Genesis: ideas of origin in African sculpture - Exhibition Preview

African Arts, Autumn, 2002 by Alisa LaGamma

"... a fortunate blend of myth and history, penetrates even deeper into that area of man's cosmogonic hunger, one which leads him to the profounder forms of art as retrieval vehicles for, or assertive links with, a lost sense of origin."

Wole Soyinka, Myth, Literature and the African World (1976:54)

In the beginning, there was Africa. It is the place where humankind began, between five and seven million years ago, and the drama of its development unfolded. Africa is also the fount of all artistic traditions. Until recently it was widely assumed that a "creative explosion" originated with the arrival of modern humans, Homo sapiens, in Europe approximately 40,000 years ago, about 60,000-110,000 years after they began their evolution in Africa. This long-held assumption has been disputed by new discoveries in South Africa, two hundred miles east of Cape Town. At the site of Blombos Cave, researchers have unearthed ochre engravings, finely made bone tools, and symmetrical stone spear points created more than 70,000 years ago. These aesthetic refinements served no utilitarian purpose. At present they are the earliest evidence of human creativity and the first known visual manifestations of abstract thought.

Blombos Cave at the southern tip of the continent and the Egyptian pyramids in the north represent a span of 5,000 miles and some 5,000 years about which little is known of the African traditions that have been formative of the world's art. We are obliged to deal with the tip of the iceberg, as our knowledge of the continent derives from some archaeological sites and several centuries of historical contact with the Western and Islamic worlds. The exhibition "Genesis" explores beliefs of origin as they are embodied in African sculpture. The examples on display make manifest the traditions that are the foundation of conceptions of origin and have profoundly informed a people's sense of identity.

The Greeks gave Western civilization the word most closely associated with Judeo-Christian concepts of the origin of the world: "genesis," derived from genesis kosmou, or "origin of the cosmos." All human societies define their identity through accounts of their origin that interweave elements of spiritual belief, myth, and historical fact. These accounts are invariably related to contemporary experience and circumstances. A people's aspirations concerning their place in the world develop out of such an understanding of their past. The historian Jan Vansina has noted that a worldview "is a representation of ultimate reality in all its aspects, visible and invisible" (1985:133). As such it is often intuitive to its proponents but difficult for outsiders to comprehend. Vansina suggests that one key to grasping a culture's worldview is to examine its religious system and its traditions of origin--"how the world began, how people were created, and how they became as they are now." These "mythical charters" complement the social structure that is in place, but they are subject to continual revision. They have in turn inspired visual forms of expression that are among the most celebrated monuments in the history of art.

How did the world begin? What is our ancestry? What is the source of agriculture, of kingship, of other societal institutions? African cultures have sought to provide answers to these questions through elaborate, interwoven traditions of oral history, poetry, and art. There is a danger of oversimplifying the 70,000 years of African art history and the thousands of distinct cultures found on the continent. Therefore, this exhibition includes an analysis of how artists in a broad spectrum of African cultures have interpreted ideas of origin and sought answers to questions central to their identities. Through comparative sculptures, the exhibition explores a range of cultural perspectives and their related local traditions. These outstanding artistic achievements serve as visual documents for considering several aspects of genesis and origins: theories about the creation of humankind; the source of precepts and social values fundamental to a culture's well-being; the origins of a collective heritage and common identity; genealogies that situate individuals within an extended history of descent; and the origins of a political system. Against this backdrop, the exhibition examines in depth the nuanced complexity of one noteworthy sculptural form, the ci wara antelope headdress of the Bamana people of Mali. In doing so it considers all the distinct regional and individual interpretations that have come to be associated with that form over the course of the last century.

Part I: Ideas of Origin in African Sculpture

Vansina has noted that "every community in the world has a representation of the origin of the world, the creation of mankind, and the appearance of its own particular society and community" (1985:21). In The Religion, Spirituality, and Thought of Traditional Africa, the anthropologist Dominique Zahan suggests that the quest for an explanation of the creation of man "constitutes the supreme effort of the mind desirous of situating man in terms of certain coordinates--inorganic world, vegetable world, animal world, spiritual universe--and affirming thereby both his attachment to all these domains and his transcendent position relative to them" (1970:7). Vansina has further noted that stories of creation are by nature "reflexive, the product of thought about existing situations--they represent a stage in the elaboration of historical consciousness and are among the main wellsprings of what we often call culture" (1985:21). Those responsible for creating related works of art give individual expression to their culture's most profound collective ideas about its origins and identity.