the latter has been identified with extensive ruins at Khami, dated to between the 15th and late 17th centuries.

D

Farmers and Pastoralists

The last 200 years of southern African history have been marked by long periods of turmoil and large-scale population movements, initiated by the disruption caused by the establishment of the Zulu kingdom (see Mfecane), and continued by the activities of colonists and settler governments. In response to new pressures, previously flexible local linguistic and ethnic identities became rigid and codified, most notably as a result of deliberate policies of classification imposed in South Africa and pre-independence Namibia. Against this backdrop, styles and forms of art should be seen as active elements in the construction and maintenance of cultural identities rather than as passive reflectors of existing groupings. Regional and local variations also both underlie and cross-cut larger boundaries.

Although the masks and ancestral sculptures that have dominated Western interest in African sculpture are rarely found in this region, there are a number of rich traditions of woodcarving among peoples such as the Zulu, Venda, Tsonga, Shona, and Tsotho, who produce small figurative carvings as well as such objects as headrests, staffs, pipes, doors, and ceremonial vessels. Pots, in particular beer pots made by women, were often finely decorated. In the 20th century greater access to imported beads and new fabrics led to an expansion of the varied traditions of decorative beadwork in a huge variety of styles associated with a long-standing aesthetic of body decoration. In areas such as Swaziland and KwaZulu-Natal, where local courts remain important in contemporary politics, beadwork and new forms of “traditional” dress for ceremonial occasions have remained highly significant. Among several groups in Botswana and South Africa, ideas about female control over domestic space have been expressed through a range of women’s mural painting, which newly available paints have often stimulated to novel forms. In the case of the best-known example, the Ndebele, mural painting developed in the 1930s and 1940s as a new means of expressing ethnic identity on the isolated farmsteads to which they had been scattered following their defeat by the Boers (see Afrikaners) in 1882, before being co-opted and promoted by the tourist authorities of the apartheid government.

X

Art in Africa Today

Throughout most of Africa, the 20th century was a period of rapid change, which brought many losses as well as gains. Many local religious, social, and political institutions, such as cult groups, age grades, and royal courts, which provided artists with their main sources of patronage, were displaced or at least strongly modified by such cultural incursions as Christianity, formal education, wage labour, and the modern nation state. As people actively engaged with these changes, which have led to the movement of young people from the countryside into the towns, many of the older artistic practices were discarded as no longer relevant, or were only continued in much-reduced forms. However, where traditions are still seen to meet present needs—for example, in the transition of young people to adult status—they have continued to be practiced into the 21st century, albeit adapted to fit into school holidays and meet contemporary aspirations. At the same time new artistic practices have developed and older ones have successfully adapted and expanded. In some cases newly felt ideas of ethnic identity stimulated by competition or repression within nation states have promoted an expansion and transformation of elements drawn from the past. In some areas tourists and art dealers have provided new patronage for carvers and other artists, although they have also accelerated the decline of many traditions by acquiring and exporting thousands of older works.

The development of painting and sculpture in the European tradition was an important 20th-century phenomenon. There were two major strands to this development, one based on formal education in art schools, the second drawing on a variety of European-promoted workshops.

Since colonial regimes in the first part of the century saw little need to provide art education for their subjects, the pioneers of this development were a small number of men who were able to secure funds to study in Europe. Among them was the Nigerian Aina Onabolu (1882-1963), who returned determined to press the government to establish art-teaching in schools. Although art tuition at Achimota College in Ghana and Makarere College in Uganda began as early as the 1920s, the more significant advances were not made until the 1950s. There had been individual art teachers in Nigeria earlier, notably Kenneth Murray, whose collection of traditional art formed the core of the national museum, but art departments were established in Nigeria at Zaria College in 1953, and at Yaba College, Lagos, in 1955, while art schools opened in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, in 1957 and in Dakar, Senegal, in 1960.

The philosopher-poet, Léopold Sédar Senghor, who became the first president of independent Senegal, was anxious to counteract the French government’s well-intentioned policy of making Frenchmen of all its subjects throughout the world, proposed the philosophy of négritude, asking what it meant to be a black person. Under the influence of this philosophy, students trained in the Dakar school of fine art at first drew their motifs from traditional African forms of masks and figure sculptures. Many of their works were translated into tapestries which, it has been suggested, encouraged the adoption of more simplified forms.

Students at some of the other institutions quickly began to query the European emphasis in the curricula and to demand greater local relevance. At Zaria College a small group formed a society to promote the exhibition of African-inspired works and the recognition of local traditions. Its members, who form the highly influential older generation of artists in Nigeria today, included Bruce Onobrakpeya (1932- ) and Uche Okeke (1933- ). The latter went on to teach at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where he and his students developed what became known as the Uli school, drawing on motifs used by Igbo women for mural painting and body decoration.

The problem faced by the so-called “Zaria Rebels” still confronts many African artists today, namely whether they should or could construct a distinctively African dimension through their work, while still contributing to and striving for acceptance within the mainstream of contemporary art. One widespread response, echoing Okeke’s philosophy of natural synthesis, has been to seek inspiration in local scripts and symbols, for example the Amharic texts and magic scrolls incorporated in the works of the Ethiopian artists “Skunder” Boghossian (1937-2003) and Wosene Kosrof (1950- ). In Sudan, meanwhile, the fluid forms of Arabic calligraphy have been explored by Osman Waqialla (1925- ) and El Salahi (1930- ). Elsewhere, artists have combined formal innovation with an exploration of the possibilities of local pigments and materials such as earth and bark pigments and mud-dyed cloth. However, others, such as the South African painter David Koloane (1938- ), have argued that, like all artists, those in Africa are entitled to experiment in whatever form or media they choose without being restricted by any preconceived notions of African identity. Nonetheless, many African artists, like the Sudanese sculptor Amir Nur (1939- ), have felt obliged to seek to earn a living in the West.

Although there were a few women among the first generation of academically trained artists, notably the Sudanese painter and art teacher Kamala Ibrahim Ishaq (1939- ), most found it difficult to sustain their careers and it is only in the past few years that a growing number of female artists have begun to achieve recognition. Outstanding among these is Sokari Douglas Camp (1958- ), a Nigerian who trained in California and London, and who is now based in the latter city, from where she receives commissions from all over the world for her sculpture of welded sheet metal.

The second major current of developments has its source in a number of informal workshops, missionary craft schools, and other individual teaching projects sponsored by interested Europeans. The best known of these were the Oshogbo workshops (southern Nigeria) and the soapstone-carving group set up at the National Gallery in Zimbabwe (then Rhodesia) in the early 1960s. Many of the promoters of these schemes saw their role not as teaching students about art, but as tapping some supposedly inherent mystical creativity that would be tarnished if the artists were exposed to Western art history. In the case of Oshogbo, only a few of the original artists, such as Twins Seven Seven (1945- ), are still active but there is a thriving school of their successors working in a similar style, mostly for the tourist market. In Zimbabwe there are now vast numbers of sculptors, some of whom have achieved considerable international acclaim. Among them are a few, such as Tapfuma Gutsa (1956- ), who are successfully experimenting with a wider range of forms and materials. In South Africa apartheid continued to limit art education for black Africans, resulting in a very different history of informal craft and art centre-based training, albeit one that has produced a very diverse and interesting range of artists. In recent years a number of influential artists’ workshops have been held in South Africa and neighbouring countries, bringing local artists together with black Africans working abroad and other European and American artists.

Throughout Africa large numbers of artists are working in a variety of new forms and traditions that have developed in the colonial and post-colonial period. Some of these, such as the Makonde and Kamba carvers of East Africa, are for expatriate and tourist patronage while others, such as sign-painters, mural painters, makers of funerary monuments in cement, carvers of decorated coffins, and portrait photographers, work primarily for local customers. A few artists from among the latter have been selected and promoted by European collectors and art dealers and have adapted their styles in response. Among the best known of these is the painter Cheri Samba (1956-) of the Democratic Republic of the Congo, whose work draws on a tradition of popular painting developed in the 1960s. Although the work of these artists is often interesting in itself, many commentators have criticized aspects of their promotion as reviving images of an exotic and primitive Africa.