Clark Atlanta University

The Attitude of the Educated African to His Traditional Art

Author(s): Ulli Beier
Source: The Phylon Quarterly, Vol. 18, No. 2 (2nd Qtr., 1957), pp. 162-165
Published by: Clark Atlanta University
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/273189
Accessed: 23-10-2019 19:41 UTC

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By ULLI BEIER

The Attitude of the Educated African

To His Traditional Art

SINCE its "discovery" by a group of Paris painters in 1907 Negro art

found a steadily growing number of admirers in Europe and has c
tinued to exercise a fertilizing influence on European art. But in Afr
paradoxically, the educated Africans like to dissociate themselves fr
their great cultural heritage. Not only is the study of Negro art com
pletely neglected by Africans but frequently they have decidedly an
tagonistic feelings toward the art of their fathers. This is particula
true of the visual arts. Tribal music is still popular with quite a few
people and African history and customs too have their defenders. O
carvings are nearly always rejected, sometimes indeed rejected passi
ately.
I have asked numerous Africans why they dislike my collection of
African carvings and usually they had their answers ready: they are
"ugly," "crude" and "not true to life," I was told.
Let us examine these criticisms a little closer. Let us first look at
the statement that African art is "not beautiful." I must make it clear
from the beginning that I think it is a prejudice that art must be be
tiful. Beauty is a very relative thing and very difficult to define. I
doubt whether our concept of beauty can be really dissociated from
other emotional factors. In judging the beauty of a woman, for example,
we would invariably be influenced by her sex appeal. Similarly we may
be tempted to call a cripple ugly, because the sight of him arouses in
us the most unpleasant fear that one day we may suffer a similar
misfortune. It is possible therefore that an "ugly" picture is one that
causes an unpleasant emotional reaction like fear, or bad conscience or
something of the sort. But the very fact that a carving or picture is
capable of producing such a strong emotional reaction proves that it is
a work of art.
In the realm of literature the notion that art and beauty are by no
means identical is quite familiar. Nobody could possibly call Macbeth
a beautiful play - yet few would deny it is a work of art. Yet the idea
that the poet enjoyed liberties which the painter and sculptor could
never share has been widespread in Europe since the Renaissance. The
poet, it was argued, could describe the unpleasant, the painful, the hor-
rible with all the words at his disposal; the painter or sculptor on the
other hand must keep within the limits of "beauty" under all circum-
stances. The result of this purely aesthetic attitude to art was ultimately

162

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 THE EDUCATED AFRICAN 163

a perversion: painters of the Seventeenth Century, for ex

pected us to admire the physical beauty of a human body
at a crucifixion. A picture which is thus ignoring the hu
of the situation in order to do justice to some abstract con
is really telling a lie.
But the criterion of a work of art is that it reveal some kind of
truth. That it will help us to realize and experience in an elevated
some of our basic unconscious emotions.
It is of no importance, therefore, whether we define African art as
"beautiful" or not; because more than any other art in the world per-
haps, it by-passes the intellect in its powerful direct appeal to our
emotions.
Let us now look at the other criticism, that African art is "crude
and not true to life." This has arisen out of a misunderstanding. People
who were brought up in school to admire a shallow sort of realism
(whether in Europe or Africa) generally seem to believe that when-
ever an artist does not represent natural forms, he has failed to achieve
a real likeness of the object he was trying to portray. But there have
been few periods of art when the imitation of natural forms was con-
sidered a worthwhile aim of the artist.
There have always been artists, of course, who believed that they
had justified their existence merely by faithfully copying nature. But to
the African artist form has never been an end in itself but merely a
means of expression. To him art was a form of communication - a
language. He carved, composed music or danced because he found him-
self unable to express his emotions in words. (It is significant that when
our emotions are particularly strong we say that we are "struck dumb"
or "speechless.")
We need the artist because some of the most important things in
human life and experience cannot be explained rationally. We experience
the divine, for example, but we cannot rationalize it. Therefore we create
symbols to give it some tangible form: the symbol may be Christ, or
Buddha, or Nyame, or Sango.
There are people, of course, who believe that there are no mysteries
in the universe. That there is no need for symbols because everything
is explained. To them God is merely the wishful thinking of humanity
and love only a series of chemical reactions. They have no room for art
in their lives. When they speak of art, what they mean in fact is deco-
ration- not communication.
It is a tragedy that so many educated Africans have come to beli
that the traditional African carver made a "crude" attempt to copy n
ture. The African artist in fact did not represent natural forms beca
he was interested in something far more important than the mere
outside of things. He needed symbols to express the supernatural, and
therefore, he had to invent forms.

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164 PHYLON

There is, I believe, only one example of realism in African

Ife bronzes. It is unfortunate that these bronzes have been boosted so
much and are generally overrated in their value and importance by
Africans today. I have met many who took pride in the Ife bronzes
because they were so realistic that they could almost have been made
by Europeans. These people have frequently expressed the view that
more recent Yoruba carving represents a sad degeneration of the culture
that produced the Ife heads. But the Yoruba carvers who were produc-
ing superb works even a generation ago tried to do something different
from the Ife bronze caster and in my opinion they achieved something
greater. It is worth while to remember that it was the symbolic Afri-
can art - not the classicist Ife heads- that was able to infuse fresh
blood into the stagnant European art at the beginning of this c
When I presented these ideas to the students of the first Extra-
Mural Vacation course on West African Culture at Ibadan I got an in-
teresting reaction. "This is all very well," I was told by an undergradu-
ate of the University College, "but how can we be asked to appreciate
the qualities of traditional carvings objectively if we must needs associ-
ate them with the evil practices of paganism of which we do not ap-
prove?"
This remark, followed by many similar ones, provided indeed an im-
portant clue. The rejection of traditional art was due to the fact that
most educated Africans found that it reminded them unpleasantly of
the "evil" pagan culture of their forefathers. This was the emotional
basis of the intellectual criticisms of "ugly" and "crude." It also explained
immediately why the same people who rejected the carvings were capa-
ble of enjoying and appreciating tribal music. There is a great deal of
tribal music which is not religious; and even when the music is ac-
tually taken from a ritual, the connection between a drum rhythm and
pagan beliefs never can be as blatantly obvious as in the case of carved
images, which immediately arouse associations of "idol worship," "hu-
man sacrifice," etc.
I have never understood how it was possible to defame pagan African
cultures so completely and give them such a nimbus of viciousness.
True enough such things as ritual murder and human sacrifices were
practiced in West Africa. But it is ridiculous to judge an entire culture
solely by its cruel aspects because every culture has got its own pe-
culiar form of cruelty. If West African paganism had its human sacri-
fices, the Middle Ages in Europe had the Holy Inquisition and the
"progressive" civilization of the Twentieth Century has its atom bomb.
Surely it is ridiculous that after Hiroshima some people maintain that
our industrial civilization is more humane than pagan African societies
had been. Surely it is absurd that when (according to a recent state-
ment of the Home Office Parliamentary Undersecretary of State) sixty
serious crimes are committed every hour, twenty-four hours a day, three

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 THE EDUCATED AFRICAN 165

hundred and sixty-five days a year in the United Kingd

still believe that Europeans can teach "higher moral valu
Africans.
I am not suggesting for a minute that the present changes in Africa
should not have taken place or are deplorable. But I do feel that it is a
very dangerous thing to interpret an economic revolution as a change
from a "bad" or "evil" form of society to a "good" one. It makes all the
difference in the world whether one is fighting for certain political,
economic and social changes because one sees the need for adjusting
oneself to world conditions, or whether one believes the changes to be
a moral issue.
It may seem to the reader that I have deviated enormously from my
subject. I have set out to speak about a certain attitude to art and I
have ended in grinding an axe for pagan cultures. But I believe that
there is an important connection. As I have pointed out before, art is
not merely entertainment or decoration, but it expresses the most
fundamental unconscious beliefs and emotions of a nation. People's at-
titude to art is more than a mere "interest" or "hobby." It is highly
symptomatic of social and cultural conditions. The ambivalent feelings
of the educated African towards his forefathers and his past are a worry-
ing symptom. He is a nationalist on the one hand, and on the other hand
he rejects the greatest expression of the philosophy of life of his fa-
thers as "evil." As long as this conflict lasts, he may well find it dif-
ficult to be free enough to produce a new culture of his own.
When I am pleading the case of African art with educated Africans
I am in fact asking them to see the present social revolution not as a
change from an immoral to a moral society, but as the disintegration
of tribal cultures under the impact of foreign occupation and world
economy. It is the disintegration of cultures which has produced some
of the world's finest sculpture, music and poetry. The appreciation of
these past achievements must be one of the foundation stones of the
new national African cultures.
And what, after all, will be the value of political independence if i
does not safeguard and secure the growth of a new African culture
will enrich the world as the old tribal cultures have done!
Note: I use the word "educted" to mean "having had a Western education." I do of course not
wish to imply that illiterate people are not educated.

+-

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