My Journey Through African Heritage

African Arts, Winter, 2006 by Sidney Littlefield Kasfir

My Journey Through African Heritage

Alan Donovan Nairobi: Kenway Publications (East African Educational Publishers), 2005. Distributed in North America by Michigan State University Press and in the UK by African Books Collective (Oxford). 400 pp., 300 color illustrations. $110 hardcover.

This barkcloth-wrapped, 400-page memoir-cum-coffee-table-book sat on my Lamu chest for five months because I had no idea how to review it. As a firsthand account of the hugely successful commodification of things African, from all the well-known textile traditions to Kenyan nomadic jewelry, decorated gourds, and West African sculpture and their spectacular rebirth as (sometimes high, sometimes goofy) fashion, this book has no peer, With its compilation of hundreds of full-color, glossy images, it is an inestimable teaching resource and therefore worth far more than its hundred dollar-plus list price. Alan Donovan is in important ways a somewhat younger, American Ulli Beier and Frank McEwen rolled into one. He is a well-known personage in Kenya, but for readers who are still stuck in West or southern Africa for their cultural moorings, his leanings could be summed up as one part Afrophile and Turkana scholar-collector, one part socialite do-gooder, and one part designer and impresario. African Heritage, his Nairobi-based business and obsession for the past thirty-odd years, was the "largest, most organized craft retail and wholesale operation in Africa" according to a World Bank report of 1995 cited prominently in the book.

To academic purists (and we are a snobby lot), everything Alan Donovan stands for is anathema: runway models wearing men's agbada, sexy "Jungle Safari" outfits assembled from clever combinations of trade beads and Lurex, and occasional bad art from Mali, Guinea, Cote d'Ivoire, and Nigeria: Christopher Steiner's Abidjan traders would shrug and call them "copies." But until the business was liquidated in 2004 due to the terrorism-induced tourism slump, the visitors who bought it all and the government ministers, ambassadors, and aid experts who were frequently photographed looking at it were not academic specialists and happily embraced the flashiness and hybridity.

To a postmodernist sensibility, on the other hand, Donovan's extravaganzas of tradition-gone-haywire and geographic- and gender-impossible reconfigured styles worn by fabulous-looking models can only excite admiration and approval. An example or two: on p. 363, at the Miss Nairobi Centennial, the winner, Emma Too, wears a black suede outfit loosely based on a Turkana leather dress but with a hand-hammered floor-length brass necklace (this a takeoff on a less jaw-dropping Turkana bead version) with a Masai face chain and hammered brass Hollywood-esque "slave" arm band; contest runner-up Gladys Sakaja is in a blue and yellow Malagasy embroidered cape tailored as a low-cut dress, with a "Cleopatra" necklace and shaved head. Or on p. 80, in the "Ghana Gold" segment of an African Heritage Festival designed and staged by Donovan, flawlessly toned male (presumably Kenyan) models wearing kente in traditional toga-fashion provide the backdrop for two elegant women seated in "Kente evening coats over silk gowns, ancient jasper beads, amber, and Fulani gold earrings." It's all about sensuality and luxe and for a certain type of taste this is over-the-top Paradise (a term Donovan likes to use).

Inevitably there are lots of ensembles using bogolan, Okene cloth, and kente in sophisticated ways. But what distinguishes Donovan's creations from the competition is the jewelry, which, like the clothes, runs from subtle reinterpretations of actual ethnic designs, often pastoralist Kenyan or Ethiopian, to fantasy pieces. He learned the fabrication techniques originally in 1971-72 at the Bombolulu craft workshops, an occupational training center for disabled Kenyans (p. 156). Beginning with the coiled brass surutia worn by married Samburu and Masai women and aparaparat, the leaf-shaped brass earrings and lip ornaments worn by Turkana women, he designed a collection of necklaces which were first worn in his Nigerian Festival (more about that later) and later sold under the trade name NALA.

As a general rule, designs which come out of Kenyan workshops are widely copied and marketed by competitors, a situation that has led Donovan to bring lawsuits against his imitators. This is one area in which African artisanal practice clashes with the handcraft production system initiated at African Heritage. In traditional workshops, copying was the main learning technique and imitation was not only tolerated but encouraged, in most places in Africa, the organization of informal sector artisanship has changed along with patronage demands, but artisans typically do not claim to own designs in any formal copyright sense. As a result, Donovan has found himself in the position of training jewelry makers who eventually leave and start businesses of their own using his designs (though not with his financial resources, to be sure), a practice which is culturally sanctioned but violates modern copyright law. He has also found himself buying back his own designs from other shop owners a few blocks from African Heritage who brazenly paid his staff to steal them.