African Art

Today we're talking about African art. One of the things you may notice as we go through the slides in this section, and as you look at the images in the book, is that a lot of what we're seeing is quite recent. And the reason for this is not that African art doesn't have a long history. People evolved in Africa, and some of the oldest artistic objects we found anywhere in the world are actually from Africa. But because our understanding of the indigenous arts of Africa often have an interrupted period in the middle of history, so during the period in which Europe was exerting colonial powers in Africa, predominantly during the 17th and 18th and 19th centuries, there's often intentional attempts to erase indigenous and colonial histories, in some cases to help those people assimilate to a more European lifestyle, or in other cases to erase facts that were difficult or inconvenient for European colonialists to explain. So in some cases we have oral traditions or other explanations of these pieces that suggest a longer history, but not physical examples to verify them with. And in other cases the oral traditions have been lost as well, so what we know about these indigenous works are gathered through archaeology and research and comparison with the existing traditions that we do have. We're going to start today by looking at this figure, the nail figure, or Nkizi Nkandi, and this figure was made by the Congo culture. The Congo culture was one of the largest kingdoms in Central Africa at the time of contact with the European colonialists. Our first written European records of the Congo come from the early 1400s, and they come from Portuguese explorers, and the Congo remained an independent kingdom. They aren't actually brought under a European colonial control, again in this case Portuguese control, until the 19th century. So unlike some of the other groups in Africa, the history of the Congo people is fairly well documented, and we know that these kinds of nail figures were used widely in spiritual practices. These human-shaped Nkizi are the most powerful, but also the rarest, of these types of figures. At their simplest, they can be simply a gourd or other hollow vessel, and they can also take on animal shapes as well as human shapes. Figures like these would be sculpted by an individual called a blacksmith, even though he worked in both wood and metal, so a little bit broader than our modern use of this term, and then they would be given to a person called a ritual specialist. A ritual specialist is somebody that had spiritual powers, we might think of them kind of like a shaman or a priest, and they would prepare these figures for their end use. Among the Congo, the belly or the kind mid-torso is where they thought the spirit resided, and we can see on both of these examples that there is originally an opening in that mid-torso area, and that opening is filled with substances that have spiritual power, according to traditional Congo beliefs, and then sealed up by the ritual specialist. Once these figures were made, they could be used multiple times, and each time it was used, a nail or blade would be stuck into the figure to show that that power or that spiritual idea is being evoked. Human-shaped Nkizi like these that we see here are widely used to heal sickness, to ward off curses, witches, and evil spirits, which we think particularly the example on the right-hand side might demonstrate that. If we look really closely at what's covering the belly here, it's actually a little piece of mirror, and that mirror would be thought to be reflecting the image of that witch or that evil spirit back at it and scare it off. And figures like these in the later periods, in the late 19th and early 20th century, also began to be made for the tourist trade. These later tourist figures were made specifically for sale and were not put through the same traditional development where they would have the ritual specialist develop them, and they often had nails or blades simply hammered into them for effect and to make them look more real or look more convincing to the tourists who were buying them. We also see that in many Sub-Saharan African cultures, worship of the ancestors and connections to the ancestors are extremely important. In the Benin culture, it was traditional that when you became the king or when a new king ascended to the throne, that his first job or his first big public role was to make an altar for the previous king, who's typically his father. The last king of the Benin was deposed in the late 19th century by British colonial forces, but in the mid-20th century, as Nigeria begins to become independent again, this altar is erected to the memory of that last king. And this altar evokes those traditional altars that had been destroyed earlier and gives us a good idea what those might have looked like. So we see, looking at this altar, that there's a number of bronze items here. There's bells on the altar itself, and those would be rung to summon the spirits. And then we see four cast heads, and these heads are indicative of the wealth and power of Benin culture. The large number of necklaces these figures wear were made out of coral or represent necklaces made out of coral, which were only worn by royalty. And we can see that they all four wear elaborate beaded headdresses as well. The central figure uses hierarchical scale, so that central figure of the king or oba is much larger than the attendance on either side of him. And he has a non-naturalistic proportion. And this is, again, quite common in African art, where we see that individuals often have a large or exaggerated size head. And that head being a large size is indicative of intelligence or wisdom. And in this case, we can also see it as an analogy that he's the head of the body of the people. We actually have similar phrases in English when we refer to somebody as the head of the body politic. And these elaborate cast bronze objects are part of what European colonial powers struggled with in African art. Because of their inherently racist beliefs that Europeans were similar to Africans, they believed that Africans simply didn't have the intelligence or the skill to develop this kind of elaborate cast bronze object. And these objects were thought to be, in some cases, imported. Or in other cases, they were just kind of quietly whisked away or destroyed to eliminate evidence of African skill and craftsmanship. On the top of each of these four cast bronze heads, we also see a carved elephant tusk. Obviously, ivory poaching is a huge issue in our modern world today. But if we think about the courage it takes to face down and hunt an elephant without modern weapons, with a bow or a spear, this was a feat of strength and skill. So these carved ivory were indicative of the skill and courageousness of the warriors associated with the king. And these carved images on the tusks represent important events in his reign. The staffs in the center represent the staff associated with the different past kings. Like the bells, these have rattles in them. If you move them or shake them, they make a noise that's designed to evoke or to call the spirits. And as a new king, you would be expected to not only build this altar, but in times of difficulty or times of strife, you would be expected to make sacrifices and to consult your ancestors to make the best decisions for all your people.