African voices
When the show "Heroic Africans" was mounted at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the response to it was overwhelming, many people coming face to face with the great art of the Dark Continent

"The discovery of the art of Ife is a textbook example of a widespread cultural and political phenomenon: that as we discover our past, so we discover ourselves – and more. To become what we want to be, we have to decide what we were. Like individuals, nations and states define and redefine themselves by revisiting their histories....’
— Neil MacGregor

"When an elder dies, it is as if a whole library had burned down."
— An African saying

THE story of African art bursting upon western sensibilities, especially in the early years of the 20th century, has often been told. Picasso, Braque, Modigliani — all owed great debt to it; scholars turned to studying it in all seriousness; museums started collecting it. But how the regarding of it qua art, and not simply as a miscellany of ritual, tribal objects, brought a sense of pride to African communities themselves is a story in itself.

A part of this is told by Neil MacGregor, director of the famed British Museum, in that most enticingly titled and engagingly written work of his A History of the World in 100 Objects when he speaks of an Ife head in his museum. Ife, in case we do not know it, is a city in south-western Nigeria, inhabited by the Yoruba people. There, in 1938, in the grounds of a royal palace, was discovered a group of 13 heads, all cast in brass. The world, already beginning to get sensitised to African art, was stunned by their beauty and immediately recognised these as "supreme documents of a culture that had left no written record," while embodying "the history of an African kingdom that was one of the most advanced and urbanised of its day."

The Yoruba had always believed that theirs was the planet’s oldest organised community but here was something that showed the world what artistic brilliance that community had attained. "Today", says MacGregor, these heads, "play a key part in how Africans read their own narrative."

The Ife head in the British Museum is a truly spectacular work, challenging some notions while affirming others, of what great art is, or can be. Its superb technique and finish apart, one recognises that it is a portrait, observed, idealised and abstracted, all at once. Whose portrait remains unknown but one senses in it an air of quiet authority, almost of serenity. A chief perhaps? Someone endowed both with worldly and spiritual power?

Ben Okri, the Nigerian writer whom MacGregor quotes, saw in it ‘not only a ruler but a society and a civilisation’. For, he said, "It has the effect on me that certain sculptures of the Buddha have. The presence of tranquillity in a work of art speaks of a great internal civilisation because you can’t have tranquillity without reflection, without having asked the great questions about your place in the universe and have answered those questions to some degree of satisfaction. That, for me, is what civilisation is." These are moving words, nobly uttered.

Apparently, brass was not the only material that the great craftsmen of Ife worked in. For from the same place, and region, also come a number of works of exceptional beauty in terracotta, many of them simply heads. Once again, however, one has no idea of whose portraits these are and what purpose were they truly made for.

Whether with all their refined naturalism, these were works that were ‘centrepieces of active shrines that served as points of engagement between divinities and their devotees’, stays unclear.

The inscrutability of it all comes home when one realises that these terracotta heads "have been buried, unburied, and reburied repeatedly since the time of their creation", as archaeologists have established. But nothing of this keeps one from registering their gracious presence, a fusion of ‘the earthly and the divine’.

When you regard African art as a whole, a welter of names of peoples and places keeps coming at you: Yoruba, Benin, Guro, Chokwe, Bangwa, Hemba, the Cameroons, Ivory Coast, Congo, Botswana, Angola. But it is when you concentrate upon a single work and envision the context from which it comes or reconstruct the ‘function’ that it performed that its quality springs to life.

Recently, when the show "Heroic Africans" was mounted at the Metropolitan Museum in New York, the response to it was overwhelming, many people coming face to face with the great art of the Dark Continent as if for the first time. Writing about the show in the New York Times, Holland Cotter said it is "as beautiful to look at as a show can possibly be".

Designating it as "a perception changer", he spoke of the manner in which it was capable of doing away with countless misunderstandings about African art. "African art has no history? No independent tradition of realism? No portraiture? All African sculpture looks basically alike, meaning ‘primitive’? African and western art are fundamentally different in content and purpose?" If you entertain any of these thoughts, he said, you would be "wrong across the board".

Countless people have woken up to African art, to Africa as a whole perhaps, very late. Like the great Urdu poet, Faiz Ahmed Faiz. But when he did, he sang of it. It is time, he said, to hear its voice. "Come back, Africa", using the slogan of freedom-fighters, is the title of a poem of his, in which he speaks in the voice of a whole continent.

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