Tribal Art Forum

BEHIND THE MASK: African Art/Western Imagination

by

Michael Yates

INTRODUCTION                                                    

Are art collections the result of the enthusiasm of people who, for whatever reason, follow their primeval urge to hunt and gather, an impulse that in prehistoric times was necessary for survival? But then great collections are not an essential necessity and seldom make a profit. Perhaps it would be better to regard the collection of works of art as a significant result of taking pleasure in possessions.

(Dieter Neupert[1])

The history of collecting illuminates something striking: the human mind’s unquenchable curiosity, and its love for the wonder of the world.

(A. C. Grayling[2])

When I was about twelve, I bought a small book of west African masks and figures; I no longer remember what prompted me to do so. I doubt that I had seen such art, so I surmise that the illustrations affected me in a way that other types of art did not. When I was 19 I was accepted by Voluntary Service Overseas and worked in the Solomon Islands for a year. Working for the Geological Service, I alternated between office work in Honiara, on the island of Guadalcanal, and field work on the island of Santa Isabel. It was a wonderful time for me, visiting remote Melanesian villages, meeting people who still carved and used beautiful utilitarian objects, listening to folktales about how the different people, animals and birds crossed and settled on the various Pacific islands. On my way back to England I stopped in New Zealand, where I visited several museums that held large collections of Maori art.

For many years I visited museums in Europe and America, but didn't think seriously about collecting tribal art until 1980. I had been living in London for a few years and discovered a handful of dealers and galleries specializing in tribal artefacts. I met David Morris, a fellow collector, in Ian Auld’s Camden Passage shop in Islington. We spent most Saturday mornings together, alternating between Portobello Road and Camden Passage. David’s small house in Chislehurst was crammed with tribal and non-tribal art, including pieces that he bought from Herbert Rieser, an important dealer who, sadly, died in 1978, just before I began to collect.[3] Two dealers, the ceramicist Ian Auld and Maurice Joy, became my good friends and I spent many happy hours in Ian’s shop listening to him talking about art.[4] Sadly, neither Ian nor David are still with us. But, something rubbed off from them (Ian had been a teacher in Nigeria at one time) and my enthusiasm for African art grew. Maurice Joy, as ever, allowed me access to his wonderful library of tribal art books and our (sadly, infrequent), walks on Hampstead Heath are peppered with erudition and scholarship. Maurice once worked with William Fagg at the British Museum, and his encyclopaedic knowledge of all things tribal has never ceased to amaze me.[5] On one occasion, I showed Maurice a small animal figure that had been brought to England years ago, found by the previous owner in east Africa.  Maurice immediately said “Rhodesia” and added that the only other time he had ever seen such figures was over forty years ago in a Liverpool museum.

I have been lucky in another way. Over the past few years, many fine scholars of African art have produced excellent and exciting exhibition catalogues and essays, often based on years of field work. I only know these people from their books, but have learnt much from them and, like many others, I owe them a great debt of gratitude. There are too many to list, but if I mention the names, William Fagg, Roy Sieber and Robert Farris Thompson, readers will understand what I mean.

Over the years I have continued to collect both tribal and modern art, and have seen objects go into and out of fashion as trends change. Museum attitudes toward their collections have changed as well. What follows are some random thoughts on subjects that interest me. They range from the meaning of the word “art” to the question of how objects from Africa became “art” in the western sense. They include thoughts on how collectors and museums understand, interpret and display African art.

                       

                                                Guro heddle pulley, Ivory Coast.

                                                                    1.                                                

I believe Confucius said that one should first define one's terms. Today I collect “Tribal art” from Africa. I have asked myself why we apply this term for carvings, masks, sculptures and utilitarian objects. During the 19^th and early 20^th centuries it was called “Primitive art”, an ethnocentric term redolent of cultural superiority. Here are a couple of short extracts from “Primitive Art” by L. Adam (1940) described in the book’s cover blurb as an anthropologist and artist.

The best way then to define “primitive” peoples would be to say that they comprise all those tribes who are outside the spheres of (a) modern European civilisation, and (b) the great Oriental civilisations - in other words, peoples representing comparatively low cultural stages.

or

All the primitive races of modern time are physically distinct from prehistoric man and from the modern European. Their classification as “primitive”, however, is based on the stage of their cultural development, rather than on their somatic features.[6]

Until recently I doubted if anyone still uses the term “Primitive Art”, which I thought had been consigned to the dustbin of history. But, in 2003 I found it used to describe the Berkley Galleries as “dealers in primitive art”. Alright, the Gallery was open during the 1950’s, when such art was considered to be “primitive”, but I was taken aback to see it in use so recently.[7] Today, most people use “Tribal Art”[8]. But as I show below, even “tribe” is contentious, and this may be why the French have begun to use “Art Premier” as their preferred term. For the moment, I am sticking with “Tribal Art” and that is what I collect.

                                                           2.

Among the most striking and (for better or for worse) fruitful results of the vast development (I had almost said hypertrophy) of world communications in this century is the present condition of art in the “civilized” world, a state of virtually complete eclectism, of freedom from the blinkers formerly imposed by the Western tradition upon the vision of artists and of the patrons of art. Hence has arisen the International Style, which may look anywhere for its inspiration, subject only to the trammels of fashion and commerce.

William Fagg[9]

Some years ago it was common practice to say that African art was discovered in the early 20^th century by a handful of artists in Paris.[10]  Maurice de Vlaminck, a painter, claimed to have been the western artist to “discover” African art, in 1905 (this date is now disputed; more likely, it was the following year). According to Vlaminck, he had been painting in the open and, retiring to a bistro, saw three African statues between the Pernod bottles behind the bar.[11] Vlaminck persuaded the owner to sell them to him for a round of drinks. He said he was, “moved to the depths of my being”[12] and, after showing the figures to a friend of his father, he was offered a white Fang mask and two statues that belonged to the friend.[13] Shortly afterwards Vlaminck sold the Fang mask to André Derain. “When Picasso and Matisse saw it at Derain’s home they were absolutely thunderstruck.”[14] However, according to Matisse, Picasso had previously seen an African statue that Matisse had purchased from a curio shop, “Chez le Père Sauvage”, in the Rue de Rennes. Matisse was showing the statue to Gertrude Stein when Picasso called by unexpectedly.[15] We also gain insight into attitudes toward tribal art in 1906 when we consider that the poet and friend of Picasso and Braque, Guillaume Apollinaire, was planning a series of art books that would include one titled L’Art chez les Sauvages (The Art of Savages).[16] Did the proposed title come, I wonder, from the name of the curio shop “Chez le Père Sauvage” or did Apollinare and others consider tribal art to really be the work of savages? Somebody once defined tribal art as the work of people without names. Perhaps it was the anonymity of the artists that excited Picasso and his friends. As the Roman poet Horace said:

Many brave men lived before Agamemnon; but all are overwhelmed in eternal night, unwept, unknown, because they lack a sacred poet.

Horace, Odes iv. ix. 25  (65 BC - 8 BC)

In fact, we have Picasso’s own views on African art. When we read his intense words, I think we can understand just why everything that had been painted before his Les Damoiselles d’Avignon became redundant.

All alone in that awful museum (.i.e. the Trocadéro), with masks, dolls, ,made by the redskins, dusty manikins, Les Damoiselles d’Avignon must have come to me that very day, but not at all because of the forms; because it was my first exorcism-painting - yes, absolutely … The masks weren’t just like any other pieces of sculpture.  Not at all. They were magic things … The Negro pieces were  intercesseurs, mediators; ever since then I’ve known the word in French. They were against everything - against unknown, threatening spirits. I always looked at fetishes. I understood; I too am against  everything. I too believe that everything is unknown, that everything is an enemy! ... all the fetishes were used for the same thing. They were weapons. To help people avoid coming under the influence of spirits again, to help them become independent. They’re tools. If we give spirits a form, we become independent. Spirits, the unconscious (people still weren’t talking about that very much), emotion - they’re all the same thing, I understood why I was a painter.[17]

Possibly, then, it would be fairer and more accurate to say that these artists did not “discover” African art, but that they recognised it for what it was - art - and that they liberated it from the domain of the ethnographer.[18] Picasso, Braque and their contemporaries were suddenly presented with insights that enabled them to escape the restraints laid upon them by generations of western artists. Their art flourished, perceptions were altered, and the world would never be the same. However, it would be even more accurate to say that these Paris based artists were not the first to recognise the qualities of African art. After the British punitive raid on Benin (1897), large numbers of metal and ivory art works were removed from the city and dispersed around Europe. Some were purchased by the Berlin Museum für Völkerkunde (now Ethnological Museum) and in 1901, museum staff member Felix von Luschan felt able to say that:

These Benin works indeed stand at the highest level of European casting technique. Benvenuto Cellini could not have cast them better, nor could anyone before or after him, down to the present day. In technical terms, these bronzes stand at the highest apex of what is achievable at all.[19]

Perhaps more work is needed before we can definitely say just who in the west “discovered” African art, after all!

                                               

                                                   Seated Senufo figure, Ivory Coast.

                                                                    3.

In 1996, London became the centre of interest for all things African. There were exhibitions of contemporary African artists, dance and music events throughout the capital. But most important was a monumental exhibition, “Africa. The Art of a Continent", curated by the artist, Tom Phillips, at the Royal Academy of Arts in London’s Piccadilly. African art had never been seen before on such a grand scale. This was not just an exhibition of the arts of west Africa, south Africa, Egypt, or of the Maghreb. This was an exhibition that covered the whole of Africa for the first time. Among the hundreds of outstanding pieces in the exhibition were many from very ancient times, indeed. Most of these were stone and terracotta which, unlike wood, survived the African climate. Amazingly, there was a wooden animal head that had been dated to the 8^th or 9^th century CE and had survived in a wet Angolan gravel pit.[20] There were superbly crafted stone tools and ceramics from ancient Egypt. There were beautiful paintings made on rocks by the San people of southern Africa which, again, dated back thousands of years. There were two life size clay heads that had been found at Lydenburg in South Africa and were dated to 500 - 700 CE. Moving to West Africa, there were 10^th century CE bronzes and pots from Igbo-Ukwu in southeastern Nigeria. There were other Nigerian metal heads and figures from the 12^th – 15^th centuries CE, and 16^th century CE bronze heads and plaques from Benin. There were also terracotta figures from Mali and Nigeria, many more than 2,000 years old.[21] A glance through the catalogue soon confirms that the early 20^th century “discovery” of African art was, indeed, a realisation of something that had been around for a very long time.

                                   

                                                Upper torso of Lobi figure, Burkina Faso.

                                                                    4.

We don't know exactly when Africa was discovered by outsiders. The ancient Greeks and Romans travelled along the southern shores of the Mediterranean Sea, Arab dhows sailed south along the coast of east Africa and there was sea contact between east Africa and Indonesia.[22] I have heard that the Phoenicians circumnavigated Africa, although I know of no evidence to support this.[23] It has also been suggested, by Gavin Menzies in his book, 1421 The Year China Discovered the World, that a Chinese fleet sailed down the east coast of Africa, rounded the Cape of Good Hope, and sailed north along the west coast of Africa as far as the Cape Verde Islands in 1421. Part of this fleet may have explored the mouth of the Congo River, although many academics dismiss this idea.[24]  We know that European sailors, especially from Portugal, were exploring the West coast of Africa from the 15^th century CE onwards - after the Chinese had visited much of West Africa - and we know that these sailors returned to Europe with material items from Africa. Two scholars, Ezio Bassani and Malcolm McLeod, have documented hundreds of African items that managed to find their way to Europe during the period 1400 - 1800 CE.[25] The vast majority of these are weapons and textiles. There are also many works of carved ivory that were carved specifically for the Portuguese gentry. Some of them display Portuguese coat of arms and the Portuguese may have left orders with the Africans, probably including drawings of their coat of arms, and collected the ivories on their next voyage. These works are exquisite. It has sometimes been claimed that they are early examples of “tourist” or so-called “airport” art; but there is really no comparison.[26] Very few masks and carved wooden figures have been traced to early European collections. Perhaps the Africans, wishing to preserve their secrets, kept such objects away from prying European eyes. Perhaps the Christian Europeans were aware of such things, but did not want them.[27] Religion had a powerful hold on 15^th - 16^th century CE European minds and people were afraid of upsetting the church (think of what happened to the Cathars and, later, to Galileo).  15^th century Christian priests were only too happy to force African converts to publicly burn their masks and “idols”, replacing them with their own “idols” in the form of crosses, crucifixes and religious paintings.[28] I wonder what the Africans made of the Christian notion of drinking a dead man’s blood and eating his body?

           

                                       Lobi figures, Burkina Faso.                                                  

                                                      5. 

Is there a better illustration of Western misconceptions about religious imagery than the word “fetish”?[29]

It has been suggested that Christian images of St. Sebastian, tied to a tree and shot full of arrows, inspired the Kongo people to produce wooden figures covered with nails. Called nkisi (plural minkisi), these objects were soon being called fetishes by Europeans (although scholars now prefer the term, power objects).[30]

Some have a Lion’s Tail, some a Bird’s Feather, some a Pebble, a Bit of  Rag, a Dog’s Leg; or, in short, any Thing they fancy: and this they call their FITTISH, which Word not only signifies the Thing worshipped, but sometimes a Spell, Charm, or Inchantment.

 William Smith, 1744[31]

The problem here was that as soon as the Europeans saw minkisi (or almost any African object), the object became decontextualized (see Picasso’s comments in section 2 above, for example). Europeans, familiar with stories of witches causing pain (even death) by pricking small images with pins, jumped to the conclusion that the minkisi were made to be used in a similar manner.  This belief lasted into the 20^th century.

The most powerful and most feared of all the fetishes in the catalogue belongs to the medicine-man who has the mbanzangola fetish … If a person desires to cause pain, disease, or death to another, he goes to a medicine man of this fetish order, and, having paid a fee, he drives in a nail or knife where he wants his enemy to feel the pain. A knife-stab in a vital part means a painful death to the man’s enemy; a nail in the shoulder, elbow or knee means excruciating agony in one or another of those joints, and indicates that the man does not want to kill his enemy, but only wishes him to have rheumatism, abscesses, or such minor ailments. These fetish images are often stuck over with nails, knives and other sharp instruments. This is probably the only fetish image in connection with which there is no “white art” practiced - it is neither a protective fetish nor a curative one, but always used to inflict pain.[32]

This was written by John H. Weeks in 1914, around the time that Karl Edward Laman, a Swedish Covenant Church missionary, took it upon himself to ask those Kongo people who were literate in their own language (as was Laman) to respond to a questionnaire that he prepared. Apparently, Laman had no fewer than 429 note books by 1919; these are a unique archive of Kongo life in the first two decades of the 20^th century. But, much of this archive was not available to the public until 1974, through the work of two American scholars, John Janzen and Wyatt MacGaffey.[33] Minkisi, it was revealed, had nothing to do with the ideas expressed by John Weeks, who in 1912 had penned Among Congo Cannibals. They were, in fact, objects that conferred confidence to the Kongo people and helped them overcome their ailments.

Nkisi is the name of the thing we use to help a man when he is sick and from which we obtain health; the name refers to leaves and medicine combined together … An nkisi is also a chosen companion, in whom all people find confidence. It is a hiding place for people’s souls, to keep and compose in order to preserve life (breath). But the help in healing is why people are especially grateful for minkisi …Minkisi differ in form and nature because the sufferings in the human body differ. The minkisi, in like manner, are as diverse and as many as the many, many illnesses in the land … The ingredients put in the nkisi are categorized like the diseases in the body in order to help the nkisi in its work … Nkisi Nkondi receives wedges or “nails” made of vegetable matter if the person driving them has no iron ones. Lacking an iron wedge, a nail will be driven into the statue to “bind” it. It is believed that because of the wound that has injured Nkondi, he will become angry quickly and go “tie up” the person identified in the divination … The medicines are the ingredients; their strength comes from each individually and from their being joined together. Each ingredient has an action upon man and the bringing together of these forces is what heals a person.[34]

H. Cory was another Africanist who, like Karl Edward Laman, was prepared to ask questions and seek answers. In Cory’s case, they concerned small clay figurines that were used by children among four Tanzanian (then Tanganyika) groups of people; the Sambaa, the Zigue, the Nguu and the Pare.[35] On the surface, the figures could be viewed simply as toys. Cory realised that, in fact, they help children enter adulthood during puberty initiation rites.

The most systematic use of representational art in the form of figurines was made during the puberty rites of those Bantu tribes that perform circumcision of boys and the corresponding operation on girls - tribes living in the eastern part of (Tanganyika) … Figurines were also used in ceremonies connected with the birth of the first child and with rites of ancestor worship, as well as on less solemn occasions but there use was sporadic rather than systematic. There was perhaps a time when figurines were always used in the puberty ceremonies of certain tribes which also used them, but not necessarily or regularly, on other occasions. At the same time there were tribes which had no puberty ceremonies but used figurines on other occasions, and finally there were large areas in which the use of figurines was completely unknown.[36]

Each figurine had its specific song, which the children were taught, and the figurines were used to help remember the “message” delivered in each song.

                                                                   6.

As is the case with myths, masks, too, cannot be interpreted in and by themselves as separate objects.                                                    

Claude Lévi-Strauss[37]

There is probably nothing more emblematic of African art than the mask. The earliest known illustration of an African mask is probably that in François Froger's book, Relation d’un Voyage Fait en 1695, 1696 et 1697. The illustration shows a man wearing a form of horned helmet mask and is described as the “dress of the circumcised”.[38] It probably depicts a man standing on the banks of the Gambia River, near the town of Barra. The Kassa people who now live in the area do not perform masquerades, although several neighbouring people, including the Jola, do. A Jola mask called Kebul (Horned Mask) had been used within living memory as a part of circumcision rituals.

Masks do not simply represent when used, they live. They are a means for the denizens of the otherworld to manifest their existence and presence. Masks are. This is what the anthropologist Frank Herreman has to say on the subject.

         One of the most dramatic manners whereby the contact between humans and the supernatural acquires a visible form is at the moment that spirits under the form of masks appear. According to our understanding, the mask is a means of partially or wholly covering the face or the body to render it unrecognisable, and through which the masker acquires another identity. In large parts of the world the original function – associated with the supernatural – has declined, and masking has evolved into a form of profane recreation coming to the fore only once or at most a few times per year, for example during carnival. In West and Central Africa, the function of a number of masks has remained much closer to its original significance. Consequently, such masks still manifest at crucial moments during the cycle of the seasons, and within the course of an individual’s life cycle as well. The mask wearer in this context is, therefore, a more important person than someone who masks for purely recreational motives. In the African context the mask wearer is always an initiated person whose identity is not made known. He undergoes not only a physical, but also a psychic transformation. He comes under the spell of the spirit that he incarnates, and one believes that he so disposes of the supernatural characteristics of the latter. Since the supernatural stands outside the law of the living, one supposes that the mask acts according to its own whimsy. In these acts, however, sits a structure that is dictated by the priest, the magician, the society, the elders, or other forms of the power structure. They must watch over the observance of religious rules, the common law, and the maintenance of various rituals which must be carried out within the scope of events in life’s cycle. Thus, the masks are important instruments that aid in the consolidation of the position of power of the various authority structures.[39]

When I visited New Guinea in the early 1960’s I heard the sound of bullroarers echoing through the highland valleys. When I asked what they were, I was told that they were the voices of spirits. The spirits associated with African masks also have their own voices. Frank Herreman again:

Mask wearers are as a rule very active in their movements. They run, turn about, and express themselves by means of a sign language, or by expressing sounds which only the initiated understand. Usually they are accompanied by one or more musicians who incite them to dance. The dynamic of the mask marks a shrill contrast to the static ancestor or power statues that the believers themselves go to seek out.[40]

Masks are mediums through which the supernatural take on a physical reality. They can have a single function, or they can be used for various tasks. Some African groups have many masks, the Dogon, the Dan and the Pende, for example. Others have very few.[41] Some masks are associated with circumcision rituals, as the Jola mask mentioned above. Others appear at times of death, when negotiation with the dead person’s spirit is needed. But, in almost all African traditions the masked person is male (Herreman, above, constantly refers to the masker as “he”). There is, however, one notable exception; the tradition of the Bundu masks that are worn by women of the Sande Society of Liberia and Sierra Leone.[42]

Many collectors of African art first became collectors because they saw, and bought, an African mask. Masks, wherever they come from, are magical objects. As such they are timeless and, in a sense, universal.

                                   

                                                                Pende mask, Zaire.

                                                                    7.

In the end it comes down to asking questions, and, most importantly, understanding the answers. Here is William Fagg again, this time talking about how he believed that African tribes could only understand their own sculptures and not those made and used by other tribes. He could just as well have been writing about the dialogues between westerners and Africans.

It is the unity of art and belief which makes understanding and acceptance of the forms of art easy for members of the tribe, but correspondingly difficult for non-members, since they do not share the belief. Tribal art then, is “functional” within the tribe, but not outside it. And since the concept of “art for art’s sake” is a modern invention of the European decadence, and is not present in tribal Africa, it follows that the sculpture of one tribe will be meaningless and unintelligible to people of another tribe, because it is art divorced from its content of belief.[43]

Here Fagg was talking about “understanding” the meaning of an artwork, and it was a lack of understanding between African artists and western viewers that brought about the following from Susan Vogel:

“Art” cannot be described from a Baule point of view at all, simply because their view does not include “art” in the Western sense of the word. As I questioned people about their objects, they told me things that at first seemed irrelevant to the research. Gradually I realized they were telling me what they felt I had to know to see their objects correctly. Eventually I was forced to recognize that their understandings and appreciations of these objects were the opposite of those I had learned from a Western museum culture; theirs focused on the spiritual presence associated with the object, and were only marginally concerned with the physical form of the object, while mine placed high value on the tangible, man-made object and involved the suspicion that the metaphysical dimension was not available – even vicariously.[44]

Some years ago the late Ian Auld, ceramicist and collector of all things tribal, told me of this comment, made by an African who had been looking at a private Western collection of African art:

You have no idea just how much power there is in this room!

When we view an object, any object, we bring together our conscious and unconscious experiences and let them combine to form an opinion.  And, of course, we (westerners) carry our colonial and neo-colonial baggage with us. There is no way that we can look at an African object through an African’s eyes, because we lack the experiences in the African’s mind; our imputations are different. For example, the Fon people of Benin use a word, alonuzo, to mean “art”. Their word actually means “something made by hand” similar in meaning to the word used for “art” by the Ewe of Togo, adanu, which means “accomplishment, skill, value”. Taken together, we may suggest that the Fon and the Ewe see art as “something made by the skilled and accomplished (human) hand that is of value”.[45] “Value”, does not mean “monetary value”, as it might in the West.

Sadly, most of those who write about African art are westerners and there are very few books on the subject written by Africans themselves.[46] The best western writers have done fieldwork in Africa and interviewed the people who make and use this art. Many use local translators for their work. But, things can be lost in translation. To quote a Baule proverb:

Living a long time in a village, one comes to know everything, but the foreigner can peer for all he’s worth, he sees nothing.[47]

I belong to an on-line African Arts group where one member repeated the idea that there was no word for “art” in any African language. As we can see from the above, I did not agree, and my reply prompted this response from Lee Rubenstein:

I agree with your refusal to accept the suggestion that there is no word  for "art" among African cultures.  Given the diversity of cultures and the preponderance of languages - reflective of multitudinous histories, migrations and societal transformations over the centuries - it is more likely true (or closer to true) that the understanding of culture-specific aesthetic principles and requirements is limited.  The fact that African "art" is rooted in complex social, religious, philosophical and cosmogonical ideational structures (as is the art arising on any          continent) does not preclude the possibility that aesthetic principles are indeed applied in formulating the stylistic expressions that emerge from particular artists and communities.  Otherwise, why would there be observable continuities that allow for attribution of particular works to particular traditions?  It seems to me only logical that the appearance and persistence of so many diverse sculptural traditions and artistic expressions distinct from the representations emerging elsewhere would suggest significant ideas and representations underlying these        styles.  Recognizing the presence - and understanding the nuances - of aesthetic perceptions and philosophical conceptions (or     hearing/listening to their elucidation when offered) is among the emerging opportunities presented by the growth of African scholarship    and the inclusion of African voices in the discussion of African material traditions; additional resources have been generated through the on-going immersion in and interaction with specific communities by Western and other non-indigenous scholars, African and non-African. Perhaps the most developed instance at this time is the field of study pertaining to Yoruba aesthetics which is continually expanded by both Yoruba and non-Yoruba scholars and the artists themselves. In this regard, I think it appropriate at this time to re-visit a message contributed in 2008 by group member, artist and scholar, Moyo Okediji, author of, for instance, African Renaissance: Old Forms, New Images in Yoruba Art:

The African artist is sophisticated. We hardly know this because we don't speak his language. If you were to listen to Lamidi Fakeye talk about his work in English, you probably would not be impressed. If he spoke to you in Yoruba, and he begins to invoke poetry, metaphors, theories and analogies, in a commanding play with words, you will begin to realize how sophisticated he is.[48]

In 1991 the Center for African Art in New York organised an exhibition, Africa Explores, which considered many aspects of 20^th century African art; not just the “classic” art of the type collected by Picasso and others, but also contemporary ceramics, installations and paintings produced by Africans at the end of the 20^th century.[49] It was an inspirational idea. Museums had, for too long, concentrated on the past and ignored much of what was going on in present-day Africa. But, the Nigerian artist and writer Olu Oguibe was having none of it. According to Oguibe, the show comprised:

The same old binary of the Self and the Other. The Self, which is America and the West, is again universalized and hegemonized, and endowed with the monopoly of cognition/sanction. That which it does not know is unknown. That which it does not present is not represented, and that which it does not speak for cannot speak.[50]

What had happened was that many “traditional” art objects had vanished into museums and private collections and new collectors were unable to obtain such items. Accordingly, many collectors began seeking out other objects for their collections, realising that they could no longer compete with the richer collectors. Pieces made in the 1940’s and ‘50’s were considered suitable objects to collect and these often sold for much lower prices than the slightly earlier items. Other collectors sought out early photographs, especially by African photographers, contemporary paintings; hairdresser’s advertising boards, or even modern Akan coffins![51]

                                                                   8.

The term tribal is used here with considerable reluctance. It denotes a kind of society (and art) that cannot be coherently specified.           James Clifford[52]

A problem that has plagued art historians for years is the western concept of the term tribe, which has often created great confusion. Tribes were often designated by colonial administrators who, wishing for an easy life and a simple division within their territories, would lump people with a catch-all name. The people themselves often saw themselves, or their neighbours, as something else altogether. William Fagg had this to say of the term tribe.

Thus far, we have for the sake of simplicity spoken of the tribe as though it were a static and clearly defined entity, a kind of fixed datum to which we could attach each style of African art. In fact, the case is far more complicated: the tribe is essentially a dynamic phenomenon, constantly changing under gradual or violent pressures, and often very difficult to pin down in terms of the categories of Western science.[53]

The Danish writer, art-historian and collector of African art ,Carl Kjersmeier, produced a series of four books between 1935 and 1938 under the title Centres de style de la sculpture negre africain [54]  In 1921- 22 Kjersmeier and his wife, Amalie, had driven some 6,000 kms through Senegal, Mali, Burkina Faso and Guinea, collecting artworks on their journey. They also toured European museums, examining as much African art as they could find. The result was that Kjersmeier was able to classify African art by geographical and tribal styles for the first time.

William Fagg, one of the many scholars following in the footsteps of Kjersmeier, believed that tribes could be recognised by their art styles. Fagg had visited Africa many times, and had developed a remarkable ability to identify and place carvings within specific tribal groups. His book Tribes and Forms in African Art (1965) lists and illustrates artworks from over one hundred tribes and is a model of its kind. However, this was not the whole story. For example, L. Malcolm published “A note on brass casting in the Central Cameroons” in 1932, in the journal, Man. According to Malcolm, so-called “Ibo” or “Ibibio” bells that were frequently found in Eastern Nigerian were actually cast in the Cameroons and then sold to their neighbours, the Cameroonians having no use for such bells themselves.[55]

In 1973, René Bravmann produced Open Frontiers: The Mobility of Art in Black Africa,[56] in which he suggested that the model of ‘one tribe, one style’ was a “dreadful oversimplification”. According to Professor Bravmann,

the movement of shrines, spirit forces, and individual religious specialists and believers has made the area of art and religion an extremely fluid one. These avenues of mobility and change destroy the ‘walls’ that have been built about African cultures and their arts and point to the very open frontiers, both geographic and conceptual, that exist between them.[57]

Christopher Roy included a short essay devoted to “Centers of Style” in the 1985 book, Art and Life in Africa. [58] Roy extended the idea of open frontiers by suggesting that there were many African centres where people, often from one family, would produce art works for different surrounding groups.

Such ‘Centers of Style’ have been described in the past, notably the ‘Ogowe River Style’ of Gabon, where Punu, Lumba, Ashira, and others use masks representing the spirits of deceased maidens in a very uniform style. Here, it appears, masks are carved by the Punu and traded to many other groups who use them in similar performances. Similarly, in the grasslands of Cameroon, a workshop in one small kingdom – Kom, for example – may provide masks and other carvings to neighboring kingdoms, resulting in a homogenous style best described as the ‘Cameroon Grasslands Style’. Other centers of style exist among the Lubas of southeastern Zaire, who produce sculpture for the Songye and other neighbouring groups, among the Ibo of south-eastern Nigeria, among the Akan of Ghana and Ivory Coast … and in many other areas.[59]

Roy then goes on to describe the Konaté family from the village of Ouri in central Burkina Faso, who produced masks for neighbouring tribes in the 1980's. They also made masks for sale to tourists visiting Ouagadougou.[60]                                       

                                                                                                           

                        Upper torso of Lobi figure, Burkina faso.

                                                       9.

At the turn of (the 20^th) century, it was self-evident that primitive objects were “idols” fit only to be burned by missionaries or to teach would-be colonialists about the territories they would enter; within twenty years it became equally clear that primitive statues were beautiful objects, suitable for collectors.       

Marianna Torgovnick[61]

The first African masks and statues brought to Europe were regarded with suspicion. Most would have been placed in ‘cabinets of curiosities’ by wealthy collectors. Public museums (including the British Museum) gradually evolved from these private collections, although many of the items on display were little understood by those who came to view them at first.[62] To begin with, collections could only be formed by those who had sufficient time and money to collect. But, according to Philipp Blom, when Europe experienced its first “explosion of collecting activity” in the 16^th century CE, society had changed enough to allow less wealthy collectors to participate. [63]

Two of the earliest collections of ethnographic material were formed by Sir John Lever (1729 - 1788) and Lieutenant General Augustus Henry Lane Fox Pitt Rivers (1827 - 1900), although Europeans have collected the odd African item or two ever since the Portuguese began visiting West Africa in the 15^th century. However, private collectors of African art only came to the fore in the 20^th century, and many of them collaborated with public museums and helped finance museum collections. Many collectors bequeathed their collections to highly respectable museums.[64] Peggy Guggenheim famously said, “I am not an art collector. I am a museum”, a statement that rang a sympathetic chord with my wife, Emma, who has often described our home as, “A cross between a library and a museum.”[65] But there were also differences in the way museums and collectors approached their collections.

There is a curious antithesis of objectivity between the professional art historian or museum curator on the one hand and the private collector on the other in the purchase of what may be virtually the same pieces. The professional regards taste as a vague, ambivalent characteristic; he tends nowadays to profess scientific detachment, he must shun prejudice. ‘He must’, as Herbert Read says, ‘arrange and categorise with Linnaean assiduity’ to fill his gaps, to be representative, ultimately to educate. The collector’s considerations are far more personal. Does the object appeal to him; does he think it beautiful; is it sufficiently different from what he already owns; will it ‘go’ with the rest of his belongings?

Frank Herrmann[66]

We can see from the photographs in Carl Einstein's Afrikanische Plastik (1915) that the body of work that collectors would soon yearn to own had already been established.[67] Museums, especially in Germany, were at the forefront in purchasing African art. But private collectors, dissatisfied with museum policies, were also beginning to stir. Sadly, over the years, some collectors began adding African antiquities to their collections. Many had been removed illegally from Africa and, in an effort to stem the flow of stolen antiquities, many museums now refuse to accept unprovenanced items.[68] Museums, especially in Britain, began to examine all items offered to them, not just antiquities. During the 1960’s and 1970’s most African countries established laws prohibiting the removal of ethnographic items (masks, figures etc), without specific permission. It followed that any item taken from Africa without permission after these dates could not be accepted by the museums. This means that some museums now no longer liaise with private collectors.

The last twenty years have seen an increasingly strident debate over what constitutes a legal and ethical market for art and antiquities. Throughout the art world, the focus has been on moral considerations, and challenges to long-held beliefs and practices have become ever more frequent. At the same time, the legal framework pertaining to the collection and exhibition of works of art has grown increasingly complex. Museums, private collectors, and dealers now function under a continually evolving network of civil and criminal laws, customs policies, and international treaties. Acquisition, exhibition, and ownership of art are fraught with risk and uncertainty for the most careful curator and collector.[69]

This was written in 2005 by an American academic, Kate Fitz Gibbon, in a collection of essays entitled, Who Owns the Past? Cultural Policy, Cultural Property and the Law. However, Emma C. Bunker, another contributor to the book, was aware that things were not necessarily so clear cut.

The art world needs to wake up. We have painted ourselves into an untenable corner in which two impassioned groups are embroiled in a bitter dispute over the acquisition and ownership of archaeological material. On one side are dealers, private collectors, and public collectors (museum curators), who ardently promote the private acquisition, ownership, and preservation of antiquities. On the other side are archaeologists, anthropologists, and government officials, who regard dealers and collectors as felons akin to drug traffickers and arms dealers.

Until recently, collectors were considered cultural heroes who rescued and preserved artefacts from ancient cultures and shared them with the scholars, academics, and connoisseurs of their day. This passion for the past was inspired by a search for knowledge about the diverse cultures of the world that blossomed during the Age of Enlightenment of the 18^th century. This antiquarian viewpoint was the impetus for the establishment of some of the great institutions of the world, such as the British Museum, where antiquities were cherished and admired as visual embodiments of the ancient civilizations that produced them. The ideas of the Enlightenment led to the formation of significant private collections … These collectors were not despoilers of the past but people of great intellectual curiosity who cherished the past long before the world was peopled by a multitude of scientifically trained archaeologists.

The last decades have marked the beginning of an Age of Transition between the antiquarian philosophy of the past and the anti-collecting philosophy of today. At the heart of the anti-collecting philosophy is the idea that Western collectors, dealers, and museums are directly responsible for the looting of archaeological sites. Usually, however, the looting process is initiated by local people and minor officials in the source countries, who seek out international connections because they are desperate for cash. By and large, archaeologists have failed to protest local involvement for fear of losing the excavation permissions given by source-country officials. Instead, the war of words is directed against collectors and dealers, a situation that could ultimately drive collectors and dealers underground.[70]

Shortly before the Royal Academy of Arts’ exhibition, Africa. The Art of a Continent, was due to open (in 1996) the British Museum announced that it would not loan its items unless certain objects, including antiquities loaned by private collectors, were removed from the exhibition.[71] The privately owned items were removed and the exhibition went ahead. The exhibition catalogue, already printed, includes the missing objects. In a statement, issued at the time by the Academy, we find the following somewhat ambiguous paragraph.

It might seem that the archaeological case against including works from Djenné, for instance, is unanswerable. It might also be argued that while the illicit trade in items of cultural property from archaeological sites in Africa and elsewhere must be eradicated, the cause of promoting awareness of both the damage that this trade is causing the patrimony of the states concerned and the importance of these works cannot be served by hiding them from an interested and possibly influential international audience .[72]

Clearly, the Academy found itself between two opposing positions. On the one hand it felt duty bound to condemn illegal looting, whilst, on the other hand, it had needed justification to exhibit such items in the first place. Perhaps the Royal Academy should have thought a little harder about some of the intended objects at an earlier stage. After all, two years earlier they had come under sustained attack from leading archaeologists for showing items from the George Ortiz collection of mostly unprovenanced antiquities.[73]

Peter Watson, in The Medici Conspiracy - The Illicit Journey of Looted Antiquities from Italy’s Tomb Raiders to the World’s Greatest Museums, mentions the work of Neil Brodie, a researcher then working for the Illicit Antiquities Research Centre at Cambridge University.

Brodie has also examined what he calls the “baleful effects” that the commercial market exerts on African Heritage. The plundering of     Africa’s past, he says, is “intimately related” to the demand of Western museums and collectors. He notes the author’s comments in a 1960 book, for example, that “African clay sculptures are very delicate and are rarely to be found in museums.” By 1984, all that had changed, probably brought about be an exhibition at the Zurich Kunshaus in 1970, which sparked “a collecting frenzy.” Bura statuettes from Niger were only discovered in 1983, in an official dig. But after a show toured France in the 1990’s, wide-scale looting of Niger followed. Many were on sale (in America) in 2000, together with (Nigerian) Nok terra-cottas.[74]

Watson actually named the American gallery that was selling the Bura and Nok pieces, no doubt in an attempt to shame the gallery. What probably happened was that collectors, now knowing where to find such pieces, contacted the gallery in the hope of obtaining some for their collections!

Watson continues:

Many of these latter came with a thermoluminescence date from the Bortolot Daybreak Corporation. Brodie said, “Bortolot’s Web site makes for interesting reading. It claims that before 1993 most Nok terra-cottas appearing on the market were fake, and that genuine objects were    usually poorly preserved fragments. Then, in 1993, a consortium of European dealers organized systematic looting of the Nok area,       whereupon there was a flood of genuine heads and the fakes all but disappeared.” The threat posed to the archaeology of West Africa     became so serious that the International Council of Museums felt constrained to publish in May, 2000 a “Red List” of African antiquities      under imminent threat of looting or theft. Among the eight most threatened types of antiquities were Nok terra-cottas and Bura          statuettes. In a mere seventeen years, the latter had gone from being first discovered to an “endangered species”.[75]

Did “a consortium of European dealers” really “organized systematic looting of the Nok area”? If so, they were breaking the law and deserve no support. Nor, sadly, would they be the first dealers to act in such a manner. Jacques Kerchache (1942-2001), a well-known French dealer, once spent time in a Gabonese jail for illegally removing Mahongwe m’bweti reliquary figures from Gabon.[76] Such activity is often justified by dealers and collectors who argue that they are “rescuing” objects that would otherwise be thrown aside and destroyed, in the case of wooden objects, by termites. But there is, of course, a human side to all this. In the 1960’s a number of masks were stolen from villages in what was then Upper Volta (today Burkina Faso).

While the participants waited in their air-conditioned cross-country vehicles their henchmen stole the masks from the huts in which they had been placed. A high price was paid for this systematic campaign in the land of the Bobo: there were countless suicides of villagers who felt they could not live on after the loss of their masks.”[77]

I agree that there is no moral justification for condoning the illegal removal of antiquities from countries simply because rich collectors elsewhere are prepared to pay high prices for them. I am a supporter of museums and do believe that these institutions have a responsibility to display their holdings as best they can. As a boy, I would regularly cycle a few miles to visit a local museum that had a superb collection of Roman artefacts. This museum stimulated an enthusiasm for history that remains with me. So, I am confused when some museums are attacked by the very people who should be supporting them. Museums have, of course, always had their critics. Here is the anthropologist, and one-time surrealist, Michel Leiris:

Nothing seems to me so like a whorehouse as a museum.[78]

Nor was he alone:

An object in a museum’s case’, he wrote, ‘must suffer the de-natured existence of an animal in the zoo. In any museum the object dies - of suffocation and the public gaze - whereas private ownership confers on the owner the right and the need to touch. As a young child will reach out to handle the thing it names, so the passionate collector, his eye in harmony with his hand, restores to the object the life-giving touch of its maker. The collector’s enemy is the museum curator. Ideally, museums should be looted every fifty years and their collections returned to circulation …

Bruce Chatwin[79]

I am sure that this sentiment would have found approval from André Breton and Tristan Tzara who, like other surrealists, collected African and other forms of tribal art. For some reason or other many surrealists preferred to collect Oceanic art.[80]

The primitive is immersed in an entirely magic world, a place that echoes, where a continuous union between man and things exists, where barriers of individual consciousness shift, it has always embodied man’s forgotten powers to the surrealists, and they are impatient to recapture it.

Julien Gracq[81]

Over the years, museum curators and their exhibitions have continued to be criticized:

Today, museums and galleries of what we have agreed to call primitive art resemble jewelry (sic) stores. Objects are displayed, singly or in groups, in glass cases. Dramatic spotlights isolate the objects from each other and from us. We peer at them, sometimes walk around them, but with the glass marking a distance between us and them. Walls are a modernist white or a uniform, mysterious darkness – either way the walls ground the objects against a solid, neutral background, conductive to the contemplation of form. The displays aestheticize (sic) the objects and present them as the valuable jewel-like things they have become. Floating in cases, spotlighted against light or dark, the objects cast a mysterious spell, invoke images of “unknown”, “mysterious” places. These stark spaces work in two ways: they create a nude formalism which is somehow sensuous and erotic, even as it is primarily hermetic and cold.

Marianna Torgovnick [82]

But, the biggest attack specifically on ethnographic museums came in 2007, when Sally Price produced Paris Primitive. Jacques Chirac’s Museum on the Quai Branly.[83] The Musée du Quai Branly was the dream child of Jacques Chirac, President of France, and his friend Jacques Kerchache, an art collector and sometime art dealer (mentioned above). Kerchache and others had been arguing for years that ethnic art should be shown alongside the Mona Lisa in the Louvre.[84] It was an old argument, but one that appealed to Chirac, who did arrange for important tribal pieces to be brought to the Louvre, much to the shock of many art historians. But, the two Jacques had only just started. In fact they wanted to create a world class museum to house some of the greatest known tribal pieces. The result was the Musée du Quai Branly, a magnificent museum that opened in 2006.

Sally Price, a professor of American Studies and Anthropology, had previously attacked collectors and museums in her 1989 book Primitive Art in Civilized Places; many of the same arguments can also be found in her book, Paris Primitive.[85] She seems to be especially annoyed that the Paris Museum was created at the behest of two non-academics (even though one of them did happen to be the President of France!) and is especially scathing of Kerchache, whom she calls a ‘connoisseur’.  Connoisseurs are not to Professor Price’s liking, as she had previously devoted a whole chapter to them - “The Mystique of Connoisseurship” - in Primitive Art in Civilized Places.[86] I wonder if she has read Herbert H. Cole’s essay “A Crisis in Connoisseurship?” (African Arts XXVI, 1. 2003) where Professor Cole actually applauds connoisseurship and laments that there is not enough of it. Interestingly, Cole's main reason for complaining about the lack of connoisseurship was that there were no longer enough people who could recognise the fake African art that was flooding the market. Cole, by the way, is also the co-author of two standard works on Africa art, The Arts of Ghana (1977) and Igbo Arts. Community and Cosmos (1984) and has done much to further our understanding of African art.[87]

Another example of an academic’s dislike for collectors is a comment made by the Belgian tribal art dealer, Jo de Buck, about Father Joseph Cornet (an academic). “As our friendship developed, he told me he didn’t like to consult as an art expert because his interest lay in teaching and conveying information rather than assessing objects for their market value. It was funny to see how proud he was that he didn’t possess a single piece of African art, except for a small, fake Lega maskette that had been a gift from somebody special.”[88]  I suspect that Cornet was also aware that some academics were, in his eyes, neglecting their academic duty.

The increasing tendency for collectors and dealers to sponsor academics to write about their collections is in one fundamental sense self-defeating, since the building of the collections is helping to destroy all possibility of explanation of the pieces.

Keith Nicklin & Jill Salmons[89] 

This, I suspect, is one of the main reasons why many academics dislike private collectors. Recently, two American academics were prepared to openly list collectors and others with criminals:

Smugglers, dealers, collectors, and those of similar ilk.

Nancy L. Kelker & Karen O. Bruhns[90]

Luckily, all is not lost for museums, dealers and collectors. James Cuno, president and director of the Art Institute of Chicago, has issued a polemic denouncing the politicization of culture, in which he pleads for a return to a system where museums can again, acquire undocumented objects.[91] Perhaps there will be a change after all, one in favour of museums, dealers and collectors.

Today, the odds are stacked against collectors of many kinds of art. National borders are rapidly closing. The United Nations is sponsoring ever more restrictive international treaties that discourage the collecting of any art except that of one’s own country … the value that collectors and art markets create has been in most cases the only reason that much of the world’s art has survived … But possibly the tide will turn, and … art collecting and its adjuncts, connoisseurship and the search for quality, may once again see their reputations restored.

Eugene Thaw [92]

                           Makonde staff finial.                 

                                                                    10.

There is another insidious problem that collectors and museums must face, namely, that many of the objects offered for sale on the African art market have been stolen from Africa. I don't mean stolen in a philosophical sense. Many items are physically removed from Africa by thieves, without permission of their owners or of the government. Several instances are now well-known, including what some people see as the whole scale theft of items from the city of Benin in 1897. A number of publications go into the background of this event.[93] Suffice it to say that hundreds, if not thousands, of items were removed from the Oba’s palace. Many pieces are now in some of the world’s great museums, others in private ownership. Over the years these pieces periodically surface in auction houses, usually without controversy. However, in December, 2010, Sotheby’s in London announced that it was withdrawing a Benin ivory head of a queen from a forthcoming sale. The carving was an item removed from Benin in 1897 and valued between £3.5 - £5 million pounds. Unlike previous sales, pressure had been put on Sotheby’s, claiming that the head was stolen property. Over a hundred years may have passed since the item was removed from Benin, but the question remains. Can stolen property be sold today, no matter when it was stolen?

Then again, look what happened to a group of some 600 wooden Oron ancestor figures, called Ekpu, gathered by Kenneth Crosthwaite Murray so that they could be placed in a purpose built museum in Oron. In 1944 Murray, who worked for the Nigerian Federal Department of Antiquities (later the National Commission for Museums and Monuments), surveyed the Oron region in order to ascertain how many Ekpu statues remained and where they were. Murray had hoped that a museum would quickly be built to house these 600 figures, but things did not turn out that way. Murray was criticised by his bosses for collecting so many figures when there was nowhere to store them. He then tried in vain to have the museum built. But in 1958, when the figures were being casually stored in temporary accommodation, it was discovered that about 30 figures were missing, presumed stolen. Enquiries showed that an African dealer, later imprisoned, had arranged for the figures to be stolen and that they had then been smuggled out of Nigeria and sold to European and American dealers. Interpol was alerted and a few figures returned. Others found their way into private collections.  In 1968, William Fagg wrote about one of them in a catalogue of the Katherine White Reswick Collection.

This is one of a number of examples in American and European collections which are known to have been removed from the Oron Museum ten years ago. Ethically, if not legally, therefore, it is a kind of suspense account and at a propitious time it is hoped to close it in a just and honourable manner which will at the same time do nothing to diminish the honour in which the long dead Oron carvers are held in the world outside Nigeria.[94]

When Fagg wrote the above, the Nigerian Civil War (also known as the Biafran War) was raging and nothing could be returned to Oron. But the war ended in 1970 and the Katherine White Reswick figure, now “owned” by the Seattle Art Museum, Washington (Cat No. 81.17.515), is still, so far as I know, in America.  Incidentally, the Oron Museum was looted on several occasions during the Civil War, some Ekpu figures even being used for firewood by the looters.  Just over 100 figures remain in the Museum.[95] Recently, another Oron figure was presented to the Art Gallery of Ontario[96], and a similar piece can is at the Dallas Museum of Art.[97] Were these figures stolen from the Oron Museum?  I don't know, but I would love to know where they came from. Surprisingly (perhaps, not surprisingly), neither institute mention the sources of the figures in their publications.[98]

Another well documented theft was that of the Cameroonian Royal beaded throne, the Afo Kom.[99]  The throne, backed by a nearly life-size figure of a king, was removed from a storage hut near the Kom royal palace in 1966. It was later smuggled out of the country and not heard of again until seven years later when it surfaced as part of an exhibition, Royal Art of Cameroon, at Dartmouth College in New Hampshire.[100] The throne had been lent to the exhibition by its then owner, New York dealer Aaron Furman, who was reputedly offering it for sale at $60,000. Furman insisted that he got the throne from a legitimate intermediary who was acting on behalf of the Kom king. However, the Cameroonian government intervened and officially requested that the throne be returned to its home. The throne was returned to Cameroon and Mr Furman was left wiser, but poorer. Caveat emptor, as they say.

When the Louvre opened its doors to tribal art, the Nigerian Embassy in Paris was quick to point out that two Nok terracotta sculptures, some 2,000 years old, had been illegally removed from Nigeria.[101] The works, apparently, were purchased from a Belgium dealer for $360,000. This is what the Embassy had to say:

Some artworks from Nigeria, including Nok sculpture, are now on exhibition at the Louvre Museum. The artworks of Nok cultural origin are among artworks classified by the International Council of Museums and cannot be bought, exported or transferred by or to individuals or institutions. The sale, export, or transfer of these artworks is against the laws and regulations of 1953, 1957 and 1974 of the Federal Republic of Nigeria. The Embassy of the Federal Republic of Nigeria avails itself of this occasion to warn individuals or groups against the purchase, sale or export of these Nigerian artworks.[102]   

In fact, the story of these Nok sculptures is more complicated than that statement suggests.  Around 1998 President Chirac of France contacted his  counterpart in Nigeria, then President General Abdulsalami Abubakar, asking permission to buy “three fantastic Nok pieces illegally exported to Brussels by a private dealer”.[103] The request was passed to the Nigerian Ministry of Culture which, in turn, sought advice from its National Commission for Museums and Monuments. The Commission advised that the sculptures had been, “illegally exported from Nigeria and therefore remained the legal cultural property of Nigeria”. If the deal was approved then it would “confer legality on the deal and encourage further looting”.  The Commission then suggested that Interpol should be informed. A year later, when President General Abdulsalami Abubakar had been overthrown and civilian rule had been re-established, President Chirac contacted the new Nigerian President, Chief Olusegun Obasanjo, who granted permission to purchase the sculptures, although the National Commission for Museums and Monuments apparently did not. Clearly, the Nigerian Embassy in Paris had not been informed of what was going on behind the scenes. Technically, President Chirac was acting legally. But there is clearly something wrong here and I am on the side of the National Commission for Museums and Monuments in this case.

In May, 2009, a group of academics led by Eric Huysecom, Professor of archaeology at Geneva and Bamako universities, signed a letter in the French paper Le Temps condemning an exhibition at the Barbier-Mueller Museum in Geneva. The exhibition was “African Terra Cotta: a Millenary Heritage”. The letter was titled “Le pillage de l’histoire africaine” (The pillaging of African history) and suggested that some of the objects shown in the exhibition had been illegally removed from Mali. This is not the only time that the Barbier-Mueller Museum has been accused of obtaining stolen art works.  On May 10^th, 2010, ICOM (The International Council of Museums) issued a press statement to say that a Makonde mask that had been stolen from the National Museum of Tanzania in Dar Es Salaam in 1984 was being returned to Tanzania by the Barbier-Mueller Museum, which purchased the mask in 1985 from a Paris dealer.[104]

The Barbier-Mueller Museum is a private institution run by Jean-Paul Barbier and exists because M. Barbier’s father-in-law, Josef Mueller (1887 – 1977), formed a large collection of art, including tribal art, that became the nucleus for the museum following Mueller’s death. Mueller, a Swiss national, had lived in Paris and collected paintings by Cezanne, Picasso, Leger and many other contemporary painters. He had also spent Saturday mornings visiting  Paris flea markets in search of tribal art. Mueller amassed a large, superb collection of art.  Many pieces were sold in 1978 by Christies, but the really fine pieces were retained and the Barbier-Mueller Museum was born.[105]

Jean-Paul Barbier had previously come in for criticism from Professor Sally Price (mentioned above). Although Jean-Paul Barbier and his museum staff have produced many superb exhibitions and books on tribal art, and have expanded our knowledge on many previously little-known tribal groups, his museum is a private museum run by a “connoisseur”, and this earned M. Barbier the wrath of Professor Price.[106]

Of course, thefts are still happening. In November, 2009, the Pan-African News Wire reported that two ancient stone monoliths, stolen from the Cross River district of Nigeria by Cameroonian poachers, had been found by French customs officers in Toulouse. The importer, from Cameroon, was arrested and the monoliths returned to Nigeria.[107]
Examples such as these above are, sadly, commonplace.[108] Let me end, though, with a story which, as with the Afo Kom, ended on a positive note.
Around 1908-09 the explorer, Emile Torday, photographed a Kuba chief, Nyimi Kot a Pe (ruled 1902 – 16), standing beside some royal statues. The statue on the left of the group was called Kashaashwiimi by the Kuba people and, like the others, was a power figure. Over the years all of these figures were stolen from the Kuba.  Kashaashwiimi resurfaced in an American auction catalogue. It was spotted by a Kuba expert, Scott Rodolitz, who agreed to bid for the piece on behalf of some Kuba friends in Africa.  He was successful, and Kashaashwiimi was returned to the Kuba people.[109]

       11.

We have seen how African art has been considered separate from Western art. Indeed, all non-western art has been seen as being separate and discrete from western art. This usually implied that such art was inferior. Early books devoted to the history of art would, inevitably, begin with a chapter on “primitive” art, which would lump stone-age cave paintings alongside examples of tribal art, before progressing to the history of Western art. Things changed in the late 1930’s when Ludwig Goldscheider took a radical stand and, in one book, displayed Western and non-Western art as equals. This was Art Without Epoch (George Allen & Unwin, London. 1937 [?]), perhaps the first book to escape the straightjacket of previous concepts. Goldscheider’s work influenced a number of people, including the author Bruce Chatwin, and a number of subsequent books, such as Phaidon’s epic 30,000 years of art (Phaidon, London. 2007. No editor shown.) and Julian Bell’s Mirror of the World. A New History of Art (Thames & Hudson, London. 2007). In these  books, the history of art is shown travelling along conventional time lines, but Western art is only shown as a part of the chronological story. Thus, we are given details of what was happening simultaneously worldwide.

It had often been assumed that African nations could not have had the necessary skills to make, say, the Benin bronzes, or the Ife bronze heads and that they must have received outside help. We now believe that this was not the case and that the African craftspeople were, indeed, capable of working out, and overcoming, their production problems. Julian Bell, though, does make one pertinent observation, in this case with reference to a superb Nok terracotta figure that is illustrated in his book. [110] Calling the Nok figure a “king”, Bell says:

It may not be a coincidence that the crook in the king’s armband is the badge of office a pharaoh would have worn.[111]

Is this figure evidence of a link between ancient northern Nigeria and ancient Egypt, or is it a case of independent synchronicity? Actually, it may not be wild speculation. In 1996 the Indianapolis Museum of Art mounted an exhibition that considered what evidence there was to suggest links between ancient Egypt and the rest of Africa.[112]

In 2008 another museum, the Foundation Beyeler in Richen/Basel, Switzerland, held another groundbreaking exhibition, entitled “Visual Encounters”.  It combined outstanding works by artists such as Picasso, Braque, Monet and Rothko with some 200 tribal pieces. “Are we ready to accept ‘equality’ between an nkisi from Congo and a proto-cubistic canvas by Braque or Picasso?” they asked. The exhibition provoked much talk of “post-modernism” (and many others “isms”) and came in for considerable criticism. But it was a bold attempt to redefine what  constitutes art. To my eyes, the exhibition was truly brilliant and I will never forget the sight of two stunning Papua New Guinea crocodile carvings lying alongside one of Claude Monet’s triptychs, Le Bassin aux Nymphéas. Beautiful.[113]

                                                                   12.

Mundus vult decipi, ergo decipiatur (The world wants to be deceived; so shall it be!)

Attributed to Petronius [114]

Documents or objects are forged for all sorts of reasons, but by far the main motive is gain. The more flourishing a market in art, the more fakes.

Jan Vansina[115]

Herbert Cole’s The Arts of Ghana (1977) is a catalogue that accompanied an exhibition of the same name. Shortly before the exhibition opened, Cole and his co-organiser, Doran H. Ross, became aware that some of the exhibits were not as old as they appeared. Nevertheless, they were beautifully carved objects and were kept in the exhibition because of their beauty. Shortly afterwards, Doran Ross, discovered that some of these objects had been produced in two Kumase workshops, one run by Francis Osei Akwasi (born 1946). Akwasi was related to a master carver Osei Bonsu (1901 – 1977), who had not carved “antiquities”, but who had nevertheless inspired him to become a carver.  Around 1971 or 1972 Akwasi had been approached by a Hausa trader to produce a “Baule mask” from a photograph. He had also been asked to deliberately age the mask’s surface so that it would look like an old piece. He was then asked by the same Hausa trader to carve some “old Fante dolls” and that was the start of Akwasi’s career as a carver of “antiquities”. Doran Ross became friends with Akwasi and some other Kumasi carvers and, having co-written a paper on them, felt obliged to say that the paper could “potentially affect the livelihood of a number of people”.[116]  Ross also added:

The Kumase carvers create, using traditional and not-so-traditional methods, objects of exceptional technical and aesthetic quality. Their goal is simple – to make money. As they state so accurately, “things that look old sell for more”. They are not trying to create exotic iconographic combinations nor do they claim any specific age or provenance for their carvings. Their immediate clients, the traders of Kumase, know that the objects are not old, although these dealers will be the first to sell them as antiquities. The Kumase carvers have counterparts in most art-producing areas of sub-Saharan Africa. Because of the money involved, this profession attracts many of the most talented carvers, drawing them away from traditional patrons to urban centers where their arts can be more easily marketed.

The Kumase carvers not only shared their methods with us, but they also became our friends. We do not publish this article as an attempt to spoil their business. On the contrary, we celebrate their talents and have confidence that their methods will continue to improve at a pace that keeps them several steps ahead of most scholars and collectors, and probably ahead of us as well. The ultimate irony in the problem of fakes in the art market is that fakes will continue to improve as methods of detecting them improve.[117]

In 1991, Wednesday 20^th November to be precise, The Kuhn collection of African art was sold by Sotheby’s auction house in New York. The collection of 140 items, formed by Dr Robert and Helen Kuhn of Los Angeles, had an estimated value  between 2.8 and 3.9 million dollars. The glossy, hard-back, catalogue featured one specific item on both the front and back of the dust jacket. This was “A Highly Important Inland Niger Delta Zoomorphic Figure”, a terracotta figure of a ram that measured 31 inches in length and stood just over 31 inches in height. An impressive object, according to thermoluminescence testing made between 570 and 1000 years ago, it sold for a staggering $250,000.

Seven years later, journalist Michel Brent, who had spent many years investigating the trade in stolen antiquities around the world, met a Malian potter named Amadou in Bamako. According to Amadou, part of the sculpture, the head and front legs, had been found in the village of Dary, on the banks of the Niger River, in 1986.  Amadou had attached the rest of the body to the ram, so that it could be sold. He also added that other pieces of his handiwork had ended up in the collections of the Belgium count Baudouin de Grunne and in the Barbier Muller Museum in Geneva.[118] According to Michel Brent, “Since the 1980s, nearly 80 percent of the allegedly terra cottas that have left Mali have been counterfeit. Prized by collectors, Malian terra cottas have been looted from hundreds of archaeological sites on the middle Niger River. As these pieces have become increasingly scarce, Malian antiquities dealers have sought faked pieces from local potters. The resulting trade has seriously corrupted the art historical record. In most cases it is now simply impossible to tell if terra cottas published in scholarly works on West African art are genuine.”[119]

Fakery in art must surely be as old as the hills. It is certainly not a new phenomenon, but it is a troubling one.  I think it fair to say that there were few African fakes around when Picasso and Matisse started their collections, although Jan Vansina points out that in 1900 a genuine Fang knife with a false cuneiform inscription appeared on the market and that fake Benin objects were being sold within three years of the looting of Benin City in 1897.[120]  

One curious, and unresolved, case of fakery was outlined in the exhibition Kingdom of Ife. Sculptures from West Africa, which ran in London’s British Museum in early 2010.[121] In 1910 the anthropologist Leo Frobenius, then visiting Nigeria, discovered a life-size metal head that had been dug up in the late 19^th century in the Olokun Grove in the town of Ife.  Frobenius sought permission to remove the head to Europe, but was refused permission and the head was returned to the family responsible for the Olokun cult, until the Ooni (Ruler) of Ife had it brought to the Ife Palace for safekeeping in 1934. Some ten years later the head was sent to the British Museum for dating, where it was discovered to be a modern brass sand casting. It would appear that, sometime between 1910 and the early 1940’s, a copy had been made of the head that Frobenius had seen and that this copy had replaced the original. Why this was done remains a mystery. Had the original been sold or stolen and a copy made to replace the original? Or had a copy been made so that, if stolen, the original would still be available at the shrine?  We don't know what happened, nor do we know the whereabouts of the missing original.[122]

Today, the market is flooded with fakes. Indeed, in 1987 John F. Povey, then editor of the journal African Arts, seemed to imply that one should be suspicious of just about any piece of so-called tribal art.

My own valuation is that up to $20 you can’t go wrong. Above that amount you are taking a lot of chances.[123]

Povey was, of course, right to include monetary cost in the above. Fakes are not just made to deceive; they are made primarily to take money away from the unwary.[124] It used to be said that if a collector bought only from established and reputable dealers then there was less likelihood of buying a fake. And this can still be true today, although even the best dealers can  be fooled. One collector expressed his feelings thus:

And from my untrained eye, it would seem that if an "upper end" dealer has an item it is always "the real thing" but if you have it, it is always a fake.[125] 

To me, a fake is simply something that has been made to deceive, or that is sold as something else. Or else, to quote Jan Vansina, they are “forgeries in the sense that they do not correspond to the indications of origin attributed to them”.[126] Of course post-modernists will not be satisfied with these simple definitions and readers wishing to explore the subject of Africa art fakes should read Christopher B. Steiner’s book African Art in Transit (1994), which takes a look at the art scene in one West African state.[127] Steiner gives several definitions of African art, from many sources, but he also includes the following telling passage:

Most of the (African) traders divide the objects they sell into two broad categories: old (ancient) and copy (copie). If asked to analyze the terms further, most traders with whom I spoke said that all the objects in the market should in fact be referred to as copies. A more accurate way of classifying the types of art objects they sell is to draw a distinction between an older copy and a more recent one. Dramane Kabba (a trader) explained:

“At the beginning, there was only one of everything that you now see in the market place. When the Europeans came they took these things with them and put them in the museums and in the books. After that time, everything became a copy (of what was in the books). A copy can be a hundred years old or it can be only a few years old, but everything is a copy of those first objects which are now in the museums and in the books.”[128]

Actually, I quite like the term “copy”. It does away with all the confusion that surrounds fakes and fakery. It is, I suppose, a question of degree, with some “copies” being older (and, thus, more genuine?) than others. However, I also find Dramane Kabba’s view to be rather sad. How, I wonder, can people find any pride in themselves, or their history, when it is all in foreign countries? Perhaps we really do need to re-evaluate our holding onto the Benin bronzes that adorn the walls of the British Museum. And if the Benin bronzes, what about all those looted items from Nok and all those other various Malian sites?[129] I note that in a recent newspaper article Mwai Kibaki, President of Kenya, is asking for the return of thousands of Kenyan artifacts in museums and private collections around the world.[130]

Of course, one way to avoid fakes is to only seek out objects that carry known provenances. Though here also we have to be aware that past histories can also be faked! Nevertheless:

On the finger of a throned queen

The basest jewel will be well esteem’d

William Shakespeare[131]

Or again:

The desire of possessing a fine picture is doubtless much increased by such picture having a pedigree - that is, that it is known to have been in the possession of some illustrious family, or celebrated individual.

Thomas Winstanley [132]

The psychoanalyst, Werner Muensterberger, has a slightly different take:

Buying a painting that was once owned by a well-known person means, in a way, standing in their shoes, walking in their footsteps, possessing a small part of their myth. The idea is that the value of the objects they buy will rub off on them. The objective is to convince themselves that they are ‘someone’ or alternatively they cultivate a secret garden which may bring to light a different self.”[133]

I was  told the following story by a well-known London dealer. The dealer knew that a famous collector was coming to examine his stock. Knowing that the collector liked a certain type of figure, the dealer had selected a Lobi figure which, he felt, would be to the collectors liking.  But the figure had no known provenance and  the collector dismissed it with the comment that it was not “important” enough for his collection. A few months later another dealer asked if he could borrow the Lobi figure as he had a potential customer for it.  The customer was, of course, the same collector and the second dealer did manage to sell the figure to the collector. Some weeks later a friend of the first dealer visited the collector and was told by the collector that he had bought the figure, “because it came from a great French collection”![134]

At one time it was possible to date an African sculpture by its display stand; that is if the stand had been made by the Japanese carver Inagaki, who arrived in Paris shortly after the end of the First World War. Inagaki was a superb and unequalled craftsman, whose stands were used by many important collectors during the 1920’s and ‘30’s. Thus it followed that any piece on an Inagaki stand must predate the stand. Sadly, Inagaki stands are now being faked along with the African pieces.[135]

Another problem is that many dealers, and the major auction houses, simply refuse to say where their pieces come from.  The dealers may simply not want to reveal their sources, in order to protect their own living. A collector who knows where pieces are coming from can bypass the dealer and go directly to the source, avoiding the dealer’s percentage. Auction houses, on the other hand, have frequently claimed “customer confidentiality”, a term that has been used to cover up all kinds of irregularities.[136]

                       

                                    Songe power figure, Zaire.

                                                     13.

It seems to me that when we talk about the distinction between that which is genuine and that which is considered to be “fake”, we are often supposing that, originally, all African art was pure and untainted by outside influence. It is as though African were living in some form of idyllic arcadia. But, of course, this is untrue. There has always been interplay between groups of people. To quote Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Cultural purity is an oxymoron”.[137]

Any form of contact between two or more groups must, sooner or later, bring about change in one form or another. Here is what Enid Schildkrout and Curtis A. Keim have to say about the initial contact between Africans and Europeans.

From the earliest contacts, Westerners deliberately or inadvertently influenced certain spheres of African craft and artefact production. Missionaries’ attitudes towards African material culture were by no means monolithic, but many of them nevertheless had some effect on African production processes, at least among people living close to mission stations. Protestants usually discouraged all art as idolatry, though this did not always stop them from collecting, while Catholics accepted the idea of iconic representation but asked for a shift to representations of Christian themes and images…in some places furniture and utilitarian objects were obviously affected more than medicines and ritual artefacts; in other places sculpture began to be dissociated from, or inserted into, particular ritual contexts.[138]

And it was not only the missionaries who affected the production of African art processes.  It has been noted by sociologists that the presence of even the most impartial observer alters the situation being observed. So too, the presence of Westerners in Africa altered the production of African artefacts. The example given below applied to what was then the Congo, but similar events were no doubt taking place elsewhere in sub-Saharan Africa.

The way in which objects were exchanged between Africans and Europeans itself affected the production of art. The early traders used Western trade goods as currency - items like cloth, beards, or wire. But Europeans also bought up African currencies such as cloth and iron bars and used these in their transactions for artefacts, at least until Congo currency was introduced in 1910. African objects soon incorporated imported materials, including currency (glass beads, for example), deliberately-introduced substances (like bakelite, introduced in 1908 and later sold as fake amber), scrap (such as tin from cans), other metals, and some forms of cloth. In many cases, these new materials did not change the meaning or use of the objects for Africans even though it sometimes enhanced their value. However, as Western notions of authenticity developed, collectors often required the rejection of imported materials. This led to the paradoxical situation in which objects made for local use in Africa often incorporated acrylic paint, plastic, and imported cloth, while a lively ,market emerged in faked authentic objects using only “natural” materials - mostly wood, raffia, hide, copper, and feathers – that met Western consumer expectations.[139]

Not only did Western technology bring about change in African art, but the collectors were themselves also responsible for changes that they wanted to avoid.

From the point of view of the collectors, emerging ideas of authenticity prevented the market from being flooded with objects that were created expressly to meet the new demand. In the Kasai (region of the Congo), for example, (Leo) Frobenius, (Emile) Torday, (Samuel P.) Verner, and (Frederick) Starr were all busily collecting “fetish” figures and masks around 1905 (and) these men were exchanging information about sources and values in their competition for the best objects and the best prices. Not surprisingly, this led to the production of objects specifically to meet the needs of this burgeoning market. While emerging definitions of authenticity seemed to provide a way for the Europeans to distinguish old from new and good from bad, Africans quickly understood Western notions of value, aesthetics, and authenticity and began to shape the supply accordingly. Thus the very criteria that precluded collecting objects made for foreigners assured that this process would take place.[140]

                                                          14.

Nearly one in every three people in North America collects something, and this figure is unlikely to be very different for most of northern and large parts of southern Europe. Some 30 per cent of this population are therefore willing to define themselves as collectors, and to see collecting as a significant element in their lives.

Susan M. Pearse [141]

            Sigrid and Floros Katsouros at home with some of their Lobi collection.

The typical collector is a male, usually unbalanced in some direction, who, if he were normal, would not need to collect odd bits and pieces. I believe that any collector of anything suffers from some kind of mental or psychological aberration, and that his collecting is a therapy which may run into a great deal of expense but which protects his sanity and allows him to operate in other fields fairly normally.

James A. Michener [142]

Why, though, do we collect? “Why, indeed, does one collect – and, in particular, why does one collect so much?” asks Sir David Attenborough.  “Perhaps”, he continued, “collecting is a basic human instinct. Maybe it is an inheritance from the time, twenty or thirty million years ago, when man spent their lives hunting and brought back their trophies to the cave. Maybe it is a kind of home-making, nest-building urge. I am writing these words within a week of returning from the Antarctic where I watched penguins laboriously picking up pebbles and carefully arranging them around their feet in order to stake out their territory in the colony and build a platform on which to lay their eggs. I saw them squabbling over a particular pebble – to my eye, indistinguishable from a hundred others - and even stealing specially desirable ones from their neighbours. That spectacle, I must confess, evoked uneasy echoes in my mind.”[143] Nor was Attenborough the first to ask uneasy questions about his passion for collecting.

Certain aspects of human conduct seem at first glance not at all exceptional or mysterious. Yet on closer inspection we see that they can be quite perplexing and not easily understood. One such trait is collecting.

Werner Muensterberger [144]

And yet the Belgium artist Willie Jean Mestach, himself a great collector of African Art, felt able to say: “Tell me what you collect, tell me how you collect, and I will tell you who you are.”[145] But, of course, in this day and age there are many who would not agree with Willie’s simplistic approach to collectors.

The objects (collectors) cherish are inanimate substitutes for reassurance and care. Perhaps even more telling, these objects prove, both to the collector and to the world, that he or she is special and worthy of them.                    

Werner Muensterberger [146]

According to the German literary critic, essayist and philosopher, Walter Benjamin,

 The collector is the true resident of the interior.[147]

Collecting was a way of coming to terms - one’s own terms, that is - with an outside world that was in chaos. Benjamin again:

Thus the life of a collector manifests a dialectical tension between the poles of disorder and order.[148]

American historian Marybeth Hamilton offers a slightly different dialectic. Collecting can certainly bring its rewards:

The pleasure of collecting lies in creating a personal system, an alternative universe of aesthetics and taste.[149]

But there is also a dark side:

Lose control of that universe and the collector’s pride and bravado becomes envy and frustration.[150]

Werner Muensterberger, quoted above, is a New York psychoanalyst and collector of African art who agrees with other cultural theorists that collectors are dominated by neurotic, fetishistic, compulsive or obsessional desires and, like Walter Benjamin and Marybeth Hamilton, he sees a dialectic within the collector’s psyche:

Collecting is not simply a response to certain manifest stimuli, as a rare coin collector of my acquaintance claimed because he remembered when he first found a penny and shortly thereafter began hording old coins, even before he entered school. There are many similar examples, of course. However, further exploration showed with amazing frequency that the inclination itself was an undeniable reaction to earlier states of frustration. This appears, at least temporarily, to dominate a person’s behaviour and, in a more definable way, has a curious double function because acquisition acts as both a palliative and a stimulant. After the collector has found a new object or made another acquisition, it seems to serve as an acknowledgment of his worth, at least consciously and for a while. Meantime he no longer feels haunted by self-doubt.[151]

Another collector, this time of studio pottery, recently had this to say about his own obsession:

It is my opinion that people who are “serious collectors” of anything really need to take a close look at themselves, as obsession can indeed prove to be somewhat unhealthy. Take my own case, for instance. Why does a seemingly normal person who has a good job and does all the things that normal people do – hold dinner parties, visit the pub, and go on holiday to Spain – suddenly develop an obsession? Why does this obsession take over his life to the extent that there is “always room for just one more pot in the house”? If you have identified with this description, it is probably too late to save you; if not, you may wish to take heed and retreat now, before you become hooked!

Alistair Hawtin[152]

Of course, some writers have always wished to go even deeper. See, for example, the essay ”Telling Objects: A Narrative Perspective on Collecting” by Professor Mieke Bal.[153] After explaining that her theories have been worked on “through the eras of structuralism and poststructuralism” we are offered a paper which, to be frank, follows some pretty tortuous paths. Take the following:

Cultural objects must signify through common codes, conventions of meaning-making that both producer and reader understand. That is why they have to be inter-subjectively accessible. A culture consists of the people who share enough of these conventions to exchange their view (inter-subjectively), so that making cultural artefacts is worth some subjects while.[154]

Denis Dutton, an American born Professor of the Philosophy of Art at the University of Canterbury, New Zealand, has, over the years, failed to be impressed with similar verbosity. In a paper, “Mythologies of Tribal Art” Dutton compares and contrast what he calls “Old Mythology” (roughly, beliefs prior to c.1906) with the “New Mythologies” (that is cultural theories that post-date Picasso’s “discovery” of African art.)[155]

Under the influence of poststructuralism, New Mythology often presupposes various forms of constructivism, the idea that categories of human existence are constituted entirely by our own mental activity: we “invent” or “construct” the “primitive,”, tribal “art,” “religion,” and so on. The knots into which theorists become tied in trying to introduce such poststructural rhetoric into the study of tribal arts is illustrated in Barbara Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, who writes “ Ethnographic artefacts are objects of ethnography. They are artefacts created by ethnographers. Objects become ethnographic by virtue of being defined, segmented, detached, and carried away by ethnographers” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, Barbara. 1991. “Objects of Ethnography,” in Exhibiting Cultures, Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, eds. Washington: Smithsonian Institute Press. p.387.) From her first sentence, a dictionary definition,  Kirshenblatt-Gimblett deduces a constructivist howler: the trivial fact that ethnographers define the ethnographic status of artefacts does not entail that they create the artefacts. Nor do they create the artefacts’ meanings: it is the people being studied who determine that, and this awkward reality gets obviously in the way of attempts by New Mythologists to revitalize cultural knowledge and meaning.[156]

I must admit that my own collecting urge seems a far cry from the above. Yes, like David Attenborough, I do wonder what madness it is that drives me to collect African art. There is something in my make up that directs me to collections, just as, I’m sure, I am lacking in that element that makes some people gamble. Cards, horses, football results, just leave me cold. But, show me a fine African sculpture and I am immediately transported to another realm!

The first African piece that I bought was a single Yoruba ibeji. It was a Saturday afternoon and I was in London with my 10 year old daughter. We were due to see a film and found that we had an hour or so to wait for the performance. So, walking around the surrounding streets, we came across a curio shop. And there, in the window, was the ibeji. I bought the piece because it just resonated with something inside me. I was also intrigued with the story that the salesperson told, about how the spirit of a dead child was living within the carving. Clearly, my daughter was also impressed, because she insisted on holding the figure throughout the film show, rocking the carving as though it were a baby. And all my pieces of African art hold stories like that. They may be beautiful, they may have come from some amazing African group, but, at the end of the day, they have become objects that personally relate to me.

Collections are essentially a narrative of experience…

Susan M. Pearse [157]

In an essay devoted to Sigmund Freud’s collection of antiquities Lynn Gamwell agreed:

His antiquities collection is inexhaustibly layered with meanings and associations, surrounded by endless anecdotes.[158]

And, I suppose, these “layers of meanings and association” can also be grasped by others, and not only the collector.

Every collection is a public confession …[159]

Today, with African art pieces regularly fetching tens of thousands (even hundreds of thousands) of pounds, it is not always easy for the “ordinary” person to collect. But David Kidd, a distinguished collector of Oriental art, hit the nail on the head when he said:

"Having a lot of money and using it to buy great pieces of art on the world market – anyone can do that. Not having money, but still being able to buy great pieces – that’s fun."[160]

And so it is! And that is why, over the years, I have collected so many things. Collecting African art has given me pleasure and it confirms my optimism for the future. But, as I approach the Biblical age of “three score and ten”, I do wonder what will become of the things that I continue to keep?

                                   

                                            Senufo figure of a European, Burkina Faso.

                   15

In my ‘art-world’ days I was a veracious collector, but only a few pieces remain. Sold the Egyptian relief. Sold the Archaic Greek torso. Sold the fifth-century Attic head. Sold the Giacometti drawing. Sold the Maori carving, which once formed part of Sarah Bernhardt’s bed. They were sold to pay for books, or journeys, or simply to eat, during the years of pretending to be a writer.

Bruce Chatwin[161]

Ian Auld once said that he hoped his collection of African art would be sold at auction, thus allowing other collectors to enjoy the pieces that had given him so much pleasure over the years. In other words, Ian did not wish his collection to end up in a museum. I have one piece in my collection, a wooden Teké figure, carved prior to 1884, when the missionary George Grenfell collected it in the Congo, which I feel should be left to the British Museum.  Grenfell donated the piece - a “Congo idol” according to the old label that is attached - to a Baptist college in Bristol, who sold it in the early 1990’s because some of the college staff felt it inappropriate to keep such a “pagan” object. Grenfell was an important figure in British history, second only in importance to David Livingstone when it comes to missionary work in Africa, and so this figure should, I feel, be kept for the nation. But, would the Museum want it, given that there are now so many rules and regulations regarding the acquisition of “new” pieces? And what about the rest of the collection? Like Bruce Chatwin, I feel a growing need to travel while I am still able and so I have begun to sell off the odd item or two.  As Maurice Joy said, “There are no pockets in shrouds” and so, perhaps, I should not feel too sad. I know that certain pieces will stay with me to the end. I doubt if I could ever part with the 19^th century Ashanti terracotta heads that David Morris left to me in his will. I also know that my collection of over a hundred Adan figures will stay, so that I may continue to research these little known pieces.  But, according to the Buddha, all conditioned things are impermanent, and as collections are comprised of “conditioned things”, then so too will they eventually be dispersed.

                                   

                                                        Two Adan figures.

There is a Chinese proverb, “Give a man bread so that he may live, but also give him a flower so that he may have reason to live”. Art, in its many forms, has been, and continues to be, my reason for living. Art, and the love of my friends and companions. I only hope that in these days of uncertainty others will continue to be inspired by the love and creativity of mankind and that all will gain as much as I have gained so that their lives may also be so deeply enriched.

                                      

                                                      Adan figure, Ghana.

      Bibliography

I have found the following books to be especially useful in the preparation of these essays. They are in addition to the books listed either in the text or in the endnotes.

Abiodun, Rowland, Henry J. Drewal & John Pemberton III (eds). The Yoruba Artist. New Theoretical Perspectives on African Arts The Smithsonian Institution Press, Washington & London.

Adler, Peter & Nicholas Barnard. 1992 African Majesty. The Textile Art of the Ashanti and Ewe Thames and Hudson, London.

Allison, Phillip. 1968 African Stone Sculptures Land Humphries, London.

Bacquart, Jean-Baptiste. 1998 The Tribal Arts of Africa – Surveying Africa’s Artistic Geography London.

Barbier, Jean Paul. 1993 Art of Cote D’Ivoire from the collection of the Barbier-Mueller Museum  2 volumes. The Barbier-Mueller Museum, Geneva.

Bassani, Ezio & Malcolm McLeod. 2000 African Art and Artifacts in European Collections 1400 – 1800 British Museum Publications, London.

Bassani, Ezio, Michael Brockemühl & Patrick McNaughton. 2002 The Power of Form. African Art from the Horstmann Collection Skira, Milan.

Berzock, Kethleen Bickford & Christa Clarke. 2011 Representing Africa in American Art Museums University of Washington Press, Seattle & London.

Chemeche, George. 2003. Ibeji. The Cult of Yoruba Twins 5 Continents, Milan.

Clarke, Christa (ed). 2001 A Personal Journey. Central African Art from the Lawrence Gussman Collection Neuberger Museum of Art, New York.

Cole, Herbert M. & Doran H. Ross. 1977. The Arts of Ghana University of California, Los Angeles.

Cole, Herbert M. & Chike C. Aniakor. 1984. Igbo Arts. Community and Cosmos Museum of Cultural History, University of California, Los Angeles.

Colleyn, Jean-Paul (ed). 2001. Bamana. The Art of Existence in Mali Museum for African Art, New York.

Cornet, Joseph. 1978. A Survey of Zairian Art. The Bronson Collection North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, North Carolina.

Drewal, Henry John, John Pemberton III & Rowland Abiodun. 1989 Yoruba. Nine Centuries of African Art and Thought The Center for African Art in association with Harry N. Abrams Inc., New York.

Drewal, Henry John & Margaret Thompson Drewal. 1990 Gẹlẹdẹ. Art and Female Power among the Yoruba Indiana University Press, Bloomington.

Drewel, Henry John & Enid Schildkrout. 2010 Kingdom of Ife. Sculptures from West Africa British Museum Press, London.

Einstein, Carl 1915 Afrikanische Plastik Verlag der weißen Bücher, Leipzig.

Eisenhofer, S & François Neyt 2000  Ife, Akan and Benin: West African Art from 2000 Years Arnoldsche Art Publishers Germany.

Errington, Shelly. 1998 The Death of Authentic Primitive Art and Other Tales of Progress University of California Press, Berkley.

Fagg, William. 1965 Tribes and Forms in African Art Methuen, London.

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Felix, Marc L. 1990 Mwana Hiti. Life and Art of the Matrilineal Bantu of Tanzania Fred Jahn, Munich.

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Fogel, Jonathan Tribal Art Quarterly journal. It began life as Tribal Arts/Le Monde de L’Art Tribal. At one point the journal split into two publications, Tribal Art and, confusingly, the short-lived Art Tribal.

Flam, Jack & Daniel Shapiro. 1994 Western Artists/African Art The Museum for African Art, New York.

Flam, Jack & Miriam Deutch (eds). 2003 Primitivism and Twentieth-Century Art. A Documentary History University of California Press, Berkley.

Goldwater, Robert. 1960 Bambara Sculpture from Western Sudan The Museum of Primitive Art, New York.

Goldwater, Robert. 1964 Senufo Sculpture from West Africa The Museum of Primitive Art, New York.

Grootaers, Jan-Lodewijk & Ineke Eisenburgh (eds). 2002 Forms of Wonderment. The History and Collections of the Afrika Museum, Berg en Dal 2 volumes Afrika Museum, Berg en Dal, Holland.

Grootaers, Jan-Lodewijk (ed). 2007 Ubangi. Art and Culture from the African Heartland Mercatorfonds, Brussels.

Hahner-Herzog, Maria Kecskési & László Vajda. 1998 African Masks from the Barbier-Mueller Collection, Geneva Prestel, Munich.

Kerchache, Jacques, Jean-Louis Paudrat & Lucien Stéphan. 1988 Art of Africa Harry N. Abrams, New York.

Kramer, Fritz. 1993 The Red Fez. Art and Spirit Possession in Africa Verso, London.

Lamp, Frederick. 1996 Art of the Baga. A Drama of Cultural Reinvention The Museum for African Art, New York, and Prestel Verlag, Munich.

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Acknowledgements.

               It was, of course, the confusion of an amateur…..

                                                                                                Sheila Paine[162]

This essay was written by me, and any faults are necessarily of my own making. Nevertheless, I could not have written any of the above without the help of many friends. I would especially like to thank the following. The late Ian Auld, Richard Balyuzi, Ben Hunter, Professor Jean Michel Massing, the late David Morris, Freddy Joy, Maurice Joy, Professor Michael Pennie and Charles Vernon Hunt. The opening illustration is from an exhibition at Boston’s Hamill Gallery.

                                                                                    Mike Yates

                                                                                    Wiltshire, England (2011).

(Michael {Mike} Yates is an English folklorist who has conducted extensive field-work in England, Scotland and the Appalachian Mountains of North America. Over the years he has recorded and produced many albums of Traditional British and American folk music and folk tales. He has written extensively on folk music and is the co- author of Dear Companion. Appalachian Traditional Songs and Singers from the Cecil Sharp Collection EFDSS, London, 2004 and the author of Traveller’s Joy. Songs of English and Scottish Travellers and Gypsies 1965 – 2005 EFDSS, London, 2006.)