Re-Framing Africa

…Reading the Contemporary brings together twenty-two essays and articles from numerous art magazines and journals, written between 1991-97. Divided into four sections –‘Theory and Cultural Transaction’, ‘History’,  ‘Location and Practice’ and ‘Negotiated Identities’ – the collection, as the editors explain, represents a body of critical thought that ‘ challenge[s] the containment of Africa as a monolithic entity’. Dealing with art history, anthropology, primitivism, Eurocentrism, African cinema and, at its heart, contemporary visual arts practice, contributors such as Kwame Anthony Appiah, Laura Mulvey, Everlyn Nicodemus and John Picton testify to the authority of this anthology. If Reading the Contemporary is a challenge to traditional readings of African art history, why is this significant and where might it be taking us?  

From  art history syllabuses to anthropology, African art has commonly been subjected to the reductive and even derisory interpretation of western academia. In fact, if I cast my mind back to the college library, innumerable studies about ‘ancient Africa’ or 'primitive art in Africa’ commonly outnumbered contemporary material on the subject. Books on the 1940s and 1950s photography of Seydou Keita and Mama Casset were not available. More common, however, were the traditional texts which have so dogged African art and culture. Africa, it seemed, was imagined as one coherent land mass, distinctions between Arab Africa or Sub Saharan Africa, or rural and cosmopolitan life, Black, White or Asian experience, all of which would complicate this image, were rendered invisible. 

Geoffrey Parrinder’s African Mythology (Paul Hamlyn, London, 1967), although more than thirty years old, is typical of this mind set. Through the ‘exploration’ of the mysteriousness of African art such books habitually enacted a [patho]logical subjugation of the subject. In his introduction, Parrinder assures us that, ‘In this century appreciation of the power of much African has been given by artists such as Jacob Epstein and Henry Moore, and our own art has been influenced by it. African art is not often photographic.’ Paradoxically, the obsession with producing a mythological Africa illustrated an amnesia vis-á-vis European domination which had demonised and destroyed the very histories and cultures now valorised in these texts. Parrinder continues: ‘There are still races of Pygmies and Bushmen surviving from ancient times. And behind modern political doctrines there are countless myths and stories which form part of the background to the thinking of African peoples’ (my emphasis). Ironically, it was during the 1960s, when many African countries were decolonising and Africa became the cold war battleground for Marxist and capitalist ideology that the past became the focus of western valorisation… 

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