A Saint in the City: Sufi arts of urban Senegal

African Arts, Winter, 2002 by Allen F. Roberts, Mary Nooter Roberts

It's so hard to be a saint in the city.

Bruce Springsteen

"A Saint in the City" presents the visual culture of a dynamic religious movement known as the Mouride Way that is inspired by a Senegalese Sufi pacifist, poet, and saint named Amadou Bamba (1853-1927). (1) Mourides are galvanizing contemporary Senegal and its ever-expanding diaspora through their hard work and steadfast devotion. (2) The exhibition presents a striking range of Mouride arts, from large popular murals, intricate glass paintings, and calligraphic healing devices to posters for social activism, colorful textiles, and paintings by internationally known contemporary artists. (3) A devotional sanctum filled with sacred imagery and an urban market scene capturing the bustle of contemporary Dakar are re-created to suggest how Mothrides live and work under the beneficent eye of the Saint (Fig. 1). Artist profiles and videos feature the voices and works of nine artists who have shaped our understanding of this deeply spiritual movement. Signal works from Islamic cultures elsewhere in Africa reveal a similarity to Mouride arts while underscoring particularities of Mouride creativity.

Mouride arts are derived from images and messages of Amadou Bamba, his descendants, and his most ardent followers. A single photograph of the Saint taken in 1913 (Fig. 2) has become the catalyst for an explosion of artistic imagery, especially since the 1980s. (4) Of particular interest is "the centrality of usefulness in [the] popular visual culture" of everyday life (Morgan 1998:24, our emphasis)--that is, how images are instrumental to solving problems and meeting needs. Two terms, "icon" and "aura," are points of reference for the visual dynamism of Senegal, for they allude to how sacred images convey a blessing power called baraka (or barke). (5) Baraka helps people to address and overcome the misfortunes, contestations, and transitions of everyday life. Investigating such social processes and visual practices helps redress a deficiency that David Freedberg has perceived in the literature of representation, in which images may be described "but the relations between how they look and why they work are almost entirely passed over" (1989:135). (6)

Like the icons of Byzantium (see Belting 1994), images of Amadou Bamba and his family are active sources of potency and power. It is common to see Mourides touch Bamba's image to their foreheads or kiss wall murals to receive his blessing. As David Morgan asserts, "the first thing to learn about the popular piety to which ... images appeal is that, for most people, it is more important to cope with an oppressive or indifferent world than to resist or subvert it [Fig. 3]. Thus, the theology of the sublime and sovereign Deity is subordinated by many believers to an apparatus of intercession" (1998:23-24). Mouride visual culture provides just such an apparatus.

It is not difficult to understand why some have debated whether baraka should be translated as "charisma," as understood through Christian theology and Weberian sociology (Cruise O'Brien 1988). In our opinion, the term "aura" comes closer to the Mouride concept of baraka than "charisma" seems to do. (7) "Aura," from the Greek, literally means a "breeze" or "breath" (OED 1982:565), and is extended to refer to the inherence of power and presence within a work of art (Freedberg 1989). "In the auratic experience the object becomes human, as it were" (Foster 1988:197), and possesses the capacity to produce a response, bestow well-being, and protect its viewers. Through the theorizing of Walter Benjamin and the debates his work has engendered, "aura" has also come to be associated with the "authenticity of a thing ... [and] the essence of all that is transmissible from its beginning, ranging from its substantive duration to its testimony to the history which it has experienced" (1988:221). When Benjamin wrote that "to perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability to look at us in return" (1988:188), he might have been speaking of a Mouride sense of how their icons possess baraka. That an image with aura has "weight, opacity and substance" and "never quite reveals its secret[s]" (Baudrillard 1983:22-23) also echoes Mouride sentiments. Above all else, Mourides feel that baraka does things: it works, changes, and helps.

Social scientists might assert that human agency underlies the experience of aura. From such a perspective, one may believe that saints, holy places, relationships, and sacred objects possess baraka, but these are predispositions, intentions, and imaginings rather than "realities." (8) Such perspectives can bear useful fruit, and we recognize that the visual culture we would understand is shaped by religious values, epistemological frameworks, and onto logical premises; but "A Saint in the City" pursues a different path, following the call of Rowland Abiodun (1990) to put the "African" back into "African art." After one hears many Mourides explain how transformative baraka can be, especially through the powers of writing and as directed through mystical devices of healing and protection, it is difficult not to accept such an explanation as its own frame of reference. Regardless of whether those espousing a Cartesian sense of science would accept such views, "A Saint in the City" presents Mouride visuality as closely as possible to how Mourides themselves might prefer to present it. (9)