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

African Arts, Winter, 2002 by Constantine Petridis

With the exception of Niangi's contribution, the seven essays are lavishly illustrated with recent field photographs taken by their authors, but the photographs used as frontispieces for the different chapters are all by Jordan. Because there are no captions with these frontispieces, it is rather confusing that an image depicting a Chokwe version of a mask character called Katotola, performing in the vicinity of the Manyinga village in Zambia in 1991, was chosen to introduce Niangi's chapter on the Holo. (3) Following each essay section is a catalogue section in which images of most of the exhibited objects are accompanied by descriptive entries by the editor, curiously enough, the title of each section and the explanation of what the title stands for follow the essays to which they pertain and precede the actual catalogue section. The entries as such are generally concise, offering essential contextual or stylistic background information in just a few lines.

The objects reproduced in the catalogue sections are just stunning, even if not all of them merit the Western qualifier of "masterpiece." As a whole, they provide an extraordinary window on the varied art forms that the Chokwe and related peoples created over at least the past two centuries. One might object that Jordan's selection did not include works from some of the best-documented historical collections of Chokwe and related materials from the museums of Berlin, Lisbon, Neuchatel, or Tervuren, but no one will deny that the objects grouped together testify to the diversity of Chokwe art. Moreover, examples from the cited European collections have been included in previous exhibitions and publications and are consequently quite well known; the present volume shows many unknown objects from private collections, providing ample proof that one's research cannot be limited to well-established public collections. Jordan's selection also encompasses object types that have never before or rarely been published or exhibited, such as the beaded chief's crown and container (cat. 53, 54), the emblem in the form of an antelope horn (cat. 55), the Ngaji mask (cat. 88), the figures representing masked ancestors (cat. 95, 97), the initiation hats (cat. 98, 99), the mask for the mungonge association (cat. 100), and the woman-fish figure (cat. 114).

Despite the few minor criticisms expressed in this review, Chokwe! constitutes an important scholarly addition to our understanding and appreciation of the arts of the Chokwe and related peoples. Drawing on recent fieldwork conducted by a new generation of anthropologists and art historians from the United States, Europe, and Africa, it provides a sensitive and nearly complete picture of one of central Africa's most sophisticated and complex cultural regions. In exploring contemporary practices and beliefs as they were experienced and recorded by the contributors in the early 1990s, the exhibition and its catalogue also put Chokwe art, as it is preserved in public and private collections around the world, in historical perspective. As Frederick Lamp points out in his opening statement in the catalogue (p. 10), in light of the rapid cultural changes affecting the whole African continent, the essays brought together in Chokwe! testify to the continuing need for rigorous and extensive fieldwork to document the backgrounds of nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century African art forms.