African Art

In the great process of subtraction that has to take place if one wishes to delimit the sphere of African art, there will drop out then the broad areas transformed or influenced by Hamitic civilization: East Africa, including Abyssinia, which has had a special development (use of the plough, Christianity); the extreme south and south-west; the north with the Sahara and the adjoining saltpan to the south, and even large parts of the Sudan. In these northern regions the fate of art was eventually sealed once and for all by the influx of Islam with its hostility towards pictorial representations, an influx still continuing and advancing today.

All the same the social gradation revealed in African art is not excessively pronounced; it keeps itself within relatively narrow boundaries. The sumptuousness and formal richness of the objects varies rather from tribe to tribe than within the society, where as yet distinctions of class are only loosely present; varies too according to the nature or importance of an object or a class of objects.

It will be necessary to classify the overflowing mass of the country's artistic products, to group them, to dam in their multiplicity so that we shall not flounder in them. What suggests itself to us is to follow the actual division of the country by individual tribes and topographically homogeneous areas. The connoisseur of African art, particularly the collector, moves with the utmost confidence among an infinity of strange-sounding tribal names, which always convey perfectly clear stylistic ideas to him. There are indeed very marked tribal styles in Africa , so that a division by tribes offers itself very naturally. This procedure is thus the one followed in most accounts of Negro art. One of its advantages lies in its being so very safe, in that it deals with clearly defined factors. Justice is done to the multiplicity, and anyone who attaches great importance to universal stylistic principles may subsequently extract them by the comparative method.

The Ibo, Ibibio and Ijaw in south-east Nigeria clearly lead us to the tribes of the Cameroons . The Cameroons have their apex in the north on Lake Chad (an important excavation area for ancient African art) and touch in the south-west the Atlantic Coast . Artistically the most important region of the Cameroons is that of the savannah vegetation, the Grasslands of the Cameroons, with tribes like the Bamum, Bali, Bangwa, Tikar, Bafum, Bekom etc.; in the coastal district live the Duala, famous for the colourful prows of their boats; and in the Cross River area, towards Nigeria, the Ekoi.

The division of African cultures and African art by tribes occurs, one might say, on one level; it takes the continent as a flat structure with tribe ranged beside tribe, as a sort of bright mosaic of peoples, cultures and styles. More important is the division in depth, that is to say, by cultural levels, which of course presupposes a certain acquaintance with tribal styles and peculiarities. In the first part of this book we set forth the way in which several cultural layers had overlaid one another in Africa . The question now arises whether this cultural-layer structure is also visible in art, whether there is any particular structure of artistic attitudes corresponding to it. Purely theoretically one is immediately inclined to answer in the affirmative, since it can scarcely be otherwise; but in practice difficulties arise at every step. The basic cultural ground of African art is that from a primitive peasant civilization without any higher social or political forms to the highly feudal Negro Kingdoms.

Another extremely confusing fact is that the less highly developed is not earlier in time than the more highly developed, but later, and that the traditional link between old and new is nearly everywhere disturbingly broken. All origins lie shrouded in obscurity: the climate and the termites have taken care of that; this is true both of the origins of old African art and of the new.