My Journey Through African Heritage

African Arts, Winter, 2006 by Sidney Littlefield Kasfir

It would be possible, if space permitted, to follow many other strands of fashion history through the thirty-year period covered by this memoir. There is material here to match not only the current wave of Nigerian FESTAC and Osun Festival studies in terms of the complex cultural politics of heritage, but also any coffee table book for sheer visual extravagance. Nowhere is Alan Donovan's personal style more purely distilled than in the opening chapter on his own house, overlooking the Athi Plains outside Nairobi and inspired by his trips to Djenne, Lamu, Ghana, Marrakesh, and Bali. The exterior, a cross between an ocean liner in full sail and a Malian Friday mosque, contains within its myriad rooms furnishings of Kuba cloth, bogolan, handwoven cloth from Bida, doors and frames from Lamu, a Chokwe chair, beaded items from a Shango shrine in Nigeria, antique marionettes from Bamako, and a large sculpture by Francis Nnaggenda. Maybe "less is more" for the Turkana, but for Donovan himself, the style is pure Architectural Digest multicultural.

reviewed by Sidney Littlefield Kasfir