St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Sunday, May 31, 1959
Impressions of African Art
Old And New Aspects Woven into the Common Life
By Donald Grant
PEOPLE PRESUME that the Garden of Eden was located somewhere be tween the Tigris and the Euphrates. The Arabians will show you a white-domed structure ou de Jedda in full confi-dence that it is the tomb of Eve. However, I have my own theory about these things: Life, I feel sure, was invented in Lagos.
How else do you account for the pulsating beat, the vital throb of this remarkable West African city?
One arises in the morning and looks out at the hot mists hanging over the mangrove swamps. Already the lovely little orange-headed lizards are scampering under foot. And already the people are about: their voices sing, their loose robes are of bright colors contrasting nicely with the dark shades of faces, arms, shoulders, legs and bare feet. Men are muscular and their white teeth gleam. To watch the women of Lagos walking with burdens balanced high on their heads, arms swinging to the rhythm of moving thighs, is to watch a ballet on a stage as broad as the horizon. Most of the women have babies strapped to their backs; a feeling for cadence begins young.
People walking, people on bicycles, people in old cars and trucks throng the streets, between rows of trading stalls where bright yard-goods hang. There are baskets of fish, beaded trinkets and mangoes. Life bubbles and bursts in laughter and sobs. Once I saw a motorcyclist take a nasty spill. The whole street full of people responded with a great moan of sympathy, like the cello section in a tragic passage of Beethoven.
THROUGH SUCH STREETS one moves away from the main road, to the studio of Felix Idubor, the brilliant young sculptor of Benin and Lagos, in Nigeria, and sometimes of London. Look around: There is poverty, here, and much wood-carving, a few bronzes newly cast, and a clay bust half-finished. covered with a wet rag. “Studio” is a misleading term. It is a hot little cubicle in the slums. Some of Idubor’s work is in process in a dusty hallway outside. Living quarters are in beyond the “studio,” through the limp curtains.
Here is Idubor himself, a lean muscle of a young man, just turned 30 years old. As a very small boy he made a carving tool from a six-inch nail and fashioned figures for the ju-ju shrines Benin. Then, for a time, he turned out the sort of things tourists buy. Finally someone managed a London show; when Idubor returned he was an artist, whatever that is.
“Now I look at a piece of wood.” he says, “and I decide what is in it: I try to free what I see from its prison-in the wood; the result is the wood-sculpture which you, too, may see.”
Some of Idubor’s wood carvings are still like ju-ju shrine figures. But some are light and soaring. All are full of the life of Lagos….He has been invited to West Germany to show his work; the Governor General of Nigeria has taken an interest in him, and he has been commissioned to decorate the doors of government buildings….
BEHIND IDUBOR is a very old art tradition of Africa: antique Benin bronzes grace the great collections. The Museum of Primitive Art in New York paid $56,000 for an old ivory mask from Benin last year.
With little benefit from publishers, television or the other machines of communication, the arts flourish in Africa. Storytellers amuse and horrify with their terrible tales. One may read poems, sensitive as a gazelle, telling of an African hope that machines to lighten the burdens of men and women may be introduced in Africa without bringing with them a dehumanizing force. There are African poems about love of nature and women. And political poems, sometimes bitter. High on the roof of Africa, at Addis Ababa, young students write verses praising a Coptic Christ.
Then there is music: In West Africa, the “High Life,” a kind of Jazz influencing and possibly influenced by music from Trinidad and Rio de Janeiro; at Johannesburg, incredibly complicated rhythms of gold mine drummers, pounded out with terrific energy, and one drummer can grasp the sticks from another to sustain the beat, without losing a stroke. Up where the Blue Nile and the White Niles meet, like the Mississippi and the Missouri at St. Louis-at Omdurman and Khartoum, the music has combined Arabic quarter-tones with African rhythms in something new, something sad and something fine.
DANCING CAN BE SEEN everywhere in Africa, in cabarets and cafes or just beside an oil lamp burning anywhere in the African night. I watched a crew digging a sewer in Johannesburg and they chanted in unison as their picks and shovels moved in a kind of a dance.
Africans communicate. The “talking drums” and the “bush telegraph” still speak. One can walk into one end of an “African location” in the unhappy colonial parts of East Africa and within minutes one’s presence, the nature of one’s errand and possibly the details of one’s life are all known everywhere there. Messages leap mountains and rivers. Africans seem always on the move, walking mile after mile; the human being is the basic unit of energy. As Africans walk over lonesome roads or narrow footpaths they carry messages, pass the word on, listen to the news of passing fellow travelers.
Non-Africans do not always understand what is being communicated. At the Sunday afternoon gold mine performances, outside “apartheid” Johannesburg, one hears defiance in the drums: the message sends a pulse through the watching Africans like the wind sweeping the veldt grass.
Even the silences of Africans can be eloquent. Africans can sit in a circle and quietly share a mood, of inner pain or love or fear….. This, too, is communication.
DISCUSSIONS OF AFRICAN influences on the painting of Pablo Picasso or the sculpture of Henry Moore; the similarity of art-forms in Africa, Bali and medieval Spain-such speculations may amuse Western intellectuals. But when death walks the streets of Leopoldville and the women mourn with a song, and their flailing arms beat a despairing dance, no intellectual analysis is needed to understand what is being expressed.
In Blantyre, the very presence of Rose Chibambo, the chairman of the women’s section of the Nyasaland African Congress, is an esthetic experience: she is pregnant, her feet are bare, on her handsome head is a scarlet kerchief. knotted high. Her face is a silent primer of patience, as she waits at once for the birth of her baby and for the colonial police to come and take her to jail….
Rose Chibambo had her baby, and only after that did the prison gates close her in. Life, I think, has first call in Africa-before politics; and even before art, though where one ends and the other begins is hard to say.
