The Baga and their art - art of a people living in part of Guinea, Museum of African Art, New York, NY; adapted from 'Art of the Baga: A Drama of Cultural Reinvention' - Under the Hammer - Cover Story

American Visions, April-May, 1997 by Frederick Lamp

The various peoples known as Baga occupy a narrow stretch of marshy lowland along the Atlantic coast of the Republic of Guinea. For centuries, they have been battered by peoples and cultures--some, close "neighbors', others, European colonizers. By the middle of the 20th century, the culture and polity of the Baga were in complete disarray, finally falling to a combination of an Islamic cultural jihad propagated by their Susu and Malinke overlords and a modernist nationalist ideology imposed by the regime of Sekou Toure. Today, an authentic Baga culture is being reinvented, principally (as always with the Baga) artistically. Their cultural history and its renaissance are explored in depth in an outstanding exhibition organized and presented by the Museum for African Art (New York City) and the Baltimore Museum of Art. "Art of the Baga: A Drama of Cultural Reinvention" is based on the research of and curated by Frederick Lamp. The following excerpts from the exhibition catalog written by Lamp highlight the history of a culture under pressure and the possibilities and perils of both resistance and assimilation.

One of the smallest ethnic groups in Guinea, the Baga are little regarded as a political force; their history in the peoples of other regions. The art of the Baga--a monumental legacy that has had a significant impact on 20th-century Western art--has been their response to these aggressions.

The subject of spiritual transformation is a constant thread throughout Baga art and culture. The Baga see themselves as a transformed people, and this transformation permeates their identity today. It is fundamentally expressed by the oral tradition on the migration from the Fouta Djallon--the evolution of the Baga from a mountain people to a lowland people. According to this tradition, the Baga migrated to the coast before the 16th century in a resolute attempt to resist conversion to Islam. They carried with them their most high spirits, represented by massive costuming and extravagant performance.

In this transition, the acceptance and nonacceptance of transformation were the key to social status: those who accepted the inevitability of change were endowed with highest status by virtue of their earliest arrival at the location of a new Baga world. Those who were reluctant to accept change, those who fought it, those who were "crazy" enough (in the eyes of the north-central Baga Sitemu) to try to maintain Baga society as it had been, staying in the Fouta to fight the Muslims, eventually arrived on the same stage, only to find that their efforts had been in vain and their place in Baga society had been reduced to second and third class.

Once on the coast, the Baga invented or "discovered," they claim, an impressive variety of both spiritual beings and spiritual "ideas," which they manifested in spectacular forms of art, adding to their existing corpus. Over the centuries their rich tradition of both masquerade and sculpture developed, its forms reflecting a spiritual world useful to the Baga in creating institutions of welfare, polity, justice and guidance.

Baga society has no centralized political structure; a unified polity has been created and maintained through a powerful imaginative framework of ritual endorsed (and largely controlled) by the elders. This framework is constructed of compelling images, which invoke respectively a sense of omnipotent and fearsome oversight, benevolent guidance, ideal behavior, control over natural forces and so forth.

To some extent, the French curtailed indigenous ritual activity. For the most part, public masked dance was tolerated and perhaps even encouraged by some French with a fondness for exotic manifestations. The more restricted and sacred dances, however, especially those of initiations held at night in the sacred groves, were generally discouraged.

The most direct intervention came in the form of the institution of chieftaincy, a form of government foreign to the Baga. With the French refusal to recognize the Baga system of rule by a council of elders, traditional structures of control were shattered. The French wanted an unambiguous chain of command, which a system of chieftaincy better served. As always seemed the case, the youth have been eager to capitalize on the opportunity to usurp power; thus with the coming of colonial rule, young Baga men aligned themselves with the French in sufficient numbers to seize power as collaborators.

The elders managed to sustain their position, however, retaining the allegiance of their people even while the new chiefs executed the wishes of the French commandants. Despite the colonial interdiction, disputes and social issues continued to be brought to and resolved by the council of elders. Ritual, the rubric under which much of Baga daily life falls, continued to be regulated by the elders and not by the chiefs.

Certainly the regalia of the Baga patriarchs' ritual were severely diminished during the colonial period. D'mba [the image and ritual signifying ideal behavior] disappeared from many of the villages of the Baga Sitemu; by the 1930s, very few masks at all remained in the southern Baga areas. The male initiation was greatly restricted because of the demands of Christian education.