Bridging the Gap The Postwar Era and the Significance of John Biggers’s Ananse

Bridging the Gap

The Postwar Era and the Significance of John Biggers’s Ananse

Alain Locke’s The Legacy of Ancestral Arts (1925), a clarion call “to connect African art to African American modernists”; Sargent Johnson’s copper masks from the 1930s, “the most dramatic early use of African artistic language”; and other seminal works by Aaron Douglas, Loïs Mailou Jones, Richmond Barthé, and Hale Woodruff, to name a few, variously illustrate the influence and allure of Africa for African American artists in the early part of the twentieth century. Despite such well-documented activities, in the postwar era Western art’s “debt” to African art remained doggedly garrisoned by Eurocentrism, with the museum and white avant-garde being de facto gatekeepers. Notwithstanding resultant (racially) bifurcated art historical narratives, as Tobias Wofford succinctly put it, the “epiphanies brought on by encounters with non-Western art in museums and marketplaces” were experiences shared by African Americans and European artists alike. In essence, regardless of their race and even their motivations, artists were largely influenced by African art and artifacts without recourse to actual lived experience on the continent. Within this context, John Biggers’s publication Ananse: The Web of Life in Africa assumes great significance. The result of a six-month research trip to West Africa in 1957, funded by the United Nations Educational Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO), Biggers’s “epiphany” enabled him to express what his contemporaries could not […]

[…] Biggers arrived in Ghana (formerly Gold Coast) in July 1957, shortly after the country gained independence from Britain. Born in Gastonia, North Carolina, in 1925, a man from the South, he left behind a nation increasingly fractured and in many ways bewildered by its own racially motivated obstinance, yet to suffer the ignominy at Little Rock Central High School, Arkansas. While the United States contended with an emergent civil rights movement led by Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., in Africa, European rule increasingly faced the force of anticolonialists.

[…] Despite allying with Britain in World War II just a few years earlier, by the early 1950s the United States began endorsing those who stood firmly against British imperialism. In 1953, four years before Ghana’s independence, Time magazine ran a cover feature titled Gold Coast’s Kwame Nkrumah in the Dark Continent, Dawn’s Early Light? Enthusiastic support for this new “early light” continued with coverage of Ghana’s momentous independence, which was widely reported across the United States. The Black-owned Pittsburgh Courier celebrated by publishing a “Ghana Salute Supplement” and ran the headlines “New African Nation Born” and “The Courier Salutes Ghana.” The front cover editorial declared “the significance to American Negroes is more than the extension of a greeting or the hand of welcome. This is because the ancient empire of Ghana was the land of the forefathers of most American Negroes.” Heralding a new era for the continent under the stewardship of the self-anointed “Osagyefo,” Pan-Africanism brought new optimism and allure to Africa.  In 1959, Time featured on its cover Ahmed Sékou Touré, Guinea’s first postcolonial president, under the heading “Black Africa: The Dawn of Self Rule.” Touré embarked on a celebrated visit to the United States in 1958 shortly after becoming Guinea’s president, following the end of French rule. He was also portrayed on the cover of Ebony magazine with his wife, Hajia Andrée Touré, next to the headline “African Leader Visits the South.” His visit began in North Carolina, described as “one of the more advanced of the southern states.” This unequivocal embrace of incumbent African leaders (including those with discernably Marxist leanings) by US government and media alike stood in stark contrast to America’s own racial realities such as Montgomery bus boycotts, the aftermath of Emmett Till’s brutal murder, Greensboro counter sit-ins, and so on. In Africa, decolonization was in its infancy as countries north, south, east, and west were edging toward postcolonial rule, sometimes peacefully but often violently.

Examples of African anticolonial campaigns characterized by pronounced or escalated violence included the suppression of Mau Mau in British Kenya, the Algerian War of Independence against French domination, and the emergent Portuguese Colonial War. Where legalized segregation in the United States was arguably moribund, its South African doppelgänger, apartheid, was in its infancy. The Sharpeville massacre in 1960 was a stark and bloody consequence of Black South African resistance. Despite coinciding with a politically and racially volatile transatlantic postwar era, Ananse elided visual reference to what were often the traumatic realities of civil rights and anticolonial movements. Through dreamlike evocations, graceful depictions of everyday life, and sublime portraiture, Biggers’s expressed an alternative view of humanity, one not beholden to contemporary forces of abjection and racial inequality but propelled by what he vigorously described as an “all-consuming urge that constantly burns within me to be able to bring out into the light for everyone what is good, what is true, what is meaningful and what may not yet be known, so that I may make my own contribution to the art and history of the negro.” Titles such as Yoruba Shrine (1957), Returning Home (1957), Fishermen’s Village (1962), Cassava Study, Laughing Girl, Three Kings (1962), and His Highness the Timi of Ede (1962) reflect Biggers’s realist approach. These drawings do not have the explicit visual fusion of American and African symbolism found in Biggers’s later work. Nevertheless, in multiple ways Biggers found commonality between the Africa he experienced and the America in which he lived.

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