African creation myths as political strategy

African Arts, Spring, 2004 by Suzanne Preston Blier

Creation myths reflect the unique contexts of their inception, revelation, and later ritual, serial, or political practice. Those myths complementing the handsome artworks from Africa displayed in "Genesis: Ideas of Origin in African Sculpture" are subject to multiple and often competing readings, and it is not surprising that some of the most heated debates with regard to African art history have centered on the interpretation of certain of these accounts. For example, the French school scholarship of the ethnographer Marcel Griaule oil the Dogon (1965) has been contested by scholars as diverse as the American literary theorist James Clifford (1988) and the Dutch anthropologist Walter van Beek (1991, 2001). The Belgian anthropologist Luc de Heusch (1982) and the Dutch American historian Jan Vansina (1978, 1983) sharply disagree about whether Kuba genesis accounts can (and should) be understood as classic (ahistorical) creation narratives that can be analyzed in Structuralist terms, or whether instead they should be viewed as historical documents containing vital details of the Kuba past.

These and other such disputes have been the focus of a significant number of scholarly articles, and the charges leveled by one side against the other suggest just how contentious these issues inherently are. Similar passionate debate of course characterizes discussions of many texts concerned with genesis--the Bible being a primary example. In this article I explore the competing strategies at play in coming to understand the creation accounts and related arts of the Dogon, Batammaliba, Kuba, and Bamana, and of the ancient culture of life.

Dogon Scholarship, Social Change, and the Invention of Origin

Artworks of the Dogon people of Malt reveal the unique ways in which scholarly approaches complicate ideas of genesis myths. The rich Dogon myths of origin collected and elaborated by the French ethnographers Marcel Griaule and Germaine Dieterlen (Griaule 1965; Griaule & Dieterlen 1965)--accounts of Nommo (pseudo humans in the form of serpents), celestial theft, defilement--are now all too familiar elements of the general understanding of Dogon artistic form and meaning. The early reading of the seated Dogon figural pair now at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as a "primordial couple" (Laude 1973: fig. 37; Fraser 1974:13-21) exemplifies this approach (Fig. 1). Many other sculptures were assumed to reference the Dogon mythic world or its aftermath. In the depiction of two seated balafon players (Fig. 2), features of twinning and androgyny (breasts and beards) historically have been seen to be important Dogon genesis motifs. The musical instrument was also linked to complementary ideas such as nyama (life force), the primacy of the fertilizing word, and connections between sound and the organization of world principles (Klobe 1977:34-35).

[FIGURES 1-2 OMITTED]

More recently the validity of Griaule's and Dieterlen's accounts has been called into question. James Clifford has deconstructed this mythic paradigm (1988), suggesting that these narratives reflected, at least in part, French Surrealist interests of the era; Walter van Beck offers a quite different critique (1991, 20(11), namely that his own interviews with tire Dogon, some fifty years after those of Griaule, reveal little if any evidence of this mythic base. In his view, rather than being mythmakers, the Dugon carry an aura of groundedness and pragmatism. If there is a case to be made for the scholarly shaping of ethnographic subjects, the Dogon example expresses this in particularly striking ways.

The reception of Dogon art (and creation myths) in the West also is part of this story. In retrospect it seems clear that whatever its validity, Griaule's view of the Dogon as a peaceable place of mythic primacy offered a cogent counter model to the horrendous atrocities of World War II, which cut short Griaule's fieldwork period. So, too, the dominant mythic view of Dogon art promoted in various exhibitions and publications in the 1960s and early 1970s following Griaule's widely read works, especially his Conversations with Ogotemmeli (1965), coincided with the antiwar and back-to-the-earth movements in the United States and France. Dogon arts (and the creation accounts associated with them) spoke to Western audiences as vibrant exemplars of a better, more connected world. These stripped-down artistic forms, with their balanced horizontal and vertical elements, seemed both to reinforce this idea and to complement modernist aesthetics of the era.

It is not clear how any of the reaction in the West fits with the views of the Dogon themselves concerning their genesis narratives and arts, but understanding the political and historical situation of the Dogon offers an important lens into genesis ideation. As is now generally recognized, the Dogon did not arrive in the Bandiagara region as a unified cultural whole, but instead comprised multiple populations and migration flows--Gur, Mande, and other--each cultural substratum modifying the underlying matrix of the local setting (Huet 1994:48). Many of these diverse populations sought refuge in the remote Bandiagara escarpment as a result of the enormous violence and disruption promoted by the empire building that extended from the fourteenth to late nineteenth centuries involving the succeeding Mali, Songhai, Bamana, and Fulani states. One of the most difficult eras was that of the nineteenth-century Islamic Fulani emperor Seku Amadu, who forced many Dogon into servitude and slavery (Huet 1994:121; see also Blier 2003). That Van Beek found traditions very different from those recounted by Griaule may not be all that surprising.