The Sunday News
WE take a brief detour that takes us to the question where we pose the question regarding whether Africans ever developed their own form of writing or not. Did Africans ever write or they resorted to oral forms of documentation? Were the Africans become victims of racism where they were regarded as inferior to people with lighter skins?
Hieroglyphics was accepted as a form of Egyptian writing, so was cuneiform for the Sumerians. The Chinese and Japanese have their own forms of writing which are accepted worldwide though we may not understand them as they look weird bizarre.
The issues emerge as I begin work on my next book titled, “From Utility to Aesthetics: Unpacking African Ceramics.” The contentious issues arose and I began questioning many things. On the walls of the clay pots, I realized there were a lot of symbols, emblems and signs of African origin.
These, like is the case in other languages, expressed thought and processes. The writing was created through painting, drawing, tattooing, inscriptions, scarifications and engraving.
All these were a way through which Africans expressed and documented their history, worldview, thought and cultural practices. Several surfaces were used where this form of writing was executed. The surfaces included, inter alia, the following: wood, mud, pottery, horn, basketry, ivory, human skin (painting, tattoos and scarifications), leather, and rock (petroglyphs).
The tragedy has been that Africans have not seriously sought to decipher the writing to unpack the languages resident in what some may perceive as art. I have always argued that art was functional and a form of writing that communicated knowledge and information from the ancients.
We miss it altogether when we see art and nothing more beyond it. Cuneiform and hieroglyphics are art by all accounts and they have other roles to play. In order to facilitate effortless learning, the medium of writing came in the form of art. The characteristics of art were clearly resident. Even those who failed to see beyond the art partook of the artistic renditions and reveled in them.
However, artistic writing transcended the confines of mere art to embrace thought, processes and concrete knowledge and information. This layer of meanings has not been fully grasped. African have many symbols it executes on various surfaces as enumerated above. In art, I shall argue in my forthcoming book, there are several layers of meanings beyond mere aesthetics.
When African artifacts were essentially functional, they were weak in finesse. The vessels were crude and not meticulously embellished. However, when they went beyond utility they began to embrace aesthetics and a polished finesse.
Some artifacts assumed new roles in funerary traditions, in particular when they became food containing vessels for the journeying spirit following death. The spiritual dimension enhanced beauty, just as did royalty. Vessels that contained libations were decorated to please the spiritual characters being appealed to. There was in this instance, art and utility conjoined in the new assumed roles.
However, this was not all. There was yet another dimension beyond utility and aesthetics. I have been closely following the religion and philosophy of the Dogon people of Mali. Arguably, the French who were their colonisers have studied their religion and philosophy the most. Whereas in Matobo North the women execute geometric motifs on hut walls, baskets and clay pots, the Dogon went beyond the geometric symbols, signs, and motifs. I have observed that they dwell quite a lot on the emblems that centre around their ancestral spirits that they term the Nummo whose upper bodies comprise humans and the lower parts are fish like.
In southern Africa we would call them omamlambo or njuzu (water sprites). They are hermaphroditic; having both male and female sex organs. It is perhaps not accurate to refer to the Dogon as having a religion. Rather, it is spirituality. Related to this there are several animals, birds, serpents and reptiles that add to the art, if we might call it that. A scrutiny of the identity of the emblematic animals adds yet another layer of meaning and roles of the art.
The Dogon seem to have led the way in this respect. Researchers observed that what the Dogon produced, largely through relief, were replicated elsewhere pM and the Aztec. Nevertheless, the community that replicated Dogon symbols were the community around Globekli Tepe in Turkey. There are a lot of similarities between the art at Globekli Tepe and among the Dogon.
I will argue that the animals, birds and reptiles that they produced through relief were much more than art. There was thus the third layer of utility in what seemingly looked like art. I looked closely at the animals and reptiles and was convinced these were played fortification roles. That was the time when people believed in the existence of negative forces and thus took measures, in the form of art, to fortify their settlements and themseives. The ancients led precarious life and always felt threatened by the various environmental forces, powers and energies.
The frontline protectors were the ancestors and worked in collaboration with various creatures, on the basis of their symbolic traits complemented the ancestral spirits or they became the tools in the hands of the same ancestors. In collaboration with an assortment of animals, birds and lizards they worked to create a protective spiritual environment.
Dogon wooded doors were splendid with various motifs, emblems, symbols, signs in conjunction with geometric symblols inspired by cosmos designs and other traits such as movement, rhythm, balance, equilibrium. Serpents were common, so were rams with spiral horns. Some big lizards such as the iguana were known to be protectors where there were threats from negative forces. Such lizards became an integral part of the Dogon arsenal to protect them from evil forces.
When I visited one site of San rock art I was pleasantly surprised to see one of the objects found at Gobekli Tepe in Turkey. Of course, that did not come as a surpise to me as I had already arrived at the conclusion that the ancients in various parts of the world shared a common worldview, spirituality and, out of that, some common cultural practices. Were it not for the heavily protective Western scholarship and academy, Africans, through their spiritual endowment, would decipher seemingly mysterious phenomena found in caves, temples and royal palaces and scrolls in hidden caves.
In essence, we have identified the layers of artistic expressions, meanings and their different roles. All is art but art directed at different roles such as the therapeutic aesthetics, transmitted messages with meanings from the ancient past and the protective/fortification roles of art when it depicts a variety of animals, birds, reptiles and snakes/serpents.
Essentially, therefore we have been dealing with writing as a form of language performing certain roles such as inter-generational transmission of knowledge and information, engendering a common community culture, social cohesion and some sense of rootedness and belonging.
Sadly, Africa has taken a disastrous route towards seeking to decipher Heir languages. Embracing exotic languages has become a status symbol. African forms of writing are despised and associated with primitively and paganism. Africa is all the worse off as their histories shall forever remain masked in the art which is taken at face value and not as a form of writing and methodology for fortification and defence.
In Nigeria, there are colleges that have discarded history subject from the curriculum. They have been mistakenly advised that the subjects that matter are science ones. What a lie! Other people will continue to churn out histories that depict Africans as a pagan people with no history, no philosophy and therefore no future other than as hewers of wood and drawers of water for peoples who have not abandoned their histories.
