The Verbal and the Visual in a Globalizing Context: African and European Connections as an Ongoing Process

Mineke Schipper

n the twentieth century painters, sculptors, poets, storytellers, novelists, singers, and their works went global. Artists and arts from all over the world and widely different origins started to meet and influence each other. In the fields of the arts and literature as well as in the domain of theory, this fact has been taken into account. In this paper I would like to connect some verbal and visual representations resulting from the contacts between Africa and Europe in both continents. Representation is understood here as relationship, as process, as the relay mechanism in exchanges of power (Mitchell 420). If we thus look at some verbal and visual aspects in combination, we should be able to gain some insight in their interconnectedness. As a result of the history of colonization, a number of European and African intellectuals, artists, and writers have been actively involved in processes of negotiating power, along the lines of their own imagination. In the academic world the nonexperienced and the nondescribed are mostly referred to in terms of the already described: nonresearched objects are identified on the basis of what we already know. This holds for both the verbal and the material arts. Inevitably this directs and possibly biases the research. In literary studies, for example, the definition of African literary genres or the periodization of literary movements often seem to have been determined by the earlier use of those concepts in Western literary history. And in Western art history one is still often inclined to consider the passage from realistic to abstract as a self-evident chronological order, since this was their order in the context of Western avant-garde, without even considering the possibility that this is not necessarily the order of things to happen. Indeed, over the last century, African arts and literatures have mostly been studied from the angle of a non-African history, which only recently has begun to change. But the artists practice always defies theory and research. I will first go briefly into the invention of the primitive by Western avant-garde artists and the influence of African art on a number of European artists, a matter of orally transmitted ideas resulting in visual forms of expression. Secondly, I will discuss the impact of the colonial presence on some narrative genres and visual art forms in Africa. Thirdly, I will try to compare and connect the various issues discussed, as participants in this interlocked process of representation. In this process of negotiation and appropriation there will certainly be more differences than similarities, but are not differences as relevant in such a globalizing rendez-vous du donner et du recevoir? Vol. 31, No. 4, Winter 2000

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From the nineteenth century onward, large numbers of material objects of African origin unfamiliar to European artistic traditions were bought or stolen in Africa and shipped to Europe where they were sold by dealers, collected by amateurs, and more and more also exhibited in anthropological museums. By the end of the nineteenth century, in the heyday of evolutionism, the current idea in Europe was still that the West was superior to societies that were designated primitive: In their representation of the ugly no people surpasses those West Africans, the German anthropologist Friedrich Ratzel observed in 1885. Let us not talk about their indecency [. . . ;] for the most part they are as brutal by nature as they are exaggerately ugly; and at that there is the clumsiness expressed in the sculpures of their gods (85, my trans.). In European Primitivism, Dadasm, and Surrealism, however, artists and writers expressed great sympathy for Africa, although they had never been there. Western artists who looked at African objects were conditioned by their own preconceived idea of what they thought primitive culture was. They invented their own Africa based on both visual and oral traditions transmitted over the centuries by travelers as well as by those who had not been there. Gradually African art started to influence and change European early twentieth-century art. Avant-garde artists became fascinated by the unknown mysterious world these objects seemed to radiate. They felt attracted to primitive art, which they associated rather indifferently with Africa and Oceania and, closer by, with the world of rural people, children, the insane, and women. The Dadaists called primitive art art ngre. Dada and Surrealism, the French variant of Dada, were both part of a broad literary movement that sought to liberate Western thinking from all logic and from all moral and aesthetic pressure. The binding element of those widely different primitivist artists was probably that, as artists, they felt inclined to search for something outside the dominant conventions in their own cultural context, turning upside down the established ideas of Western superiority about Africa. Nonetheless, their thinking continued to be evolutionist in so far as they saw primitive culture as static and primitives as creatures living in a fixed ethnographic present. They imagined primitive life as a lost paradise for which they were nostalgically longing. As primitivists they revolted against the conventional arts of their time which they tried to resist and provoke wholeheartedly. Before it was presented in quotation marks, as it is nowadays, the concept of primitivism had been used without much critical reflection. In the catalogue of Primitivism in 20th Century Art (1984), William Rubin felt obliged to apologize in detail for using the term for lack of a better one in naming his Museum of Modern Art exhibition. His definition of primitivism was the interest of modern artists in tribal art and culture, as revealed in their thought and work (1: 3). In general, the term is used to refer to the discourses on the primitive. Picasso has been considered a key figure in twentieth-century primitivism, although other artists and writers, such as Matisse, Vlaminck,

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Derain, and the poet Apollinaire, had discovered African sculpture before him. According to Rubin, Picasso was so strongly associated with tribal art that the myth was created that he himself must have African blood in his veins via Spanish-Moorish connections. As a young artist Picasso strongly dissociated himself from his father, who was a bourgeois professor at the art academy in Barcelona and who seems to have been an impressively beautiful man. Son Pablo turned his back on his fathers conventional art, embracing primitivism (Rubin 241). The crucial moment in this development is constituted by the painting of Les demoiselles dAvignon (1907), as explained by Rubin (241 ff.). The original idea for the painting was anecdotic: it was meant to tell the story of a medical student, a sailor, and five nudes in a brothel, but gradually it turned out more abstract, expressing the dilemma between fear (of diseases one can catch) and desire, between sex and death. In between the earlier and later version of the painting of the Demoiselles, Picasso visited the Trocadro Museum. As he told Andr Malraux in an interview, the relations of this painting with art ngre were established the day when, for the first time, Picasso visited the storage of the museum which was full of Africa objects. He was there all alone and felt the inescapable power of the statues and masks; their force was so strong that he felt like running away. He experienced their presence as a shock, a profound revelation that he expressed in his famous statement: At that very moment I knew what painting was all about. Picasso considered the objects magiques et raisonnables, as they possessed magical power and an inescapable logic. Or, in his words to Malraux: For me the masks were not just sculptures [. . .]. They were magical objects [. . .] intercessors [. . .] against everythingagainst unknown, threatening spirits [. . .]. They were weaponsto keep people from being ruled by spirits, to help free themselves [. . .]. If we give a form to these spirits, we become free. (qtd. in Rubin 1: 255) After this visit to the Trocadro Museum, Picasso seems to have been thinking in terms of conjuring, magic, and mediation in relation to his own art. The result was indeed something new in Western art, but the Western artists were not interested in non-Western traditions as such. They were only interested in their own work. They borrowed, selected, and combined. Selectively they managed at will the results of their own Africa imagination. In Western art the Demoiselles are considered to be an important painting, and many critics have emphasized its originality, whereas the direct influence of African art on Western art has often been belittled or denied. At the utmost it has been admitted that Picasso had some affinity with African art. However, he has indeed borrowed directly, as Colin Rhodes explains in his book Primitivism and Modern Art: when around 1907 Picasso came into contact with African sculptures, his way of painting changed radically (16). In France, Picasso was certainly not the only artist to be intrigued by African art. Vlaminck, Derain, and others showed each other their collected

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objects. Georges Braque was impressed and has been quoted as stating that Negro masks had opened new horizons to him, which enabled him to find forms of expression going against all false traditions that he disliked. It was mainly African masks and statues from Ivory Coast, Gabon, and Congo that influenced artistic circles in Paris in the first decades of the twentieth century. Picasso and other artists were not inhibited by any knowledge of the original meanings of the masks and sculptures, or their functions in relation to birth, death, and fertility in the countries of origin: they were simply put under the heading of art ngre. They did not care about ideas people from the cultures of origin might have had about them or whether they had appreciated them as beautiful and what beauty might have meant to them. (Indeed, it took a long time before such questions began to interest Western artists and critics.) This also holds, in fact, for the exhibition Primitivism in 20th-Century Art in 1987 in New York: the aim was not to describe the selected African objects as art. The curators were only interested in the metamorphosis the objects underwent, in the ways in which European artists had handled or processed them in their own art. To what extent Picasso, Braque, Brancusi, and other artists were tributary to the artistic influences from Africa has largely remained underexposed. Dada originated in 1916 in Switzerland in a cabaret named Voltaire in Zurich, where French, German, and Rumanian writers and artists had met since the beginning of the First World War. The word ngre was indistinctly used at every odd moment for art from Africa and Oceania. Dadaists were interested in primitive art, as against the art of a bourgeois society that they held responsible for the madness of the ongoing war. The music performed in the cabaret was called African music; the masks made by artists such as the Rumanian Janco were called African masks. Dada and Surrealism were no more interested in the cultures of origin than the earlier mentioned painters. They were only fascinated by what was considered the inherent spiritual power of primitive art. The poets of the movement wrote poetry that they said was inspired by Africa and Negroes. However, their leading agenda was to get rid of the old norms of the established canon of a bourgeois society. Dada and its French variant Surrealism established branches in several other European countries. Their program was mainly a non- or antiprogram in its striving for absolute freedom from existing art conceptions and norms. From the artists perspective, primitive peoples were so attractive because they seemed to have no norms, no conventions. This again was an evolutionist error of thought made by both Dada and Surrealism. The underlying idea was that primitives were in a prephase of humanity and still part of nature. Therefore they were supposed to have no norms at all. Indeed, other than Western conventions did not seem to exist (an interesting case of Eurocentrism) and having no rules was absolutely enviable. Surrealist artists and writers tried to descend into their subconscious. The idea was that free association would automatically lead to artistic results. The Surrealists expressed their descent in criture automatique, which was the only real poetry. They emphasized that they wanted exactly what (they thought) the primitives wanted: to explore the dream- and spiritual

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world. They were fascinated by magic, chance, coincidence; they wanted to remove all obstacles that obstructed the communication with the subconscious and thus with real art. Europes limited artistic contacts with Africa developed along with colonization. Stereotype ideas about Africa and Africans, and a serious lack of unprejudiced information and interest in Africa made unbiased knowledge unlikely. And indeed, myths about Africa and Africans have worked through in Western arts and literatures, and prevailed in the avant-garde. To what extent can a similar inclination to myth-making be found in African art and literature about the West? Of course, a crucial point to be taken into account right from the start is the difference in power in the (post-)colonial history of Africa, a difference people have tried to cope with. The European presence has indeed been visible for a while in some forms of artistic expression. The representation of white people and Western paraphernalia seems to have been intended, among other things, as a means to handle the harsh reality of white domination and European power in Africa. Such coping is expressed in peoples work of culture, defined by Gananath Obeyesekere as the process whereby symbolic forms existing on the cultural level get created and recreated through the minds of people (xix). In the colonial period, two main aspects determined the issue of the difference between black and white people as expressed in African art, narrative, poetry, songs, ritual, and theatrical performance. On the one hand, people were intrigued by the power of the Europeans, albeit with reservations and mixed feelings about the consequences of the European presence in Africa. On the other, there was strong resistance against the many injustices of domination, and much critical comment, and the two themes were often combined. Here, I can only briefly look into one verbal and one material genre dealing with the issue. Both origin myths as well as wooden sculptures referred to as colons have negotiated with the arrival and presence of Europeans in Africa, in various and rather different ways. In both the oral and the material arts the function of the cultural elements and influences from outside was to serve specific needs of the people concerned. The inequality of black and white people represents just one of peoples numerous misfortunes explained in myths of origin, next to the origin of other miseries, such as illness and death, the trials of a womans periods and pains of childbirth, etc. All over the world people seem to feel the need to imagine the origin of all sorts of inescapable bearings on everyday life. The theme of the origin of black and white people served to explain historical developments that proved both unfair and inescapable. In order to make my argument clear, it is necessary to present some points about the origin of black and while people in oral creation stories, material presented earlier in my book Imagining Insiders. Veronika Grg-Karady categorized the numerous myths of origin concerning black and white people she collected from all over Africa according to the themes of destination, trial, and committed error. The origin of the difference, with its far reaching consequences, is sometimes attributed

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to sheer arbitrariness or fatepeople being unable to change it. It can also be a matter of preference of one of the ancestors for children of one particular kind. There is a Dogon story about a woman who gave birth to a white and a black child. The mother is convinced that the white child will bring bad luck and throws him into the river. Nommo, God himself, then takes him, raises him and provides himand therewith his offspringwith knowledge of all things. Ever since then, white people have been superior and have been in power (Ambara Dolo, in Grg-Karady 284n). While at first there is a preference, as described in this story, for the black child, this eventually turns out to conform to the dialectics of progress: in the end he finds himself in the least favorable position. It also happens that the creator or the parents love the white child more (because it would look more like them) than the black child. Eventually, in most of the stories, the whites and their offspring are better off: the human being with the white skin is presented as the one who takes the most advantage of the positive or negative situation in which he (it is hardly ever a she) finds himself. Many of the stories about difference in skin color are unmistakably linked to the historical fact of colonization: Europeans came to colonize and Africans were colonized. In order to explain this power and the apparent good luck of the Europeans, African stories tell how and why the white man came to have the first choice when resources were being distributed; how and why they received the paper and the books and the stationery, the guns, the machines, and the money. In certain stories, the light skin is qualified as a sign of beauty and the positive aesthetic qualities of the white Other are sometimes even associated with positive ethical ones. In stories that display such an obvious lack of self-esteem, the storytellers seem to struggle with their attempts to explain the power of the white man in the first decades of colonial times. The negative white qualities mentioned include their delicate health and their malign, jealous, and egotistic character, as well as their aggression and their systematic exploitation of the Africans. Such observations, however, are hardly presented in the creation and origin myths. They are emphasized in different kinds of stories that began to circulate at the beginning of colonizationfor example, in prophecies, chronicles, and anecdotes (Grg-Karady, ch.5). In a tale that is at least a century old and that is still told in Westas well as in Central Africa, the origin of the difference in power and prestige between Africans and Europeans is accounted for. In Congo, I collected the following version of this tale: God the Father had two sons, Manicongo and Zonga, and He loved Manicongo just as much as He loved Zonga. One day He decided to put them to a test. He summoned them and told them to go forth the next morning at daybreak and bathe in a little nearby lake. Zonga, the youngest son, was obedient and sensible. He stayed up all night and the next morning he arrived at the lake even

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before the first cock crow. He dived into the lake and to his surprise, he saw that his whole body had turned white. By then Manicongo, the eldest son, was also awake. He had not stayed up all night. After having a good meal and plenty to drink, he had danced and made merry until the wee small hours of the morning and then fell into a deep sleep. No wonder he overslept. He jumped out and ran to the lake, but just as he was about to dive in, the water receded. Only the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet managed to touch the water for a split second and they turned white. For the rest, Manicongo was still as black as he had always been. God the Father praised Zonga and rewarded him for his sensible conduct. He was allowed to select whatever he wanted from all his fathers riches. Zonga quickly chose the paper, the pens, the telescope, the rifle and the gun powder. There wasnt much left for poor Manicongo but a couple of copper bracelets, a few sabers, a hoe to work the land with and some bows and arrows. From that moment on, the two brothers could no longer live together in Africa and so God decided to separate them. Zonga crossed the ocean and became the father of the white people and Manicongo stayed in Africa and became the father of the black people. Ever since then, the whites have become richer and richer and the blacks have remained just as poor as they were. (31-32) The visions represented in a number of such creation stories are clearly marked by white colonial discourse, as it has been spread by the colonial culture through the missions, the system of education and administration. Some variants of the above story end with the conclusion that Zonga, or his descendants, would return to bring wealth and happiness to Mother Earth. This may explain why the arrival of the first white people in some parts of Africa was welcomed with the usual hospitality: they were considered as the children of Zonga who had returned to honor their pledge. However, they did not. Often they were bad and greedy: They gathered treasures only to transport them to the other side of the ocean. Twenty million black Africans were deported in this way. And the Africans of course wondered why the descendants of Zonga had not kept their promise (Kane 12). The message of fatal victimization and material poverty associating dependence with inferiority was exactly the message the colonial Europeans transmitted, a message that systematically confirmed the supremacy of Western culture to which one could only get access by means of their religion, their schools, and their material wealthwhich God seemed to have given them right from the start. In the colonial context the mythical color metaphors were used to refer to sin, hell, and Satan, on the one hand, and to purity, holiness, and angels, on the other, in order to confirm and justify the hierarchical colonial relationships. In a number of oral stories about the origin of Africans and Europeans, the skin color opposition as the most striking feature has

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quickly been chained to other oppositions and differences the colonials used to impose on the basis of the manichean allegory of colonizer versus colonized. Myths, however, change and provoke debates, confrontations, reconciliations, all producing new myths, variations of myths, resurrections of old myths, myth associations and interpretations (Obeyesekere 131). In the debate, arguments develop in favor of myths as well as against them, and thus the debate leads to versions of earlier products that are the very opposite of the ones they were reacting against (Obeyesekere 132). This is indeed what happened, not only in the oral chronicles and anecdotes referred to earlier (Grg-Karady), but also in African written poetry, theater, and novels. A number of early African writers and poets questioned the existing relations on an unequal footing, and it became a subject for debate. Many of them felt it was their first responsibility to demystify the very ideas on which the origin myth of race and color was based, as I have argued elsewhere (see Imagining Insiders). In the words of Obeyesekere, symbolic forms are referring to those signs that are constitutive of the experiences they embody, such that it is through the analysis of these forms that one gets at the experience [. . .]. Art, music, poetic language are all symbolic forms in this sense (284). Representations such as those in the creation myth may contribute to the transformation of deep traumas into cultural forms inspired by and referring to the far reaching event of colonization. Sediments of past debates on the fatal origin of European domination in Africa, were mixed with all earlier traditions as well as with new elements of form and content, not only in the verbal but also in the material arts, as a variety of digesting comments on ideas such as those expressed in the origin myth. One such comment was their colon-ization (see Jahn). The wooden figure called colon (in francophone West Africa as well as in Europe) got its name from originally representing the colonizer. The first colons represented white colonizers, but soon or perhaps at the same time, there were also clerks and African soldiers in uniform and gradually a large variety of other African figures (from hunters to dentists and medical doctors in uniforms and contemporary female beauties en vogue) in modern clothes, painted or not, sometimes imitating Western postures, such as (French-style) hands in pockets, which continue to be named colons as well. (See plates 1, 2, and 14.) Originally, colons were sculpted on the basis of a selective combination of cultural elements: postures, tattoos, position of arms, necks, headdresses, etc, which mostly originated from the local sculpting tradition concerned, while the wooden sculptures also paid careful attention to typical details in things and behavior introduced from Europe, e.g., head-gear from helmets to hats of all kinds; footwear such as shoes, boots, slippers, sandals, high heels; painted nails, lipstick, belts, buttons, necklaces, brassieres, shorts, jackets, two- or three-piece suits and ties, trousers la mode at the particular moment, and other accessories such as sticks (sign of authority), guns and pistols, watches, bags, bottles of wine, means of transport (bikes, cars), books, pencils, flags. The early white colonial colons were sometimes represented sitting in a sedan carried by porters, or positioned on traditional

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European-style chairs or elders stools, but mostly they are presented in a standing posture. It is difficult to know what exactly their function was. I feel inclined to conclude to various functions as against Eliane Girard and Brigitte Kernel who only consider their cult function. Some connoisseurs describe colons as cult objects; others present them as photos africaines (African photographs), or as ornaments, as fetishes and as dolls to play with. Contacts between Europeans and Africans have existed since the fifteenth century. There might, roughly speaking, be a difference between the imperial and the colonial phase, but in many cases it has proved impossible to determine the period from which the first colons come. In her book Statues colons (1987), Werewere Liking presents interviews she did with antique dealers and shopkeepers in West Africa who give their respective views on the functions of the colons. In their comments, which I summarize below from her book (15-19), new myths continue to sneak in. An Ivory Coast art dealer argues that originally colons were meant to be put on a crossroad as a sign to inform the people of the presence or passage of white people in the region. Later, they served in the struggle against colonialism. Fetishes were applied on the effigies to drive away or kill the Europeans: only the representations of white people could serve this purpose. Therefore their skin was expressively painted red or yellow, and their hair, noses, and outfits had to be recognizably European: there had to be no doubt about that. The collaborators of the white colonialssoldiers, chiefs, interpreters, clerks, etc.were also sculpted, either together with their white bosses or separately. They came to love the colons as souvenirs. This then was, according to this Ivorian, the period of the so-called photos africaines, proudly ordered from the sculptors by the new privileged class who exhibited them in their homes for decoration, showing off with prestigious clothes and paraphernalia such as guns or books. However, this antique dealer emphasized, such sculptures were also put on house altars to serve as protecting fetishes. A Senegalese dealer who had worked in Benin stressed that the white people in colonial times organized exhibitions with stands for Africans, where some sculptors were rewarded for their excellent African photographs, such as Mamiwatas resembling white women, or African men dressed in European uniforms or clothes. In his opinion, this was the documentary function of the colons; but they also had a voodoo function in Benin and Togo. Mainly fetisheurs and voodoo related women bought them to make fetishes and to make sacrifices: In my neighborhood many women had plenty of them in their houses and carried them around while they were dancing during their ceremonies. (16) A Nigerian antique dealer confirmed that he had seen many colons representing white colonials in the houses of women sorcerers:

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I am a Muslim and not interested in such things: as far as I am concerned, all those African sculptures are fetishes or can be turned into fetishes any moment. (15-16) Interviewed sculptors in different cities in West Africa made it quite clear that colon sculpting is good business today. People order and pay in advance. The sculptors have to work according to the wishes of their clientle. They may have to do research for it in different cultural traditions, and ultimately are experienced in many different styles, from Ewe to Ashanti or Yoruba. Apparently good sculptors enjoy studying a variety of available new models at the request of clients, middle-class Africans as well as tourists. In the past much more frequently than today, according to several urban sculptors, colons were made to serve as fetishes, either intended to kill the white man or to adore him and ask him for protection. Perhaps the tourist business has taken over as more lucrative. Still, people continue to bring to sculptors their own wood painted and prepared by a soothsayer who has covered it with a special oil and all sorts of other medicine. They may request that the sculptor not sleep with a woman and not drink beer for three days while working on the colon, and to meticuously respect all the prescriptions and conditions, from size and form of calves, ears, and bellies, to coiffure and clothes all in agreement with the prescriptions of the doctor. By representing Europeans, people may have aimed at tapping their vital powers for individual needs. Colon sculptures were of course meant for the personal benefit of the owner. The colonial occupation inspired artists to the creation of ancestors, djinns, divinities, and ordinary human beings in new outfits; they were dressed as catechists, angels, missionaries, policemen, District Officers, nurses, and nuns. Even Mamiwata, incidentally, abandoned her fishtail for a miniskirt on masks and sticks. At the same altar, in the same shrine or sanctuary, ancestors and Christian saints, Christ on a crucifix, and European plastic dolls may find themselves in each others company with Mamiwata and football celebrities. The idea seems to be that representation of power wins power over to the side of those who, materially speaking, possess such a representation. This may explain the abundance of colons in shrines, on masks, and in graveyards: colons on thrones, chairs, horses, bicycles, and nowadays on motorcycles, in racing cars, Mercedeses or airplanes, surrounded by subordinates carrying their arms and riches. The vital power of the sculptures can be multiplied by libations and sacrifices, blood being a vital element to all powers, even spiritual ones. There may be different cults and destinations, but people who use them do have in common the belief in the effects of their presence on the altar, which becomes more powerful thanks to the offerings and sacrifices that surround them. Anthropomorphous sculptures thus come to serve as intermediaries between human beings and the hereafter (see Kramer; see also Ravenhill). People give their lives a safe and meaningful basis vis--vis their cultural and natural surroundings. When the contacts with the Europeans changed

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from neutral commercial exchange into colonial relations of power, this was a serious problem, and people went in search of reasonable explanations for the caprices of fate, such as its unfair distribution of wealth among humans. Ones own belief was not abandoned but adapted, and new symbolic forms were sought. One of the symbolic forms answering the why question was the verbal creation of an etiological myth; another was the material representation of colonials, turning them into ones own objects, and using the paraphernalia they had brought along for ones own benefit. Psychologically speaking, it is always important to be in charge, to be the subject of power and thus to be able to control the behavior of others. And this is what happened: European power and behavior were observed, commented upon, processed, digested, and appropriated. They were integrated in the local cultures, in the material arts, in theatrical performance, in poetry and narrative, in oral and written communication. Changes in the existing social order involve tensions, social uneasiness, and controversies. The European presence was imagined by means of its own signs of power and prestige: guns, for example, instead of bows and arrows, which had become useless. New realities had to be represented by new commodities needed by their owners to cope with the changes. Thus, the attributes of the new authorities were symbolically adapted to the needs of the users who wanted them to serve their own social power and prestige. Although the colonials, their goods, and their African accomplices disturbed the existing orderas many novels about colonial times have made clearthere was also something curiously intriguing about them. It simply seemed unwise to exclude them, and therefore they were accommodated. There were all sorts of motifs behind the representation of Europeans in the arts: there was artistic curiosity as well as pragmatic purposes, such as their serving as figures of fun or as icons of authority (Picton 27): the representation of a European may not be the representation of a European at all, but the appropriation of the image: the representation of Igbo deities as Europeans...would be a case in point..Indeed, the appropriation of the European as ready-made up-dated image of the authority of gods and of men could be said to work precisely because it was taken for granted that the authority represented in these images was not located in Europeans themselves. On the other hand, the representation of the authority of Europeans for what it is in itself seems always to have been a subject for a ridicule that was subversive of that authority. (26) Among Pictons examples are Queen Elisabeth and Prince Philip dancing together among the cast of comic characters in the Yoruba alarinjo theater (27). The idea that the main purpose of the colons would be to solve tensions and quarrels, to heal the traumas, and to be in control (see Norris and also Chesi) is not necessarily shared by all researchers. It seems therefore wise, as Clementine Deliss argues, not to generalize about these images, and therefore to accept the possibility of variation in functions and meanings,

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thereby suspending the notion of a single validating rationalization which amounts to the real reason for their existence. It then becomes possible to view these objects as participatory elements in a trade of identities (15). And, of course, identities are never static. The origin myth had an etiological function, explaining how the problem of difference had emerged and why right from the beginning life had to become difficult, as it has been since. The colonial situation, the resulting debate, and the solutions sought led to other symbolic forms in art and literature. The colons are just one example of how people developed helpful political strategies and manipulated the colonial reality to make the best of life given the circumstances. In the process of representing the colonial impact on African arts and narratives, there are certainly more complexities than easy similarities to be noticed. Still, a comparison has the advantage of mapping out the various genres in which people negotiated with Europes colonial presence. Our examples derive only from two genres that still need to be further explored. Nevertheless, a few modest observations can be made. First, if we look at the rich variety of verbal and material forms of digestion in Africa itself, we will have to limit ourselves here to the two genres discussed earlier: creation myths and colon sculptures. Both relate to mutual influences and relations between Africans and Europeans and both seem to have become popular around the early beginnings of colonial times, although they had already been exchanged between sailors and local people from as far back as the fifteenth century, for example in the Afro-Portuguese ivory carvings (see Burland and Forman; see also Bassani and Fagg). As for the functions of the origin myth and the sculptures concerned, there are mainly important differences: the message of fatality and inequality emphasized in a large number of origin myths has been turned into meaningful ways of appropriating power and prestige symbols in the colon sculptures: colons manipulate power relations in various ways according to peoples needs, which seems in complete contrast with the mythological representation of Africans as the passive fatal victims in an astonishing number of origin myths from many parts of Africa (see Grg-Karady). However, these functions might be considered complementary. A next point for comparison is the question of whether and how the myth and the wooden figures relate to their respective earlier formal traditions. The origin myth is a well-known oral genre, and the story of the origin of black and white people belongs to this category of myths. As for its motif and characters, the quoted story of Manicongo and Zonga, for example can be linked to the worldwide existing narrative of the two brothers, upon which it may have been grafted. In the plot of this tale, the younger brother is generally depicted as less prestigious and powerful but cleverer than the elder brother. It is a popular story frame in many cultures. In each culture where such an origin myth of black and white people exists, one might search for possible variants of the two brothers story and for the ways our origin myth relates to other narratives (and their functions) in

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contemporary society. Stories develop on the moving crossroads between past traditions and present situations. This holds no less true for the material arts, and the colons are a case in point: the prevailing formal conventions of the local tradition concerned are always the basis for the integration of new features or foreign elements. To illustrate this, I choose the Baule example of the blolo bian (see plates 3, 4, and 5). An old specimen (nineteenth-century) of such a carving that had belonged to the grandmother of the curator of the National Museum of Abidjan, Nguessan Kouassi, has no modern paraphernalia at all. The blolo bian represents the otherworld lover each woman used to have, while each man had his blolo bla in the otherworld. Such lovers can intervene in the lives of their earthly partners in the case of sexual or relational problems. The soothsayer is able to analyze these problems; he can decide whether the problem has been caused by the blolo bian or blolo bla. He can order them down to earth by means of a wooden sculpture that represents them. They are then made on the basis of the clients dreams in which the blolo is usually represented as an ideal, rich, beautiful, strong, powerful lover (see Girard and Kernel; see also Ravenhill). Colonization led to important changes in the Baule world, in Baule ideas about the otherworld (blolo), and in the related figurative art. According to Philip Ravenhill, the otherworld mates were now depicted with less scarification, with more clothing, and often in brighter hues achieved through the use of industrial paints rather than natural dyes (65). In an interview, a young woman of twenty-four told Eliane Girard et Brigitte Kernel about her lover in the hereafter: My blolo bian is very beautiful. He wears trousers a la mode and a jacket with short sleeves; he has beautiful hair, patent leather shoes, and a watch. I remember it was my grandmother who advised me to get my hereafter husband to come down to earth. In the beginning I laughed at the idea; now I believe in it: my blolo bian really is my hereafter husband. I sleep with him once a week (the night before the day that is especially dedicated to him, on which day he receives offerings), I speak to him every day, I ask him to intervene when I am in trouble, I give him food, flour, and eggs. He eats, for sure, even if some food is left in the plate. My husband does not like my paying attention to my blolo bian; he says its just legends. Not all blolo bians are as beautiful as mine is; sometimes it is just a simple piece of painted wood. (64-65; my trans.) Over the years, blolo bian and blolo bla have acquired new looks and appropriated all sorts of new commoditiesfor the men: uniforms, suits, ties, football shirts and shorts, watches; for the women: necklaces, European dresses, bras, shoes with high heels, handbags, etc. However, they continue to have Baule features as well, such as elaborate hairdos. The relation of the representation to what it represents as a process may provide some insight into the complex links between the verbal and the visual things we are studying. And there is, as Ravenhill has observed, a common imagining going on at several levels, in the first place between

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client and patron, but also between buyers and sellers. In his view, the clothed modern Baule blolo is also the model that through outsiders perception has been reinvented as the colon: the differences are less those of essence than of the imaginings occasioned by the object and the narratives generated around the object (80). Outsiders can also appropriate it as a souvenir: the function of an object always depends on the narrative attached to it, either by the artist or by the owner. It is always a matter of relations. Representation as a process does not guarantee any fixed directionality, but on the contrary, as will be seen shortly in the case of Chri Samba, it suggests an inherently unstable, reversible, and dialectical structure (Mitchell 420). Although they all resulted from European expansion and colonization, the overall processes of digesting Africa for European artists and digesting Europe for African artists can only be linked by dissimilarities in impact and power. The earlier used metaphor of the moving crossroads of peoples past traditions and present experiences in the process of representation also holds for the globalizing art of painting. We started our discussion with European primitivists and Picassos crucial visit to the Trocadro Museum. Gauguin was the first who left Europe for the world of the primitives in a time when African sculptures and masks began to appear on the European market. Europeans met with African art objects but not with their makers whom they ignored and who were often less known in Europe than the antique dealers who sold their works. Contemporary artists and writers from Africa are regularly invited to visit the West and their experiences inspire them in many ways. One of the artists who critically imagines his global perspective on the world is the Congolese painter Chri Samba, who emphasizes that he paints for Africans and Europeans, and yes, in fact for the whole of humanity. Sambas paintings are also narratives. He paints European scenes from his own perspective, for example, in his painting Paris est propre where a woman and a man are letting out their dogs against the background of the Eiffel tower, while on the foreground three African migrant workers with brooms and water are cleaning the street removing the smelly dog shit. The text underneath says: Paris is clean thanks to us, the immigrs who do not like dogs urine and shit (my transl.). For Samba, Europe and Africa are both objects he imagines. He refuses to take any lessons from European art critics. He no more takes into account European ideas about art than did the Western avant-garde at the beginning of the twentieth century as far as African ideas about their own art were concerned. Often Samba himself figures as a character in his own paintings and presents himself as an observer of his surroundings, whether it is the global problem of AIDS or, as in the diptych Aroport frontire,which explains the difference in power between an African trying to enter a European country (invoking Allah) and the European visiting an African country (bribing the military police). Samba is a chroniqueur involved in a huge project of autobio- and autopictography. A striking example is his painting Homage to the ancient creators (1994) in which he pays a visit to an

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anthropological museum in Zurich where he finds in the basement a large number of African objects (masks, sculptures, textiles) of excellent quality (see plate 13). His reactionas he explains in the margin of the painting is significant: I felt as if some of those objects caused frictions on my body (me faisaient des frictions au corps). This convinced me that these objects still possessed their supernatural powers, and that they were authentic ones. . . . I was amazed to hear that Mr. Coray, who had mounted this impressive collection, had never been to Africa where the works of his collection had come from, to meet with the creators to whom I pay my homage. (my trans.) Ironically the responsible director for the collection told him that he wanted to make up for the museum peoples ignorance in the past by inviting some contemporary African artists who would incarnate the value of the ancient artists in the present. Thus the circle of history since Picassos illuminating visit to the Trocadro closes: Samba takes over and continues to write and paint the story where Picasso left it. It is now his turn to appropriate Picassos legacy as well as the art of his own ancestors. On the painting there is his autoportrait at the center, against a window with a view of a very blue sky; at the table in front of him, a number of the authentic objects are presented, mostly resembling Kuba sculptures and a bead mask. According to Samba there are two kinds of art works, as he states in an interview in Chri Samba, a Retrospective (1984): There are those that I cant evaluate, because they mean nothing to me; and then there are others that strike a chord. In the West you often hear about artists who paint without having any clear idea about what they want to say. They paint just to be painting. Theyre expressing themselves, whatever that means. Personally I am interested in expressing ideas. . . . In Ostende there was a journalist who asked whether it bothered me to know that Western artists have abandoned my style of painting. My answer was blunt. If Western painters have stopped telling stories, the reason may be that they have run out of ideas! (12, trans. Charles Lynn Clark) Differences as well as similarities between verbal and visual forms of expression are equally significant for their respective artistic forms and social functions. As for the question What difference do the differences (and similarities) make? (Mitchell 91), it needs to be further explored in the interdisciplinary field of verbal and visual realities and imagined worlds.

WORKS CITED
Bassani, Ezio, and William B. Fagg. Africa and the Renaissance: Art in Ivory. New York: The Center for African Art; Munich: Prestel, 1988. Burland, Cottie A., and Werner Forman. So sahen sie uns. Das Bild der Weissen in der Kunst der farbigen Vlken. Vienna: Verlag Anton Schroll, 1968.

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Chri Samba. A Retrospective. (Catalogue of the Exhibition at PMMK in Ostende, Belgium, and ICA in London) 1991. Chesi, Gert. Voodoo. Jahn 241-320. Deliss, Clementine. Cultures, Objects, Identities. Exotic Europeans: An Exhibition organised by Roger Malbert. London: The South Bank Centre, 1991. 7-24. Grg-Karady, Veronika. Noirs et Blancs. Leur image dans la littrature orale africaine. Paris: Slaf, 1976. Girard, Eliane, and Brigitte Kernel. Colons: Statuettes habilles dAfrique de lOuest. Paris: Syros Alternatives, 1993. Jahn, Jens, ed. Colon. Das Schwarze Bild vom weissen Mann. Mnchen: Rogner and Bernhard, 1983. Kane, Sadou. Where Are the Good Children of Zonga and Manicongo? ViceVersa Nov. 1995: 12. Kramer, Fritz. Die Fremdheit afrikanischer Colon-Figuren. Jahn 205-16. Mitchell, W. J. T. Picture Theory. Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1994. Norris, Edward Graham. Colon im Kontext. Jahn 13-64. Obeyesekere, Gananath. The Work of Culture. Symbolic Transformation in Psychoanalysis and Anthropology. Chicago: The U of Chicago P, 1990. Picton, John. Nigerian Images of Europeans: Commentary, Appropriation, Subversion. Exotic Europeans: An Exhibition Organised by Roger Malbert. London: The South Bank Centre, 1991. 25-27. Ratzel, Friedrich. Vlkerkunde. Vol. 1. Die Naturvlker Afrikas. Leipzig: Verlag des Bibliographischen Institut, 1885. Ravenhill, Philip L. Dreams and Reverie. Images of Otherworld Mates among the Baule, West Africa. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution P, 1996. Rhodes, Colin. Primitivism and Modern Ar t. London: Thames and Hudson, 1994. Rubin, William, ed. Primitivism in 20th Century Art. Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern. 2 vols. New York: The Museum of Modern Art, 1984. Schipper, Mineke. Imagining Insiders. Africa and the Question of Belonging. London: Cassell Academic, 1999. Werewere-Liking. Statues colons: Statuettes peintes dAfrique de lOuest. Dakar: NEAARHIS, 1987.