4
Art et politique en Afrique Noire/Art and Politics in Black Africa by Bogumil Jewsiewicki Review by: Mary Jo Arnoldi Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines, Vol. 25, No. 3 (1991), pp. 505-507 Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Canadian Association of African Studies Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/485999 . Accessed: 17/06/2014 22:44 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp . JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. . Taylor & Francis, Ltd. and Canadian Association of African Studies are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 185.2.32.89 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 22:44:35 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

Art et politique en Afrique Noire/Art and Politics in Black Africaby Bogumil Jewsiewicki

Embed Size (px)

Citation preview

Art et politique en Afrique Noire/Art and Politics in Black Africa by Bogumil JewsiewickiReview by: Mary Jo ArnoldiCanadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines, Vol. 25, No. 3(1991), pp. 505-507Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd. on behalf of the Canadian Association of African StudiesStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/485999 .

Accessed: 17/06/2014 22:44

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

.JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

.

Taylor & Francis, Ltd. and Canadian Association of African Studies are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,preserve and extend access to Canadian Journal of African Studies / Revue Canadienne des Études Africaines.

http://www.jstor.org

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.89 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 22:44:35 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

505 Book Reviews / Comptes rendus

situation actuelle au Zaire. On decouvre dans ce livre que ce sont en fait les revendications des travailleurs qui avaient servi de plate-forme aux programmes et ambitions politiques des "6volues" qui constitueront jusqu'A ce jour, on le sait, la nouvelle classe dirigeante du pays. Le fait que celle-ci ait par la suite non seulement tourn6 le dos aux travailleurs et paysans mais bien plus les ait exploites et appauvris expliquerait la grave frustration de ces derniers et la

rupture actuelle entre les gouvernants et les gouvernes. Mais comment, doit-on se demander, expliquer que ces travailleurs dont les revendica-

tions ont permis de generer la nouvelle classe dirigeante et de briser le joug colonial ne soient

plus capables de s'en sortir avec le joug dictatorial et impbrialiste depuis plus de 25 ann6es?

L'ouvrage de Higginson permet certes de voir combien les dirigeants actuels recourent aux m'thodes coloniales pour asseoir leur pouvoir et 6touffer la conscience des masses: appau- vrissement g6neralis6, sous-information, "diviser pour mieux r6gner," clienttlisme poli- tique, abrutissement a travers la bikre, la musique, etc. Mais cela suffit-il pour comprendre cette paralysie collective du peuple za''rois? Telle est la question que se posent ceux qui peu- vent encore r6flechir dans ce pays. Elle interpelle les chercheurs africains et africanistes.

Mumpasi Lututala

Dipartement de dimographie Universitr de Kinshasa

Bogumil Jewsiewicki, ed. Art et politique en Afrique Noire /Art and Politics in Black

Africa. Quebec: Association canadienne des etudes africaines / Canadian Association of African Studies and SAFI, 1989.

In the introduction to this volume, Bogumil Jewsiewicki discusses the convergence of a num- ber of major theories and perspectives in the study of art, history, and society which have

shaped the contributions. First, a growing number of historians and social scientists are join- ing art historians in looking anew at the arts and the material culture of Africa, and particu- larly the role that material experience plays, not only in economic and aesthetic realms, but in

political and social practices as well. This convergence shifts the focus away from the study of isolated structures, objects or

texts, towards theoretical and methodological approaches which privilege process, social

practices, and human agency. These processes and practices are explicitly viewed as histori- cal phenomena, existing at a particular time. The concern in each essay is to understand the

dynamic relationship between structure and practice, and the role which the visual arts

(paintings, sculptures, postcards, and book illustrations) play in the reproduction and trans- formation of society. A second, equally important, dimension of this movement within West- ern scholarship at large, and in Africanist scholarship in particular, is a new self-reflexivity about the scholarly enterprise and a growing awareness of the history of the West's "invention of Africa" as the "Other."

Contributors include anthropologists, historians and a linguist. The first two essays by anthropologists Christraud Geary and Marie-Claude Dupr6 are excellent case studies of the role which "traditional" art forms played in political processes in the Cameroon Grassfields

kingdoms and among the Tsaayi of Zaire. Geary's essay clearly demonstrates how a proces- sual perspective, rather than a static functionalist approach towards the employment and

deployment of art and of artists results in a more dynamic and subtle picture of the ways in which art was manipulated as a political strategy in Bamun and Bali-Nyonga during the pre- colonial and early colonial period. Dupr6's analysis of the Tsaayi idumu mask embeds the

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.89 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 22:44:35 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

506 CJAS / RCEA 25:3 1991

structural analysis of the mask and its internal signs in historical processes and in social prac- tices. She first examines the mask's form and its graphics as the material representation of the basic bipolarity which organizes Taasyi social and political institutions. She then demon- strates in convincing ways how this bi-polarity emerges in practice and how it has been mani- pulated and transformed by different subsections of the population at different times.

Ed Alpers, a historian, cuts a wider swath, examining the historical role which a variety of "traditional" and "commercial" art forms played in Mozambique during the colonial period and the liberation struggle. His analysis focuses on the specific ways in which different art objects were used as both social commentary and as modes of resistance to colonial domina- tion. Most interesting is his discussion of the process by which the "unofficial" ideology expressed through paintings and sculpture made by artists during the liberation struggle was consciously transformed and incorporated into the "official" ideology of the post-colonial state.

T.K. Biaya, a psycho-linguist, examines three themes in popular Zairian painting which emerged from 1970 to 1985 and which constitute a historical discourse about the changing socio-political situation in Zaire from the perspective of the dominated class. He locates the production and consumption of these paintings within the everyday experience of this class in urban Zaire. His analysis of the paintings defines collective memory as a vehicle for popu- lar thought and ethnicity as a practice which is manipulated both by the dominant and dom- inated classes. He strongly suggests that the future of Zairian studies must seriously address this popular consciousness.

The final essay by the historian Jacques Marseille shifts the focus of discussion from art objects created and used in Africa to an examination of the conscious manipulation of popu- lar images, engravings and postcards in the "invention of Africa" in France during the colo- nial period. His essay outlines the main themes which were exploited in colonial propaganda and he discusses the various categories of images and their interpretations published in pop- ular books and educational texts. One of the most interesting examples is a powerful series of four photographs which celebrated France's role as the "civilizer" of its African colonies. The photographs were exhibited at the Exposition coloniale of 1931. In the first photograph, a young boy is shown wearing minimum clothing, with a local teacher who is also nearly nude. The second photograph shows the same boy wearing more clothing at a colonial primary school. The third photograph shows the boy wearing a full boubou at a professional school, and the final photograph in the series finds him dressed in European shirt and trousers at a professional college. The visual transformation from "savage" to "civilized" expressed through the idiom of clothing from a state of semi-undress popularly associated with black Africa, through the donning of the "Arab" boubou to the adoption of the European mode of shirt and trousers could not have been missed by visitors.

In all of the essays the visual arts are shown to be powerful agents and central to the con- stitution of political experience. The volume strikes a nice balance between essays which address the relationship between art and politics in pre-colonial, colonial and post-colonial settings both within Africa and in Europe. The notion of politics is expansive and focuses not only on official institutions and elites, but on popular consciousness and the marginalized. All of the essays situate the creative act, its products and transformations within specific times and places, and they also examine specific political strategies and processes within which these art objects play a critical role. My only criticism is that for the most part the authors failed to come to terms with the aesthetic dimensions of art, images, and artistry and

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.89 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 22:44:35 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

507 Book Reviews / Comptes rendus

their power to invoke mood and tone in shaping social and political experiences. Yet despite these failings, this is an important and timely volume. Its interdisciplinary approach is excit-

ing and has resulted in new insights and suggests directions which will surely be influential in

shaping future research on African arts.

Mary Jo Arnoldi

Department ofAnthropology Smithsonian Institution

Washington, DC

Ruohei Kagaya. A Classified Vocabulary of the Pare Language. Tokyo: Institute for the Study of Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa, 1989. 179 pp. Bantu

Vocabulary Series 6.

Some 120 languages, ninety percent of them Bantu, are spoken in Tanzania. Of many of these no description, old or new, exists. For a minority, perhaps twenty per cent, there is a

description or a descriptive grammar, but it often dates from the late nineteenth or early twentieth century. Most are in German, some in English. Recent work has been done on only a very few languages and consists most often of a detailed analysis of some component of the

language, not the whole system. At first sight, there is nothing alarming about all this. The most recently available figures

suggest that many of these languages are still spoken by healthy numbers of people. Closer

inspection reveals a different situation. Many are increasingly spoken by older and less edu- cated people, increasingly used as a second language, and increasingly infiltrated by Swahili. While no one denies the obvious political need for, and role of, the national language, this is a sad situation. Sad for Tanzania, because these languages are a vital part of its heritage. Sad in

general, because they represent considerable genetic diversity, which needs capturing before it vanishes.

A number of factors in the English-speaking academic world contributed to this situation

beginning in the mid-I96os. Up to the I96os, the undisputed centre of work on African lan-

guages was the School of Oriental and African Studies in the University of London, but its

output began to decline in that decade, and collapsed by I980. By the 1970s, the American universities which replaced it were not primarily interested in basic descriptive studies, but in

using African linguistic data for theoretical purposes. African scholars themselves might have been a potential source of new work, but in Tanzania the emphasis on nation-building and its

linguistic corollary, strengthening the national language, meant that until the late 1980s Tan- zanians could not do work on other vernaculars. Political change in Tanzania has led to a

loosening of such restrictions, and local scholars are now moving to fill the gap. A new source of scholarship on Bantu languages is Japan. The Institute for the Study of

Languages and Cultures of Asia and Africa at Tokyo University publishes a series on Bantu to which this volume belongs.

The title of this book does not reflect fully its contents, for one third of the book, in fact, consists of an outline of the grammar of (South) Pare, two thirds of a classified lexicon. The lexicon contains about 2400 entries (including a few unspecified variants), plus over one hundred other dialect variants. Each entry consists of the Pare item, with English and "Zan- zibar" (= Standard) Swahili equivalents, and the plural form for nouns. The whole is

arranged into twenty-two categories and eighty-two subcategories (following a system set

This content downloaded from 185.2.32.89 on Tue, 17 Jun 2014 22:44:35 PMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions