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Africa’s Diasporas of Images

John Peffer

To cite this article: John Peffer (2005) Africa’s Diasporas of Images, Third Text, 19:4, 339-355,
DOI: 10.1080/09528820500124479

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CTTE112430.fm Page 339 Friday, July 8, 2005 3:36 AM

Third Text, Vol. 19, Issue 4, July, 2005, 339–355

Africa’s Diasporas of Images

John Peffer

This article seeks to bridge gaps between the production of visual objects
Third
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in Africa and their reception abroad, and to destabilise the distinction of

‘traditional’ from ‘contemporary’ in African art.1 The title of the 2004
ACASA Triennial, ‘Roots and Routes’, and its reference to James Clif-
ford’s 1997 book of similar name, suggest the potential to dramatically
shift the emphasis of the collective but diverse practice of African Art
1. This article is based on a
Notes

History.2 I imagined that those of us who participated in the week of

paper delivered at the Arts
Council of the African panels and discussions had been summoned to seek, in each of our own
Studies Association researches, the possibility of a connection between Africa the continent
(ACASA) Triennial
conference in 2004 in
and the Africa enmeshed in cultures and worlds abroad. I also under-
Boston. I would like to stood the imperative for all the crucial points of intersection between the
thank Sylvester Ogbechie arts of different cultures within the African continent itself to be
and Dana Rush for their
thoughtful comments on
explored. In the spirit of the conference theme, I propose a consideration
an earlier draft of the of all African art from the perspective of diaspora, as objects in motion,
article. My initial and as objects that articulate between and across disparate cultural
inspiration came from my
reading of Kobena
histories and the cultural zones of others.
Mercer’s insightful review,
‘African Photography in
Contemporary Visual
Culture’, Camera Austria, THE OBJECT AS DIASPORA
75, 2001. My gratitude
also to Grace Radkins, a
student in my African What would happen if we began to consider art objects from Africa as
Modernity and Modernism themselves a diaspora, as opposed to the traditional view of African
seminar at Northwestern diasporas as the spread of persons, as containers of culture, around the
University in 2004. Her
work in that seminar, on globe? What would this imply for our interpretations of African art
African photography, and objects of all sorts, even images of Africa more broadly defined, espe-
our discussions about the
exhibition of Malick
cially as these objects and images have travelled within Africa and abroad
Sidibé’s art in New York, for centuries? Most of us are used to seeking original social, cultural and
played a major role in the aesthetic contexts of African art objects as a means to uncover their true
development of the original
text.
local relevance, so as to share these insights with our readers and
students. What implications would a diasporic focus hold for the status
2. James Clifford, Routes:
Travel and Translation in
of the object if the contexts of the distribution of objects were also central
the Late Twentieth to our analysis? This is in fact a question that has a long history in our
Century, Harvard profession. As a recurring theme, but one that has also been continually
University Press,
Cambridge, MA, 1997. sidelined by those invested in a timeless view of Africa it has been either
directly addressed in, or has implicitly underpinned, the work of many of

Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online © 2005 Kala Press/Black Umbrella
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/09528820500124479
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340
3. See René Bravmann, Open
Frontiers: The Mobility of
Art in Black Africa,
University of Washington,
Seattle, 1973; Christraud
Geary, ‘Art and Political
Process in the Kingdoms of
Bali-Nyonga and Bamum
(Cameroon Grassfields)’,
Canadian Journal of
African Studies, 22:1,
1988; Sidney Littlefield
Kasfir, ‘One Tribe, One
Style? Paradigms in the
Historiography of African
Art’, History in Africa,
no 11, 1984; John Picton,
‘Art, Identity, and
Identification: A
Commentary on Yoruba
Art Historical Studies’, in
Rowland Abiodun et al,
The Yoruba Artist: New
Theoretical Perspectives,
Smithsonian Institution,
Washington, DC, 1994;
Mary Nooter Roberts and
Allen F Roberts, eds,
Memory: Luba Art and the
Making of History,
Museum for African Art,
New York, 1996; and
Christopher Steiner,
African Art in Transit,
Cambridge University
Press, Cambridge and New
York, 1994. See also Susan
Vogel’s video “Fang: An
Epic Journey”, Prince
Street Pictures, 2001; and
Boris Wastiau Exit Congo
Museum Royal Museum
for Central Africa,
Tervuren, 2000.
4. Igor Kopytoff, ‘The
Cultural Biography of
Things: Commoditization
as Process’, in The Social
Life of Things:
Commodities in Cultural
Perspective, ed Arjun
Appadurai, Cambridge
University Press,
Cambridge, 1986.
5. See David Freedberg, The
Power of Images: Studies
in the History and Theory
of Response, University of
Chicago Press, Chicago,
1989; especially chapter
two, ‘The God in the
Image’.
the more prominent writers in our field for several decades. A cursory
sample of this type of writing would include René Bravmann’s work on
art in African borderlands, Sidney Kasfir’s deconstruction of the one-
tribe–one-style paradigm, Christraud Geary writing on art patronage in
the Cameroon grasslands, Mary Nooter-Roberts and Allen Roberts on
the Luba complex, John Picton’s critique of the identity of the term
‘Yoruba’, Chris Steiner on West African art traders, and the life’s work of
Robert Faris Thompson.3
Taking such studies of continental African art practice as the basis, I
would like to propose a different kind of conceptual map, one that
moves once and for all beyond the colonial categories based on a false
sense of fixed ethnicities and static geographies, one that links African
cultures historically within the continent and also manifests the locations
outside of Africa where African people have been ‘sown through’ (my
preferred definition of the Greek word dia-spora) the lands of others for
hundreds of years. Such a map would also include locations where
significant numbers of African objects have been placed in museums and
private collections over the centuries. Such a map would also highlight
the history of European, Arab and other diasporas of persons, objects
and ideas throughout the continent. Perhaps such a map, if all marked
up at once, would be too densely drawn to be readable, too tangled a
palimpsest to be useful in coffee table catalogue. But at least in abstract,
this new conceptual map would help visualise how African art objects, in
their way, have a history that parallels Africa’s many historic diasporas
of people.
What would it mean to consider African art objects as diasporas,
as ‘sown through’ other cultures, and what would it mean to view
these objects, in their very materiality, as performing diaspora? These
questions are not unlike those proposed by Igor Kopytoff in his essay
on ‘The Cultural Biography of Things’. Kopytoff spoke of commoditi-
sation as process in Africa and the West to demonstrate that persons
may be devalued to the status of mere objects (through slavery), but
later revalued.4 Following Kopytoff, I would like to argue the insight
for us as historians of seeing art objects as surrogate bodies, like
persons with biographies. As David Freedberg has shown for the
history of Western art, the popular view of images has often been
conflated with the presence of real human bodies, especially in figura-
tive art – human bodies have at times been read as signs, and images
have been perceived as if they were human actors.5 The recent media
treatment of the toppling of statues of Saddam Hussein, as a surro-
gate for the toppling of the man himself, during the conquest of
Baghdad, has followed this pattern in an immediate and disturbing
way.
Objects are not just moved from place to place, they could also be
said to concretise movement in their form; they are the focus of
makers and viewers in a repeated and changing manner across the
chains of history and semiosis. My main argument is that objects are
themselves diasporas in the sense that they may hybridise their subjects
and their beholders, in different configurations according to historical
context.
It is worth recalling some of the more striking characteristics of
diasporas. They often represent historic and traumatic migration, or
CTTE112430.fm Page 341 Friday, July 8, 2005 3:36 AM
6. James Clifford, ‘Histories
of the Tribal and the
Modern’, in The
Predicament of Culture:
Twentieth-Century
Ethnography, Literature,
and Art, Harvard
University Press,
Cambridge, MA, 1988. See
also Brent Hayes Edwards,
‘The Ethnics of
Surrealism’, Transition, 78,
1999, p. 84–135.
7. Wyatt MacGaffey,
‘“Magic, or as we usually
say, art” A Framework for
Comparing European and
African Art’, in The
Scramble for Art in Central
Africa, eds Enid
Schildkrout and Curtis A
Keim, Cambridge
University Press,
Cambridge and New York,
1998, pp 224, 225.
341
series of migrations, into the land of another, which later coalesce into
communities self-defined in resistant relation to the host country.
Peoples in diaspora become like signs of some elsewhere and some
other time for the mainstream culture in the ‘host’s’ country. As a
result they too, in a sense, misrepresent the homeland as a mythic and
homogenous locale, lost in time. Nostalgia for this homeland-made
mythic, and the experience of displacement within the host culture, can
be a powerful nexus for personal and collective identity. Another more
affirmative but paradoxical characteristic of diasporas is that they often
have a profound influence on their host culture, even while becoming
in most respects assimilated to it. For example, W.E.B. DuBois
famously theorised that the political experience of African-Americans
was one of the defining features of the culture of the United States.
James Clifford and others have also noted how Black America was
taken in 1920s Paris as a sign of American culture, and of the future,
more broadly.6
AFRICAN ART SOWN THROUGH THE WEST
In a process similar to the historic traumatic dispersion and later recep-
tion of African diasporas in the Atlantic world, the life of African art
objects in European and American museums has had a paradoxical
impact and a correlative history. Images of Africa and images from
Africa, like diasporic bodies as subjects and sites of representation, have
moved from continent to continent and back again. Especially in their
movement and revaluation from domestic, ritual or locally defined
aesthetic object to art object in the modernist Western art gallery or
museum, African art has historically followed a trajectory of renaming
and status alteration uncannily similar to the changing status of African
persons in diaspora. The following passage from Wyatt MacGaffey
could easily be reworded to describe the history of the transatlantic slave
trade:
The process by which an African object becomes art includes removing it
from its context of origin to the accompaniment of varying sorts and
degrees of violence. Besides the literal violence of theft, confiscation, and
the like, we must include violence done to the object itself, which is often
stripped of its accoutrements, varnished or even remodeled. In the past it
has also usually been stripped of its name, identity, local significance, and
function.
I would add that its relation to history is also stripped. MacGaffey
continues:
In exchange for what it has lost, the African object is given a new context
and a new identity. Its first lodging in Europe would have been an ethno-
graphic museum … where its function was precisely to exemplify not art
but the contrast between primitive cultures and those capable of produc-
ing art. It was renamed as a fetish, fertility figure, or ancestor figure, and
presented as a characteristic cultural product of a ‘tribe’…. For an artifact
[such as this] to become art, a further stripping and re-identification is
necessary, abandoning not only the indigenous context but also the
anthropological narrative.7
CTTE112430.fm Page 342 Friday, July 8, 2005 3:36 AM
342
8. Ibid, p 229.
9. This object is discussed in
detail in Wyatt MacGaffey
and Michael Harris,
Astonishment and Power,
Smithsonian Institution
Press, Washington, DC,
1993, p 76.
10. See also Hal Foster,
Recodings, Bay Press,
Seattle, 1986, the chapter
‘Primitivism, or the
Unconscious of Modern
Art’.
11. Ibid., p. 323. See the
catalogue objects interdits
Foundation. Dieppe, Paris,
1989, p. 10.
12. See also Steiner, op. cit.,
pp. 162–4.
MacGaffey is well known for his detailed studies of turn-of-the-century
Congo/minkisi, which he claims are like people in that they contain a
body and an animating spirit, are named and have characters like
personalities.8 One category of nkisi, nkisi nkondi, may take the form
of a carved human figure with a frightening appearance. In one striking
example, now in the collection of the Ethnographic Museum in Stock-
holm, an nkisi nkondi is built around an empty wine bottle with a tuft
of leather and cloth strips falling like hair from the top, and the claws
of a monitor lizard hang as terrible hands at its sides. The box in the
centre once held a mirror and contained within it the ingredients that
animated and composed the spirit of the object. The box represents a
swollen belly, considered to be the bodily locus of malfeasant witch-
craft. Other small objects and bits of cloth hang from the bottle as
tokens called ‘dogs’, meant to help the animating spirit of the sculpture
sniff out its victim.9 Nkondi is a ‘hunter’, and these ritual devices were
used to search and destroy the instigators of misfortune, the breakers of
communal oaths and the performers of witchcraft. Their wooden, glass
or clay structure was the container and armature for a range of potent
‘medicines’ that combined to create the spirit represented. MacGaffey
has suggested (along with Freedberg and Kopytoff) that it is not just
things like nineteenth-century Congo power objects that are conflated
with ideas of a human person. We should also consider in this regard
the ‘priceless’ status and the attribution of quasi-spiritual value
projected onto all objects in the temple-like precincts of modern muse-
ums.
In keeping with the idea of the transvaluation of visual objects, it is
1 Nkisi Nkondi Mungundu, before 1907, National Museum of Ethnography, Stockholm, Sweden
worth recalling here that modernist artists in Europe, and their ideas of
modernity, were marked from the onset by the encounter with various
forms of African and other non-Western art, christened as Western
Modernism.10 MacGaffey cites Paul Gauguin’s purchase of two Loango
minkisi at the 1889 Universal Exposition in Paris which he cleaned up,
painted, and signed with his own name.11 Through a long series of trans-
valuations, African ritual ‘fetishes’ became commodities stripped of their
original value and their primary status as manifestations of social rela-
tions. They came to hide new colonial social relations in their form, simi-
lar to the process Karl Marx describes in Grundrisse as ‘the fetishism of
commodities’. They became yet another kind of idol in the museum
context.12 Each step of this process of objects being sown through local
and then foreign cultures, and interpolated across time, could be charac-
terised as diasporic.
Attention to the diasporic nature of the processes of cultural decon-
textualisation and revaluation gives life back to the objects, not in the
sense of retrieving a holistic anthropology of original contex, but rather
as a means to reassert the absent history part of African Art History and
explore the origin as a geographically and semantically mobile focal
point. From this perspective on how to interpret art, the object can be
understood as an encounter at any given moment, and if tracked over
time the same object can represent a history of encounters. This process
works both ways, just as a nkisi may come to epitomise African art in
the museum context, so too green glass wine bottles may come to be
used to construct a nkisi in the context of an intoxicated, murderous
exploitation of the Congo colony from 1885–1908.
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343

13. Walter Van Beek, ‘Enter

the Bush: A Dogon Mask
Festival’, in Susan Vogel
and Ima Ibong, eds, Africa
Explores: 20th Century
African Art, Center for
African Art, New York,
1991. My consideration of
nyau is necessarily limited
here. Deborah Kaspin has
discussed the recent politics Photo: Tony Sandin. Courtesy Museum of Ethnography, Stockholm, Sweden.
of nyau in ‘Chewa Visions
and Revisions of Power:
Transformations of the
Nyau Dance in Central OTHERS, MASQUERADES AND HISTORY
Malawi’, in Modernity and
its Malcontents: Ritual and
Power in Postcolonial We have a means to rethink a history for African art when we consider
Africa, eds Jean Comaroff Africa’s art as a diaspora of images, and Africa’s objects as diasporas.
and John Comaroff,
University of Chicago
We also have a key to help understand the curious cases of Maria and
Press, Chicago, 1993. See Elvis, there are two types of masquerade performed in rural Malawi.
also Laurel Birch de Elvis and Maria feature in the parade of masks, collectively called Nyau
Aguilar, Inscribing the
Mask: Interpretation of that are a defining feature of Maravi village communities. Similar to
Nyau Masks and Ritual what Walter Van Beek has described for the Dama funeral dance of the
Performance among the Dogon of Mali, Nyau masquerades, especially the Gule Wamkulu, or
Chewa of Central Malawi,
University Press, Fribourg, great festival of masks, enact a re-ordering and representation of the
1996; Peter Probst, Picture world of the living after the disruption of the cosmological order that
dance. Reflections on Nyau occurs following the death of an important elder member of the commu-
image and, experience.
Iwalewa Forum Heft 1, nity.13 Nyau masquerades are performed during two-day long funeral
2000. celebrations that include an array of characters. The range of characters
CTTE112430.fm Page 344 Friday, July 8, 2005 3:36 AM
344
14. Zoë Strother has described
a similar creative process
for the invention of
modern Pende mask types
in Inventing Masks:
Agency and History in the
Art of the Central Pende,
University of Chicago
Press, Chicago, 1998.
15. My description of these
masks is based on my
reading of de Aguilar,
op cit.
16. de Aguilar, op cit, pp 55,
96.
17. Ian Linden with Jane
Linden, Catholics, Peasants
and Chewa Resistance in
Nyasaland, 1889–1939,
Heinemann, London,
1974, pp 129–30.
give form to the interpolation and enfolding of foreign, urban African,
and Christian others as experienced in local village-based communities.
Cultural others (whether African or non-African), beasts and spirits
roaming about in the wild space past the edge of the ‘civilised’ area of the
village, and the ancestors of deceased members of the community – all
three of these are located, spatially and conceptually, ‘outside’ (and
culturally ‘other’ to) Maravi village life. During funerals and male initia-
tion festivals the personifications of dangerous strangers and local ances-
tors arrive from the beyond, to perform local history in the public square
of Maravi villages.
As masks, these personae are performed by a society of men, also
called Nyau, consisting of those initiated into adulthood. The Nyau
masking society is organised on a village-to-village basis, under the
leadership of local chiefs. At funerals and festivals they perform masks
of wild animals and bush spirits, of stock local characters like the
‘village chief’, and the ‘ambitious young nephew of the chief’. Some of
these stock characters are danced in a pantomime or wear a facial
portrait of actual well-known persons from the village such as a
specific historical ruler memorable for his benevolence, or a nephew
desirous of the throne and noted for his bellicosity. Therefore, masking
tends to merge real historical actors with the previous stereotypes of
given masks, sometimes resulting in the invention of a new mask
type.14
Nyau masks also commemorate important types of outsiders,
consolidating them with local characters. One of the more popular
genres to appear in the Gule Wamkulu in recent decades is the red-
faced Maria, or Doña Maria. This archetypical ‘female’ mask may be
danced by a man wearing a brightly coloured skirt, false breasts,
straight hair, and earrings. Her face is red, or pink like that of a
sunburnt European.15 But red is also a colour associated in local
cosmology with transitional periods and their inherent danger; with
madness, with menstrual blood, and with the transformative heat of
fire. Maria’s name is borrowed from the Catholic Virgin Mother of
Christ and the term of respect for a woman in Portuguese, but her
dance is often lewdly sexual (thus teaching proper behaviour through
the example of its opposite), and her face may be marked by scarifica-
tions considered beautiful and ‘traditional’.16 The Maria—type mask
has been popular since at least the 1940s, when Catholic missions, well
known for their special regard for the Virgin, used the militant Legion
of Mary to suppress the practice of Nyau in Maravi villages.17 Early
accounts of the Maria mask type indicate that she was intended as an
anti-Christian parody of the Virgin Mary, and Ian and Jane Linden
have described the Nyau societies as an active oppositional force
against both colonials and missionaries during the British regime, up to
the time of independence.
Maria’s image today is more complex. Several Marias may perform in
the same gule wamkulu. One may represent an African city girl, another
a parody of African or European Christian women. Interestingly, masks
called Maria may also depict the ‘mother of all’ in both Christian and
non-Christian senses. In the guise of a ‘foreign’ lady, Maria is often the
representation of senior and respected local women such as the chief’s
wife or sister, the mother and ancestress of a lineage (a revered position
CTTE112430.fm Page 345 Friday, July 8, 2005 3:36 AM
18. de Aguilar, op. cit, p. 85.
19. Edward Alpers, Ivory &
Slaves in East Central
Africa: Changing Patterns
of International Trade to
the Later Nineteenth
Century, Heinemann,
London, 1975, pp 240–2.
345
in this matrilineal society). According to de Aguilar, a Maria mask can
even represent the namkungwi, a powerful and wise older woman
instrumental in the coming-of-age schools for young boys and girls.18
Finally, Maria masks are often carved as generalised portraits of beauti-
ful Chewa women.
During the nineteenth century, the East African slave trade fractured
African communities. Rulers of Maravi peoples also competed for the
acquisition and selling of slaves.19 One consequence of these social
upheavals was the mass migration and eventual political domination of
Yao clans from the area of Portuguese-dominated Mozambique, in
areas formerly ruled by Maravi subgroups like the Chewa. In the same
period, Ngoni communities, mostly male warriors fleeing the nation-
building wars of Shaka Zulu in Southern Africa, pillaged the region,
subjugated, and eventually intermarried with local residents. Chokwe-
related peoples were also brought through the area from the west, in
the present area of Zambia, as traders possibly as captives taken into
slavery, and as pawns taken into extended families in Chewa and other
Maravi communities. In short, during the nineteenth century many
different peoples were integrated into the Maravi, sometimes becoming
members of lineages, and very probably importing novel ideas about
art, entertainment, ritual and the sacred. Cultural exchange worked in
many ways: even in staunchly ‘Ngoni’ and ‘Yao’ areas today, the Nyau
masquerades supposedly central to Maravi identity are often
performed.
One way this early period of cultural collision has been recorded
and made relevant for the present is through the mask Elvis, face
danced in Maravi communities since at least 1977, the year the pop
singer died. One manifestation of post-second World War globalisation
was the expansion into non-Western markets by the Western-based
media and entertainment industry, in the form of vanity magazines,
Hollywood-type films, and the mass distribution of popular musical
recordings. It was also a time of growing political independence for
formerly colonised African countries like Malawi. With Elvis, older
forms of masks seem to have been combined with the hypersexualised
image of the King of Rock and Roll, whose gyrating hips and upbeat
imitation of black American party music was mass marketed to the
postwar period’s youth. Elvis is complex. His image in this mask incor-
porates earlier ideas of the raucous energy of youth, but the spire of
hair above the forehead, while over-exaggerating the real Elvis’s
pompadour, also refers to the form of headdress worn by nineteenth-
century Ngoni regiments: a tall plume of ostrich feather. 1977 was also
the year of Queen Elizabeth II’s silver jubilee. Thus the mask may also
refer to the coarse hair fall on the helmets of the Queen’s honour
guard. All of these signs are sealed by the forehead tattoo that marks
the face as ethnically ‘chewa’.
Nyau funeral masks taken together, or taken separately in the forms
2 Elvis, wooden mask, Maravi peoples, Malawi, c 1970s, private collection
like Maria and Elvis, may be said to mark the place, and to domesticate,
the unknown aspects of the outside world in the terms of the family, and
of the familiar. They also record, interpret as dramatic performance, and
collect the mostly unwritten historical experience of local people. They
materialise encounters with mysterious outside forces and with real
cultural others, from primordial to modern times.
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346

Wooden mask, Maravi peoples, Malawi, c 1970s. Photo courtesy of Axis Gallery New
York.

ARTICULATION OF THE IMAGE

If those objects commonly labelled ‘traditional African art’ may be re-

thought as bodies in diaspora, then what about other recent visual cultural
forms from Africa, such as studio photography? Here the potential for
conflation of real bodies and images is possibly more pronounced because
CTTE112430.fm Page 347 Friday, July 8, 2005 3:36 AM
20. Christopher Pinney,
‘Introduction: “How the
Other Half …”’, in
Photography’s Other
Histories, eds Christopher
Pinney and Nicolas
Peterson, Duke University
Press, Durham, 2003, p 3.
In the same volume, see
also Stephen Sprague,
‘Yoruba Photography:
How the Yoruba See
Themselves’. See also Olu
Oguibe, ‘Photography and
the Substance of the
Image’, in In/sight: African
Photographers, 1940 to the
Present, exhibition
catalogue, Guggenheim
Museum, New York,
1996. Pinney’s comment
here is in response to his
reading of Sprague and
Oguibe.
21. See Olu Oguibe, op cit.
22. Mercer, op cit.
23. Pinney, op cit, p 14.
24. Ibid, p 12.
25. Manthia Diawara, ‘The
1960s in Bamako: Malick
Sidibé and James Brown’,
The Andy Warhol
Foundation for the Visual
Arts Paper Series on the
Arts, Culture, and Society,
Paper Number 11, 2001.
My own comments here
owe much to Diawara’s
thoughtful recollections.
347
of the reality effects of the photographic medium, and because portraits
themselves tend to call to mind actual human models. Here again we
should proceed with some caution, since, as Christopher Pinney has writ-
ten in his groundbreaking edited book, Photography’s Other Histories:
If an image that appears to do a particular kind of work in one episteme
is able to perform radically different work in another, it appears inappro-
priate to propose inflexible links between formal qualities and effect.
Instead we need a more nuanced reading of the affinities between particu-
lar discursive formations and the image worlds that parallel them, as well
as sophisticated analyses of their transformational potentialities.20
Pinney argues that all images, but especially mimetic photographic
images, exhibit an excess of aesthetic and historical data. The photogra-
pher sets the mise-en-scène and crops the picture, but inevitably the
image includes more than the photographer can control. Photographs
are thus ‘contrived’ but do not exclude ‘random factors’. This represen-
tational excess is what Olu Oguibe might mean by his phrase, ‘the
substance of the image’, as that which lies in wait, ready to be resurfaced
by readers as authors who sense an affinity in the image.21 A photograph
(like a nkisi or nyau mask) composes, it conjoins and articulates a situa-
tion from dispersed elements. It can also be reproduced, and changes
hands, and its successive viewers may become like authors, as much as
the social setting, the photographer and the sitter are its authors. Kobena
Mercer has argued (and Barthes in Camera Lucida has lyrically told)
that photographs are appreciated through a complex process of identifi-
cation with the image, which across time and cultures often amounts to
misrecognition.22 These misrecognitions constitute the disturbance in the
image (what Barthes might call the punctum). Thus, whether in Africa or
elsewhere, we understand old photos or others’ photos by perceiving
something similar, yet distant, in them. In this way, photography contin-
ually produces encounters with otherness in its audiences. It also is a
context for the experience of alterity for its subjects, those who have
posed for an image that will be recognisable to them as a ‘photographic
portrait’ and more than just a realistic depiction. Different cultures
participate in the encounter, the sowing through of the photograph, in
the event that is captured and travels over space and time. Photographs
take but also make.23 I agree with Pinney’s claim that photography,
especially from outside the West, demands a theory that ‘addresses the
often radically different nexus of world, human subject, and representa-
tional practice whose contours photographic practice throws sharply
into relief’.24 As a tentative step in that direction, and as an example, I
turn to the work of Malian studio photographer Malick Sidibé, consid-
ered in light of the fantastic reception of his images abroad.
Malick Sidibé is one of Africa’s most celebrated photographers. He is
known best for his black-and-white photographs of young people in the
clubs around Bamako, Mali, in the 1960s and 1970s, though he
continued to make photographs in later years. These older photos docu-
ment the attitudes, styles and tastes of the youth in post-independence
Bamako. Sidibé’s style of informal snapshot portraits was new for its time,
and his photography has been related by Manthia Diawara to the cultural
revolution that followed political independence in Mali in 1960.25 In the
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348
26. Though cited as
‘anonymous’ in Africa
Explores, the author went
on to become the most
famous African
photographer today,
Seydou Keïta. See Elizabeth
Bigham ‘Issues of
Authorship in the Portrait
Photographs of Seydou
Keïta’, African Arts, Spring
1999. See also John
Picton’s critique of the Jean
Pigozzi/Andre Magnin
enterprise: ‘In Vogue, or
the Flavour of the Month:
The New Way to Wear
Black’, Third Text, 23,
Summer 1993 and Richard
Vine, ‘Seydou Keïta Legacy
Disputed’, Art in America,
December 2003.
27. One recent show and
catalogue (Michelle
Lamunière’s You Look
Beautiful Like That: The
Portrait Photographs of
Seydou Keïta and Malick
Sidibé, Yale University
Malick Sidibe examining his archive, Bamako, 1997. Photo courtesy CAAC/Magnin by Andre Magnin
early 1990s, Sidibé was ‘discovered’ by André Magnin, personal curator
for Swiss collector Jean Pigozzi. Magnin first met Sidibé while in search
of the author of the anonymous photographs displayed on Susan Vogel’s
1991 ‘Africa Explores’ exhibition at the Center for African Art in
New York.26 Sidibé’s work has since been promoted internationally by
Magnin and by the Revue Noire group in Paris. In 1996, Sidibé was
included in the ‘In/Sight’ exhibition at the Guggenheim Museum, and has
since been featured in numerous catalogues and exhibitions abroad.27 In
1999, 30 of his photographs from the 1960s and 1970s were exhibited at
Deitch Projects gallery in New York, along with wooden sculptures
modelled after his images. In each of these settings – 1960s Bamako,
1990s international art stardom, and the Deitch Project show – the
nature of the diasporic encounter with Sidibé’s images has been
reformed and revalued. The first and most dramatic shift, from studio
portraiture to international art status, witnessed an alteration in the scale
and presentation of Sidibé’s work, from mostly small-scale portable
works printed almost to the edge of the paper, and meant for a small
familiar audience, to large-format framed images with a large white
border, whose sitters became anonymous for a general international
viewing audience relative to the photographer’s own rising individual art-
star status.
6543 Advertisement
Malick Sidibe,
Sidibe examining
for
snapshots
Let’s
Deitch
Posechis
Projects
with
1960s–1970s
archive,
the exhibit
Disc
Bamako,
Jockey,1997.
Florina
Photo
Club,
by1964’,
Andrenote
Magnin
the upturned pot used as a resonator for speakers, and the album by F Hardy
CTTE112430.fm Page 349 Friday, July 8, 2005 3:36 AM

349

Malick Sidibe, snapshots c 1960s–1970s, courtesy of CAAC/Magnin. (Note the mix of

Marlboro men more about slippers and gangster hat, below right.

As Manthia Diawara has wonderfully described, in his own recollec-

tions of coming of age in Bamako in the 1960s, Malian youth chose to
Press, New Haven, 2001) is use their new-found freedom from colonial control in paradoxical ways.
notable for its careful They wished to detach themselves from what they considered the colo-
attention to the Malian nised mentality and the older customs of their elders’ generation. But they
contexts of production and
reception of the original did this not by conforming to the Marxist ideology and revisionist tradi-
photographs. tionalism advocated by independence theorists like Sekou Touré and
CTTE112430.fm Page 350 Friday, July 8, 2005 3:36 AM

350

Malick Sidibe, Let’s Pose with the Disc Jockey, Florina Club, 1964’ Courtesy of CAAC/Magnin, Note the upturned pot
used as a resonator for speakers, and the album by F. Hardy as the centre of median in the image.

Frantz Fanon. Instead, they fashioned themselves after the international

youth culture of the 1960s, and especially after what other young people
of African descent were doing in Europe and America. In Diawara’s view,
they showed their rebellion against both parents and colonial ways by
embracing the ‘diaspora aesthetics’ of being young and rebellious and
pan-African. Malian youth of the 1960s expressed their new freedoms
from the culture of the elders (both foreign-colonial and local-familial)
through a look derived from the club scene, referred to in French as the
yé-yé scene, and in local slang as grins. They embraced the music and look
of French bubblegum pop chanteuses Françoise Hardy and Sylvie Vartan,
the Beatles, and later Jimi Hendricks, and James Brown.
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351

Advertisement for the Deitch Projects exhibit.

A grin is a clique, a social in-group formed around drinking sweet tea,

listening to music, discussing politics, relationships and fashion. The term
yé-yé came to Mali via French pop, and ultimately from the Beatles’ imita-
tion of the hip doo-wop phrase ‘yeah-yeah’, as heard in their 1962 hit
single ‘She Loves You [yeah yeah yeah]’. The phrase came to epitomise
the stylish modishness, political self-consciousness and sexual liberation
of the international youth culture of the 1960s, and it was used to describe
French teen idols like the ‘yé-yé girls’ Hardy and Vartan. This continental
version of French yé-yé culture was memorialised in Jean-Luc Godard’s
1966 film Masculin–Féminin about stylish, but alienated teens he calls,
‘the children of Karl Marx and Coca-Cola.’
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352
28. My thanks to Modou
Dieng (personal
correspondence) for
pointing out this nuance to
me.
29. Diawara, op cit, p 3.
In Mali, as in other Francophone African countries, the yé-yés came
to be considered ‘bad kids’, hippies, and a bit rough by older or squarer
folks.28 This African face of the yé-yé scene has also been captured on
film by the classic ‘outsider’ characters Mory and Anta in Senegalese
director Djibril Diop Mambety’s celebrated Touki Bouki of 1973. In
Sidibé’s photographs too, the cultural collision of the yé-yé and the grin,
the drinking clubs and international pop culture, appears composed in
an original moment.
By emphasising exclusively the local impact of James Brown over
Françoise Hardy, Diawara underestimates the non-racial kinds of identi-
fications enacted by these Malian youth, especially their initial engage-
ment with global youth culture through French youth culture. His
reminiscence also occasionally falls into what I see as a Senghorian
Negritude trap, for instance, when he reduces all things ‘African’ to
some essential earthiness supposedly vindicated by reference to the
‘primordial’ Dogon people. The Dogon, though relatively small in
number, have been a favourite subject of French anthropologists (and
for African intellectuals like Leopold Senghor). This has been the case
ever since their art was first described by Marcel Griaule in the 1930s.
For unwary students of art, the Dogon have come to epitomise every-
thing ‘traditional’ in Africa. This primitivising lapse aside, Diawara does
argue convincingly that it was through the camera work of Malick
Sidibé that a unique sense of modern identity for Bamako’s youth was
both documented and created.
With Sidibé’s photos the rapid movement of international images was
momentarily halted, and altered, so that young Malians could fit them-
selves into the picture. The post-independence era in Africa translated by
Sidibé’s images was one characterised by an explosive proliferation of
mediatised images of the human body. This was the case in Mali as
much as it was in post-Second World War Europe and America. Under
such conditions, the work of the photograph takes on a special function.
Although their precise contours depend on the locale, photographs hold
the potential to place their subjects into the flow of external images. One
might say, ‘I looked like that, and they looked like that too’. Looking
through personal photo albums may heighten this aspect of identity-as-
comparison, especially when done as a group activity. Diawara claims
this was precisely the case for the yé-yés and the grins who collected and
discussed their own photographic images, as well as pictures from
foreign magazines and record album covers.
Diawara claims, further, that Sidibé’s photos are ‘a gateway to every-
thing that was fashionable then; everything that constituted our [Bama-
kois] modernism… [They speak] not only as important aesthetic
documents on the culture of the 1960s, but also as documents that both
problematise the narrow meaning of nationalism extant at that time, and
open the door for a Pan-African and diasporic aesthetics through rock
and roll.’29 In short, though nearly all of Sidibé’s photographs from the
1960s and 1970s show people who have chosen to align themselves with
the West, through the outward signs of dress, hairstyle, clothing and
musical taste, this materialism did not derive from the subjects’ desires to
be just like the West. It came from their desires to align themselves with
the global youth movement and with the modernity of black diasporas
that they considered themselves to be a part of.
CTTE112430.fm Page 353 Friday, July 8, 2005 3:36 AM
30. My gratitude to Deitch
Projects for responding to
my inquiry about this show
by sending me a press kit
and reviews.
353
In 1999, a selection of Sidibé’s party photographs were shown in an
exhibit at Deitch Projects, called ‘The Clubs of Bamako’.30 They were
shown with 14 life-size polychrome wooden sculptures commissioned to
mimic subjects in the photographs. The sculptures were carved by four
artists, not from Mali, but from the Ivory Coast: Nicolas Damas, Emile
Guebehi, Koffi Kouakou, and Coulibaly Siaka Paul who previously were
known mostly in the Ivory Coast for making commemorative statues for
the deceased. What are we to think of such a juxtaposition? On the one
hand, the Ivoirian sculptors are part of a fascinating culture of modern
commemorative statuary in coastal West Africa, itself inspired by
photography, and make a fascinating story in their own right. But some-
how, at least to my eye, the Deitch Projects show drastically lowered the
stakes for the kind of dynamism described by Diawara. Through their
juxtaposition, the sculptures, whose style belongs to another history and
place, distracted the viewer from the valuation of the photographs as
genuine markers of a self-assured modernity among the youth of
Bamako. The sculptures, in juxtaposition, potentially led the New York
audience, unaware of the dynamism of African modernities, to think of
all the work on the show as somehow naïve, at best visionary, and at
worst primitive.
Writing for the New York Times on 26 February 1999, Holland
Cotter called the combination of polychrome sculptures and photo-
graphs ‘Smashing … fresh, larger than life, but also rooted in time and
place’. In the September 1999 Art in America, Sarah Valdez called the
photographs on exhibit at Deitch ‘Disarmingly direct in their artistic
intention … full of jouissance, toothy grins and outrageous bellbottoms’.
Sidibé’s reprinted photographs, now larger and with a thick white
border, were resignified as ‘modern art photography’ and thus valued at
a higher level on the art market food chain. Having their images
mimicked by the sculptures brought them down a notch, but not in the
direction of what they were once intended to be (snapshot portraits),
rather as signs of Western nostalgia for a projected Africa of the mind.
The Deitch show was a place where ‘African modernity’ meant striving
for Westernisation, and doing it awkwardly. Deitch did not exhibit
Sidibé’s images on their own, as merely revalued ‘art photography’. Nor
did he, or most other international exhibitors for that matter, display
any more recent images by the artist. Only one review of the Deitch exhi-
bition noticed there might be a problem. In the summer 1999 Flash Art,
reviewer Donald Odita (himself a Nigerian-American artist) concluded
by stating that ‘this show could have been more interesting had it
consciously challenged the Western model of contemporary African Art,
rather than uphold its stereotype’.
If Africa’s diasporas of images are characterised by their momentum,
surely Andre Magnin and Jeffrey Deitch cannot have the last say in the
matter of Africa’s art or its modernity. And so I leave you with another
African image, this time from the February 2002 issue of Lucky magazine.
Do you know about Lucky? It is the practical girl’s guide to fashion
and shopping, not one of those compendia of inaccessible items like
Cosmopolitan or Vogue, not the sort of ladies’ magazine that Roland
Barthes in his Mythologies would say features only ‘Ornamental Cook-
ery’. Lucky shows you how to find what you need to get the look you
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354

want, affordably. In 2002, one of the desirable looks was the ‘retro’
1960s Op-Art print, featured on page 95 of the feature ‘Store to Street
Separates’, as worn by a model with a pixie haircut, standing in front of
the Astor Place subway stairs in Manhattan. At Astor Place, street
vendors sell half-price art catalogues on the sidewalk. In the Lucky image
one of the catalogues for sale, seen to the left of the model, is Seydou
Keïta’s monograph by Andre Magnin. Keïta is Sidibé’s better-known
elder contemporary, famous for his own studio portraits of Bamako’s
elites, seated in front of and sometimes wearing Op-art-looking ‘African’

Lucky Magazine, February 2002, p 95. Photo by Elliston Lutz.

CTTE112430.fm Page 355 Friday, July 8, 2005 3:36 AM
31. The feature on Yinka
Shonibare’s ‘African print’
sculptures in the Spring
2005 The New York Times
Style Magazine is yet
another indication that the
fashion world is interested
in an African image
without recourse to
primitivism.
32. See Brent Hayes Edwards,
‘The Uses of Diaspora’,
Social Text, 66, 19:1,
Spring 2001.
355
textile prints. Keita’s portrait of a woman looking over her shoulder,
jumps out of time — past the time-lag perceived to exist between Africa
and the West. It is an old photograph, but its subject is already ahead of
us, looking back. She has already been there, done that. Seen as a pair
with the image of Malian yé-yés, holding on to the image-to-emulate of
Françoise Hardy, this image from Lucky seems to show that Africa’s
modernity can also be a suitable model for the return of the 60s, at least
for Manhattan’s youthful street fashion of today.31
African visual objects are placeholders. The place they situate may be
7 Lucky Magazine, February 2002, p 95
the gap between performance and memory or between African histories
and the new audiences for African objects elsewhere. And this place, this
gap, these objects – move, like diasporas. They have biographies, some-
times unpleasant ones, to which we as scholars need to be more atten-
tive, at the very least to keep history in the forefront of our African Art
history. Was it not the historical nexus of Malick Sidibé’s photography,
at several registers at once, that was elided by the Deitch Projects exhibi-
tion? If so, it is our task as writers and curators to ensure that the biogra-
phies of diaspora objects are taken into account. In a recent historical
overview of the use of the term ‘diaspora’ in relation to black cultural
studies, Brent Hayes Edwards has urged a return to Stuart Hall’s formu-
lation of the concept of diaspora as articulation, as connection and
expression, but also as a wedge, a gap and a lag between peoples and
moments in space and time. As such, diaspora is an ‘intervention’, a
‘difference … that allows movement’, but retains the possibility of a crit-
ical stance in relation to essentialist ideas of nation, ethnicity and race.32
I find Edward’s return to Hall encouraging, since articulating diaspora in
this manner is expressing and describing kinds of connectivity, while
also allowing a more personal, historically rooted and politically
conscious approach to the complicating flows of images that move
around dominance. When we point to the articulations that African art
objects perform, through our own writing about the connection of
peoples and their images, I think this might open up something exciting,
or at least historically responsible, in African art studies. We would be
speaking of Africa’s diasporas of images.