Chokwe! Art and Initiation Among Chokwe and Related Peoples. - book review

African Arts, Winter, 2002 by Constantine Petridis

Edited by Manuel Jordan Prestel-Verlag, Munich, London, and New York, 1998. 192 pp., 100 color & 124 b/w illustrations, map, bibliography. $65 hardcover, $36 softcover.

This collective volume appeared in conjunction with a traveling exhibition conceived by the Birmingham Museum of Art, Alabama, and its then Curator of the Arts of Africa and the Americas, Manuel Jordan. (1) The exhibition was subsequently held at the Baltimore Museum of Art and the Minneapolis Institute of Arts (see Bourgeois 2000). Greatly appreciated by lovers of African art, Chokwe art has been well represented in many exhibitions. In 1988 the Musee Dapper in Paris devoted a monographic exhibition to the subject; it was accompanied by a modest catalogue containing short articles by the director of the Fondation Dapper, Christiane Falgayrettes, and by the Belgian scholars Anne Leurquin, Luc de Heusch, and the late Marie-Louise Bastin (Falgayrettes 1988). It is mainly thanks to the work of Bastin (1918-2000), who taught African art history at the Universite Libre de Bruxelles, that Chokwe art is relatively well known. Appropriately, Bastin was invited by Jordan to contribute an introductory essay to his Chokwe catalogue in which she offers a "panoramic overview of Chokwe arts" (p. 6), and Jordan dedicated his Chokwe exhibition and catalogue to the woman whose scholarship has been a source of inspiration for generations of art scholars.

As mentioned in the editor's preface, the exclamation mark in the title "denotes the pride and excitement a Chokwe person verbalizes when expressing his or her ethnic identity" (p. 8). Chokwe! focuses on male and female initiation institutions in which the various art forms of Chokwe and related peoples play a dominant role. The catalogue's thematic approach is based on the Ph.D. dissertation of Elisabeth Cameron, who served as a consultant for the exhibition and also contributed an essay to Chokwe! (p. 6). The central theme of initiation is divided into three subthemes, which are reflected in the three sections mentioned on the contents page. The first section, "Royal Arts," dwells on the subtheme of "Role Models," i.e., "traditional and contemporary models of success, accomplishment, and responsibility in society." The second section, "Initiation Arts," constitutes the core of the exhibition and its catalogue. (2) It considers the theme of "Potential Fathers and Mothers," focusing on "the institution of initiation and the transitions boys and girls undergo to acquire privileged knowledge and prepare for adult life." The theme of "Fulfilled Adults," which is treated in the final section, "Art and Life," sheds light on professions and activities pursued in the adult lives of the peoples under discussion. These three themes are developed in seven essays by scholars who include the art historians Jordan, Bastin, Cameron, and Niangi Batulukisi, and the anthropologists Manuela Palmeirim, Sonia Silva, and Boris Wastiau. The thematic essay sections are each followed by a catalogue section that contains succinct entries by Jordan on all the exhibited objects, many of which are beautifully illustrated in full color.

With the exception of Marie-Louise Bastin, the authors relied on recently conducted fieldwork related to their respective doctoral dissertations. Most of them had published little or nothing prior to their collaboration on this project. As a result, Chokwe! provides valuable new research and interpretations. Ironically, however, except for Bastin, the contributors to the catalogue worked mainly on the edges of the Chokwe region proper and not among the Chokwe themselves. Therefore, the essays deal more with the "related peoples" referred to in the subtitle, while the Chokwe as such are the main focus of the catalogue sections. Nevertheless, in the preface Jordan states that the use of the name Chokwe in the title is justified "because the Chokwe were the most influential in creating art styles and diffusing them ... through a vast portion of central Africa" (p. 8). Still, the inclusion in this volume of an article on the little-studied art of the Holo people of the Democratic Republic of the Congo seems odd, since nowhere is their relationship with the Chokwe made convincingly clear, and their culture appears to have more in common with that of the Yaka and the Suku. Conversely, other peoples such as the Ovimbundu, the Lozi, and the Mbunda, whose kinship with the Chokwe has been firmly established by firsthand observation, are not properly discussed in any of the essays, even though their arts are represented in the different catalogue sections.

In the opening article of the first essay section, "Chokwe Arts: Wealth of Symbolism and Aesthetic Expression," Marie-Louise Bastin first dwells on what is considered to be the "oldest known sculpture from the Bantu region": a zoomorphic wooden sculpture which she identifies as a "ritual bowl" (p. 13). After shedding light on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European accounts from the region, she discusses the oral history of the foundation of the Lunda Empire, which is the cornerstone of the Chokwe worldview and has given shape to some courtly art forms. She then proceeds to give an overview of "Chokwe types of artistic expression" and a brief description of the different Chokwe stylistic schools, which she distinguishes in the art forms of the courts of aristocrats and rulers.