My Journey Through African Heritage

African Arts, Winter, 2006 by Sidney Littlefield Kasfir

Another interesting question is who these hybrid jewelry designs are for. They include materials culled from all over the continent: silver, gold, brass, agate and jasper, old glass beads, amber, ostrich egg shells, seashells, giraffe tails, porcupine quills, crocodile teeth, beetle wings and even colonial soldiers' bullet cartridges (p. 157). Ethnic jewelry as a modern taste category appeals to cultural outsiders, since its exoticism quotient depends on considerable cultural distance: In my own experience, the rich African women who could afford such things probably would not want them, preferring the international standard of 24 carat gold.

Masai and Kamba beadwork can be bought cheaply at Nairobi street markets, but for years tour guides brought their charges to African Heritage instead, with its reassuring fixed prices and upscale, Out-of-Africa ambience. The same Masai women who sold to Donovan also sold to street traders, but Donovan's staff paid more for their best pieces and this extra cost was passed along, with the high overheads, to the foreign buyer. The problem is that the stacks of beadwork that look so good framing the neat, shaven head of a Masai woman look incongruous with masses of hair and Western clothes. Enter the hybrid design, which manages to look both ethnic and urbane at the same time. Angela Fisher, who on her photographic safaris around the continent was in a unique position to acquire raw materials, created a line of exquisite necklaces sold under her name at African Heritage, with correspondingly high prices.

Donovan's talents as an impresario, embodied in the African Heritage Nights held for more than two decades in the grand ballroom of the Hotel Intercontinental in Nairobi, allowed him to be philanthropist and entrepreneur at the same time. These extravaganzas usually began with a charity fashion show and moved through a series of events that included costumed performances by acrobats and dancers. The book not only documents the festivals in all their technicolor-costumed splendor but also offers up vignettes of the most beautiful and influential among his design collaborators and models. To several his establishment obviously shouted "Career Opportunity," whether one was a model or a designer, and these opportunities were sometimes mutual: his collaboration with Maryesta Carr connected him with the New York fashion industry and internationally known celebrity designers (p. 336). The spectacular Somali model Iman, "the most beautiful girl in the world," who began her career with him in 1975, went on to international fame and fortune (p. 249-52). In fact, the operating mantra of African Heritage would seem to have been three C's: commodification, connectivity, and celebrity.

But Alan Donovan has sides other than impresario and fashion maven, and in revisiting the beginnings of his career in Africa, a different person emerges. Like many students who came of age in the 1960s, he opposed the US war in Vietnam and was disillusioned by the assassination of President Kennedy. Yet traveling to Africa turned out not to be the idealistic adventure he had envisioned as a graduate student at UCLA. In 1967 he was sent to Nigeria on assignment as a USAID staffer. This was the beginning of the Biafran War and a chilling, far-from-glamorous time to be there. During the pogroms in the North, Igbos were slaughtered and hunted down; the atrocities committed against them were virtually identical to those committed by Idi Amin's troops in Uganda only five years later. As an expatriate, Donovan found himself protecting Igbo in Lagos by hiding them in his Ikoyi compound's garden and sharing food with them (p. 46).