The Sunday News
Tafadzwa Gwetai
In reality, some African art has always functioned as a commodity and artists have always drawn inspiration and materials from outside sources surrounding them.
While many auction houses and art museums clearly differentiate between “traditional” African art created prior to the colonial period and artwork created during and after colonisation, African art historians are beginning to change this simplistic division and instead, ask their audiences to recognise the continuity and dynamism of African art.
Looking closer, scholars find that specific historical moments had a profound effect on African communities and their art. During the slave trade and colonisation, for example, some artists created work to come to terms with these horrific events, experiences that often stripped people of their cultural, religious and political identities.
One of the most damaging experiences for many ethnic groups in Africa was the TransAtlantic slave trade. While slavery had long existed in Africa, the TransAtlantic slave trade constituted a mass movement of peoples over four-and-a-half centuries to colonies in North and South America. Millions of African people were taken to labour on cotton, rum, and sugar plantations in the “new world”. This created problems such as separating families, language groups, trading partners, etecetera are still very much at issue today.
The Colonial period, with the collapse of the Atlantic slave trade in the 19th century, European imperialism continued to focus on Africa as a source for raw materials and markets for the goods produced by industrialised nations. Africa was partitioned by the European powers during the Berlin Conference of 1884-85, a meeting where not a single African was present.
The result was a continent defined by artificial borders with little concern for existing ethnic, linguistic, or geographic realities. European nations claimed land in order to secure access to the natural resources they needed to support rapidly growing industrial economies.
Once European nations secured African territories, they embarked on a system of governance that enforced the provision of natural resources with drastic consequences for people and the environment.
Resistance to colonial rule grew steadily and between 1950 and 1980, nations achieved independence but even with independence the problems associated with the slave trade and colonialism remained. The introduction of Christianity and the spread of Islam in the 19th and 20th century also transformed many African societies and many traditional art practices associated with indigenous religions declined. In addition, as imported manufactured goods entered local economies, hand-made objects like ceramic vessels and fibre baskets were replaced by factory-made containers.
The African people made sense of these changes through art and performance. Art plays a central role, particularly in oral societies, as a way to remember and relate to our authentic “self”.
As African artists began catering to a new market of middle-class urban Africans and foreigners, new art-making practices developed. Self-taught and academically trained painters, for example, began depicting their experiences with colonialism and independence, as fine artists, their work is largely secular in content and meant to be displayed in galleries or modern homes, for example, the work of Cheri Samba, Jane Alexander, and Tshibumba Kanda-Matulu.
The diverse and complex systems now at play as a result of globalisation are having a profound impact on Africa.
“Some scholars argue that globalisation will have even greater consequences than the slave trade and colonisation in terms of population movement, environmental impact, and economic, social and political changes. Whatever the result, these stresses will be chronicled by the continent’s many brilliant artists.”
Early in the 20th Century, expatriate teachers opened “fine art” schools in numerous African centres, many of them in concurrence with their Christian missions, introducing new techniques and aesthetics.
Often these synthesised existing frameworks produced hybrid forms of African art, as in the workshops of Cannon Patterson of Cyrene, Father Groeber of Serima Mission, and Driefontein Mission in Zimbabwe. The colonial legacy has left Zimbabwe and African artists working towards the Eurocentric audience. The purpose behind souvenirs was designed to fulfil the European thirst for their taste for Africa. They are what we know as curios, crafts or airport/ roadside art. They were not designed with the local market in mind and serve only a foreign hunger.
African art has always been characterised by being functional and purposeful to the immediate community.
This has added to the wide gap that Africa was already trying to recover, fill and hold on to what is left as “ours”. As much as we aim to reclaim an identity that was lost, the dynamic nature of art and human nature has been evolving and it is up to the artists to document and preserve.
