African wave: specificity and cosmopolitanism in African comics

While most people consider painting, novels, and film to be universal formats of artistic expression, for the combination of graphic image and narrative they commonly use expressions tied to geography, like "Japanese manga," "American comics" "French-Belgian BD"--and now "African comics." Yet "African comics" as a homogenous entity probably does not exist. It is perhaps more accurate to speak of "comics from Africa," interest in which has taken concrete form in various exhibitions and international festivals, (1) as well as in the publication of comics albums and academic research, to which I have personally contributed.

AFRICAN 'LIGNE CLAIRE'

Non-African readers easily make stereotyped assumptions about African comics because too often their storylines and drawings rely on stock characters and recurrent themes, such as witchcraft. In this way, they also contain references that are easy for readers, lay and academic, to identify and store.

These artists are attracted by the language of European comics, (2) and this influence can be seen in their detailed realism and use of all the forms of ligne claire, the style of drawing with clear, strong lines of equal thickness and importance pioneered by the Belgian comics artist Herge. However, there is not always a strict correspondence between an artistic "school" originating in a colonizing nation (Franco-Belgian BD, American comics, British cartooning, Japanese manga) and the comics in its former colonies. For example, in Safari ya anga za juu (Figs. 1-2), the Kenyan Anthony Mwangi cites the Belgian comics artist Herge, the creator of Tintin and On a marche sur la Lune, and Gado, who was born in Dar-es-Salaam, takes up the line of Frenchman Albert Uderzo, creator of Asterix, in his Abunawasi (Fig. 3). In Reunion, David Bello looks to the Japanese manga tradition when he deconstructs movement in several consecutive vignettes in Elize ou les Machins Bleus.

[FIGURES 1-3 OMITTED]

What we see here is the creolization of comics, a phenomenon in which the mass media have played an essential role. Creolized culture implies mutual exchange and transfer, a flow of meanings in continuous movement, breaking up old relations and setting up new connections (Hannerz 1987, 1996). This exchange has nothing to do with Western colonialism, with unidirectional cultural influence imposed on the colonized subject to the point of provoking either unconditioned adhesion or rejection. It is more a relationship between, on the one hand, the comics created in a large-scale process in industrialized countries (America, Japan, Europe) that tend to be conceived for and read by a "globalized" audience, and on the other hand, African authors who change styles, acquire different knowledge, and make creative contributions to their societies that are richer than the local cultures in which they originated.

More versatile than its European counterpart, the African comic is paradoxically both (in Walter Benjamin's words) art "in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" because it is serialized and printed in newspapers and books, and a cottage industry which exists in the market of large-scale distribution because its horizontal integration (creativity-production-publishing) is very often managed, with great difficulty, by the artists themselves. African comics artists take advantage of international interest in art and Africa to make intrusions into the publishing world of the West and are in turn exploited by cultural operators who are not African. Their work lives in a difficult context whose hopes and fears it reflects, but the beauty of the drawing precludes excessive aggression toward the reader--which is no surprise.

Like the age in which it lives, the African comic is divided, shattered, and multiple. Although Africa is still very much tied to its own cultural traditions, its comics did not arise out of collectively preserved local memory but are part of the global flux of ideas and images in a world undergoing rapid changes, where new consumer objects come into existence and new cultural debts and credits are contracted, where relations are volatile and voices overlap. For example, the Congolese Barly Baruti sets his Mandrill series in 1950s France (Figs. 4-5), while the Frenchman lean Philippe Stassen depicts the Rwandan genocide in Deogratias; Frenchman P'tiluc edits a collective album with the Congolese artists Al'Mata, Pat Mombili, and others; while Congolese Eric Salla sets his stories in France and depicts them with meticulous realism, drawing on cuttings from magazines sent by post to him in Kinshasa. Tanzanian artists Godfrey Mwampembwa has made a animated cartoon for MTV, and the Congolese artist Pat Masioni has published an album in Flemish about the Plains Indians. Mauritius comics author Man Keong Laval NG drew a medieval saga, La ballade au bout du monde: Les pierres levees, and Li-An (Reunion) has started Le Cycle de Tschai, a series based on the oeuvre of the fantasy and space opera novelist lack Vance. Transcontinental exchanges inspire common artistic paths: African cartoonists have collaborated with European scenarists--Baruti with the French writer Franck Giroud; Hissa Nsoli with Patrick de Meersman; Pat Masioni with Cecile Grenier; Hallain Paluku with Benoit Riviere; Li-An with JeanDavid Morvan--and African scenarists with European cartoonists--Ngalle Edimo with Sandrine Martin; Marguerite Abouet with Clement Oubrerie; Yvan Algabe with Olivier Bramanti.