In Senghor's Shadow: Art, Politics, and the Avant-Garde in Senegal, 1960–1995 9780822386056

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In Senghor’s Shadow

Objects/Histories Critical Perspectives on Art, Material Culture, and Representation A series edited by Nicholas Thomas

In Senghor’s Shadow

art, politics, and the avant-garde in senegal, 1960–1995

Elizabeth Harney

Duke University Press

Durham and London 2004

Publication of this book has been aided by a grant from the Millard Meiss Publication Fund of the College Art Association.

© 2004 Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid free paper  Typeset in Minion by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

In memory of my father, ro b e rt fo r e s t h a r n e y and my grandmother, b e s s i e fo r e s t h a r n e y

Contents

List of Illustrations

ix

Acknowledgments

xvii

Preface

xxi

Introduction 1 1

Rhythm as the Architecture of Being: Reflections on un Âme Nègre 19

2

The École de Dakar: Pan-Africanism in Paint and Textile

3

Laboratories of Avant-Gardism

4

After the Avant-Garde

5

Passport to the Global Art World Notes

243

Bibliography Index

313

289

105

149 217

49

Illustrations

Plates 1

Bacary Dième, Le marché. n.d. Tapestry, 232 × 232 cm. Collection of the Government of Senegal. Courtesy of the Ministry of Culture.

2 Papa Ibra Tall, Couple Royale. 1965. Tapestry, 222 × 155 cm. Collection of the Government of Senegal. Courtesy of the Ministry of Culture. 3 Iba N’Diaye, Hommage à Bessie Smith. Collection of the National Museum of African Art, 2002-13-1. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Franko Khoury, 1987. 4

Abdoulaye N’Diaye, Bamba et Lat Dior. 1973. Tapestry, 122 × 372 cm. Collection of the Government of Senegal. Courtesy of the Ministry of Culture.

5

Issa Samb, Che Guevara. n.d. Mixed media. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

6

El Hadji Moussa Babacar Sy, Untitled. 1994. Acrylic and tar on jute sacking. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

7

Guibril André Diop, Ecology Sculpture. 1995. Recycled cans and wood. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

8

Germaine Anta Gaye, Signare. 1994. Glass painting. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

9

Germaine Anta Gaye, Végétal séries. 1993. Glass painting, gold leaf powder in wooden table. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

10

Viyé Diba, Rythme kangourou. 1993. Wood, canvas, printed textile, nails, 120 × 37 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

11 Cheikh Niass, Coiffure de femme noire. 1994. Mixed technique, 105 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Photo Elizabeth Harney. 12

set setal Murals. Rebuess, Dakar. 1994. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

13

set setal mural, La maison des esclaves à Gorée. Rebeuss, Dakar, 1990s. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

14

El Hadji Moussa Babacar Sy, Mural at French Cultural Center. Dakar, 1994. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

Figures 1

Léopold Sédar Senghor. 3 May 1977. Courtesy of ap/ Wide World Photos. 20

2

Boubacar Coulibaly, Rencontre des masques. 1976. Oil on canvas, 116 × 89 cm. Collection of the Government of Senegal. Courtesy of the Ministry of Culture. 47

3 Badara Camara. Invitation. 1978. Tapestry, 160.5 × 282.5 cm. Collection of the Government of Senegal. Courtesy of the Ministry of Culture. 55 4

Amadou Seck, Samba Gueladio. 1973. Paint, mixed media, 244 × 122 cm. Collection of the Government of Senegal. Courtesy of the Ministry of Culture. 57

5

Modou Niang, Untitled. n.d. Tapestry, 242 × 167 cm. Collection of the Government of Senegal. Courtesy of the Ministry of Culture. 58

6 Papa Ibra Tall, Vigil cosmique. 1978. Oil on canvas, 120 × 100 cm. Collection of the Government of Senegal. Courtesy of the Ministry of Culture. 60 x Illustrations

7 Papa Ibra Tall, Projection spatiale. Ca. 1970s. Pencil drawing, 65 × 49.5 cm. Collection of the Government of Senegal. Courtesy of the Ministry of Culture. 62 8

Moussa Samb, Flute Player. n.d. Tapestry. 6.28 × 6.28 m. Collection of the Government of Senegal. Courtesy of the Ministry of Culture. 70

9

Seydou Barry, Grand royal. Ca. 1970s. Oil on canvas, 217 × 146 cm. Collection of the Government of Senegal. Courtesy of the Ministry of Culture. 71

10 Weavers at work, Manufacture Sénégalaise des Arts Décoratifs. 1994. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 72 11

Ansoumana Diedhiou, Khounolbâ. 1977. Tapestry, 216.5 × 147.5 cm. Collection of the Government of Senegal. Courtesy of the Ministry of Culture. 86

12

Ousmane Faye, Spirit of Liberty. 1989. Oil on canvas, 75.8 × 94.7 cm. Collection of the Government of Senegal. Courtesy of the Ministry of Culture. 87

13 Ibou Diouf, Les trois épouses. 1974. Tapestry, 364 × 472 cm. Collection of the Government of Senegal. Courtesy of the Ministry of Culture. 88 14

Samba Balde, Savage Antelope. 1974. Tapestry, 194 × 100 cm. Collection of the Government of Senegal. Courtesy of the Ministry of Culture. 89

15

Amadou Dédé Ly, Kocc Barma. 1977. Tapestry, 236 × 179 cm. Collection of the Government of Senegal. Courtesy of the Ministry of Culture. 90

16

Alpha Wouallid Diallo, Débarquement de Blaise Diagne à St. Louis. Ca. 1970. Oil on canvas, 100 × 150 cm. Collection of the Government of Senegal. Courtesy of the Ministry of Culture. 91

17

Bacary Dième, Couple. 1978. Tapestry, 292 × 200 cm. Collection of the Government of Senegal. Courtesy of the Ministry of Culture. 93

18

Issa Samb, Assemblages for the Laboratoire Agit-Art. 1994. Mixed media. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 110 Illustrations xi

19

Issa Samb, Assemblages for the Laboratoire Agit-Art. 1994. Mixed media. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 111

20

Issa Samb’s Dakar courtyard. Spring 1994. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 113

21

Issa Samb, Untitled. 1990s. Ink on paper. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 118

22

Issa Samb’s Dakar courtyard. Spring 1994. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 119

23

Issa Samb, Untitled. 1994. Acrylic on canvas, 3 × 4 feet. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 122

24

Issa Samb, Untitled, detail. 1993. Acrylic on panel, 3 × 4 feet. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 123

25

Issa Samb, Untitled. 1994. Corrugated iron, variable sizes. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 124

26

El Hadji Moussa Babacar Sy, foot painting. 1977. Acrylic on paper. Photo courtesy of artist. 127

27

El Hadji Moussa Babacar Sy, foot painting. 1970s. Acrylic on canvas, Photo courtesy of artist. 128

28

El Hadji Moussa Babacar Sy, foot painting. 1981. Acrylic on canvas. Photo courtesy of artist. 129

29 El Hadji Moussa Babacar Sy at work on his jute sack works. May 1994. Photo Elizabeth Harney. 130 30

El Hadji Moussa Babacar Sy, Untitled. 1993. Acrylic and tar on jute sacking. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 131

31

El Hadji Moussa Babacar Sy, Untitled. 1993. Acrylic and tar on jute sacking. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 132

32

El Hadji Moussa Babacar Sy, Skite. 1993. Acrylic on kite material. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 133

33

El Hadji Moussa Babacar Sy, Skite. 1994. Acrylic on kite material. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 135

34

Issa Samb, Untitled. 1995. Installation by the Laboratoire Agit-Art. London, Whitechapel Gallery. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 137

xii Illustrations

35

The Laboratoire Agit-Art. 1995. From Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa. London, Whitechapel Gallery. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 139

36

Babacar Traoré at work at Yorkshire sculpture workshop. August 1995. Photo by Rachael Townshend. 144

37

Babacar Traoré, Puissance. 1994. Glass, mirror, and other found materials. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 145

38

Moustapha Dimé, Oiseau. Mid-1990s. Wood and metal. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 152

39

Guibril André Diop, Title Unknown. 1993–94. Recycled iron. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 153

40

Germaine Anta Gaye, Végétal series. 1992. Glass painting in wooden cabinet. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 154

41

set setal sign in the Laboratoire Agit-Art courtyard. 1994. Wood, mixed media, and acrylic. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 155

42

Djibril N’Diaye, Untitled, detail. 1994. Wood, ebony, sisal, and found metals. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 160

43

Djibril N’Diaye, Untitled. 1994. Wood, ebony, sisal, and found metals. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 162

44

Moustapha Dimé, Femme Sérère. 1992. Bowls, mortar and pestle, 145 × 49 cm. Collection of the National Museum of African Art. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 164

45

Moustapha Dimé, Femme. 1993. Wood, calabash, sisal, pestles, and jute sacking. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 169

46

Moustapha Dimé, Femme, detail. 1993. Wood, calabash, sisal. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 169

47

Moustapha Dimé, Hommage à Cheikh Anta Diop. 1990s. Wood and nails. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 171

48

Moustapha Dimé, Oiseau. Driftwood, metal, found objects. Made for tenq workshop in Saint Louis, Senegal, September 1994. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Pauline Burmann. 173

Illustrations

xiii

49

Studio of Moustapha Dimé, Gorée Island, Senegal. 1994. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 174

50 Guibril André Diop with Cosmos. 1994. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 175 51

Guibril André Diop, Choréographie ii. 1994. Found iron and nails. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 176

52

Guibril André Diop, Cosmos. 1993. Iron. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 176

53

Guibril André Diop, Déploiement. 1994. Found iron and nails. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 178

54

Guibril André Diop at work on Ecology Sculpture. 1995. Yorkshire Sculpture Park, England. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 179

55

Guibril André Diop, Ecology Sculpture, detail. 1995. Recycled cans and wood. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 179

56

Anonymous, Seated Man. n.d. Photograph with glass painting. © Africa-Museum Tervuren, Belgium. 183

57

Babacar Lô, Woman with Libidor. n.d. Glass painting. © Africa-Museum Tervuren, Belgium. 184

58 Germaine Anta Gaye at home. 1994. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 186 59

Germaine Anta Gaye, drawing of signare. 1993. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 187

60

Germaine Anta Gaye, glass painting in sewing table. 1994. Glass, paint, wooden and metal table. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 190

61

Germaine Anta Gaye, Oiseaux. 1988. Glass painting and gold leaf powder set in table top. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 191

62

Viyé Diba, Title Unknown. 1993. Mixed media, 120 × 100 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 191

63

Viyé Diba, Géometrie vitale. 1993. Mixed media, 120 × 114 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 194

xiv Illustrations

64

Viyé Diba, Plantlike Evocation. 1996. Mixed media. Collection of the National Museum of African Art. Photo by Franko Khoury. 197

65

Viyé Diba at work in courtyard studio. 1994. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 198

66

Kan-Si, Déstructuré iii. 1992. Mixed media. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 201

67

Kan-Si, Déstructuré V. 1992. Mixed media, 224 × 223.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 202

68

Kan-Si, Ritual séculaire. 1994. Oil on paper, 85.5 × 92. 4 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 204

69 Cheikh Niass, Untitled. 1993. Mixed media, recycled materials. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 205 70 Cheikh Niass, Untitled. 1994. Oil on canvas and wood. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 206 71

set setal mural, Abdou Diouf: Vive la Démocratie. Rebeuss, Dakar, 1991. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 207

72

set setal mural, Lamine Guèye. Rebeuss, Dakar, 1991. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 209

73

set setal murals. Dakar, 1991. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

74

set setal mural, El Hadji Malick Sy. Dakar, 1990s. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 210

75

set setal mural, Cheikh Amadou Bamba. Dakar, 1990s. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 211

76

set setal mural (B. F. B and J. A. M., sponsored by enda Santé Tiers Monde), Speak of Aids in the School/Parlons Sida en milieu scholaire. Médina, Dakar, 1991. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 212

77

set setal mural. Dakar, 1994. Photo courtesy of Allen Roberts and Polly Nooter Roberts. 213

78

El Hadji Moussa Babacar Sy, Mural at French Cultural Center. Dakar, 1994. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 227

210

Illustrations

xv

Acknowledgments

W

hile many people have been instrumental in making this book a reality, I must thank, first and foremost, the artists in Senegal whose generosity of spirit, engaging artistic works, and creative abilities helped shape this project from its beginnings. El Hadji Moussa Boubacar Sy, Viyé Diba, Issa Samb, Moustapha Dimé, Amadou Kane Sy, Cheikh Niass, Papa Ibra Tall, Guibril André Diop, Germaine Anta Gaye, Djibril N’Diaye, and Babacar Traoré invited me into their studios and their homes on many occasions. Many others whose works may not be directly featured herein were central players in the development of this study and provided critical assistance and advice in navigating the Dakarois artistic community. I’d like to thank in particular, Abdoulaye N’Doye, Mohammadou Zulu M’Baye, Serigne N’Diaye, Serigne M’Baye Camara, and Ibou Diouf. While in-depth preparation and research for this publication began with doctoral studies in London, I want to thank Simon Ottenberg and René Bravmann at the University of Washington and Christopher B. Steiner and John Rosenfield at Harvard University for supporting my interests in contemporary Africa as an undergraduate and master’s student, at a time when it was not altogether clear that the field would acknowledge the importance of this work. I would like to thank the Association of Commonwealth Universities for the support of a Commonwealth Fellowship that not only allowed me to attend the School of Oriental and African Studies and benefit from its wonderful library and staff resources but also to conduct a large portion of the field-

work in Dakar and Paris without needing to seek alternative major funding. I am grateful also to the Central Research Fund at the University of London and to the School of Oriental and African Studies (soas) for several fieldwork awards. The unfailing support, advice, and example of John Picton, my doctoral advisor at soas, contributed significantly to the completion of this manuscript. His belief in my abilities, critical acumen, and longstanding friendship enabled me to see how my research could engage more broadly with an exciting field of inquiry. My heartfelt thanks go to him and Sue for their love of Africa and their enjoyment of the idiosyncrasies of artistic creation and life in general. I am grateful for the insightful comments and guidance of John Mack and Christopher Green when this work formed part of a doctoral dissertation. Other colleagues in London, most notably Clementine Deliss, Elsbeth Court, Carol Brown, and members of the education department at the Royal Academy of Arts were equally supportive of this work, often sharing their contacts, providing introductions to key players in the Dakar or London art worlds, and facilitating early forums for sharing this research with broader audiences. To my Senegalese family—Professor El Hadji Ibrahima Diop, Maya and Nafi, and Pape Ass and Marie Guèye and family—I will never forget your generosity. Your love and support made my time in Dakar memorable. Colleagues Liz Mermin and Eileen Julian at the West African Research Center and Thomas Hodges at the U.S. embassy all shared their knowledge of Senegal and its artists. I would also like to thank Alioune Badiane, Moustapha Tambadou, Kalidou Sy, Alexis N’Gom, Binette and Nicholas Cissé, and Bara Diokhane for their willingness to share in their experiences as supporters of the visual arts scene in Dakar. I wish also to thank Dr. Donald Billingsly for introducing me to Dr. El Hadji Ibrahima Diop. The Malleys always provided a home away from home and stimulating conversation in Paris, which was much appreciated. Revisions of this manuscript were supported through a postdoctoral fellowship at the John W. Draper Program in the Humanities and Social Thought at New York University. I wish to thank my students and colleagues at nyu for their encouragement, in particular Robin Nagle, Anupama Rao, Simone Davis, Fred Myers, Manthia Diawara, and Toby Miller. I completed the writing of this book as the first curator of contemporary arts at the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution. This curatorial position has enabled me to see the important role that my academic research could play in instigating public scholarship and programming. I would like to thank the constant support of my colleagues David xviii

Acknowledgments

Binkley, Christine Kreamer, and Christraud Geary. They were always patient when this work took my attention away from museum projects. Thanks should also go to research specialists Kinsey Katchka and Allyson Purpura who have gone beyond their duties at the museum to help with the lastminute gathering of references and reproduction of images. The insightful comments of anonymous readers at Duke University Press and of the faculty board certainly made this manuscript a much better and clearer read. I’d like to thank Katie Courtland for her unfailing faith in the project and Christine Dahlin, Ken Wissoker, Kate Lothman, and Nicholas Thomas for their patience in the production time of this book as I juggled demands of family and museum work. Steve and Nick Harney, Simon Ottenberg, René Bravmann, Kate Ezra, Wendy Grossman, Amy Futa, and others have offered conceptual and editorial advice that I have tried to incorporate to the best of my abilities. To my siblings—as the last of four I have benefited from your striving for excellence, your interests in cross-cultural studies, and your faith in your little sister’s abilities. I also must thank my mother for inspiring me with her grace, calmness, and straightforwardness in all endeavors. Thanks to Bill Callahan and Beverly and Milton Israel for their love and support. The Martin family has provided many peaceful and loving breaks away from the stress of research and writing. Finally, to Paul, who knows this material as well if not better than I. You met this project when you met me. I cannot thank you enough for your constant affection and support. In London, Paris, Dakar, various points in Asia, New York, and Washington, your calming presence and humor have made the completion of this project possible. Hours after I sent off the full manuscript of this work to the press, Ben came into this world. His brother Sam followed in similar fashion, arriving close to the date on which the revisions were due. While this book surely marks a major achievement, my success is best measured by their wonderful presence in my life.

Acknowledgments

xix

Preface

I

n the decade since I began research for this study of Senegalese modernism and Negritude philosophy, the exhibition of and scholarship addressing contemporary African arts have proliferated and matured. Since the 1990s, a number of significant publications, exhibitions, journals, and doctoral dissertations have emerged to help shape an exciting, vibrant critical discourse. I write these words as the first curator of contemporary arts in the National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution—a position that is clear evidence of the expansion and growing acceptance of this field. These developments have served not simply to challenge archaic definitions of authenticity, artistry, and identity within the field of African arts history but also notably to affect considerable shifts within the mainstream art world, opening up new spaces and possibilities for contemporary African artists. Most scholars would agree, however, that the avenues through which these artists enter the global art world remain limited, inconsistent, and, at times, highly politicized and contentious. While I cannot possibly address all the changes that have occurred since the early 1990s in this book, I believe that there has been a certain coalescence of events in the first years of this new millennium making this study quite timely. On 20 December 2001, Léopold Sédar Senghor died in Normandy, at the age of ninety-six, after years of quiet retirement from public life. Not surprisingly, his passing led many to reflect on his intellectual, artistic, and political accomplishments. As a poet, statesman, and philosopher who lived through and contributed to the changes of a century, Senghor

left a rather complicated, checkered history. While many praised the profundity of his thought, clarity of his vision, and depth of his commitment to ‘‘black civilization,’’ others regarded his legacy more skeptically, arguing that his approach to black subjectivity was both reactionary and naive. In his remembrances of Senghor, writer, curator, and critic Simon Njami wrote, ‘‘Let me come right out with it—I loathe the man. I have done for years. Why? Mainly because of his reason from the Greeks, rhythm from the Blacks. To people of my generation it was like an abdication. In that utterance he condemned the Black to an essentially hedonistic role, cutting him off from the area of intellectual investigations.’’ 1 Njami quickly acknowledged that Senghor’s remarks had to be understood within the historical context of the early to mid-twentieth century. And yet this criticism of Senghor’s theories persists. Writing in the autumn following Senghor’s death, one Senegalese scholar called for a reassessment of his works in order ‘‘to do justice to the way in which he authentically challenged French colonial claims; to pay attention to the open character of a thought that has been petrified into formulas; and to understand the ethics embedded in the notion of a ‘dialogue of cultures.’ ’’ 2 This study will engage deeply with Senghor’s thoughts on artistry, identity, and modernism, focusing attention on the complex relationship between theory and practice as the president-poet helped shape the contours of modern art in Senegal through his patronage. In the same year of Senghor’s death, curator Okwui Enwezor focused the art world’s attention on the pioneering arts and philosophical debates that accompanied the years of anticolonial struggle, liberation movements, and independence in Africa. With his exhibition The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994, Enwezor sought nothing less than to ‘‘construct a ‘critical biography’ of Africa.’’ 3 In his introduction to the catalogue and anthology that accompanied this groundbreaking exhibition, Enwezor described the aim of the project as follows: To explore and elaborate on the critical paradigms and ideas related to concepts of modernity, the political and ideological formations of independence and liberation struggles, their impact in the production of self-awareness, new models of cultural expression, dialogues with processes of modernization, and what lies at the heart of modernity itself out of the ruins of colonialism.4 While much broader than visual arts, the scope of this exhibition encompassed the history of the École de Dakar, Negritude writings, and processes of modernization and modernism that are central concerns of this detailed xxii

Preface

study of Senegalese art history. My study, like Enwezor’s, engages broadly with current scholarly interest in the histories and workings of multiple, plural modernisms outside the metropolitan West and with the legacies of the era of decolonization. Enwezor’s exhibition was equally important for the venues that it inhabited—p.s. 1 Contemporary Art Space in New York and the Museum of Contemporary Art (mca) in Chicago. It would seem, then, that with the dawn of a new millennium, the contemporary art world was ready to give greater and more nuanced thought to the modern and contemporary arts of Africa. In April 2001, ARTnews published an article declaring Africa the source of ‘‘the newest Avant-Garde’’ from which contemporary art ‘‘has suddenly burst onto the international art world’s radar screen,’’ noting that ‘‘in the past five years, artists from Benin, Senegal, Zaire, Mali, Tunisia, Egypt, Nigeria, and especially, South Africa have been receiving high-profile exposure in museums, galleries, and biennials.’’ 5 Ironically, ARTnews ‘‘discovered’’ contemporary African artists at a moment when many art insiders were questioning the relevancy of identitybased exhibitions. In the same year, Studio Museum curator Thelma Golden coined the term postblack to refer to a new generation of young African American artists who approached notions of racial and ethnic identity with skepticism, and New York Times art critic Holland Cotter wrote of a paradigm shift ushering in a new freedom for art ‘‘beyond multiculturalism’’— a kind of ‘‘postethnicity.’’ He explained: ‘‘Multiculturalism ended up being as much a hindrance as a help. It made ethno-racial identity a source for gaining culture power, but it also turned it into a trap.’’ 6 Cotter rightly recognized and warned of the pitfalls of quickly adopting these new labels and assuming that a change in semantics would effect a change in the systemic racism of the art world: The labels postblack and postethnic sound cool. But what they actually describe is a precarious balancing act. Ideally, they imply a condition of diversity in the widest sense, with minority artists right at the center of the art world—all the time, no badge of identity required—where they belong, side by side with everyone else. But, like many social ideals, postethnicity could easily end up being yet another exercise in control from above, a marketing label of greatest benefit to the privileged.7 Certainly the national and international exhibition offerings of the last several years by the brightest curators and scholars have tended to support and further develop this notion of freeing the art and the artist from the confines of ethnic, racial, or national parochialism to celebrate transnational Preface

xxiii

and global contemporary experience and artistry. The year 2001 also marked a major turning point in the history of the Venice biennale, when Olu Oguibe and Salah Hassan created the first African Pavilion for contemporary artists, producing an exhibition, Authentic/Ex-centric: Conceptualism in Contemporary African Art, which argued for a clearer understanding of the importance of African artists in the realm of conceptual arts. Its agenda, coupled with its venue, epitomized the ironies of this age in which curators and artists alike strive to move beyond identity-based affiliations but tend to reinforce them at the same time. While Authentic/Ex-centric valued the contributions of Africa and diaspora-based artists to global conceptualism, it did so with the express intent of inserting an African pavilion into the traditional, Eurocentric, and nationalist structure of the Venice biennale.8 The common thread that ties together remembrances of Senghor, increased interest in the history of modernisms in Africa and in contemporary African arts, lively debates over identity-based exhibitions, and the now common curatorial agendas that advance global, non–identity-based interpretations and exhibitions is the ongoing tension and uneasy marriage between particularism and universalism. In the ‘‘First Word’’ of African Arts in 2002, Bennetta Jules-Rosette said of Senghor and his colleagues that ‘‘their visions of Négritude became not only the foundation of an African cultural philosophy and aesthetics but also a pathway to the redefinition of the universal in its valorization of African identity through the canons of the West.’’ 9 This confluence of events suggests that we would do well to revisit Senghor’s attempts to define a broader humanism in light of continuing particularisms and local inflections of modernism. While Senghor’s thoughts about civilization of the universal (civilisation de l’universel ) envisioned an instrumentalist role for the artist and an essentialist vision of identity, they nonetheless provide important links for today’s scholars to an intellectual history with direct relevance to many current debates on identity and artistry. The most successful of the recent set of international art biennales to emerge in the age of globalism is held in Dakar. Fittingly, Dak’Art successfully celebrated its tenth anniversary at the turn of the new millennium. Some forty years after Senghor envisioned a new place for modern art in the development of an independent nation and supported ambitious patronage programs to fulfill these dreams, Dakar finds itself again the site of debates over contemporary art and identity. In the catalogue accompanying the tenth biennale, two critics expressed the opposing poles of thought regarding the best way to approach, interpret, display, and market the arts of contemporary Africa. One contributor argued, ‘‘No artist wants to be judged through the distorting lens of identity,’’ 10 while the other warned that the xxiv

Preface

label ‘‘contemporary could be an avatar of assimilation; a metamorphosis of this key word of the colonial period that has survived the so-called postcolonial time.’’ 11 This case study of modern arts history in Senegal aims to further these fascinating, timely, and important discussions on the place of Africa’s contemporary artists within a global context.

Preface

xxv

Introduction

I

n 1984, the tragic death of a young Dakarois painter, little known at the time outside his country, sparked a flurry of art critical interest in the modernist visual expressions of Senegal. Mor Faye died at the age of thirty-seven, from cerebral malaria, but word on the street was that he had died of a broken spirit and mind, driven insane by the political, cultural, and artistic environment he encountered in postindependence Senegal. At the time of his death, he left behind a collection of some eight hundred works, most of which are now preserved in the Joint Atlantic Collection, a New York–based foundation run by Senegalese lawyer and art enthusiast Bara Diokhané, with the financial backing of Spike Lee. In the years since his death, Faye has achieved, at home and abroad, mythic status as a misunderstood, alienated artistic genius and a political martyr—the ultimate artiste maudit. Faye’s beatification can be traced to the highly acclaimed and well-attended 1991 retrospective of his works curated by Diokhané at the French Cultural Center’s Galerie 39 in Dakar. It was on this occasion that Diokhané first referred to Faye as an African Van Gogh. When reviewing this show for Artforum, Glenn O’Brien built on this burgeoning myth, calling Faye ‘‘a poor black Picasso,’’ a ‘‘solitary medicine man,’’ and a veritable ‘‘African saint.’’ 1 Faye’s biography, his practice, and his meteoric, posthumous rise to fame as an ‘‘international’’ and ‘‘outsider’’ artist hold great interest. The complexities of his practice and the subsequent reception of his works introduce

many of the discussions of canonicity, hybridity, avant-gardism, Africanité, and modernism within the Dakarois art world which form the basis for this study. Faye engaged with many aspects of the Senegalese art world, forging a very personal, sometimes contradictory path between official patronage, concerns with Africanité, artistic and political freedom, and interest and participation in such modernist practices as collage. Mor Faye’s career began within the structures of the Senegalese art world. Senegal’s first president, Léopold Sédar Senghor, established a lively, wellsupported cultural system complete with art schools, a national museum, festivals, and touring exhibitions. This robust state patronage encouraged a new Senegalese modernism, using theories of Negritude as its guide. To date, most studies of this period have argued that this patronage directly resulted in a rather formulaic indigenous art school, known as the École de Dakar, best characterized by its fascination with pan-African motifs. After attending the École des Arts, the national arts school created at independence under the patronage of Léopold Senghor, Faye participated in the 1966 First World Festival of Negro Arts and included his works in the international traveling exhibitions and national art salons of the 1970s. He attended exhibitions of Picasso, Messanier, da Vinci, and others brought to Dakar’s Musée Dynamique during Senghor’s era. Without ever having traveled abroad, Faye was thus able to acquire firsthand knowledge of both modernist and classical European artworks. He benefited, as many others did, first from the teachings of the great Senegalese modernist Iba N’Diaye and, later, from those of a series of French coopérants (technical assistants) at the art schools. He also slipped easily into a civil service position as art teacher in a Dakarois high school, a sinecure provided by the Senghorian system that he would later attack. A one-man show at Galerie 39 in 1976 would prove his last public exhibition. After it, Faye spent increasing amounts of time isolated in mental institutions, enduring the dementia caused by his illness and producing artworks at a remarkable rate. While Faye exhibited widely under the auspices of Senghorian patronage throughout the 1960s and 1970s, he later broke away from the École de Dakar and is said to have vehemently and ceaselessly campaigned against the primacy of a Negritude-inspired nationalist aesthetic and the autocracy of Senghorian rule. Some accounts include colorful public displays of dissent performed outside the gates of the presidential palace. He aligned himself with those artistic forces in Dakar that sought to broaden the art world’s structure and discourse. Faye’s work was exhibited internationally in the African section of the 1994 Venice Biennale, organized by the Museum for African Art in New York, 2

In Senghor’s Shadow

and later in the museum’s related New York City show. Several years later, his works were gathered into a solo exhibition at the World Bank Galleries in Washington, D.C., in October 1997. Despite this spate of exhibitions, the writings on his work have remained cursory at best and have failed to fully address the complexities of his career and the reasons behind his sudden success. The style, method, and iconography of Faye’s practice were broad in scope, ranging from early romantic landscapes in soft gouaches to rich, painterly compositions of solitary, often masked faces to the playful, satirical, sometimes politically charged collages, produced in the last few years of his life. Ironically, he had the most freedom, time, and materials at his disposal after his commitment to a mental institution in 1980. The breadth of this artistic production has meant that Faye’s work can satisfy wide-ranging, disparate patrons. Moreover, it has baffled those seeking to fit contemporary African art works into neat categories. His oeuvre is not easily periodized and suggests a rather complicated and negotiated process of creation, both within his own practice and in the larger Dakar art scene more generally. For example, his interest in and use of diverse materials, from canvas to newspaper scraps and other detritus, was evident throughout his career. A number of his Senegalese colleagues have also innovatively employed recycled materials for economic, aesthetic, and political reasons. Yet iconographic and technical consistencies are nonetheless apparent in his works across time. The masked forms do not disappear even after Faye no longer associates himself with the École de Dakar. They return, rather, in unexpected places, appearing within mixed-media pieces and in haunting, expressionistic portraits. Many of the compositions, whether in oil, gouache, crayon, or charcoal, are marked by a meticulous detail of line, producing, in some cases, strongly contoured figurative scenes, and in others, the kind of doodling and overembellishment that suggests an agitated mind. It is easy to explain the appeal of Mor Faye’s works to a broad international audience, for they are rich in color, clever in their manipulation of volume and space, and often topical in content, with references to the apartheid struggle and icons of global popular culture. In fact, Faye’s artistry seemingly demonstrates an easily digestible modernist vocabulary, allowing Western curators to situate his work within the ambit of a shared universalism. They present him simply as an international artist, homogenized, as it were, who shares formalist concerns with artists worldwide. His critical reception signals a politics of representation and interpretation prevalent within global understandings of modern and contemporary arts from the periphery. Introduction 3

Coupled with stories of his troubled persona, his eventual institutionalization, and his untimely death, Faye’s practice appeals simultaneously to the modernist fascination with genius and mastery and the long history of European primitivist ideas about the so-called outsider artist, which conflate the creativity and artistry of the instinctual primitive, the lunatic, and the child with general Otherness (in Faye’s case, his Senegalese and Muslim origin). These connections to primitivism have profound importance to broader understandings of the iconography of the École de Dakar art world from which he emerged—one vastly more interesting than most critics have charged. So, was Faye a black Picasso, Van Gogh, or saint? Of course, such proclamations always say more about the mythologizing processes of the art world than they do about the artist. The ‘‘worlding’’ 2 of Faye as an artistic figure has, for the most part, encouraged critics to ignore the complexities and contradictions of the local circumstances that so need to be documented if a more nuanced history of Africa’s artists and arts is to be told. This book constitutes a study of artistic governmentality in the postindependence period in Dakar, Senegal. It seeks to supplement and complicate recent narratives of contemporary African art history by documenting and questioning the often contradictory and innovative means through which Senegal’s artists have engaged with the histories and practices of modernism and have participated in attempts to link a new aesthetic to the project of nation building. As this examination of the Dakarois art world will show, the material history of this important period since independence cannot be fully understood simply by employing a now familiar vocabulary of postcolonial jargon or universalist aestheticism, nor can it easily be fitted into the existing anthropologically inclined categories that still dominate the scholarly field and market for African visual arts.3 Rather, any attempt to document these arts must form part of an effort to write a bottom-up history in which the uniqueness and vibrancy of local artistic practice and cultural narrative is read in terms of the artists’ own concerns, their understandings of current discourses on Otherness in relation to their practices, and their role in the formation and contestation of various postindependence ethnic, racial, national, religious, personal, and aesthetic identities. This focus would avoid another characterization of these individuals as faceless postcolonials acting out a prescribed narrative, and it would ultimately serve to challenge stale yet persistent European approaches to contemporary African cultural practices, which locate authenticity and value within restrictive temporal and spatial parameters. One can acquire 4

In Senghor’s Shadow

more subtle understandings of the cultural products at hand and a clearer view of alternative modernisms traditionally considered ‘‘beyond the pale of Modern art history’’ 4 simply by addressing the particularities of local histories of patronage, education, practice, and modes of assessment and interpretation. As noted above, the defining feature of Senegalese art history in the era following independence was the development and persistence of a particular artistic system, which evolved under the patronage of president Léopold Sédar Senghor. He regarded art as a medium of change—a tool that could be used to advance his cultural, political, and economic development plans. Consequently, he envisioned the artist as a representative of and advocate for a new nation. All Senegalese artists, during Senghor’s time and since, have had to grapple with the influence of Senghor, his patronage, and the Negritude philosophy he propounded. For some, their involvement has been limited to a conscious decision not to engage with it. Others have sought to address it directly. In all cases, the Senghorian legacy casts a long shadow over debates about the role of the artist, the structure of the art market, and the relationship between formations of identity and artistic practice that are the subject of this study. My research on the history of Negritude-inspired visual arts and the birth of a Senegalese modernism draws on models from current scholarship that address non-Western ‘‘parallel’’ or ‘‘alternative’’ modernisms, as well as on recent efforts to reassess the contradictions and complexities of European and North American formulations of modernism.5 Increasingly, scholars, critics, and curators are focusing their attention on the place of previously marginalized artists in the political economy of the late capitalist art market and are calling into question the universality and diversity of European notions of internationalism, pluralism, and globalism.6 Such artists innovatively process and contribute to a cosmopolitan aesthetics that selectively filters the global through the local. Thus this book contributes to a ‘‘new discourse that is not organized by the art world’s fetishization of innovation and avant-gardism’’ but that is ‘‘available to discuss the range of artistic expressions that are no longer adequately compartmentalized by a Western/non-Western distinction.’’ 7 It takes the era of anticolonial struggle as its starting point—an era in which the projects of decolonization and nation building required the imagining and shaping of new senses of modern identity and subjectivity. Senghor’s dedication to African socialism addressed these shifts of political, economic, and cultural power. But more important for our purposes, his patronage of the arts Introduction 5

helped foster a rich visual lexicon, which combined local and foreign motifs, materials, and techniques and resulted in a hybrid, complicated, and often misunderstood canon of art. These visual productions were nourished, on the one hand, by a sense of nostalgia for precolonial Africa and, on the other, by a modern practice of quotation and mixing. Not surprisingly, the art practice of Senghor’s time reflected the deep sense of ambivalence and indeterminacy that has so characterized cross-cultural encounters during the colonial and postcolonial era. Envisioning the revaluation and rearticulation of African culture as key to a successful cultural and political reawakening of the continent, these efforts at shaping a new, modern African identity in Senegal mirrored those taking place within political and cultural circles throughout the continent. The parameters of this study extend into the art world of post-Senghorian Senegal, an era in which the project of decolonization is considered incomplete and the utopian visions of a newly independent nation have shifted to better suit new realities. Artists working in Senegal from the 1980s through to the present day have found their works placed within the frame of art world concerns about postcoloniality, globalization, and hybridity. For many, these arts, which offer intercultural iconographies, seem clearly to fit within paradigms of postcoloniality. Characteristically perceived as a contradictory, ambiguous, and ambivalent site, postcoloniality is shaped by what Ella Shohat has called a ‘‘mutual imbrication of central and peripheral cultures,’’ 8 ripe for forging resistant identity politics and negotiating multiple cultural positions through acts of syncretism. One can see that the debates on the links between artistry and identity, so prevalent in the years leading to independence and throughout Senghor’s era, merely prefigured those of today. My analysis is informed by a wide array of scholarship in African and diaspora studies, which continues to grapple with the complexities and evershifting definitional parameters of African identity discourses.9 Paul Gilroy’s concept of a ‘‘Black Atlantic’’ in particular allows one to reconceptualize diaspora, community, racial quintessence, and performative identity formation, aiding in our understanding of earlier Negritude and pan-Africanist projects.10 Scholarly and curatorial focus on contemporary African artists, which began as a trickle in the years following independence and continued slowly and inconsistently for several decades, has recently developed into a steady stream of art critical and historical writings characterized by sophisticated arguments and supported through a growing infrastructure within the art world.11 The visual productions from the era of decolonization and nation 6

In Senghor’s Shadow

building extending into the present day have, however, presented serious challenges to the definitional parameters of the field of study and the market serving ‘‘traditional’’ African art. As a discursive space situated at the interstices of ethnography and Western art history, African art history has approached its subjects as both worthy of the kind of aesthetic attention afforded Western visual arts and as important markers or metonyms of the distinctive cultural orders and practices of Others. The engagement of Africa’s artists in modernist arenas of practice, discourse, and the political economy of late capitalism, coupled with a growing interdisciplinary emphasis on the politics of representation and notions of Otherness have made old paradigms and categorizations untenable.12 Confronted with challenging visual forms, radically altered criteria for authenticity and the constructed nature of traditions, African arts scholars have attempted to fit these arts into categories that suit existing definitions. Often, they have refused to comment on them altogether, claiming an inability to assess adequately their quality and provenance in a manner equivalent to the study of so-called traditional works. It is little wonder, then, that many of the studies in this area seem more preoccupied with debating the validity and relevance of proposed categories than with dealing with the artworks and artists at hand.13 Both professional and amateur interest in modern arts in Africa dates back to the colonial period.14 Not surprisingly, much of this early attention grew alongside political sympathies for anticolonial struggles. European amateur artists, art enthusiasts, and educators established art schools and informal workshops throughout the continent to encourage young artists either to pursue new avenues of creation or to recapture what were thought to be quickly disappearing traditional practices and iconographies. The recent attention afforded figures such as Frank McEwen, who worked in Rhodesia, Romain Desfossés in the Belgian Congo, Pierre Lods in the French Congo and Senegal, Margaret Trowell in Uganda, Kenneth C. Murray and Ulli and Georgina Beier in Nigeria, as well as others, underscores the central roles played by Europeans or European-styled institutions in the development of new discourses and in the introduction of different working methods and materials. In its earliest years, the primary journal of the field, African Arts, joined other cultural publications such as Transition and Présence Africaine to highlight modern African art.15 In these analyses, Western scholars often brought the structures inherent to the Euro-American art worlds to bear on African arts, so that ‘‘fine’’ arts were separated from ‘‘popular’’ and ‘‘folk’’ arts, schools or -isms were identified in order to lend an easy model of categoIntroduction 7

rization, and the artist figure was endowed with patriarchal, individualistic, and genius qualities. Existing categories within the art market for African and non-Western traditional arts in general set the mark of authenticity, relegating all contemporary productions to the realm of the inauthentic.16 Critic Everlyn Nicodemus has argued that the dawn of contemporary art practice in Africa corresponded to a fundamental paradigm shift—a break in the understanding and role of the visual in African cultures, moving practices from ritual, communal, and local use to highly individualistic, aesthetic realms.17 In contrast, John Picton in his writings cautions us about the need to acknowledge the continuities between past and present production, the malleability of traditions, and the dangers of drawing a strict boundary between so-called traditional and contemporary practices.18 Commenting upon the West’s reluctance to acknowledge the contemporaneity and vitality of African cultures, Senegalese curator Ery Camara wryly noted, ‘‘The West seems to believe that it alone is capable of assimilating other cultures without ceasing to be itself. In this bag are still trapped those who believe that Tarzan is the President of Tanzania. The African artist can, without losing his identity, adopt elements of Western civilization which, without us, would not be as it is today.’’ 19 New ways of thinking about authenticity, cosmopolitanism, and hybridity move beyond calls for homogenized globalization or exoticized provincialism to consider, instead, the contemporary cultural productions of nonWestern artists under a more nuanced rubric of criticism—or, as this study suggests, through a sensitive bottom-up history, one that takes into account the complicated, lived experiences of these transnationally oriented individuals. As James Clifford has noted, New definitions of authenticity (cultural, personal, artistic) are making themselves felt, definitions no longer centered on a salvaged past. Rather, authenticity is reconceived as hybrid, creative activity in a local present-becoming-future. Non-western cultural and artistic works are implicated by an interconnected world system without necessarily being swamped by it. Local structures produce histories rather than simply yielding to History.20 The philosophical, cultural, and political rubric under which President Senghor encouraged his compatriots to throw off the yoke of colonialism and to create a new sense of identity provides one such unique history in the development of modernisms throughout the globe. President Senghor’s government policies were informed by a firm commitment to the philosophy of Negritude. By the time he assumed power in 1960, this philosophy, 8

In Senghor’s Shadow

born out of the confluences of colonial experience and anticolonial agitation throughout the Black Atlantic, had been the focus of debate for several decades. Its roots can be traced to 1930s Paris where black students from the French colonies, African Americans, and others caught in oppressive political and cultural situations fostered a discourse of racial awareness that carried them into the era of decolonization. As one of its primary advocates, Senghor, while a student and then a young deputy in Paris, sought to reignite pride in African cultural subjectivity and to engineer a philosophy to which all blacks, in Africa and throughout its diaspora, could look to revitalize their shared ‘‘soul.’’ The strength and significance of these revelations and pronunciations, advanced by Senghor and colleagues such as Aimé Césaire, Léon Damas, Alioune Diop, and Etienne Léro, have been somewhat tempered by the potency of the later critiques of Negritude’s essentialist claims.21 Senghor’s formulations of Africanité, which drew heavily on European anthropological, evolutionist, and primitivist models to characterize racialcultural authenticity, coupled with his insistence on the ‘‘emotive’’ and ‘‘rhythmic’’ qualities of this reclaimed Africanness, led many to dismiss his philosophical writings as reductivist, misguided, and ultimately selfprimitivizing. My first chapter addresses the significance of these first debates and attempts to form a cohesive voice and identity with which to counteract the travails of colonialism. In order to better appreciate the richness of both the written and visual material of this period, one must trace Léopold Senghor’s contributions to the development of a Negritude philosophy, noting its highly cosmopolitan sources in the writings and political activism of the Black Atlantic and in European intellectual history. Mindful of its paradoxes, the analysis can then focus on the manner in which Senghor converted Negritude into both a nationalist and humanist ideology on which he based his approach to governance and patronage of the arts. In the first years after independence, Senghor developed the tenets of Negritude philosophy into a model for forging national and supranational identity discourses. By the time he became president, he had broadened his philosophical outlook into a humanistic vision of what he called a ‘‘Universal Civilization,’’ to which all cultures would contribute their unique elements. Negritude would thus serve as a wake-up call, a rallying point around which blacks could formulate and nurture unique cultural characteristics to then contribute to this greater whole. As main patron of the arts in his new nation, Senghor encouraged artists to craft a distinctive visual vocabulary through which to share and celeIntroduction 9

brate a newfound sense of and belief in Africanness. This aesthetic was to be composed of recognizable, pan-African motifs—masks, carved statues, incised combs—all of them, ironically, commodified signs of l’art primitif (primitive art) within the European marketplace and imagination. This plea for reclaiming and revaluing Africa’s visual traditions was accompanied by a modernization agenda positing that Africa’s artists should and could appropriate materials and techniques from abroad. The Senghorian government’s patronage system thus resulted in the canonization of an aesthetic of Africanité, one later labeled the École de Dakar. This school was primarily associated with the teaching mechanisms and visual productions of the government-endowed art academy and textile center. The works of this École de Dakar featured prominently within the annual salons at the national gallery and in internationally traveling exhibitions. So strong was the rhetoric surrounding these visual productions that few critics questioned either the visual coherence of the school or the directness of the links between Negritude philosophy and the school’s visual forms. Many have therefore easily accepted the existence of this school, seeing it as a crude, simplistic visual translation of a complex set of philosophical writings. Many of the artworks associated with anticolonial agendas and emergent so-called third world nationalisms have been dismissed as blind, rather ineffectual attempts to invent new cultural traditions that perpetuated primitivist tropes of Africa and/or drew heavily on European modernist models of artistic form and technique. Hence Senegal’s École de Dakar has been viewed either as mere mimicry of École de Paris 22 imagery or as a misguided adherence to the cultural primitivism of Negritude.23 In fact, the usual narrative surrounding the arts from this early independence era assumes that the overwhelming power of the state-run art world resulted in few creations of any art historical significance. Rather, artists, seduced by money and duped by ideology, simply translated philosophical tenets into visual form. On closer analysis, however, it becomes clear that the École de Dakar did not form a coherent visual whole. Moreover, the kind of reductionist reflection theory thus far employed to characterize the links between Negritude ideology and an École de Dakar iconography neglects the negotiable and highly subjective aspects of artistry. As T. J. Clark and others have argued, ideology is not directly transferred to a work of art, it is, rather, carefully and selectively adapted and manipulated by visual practices.24 By accepting a one-to-one correlation between ideology and aesthetic, past accounts have linked the failures of Negritude’s claims with those of the period’s visual products. As this study will attest, the milieu of early state patronage and racialist discourse was witness to highly complex, at times paradoxical, 10

In Senghor’s Shadow

visual creations that far exceeded the narrow tenets of Negritude in cultural significance. Rather, the most important aspect of the École de Dakar was that it represented a world of power, money, and discourse on the arts, which helped nurture the first debates in postindependence Senegal on the role of the so-called modern artist and modern art in the making of the new nation and the emancipated African. An analysis of the formal, iconographic, and sociological aspects of the École de Dakar problematizes its formal coherence and complicates its at times disturbing relationship to European primitivist images of and approaches to Africa. If one takes into account the difficulties of assessing these hybrid works of art as either instances of unreflective mimicry or as clever and sardonic rereadings of stereotypes, then alternative interpretations acknowledging the historical circumstances specific to École de Dakar iconography emerge. These artworks may, indeed, have either superseded or outpaced the philosophical tenets of Negritude, resulting in important synthetic solutions to tensions between global and local forces at play in postindependence sociopolitical culture. In other words, they may have signaled the formation of a distinctive Senegalese modernism—one reflective of the cosmopolitan, urban milieu into which and from which they were born. Much of the euphoria surrounding independence, as well as most of the funds available to support the arts, began to dwindle in the 1970s and 1980s, leaving government-sponsored institutions shells of their former selves. A growing sense of public disillusionment with Senghor’s brand of cultural nationalism and strong-handed modes of governance accompanied gradual shifts in cultural policy and patronage. Negritude’s promises began to lose their charms for both artists and intellectuals as many began to realize that they did not deal with vital socioeconomic challenges. It became painfully obvious that even during its heyday as state discourse, Negritude and its political equivalent, African socialism, had never addressed more than an elite audience.25 So, during the 1970s and 1980s, many artists who had trained in the staterun art academy and had benefited from its generous support, began to conceptualize their practice in new ways, seeking to break free from a state monopoly that seemed to stultify expression and limit venues for distribution, reception, and interpretation. As these artists began to operate beyond the structures of state patronage, they also developed new means through which to govern themselves. Through the foundation of cooperatives, associations, and workshops, artists have attempted to craft more suitable, more habitable social and intellectual terrains of artistic practice. These associations have provided much-needed forums for alternative voices to be heard Introduction 11

and artist-led exhibitions to be organized. References to broader debates in modernism and, now, postmodernism, provide a framework for artistic concerns and debate within what has become an increasingly cosmopolitan art world in Dakar. These new terrains of practice are often spaces of collaborative work. For example, in the late 1970s, a multimedia performance–based group known as the Laboratoire Agit-Art found a temporary home in the shared living and working site of the Village des Arts—at its largest, a loose collection of more than eighty practicing artists working across various media. Such groupings, and numerous smaller ones like them, physically and psychically served as artistic homes to a wide array of individuals who engaged with new iconographies and cultivated alternative working methods (most notably communal and performance-oriented practices and the recycling of indigenous materials). These artists developed strategies of visual expression with which to better express the sociopolitical and cultural concerns of their generation—one that had limited memories of the colonial period and, therefore, far less use for the revaluative efforts of Negritude ideology. The works of these groups of artists challenged the web of essentialist fictions surrounding Negritude’s vision of African heritage, its received notions of authenticity and origin, and the aesthetic vocabulary deemed most appropriate to express a sense of Africanness. The self-proclaimed avant-gardists engaged in interesting and often surprising ways with European modernist visual techniques and aesthetic concerns. Their adoption and manipulation of these metropolitan sources, coupled with reclamations of indigenous paradigms of practice, ironically paralleled Senghor’s own ruminations on European understandings of Africa and its relationship to modernity. It is important to understand that their avant-gardism at times entailed both an incorporation of and a reaction against an École de Dakar sense of Africanité, or what Senghor would call nigritie (African spirit). One of the greatest challenges in studying the historical workings of the Senegalese scene is to resist temptations to map out distinctive, digestible periods of artistic practice and patronage. Certainly one may distinguish between the early, heady days of Senghorian government patronage, when the Ministry of Culture received up to 30 percent of the national budget and postindependence euphoria provided artists with a sense of purpose with which to create images embodying the spirit of the new nation, and the fiscally conservative cultural policies and the climate of austerity evident under the Abdou Diouf government after 1980.26 But perhaps the aptest model for understanding the field of production during the postindepen-

12

In Senghor’s Shadow

dence period is one that emphasizes the intersection of histories and zones of practice wherein those working under government patronage shared physical space and a cultural climate with those seeking to subvert the system’s premises. Often, artists had feet in more than one camp, as it were, paradoxically benefiting from government bursaries while engaged in their critique. The avant-gardist and anti-Negritude movement was thus enabled by Senghor’s commitment to Negritude arts—a patronage that allowed a wide range of Senegalese artists to obtain academic instruction and prepared them to work critically within and outside the status quo. The early avant-garde in Senegal operated as avant-gardes have in other art contexts, wherein the reaction involves only a superficial erasure of the status quo. Thus their rebellion soon became institutionalized and incorporated into the very fabric of the art establishment they wished to critique.27 The critical ramifications of activities at the Village des Arts and elsewhere led to greater creative freedom for artists and allowed them to expand their practices to sources outside the official art world by apprenticing with local carvers, glass painters, and the like to make their work more applicable to indigenous systems of art practice. A new generation one might call the ‘‘post–avant-gardists’’ began to appreciate the qualities of local materials, to reconsider methods of art education within and beyond the academy, and to work in media not favored by Senghorian patronage, such as sculpture and glass painting. As a highly cosmopolitan place, Senegal boasted an art world that benefited from and contributed to the global art market. Under Senghor, this interaction was envisioned, in part, as visual evidence of the awakening of a Black Atlantic spirit, in part, as a logical engagement with the opportunities afforded a nation with such close historical and cultural ties to France, and, ultimately, as an attempt to contribute unique cultural values to a nascent, more humane form of universalism. All of these prongs of international activity were subsumed under the cultural-nationalist programming of the Ministry of Culture. The cycle of production and consumption of Senegalese arts, in particular, and contemporary African arts, in general, has changed significantly in the post-Negritude era. Under Senghorian patronage, the role of the artist was to be ‘‘African’’ and ‘‘modern’’ and that of his critic was to acknowledge and applaud this visual Africanité. The patronage for these arts, both local and international, supported the Negritude agenda. State patronage in the post-Senghorian era has showed a different face, and a growing number of private galleries, foreign cultural centers, and international opportu-

Introduction 13

nities have provided artists with alternative sources of support. As artists’ goals and markets changed during the postindependence era, their efforts to bypass the Negritude claims of the École de Dakar led to new senses of cosmopolitanism and globalism. In contrast to the era immediately following independence, the involvement of artists in transnational networks in the 1980s and 1990s was often experienced at an individual level, through scholarships and frequent, itinerant sojourns in France and elsewhere to show in galleries or to participate in international workshops and biennales. Ironically, the shift to individual involvement did not remove the tendency within the larger marketplace to categorize these artists as representatives of racial, ethnic, or national typologies. Moreover, the transnational nature of the Dakarois scene today does not just concern an outward flow of artists to capital and opportunity in Europe and America, but increasingly features a steady flow of Western patrons, dealers, and curators to Dakar to collect and ‘‘scout’’ for talent to bring back to galleries eager for the new and exotic. This international presence has been especially strong during the Dakar biennales beginning in 1992 and extending to the present. Some patrons, critics, and proponents of so-called transnational or global arts favor only those contemporary African works that seem to satisfy the reigning penchant for conceptual, technology-based arts (installation, video, photography), thus shifting the market away from the painting tradition in Senegal and placing more emphasis on the works of artists who reside permanently in the diaspora, where such technology and training is more readily available. The more African artists exhibit internationally, the more crucial it is for them to have some control over the manner in which they engage and are implicated in the global arena. The ‘‘new,’’ post-Negritude Senegalese arts in this context need to be understood in relation to a complex cultural and aesthetic history that is local in nature but inflected with decades of engagement with international artistic discourses and forms. The role of the critic has thus become a highly politically charged endeavor in which one must negotiate between the idiosyncrasies of local and global marketplaces and must create interpretative frameworks that speak to a broad range of audiences. The final chapter of this book therefore ultimately addresses the difficulties of creating a space within which more nuanced understandings of local and transnational aesthetic practices and art worlds can be discussed.

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A Brief Note on Terminology and Methodology In this study, I have tried to approach this history of arts governance and institutionalization through the model of an ‘‘art world’’ or ‘‘field of cultural production,’’ introduced by scholars Arthur Danto and Pierre Bourdieu, respectively.28 In telling the story of the rise and demise of the Senghoriansupported art world, this analysis does not seek to present a simple beforeand-after picture of an overbearing state structure followed by artistic freedom, of a strict academy replaced through the valiant efforts of a liberating avant-garde. Rather, it regards these changes as part of important ongoing processes of structuring and continued negotiations of artistic governmentality within the Dakarois artistic arena. Certainly, Senghor’s strong influence and attempts to structure the art world have had lasting effects on the ways in which artists organize themselves and view their work within Senegalese society, as well as on the manner in which that society envisions their role and assesses their practices. In this sense, the research documented in this book, which focuses on artists’ works during and following the Senghorian era, analyzes the operation of an overarching Negritude/École de Dakar legacy. Individuals still use the moniker of the École de Dakar to invoke associations of officialdom and to recall particular kinds of iconographic celebrations of Africanité and nationalism in order to situate their works with respect to Senegalese art history. Over 250 artists were registered with the artists’ associations in Senegal (and presumably many others were not) during the time I conducted primary research for this study, so the discussion of artistry within this book can never be anything more than a sampling. In choosing the artists herein, I have tried to span the generations, beginning with several who worked at the height of Senghorian patronage and ending with those who had just graduated from the art schools in the mid-1990s. Admittedly, there are many artists from the first generation of the 1960s whose repertoire has changed little since those days. For that reason, the focus is less on those individuals who still pursue a narrowly defined panAfrican aesthetic and more on those who reflect critically on this history and consciously situate themselves with respect to it.29 The early 1990s, the period in which my research was conducted, saw renewed political and economic crises strike the Senegalese state. In January 1993, the French government and the International Monetary Fund (imf) forced through a 50 percent devaluation of the African franc (the cfa), the common currency of French-speaking West Africa, fixed to the French franc since the Second World War. This decision served to double the price of imported goods, inIntroduction 15

cluding artists’ materials, and resulted in local economies’ panic, creating wild inflation even on indigenously produced foodstuffs. The devaluation sparked riots in Benin, Mali, Cameroon, and in downtown Dakar. These instances constituted but the most violent of a series of civil disturbances fed by political and economic disenfranchisements and uncertainties. For artists, dealing with the devaluation meant encountering prices for materials that had more than doubled over night and an art school reduced to squatting quarters in dilapidated buildings. Moreover, the economic crisis brought added pressures to sell and attain steady success in order to contribute to dwindling family resources. International success became all the more enticing, given that one’s fees would be paid in foreign currencies. When I arrived in Dakar to begin research, the successes and failures of the Second Dakar Biennale (held Christmas 1992) were still fresh in the minds of Dakar’s artists, and planning for the next biennale was moving excruciatingly slowly and unsteadily. Already rumors of the opportunities to be had during the upcoming africa’95 celebrations in Britain were circulating. Access to its riches was controlled by the discretion of one local artist/curator, El Hadji Moussa Babacar Sy—an individual who had played key roles in the development of nongovernmental artistic arenas since the 1970s and one who will emerge as a central figure in my following analysis. The 1992 biennale had resulted in great antagonism between the government bureaucracy and artists who complained of poor treatment and curatorial incompetence. Artworks were, at times, haphazardly or precariously arranged at venues, and many local practitioners (especially those perhaps most vocal about conditions of artistic practice) found themselves barred from official colloquia and remained mere witnesses to a discourse surrounding the displays dominated by European (primarily French) art critics and curators.30 Frustrated with the government’s pandering to foreign experts and lack of engagement with local artists’ associations, many artists turned their attention to the patronage opportunities available at the French Cultural Center in downtown Dakar. They also created a series of parallel art happenings and exhibitions that drew visitors outside the gallery spaces of officialdom. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, the French Cultural Center provided by far the most important source of funding, scholarships, and exhibition support for local artists, largely due to the efforts of the then director, François Belorgey. Yet even this patronage choice underscored the extent to which Senegal’s artists relied on foreign money and influence to gain opportunities in the international arena.31 Throughout this study, I have used terms that require definition, as they operate within and between so many different scholarly discussions. Fun16

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damental to an efficacious use of all of the terms below is a vigilant effort to avoid potentially dangerous ahistorical, depoliticized, and universalizing applications. First, I employ postcolonial interchangeably with postindependence to describe the specific sociocultural space or zeitgeist within which artistic and political practices occurred. With this use, I do not intend to ignore the neocolonial realities in Senegal but, rather, to emphasize the strength of anticolonial and nationalist euphoria during the early years of Senghorian rule and École de Dakar production. Within this highly charged milieu, the project of ‘‘decolonizing’’ the mind, in order to achieve a ‘‘postcolonial’’ sense of being, was of utmost importance. The formation of Negritude philosophy and, more specifically, the innovative means through which Senegal’s artists appropriated and manipulated European primitivist images of Africa to produce ‘‘deformations of mastery,’’ 32 suggest acts of creative transcendence and satirical forms of mimicry, associated with notions of postcolonial hybridity.33 I use the term modern to describe artistic practice, iconography, and discourse in the Dakarois art world. This term complements the equally contentious designation of contemporary to refer to arts created within a distinctive cultural space emerging in the postindependence period.34 In this milieu, artists saw their work as playing an important role not simply in the formation of a new nationalist sense of being but also as part of emergent systems of modern political, philosophical, and economic thought. While there is much debate within the field over the usefulness of the contemporary label, it is, in fact, the employment and manipulation of modern that seems to me to be of most importance to this study and others, if the ‘‘modernity’’ of African cultural practices is to be properly acknowledged. Since Western discourse on the visual arts has traditionally claimed aesthetic modernism as the sole property of Western artists and regarded the mechanisms of modernity as equally Western phenomena, artists living within the former third world have never been afforded the status either of contributing members to the modernist canon or of participants in a global modern matrix. This insidious separation between the ‘‘West and the Rest’’ denies not only modernism’s ‘‘global influences’’ but also ‘‘masks its function as a dominant force of history to which peoples all over the world are increasingly subjected.’’ 35 As cultural critic and artist Rasheed Araeen asks, ‘‘If other peoples are now, in turn, aspiring to its material achievements and want to claim their own share, why are they constantly reminded of its harmful effects on their own traditional cultures? . . . Why is the aspiration of other cultures for secularism and materialism seen as antithetical to their own traditions?’’ 36 Introduction 17

The Western approach either denies or questions postcolonial aspirations for modernity. Moreover, as Araeen argues, this denial of modernity results in a corresponding exclusion of the ‘‘objects of high culture produced by the ‘other’ ’’ from serious consideration.37 The application of the term modern to describe the political, philosophical, and artistic realms of Senegalese society in the colonial and postcolonial periods seems apt if one considers the degree to which colonial and then nationalist politics engaged with secular, democratic, and capitalist structures. The philosophical basis of Negritude, as an essentially progressive, humanistic discourse, is most certainly modern in its form. Furthermore, the role developed for the artist figure and the arts within postindependence Senegal reflects clearly a sense of individualism and avant-gardism associated with the modern. Situating this analysis with regard to the complicated and contradictory history of modernism does not require one to think of a strict, faithful adoption of European models but rather to give credence to the variability of modernist contexts on a global scale.38 Finally, the reader will note that I refer to the artistic practice within Senegal variously as Senegalese and Dakarois. The former term best denotes the project of cultural nationalism at work in the Senghorian period, a term that sought not only to create a sense of cohesiveness at home in the postindependence era but also to promote the nation and its arts on an international scene. In the final decade of the preceding millennium, despite much talk of the post-nation, Senegal as a moniker for a set of artistic practices and history continues to be used within the global art world and market. In contrast, the term Dakarois naturally allows for a more site-specific, local approach to a visual history. The political and economic power of postcolonial Senegal has always been located in Dakar, and thus arts patronage, training, and exhibition takes place primarily there.39 However, Dakar has always positioned itself as a cosmopolitan, exciting urban center at the crossroads of the Atlantic world and the Sahel. As noted in the chapters that follow, it has been home to an important cultural-political history that ultimately influenced modern artistic practice. As a vibrant metropolis, it has always provided a sophistication and sense of urbanity to the arts produced within it. Now, with the popularity of the International Dakar Biennale, the city is situated in a global, contemporary artscape—alongside New York, London, Paris, Havana, Venice, São Paulo, Cairo, Brisbane, and Istanbul.

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1 Rhythm as the Architecture of Being: Reflections on un Âme Nègre

T

he philosophical and poetic visions of Léopold Sédar Senghor figured large in the cultural history of the immediate postindependence period in Senegal. As the first president, Senghor erected an elaborate institutional and ideological framework through which to promote the philosophy of Negritude. He envisioned Negritude not only as a theory of racial belonging for black people worldwide but also as a cultural rallying point with which to begin the crucial postcolonial process of nationalist affirmation. During his presidency (1960–80), Senghor envisioned culture as central to the successful economic and political development of his newly independent nation.1 His attitude helped create an ‘‘art-culture system’’ 2 that art critics labeled the École de Dakar. The cultural productions of this school were said to give visual form to Senghor’s poetic and philosophical writings on the relationship between Africanité and modernity. These works fashioned a distinctive artistic vocabulary to express a new awareness of African cultural subjectivity. The stylistic attributes and structural matrix of this École will be further elaborated in chapter 2. Senghor’s brand of Negritude was informed by a wide variety of conditions and experiences, many of which served to differentiate his philosophy from those of other Negritude theorists. An examination of his cultural and intellectual milieus in Senegal and France is indispensable if one hopes to understand the workings of the distinctive art world that emerged as Senghor institutionalized Negritude’s tenets.

1

Léopold Sédar Senghor. 3 May 1977. Courtesy of ap/ Wide World Photos.

This chapter begins by tracing the development of Negritude philosophy in relation to the broader history of Black Atlantic investigations of panAfricanist cultural paradigms. Like other black intellectual engagements with racialist thinking, Negritude developed partly as a result of a complex process of appropriation and rearticulation of earlier European ideas about Africa and its peoples.3 The particularities it acquired in the hands of Senghor and his contemporaries should be interpreted, therefore, within the larger framework of early modernist European intellectual thought and situated within a distinct period of ‘‘negrophilia’’ in Paris.4 The early politico-intellectual history of Senegal, in which urbanized inhabitants could imagine communities and construct and transgress boundaries of racial, cultural, and political identity quite differently from those living in other colonies, provided a critical backdrop not simply to the development of theories of race and identity, at home and abroad, but also to the eventual flowering of Negritude as a cultural nationalist narrative under Senghorian rule. One can trace the development of a cultural system, public discourse, and aesthetic lexicon based on Senghor’s continual refashionings of the concept of Negritude (figure 1). While many historians and critics have focused on the poetry and prose of Negritude, questioning the preoccupation with a mythic ‘‘traditional’’ Africa and the use of European essentialist, racialist narratives of African cultural 20

In Senghor’s Shadow

history, few have given the same attention to the visual arts that flourished under Senghor’s patronage.5 This lacuna has resulted in only a partial telling of the history of the period and, perhaps more important for our purposes, has ignored the crucial point at which theory was put into visual practice. The marriage of Senghor’s philosophical preoccupations, his politics, and his own artistry was extremely complicated and often uneasy. Through its explication, one can begin to recontextualize the visual arts that arose within the matrix of a Senghorian art world.

Negritude’s Birth: ‘‘What Is Africa to Me?’’ Senghor credits his friend, the poet and politician Aimé Césaire, with first coining the term Négritude in 1932–33. The term itself was a clever riposte to the pejorative French label of nègre (negro).6 Césaire broadly defined Negritude as the ‘‘simple recognition of the fact of being black, and the acceptance of this fact, of our destiny as black people, of our history, and of our culture.’’ 7 He was also the first to publish the term, in 1939, in his now famous ode to his homeland of Martinique, ‘‘Cahier d’un retour au pays natal.’’ He wrote: my Negritude is neither tower nor a cathedral it thrusts into the red flesh of the soil. . . . Eia for those who invented nothing! for those who have never discovered for those who have never conquered.8 For Césaire, the act of defining Negritude was an intimate moment of reflection and revelation not intended to become either a personal philosophy by which to live or a blueprint for forging a cultural nationalism and aesthetic. However, by the first year of his presidency in 1961, his friend and colleague Senghor had developed Negritude into just such an entity. In Senghor’s writings, Negritude becomes ‘‘quite simply the assembly of the values of the black civilization. It is not racism, it is culture.’’ 9 The term has been appropriated and reinterpreted by many parties, each with its own agenda. As one reads both the philosophical exegeses and poetry associated with it, one soon realizes that even its most avid proponents, such as Senghor and Césaire, continuously redefined and reapplied it to an ever-expanding universe of ideas and forms.10 In its most common usage, Negritude describes a literary and ideological movement started by a group of young, black, male students from the French colonies who had come to Paris in the 1930s and discovered that despite their French colonial upbringing and their command of the language and culture, they were Rhythm as the Architecture

21

seen and treated as outsiders in the metropole. For these young intellectuals, Negritude initially served as a powerful apparatus for negotiating identity. It was a useful aid in their journey toward self-discovery and self-definition; an affirmation of their humanity and, as Frantz Fanon has suggested, their manhood.11 In a period marked by disillusionment with European civilization and Enlightenment rationalism, as well as growing anticolonial sentiments, Negritude also provided a discursive space within which to question reigning political and cultural hegemonies. Among its advocates were writers from French colonies in Africa and the Caribbean such as Birago Diop, Aimé Césaire, Etienne Léro, Léon Damas, Jules Monnerot, and Jean Price-Mars, many of whom supported institutions such as the Société Africaine de la Culture and its journal Présence Africaine and contributed to pan-African conferences that called for art and artists to serve on the front lines of cultural development. While these gatherings began in the early 1930s and continued after the Second World War, the complexities of the debates characterizing them only reached a larger audience in 1948, with the publication of an anthology of poetry from Africa and the Caribbean edited by Senghor and prefaced by Jean-Paul Sartre.12 In ‘‘L’Orphée noir,’’ an empathetic Sartre traced the contours of Negritude, regarding it as a powerful and much-needed awakening of and reckoning with black consciousness. In Heideggerian terms, Sartre characterized it broadly as the ‘‘black man’s being-in-the-world.’’ 13 Recognizing its revolutionary nature, he explained to a European audience: ‘‘A Negro cannot deny that he is Negro, nor claim to be part of this abstract, colorless humanity: He is black. He is thus forced to be authentic. Insulted, enslaved, he draws himself up, picks up the word ‘nigger’ that has been thrown at him like a stone, and proudly asserts himself as a black man facing the white man.’’ 14 Sartre rightly isolated a central feature of Negritude: its emancipatory and subversive possibilities that provided those without previous access to the metanarrative of universal history or the power to control the means of communication and representation with an apparatus through which to reclaim and reinvent the meaning of blackness in the modern world.15 By utilizing and manipulating the linguistic and representational tools of the colonial master, Negritude also challenged the logic of the objectifying gaze under which the colonizer had for so long fixed and confined the colonized. Sartre explained, ‘‘Here, in this anthology, are black men standing, black men who examine us; and I want you to feel as I, the sensation of being seen. For the white man has enjoyed for three thousand years the privilege of seeing without being seen.’’ 16

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But for Sartre, the subversive nature of Negritude was but a means to an end, leading to a world without racial categorization and injustice. Thus the Negritude advocate was envisioned as worker and revolutionary in a dialectical process that brought liberation to oppressed peoples worldwide, not simply to blacks. Characterizing it as ultimately a ‘‘self-negating’’ movement, Sartre wrote: ‘‘Thus Negritude is the root of its own destruction; it is a transition and not a conclusion, a means and not an ultimate end.’’ 17 By applying a straight Marxist reading to the tenets of Negritude, Sartre easily elides the otherwise complicated and diverse histories of racial and class-based struggles in the modern age. The solidarity he suggests between colonized black and disenfranchised worker amounts to a dismissal of the specificities and violence of the colonial system.18 The discussions of these young students, whether focused on a shared black consciousness and cultural memory or on links with a mother Africa, formed part of a continuing movement of self-reflection among intellectuals in what Paul Gilroy has called the Black Atlantic. I employ Gilroy’s term here as a useful paradigm for understanding the historical complexity, breadth, and vitality of a vast community of people who shaped and participated in ‘‘an open-ended black political culture’’ through ‘‘an infinite process of identity formation.’’ 19 Within the flexible context of the Black Atlantic, one can approach the artistic and intellectual activities on both sides of the ocean as a single analytic field in which ideas, peoples, and objects continually circulated and engaged with one another. One can, therefore, situate Senghor’s desire to express a distinctive African cultural identity through a carefully constructed vision of racial quintessence within a historically rich set of circulating ideas.20 As discussed below, exposure to earlier pan-Africanist and black nationalist writings and debates—from America, the Caribbean, and expatriate colonial Africans in Europe—was also a crucial factor in the later development of Senghor’s and others’ ideas of Negritude.

Pan-Africanism: Negritude’s Progenitor In 1903, African American intellectual, writer, and cultural spokesman W. E. B. Du Bois published The Souls of Black Folk, a collection of essays in which he spoke of Africa as a ‘‘sleeping giant’’ waiting to awaken in the twentieth century.21 Du Bois encouraged African Americans to take pride in their shared African heritage and in the integrity with which they, as a strong people, had endured suffering throughout history. Though addressing the particularities of the situation in the United States, Du Bois’s description of

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23

‘‘double-consciousness’’ or a sense of ‘‘two-ness’’ experienced by American blacks held a striking resemblance to later Negritude writings on the black condition under colonialism from both the Caribbean and Africa.22 In the wake of the First World War and the great migration north, the growth of a pan-Africanist political perspective among black intellectuals in the United States led to a sense of oppression shared with their African brethren suffering under the forces of colonialism and imperialism.23 Du Bois took advantage of the wide interest shown in his ideas to help organize the naacp, addressing specific demands of the African American experience and then, with the aid of the Senegalese deputy to France, Blaise Diagne, to design an international pan-African congress in Paris in 1919. Other meetings followed in 1921, 1923, 1927, and 1945, at which participants of African descent discussed themes of equality and justice.24 These gatherings not only served as sites for intellectual debate but also as hotbeds of political activism at which the young, future politicians of a postcolonial Africa engaged with socialist and communist theories and learned from the strength of European unionist politics.25 In the same year as Du Bois’s first congress in Paris, the Jamaican black nationalist Marcus Garvey arrived in New York and founded the United Negro Improvement Association (unia), which asserted that African Americans could never live with real freedom and justice in the United States and favored a mass exodus back to Africa.26 While Garvey never stepped foot on the African continent, his zealous calls for a renaissance of the black race were noted by young scholars and politicians like Kwame Nkrumah and Jomo Kenyatta who would later formulate their own ideas about panAfricanism, suited for the exigencies of the decolonization era. Frenchspeaking African intellectuals in Paris who preceded Senghor, Césaire, and their colleagues also imbibed Garvey’s rhetoric.27 In 1925, African American philosopher Alain Locke published a collection of essays in a book entitled The New Negro, which celebrated the vitality and uniqueness of African American culture.28 These essays served as a call to action for the African American ‘‘talented tenth’’ to create a discursive space for black culture within a racially polarized America.29 In the foreword, Locke envisions the search for a distinctive black consciousness through artistic endeavor as one of self-determination, as a kind of emergent nationalism that relied on the awakening of the spirit of the black masses. He wrote: The New Negro must be seen in the perspective of a New World, and especially of a New America. Europe seething in a dozen centers with emergent nationalities, Palestine full of a renascent Judaism—these are

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no more alive with the progressive forces of our era than the quickened centers of the lives of black folk. America seeking a new spiritual expansion and artistic maturity, trying to found an American literature, a national art, and a national music implies a Negro-American culture seeking the same satisfactions and objectives.30 We will hear echoes of these ties between nationalist rhetoric and black aesthetics in the discourse surrounding the École de Dakar and the Senghorian art network. In his collection, Locke included an essay entitled ‘‘The Legacy of Ancestral Art,’’ which strongly encouraged African American artists to study, reflect, and draw on their African roots by giving form to this heritage in their works. Locke observed that for European artists, African arts were ‘‘a mine of fresh motifs, . . . a lesson in simplicity and originality of expression. . . . surely, once known and appreciated, this art can scarcely have less influence upon the blood descendants, bound to it by a sense of cultural kinship, than upon those who inherit it by tradition only.’’ 31 African American writers soon responded to Locke’s challenge. In the following year, Countee Cullen published ‘‘Heritage,’’ a poem in which he asked, ‘‘What is Africa to me?’’ musing romantically about his mother continent.32 In 1928, novelist Claude McKay published his novel Banjo, in which he eulogized the folk traditions and wisdom of ordinary, hardworking African Americans. McKay believed these individuals had the ‘‘raw unconscious and the devil-within-them pride in being Negro’’ and illustrated ‘‘the irrepressible exuberance and legendary vitality of the black race.’’ 33 McKay’s cultural primitivism placed his writings squarely in line with those focused on an immutable, racially based, shared collective identity. His work was much heralded not just by African Americans but also by French West African and Caribbean students keeping abreast of the African American renaissance from Paris. Senghor once said of him, ‘‘Claude McKay can be considered . . . as the veritable inventor of Negritude . . . not the word . . . but of the values of Negritude.’’ 34 Friends of Senghor recall that he was especially impressed with the productions of African American poets and writers, claiming that he could recite many of their works by heart.35 In his memoirs, he admits to their impact on his own early writings: ‘‘Above all it was Negro American poetry. I even met some Negro-American writers. These discoveries were true revelations for me, which led me to seek myself and uncover myself as I was: a Negro (nègre), morally and intellectually interwoven with French. I then burned almost all my previous poems to start again at zero. It was 1935.’’ 36 Senghor and his colleagues in Paris had direct

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access to these writings and opportunities to exchange ideas with the authors at the pan-African congresses and in a literary salon and journal run by a Martinican woman, Paulette Nardal.37 Though only six issues were published, her La Revue du Monde Noir served as a vital forum for discussions of cultural identity and racial consciousness. According to its director, the journal’s vision was apolitical and the organizers ‘‘only felt the need of bringing back the Negro into the human community and of getting him to rid himself of his complexes. . . . Our preoccupations were of a racial, literary, and artistic order.’’ 38 The journal also reprinted articles from the Crisis and Opportunity, the journals of the naacp and the Urban League, respectively, descriptions of the educational facilities at Tuskegee Institute, and experiences of freed American slaves in Liberia.39 The works of Claude McKay, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Jean Toomer, and other African Americans were regularly featured in its pages.

Black Paris: The Birth of Negrophilia Paris in the interwar period was the uncontested capital of European modernist culture, hosting a plethora of intellectuals and artists from throughout the continent. The city also benefited at the time from the influx of Russian talents fleeing the revolution—such as Igor Stravinsky, Sergey Prokofiev, George Balanchine, Marc Chagall, and Antoine Pevsner—and from Americans both white and black seeking to escape prohibition, puritanism, and racism at home. An increasing number of African American writers and visual artists, largely supported by white American philanthropy, sojourned in Paris at this time and began to take part in the informal networks of black intellectuals from the colonies.40 As noted by Theresa Leininger, ‘‘In France they learned about other Black peoples by socializing with Africans and West Indians, depicting Martiniquans and Senegalese, reading Black periodicals, and studying African art. These personal encounters affirmed a sense of shared community and history in a way that the United States could not offer between the World Wars.’’ 41 This same period in American history, the 1920s, is often described as the Harlem Renaissance, a moment when ‘‘Harlem was in Vogue.’’ 42 Artistic activity and intellectual debate flourished among educated African Americans and white patrons who flocked to clubs, music halls, and literary salons to celebrate the vitality, richness, and exoticism of the so-called New Negro. Artists began not only to claim links to Africa and envision a shared African American identity but also to negotiate unique ways to define their 26

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place within modernity.43 African American art historian Richard Powell described the appeal of the New Negro movement in terms that could be equally applied to the growing rage over so-called art nègre in Paris.44 He writes: For many people this ‘‘New Negro’’ entity was not so much a movement, a moment, or even an actual person, as a mood, or a sentiment in which black culture and its practitioners were seen as a valuable part of a larger cultural scene. In a society that had recently suffered a war of tremendous proportions, and was increasingly changing into an urban, impersonal, and industry-driven machine, black culture was viewed, interchangeably, as life-affirming, a libidinal fix, an antidote for ennui, a sanctuary for the spiritually bereft, a call back to nature, and a subway ticket to modernity. The ‘‘New Negro’’ was the perfect metaphor for this moment of great social rupture, because, like a medicine-show elixir, it was perceived as the cure for everything.45 Paris also acted as a crucible for the mixing of a privileged set of students from the African French colonies and Indochina, who arrived on scholarships to be trained in the metropole’s best schools, and young scholars from the French dominions and territories in the Caribbean, who often attended the same institutions or trained in schools of colonial administration to secure positions as bureaucrats in West Africa.46 Negritude arose within this highly cosmopolitan milieu, in which participants from the Black Atlantic could exchange ideas about anticolonial struggle and begin to demarcate a site within which to grapple with notions of a growing black consciousness. Negritude philosophy added its voice to a preexisting ‘‘native’’ discourse concerning the place of black peoples with regard to modernism and its capitalist structures. The traffic in ideas within the terrain of the Black Atlantic was never merely linear or unidirectional. Rather, African American and Caribbean students learned of Africa, its languages, religions, and customs firsthand from their African classmates, and the young Africans gained insight into the perseverance of ‘‘Africanness’’ and Africanisms within populations long absent from the continent itself. Through this contact, African students found a means of locating their experiences of the colonial system within a larger revolutionary structure, fighting against oppression and discrimination on the other side of the Atlantic.47 James Clifford has described this historical juncture in Parisian history as the unique point at which ‘‘a crucial modern orientation toward cultural order,’’ what he called an ‘‘ethnographic surrealism,’’ functioned.48 In the Rhythm as the Architecture

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wake of the brutalities of the First World War and growing concerns over the inhumanities of the colonial mission civilisatrice (civilizing mission), many artists and intellectuals, notably André Breton, Georges Bataille, René Menil, and Michel Leiris, began to question the legitimacy of Europe’s claims to universalism and civilization and its faith in rationalism, capitalism, and empiricism. Clifford explained the ‘‘ethnographic surrealist’’ attitude as ‘‘a belief that the other (whether accessible in dreams, fetishes, or Lévy-Bruhl’s mentalité primitive [primitive mentality]) was a crucial object of modern research.’’ 49 This approach provided ‘‘a style of scientifically validated cultural leveling, the redistribution of value-charged categories such as ‘music,’ ‘art,’ ‘beauty’ and ‘sophistication,’ ‘cleanliness’ and so forth.’’ 50 The combination of this kind of cultural relativism with the surrealist aesthetic, which valued fragments, juxtapositions, ruptures, and curious collections of objects and ideas, enabled a reevaluation of Others’ cultures in a way that attempted to reach beyond the exoticism described by Edward Said in his writings on Orientalism.51 In this interwar period, non-Western forms of material culture underwent an important taxonomic shift from artifacts to artworks. Since the turn of the century, these cultural objects had been classified as either primitive arts or ethnographic artifacts that existed in a distinctive ‘‘aesthetic anthropological object system’’ 52 situating authenticity within the presumably traditional and static worlds from which they had been collected. As Clifford notes in his ‘‘Histories of the Tribal and the Modern,’’ before the rise of cultural anthropology and the ‘‘discovery’’ of formal artistic qualities by Picasso and other modernists, these objects traveled through a whole web of shifting categories—from antiquities to curiosities to orientalia to fetishes.53 The term nègre, as it functioned during the early modern period, acted as a label for this incredible variety of cultural constructions: ‘‘During the twenties the term nègre could embrace modern American jazz, African tribal masks, voodoo ritual, Oceanian sculpture, and even pre-Columbian artifacts. It had attained the proportions of what Edward Said has called an ‘orientalism’—a knitted together collective representation figuring a geographically and historically vague but symbolically sharp exotic world.’’ 54 Clifford’s analysis draws, in part, on the writings of French art historian Jean Laude, who coined the term negrophilia (négrophilie) to characterize the era in which this fascination with all things sauvage (savage) and primitif (primitive) peaked.55 Laude outlined the highlights of this moment: Montmartre clubs filled with a bourgeoisie who pulsed to the rhythms of Jazz music and danced the fox-trot, the shimmy, and the one-step; African American performers Josephine Baker and Sidney Bechet finding star28

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dom in their cabaret La revue nègre at the Théâtre des Champs-Elysées; and, finally, the material culture of the colonies filling pavilions in the streets of Paris at the Exposition Coloniale de Vincennes in 1931, an enormous archival presentation of colonized Others, brought to perform for metropolitan audiences. Léopold Senghor arrived in the City of Lights in 1928, at a moment still characterized by intellectual and political ferment, as well as by this growing interest in art nègre and African American cultural forms.56 He visited the exposition in his student years and became familiar with the modernist primitivism in the works of European artists. Many years later, he wrote of his participation in the bohemian lifestyle in the Left Bank cafés. He would frequently accompany poets, writers, and visual artists to Picasso’s studio. Senghor recalled one such occasion, ‘‘I still remember Pablo Picasso’s friendliness, seeing me to the door as I was leaving and saying: ‘We must remain savages.’ And I replied, ‘We must remain negroes.’ He burst out laughing, because we were on the same wavelength.’’ 57 So, negrophilia and ethnographic surrealism grew hand in hand. Clifford’s analysis of their symbiotic relationship is supported by Laude’s claims that strong interest in ‘‘Negro’’ forms led directly to the French Assembly’s decision to support the founding of the Institut d’Ethnologie (Institute of Ethnology), headed by Marcel Mauss, and the Musée de l’Homme (Museum of Mankind) at the Trocadéro, and to finance the elaborate fieldwork of the Mission Dakar-Djibouti.58 Highlighting the importance of this mission, Laude continues: It marked the moment when Africa discovered itself (unveiled and found itself ), when its image transformed in the European consciousness but also in science. One can date from this Mission and those which followed a recognition—an understanding, a taking charge by African intellectuals—of their traditional cultural values. If, in the West one continued to speak of art nègre, it was really the arts of black Africa which began to be the question.59 The marriage of art, science, and politics, seen, first, in surrealist aesthetic practices and leftist politics, second, in ethnography’s expansion as a science and its engagement with alternative epistemologies, religions, and social structures, and third, in the taxonomic shifts surrounding the collecting and display of so-called primitive arts, well served young black intellectuals who sought affirmation, clarification, and opportunity to advance a more balanced vision of African histories and realities. Senghor later reflected on the process of cultural awakening during those first few years in Paris: Rhythm as the Architecture 29

I have to stress over and over again that it was also Europe, that it was France which saved us . . . especially by teaching us the values of Black Africa. It will be remembered that the First World War had, in the view of the most lucid minds in Europe, marked some degree of bankruptcy of civilization, i.e., their civilization, through its absurdity as well as the spiritual and material ruins in its wake. . . . Their criticism became radical and extolled the rehabilitation of intuitive reason and of the collective soul, of archetypal images arising from the abysmal depths of the heart, from the dark regions of the groin and the womb.60 He and his African and West Indian colleagues found just such attitudes in the writings of a number of European anthropologists and ethnologists whose thoughts were published in the pages of La Revue du Monde Noir. In the works of Maurice Delafosse, Leo Frobenius, Placide Tempels, Emile Durkheim, and Lucien Lévy-Bruhl, Senghor and his colleagues saw the possibility of reinterpreting and rewriting the history of African peoples, making that history relevant to contemporary political struggles.61 In his Histoire de la civilisation africaine (1936), Frobenius began the important process of addressing, in a serious scholarly manner, the history of African peoples. He wrote of the remarkable splendors, wealth, and highly sophisticated social structures of historical Africa, citing the descriptions of earlier travelers to the Congo as follows: ‘‘Swarming crowds dressed in silks and velvets, great states organized down to the last detail, powerful sovereigns, wealthy industries, civilized to the very marrow of their bones.’’ 62 Similarly, when writing about the Kasai-Sankuru, Frobenius told his reader that they had ‘‘art worthy of comparison with creators in the Roman-European style. The gestures, manners, and moral standards of all the people, from the smallest child to the oldest man, although completely natural, were full of dignity and grace.’’ 63 Moreover, Frobenius asserted that after twenty years of expeditions to Egypt, South Africa, the Congo, Dahomey, Senegal, Nigeria, and the Sudan, he found traces of the same culture throughout Africa, declaring that an ‘‘essence or a civilisation’’ ‘‘bearing the same stamp’’ existed throughout the continent. He wrote on this point: Everything has a definitive aim: harsh, severe, tectonic. That is the main characteristic of African style. Anyone who comes close enough thoroughly to understand it, soon recognizes that it dominates all of Africa and is the very expression of its essence. It is manifest in the gestures of all Negro peoples as well as in their plastic arts. It speaks in their dances and in their masks, in their religious feelings as in their mode of exis30

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tence, in their forms of government and in their destiny as peoples. It lives in their fables, their fairy tales, their legends and myths.64 It is little wonder then, that on reading the works of Frobenius, Senghor wrote: ‘‘Suddenly, like a thunderclap—Frobenius! All the history and prehistory of Africa were illuminated to their very depths. And we still carry the mark of the master in our minds and spirits, like a form of tattooing carried out in the initiation ceremonies in the sacred grove.’’ 65 With even greater attention to objectivity and empirical study, Maurice Delafosse investigated the history of West Africa, relying on local sources, Arab historians and geographers, and archaeological research. He wrote of the political structures and trade routes that supported the empires of Ghana, Mali, Gao, and the Mossi states. He, too, marveled at the skills of African artists, claiming, ‘‘certain Benin bronzes are worthy to compete with the corresponding products of several famous civilizations.’’ 66 These accounts of African history found their way into Senghor’s poetry, Cheikh Anta Diop’s philosophy, Julius Nyerere’s socialist programs, and Sekou Touré’s revolutionary rhetoric. In his writings on African identity, Senghor even borrowed vocabulary from these anthropologists, speaking of ‘‘vital forces,’’ ‘‘essence,’’ and the ‘‘black soul’’ (a term used by Delafosse).67 As I will discuss below, his uncritical use of these terms, and his acceptance of anthropological models more generally, caused many to question his notions of racial purity, which often seemed to veer dangerously close to the racialist writings of European nativists.

‘‘Island Scars upon the Water’’: West Indian Formulations of Negritude Common scholarly interpretations of Negritude writings characterize the movement as a violent rejection of Western culture and as a call for the assertion of black pride. This perspective focuses especially on the antiimperialist, angry rhetoric of some of the young Caribbean intellectuals. In 1932, Etienne Léro, Jules Monnerot, and others published a political journal and manifesto entitled Légitime Défense. Armed with the rhetoric of surrealism and communism (the name of their journal was, in fact, taken from a small book published by surrealist André Breton), these young scholars waged a war on the ‘‘abominable system of coercion and restrictions which destroys love and delimits dreams, generally known as Western civilization.’’ 68 In Légitime Défense, the students ridiculed the black bourgeoisie of the French West Indian islands, who, they claimed, simply aped European cultural habits and tastes. Rhythm as the Architecture

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Surrealism served these students well because it sought to expose the flaws of European rationalism, the evils of imperialism and colonialism, and the underlying capitalist system which contributed to the enslavement of black peoples throughout the world.69 The support of prominent surrealists for anticolonial movements in North Africa and Indochina also encouraged the adoption of their methods by Caribbean agitators. While their journal was short-lived, just one published issue, its rhetoric served as an important catalyst for rallying intellectuals of African descent throughout the colonies to challenge European cultural hegemony. To understand the militant attitudes of these students, one may turn to the writings of Frantz Fanon, who noted in his Black Skin, White Masks (1952) that it was only when Antilleans arrived in Paris that they realized that they, too, were blacks in the eyes of the French.70 This realization threw them into a cultural and racial no-man’s-land. Many of the young Caribbean writers whom Senghor befriended in Paris, such as Léon Damas, Etienne Léro, and Césaire, wrote of the scars of physical and cultural displacement endured by African diasporic peoples who longed for an attachment to African homelands. Much of their work drew on their profound sense of shock when placed, after arrival in France, in the category of nègre along with other colonial subjects.71 In his Cahier d’un retour au pays natal, Césaire recounted an experience he had on a Parisian tramway when he sat down beside another black man whom the other French passengers were ridiculing. Césaire found that he was participating in this ridicule and realized, for the first time, that he, as a highly educated évolué (highly assimilated black Frenchman) had internalized the racist attitudes of the French.72 He was forced to confront his own blackness.73 He wrote: ‘‘In Paris, at the same time that I discovered culture, I better understood the reasons for my own malaise. I became conscious of belonging to the basic category of Negro [nègre]. My poetry was born from that confrontation.’’ 74 In contrast to those of their Caribbean colleagues, the works of Senghor and his Senegalese cohorts were, for the most part, more concerned with defining the relationship between France and her colonial subjects in Africa than with calling for decolonization, retribution, and accountability. For his part, Senghor found Etienne Léro’s stance in Légitime Défense too militant and preferred to focus on the cultural project of decolonizing the mind rather than on political agitation.75 He, therefore, began publishing his early thoughts on Negritude in the pages of L’Étudiant Noir (1935), a journal emphasizing cultural consciousness. In it Senghor spoke of having an ‘‘anti-

32

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racist racism,’’ hoping to inspire a ‘‘cultural awakening of Black students in Paris, [which was] above political nationalism.’’ 76 The differences between the Negritude writings that flowed from the pens of the Caribbean students and those of Senghor and his West African colleagues speak to the internal contradictions, variations, and complexities of experiences under colonialism. Notwithstanding the impact of the mission civilisatrice and the effects of the assimilation policy, the Senegalese students retained ties to an environment that both physically and culturally predated colonialism. In many cases, their families had lived in the same area for generations; they were able to continue to speak their own languages (even with the addition and mixing of French); to relate myths; and to adhere, at least partially, to preexisting social structures (such as castes in the case of the Senegalese) and religions. While much important scholarship has been conducted across the disciplines on the existence and significance of remaining so-called Africanisms in the diaspora,77 there is still little doubt that the spatial, cultural, and psychological displacement and disjuncture resulting from the Middle Passage had a profound effect on the shape that diaspora cultures would take. Senghor’s francophone Africa did not experience this cultural injury and process of transformation to the same extent. In contrast, therefore, to Senghor and his friends, the Caribbean intellectuals in Paris had little choice but to operate fully in the language and social systems of the oppressor. This comparison also clarifies the specificities of the Senegalese bourgeoisie’s encounter with and understanding of the colonial situation and its subsequent engagements with reclamations of Africanité. While abroad, Senegalese scholars like Senghor, Diop, and Ousmane Socé had the opportunity to move beyond the parochialism of their particular colonial predicament and to develop a Black Atlantic, global vision. Clearly, the process of identity formation and the representation of differences most frequently occur when there has been an uprooting that questions a fixed sense of location and relationship to others.78 Certainly, their encounters in Paris with other colonial subjects and French metropolitan society provided these young thinkers with just such an occasion. On the other hand, as I will discuss below, scholars of Senegalese history have often argued that French policy in the colony, which focused primarily on the assimilation process over a system of association, played a pivotal role in both the flowering of the Negritude philosophy and in its initial acceptance as cultural policy in a newly independent nation.79

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Strategies for Negotiating Difference: Assimilation Policy in the Four Communes While early formulations of Negritude had much to do with historical and contemporaneous theories of the black condition and the status of nègres in the metropole, its later incarnation as ‘‘cultural dominant’’ in the newly independent Senegal must also be interpreted in relation to the particularities of local history and politics and Senegal’s experiences under the French colonial system.80 In his poetry, Senghor looked to the cultural practices of the Serer and Mandinke for instances of Africanness which he then extrapolated to support an idealized pan-Africanism.81 Artists likewise drew on traditions and histories that found their legitimacy in places quite distinct from the officialdom of government systems. As the capital of French West Africa, Senegal was the only territory in which the French colonial administration seriously attempted to apply a policy of assimilation through administrative and educational means. When this project of creating black Frenchmen proved too difficult, it shifted into a relationship of association.82 These policies led to early opportunities within the colony for political participation in the French Chamber of Deputies (as early as 1848) and citizenship rights for inhabitants of the long-established coastal trading areas, known as the four communes (Dakar, Saint Louis, Rufisque, and Gorée).83 While Portuguese trading vessels were active in the Senegal River region as early as the fifteenth century, regularized contact between the region and European seafaring nations was not well established until the seventeenth century. The French built a fort and lucrative trading houses on the Ile Saint Louis in 1659. Until 1854, most French contact was limited to coastal regions, contributing to a vibrant, cosmopolitan population. At this historical juncture, the then governor of the French colony, Louis Faidherbe, began an organized infiltration of the interior, launching campaigns from his base at Saint Louis. He and his troops soon encountered a rich mix of nomadic and sedentary peoples who shared a long history of vassalage to powerful states and kingdoms, most notably the Malian empire and, much later, successive Wolof kingdoms which grew wealthy and strong through their control of the Saharan trade routes and taxation of large populations living under their rule. These peoples also shared common kinship structures, architectural and artistic practices (mostly portable such as jewelry filigree, textiles, body arts, dress) and eventually, with the arrival of Islam, religious beliefs. Senegal has six major ethnic groups: Wolof, Serer, Toucouleur, Diola, 34

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Mandingo, Fula (and smaller populations such as the Lebou who are the longtime inhabitants of the Cap Vert region; this demographic mix remains similar today). Historian Michael Crowder has noted that despite its diversity of peoples, there appears to be ‘‘an indigenous homogeneity that has nothing to do with the French policy of assimilation, and which is greatly encouraged by a common adherence to Islam.’’ 84 The first conversions to Islam in the region occurred among the Toucouleur in as early as the eleventh century. While numerous leaders made attempts at conversion through jihads, the majority of Senegal’s Muslim faithful converted peacefully toward the end of the nineteenth century. As scholars such as Donal Cruise O’Brien, Sheldon Gellar, and Martin Klein have documented, this widespread adherence to Islam is organized around charismatic Sufi brotherhoods, which have played and continue to play substantial political and socioeconomic roles in Senegalese society.85 The semblance of homogeneity to which Crowder refers also resulted from the prevalence of Wolof as a lingua franca and the strength of forces of urbanization and trade unionism, which cut across ethnic lines. Perhaps the greatest measure of social differentiation within Senegal historically and, to a certain extent, today, is the division by caste. Most of the ethnic groups in the region operated with similar caste distinctions composed of nobles and free individuals, artisans (smiths, jewelers, weavers, and leather workers), minstrels and griots, and the descendants of liberated slaves and slaves. Displacement—through continuous migration to the cities, overwhelming adherence to Islam, dominance of Wolof cultural mores and language in wellpopulated areas, and French educational systems—has certainly tempered these categories and produced a distinctive coastal, urban culture, but it has not completely eradicated them. As one scholar notes, ‘‘The history of coastal Senegal and its colonial past was as important to the urban elite as the history of Tekrour, the Wolof Empire, and Al-Hajj Umar or Lat-Dior was to the interior peoples.’’ 86 Among the urban elite, distinctions between French, creole, and black African originaires (initially a person from the four communes; later a term applied to any Senegalese with French citizenship) equaled and, at times, superseded those between artisan and free individuals, Wolof and Serer. The economy of this urban terrain relied on the market for groundnut crops. Thus, from its early days at the turn of the twentieth century, coastal, elite politics was intimately connected to Muslim, largely rural, interests. This model for political economy continued into the era of decolonization and became a crucial aspect of postindependence political campaigns and allegiances under the Senghor and Diouf regimes. Rhythm as the Architecture

35

While politics in the four communes allowed for the articulation of native demands, paradoxically, these assertions were concerned primarily with obtaining the privileges of French citizenship promised by assimilation policies and the statutes of the 1789 French Revolution. For the most part, local political structures modeled themselves after highly bureaucratic and centralized French structures of administration.87 The urbanized communes supported small but significant populations of French businessmen and traders who entered into personal and professional relationships with Senegalese trading women (signares).88 This community had a stratified social system of Europeans, creole descendants, free African traders, and slaves, Muslims and Christians alike, all with assumed rights to property and access to metropolitan markets. The creole community, together with the Africans born and living in this location, came to be known as habitants and, later, as originaires. Under the assimilation policy, these originaires were afforded full political rights as French citizens in 1848.89 In that same year, Senegal sent its first deputy to the French National Assembly, Durand Valentin, a creole from Saint Louis. It was not until 1914 that the first indigenous deputy of African descent, Blaise Diagne, took his seat in the National Assembly. In 1930, Diagne, who envisioned himself as a champion for originaire citizenship rights, delivered a now famous speech to the metropolitan Chamber of Deputies, praising French colonial policy and such hated institutions as the forced labor program in the territories and celebrating a united France, the metropole and her colonial holdings. His attitudes, representing the pinnacle of pro-citizenship campaigning and accommodationism, drew much criticism from pro-nationalist students in Paris at the time, who quickly labeled him ‘‘the Good Apostle.’’ 90 The political rights of assimilation policy in the communes allowed citizens access to French educational facilities and legal representation in the metropolitan courts, but they were entitled to retain indigenous laws of inheritance and marriage (statut personnel ). Those unfortunate enough to have been born outside of the small, urban areas, only achieved the status of sujet and were subject to summary judicial judgment (indigénat), head taxes, military conscription, and forced labor (corvée).91 So coveted was the right of metropolitan citizenship among the originaires that when the French expanded their control beyond these coastal regions in 1880, the originaires eagerly joined French expatriates in opposing an accompanying expansion of assimilationist policies to the hinterland.92 Debates about the nature of the assimilated Senegalese dominate the historical literature regarding this period. In the most extreme cases, the ideal assimilated African would live 36

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like a typical French citizen, governed not by native law and custom, but by French codes. He was not a polygamist. Literate in French, he was expected to have contributed in his own way to the success of the mission civilisatrice in the colony. Thinking in French, living French, more at home in French society than elsewhere, he was expected to be in everything except color of his skin, a Frenchman.93 Historians G. Wesley Johnson and John Hargreaves concur with findings of high degrees of assimilation among habitant/originaire populations in the communes, dating their transformation process to the late eighteenth century.94 And, in his study of the particularities of assimilation policy, Michael Crowder writes that ‘‘Senegal is interesting both because it is an exception and because as a result of the application of the policy of assimilation, it is one most marked by the former metropolitan power.’’ 95 However, these scholars also note that the process of assimilation was never simply a blind adoption of the colonizer’s cultural ways resulting in a community of ‘‘mimic men.’’ 96 While these urbanites fought for French political rights, in part because they made good economic sense, they saw no contradiction in maintaining non-French cultural and religious practices. Johnson asserted, in fact, that the practice of Islam served as a potent means of resisting cultural assimilation and that the spread of French rule, which destroyed existing political and social structures, drove many Wolof and Toucouleur into the Muslim brotherhoods of the interior. Recognition and acceptance of the hybrid nature of life in the communes lead to a regular practice whereby Muslims could swear an oath of French citizenship on the Qur’an before a Muslim judge.97 The multiple allegiances held by citizens of the four communes were manipulated by French businesspeople and administrators who actively practiced and nurtured forms of clientelism with powerful marabouts, such as El Hadji Malick Sy (Tijaniyya brotherhood) and Amadou Bamba (Mouride brotherhood), both of whom controlled the growing and harvesting of lucrative groundnut crops inland. This brief overview of the four communes’ politico-intellectual history illuminates the complex web of cultural, racial, ethnic, and religious allegiances that existed just thirty years prior to the time when Senghor sought to ‘‘invent’’ a new national allegory founded on a sense of historical connection to a shared past and looking toward a viable future. While not from a family of originaires, Senghor grew up in the small, wealthy coastal town of Joal, just south of Dakar and Rufisque.98 As a boy, however, he did enter into the French educational system in the communes, eventually winning scholarships to study in Paris. His mentor as a young man was none other than Rhythm as the Architecture

37

Blaise Diagne, whose own example he later followed by becoming Senegalese deputy to the National Assembly. His reluctance to call for political, rather than simply cultural, independence until the very eve of the collapse of the colonial system and his continuing strong links and friendship with France after independence can be directly linked to his experiences within this history in the four communes. In his writings on colonial politics in Senegal, Michael Lambert has argued that prior to the formulation of Negritude philosophy, Senegal’s politicians evoked black identity to gain French citizenship. Afterward, they evoked it in order to posit a black African nationalism and utilized it as a strategy to create political distance from France.99 Their use of ideas of Negritude (to create African personality) and of an equally philosophical African socialism (to fashion a nationalism) should therefore be seen as an attempt to negotiate difference: in the former case, between black and white, and in the latter, between French and African. The shifting dialectic of this negotiation process occurred most probably because ‘‘being black and a French citizen in the communes was one thing; being a black Frenchman in Paris, however, was another.’’ 100

Defining an African Essence and an Esthétique Africaine: Senghor’s Brand of Negritude ‘‘It is becoming common to describe two negritudes. Senghor’s looks back to tradition and eloquently gathers up an African essence. Césaire’s is more syncretic, modernist, and parodic—Caribbean in its acceptance of fragments and in its appreciation of the mechanism of collage in cultural life.’’ 101 James Clifford’s delineation of two types of Negritude writings is a common reading of the different approaches to cultural tradition and authenticity taken by its two most famous practitioners. While most critics would agree that the tenor and trajectory of Césaire’s and Senghor’s writings often diverge, in part because of artistic style, in part because of dissimilar cultural circumstances under colonialism, this binary approach to Negritude forestalls a nuanced understanding of the many stages the philosophy underwent in the hands of both theoreticians. A characterization of Senghorian Negritude such as Clifford’s does little justice to the complexities of Senghor’s writings, produced throughout a lifetime of scholarship, nor does it accurately portray the syncretism of the poetic and visual arts that emerged in concert with Negritude ideas. Senghor’s perception of Negritude was multidimensional, looking eloquently and nostalgically to the past while simultaneously envisioning a proactive, revolutionary role for the philoso38

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phy, seeing it as a tool for forging a new supranational and national sense of being and belonging. Clifford’s observation does, nonetheless, recognize a central concern in Senghor’s writings, one that glorified a partly remembered, partly invented or reconstructed past the philosopher ingeniously mixed with scholarship on African history, myth, religions, and languages. His childhood memories of life in the small town of Joal and of his family’s Serer customs and myths served as vital links to an African past that his schooling had disregarded, and as fodder for determining the spirit of a community, whether racial, ethnic, or national.102 Senghor wrote of a ‘‘negritude of the sources,’’ by which he referred to an assumed set of precolonial conditions under which Africans lived in harmony with their world in what he romantically labeled ‘‘the Kingdom of Childhood.’’ Recalling the growth of Negritude philosophy and accompanying black consciousness in the 1930s, Senghor wrote: We discovered, during the years 1930 and 1934, the marvels of Desire, the Vital Force of Negro Africans. Hard years for a whole generation of young people, imprisoned in their faculties . . . we walked, armed with the miraculous insight of double consciousness, perceiving the marvels of the kingdom of childhood. We were reborn in Negritude. Africa sings, paints, sculpts around these newborns, around these fiancés, around these ancestors, in the market stalls and in the fields, as at court with the princes.103 It is no coincidence that this assumption of precolonial bliss emerged in Senghor’s writings, as it had been a mainstay of French literature since the Enlightenment and became prominent in the anthropological discourse surrounding Africa in the late nineteenth through to the mid-twentieth centuries.104 In Time and the Other (1983), Johannes Fabian investigates the ‘‘construction of anthropology’s object through temporal concepts and devices [as] . . . a political act.’’ 105 In considering the discipline’s measures of time and space as ‘‘ideologically construed instruments of power’’ that have aided Western scholarship in demarcating apparent differences between ‘‘us’’ and ‘‘them’’ and in controlling the apparatuses of historical interpretation, Fabian’s analysis illuminates the construction of a ‘‘petrified relation’’ between Africa and the West. The vacuum in which African cultures are placed serves, then, as a means of securing a sense of ‘‘tradition,’’ ‘‘authenticity,’’ and ‘‘purity’’— abstractions that have been shown to operate at the very heart of the international market for so-called tribal or primitive arts.106 Rhythm as the Architecture 39

In the process of mining European modernist approaches to African history, Senghor eagerly cultivated the image of a knowable, pristine, unchanging land of the ‘‘noble savage,’’ which occupied the role of Europe’s Other. He celebrated the petrified continent and its inhabitants represented in these accounts, as they seemed to make Africa all the more authentic and traditional, in contrast to the alienation engendered by colonialism. In order to craft a holistic vision of the black race, Senghor set out to document, systematically, the values, social institutions, and epistemologies of ‘‘traditional’’ African cultures to which he believed the black soul, or âme nègre, was inextricably linked.107 This belief that black peoples had a profound and essential ‘‘spiritual association with African culture,’’ 108 one unaffected by the vicissitudes of history, was, therefore, pivotal in his definition of a collective personality. In his own poetry, Senghor regularly evoked an image of a mythic, mystical, and humane Africa to which he and his expatriate colleagues might return periodically for nourishment. In ‘‘For Khalam,’’ he wrote: We shall bathe my dear in the ambience of Africa. Wild perfumes, thick mats of silence. . . . Cushions of shade and leisure, the noise of a wellspring of peace. Classic words. In the distance, antiphonal singing, like the cloths of Sudan. And then, friendly lamp, your kindness to soothe the obsession of this Ambience White black and red, oh red as the soil of Africa.109 Senghor often defined this Africa in feminine terms and used the power of color association to describe the beauty of her blackness and her pride.110 In ‘‘For Koras and Balafong,’’ Senghor used the color black to emblematize the comforts of Africa, thus anticipating the ‘‘black is beautiful’’ assertions in North America: Africa night my black night, mystical-lucid black-brilliant . . . Night delivering me from arguments and sophistries of salons, from pirouetting pretexts, from calculated hatred and humane butchery Night dissolving all my contradictions, all contradictions in the primal unity of your blackness.111 Having isolated the very foundation of the black community in its unique connection to African heritage, Senghor then began to further differentiate the âme nègre from other identity-based groupings, distinguishing it 40

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as emotive, expressive, and rhythmic—ultimately a reflection of biological factors.112 In his philosophical treatises, he began to write of the physiopsychologie du nègre (Negro physiopsychology).113 For instance, in Foundations of Africanité (1971), Senghor sought to better define the elements and workings of African culture, explaining it as ‘‘the psychic constitution, which, in each people, explains its civilization. In other words, it is a certain way, proper to each people, of feeling and thinking, of expressing itself and of acting.’’ 114 The reliance on assumed biological, spiritual, and cultural similarities mirrored earlier European racialist arguments that had endowed each race with distinctive characteristics and had equated outer appearance with inner constitution. Senghor defined the African approach to life not as a mere instinctive reaction but as an expression of intent by one in control of his own agency, what he called ‘‘an act of cognition.’’ 115 In his own reading of Negritude, Sartre described this trait as ‘‘a certain affective attitude toward the world.’’ 116 In Senghor’s words, ‘‘By the very fact of his physiology, the Negro has reactions which are more lived, in the sense that they are more direct and concrete expressions of the sensation, and of the stimulus, and so of the object itself, with all its original qualities and power.’’ 117 Senghor’s attraction to African American cultural productions was based on this conception of the psychic essence of Africanness, and he noted, ‘‘What strikes me about the Negroes in America is the permanence not of the physical but of the psychic characteristics of the Negro-African, despite race-mixing, despite the new environment.’’ 118 Many scholars disagree with Sartre’s benign characterization of Senghor’s ‘‘racism,’’ criticizing Senghor for internalizing and even legitimizing the denigration implicit in the colonial and imperial enterprise. In his study of French writings about Africa, Christopher Miller notes that Senghor’s theories were disturbingly close to those of the Comte de Gobineau and his followers, which suggested that blacks were devoid of logical thinking and only approached life in a sensual fashion. These critiques arose in particular from Senghor’s claims that ‘‘European reason is analytic and Negro reason intuitive.’’ 119 In his famous essay entitled, ‘‘L’esprit de la civilization ou les lois de la culture négro-africaine’’ (The spirit of civilization and laws of negro-african culture), Senghor noted that ‘‘Gobineau defined the Negro as the creature who was the most energetically seized by aesthetic emotion. Because that which interests the Negro is less the appearance of the object but its deeper reality; less its signification than its meaning.’’ 120 According to Christopher Miller, Gobineau’s ‘‘Essai sur l’inégalité des races humaines’’ (Essay on the inequality of the human races) is: Rhythm as the Architecture

41

at the origin of a notion that gained wide acceptance: that blacks are endowed with greater ‘‘imagination’’ than whites and are thus the source of the arts. From the Essai, through Guillaume Appollinaire’s theories on ‘‘fetish-art,’’ to Sartre’s ‘‘Orphée noir,’’ this assumption continually endows the black with a type of thinking that simultaneously robs him of his ability to think as a fully reflexive intellect. The Essai often reads as a caricature of other, subtler texts.121 Similarly, Manthia Diawara asserts in his analysis of V. Y. Mudimbe’s Foucauldian reading of Negritude that ‘‘the négritude poets, even as they sang about the ‘total sum of black values’ and denounced European ethnocentrism, were reasserting the superiority of the West over Africa.’’ 122 He further argues that ‘‘Senghor’s assimilationist discourse, far from making the African the European’s equal, and therefore, uncolonizable, participates in a universalist concept of man that posits Western man as the model and the African as its aberration.’’ 123 In contradistinction, Abiola Irele has argued that Senghor’s racially based rhetoric should be seen as a ‘‘counter-myth’’ to European hegemonic theories and therefore as a rejection of a Gobinist or Darwinian notion of a hierarchy of races.124 Returning briefly to Clifford’s distinction, it is important to realize that the originary notion of Negritude in Senghor’s writings was, indeed, tempered by another form that positioned itself as an arbiter of an alliance between African traditions and contemporary political struggles. Thus a syncretic and decidedly modern vision of Africanness accompanied this ‘‘Negritude of the sources.’’ It is certainly this second sense of Senghorian Negritude that produced the most challenging visual arts during the years in which he served as both patron and president. So while, on the one hand, he would declare, ‘‘We must remain Negroes . . . Negro-Africans . . . we must drink each day from the gushing springs of rhythm and the image-symbol of love and faith,’’ on the other, he insisted that ‘‘a civilization would stagnate and die if it were not vivified by the power of cultural spirit; its style crystallizes into vacant forms, into formulae, if it does not borrow from others.’’ 125 Lilyan Kesteloot cites Senghor’s understanding of this need for a more instrumentalist theory. He writes: We could not go back to our former condition, to a negritude of the sources. We were no longer living under the rule of the Askias of the Songhai, or under Chaka the Zulu . . . to be really ourselves; we had to embody Negro African culture in twentieth-century realities . . . to enable our negritude to be, instead of a museum piece, the efficient instrument of liberation. . . . [spoken in 1959, on the eve of independence] 42

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to institute a worthwhile revolution, our revolution, one first had to get rid of our borrowed identity—the clothing of assimilation—and to assert our essential being, namely, our negritude.126 As statesman, philosopher, and artist, Senghor began to envision himself as a spokesman for black peoples worldwide, encouraging them with the motto ‘‘assimiler, pas être assimilés!’’ (assimilate, do not be assimilated!). His largely apolitical brand of Negritude was well received by many French liberals disillusioned with post–World War ii Europe. Intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre, André Breton, André Gide, Albert Camus, Paul Rivet, Théodore Monod, Michel Leiris, and Georges Balandier supported the founding of La Société Africaine de Culture (sac) and its journal Présence Africaine, in whose pages Senghor developed his concept of Negritude into a new form of humanism.127 Founded in 1947, the publishing house Présence Africaine, with its journal, books, and conferences, provided critical mechanisms through which intellectuals from throughout the Black Atlantic could find their voices and articulate and share ideas about Africa and its cultures as it emerged from colonial rule. The importance of Présence Africaine’s activities in this era cannot be overstated.128 The very establishment of a society of intellectuals and activists, a publication house, and a set of organized forums that could nurture burgeoning political and cultural philosophies afforded the arts and artists central roles in the processes of postcolonialism. At conferences, art was envisioned to be in the service of a variety of pressing pursuits, acting as a means of exploring and expressing newfound senses of cultural nationalism, shared racial consciousness, and philosophy. One can better situate President Senghor’s approach to the arts as vehicles of development and his vision of artists as mouthpieces for a renewed pan-Africanist pride and philosophy in light of this rich history. At the sac-sponsored conferences in Paris (1956) and Rome (1959), Senghor joined intellectuals from throughout the Black Atlantic to agitate for decolonization and to advance ideas on postcolonial consciousness and artistry. Artists and writers from Africa and the diaspora played prominent roles in these proceedings, and their thoughts were recorded for perpetuity in the pages of Présence Africaine.129 During this period, Senghor’s philosophical work drew on that of French scientist and Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, who wrote in 1939 that ‘‘the foyers of human development always seemed to coincide with the points of meeting and synthesis of several races,’’ thus suggesting that it was through the synthesis of races, not assimilation, that great civilizations Rhythm as the Architecture

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were formed.130 Using Chardin’s theories, Senghor developed the concept of the civilisation de l’universel (civilization of the universal), which would incorporate the unique elements of each culture to form the ‘‘Great Civilization.’’ 131 If it was then legitimate to cultivate the values of Negritude, to awaken in ourselves dormant energies, it should be for the purpose of bringing us into the current of cultural intermingling . . . into the current of panhumanist convergence; to the edification of the Civilisation of the Universal. Biological intermingling occurs by itself . . . encouraged by the very laws of Life—against all the policies of apartheid. It is difficult in the cultural domain. Our freedom remains whole to accept or refuse cooperation, to provoke or not to provoke synthesis.132 It is often in his poetry that one could find his clearest visions of possible African contributions to a universal civilization. In numerous poems, Senghor waxed eloquently of the humanity and warmth in traditional Africa, which stood in great contrast to the inhumane, war-ridden cultures of Europe. In ‘‘Prayer to Masks,’’ he wrote: Let us report present at the rebirth of the World Like the yeast which white flour needs. For who would teach rhythm to a dead world of machines and guns? Who would give the cry of joy to wake the dead and the bereaved at dawn? Say, who would give back the memory of life to the man whose hopes Are smashed? They call us men of coffee cotton oil They call us men of death. We are the men of the dance, whose feet draw new strength pounding The hardened earth.133 As a highly educated évolué, Senghor advocated the use of the French language and, as president, sought to institute a curriculum of humanities in the Senegalese schools which included not simply history lessons in African cultures but also a heavy dose of French classics. He saw the language and culture of the colonizer not as a threat but as an advantage that the African should appreciate,134 referring to the essential French component of African life as la francité—a ‘‘clarity, order, harmony of ideas’’ needed by African students to properly approach scholarship and knowledge.135 Similarly, for the 44

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artists of the new nation, he favored the incorporation of European modernist vocabulary into their artistic expressions.136 For Senghor, French was the great equalizing force that could encourage the development of his civilization of the universal. His acceptance of many aspects of French culture led some to accuse him, like Blaise Diagne before him, of being an accommodationist. While it was Nigerian writer Wole Soyinka who delivered the widely reported and now famous objection to Negritude, ‘‘Must a tiger declare its tigritude?’’ many other African critics rejected Senghor’s desire to paint a romantic vision of their lives and their African realities, seeing Negritude as a misplaced recourse to traditionalism and a mask for accommodationist policies.137 A growing number of African intellectuals asserted that, in their work, Senghor and fellow Negritude writers practiced a kind of ‘‘archaic revisionism,’’ 138 which resulted in ‘‘the systematic elaboration of artificial cultural problems,’’ 139 while ignoring the socioeconomic challenges facing many postcolonial African states. As early as 1962, only two years after independence, Senegalese filmmaker, Ousmane Sembene characterized Negritude as ‘‘an intellectual intoxicant used by the rising bourgeoisie.’’ 140 One year later, South African writer in exile Ezekiel Mphahlele—one of the most outspoken opponents of Negritude—addressed a conference on African literature at the University of Dakar, insisting: Who is so stupid as to deny the historical fact of Negritude as both a protest and a positive assertion of African cultural values? All this is valid. What I do not accept is the way in which too much of the poetry inspired by it romanticizes Africa—as a symbol of innocence, purity and artless primitiveness. I feel insulted when some people imply that Africa is not also a violent continent. I am a violent person, and proud of it because it is often a healthy state of mind. . . . The greatest poetry of Léopold Sédar Senghor is that which portrays in himself the meeting point of Europe and Africa. This is the most realistic and honest and most meaningful symbol of Africa, an ambivalent continent searching for equilibrium. . . . This synthesis of Europe and Africa does not necessarily reject the Negro-ness of the African. . . . If African culture is worth anything at all, it should not require myths to prop it up.141 By the early 1960s Senghor had distinguished his unique form of Negritude philosophy and was poised to transfer it into the framework of arts patronage. It is within this phase of its history that Negritude was institutionalized in Senegal and began to play a significant role in the development Rhythm as the Architecture

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of a nationalist and pan-African aesthetic. Being both an artist and a politician, Senghor became a great patron of the arts in his newly independent nation. He viewed art and politics as handmaidens in the struggle toward economic development and, by extension, the artists as cultural workers who felt ‘‘the need to speak to their nation, to compose the sentence which expresses the heart of the people, and to become the mouthpiece of a new reality in action.’’ 142 He believed that Negritude, acting as the people’s cultural repository, could illustrate the rich potential in Senegalese society and thereby motivate individuals to strive for greater production. Its promotion was not simply a luxury but crucial to the success of Senegalese state building. The new president based his political platform on African socialism. Biographer Janet Vaillant has closely examined Senghor’s concept of this ideology, finding it to be an inconsistent medley of Marxist, neotraditionalist, and universalist myths that, unlike Nkrumahism or Nyerere’s Ujamaa plans, served primarily as inspirational discourse rather than a concrete set of economic ideas for development.143 Not surprisingly, Senghor focused heavily on the role of the âme nègre in the arts, the realm that he knew best and one that served, in European philosophy, as a measure of tradition, classicism, and civilization. Senghor posited that the African’s approach to and participation in the surrounding world was most clearly expressed through the imagery and symbolism of artistic form.144 He elaborated this point in his essay, ‘‘L’esthétique négroafricaine’’ (‘‘The Negro-African Aesthetic’’), using rhythm as a metaphor for the uniqueness of African artistic expression: Rhythm is the architecture of being; the internal dynamic, which gives form; the system of waves which it sends out towards Others. It expresses itself through the most material, the most sensuous means: lines, surfaces, colors, volumes in architecture, sculpture, and painting; accents in poetry and music, movements in dance. But in doing so, it guides all this concrete reality towards the light of the spirit. For the Negro-African, it is in the same measure that rhythm is embodied in the senses that it illuminates the spirit.145 A unique pan-African aesthetic relied on a connection to a Negritude of the sources for its authenticity. The arts in a modernizing Africa would be vehicles by which to bring the weight of past traditions to bear on an awakening racial and national consciousness. A speech delivered while on a state visit to Nigeria illustrates Senghor’s belief that this pan-African artistic heritage embodied a shared sensibility:

46

In Senghor’s Shadow

2 Boubacar Coulibaly, Rencontre des masques. 1976. Oil on canvas, 116 × 89 cm. Collection of the Government of Senegal. Courtesy of the Ministry of Culture.

Here, in olden times, flourished the Negro soul and imagination, creating myths, composing poems, developing art. . . . [The man of Ife] had no need to make books or build museums. His function was to express life through prayer and art, by symbolism. Thus he helped other men, all men, to lead a better life. The man of Ife, who was greeted by the West through the voice of Leo Frobenius the German, was endowed with poetic powers. His mission was to help shape the world. In the sculptures of Ife are depicted all the art, history and philosophy of Africa. And from them Western Europe discovered the forgotten notions of art in prayer, gravity in joy, dignity in suffering, restraint in the broad sweep of a gesture.146 As I will discuss in the following chapter, the works of some Senegalese visual artists incorporated generic cultural emblems, such as masks, statues, and combs, which capitalized on a preexisting European marketplace of floating signifiers of Africanness (figure 2). In so doing, many of these works seem to promote a discourse about Africa that relied on primitivist tropes.147 So it was in the arena of the arts that Senghor’s visions of a local and pan-African identity flowered and concretized. The next chapter will consider the manner in which Senghor’s beliefs in Negritude and a universal civilization were translated into practice, analyzing the cultural and artistic ramifications of his policies.148 These cultural policies made for the motor behind the creation of an elaborate institutional infrastructure, erected to service the development of a new aesthetic. Negritude philosophy, through this process of institutionalization, became an ideology, losing much of its early revolutionary zeal and emerging as the language of a new realm of officialdom under the Senghorian government. It is worth remembering, as we move into an analysis of its institutionalized phase, that for all of its flaws, the system erected by Senghor in the name of Negritude, African socialism, and modernization, set the stage for future developments in cultural discourse and artistic innovation. In retrospect, many artists at work today regard the École de Dakar/Negritude era as an outdated and rather naive segment of nationalist art history. However, the early structures and sophisticated cultural dialogue instigated by Senghor and his colleagues certainly laid important foundations for the vibrant and highly refined artistic arena evident in Senegal today.

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In Senghor’s Shadow

2 The École de Dakar: Pan-Africanism in Paint and Textile

U

nder Senghor’s tutelage, Senegalese culture underwent a period of great growth and prosperity. The new president placed the arts at the center of his attempt to craft a salient nationalist narrative and to promote a coherent representation of modern Africanness. Twenty-five percent of the state’s budget was allocated to the Ministry of Culture to build museums, art schools, presses, theaters, archives, and workshops for the emerging generation of young artists.1 For the visual arts, the Senegalese state also hosted annual salons, sponsored internationally traveling exhibitions, and provided a generous system of bursaries and civil service jobs (at the secondary schools, the Ministries of Culture and Education, and the art academies). Senghor’s opening remarks delivered at the famous 1966 First World Festival of Black Arts, held in Dakar, exemplify the lyrical manner in which he regarded the arts: ‘‘Here in Dakar, where images and ideas are borne about by four winds, we are witnessing a new wave of national art, which has its roots in the black basalt of Cape Verde. Negro art uplifts us from despair, supports us in our struggle for social and economic growth, in our stubborn determination to live.’’ 2 His patronage served, then, as the legitimating force behind artistic practice, providing a highly poetic and celebratory interpretative framework for the new arts. The resulting aesthetic has come to be known as the École de Dakar. Interpretations of this École have tended to emphasize the manner in which the ideological tenets of Negritude determined its iconographic parameters and the formal characteristics of European modernism informed its stylistic attributes. Often these analyses are

based on the assumption that the aesthetic in question is little more than a misguided and somewhat crude attempt at mimicking École de Paris, infused with visual tropes of Africanité (plate 1). Furthermore, many African intellectuals have bemoaned what would appear to be an unreflective mirroring, in the themes and motifs seen in some of these works, of classic anthropological practices of ‘‘salvaging,’’ which locate purity, traditionality, and authenticity within certain cultural forms and serve ultimately to propagate so-called primitivist and ahistorical readings of Africa and its cultures. To many, these cultural productions presented a disturbing visual objectification of the relationship between the colonizer and the colonized, a blind adoption of the Other’s ideas of oneself.3 Scholarship that deals with the invention of traditions, the imagining of publics, and the construction of spaces of belonging provides insightful means of thinking about how Senghor, through his patronage as president and artist, oversaw a program of nation building by relying on supranational (i.e., pan-African and humanist) models of community.4 These writings, which also call attention to the creativity and agency involved in imagining communities, help illuminate the artist’s role in this process of mapping and claiming a new nation-space, a new cultural territory. In his work on culture and imperialism, Edward Said has asked, ‘‘How does a culture seeking to become independent of imperialism imagine its own past?’’ 5 The writings of Frantz Fanon, which address the processes of reclamation, reformulation, and invention accompanying nation building in Africa, provide, at least, a partial response to this question. The native intellectual, who decides to give battle to colonial lies, fights on the field of the whole continent. The past is given back its value. Culture, extracted from the past to be displayed in all its splendor, is not necessarily that of his own country. Colonialism, which has not bothered to put too fine a point on its efforts, has never ceased to maintain that the Negro is savage; and for the colonist, the Negro was neither an Angolan nor a Nigerian, for he simply spoke of ‘‘the Negro.’’ . . . The Negro, never so much a Negro as since he has been dominated by the whites, when he decides to prove that he has a culture and to behave like a cultured person, comes to realize that history points out a well-defined path to him: he must demonstrate that a Negro culture exists.6 Taking Negritude as the language of exchange, Senghorian cultural policy sought to overlay the complexities of Senegalese colonial history, postindependence socioeconomic concerns, and political rivalries with a unifying 50 In Senghor’s Shadow

identity discourse. The importance of establishing a shared public discourse on nationalism, one intimately connected to the scholarship, prestige, and artistry of the president himself, deserves our attention. Most accounts of the period’s art history focus only on the overwhelming influence of Negritude, without acknowledging the very real political strife occurring beneath the veneer of festivity and unity. The political system that initially brought Senghor to power was nominally a multiparty one, with his Parti Socialiste (Socialist Party) aligned with its metropolitan parent party. Senghor was careful to maintain close relations with Western democracies, as well as the states of the Islamic world, ensuring a steady and remarkably varied supply of foreign aid sources. Soon after assuming power, however, Senghor began to squash political opposition, jailing leaders such as Cheikh Anta Diop and Mamadou Dia. These measures brought about riots and severe student and union strikes. The establishment of a cohesive sense of nationhood, emblematized in the visual arts, acted as a distraction from the messy process of building a nation out of a state.7 Toward the end of his tenure, Senghor began to allow greater political freedom, grooming his prime minister, Abdou Diouf, to succeed him. Already, at the beginning of Senghor’s tenure, opposition politicians, members of the intelligentsia, and students expressed distrust and disillusionment with the metanarrative of Negritude, which they regarded as a deliberate mystification of social and economic problems and a denial of neocolonial realities. For example, filmmaker Ousmane Sembene, speaking at a writer’s conference in 1963, insisted that ‘‘if we look at the social situation in Senegal today. . . . nothing seems to have been achieved at all. So far as I am concerned, négritude, reminds me of that ‘folfol’ worn by women expecting a baby which lets you see their whole body through their clothes. Négritude seems to me to have nothing solid about it.’’ 8 The suspicions of Negritude’s opponents were also fueled by the slow Africanization policies adopted by the Senghorian government, which left many administrative posts in the cultural, economic, and policy-oriented areas within the hands of French coopérants.9 In the postindependence period, until the 1970s, French technical assistants dominated the large civil service. The intellectual elite, including the art world, was also structured on this bureaucratic model. By locating his Senegalese identity discourse within the realm of the visual, Senghor also oversaw the formation of a new politics of representation, which questioned the relationship between race and aesthetics and the universality of European univeralism, acknowledging third world artists’ and intellectuals’ (or what scholars today might call postcolonials) presence in Pan-Africanism in Paint and Textile

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and contribution to modernism. In so doing, his thoughts prefigured current writing on the visual economy of the Black Atlantic in which the intersections of race, aesthetics, gender, and representation are paramount.10 Senghor’s patronage clearly carved out a new social, cultural, discursive, and institutional space, a kind of art world. This space acted as a nexus at which artists addressed notions of identity, traditionality, and authenticity through a visual lexicon that drew on diverse cultural and artistic sources. Sociological models provided by Pierre Bourdieu and others will help us consider the functionings of the particular structured space encompassing the arts in the immediate postindependence period. The institutional infrastructure and interpretative apparatus surrounding the École de Dakar had their heyday in the period from 1960 to 1974. In 1974, the widely touted traveling exhibition, Art sénégalais d’aujourd’hui, proved to be the last hooray for this school. In the late 1970s, harsh economic realities, spurred on by environmental catastrophes in the Saharan region, combined with an increasing pessimism about neocolonialism to place in sharp relief the inability of a state-driven aesthetic to capture the material circumstances of Senegalese nationhood and to satisfy the manifold possibilities of postcolonial creativity. My analysis seeks to complicate the narrative of this École de Dakar and to broaden the interpretation of its legacy, recognizing that the artworks grouped therein did not always follow a strictly prescribed artistic vision and that the visual artists who chose to engage with the philosophy of Negritude were not necessarily governmental dupes but actors in shaping what could, at times, be a highly syncretic postindependence vision. As part of the process of envisioning a nationalist profile, artists attempted to contest and rearticulate what Stuart Hall has called the ‘‘relations of representation’’ between Africa and Europe.11 Senghor was known to refer to the artists working in this period as his chers enfants (dear children), emphatically cementing the bond between their works and his cultural nationalist patronage. Within this burgeoning art world the artist figure assumed a variety of contradictory roles and definitions, serving as ambassador in the international arena, as seer, as documentarian, as representative within the new national space, as court ‘‘lap-dog,’’ 12 and as the quintessential male, modernist, cursed, and misunderstood genius. I shall examine the complexities inherent in such a broad-ranging signification of the artist figure within the École de Dakar and, in the chapters to follow, in the artistic arenas operating in its aftermath. The visual and rhetorical engagement with the history of European primitivism and its appropriative practices by Senghor and the artists working 52

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under his patronage brought to the fore the intimate relationship between colonialism and European modernist artistry. Many works produced within this art world relied on the marketability of particular visual motifs that were, in effect, commodified symbols of Africanness and exposed the modernist myths of discovery and mastery underlying primitivism. In the visual vocabulary of these artworks, and in the discourse of the art world they populated, artists grappled with legacies of French assimilation policy, tensions of establishing a postindependence identity, and ongoing practices of creolization and hybridization in an urban, cosmopolitan environment. Debates concerned with the politics of representation, difference, and Otherness are now central to contemporary cultural theory. Scholars interested in postcoloniality, transnationalism, and diasporas offer us new means of understanding cultural processes of creolization, hybridization, mimesis, and alterity. Whether one chooses Homi Bhabha’s ideas of ‘‘ambivalent colonial discourse,’’ Edward Braithwaite’s work on ‘‘creolization,’’ Stuart Hall’s notions of ‘‘cut-and-mix,’’ or Edward Said’s ‘‘hybrid counter-energies,’’ 13 one finds an openness to and recognition of strategies of reversal, reclamation, inversion, and juxtaposition inherent in the culture-building process. With these theoretical models in mind, one can take a more subtle look at the cultural productions of Senegalese artists, reassessing their appropriative or ‘‘quoting’’ practices and highlighting their agency and ingenuity. In fact, an approach that moves beyond a simple explanation of mimicry not only complicates the creations of Senegalese artists but also highlights the workings of modernism itself, encouraging a long overdue ‘‘political genealogy of primitivism.’’ 14 However, the referencing of European primitivism and play with colonialist visions of Africa have also been dismissed as processes that ‘‘manufacture otherness’’ 15 and as tactics that self-primitivize. This interpretation is certainly valid, as these works seem to flaunt the currency that so-called primitive arts enjoy in the European marketplace and imagination. Nonetheless, such a reading also minimizes the subversive and confrontational possibilities inherent in hybrid cultural forms emerging from the colonial paradigm, regarding them, instead, as misplaced energies, mistaken identities, and fruitless searches for authenticity within a ruling European epistemological framework. A cursory look at the accounts of the École de Dakar, from reviews of exhibitions in the media to writings in scholarly journals and catalogues, indicates a continuing struggle over terminology and an effort to understand the artworks’ relationship to more familiar modernist forms. In one of the first thorough and lengthy reports on artistic production in the postindePan-Africanism in Paint and Textile

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pendence period, French artist and then director of Dakar’s École Nationale des Arts, Bernard Pataux, noted: The Africa theme is found not only in a variety of subjects, but also in several styles which elude description, as the words available are too vague and refer to non-African criteria. We would be reducing the unknown to the known if we were to base our judgment on the fact that Senegalese artists use social and material elements which they have borrowed from a Western socio-cultural context. In other words, the artist classified as an expressionist could as well be referred to as a formalist. We can therefore only speak of Senegalese art in broad generalizations.16 It is just such broad generalizations from which one must now move away, not fearing to acknowledge Senegalese artists’ utilization of modernist forms but seeking knowledge of the unknown. The cultural productions under examination here need not be seen as afterthoughts or stragglers in the history of modern arts—forms born from the aping of mastery—but should rather be regarded as ‘‘creative misinterpretations,’’ 17 to use William Rubin’s term for describing the process of cultural translation that occurred with the appropriation of so-called primitive arts by European modernists, or what Houston Baker Jr. has called deliberate ‘‘deformations of mastery.’’ 18 One can concede to the centrality of practices of hybridization in the works of Senegal’s artists during Senghor’s time and today without then fetishizing créolité (hybridity), simply by placing emphasis on the historical and material circumstances under which artists chose to follow their creative paths (figure 3). It is only through the acknowledgment of these practices that one can begin to measure the successes and failures of this creolized aesthetic (and the philosophy informing it). In so doing, art historians may also open up a useful dialogue with centers of modernism and postmodernism outside the former metropolitan world and take more serious note of the complexities that have long existed within it.19

École de Dakar: A Restricted Field of Production Pierre Bourdieu’s ‘‘field of cultural production’’ is ‘‘a structured space with its own laws of functioning and its own relations of force’’ in which agents compete for resources and interests by utilizing diverse forms of capital (symbolic, cultural, economic).20 The paradigm he proposes mirrors similar ones articulated by Arthur Danto, Lawrence Alloway, and Howard Becker to understand the complex functionings of the European-American art arena. 54

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3 Badara Camara. Invitation. 1978. Tapestry, 160.5 × 282.5 cm. Collection of the Government of Senegal. Courtesy of the Ministry of Culture.

In his writings, Danto draws our attention to the workings of art worlds, the institutional matrices within which ordinary objects are ontologically ‘‘transfigured’’ into artworks. Arguing that the art–ordinary object divide does not simply rest in perceptible, formal differences, Danto insists that scholars must treat all the elements of this institutional space—the producers, consumers, patrons, critics, collectors, dealers, exhibitions, curators, and art historians—as crucial producers of cultural meaning.21 Lawrence Alloway asserts that the structure and organization of the art world should be thought of as a nonhierarchical ‘‘negotiated environment,’’ what he calls an ‘‘art network.’’ 22 Similarly, Howard Becker draws our attention to the weblike configuration of an art world, using the term to ‘‘denote a network of people whose cooperative activity, organized via their joint knowledge of conventional means of doing things, produces the kind of art works that the art world is noted for.’’ Most important for our purposes, however, may be his concern ‘‘with how the existence of ‘art worlds’ affects the form and content of art works.’’ 23 The Senghorian art world had many of the elements listed above, but its defining feature was that the Senegalese state occupied virtually all of the roles identified by these scholarly models. The institutionalization of Negritude’s tenets was most noticeable in the workings of the École des Arts throughout the 1960s and 1970s. In 1958–59, Senegal and what was then francophone Sudan formed the Mali Federation. The art school of this new political entity was the Maison des Arts du Mali, which provided courses in drama, music, and the plastic arts.24 When the Pan-Africanism in Paint and Textile

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federation collapsed in 1960 and Senegal declared itself an independent republic, the new president changed the Maison des Arts du Mali to the École des Arts du Sénégal.25 In the ensuing years, art educational facilities would change format, name, and location regularly, resulting, at various dates, in a separate music conservatory, school of dance, school of architecture and urban design, tapestry center, and drama academy.26 In 1960, instruction in the visual arts department in the new École des Arts was divided, initially, between Papa Ibra Tall and Iba N’Diaye, two of Senegal’s most successful artists, both of whom had been trained in art schools in France and had acquired international recognition. Papa Ibra Tall, a strong supporter of Negritude ideas, returned from France in 1960 to create the Section de Recherches en Arts Plastiques Nègres (Section for Research in Black Plastic Arts). In his teachings, he placed particular emphasis on the use of ‘‘identifiable’’ African subject matter and encouraged what he believed to be the natural artistic creativity of the African artist (figure 4).27 He preferred not to offer formal instruction for fear it would block the creative output of his students. As one of his tasks, Tall sought to deemphasize the impact of Western education on Senegalese artists, claiming, ‘‘when one leaves the European schools of fine arts, one spends the next ten years of life trying to undo these learned habits. . . . One has to do exactly the opposite of classical education.’’ 28 In this respect, his views regarding the African’s lyrical and innate connection with rhythm, emotion, and symbolism echoed those of Senghor. One can also draw parallels between Tall’s beliefs in African artistic expressivity and those espoused by European art mentors and teachers working in other parts of the African continent.29 The challenge for Tall’s students in the Section de Recherches en Arts Plastiques Nègres was to find a way to incorporate philosophical and sociopolitical ideas embodied in Negritude debates, anticolonial struggle, and postcolonial aspirations into concrete visual forms (figure 5). Tall’s own artistic career began as early as 1947, when he worked informally in oil paints under the tutelage of several French amateur artists residing in Dakar. However, it was architecture that he went to study in Paris in 1955 at the École Spéciale d’Architecture.30 In 1959, Senghor saw some of Tall’s drawings on exhibit in Paris and encouraged him to pursue fine arts instead. Senghor helped the young Tall obtain a grant to attend the École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris and pursue further instruction in Sèvres, where he studied painting, serigraphy, tapestry, mosaics, and pedagogy. Papa Ibra Tall spent his years in Paris in the heart of discussions concerning Negritude, passing many hours in the office of Présence Africaine, reading the works of Césaire, Damas, Senghor, Birago Diop, and Alioune Diop 56 In Senghor’s Shadow

4 Amadou Seck, Samba Gueladio. 1973. Paint, mixed media, 244 × 122 cm. Collection of the Government of Senegal. Courtesy of the Ministry of Culture.

5 Modou Niang, Untitled. n.d. Tapestry, 242 × 167 cm. Collection of the Government of Senegal. Courtesy of the Ministry of Culture.

and providing illustrations for many of their writings.31 His immersion in the metropolitan-based Negritude movement prepared him well for the role that Senghor would ask him to play at the art school and then, soon after, as director of a tapestry school. Tall explained the process through which he pursued an aesthetic informed by the spirit of Negritude writings: So, at the time it was a question of creating, for myself, an artistic language which seemed to me to belong to Africa and to Senegal. I concluded that art is universal but that it was necessary for there to be particularities that one had to transcend to achieve this universality. So I thought that I couldn’t imitate what the French were doing. I was completely outside of that tradition. Therefore, I thought that it was necessary for me to construct a completely new language. I was inspired by the theory of Negritude which, back then, you must recall, was unique. Wole Soyinka didn’t yet exist and the other theoreticians of the day were economic theoreticians—Nkrumah had an economic theory, not cultural. So, those of us who wanted to create something autonomous, belonging to and reflecting just us, had little to inspire us but Negritude. . . . What interested me in finding a kind of authenticity was not to create pure decoration but to create a language of visual forms which defined me for myself.32 In keeping with the humanist proclivity of Senghorian Negritude, Tall approached the fashioning of this new language and identity by playing generously with universalisms and particularisms, often narrating tales of local cultural heroes with a pan-African visual vocabulary, in European oils or dyed, imported wool. The flatness of his compositions, the strong outlining, rich colors, and manipulation of forms within the frame could certainly lead European critics to read modernist influences into the works. In other words, his search for a unique voice and authenticity did not rely simply on a ‘‘return to sources,’’ but indicated an understanding of how a carefully constructed, polyvalent visual language could help him enter and perhaps control the power/knowledge game at work in representations of Africa (figure 6). Notions of authenticity, tradition, autonomy, and real or imagined links to the past played pivotal roles in establishing new senses of community in postcolonial Africa.33 Eric Hobsbawm has commented on these relations to the past, claiming that it is clear that plenty of political institutions, ideological movements and groups—not least in nationalism—were so unprecedented that even historic continuity had to be invented, for example by creating

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6 Papa Ibra Tall, Vigil cosmique. 1978. Oil on canvas, 120 × 100 cm. Collection of the Government of Senegal. Courtesy of the Ministry of Culture.

an ancient past beyond effective historical continuity, either by semifiction . . . or by forgery. It is also clear that entirely new symbols and devices came into existence as part of national movements and states, such as the national anthem . . . , the national flag . . . or the personification of ‘‘the nation’’ in symbol or image.34 This attention to authenticity must, of course, be read in conjunction with primitivist, colonialist renderings of Africa as Eden: a land of the noble savage which was the locus (certainly in early anthropological studies) of pris60

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tine, closed, and therefore ‘‘real’’ African cultures and Europe’s dialectical Other.35 The authenticity in the international market for African arts was, and continues to be, measured in precolonial, precontact terms. The search to justify new forms within this paradigm required a secure and clear linkage to past forms and traditions.36 In Tall’s explanations, one can see how one artist, not the philosopher/ ideologue Senghor himself, understood and translated the ideas of Negritude into action. For this reason, I cite him at length: I think that we, as a people of Senegal, have authentic values. Certain intellectuals, who have lived in Europe for a long time, have been cut off from their roots so today they are young Africans who no longer have an attachment to their country. When I returned from Paris in 1960, I thought, it was necessary to look within for these deeper realities and values. It is from there that the new African civilization will come.37 And, We Africans have a philosophy, sensibilities, and values that we must translate into works of art. . . . At bottom, within himself, an artist is the product of his culture, his social milieu and his traditions. . . . I see a brilliant future for the painter in Senegal, so long as we do not let ourselves be led by foreigners. Senegalese art, as everything here, can only be created by us. Foreign specialists cannot teach us authentic art. The authenticity will come from us, without outside help, because it is within us. It remains for us to express it.38 In his search for authenticity, Tall succeeded in developing a style for which he became well known. Art historian Kojo Fosu ventured so far as to claim that ‘‘what has become known as Senegalese expression is mostly the style of Papa Ibra [Tall].’’ 39 In his compositions the hand of a skilled draftsman became apparent. They were characterized by flowing, sinuous lines whose movements endowed figurative forms with volume while simultaneously emphasizing the flatness of the picture surface (figure 7). These sweeping lines, which seemed to radiate out from the forms, produced both a strong sense of modeling and, through their meticulous application, an exquisite delicacy. His tapestries, the medium in which he excelled, were executed in monumental scale. The striking juxtaposition of bold colors and generous use of pictorial space enhanced the grandeur of works such as Judu bu rafet (1978) or Couple Royale (1965) (plate 2). In both of these tapestries, the richness of dyed wool seems to suit the folkloric, celebratory subject matter. In the former, the silhouetted figures occupy a striated world, punctuPan-Africanism in Paint and Textile

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7 Papa Ibra Tall, Projection spatiale. Ca. 1970s. Pencil drawing, 65 × 49.5 cm. Collection of the Government of Senegal. Courtesy of the Ministry of Culture.

ated by repeating spheres. Our attention is drawn to the textured forms of local beaded headdresses, elaborately plaited hairstyles, and finely detailed jewelry. The inclusion of a horse, rearing a head adorned with regalia, alludes to the proud history of the Wolof cavalry and its fight against French expansion. In the latter tapestry, Tall accentuates the presence and status of 62

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a royal couple posing in stiff, formal fashion before the viewer. They are bedecked in refined boubous (traditional robes), whose folds billow out toward the confines of the composition’s frame and whose richness Tall embellished through the use of fine filigree gold work. These figures occupy a world of riches and tradition. The second section of the new École des Arts was directed by artist Iba N’Diaye, who returned from studying and working in France in 1959 to found the Section des Arts Plastiques, or fine arts department. N’Diaye’s section modeled itself on a European art academy, drawing on the academic experiences of its director. Originally from Saint Louis, the former capital of French West Africa, N’Diaye began his artistic career by creating posters for the local Cinema Vox and then pursued his studies in fine arts in both Montpellier and at the Académie de la Grande Chaumière in Paris. He subsequently apprenticed in the sculpture studios of Ossip Zadkine and Pierre Coutin. In the Section des Arts Plastiques, his students learned to draw from live and plaster models, studied the laws of perspective, worked in oils and gouaches, and read Western and African art history. In its infancy, N’Diaye’s course was held in a café in downtown Dakar, from where his students were asked to roughly sketch the passersby.40 In contrast to Papa Ibra Tall, Iba N’Diaye adamantly believed in the importance of technical training over the search for an innate Africanness and authentic aesthetic. For N’Diaye, authenticity came from attention to skill and materials and sincerity in practice, as was evident in the advice he gave to his students: Notably to my young colleagues, I would give several words of advice: be on guard against those who insist that you must be ‘‘Africans’’ before being painters or sculptors, for those who, in the name of authenticity, which remains to be defined, continue to want to preserve you in an exotic garden. We are not born more talented than others, the majority of us do not come from traditional artistic families, in which the profession is transmitted down through the generations, but rather, we are sons of African cities, which were created, for the most part, in the colonial era, and were crucibles of an original culture, in which, according to the country, foreign or indigenous cultural contributions dominate. We are both the sons and creators of this culture, which so disturbs those nostalgic for the Africa of the ‘‘noble savage.’’ It is in this role that you have a very great responsibility: to make our profession legitimate in the eyes of our fellow countrymen, and in those of men from all the continents (under whose attentive or anxious gaze Africa is Pan-Africanism in Paint and Textile

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more than ever placed), making us masters of techniques which alone will permit us to overtake the period of infantile imagery, to renew ourselves and to give us the courage to advance the iconographic themes of contemporary Africa, ‘‘a shattered continent,’’ more now than ever a victim, but whose artists must contribute to giving a future image of the continent which, liberated from biased images, will elaborate a new ‘‘Africanity.’’ 41 Beyond a strict rejection of the essentialist foundations of Tall’s new aesthetic, N’Diaye’s comments also indicate a wariness toward the fictions supporting the cult of the self-taught, innate, artist-genius. His words make clear his understanding of the European practices of exoticizing the native (and supposedly naive) artisan and the penchant toward eliding the works of children, the insane, the untrained, and the Other under the rubric of the primitive. N’Diaye’s compositions were strikingly different from those of Tall and his colleagues at the École des Arts. They could be moody, executed in an agitated thick impasto, or whimsical and painterly, in muted gouaches or watercolors (plate 3). He was unobligingly straightforward about his involvement with École de Paris formulations, even while he frequently drew his subject matter from memories of life in Saint Louis.42 He wrote, ‘‘I have no desire to be fashionable. Certain Europeans, seeking exotic thrills, expect me to serve them folklore. I refuse to do it—otherwise I would exist only as a function of their segregationist ideas of the African artist.’’ 43 Despite the wealth of talent and experience N’Diaye could contribute to the new École in Senegal, the bias shown toward Tall’s department with its dedication to the Negritude agenda was such that N’Diaye decided to return to France, where he has lived since 1967.44 His works have received broader critical attention than those of Tall and others working at the École des Arts during this period. This imbalance may be due, perhaps, to his talents, or, perhaps, to his permanence as a figure in the French metropolitan art scene. However, this fame has had its disadvantages. Critics, unprepared for or unwilling to deal with the complexities, multiple references, and mixings in N’Diaye’s works, have characterized him as an artist somehow ‘‘caught’’ between two cultures, Senegalese and European. N’Diaye’s response to these interpretations has been simply to deny his plight, urging critics to consider him, instead, as a typical twentieth-century hybrid individual whose life and cultural references are a mélange of influences from around the world: ‘‘I think that everyone is hybrid. Nobody, no matter what civilization, can say that his originality is simply an originality of place. Originality goes be-

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yond original provenance, thanks to the acquisition from and contact with others. There is, therefore, always a mixing. The mixing is a universal part of being human.’’ 45 In 1960, the École recruited another prominent figure when President Senghor invited French mathematician and amateur artist Pierre Lods to contribute his teaching skills and ideas to Tall’s department. In 1951, Lods had established the well-known Poto-Poto school of painting in Brazzaville in the former French Congo.46 He credited the beginnings of this school to the day he came home to find his domestic servant, Ossali, painting. He recalled, I will never forget my servant Ossali’s pleasure when I found him after two days of absence, painting blue birds on an old beaconing chart from Oubangui. They were disturbing and comical, these birds, shaped like throwing knives; they boasted a presence which was similar to that of the finest African masks. I had never seen anything like it in any area of African art, but they were unquestionably Negro, by the effectiveness of their impact, the sense of greatness and magic they emanated. . . . During the following days, young brothers, cousins, and friends tried their hand. I brought everyone to my house, to my hut-studio in PotoPoto. . . . Moved to tears, fascinated, unable to sleep for several nights, I did not dare say a word for fear of breaking the spell.47 Like Tall, Lods favored a laissez-faire teaching approach, preferring not to impose European models on what he saw to be an African artist’s ‘‘innate sense of composition, of rhythm, and of color harmony.’’ 48 The works produced under his tutelage often depicted elongated, schematized figures in sharply defined movement. These forms, painted in strong contrasting colors or subtle shades of brown and ocher, were situated within idyllic landscapes or market and village scenes. Masks also frequently made their appearance in these flat, highly decorative compositions. Lods’s ideas about African sensibility, emotion, instinct, and rhythm corresponded well with those of Senghor. Not only did his teaching approach emphasize the beauty and authenticity of African artistic traditions but it also suggested that the African artist had a distinct creative gift to contribute to the ideal civilisation de l’universel.49 Senghor first met Pierre Lods at the Black Artists and Writers Congress in Rome in 1959, where the Frenchman gave a speech about his teaching methods, claiming a hands-off approach. Lods’s students remember him for his teaching method of dire rien (saying nothing). However, as evident in the citation below, he practiced something quite different.

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I left them to work on their own, without schedule or guidance. My part was to provide material—paper, paints, brushes—but I left them to work out their own techniques, and find them they did. . . . Sometimes, too, we read African proverbs that I had collected, or legends and poems written by African authors. . . . I surrounded my student painters with traditional African objects, and in the grounds I grew a large variety of native plants.50 Lods’s attitudes illustrated a common, nostalgia-driven agenda built on a web of fictions about ‘‘traditional’’ Africa. Of course, he could not simply transplant his Poto-Poto experience to Dakar because he had to enter an already established institution. And although he and Senghor agreed essentially on the importance of encouraging an authentic African art, they did not always agree on the best way of achieving this goal. Lods found the art school, with its system of exams and diplomas and its strict state patronage, to be too confining for his students.51 When Papa Ibra Tall left his teaching post at the École des Arts in 1965 to set up the tapestry school and Iba N’Diaye returned to France two years later, Pierre Lods became the key personality at the art school. He also held a separate atelier at his home where he supported a number of young artists.52 His teachings influenced a whole generation of Senegalese artists. Those listed as Lods’s students include, among others, Amadou Bâ, Ansoumana Diedhiou, Ibou Diouf, Ousmane Faye, Mohammadou M’Baye (later called zulu), brothers Seni and Kré M’Baye, Modou Niang, Maodo Niang, Madema Guèye, Ousseyou Ly, Seynabou Sakho, Amadou Sow, and Chérif Thiam. There was, in fact, a diversity of expression among these so-called Lods disciples. Despite his death in 1988, Lods continues to influence the artistic community of Dakar. The successes of Senghor’s ‘‘field of cultural production’’ are best understood when placed within the context of artistic training systems throughout the African continent. As Grace Stanislaus has noted in her catalogue on contemporary artists, ‘‘The history of twentieth century African art is intricately connected to the influence and patronage of Europeans. With rare exception, the formal and informal art schools and experimental workshops were established by Europeans.’’ 53 Two schools of thought have characterized art instruction in twentiethcentury Africa.54 First, there are those who believed in a laissez-faire approach marked by little formal instruction. The patrons of this first type of school adopted a decidedly paternalistic attitude toward their African students who, they insisted, had ‘‘natural, unspoiled talents’’ that should 66

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be nurtured and sheltered from the harms of academicism.55 Believing that ‘‘isolation is better than contact,’’ 56 Frank McEwen, founder of a workshop school at the National Gallery of Southern Rhodesia, insisted: Another major destructive agent of African talent is the Westernized art school, or the influence and the authority of this type of nefarious institution. . . . Its presence is felt through the establishment of Westernmodel art schools in several parts of Africa, directed by Western socalled professors of ‘‘art’’ who are versed in all those pompous, souldestroying gimmicks of the Western ‘‘art’’ establishment or, equally harmful, it is present in the persons of Western-trained African artists who receive . . . promotion and almost dictatorial authority.57 McEwen was not alone in his sentiments; Frenchman Pierre RomainDesfossés, who in 1944 founded Le Hangar, known officially as L’Académie de l’Art Populaire Congolais in Lubumbashi, the Belgian Congo, was also a strong proponent of the laissez-faire approach. Informal art training has taken many different forms on the African continent. Ulli Beier’s sponsorship of art workshops in Oshogbo, Nigeria, may serve as a case in point. Beier, a teacher in extramural studies at Ibadan University, and his second wife Georgina initiated a series of summer art workshops at the Mbari Club in Ibadan in 1961. German architect Julian Beinart and a Portuguese architect from Mozambique, Amencio Guedes, conducted the first workshop, which was aimed primarily at art teachers. In 1962, a second workshop was held at the Mbari Mbayo Club in the small town of Oshogbo under the direction of Guyanese artist and art historian Denis Williams (who had been teaching at Khartoum Technical Institute). This second workshop involved actors and musicians from the resident Duro Ladipo Theatre Company, who had never had experience in the visual arts, as well as a number of other members of the surrounding community.58 The following year, African American painter Jacob Lawrence joined Denis Williams to conduct another workshop. After these initial workshops, Georgina Beier set up a permanent studio in Oshogbo to work with artists in the area.59 While informal, the output of the Oshogbo artists soon became recognizable and formulaic, eventually acquiring an ‘‘Oshogbo School’’ label and producing such well-known artists as Jimoh Buraimoh, Rufus Ogundele, Muraina Oyelami, and Twins Seven Seven.60 The relationship between Portuguese architect Pancho Guedes and Mozambican painter Valente Malangatana exemplified another type of dynamic between African artist and Western patron. Malangatana, given ample supplies of materials and exhibition opportunities by Guedes, was, in effect, Pan-Africanism in Paint and Textile

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seen as the ‘‘great find’’ of this knowledgeable European, a diamond in the rough. Despite his success, he gained very little but a place in the international world as a ‘‘token’’ African artistic genius. In contrast, Margaret Trowell and her School of Fine Arts at Makerere University College in Uganda, founded in 1937, epitomized the kind of formal institution despised by McEwen.61 This school was modeled on the curriculum of a European fine arts school. Thus courses in painting, drawing, sculpture, textile, ceramics, and graphic design were all taught in a four-year program for which students received a diploma. The school later also became affiliated with the University of London.62 The École des Arts in Dakar was unique in the manner in which it combined the two distinct teaching agendas on the continent in its two departments of visual arts. One saw, in the patronage of the art school, Senghor’s passionate rhetoric of Negritude finding an institutional home.63 In 1965, at the behest of President Senghor, Papa Ibra Tall founded a tapestry school, known as the Manufacture Sénégalaise des Arts Décoratifs (msad), in Thiès, a small town outside Dakar. This new institution took the tapestry-making school in Aubusson, France, as its model, but it used what Tall believed to be authentic African themes, colors, and designs.64 The style of its creations was highly decorative, featuring intricate, brightly colored rhythmical patterns and stylized figures, all occupying a shallow space (figure 8). The tapestries featured scenes of daily life and the marketplace, explored the relationship between the sexes, documented indigenous flora and fauna, memorialized the masks and sculptures of ‘‘traditional’’ Africa, celebrated the heroes of precolonial history, and chronicled local myths (figure 9). As grandiose works, they were positioned as the ultimate embodiments of an esthétique négro-africaine (Negro-African aesthetic) and served, therefore, as the flagships of the École de Dakar. It was in the production, consumption, interpretation, and distribution of these objects that one saw most clearly Senghor’s art world in motion.65 When questioned about the choice of the medium of tapestry, Tall cited two factors that explained the establishment of the Thiès tapestry workshop. First, he and Senghor agreed that the practice of easel painting, imported from Europe, would take some time to develop. The implication here was that, despite the importation of materials, looms, and techniques from the Gobelin manufacturers, the process of weaving was inherently African in its practice. In this way, the Thiès products could be situated within the authentic sphere of indigenous weaving practices, while simultaneously contributing a modern form to the genre. Second, Tall asserted that an emphasis on the decorative, monumental arts such as tapestry, mural work, and mosaics 68

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provided a means through which to ensure the participation of the artist in the project of African socialism.66 Tall explained, ‘‘We are convinced that it is through the decorative and monumental arts that we will reach the ideal of all democratic civilizations; to immerse the people in art, an ideal which ancient Africa had achieved (figure 10).’’ 67 One must surely also consider that Senghor and Tall’s familiarity with long-standing art historical traditions in France, which featured tapestries and wall hangings serving as visual advocates for nationalist and monarchist authority, may have played a part in their decision to anchor the new aesthetic in a tapestry workshop. Tall sent four young students to train in France at the weaving workshops of Aubusson and Beauvais, and imported dyed wool from Belgium and Holland and looms from France.68 The Manufacture began weaving on basselisse (low-stringer or horizontal) looms, but in 1979 it added eight haute-lisse (vertical stringer) looms to its workshop. Initially, Tall himself produced the majority of the designs, but soon other artists, many still students at the Section de Recherches en Arts Plastiques Nègres, began to contribute drawings and painted models. The workshop also began an artists-in-residence program in which painters Alioune Badiane, Ousmane Faye, and Mamadou Wade all worked. After the original four weavers, the others were trained in Thiès, studying the properties of materials, learning about line, volume, modeling, colors, and uses of compositional space, so that they might faithfully translate the artistic intentions from the painted models. In keeping with the original contract between the freelance artist and the workshop, only six copies of a design could be produced. Any reproduction after six would require a renegotiation of royalties. An artist would normally receive a sum of 100,000 cfa francs (2,000 French francs) for the draft, a considerable amount for the time.69 When the Manufacture had the full financial support of Senghor’s government, it could produce up to one hundred tapestries per year.70 The approved designs would go through a series of steps on their way to completion. After they were approved, they were reduced and transferred to maquettes, or models, ready for the weaving process.71 Usually two or three weavers worked on a single tapestry at any one time. The designs were divided into numbered sections, each color being given a different number. Then, after weaving, the tapestries would be sent to a cutter who would block, trim, and press them. Then a border containing the names of both the workshop and the designer was added. Like those in the École des Arts, most graduates were supported by state bursaries during their studies and found employment in schools or the government ministries on completion. In addition to the presidential office, the Pan-Africanism in Paint and Textile

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8 Moussa Samb, Flute Player. n.d. Tapestry. 6.28 × 6.28 m. Collection of the Government of Senegal. Courtesy of the Ministry of Culture.

government ministries served as the primary consumers of the artworks, hanging them in their departments and public buildings, or giving them as state gifts to foreign embassies in Senegal, visiting dignitaries, and foreign governments.72 In this way, their purchase served as a forum for the exhibition of a distinctive Thiès style which became closely associated with the work of the founder himself. In 1966, Senghor created an extravagant forum, the Premier Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres, from which to launch the cultural productions emerging from this art world onto the world stage, to advocate a pan-African renaissance, and to sketch out the possibilities of a universal civilization.73 Through this festival, sponsored jointly by the Society for African Cultures, unesco, and the Senegalese government, Senghor sought to affirm Senegal’s place in the vanguard of cultural advancement. Relying on lofty humanist tones, the rhetoric of this event stressed the unity, potential, and richness of the ‘‘Negro’’ world.74 The president’s inaugural address was exemplary of this style: We feel greatly honored to be given the opportunity to welcome so much talent, coming from the four continents, the four horizons of the 70

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9 Seydou Barry, Grand royal. Ca. 1970s. Oil on canvas, 217 × 146 cm. Collection of the Government of Senegal. Courtesy of the Ministry of Culture.

10 Weavers at work, Manufacture Sénégalaise des Arts Décoratifs. 1994. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

spirit, to the Premier Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres. But what honors us above all and what is your greatest merit is that you will participate in an enterprise even more revolutionary than the exploration of space: an elaboration of a new form of Humanism which, this time, will encompass the whole of mankind from the whole of the planet Earth. Senegal welcomes you, therefore, as distinguished guests, as does Dakar, which responds to its calling. Because, black ploughshare, thrown into the fertile ocean, Dakar has always responded to the call of the trade winds, in greeting visitors from land and sea to secure dialogue from which civilizations, or at least Culture, are born.75 In this same address, Senghor left no doubt as to the place that Negritude held in public discourse at the time, asserting, ‘‘In short, the reason why we have shouldered the incredible responsibility of organizing this festival is the defense and celebration of Negritude.’’ 76 The occasion was also used to lionize the host nation as a modern, stable, and cultured society. One should not forget that in 1966, the Senegalese nation was but five years old, and in keeping with the tenor of the times, Senghor was quick to present an image of a civilized and forward-looking nation to an international gathering of powerful states whose foreign aid he actively courted. This show of culture was particularly aimed at France, which had throughout the colonial period erected itself as the measure of universality and civilization, espousing the beliefs of the Third Republic while practicing abominable acts in its colonies.77 Moreover, because he held onto his power rather tenuously, Senghor also wished, through this show of grandeur, to legitimize his rule in the eyes of the native bourgeoisie. An astounding plethora of dance, drama, and musical performances were held at the new national theater, the Théâtre Daniel Sorano, during the festival. Newly created dances by the Alvin Ailey Company and the National Dance Theater of Haiti were seen alongside dramas by Aimé Césaire and Amadou Cissé Dia (Le tragédie du Roi Christophe and Les derniers jours de Lat Dior, respectively). Musical performances by Marion Johnson, Duke Ellington, Miriam Makeba, and others completed the offerings. On the island of Gorée, site of the infamous slave fort that played such an integral part in the Middle Passage, a sound and light extravaganza was staged in front of an estimated crowd of 25,000 spectators. For the visual arts, the ceremonies featured two exhibitions: one of socalled traditional arts, in which those in the Senegalese state collection were augmented by large loans from Africa and abroad, resulting in a show

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of more than six hundred artworks at the new Musée Dynamique;78 the other, entitled Tendances et confrontations (Tendencies and Confrontations), of contemporary arts chosen by a jury of critics appointed by Iba N’Diaye.79 The latter awarded prizes to the best contemporary artworks at the festival, giving the prize for best tapestry to Ibou Diouf, that for best painting to Guyanese/British painter Frank Bowling, and that for best sculpture to Ivorian artist Christian Lattier. Many of these works then formed the backbone of the nascent Senegalese state collection. The exhibition thus can be viewed as a forerunner to the contemporary Dak’Art biennales, a connection I will discuss in greater depth in the last chapter of this book. The festival also gathered together important scholars of African arts and culture for debate and discussion in a week-long symposium academically focused in nature, taking as its philosophical theme, and title, ‘‘The Function and Significance of Negro-African Art in the Life of the People and for the People.’’ Within this broad theme, panelists considered the historical diffusion of, influences on, and encounters of ‘‘Negro’’ art with other cultures (including important Africanisms in the so-called New World) and detailed the challenges and future prospects for black arts and artists. Scholars concerned with tradition-based arts such as Engelbert Mveng, Bernard and William Fagg, Jacques Macquet, Germaine Dieterlen, Douglas Fraser, and Daniel Biebuyck primarily addressed issues of pedagogical definition and methodology. Anthropologist Michel Leiris led a series of talks about the intersection of African art with the West, drawing scholarly contributions from Robert Goldwater and Roger Bastide, among others. Finally, luminary practitioners in a wide variety of arts addressed the current situation faced by modern African artists. Pioneering Nigerian modern artist Ben Enwonwu was joined by colleagues from black America and European mentor-teachers in Africa to speak of practice, pedagogy, and patronage.80 James Porter, Katherine Dunham, and Langston Hughes spoke of visual arts, performing arts, and literature in black America, while Wole Soyinka addressed the state of theater in Africa and its diaspora. Much debate surrounded the nature of the responsibilities that African artists and filmmakers should shoulder.81 Elites and representatives from the ministries of culture of numerous independent African and Caribbean nations attended the festival. Dignitaries from the French Academy such as André Malraux joined art critics and scholars and African American artists and intellectuals, to witness the pomp of the occasion. When emperor Haile Selassie arrived in Dakar, he was given a spectacular parade, in open carriage, through the streets of the city to the presidential palace. The affair was thus held in a climate of folklore and ex74

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oticism, softening the exigencies of continuing economic dependencies and downplaying the tension of political struggles in Senegal. As he had promised, Senghor delivered an experience that was not only pan-African in nature but also served as a reminder that the histories and fates of a broader humanity were intertwined and that a postcolonial world remained very much one interconnected with Europe and America. It was at this historical juncture, in the midst of a burgeoning nationalist rhetoric and a climate of postindependence celebration, that critics began to speak of an École de Dakar. One critic described the festival ambiance: Dakar was very much ‘‘en fete’’ for the occasion. . . . As the women danced, spreading the transparent muslin of their capes like whirling wings, we heard that rhythm of the drums that was a constant exciting undercurrent to the whole festival month . . . all the buildings were white and clean, looking more like a Mediterranean than a ‘‘near North’’ African city. Everywhere there was the bright yellow, red and green of Senegal in flags and bunting.82 This glorification of African cultures proved timely for an international forum in which the excitement of decolonization and the hopes of the civil rights movement lent a certain poignancy and urgency to a black cultural renaissance.83 It was hoped that other emerging African and third world nations, wishing to throw off the yoke of neocolonialism and European cultural imperialism, would look to the festival as a guide for utilizing artistic expression to reinvent or negotiate a unique identity in relation to the larger world.84 As the introduction to the commemorative catalogue suggested, ‘‘the First World Festival of Negro Arts, in the form of a solemn affirmation of its values, has allowed the destruction of external prejudices and internal complexes, by proving that the black world is not only ‘a consumer of civilizations’ but well and truly, a ‘producer.’ ’’ 85 The privileged position afforded French dignitaries during the festival allayed the fears of French liberals seeking to assuage their colonial guilt and quell their anxieties about the decolonization process. In his closing remarks at the festival, Senghor declared it a success, claiming that the First World Festival of black arts has attained its goals. It has revealed the Negro to himself; it has identified the nature and abundance of its values, of its function and responsibility, at the global level; it has emphasized the unity of black art through its diversity. The whole world has felt and will continue to feel the profound echoes of this Negritude meeting.86 Pan-Africanism in Paint and Textile

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However, this presentation of pan-African unity and postindependence euphoria required a sanitization of Dakarois life and a careful culling of cultural elements deemed suitable for foreign consumption. It was, by all accounts, an elitist event. Senegalese troops cleared the streets of beggars, lepers, and ‘‘undesirables,’’ cordoned off poverty-stricken areas, and closed down the university to avoid disruptions by student agitators.87 And while the occasion drew rave reviews from most foreign visitors, it would become clear only three years later in Algiers, where the successor to the 1966 celebration was convened, that the Negritude-focused artistic agenda in Dakar would no longer do. In fact, in Algiers participants called for the demise of Negritude’s panAfricanist aspirations and for the birth of national consciousness in the arts. The poetic pan-Africanism of Senghorian cultural politics was regarded as a symptom of the colonial psychological condition and a distraction from the political matters at hand. One of the most vocal critics, Stanislaus Spero Adotevi, a student who would later become the Dahoman minister of culture and youth, declared in Algiers, ‘‘Negritude is a vague and ineffective ideology. There is no place in Africa for a literature that lies outside revolutionary combat. Negritude is dead.’’ He continued, ‘‘the capital error of this older Negritude, the great sin of Negritude in general was to have been, at the outset, inverted love. It was to have believed, even before its birth, in universality, when the universe was forbidden it.’’ 88 It makes for an informative exercise to compare the two festivals of Dakar and Algiers to understand not only the strength of the Senghorian art world system but also to judge how its visions for the future of independent African states and artists’ roles within them were received and understood more broadly. While the Dakar festival drew much of its funding, logistical support, and intellectual debate from abroad, its Algerian counterpart seemed a much more indigenous affair. While still receiving materials and aid from a number of important European collecting institutions, the Organization of African Unity (oau) sponsored the exhibitions at Algiers, and the accompanying symposium was declared open to ‘‘members of the oau, to the liberation movements, and to men of culture.’’ 89 The Dakar symposium had focused on rather esoteric debates surrounding the understanding of panAfrican cultural expressions. In contrast, Algiers clearly placed the spotlight on the intersection of art and politics. The gathering produced the ‘‘African Cultural Manifesto,’’ which would ensure the political freedom to achieve the cultural freedom and liberty needed to create. The document advocated, among other things, the establishment of a pan-African film institute, of continentally based publishing houses and distribution centers, the protec76

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tion of cultural heritages, the teaching of African national languages, and the encouragement of artisans and fine artists. I return to Adotevi’s address and quote it at some length to make clear the opposition, expressed by many in 1969, to Senghor’s vision. Despite his monopoly over patronage, this rhetoric most certainly would have reverberated in the Senghorian art world, opening the stage for internal challenges to follow in the early 1970s. Many of Senegal’s best artists were present for the Algiers occasion and contributed to the adjoining exhibitions. They could not help but note the challenges to the national art world in which they practiced. Adotevi stated: Negritude has failed . . . it has been hostile to the development of Africa. The Negritude we are offered is the relegation of the Negro to the slow rhythm of the fields, at the treacherous hour of neo-colonization. The timeless approach of the negritic Negro is not metaphysical, but political. Negritude today fixes and coagulates for unavowed ends the most well-worn theories about African traditions. . . . Negritude, by pretending that socialism already existed in traditional communities and that all one had to do was to follow African traditions to arrive at an authentic socialism, deliberately camouflaged the truth and thus came ripe for destruction.90 His attacks on the reactionary nature of Negritude and call for a greater role for artists in the political revolutions of the continent would have found sympathy among many of the participants in Algiers, with delegations from the plo (Palestine Liberation Organization) and anc (African National Congress) in attendance and addresses from militant figures such as Sekou Touré of Guinea and Eldridge Cleaver of the Black Panthers. While the nexus of debate was surely more focused on the political and developmental struggles of the continent and the third world, talk of and advocacy for universalism and humanism was not abandoned. Perhaps the prime minister of Algeria, president of the Revolutionary Council and president of the oau, M. Houari Boumediène best summed up the relationship assigned to art and culture in Algiers in 1969 when he said, ‘‘What meaning, what role, what function can we assign to our culture, teaching and art, unless it is that of creating a better life for all our liberated peoples, of continuing the struggle to free our brothers still under colonial yoke, and of thus participating in some way, in the universal rehabilitation of man by man.’’ 91 Despite the voiced dissent among African intellectuals, politicians, and artists to the philosophical mysticism of Negritude, Senghor embraced the euphoric climate that surrounded the 1966 festival and continued to expand Pan-Africanism in Paint and Textile

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the art world by promoting ‘‘his’’ artists beyond the shores of Senegal and the Musée Dynamique. In the early 1970s, he set up a special commission within the Ministry of Culture to administer traveling exhibits of Senegalese arts abroad. The first of these shows was held in the spring of 1974 at the Grand Palais in Paris. Art sénégalais d’aujourd’hui (Senegalese Art of Today) was essentially an exhibition of the Senegalese state collection amassed from purchases made at the annual national salons. It featured 140 works by thirtythree artists and traveled for ten years. After its successful debut in Paris, the show appeared, in varying forms, in twenty additional venues, reaching as far as Brazil, Finland, and Japan. Each time the exhibition would complete a site, its contents would be repatriated to Dakar, where older artworks would be replaced by more recent creations.92 Such a long-lasting exhibition of cultural patrimony on the world stage had significant consequences. Its contents made an enduring impression abroad and served to reinforce the link between state and artist at home. The further Senghor extended his program for the support of the arts and continued a rhetoric espousing the virtues of Negritude, the more the work of the visual artists became associated with his philosophy, his writings (be they poetic or theoretical), and his political agenda.93 He declared, ‘‘In my opinion, particularly with regard to artists, Negritude strengthened their concerns and their refusals; it answered their questions—not exactly by presenting them with a ready-made solution, a lifeless reply, but a living exhortation to continue the new line of research they had embarked on.’’ 94 Bourdieu’s field of production model helps us understand the dynamics within and parameters demarcating a given art system. While the ‘‘field’’ under Senghorian rule contained many of the elements present in the European and North American art systems, such as a strong academy, fairly consistent access to exhibition venues, regular patronage, and exegetical writings to accompany the artworks, the actual terrain of practice was highly centralized. Symbolic and economic power was concentrated in the state apparatus, which acted as primary consumer, patron, collector, dealer, curator, and historian/critic. However, as is evident in the above citation and in many speeches made during Senghor’s presidency, the president’s rhetoric and the discourse on arts that he fostered seemed to honor autonomy for artists and advocate a free debate on identity and artistry. In this sense, the new aesthetic and cultural sphere in independent Senegal was ostensibly comparable to the best of civilizations anywhere, most important, one worthy of contributing to the great universal civilization. However, the arts infrastructure remained essentially export-oriented, promoting an image of the nation and its aesthetic abroad and providing a 78

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larger Senegalese public with little guidance or incentive to acquire the kind of ‘‘cultural capital’’ needed to serve as an active consumer or patron class for these new arts.95 It may be helpful here to recall N’Diaye’s words of advice to his students: ‘‘You have a very great responsibility: to make our profession legitimate in the eyes of our fellow countrymen.’’ 96 For all of its promotion of the École de Dakar, this field of production did not lead to a vibrant market for the works of individual artists at home. Private patronage was scarce and dominated by expatriates and a small bourgeoisie. Independent and indigenously run galleries did not exist at this time; nor did a lively, critical, public debate, separate from government organs, on the merits and meanings of the artworks. By pointing out the restricted nature of this field of production, I do not wish to suggest that every art world aspires to be a copy of the European or North American system. There is no particular reason why this system should be considered an ideal, although it regards itself as the mainstream, relegating all others to the periphery. In fact, its reliance on the commodity fetishism of the late capitalist global marketplace certainly creates its own set of restrictive circumstances.97 This analysis merely serves to illuminate a contradiction between the rhetoric and reality of the Senghorian art world. Bourdieu’s model also argues that a field of artistic production should be seen as one among other operating ‘‘fields of power’’ or signification. In the Senegalese case, then, one should remember that Senghor’s field (as powerful and consuming as it was) existed alongside, and perhaps interacted with, other systems, such as those that supported the production, circulation, and consumption of sous verre (glass paintings), of textiles and dyed cloths, of Muslim gris-gris, filigree jewelry, and of so-called tourist arts. The latter area, investigated in Christopher Steiner’s work, was one in which the Wolof traders were, and continue to be, extremely active in Senegal and neighboring countries.98 It is worth remembering this point in the following discussion. The waning of the École’s dominance in public discourse after the mid-1970s is linked in part to a worsening economic situation and in part to artists’ questioning of the École’s restrictive boundaries and their exploration of techniques and aesthetic ideas within co- or preexisting local artistic practices.

Cher Enfants or Enfants Terribles As the term École de Dakar gained currency and popular usage, it glossed over the realities of the individuals confined within it. Not surprisingly, critics dubbed many of the artists of this period as dupes or pawns of a powerPan-Africanism in Paint and Textile

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ful ideologue and state.99 In this view, this generation of so-called Negritude painters seemed to express little creativity or talent and instead, was ‘‘filled with enthusiasm for the theoretic, unexplainable non-defineability of material and . . . satisfied with an elevated ‘appreciation’ supported by poetic ‘criticism.’ ’’ 100 Ironically, and perhaps not coincidentally, this characterization calls to mind the stereotypes of ‘‘primitive’’ creators discussed so adroitly by Sally Price in her look at Western approaches to primitive arts. She notes that these artists are seen ‘‘as unthinking and undifferentiated tools of their respective traditions—as people who are essentially denied the privilege of technical or conceptual creativity.’’ 101 One of the challenges facing scholars seeking to understand and comment on the École de Dakar is that while any process of art criticism entails making judgments of quality, when this procedure is set within an intercultural paradigm, the consequences of rendering judgments become manifestly more significant and politically charged. Recent revisionist and reflexive attitudes in the social sciences, brought about by postmodernism and poststructuralism, have made scholars wary of ‘‘translating’’ measures of aesthetic worth altogether. While this attitude certainly reflects good intentions, seeking to avoid long-standing Eurocentric categorizations of Others’ cultural products, it nonetheless in some circumstances has lessened the acuity of scholarship. In Senghorian Senegal, the École de Dakar and the tenets it supposedly upheld were the surest game in town. Wole Soyinka reminds us of the consequences of such a restricted system, writing, ‘‘one of the unfortunate byproducts of Negritude [was] the abysmal angst of low achievement.’’ 102 The mixed talents of its artists and the varying quality of the works under its umbrella have made the École de Dakar difficult to assess. However, the assumption that all involved in the school were somehow ‘‘infected with professionalism’’ 103 and insincere to or ill-suited for their artistic pursuits ignores the possibility that individuals such as Papa Ibra Tall, Alioune Badiane, or Ibou Diouf truly believed in the tenets of Negritude. As part of their engagement with the political, philosophical, and social debates of their day, these artists set about reclaiming and reinventing traditions and sensibilities that colonialism ‘‘distorts, disfigures, and destroys.’’ 104 The analysis of their pursuits has often failed to take into account the strength of emotional and psychological factors at play in the immediate postindependence period, as well as the frequency of broader discussions of political and economic panAfricanism. Senghor’s system, which provided artists with significant amounts of fame and fortune, had invented not only an artistic canon but also a new social 80

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category with its own rhetoric, forms of capital, and power relations. In the case of many artists, it was a struggle to make their new career understandable to their families, for whom the life of a painter or sculptor showing in galleries, at home and internationally, did not constitute a familiar or accepted notion. The obligations of family, which required every member to contribute to a shared income, were difficult to adhere to when the sale of works occurred irregularly. Furthermore, given the persistence of a caste system, the manual labor central to an artist’s work was often difficult for noncaste families to accept. As one artist explained: It is necessary to say that in Western society the individual is the master of his destiny; this is the opposite to what happens in our society where the communal dimension is primary; the personal actions of the individual are judged by others and he cares about their judgment. So therefore, the suffering of the artist in Western societies is relatively tolerable. But when an artist suffers in Africa, that poses problems of integration; we count a lot of mentally ill in our milieu because there is a rupture of social communication between these artists and their environment. In a milieu where social communication is dense, communal life is an obligation.105 Presidential patronage produced a kind of guild system into which artists were tightly bound. The Senghorian art world led not simply to very persuasive imaginings of links between race, nation, and aesthetic but also to a kind of cult of the artist, with romantic notions of the male, solitary, visionary artist figure. Modernist myths of the artist found a home in the Senghorian art world, with a skeletal indigenous market to accompany them.106 Donald Kuspit summarizes the myths surrounding the avant-garde artist figure as follows: Modern thinkers have attributed special authenticity, integrity, and power to the artist. . . . Not only has the artist been sharply differentiated from and elevated above others, but those others have been regarded as too ordinary to comprehend how extraordinary it is to be an artist—although they are obliged to be his audience, in homage to his creativity, if not necessarily to the particulars of his production. They are obliged to give him fame simply for his being, even if they can make no sense of it.107 The adoption of this web of fictions surrounding the artist figure does not, in a sense, seem anomalous to the Senegalese milieu, if one understands the nature of the Negritude project as one that ‘‘simply and faithfully takes Pan-Africanism in Paint and Textile

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categories, concepts, schema and systems from the West and runs them into African entities.’’ 108 This reading of Negritude highlights the paradox of Senghor’s project. As he sought to revalorize African traditions and systems of thought and to engineer a theory of racial belonging, he simultaneously engaged in an intimate dialogue with France. The entire project was necessarily brought about and defined by the colonial paradigm. In Wole Soyinka’s words, ‘‘Its reference points took far too much coloring from European ideas even while its Messiahs pronounced themselves fanatically African.’’ 109 The artist as seer to his society was frequently likened by Senghor and others to the figure of the griot, a member of the caste of oral historians, praise-singers, and storytellers of West Africa. In Senegal, the griot traditions still play an extremely important part of the social, ritual, and artistic framework of society,110 but the network of obligations and customs surrounding the griot caste has little to do with the social space carved out for the modern artist under Senghor’s patronage. Nor, for that matter, could an easy equation be made between the status of these painters and tapestry makers and the caste occupations of wood-carvers, leather workers, jewelers, or blacksmiths. The significant scholarship on the roles of indigenous artists stands in contrast to the vision of the artist figure in the Senghorian art world who,111 by virtue of his modernity, was to be unencumbered by traditional constraints (one might also say alienated) and yet dedicated to making the riches of the past relevant to the future of his nation and modern Africa.112 What is so interesting about the Senghorian art world is that it did not thoroughly utilize and harness existing models of the creative individual. It must be said, however, that the state’s monopoly over artistic production did not wholly curtail the ability of artists to act in a negotiated environment. The art world remained what Bourdieu would call a ‘‘space of possibles’’ and ‘‘struggles’’ in which individuals could hone their own sense of artistic personality, stature, and practice. The space to maneuver within this art network also enabled artists to apprentice with sous verre painters or with wood-carvers, to paint praises to Allah and Islam on the fronts of buses and to produce works independent of the École’s tenets within their studios.113 We will see in the struggles that eventually undermined the primacy of the École de Dakar a younger generation questioning ideas of the artist figure, seeking to reconfigure the bonds between artist and society.

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An Exercise in Strategic Essentialism? Unsurprisingly, most of the oral and written public discourse in Senegal on these ‘‘Senghorian’’ arts took an overwhelmingly romantic and laudatory tone. On every occasion he could find, Senghor, with the eagerness of a proud father, commented on the development of the art world and moved to equate it with more established systems abroad: The reason why the Senegalese painters of the present-day Dakar School won such acclaim, not only in Europe, but above all in the United States, was that they had stayed true to the black African aesthetics of ‘‘rhythmical, melodious and analogical images.’’ As André Malraux told me at the inauguration in Dakar of the Premier Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres: ‘‘You have, here, in Senegal, five or six artists who can match the greatest European artists for stature.’’ I am thinking of Ibou Diouf and Papa Ibra Tall, of Bocar Diong and El Hadji Sy.114 Like the philosophy with which it was identified, this art world existed in a realm divorced from the lives of ordinary citizens. While some of its more profound and socially minded practitioners may have envisioned an earnest connection with the Senegalese populace, its ideologue (although a self-proclaimed African socialist) situated the arts in a sublime position.115 In fact, Senghor would argue that it was because of this exalted nature that the arts, and culture more generally, could guide the nation in its development. His socialism relied on the belief that economic development would come first from harnessing indigenous (pan-African) cultural riches. Notable Senegalese artists such as novelist Cheikh Kane and filmmaker Ousmane Sembene provided some early criticism of Negritude, its contributions to cultural nationalism, and the aesthetic it engendered. However, their commentaries did not focus, in any significant way, on the visual arts, but rather more generally on the inadequacy of Negritude philosophy and its more political face, African socialism, to solve the pressing problems of postindependence hardships.116 Much of the early criticism of the École de Dakar was to be found in the accounts of foreign commentators, all of whom brought their own agendas to bear on these works. As Fred Myers has reminded us in his work on Aboriginal acrylic paintings, ‘‘contemporary art criticism represents an important and interesting arena in which relations between cultural traditions, Western and non-Western or Native and nonNative, are being negotiated.’’ 117 By approaching art criticism as a kind of signifying practice, one can locate in these accounts of the École de Dakar

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not simply a search for the correct nomenclature but also evidence of longstanding colonialist and primitivist ideas about Africa and its arts.118 Ghanaian art historian Kojo Fosu, in his extensive survey of contemporary African artistry, saw the style of the École de Dakar as a reflection of the formal influences of one mentor, Papa Ibra Tall. He cited what he believed to be the key traits of Tall’s works—their elongated, colorful figures occupying a flattened space—and labeled them as markers of the École, listing Tall’s students—Alioune Badiane, Abdoulaye N’Diaye, Fatou Seck, or Moussa Samb—as its members (figure 11). The noticeable affinities between the works of those contributing designs to Tall’s tapestry center may also have resulted from the properties and limitations of the medium itself, the technology for which would only allow very flat images shaped through large tracts of solid colors. The weaving process could not achieve the subtleties of the painted or sketched models it translated. So, to some extent, a sense of depth, volume, color gradations, and textured brushstrokes was altered in the process. Still other critics wrote the history of the school and its canon as a story about the teachings of amateur artist and mathematician Pierre Lods, whose influence began with instruction at his Poto-Poto school in the former French Congo and continued, after 1965, in the École des Arts and private studios in Dakar. This argument easily compared the works of Poto-Poto painters such as François Thango and Zigoma, who created very flat, colorful images of market scenes and mythical creatures with those of Dakar painters such as Ousmane Faye and Ansoumana Diedhiou (figure 12).119 While it is true that one can see a certain cohesion between the works of Tall and his students, or, in some cases, between the painters of the PotoPoto school and the Lodsians in Dakar, the two theories do not always relate visually to one another. Furthermore, the artistic and personal rivalry between Lods and Tall would suggest that neither would support a characterization of the École that grouped the works of their respective students together. Probably what is now the most widely known and well-argued account of the École de Dakar can be found in the catalogue to the 1991 exhibition Africa Explores. In this piece, Ima Ebong approached the history of the school as a kind of art system, tracing the relationship between Senghor’s cultural politics, the institutionalization of Negritude philosophy, and the development of a field of artistic production that gave visual form to these tenets. Ebong’s interpretation also sought to identify the key formal elements of the school, claiming that its artists ‘‘attempted to find a balance between complete abstraction and African motifs’’ and that the result of this process was ‘‘a form of semi-abstraction.’’ 120 While her narra84

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tive avoided many of the most glaring primitivist approaches to these arts, it did choose to focus primarily on those artworks that explicitly utilized visual tropes of Africa. The selected paintings and tapestries, by Amadou Seck, Boubacar Coulibaly, Ibou Diouf, and Bacary Dieme, all contain forms of sculpture, masks, incised combs, or the like, and they certainly speak to the one aspect of cultural production from this period that relied on a predictable set of signs of traditional Africa (figure 13). Ebong’s characterization of a highly structured field of production necessarily called for these illustrations, allowing only a few other possibilities by Samba Balde, Chérif Thiam, and Papa Ibra Tall. These examples could not suggest a wider terrain of practice in which artists borrowed techniques and materials from foreign sources instead of simply producing through a blind mimicry of form. Notwithstanding the brevity of the article and the general catalogue/exhibition audience to which it was addressed, it still seemed a normative approach to the subject at hand (figure 14). Like any school, the one in Dakar was uneven in its quality, vision, talent, and output. But as the works of Papa Ibra Tall, Abdoulaye N’Diaye, and Ibou Diouf would attest, not all the productions of this École can be simply dismissed as semiabstract translations of traditional forms. Rather, in a variety of cases, they should be recognized as innovative creations that used techniques and materials from European modernism to tell the tales of important pan-ethnic and pan-religious cultural heroes and historical/political particulars of Senegal’s precolonial past. Other creations commented on spiritual and ritual forces at work in local systems of belief. For example, Abdoulaye N’Diaye’s enormous tapestry entitled Bamba and Lat Dior (1973) depicted a famous meeting between the founder of the Mouride Muslim brotherhood in Senegal, Bamba, and the man considered one of the last great Wolof warriors, Lat Dior (plate 4). This meeting took place immediately before the battle at Dekkilé in 1886, at which Dior was killed by French troops. The meeting’s importance lies in the alliance sealed between Wolof followers of the warrior and the burgeoning Mouride brotherhood. Just prior to his death, Dior reportedly asked for the marabout’s blessing. His death heralded a new stage in French rule and a growth of the Mouride brotherhood, which provided a space for solace and the continuing assertion of non-French customs for many of his followers.121 N’Diaye placed the holy man in the center of his composition, taking his cues from the only extant photograph of Bamba, which showed him swathed in a white caftan.122 Bamba stares out at the viewer as Lat Dior, on horseback, strides confidently toward battle, his loyal troops following close behind. The two central characters do not interact. It is as though we as viewers have Pan-Africanism in Paint and Textile

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11 Ansoumana Diedhiou, Khounolbâ. 1977. Tapestry, 216.5 × 147.5 cm. Collection of the Government of Senegal. Courtesy of the Ministry of Culture.

12 Ousmane Faye, Spirit of Liberty. 1989. Oil on canvas, 75.8 × 94.7 cm. Collection of the Government of Senegal. Courtesy of the Ministry of Culture.

just missed the encounter, and one can almost sense the lingering heat of the teapot left in the foreground, which had provided a focal point for the meeting of warrior and holy man. Each figure is placed on a zone of concentric circles, as if on a stage. N’Diaye’s use of strong outlines and bold shades of orange, gold, and blue give the work a charged atmosphere, so that all within it seem to wait with baited breath for the outcome of the impending battle. Figures are given volume through a shadowing effect, which encourPan-Africanism in Paint and Textile

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13 Ibou Diouf, Les trois épouses. 1974. Tapestry, 364 × 472 cm. Collection of the Government of Senegal. Courtesy of the Ministry of Culture.

ages the viewer’s eye to move rhythmically around the composition. And the artist has left no space untouched, filling the entire picture plane with the gnarly branched silhouettes of the baobab trees and the folds of Wolof clothing. Similarly, in one of his tapestry designs, Amadou Ly depicts Wolof philosopher Kocc Barma, another local cultural hero in the fight against French colonization (figure 15). The popularity and strength of both of these figures are based on precolonial social systems and suggest the glories of the past age when the cëddo, Wolof cavalry, ruled much of the Cap Vert area. These works, like numerous others, practiced a more subtle mining of traditional motifs than assumed, often skillfully fusing disparate forms and traditions together from local as well as more distant sources to speak to the diverse history of Senegal’s peoples. A work like Astou at Market, designed by Ansoumana Diedhiou, pays particular attention to elements of dress and personal adornment characteristic of Toucouleur/Wolof cultures. These details of local history illustrate a more nuanced artistic process at work than Ebong’s interpretation would suggest.

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14 Samba Balde, Savage Antelope. 1974. Tapestry, 194 × 100 cm. Collection of the Government of Senegal. Courtesy of the Ministry of Culture.

The use of blanket terms such as abstraction to interpret these forms immediately situates them within a European modernist hermeneutical framework and therefore gives little incentive for scholars and critics to further pursue an investigation of the works’ formal and iconographic elements. In fact, the overarching concept of abstraction, if left unqualified or unproblematized, diminishes the very hybrid and cross-cultural nature of these creations. For instance, the existence or recognition of ‘‘an endless play of abstract forms and patterns’’ could be the result of a complicated process of syncretization, rather than simply a formulaic, derivative practice.123 Ebong continues her definition by utilizing a historical time frame as a marker. The term ‘‘École de Dakar’’ refers to the first generation of Senegalese painters, who made their public debut at the exhibition ‘‘Tendances et confrontations,’’ organized by Iba N’Diaye for the first World Festival of Pan-African Arts, held in Dakar in 1966. . . . A wider definition of the ‘‘École de Dakar’’ would take into account certain artists of the same generation who were not included in the exhibition . . . as well as younger artists, born in the late 1940s and starting to exhibit in the 1970s, who were trained at the École Nationale des Beaux Arts, in many cases by members of the first generation. These younger painters . . .

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15 Amadou Dédé Ly, Kocc Barma. 1977. Tapestry, 236 × 179 cm. Collection of the Government of Senegal. Courtesy of the Ministry of Culture.

16 Alpha Wouallid Diallo, Débarquement de Blaise Diagne à St. Louis. Ca. 1970. Oil on canvas, 100 × 150 cm. Collection of the Government of Senegal. Courtesy of the Ministry of Culture.

have developed highly individual styles, yet in many respects have not departed much from the ‘‘semiabstract’’ generic style of painting associated with the Ecole de Dakar’s first generation.124 Such a wide definition allowed the critic of yesterday and today to throw the net of Negritude over as many fish as he or she desired. As a result, the work of individuals such as Amadou Sow, whose recent experiments with schematic imagery on colored Plexiglas, with no reference to motifs of masks or sculpted figures, are classified in the same grouping as works by Amadou Bâ, whose stark, earth-toned narratives of life among the Peul feature lean, elegant figures of humans and animals, and by Alpha Wouallid Diallo, who paints the horrors and heroics of anticolonial battles in a searing, realist style. Perhaps the most useful part of her definition, which comes toward the end of her analysis, is her acknowledgment that these artists ‘‘were linked by their cosmopolitanism, their participation in local and international art institutions, rather than by any consciously unified stylistic program or theoretical position.’’ She seems, eventually, willing to concede that ‘‘this ambiguous aesthetic convention has often allowed for highly individual formal Pan-Africanism in Paint and Textile

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solutions.’’ 125 In other words, if one gives greater attention to the breadth and diversity of artistic production during this period, then no single formalist analysis is possible. Senghor himself repeatedly noted that Negritude was more of a theme than a style. Perhaps that characterization works best in our understanding of an École de Dakar whose definition lies somewhere between the celebratory, nationalist rhetoric of the postindependence era, the accompanying interest and belief in the wealth of pan-African heritage, and the creation of a highly centralized, elitist art world that gave artists the opportunity, support, and reason to pursue their craft. Rather than miring ourselves in a debate about style and influences, we need to focus on what the criticism surrounding the École de Dakar can tell us about the consequences of Senghor’s new politics of representation. Did the aesthetic engendered by the functionings of this art world serve to delineate a viable artistic vocabulary, a coherent sense of postcolonial identity (be it national, ethnic, personal, or universal), a revised relationship between European and African cultures, and/or a new Africanité?

An Unmistakable Africanité Eager to categorize the arts emerging from Senegal, most of the commentators preceding Ebong, usually writing in response to traveling exhibitions, gladly adopted the term École de Dakar with little investigation of either its actual contours or its relationship to the complexities and subtleties of Negritude. Many of these writings displayed, in fact, what James Clifford has described as a ‘‘disquieting quality of modernism: its taste for appropriating or redeeming otherness, for constituting non-Western arts in its own image, for discovering universal, ahistorical ‘human’ capacities.’’ 126 Broadly speaking, the reviews took their cue from the recitations of the president himself, emphasizing such qualities as the rhythmical sense of design and composition, the closeness to nature—seen in the use of either bright, warm, ‘‘tropical’’ colors or earth tones—and the choice of pan-African themes. Some argued that the emphasis on pan-African rather than local motifs reflected artistic and/or cultural lacunae in Senegal, perhaps the result of adherence to Islam or of scarce environmental resources. In other words, because the Senegalese were not ‘‘art-producing peoples’’ 127 like their neighbors to the east and south, they had, by necessity, to borrow from other art traditions.128 This thesis assumed that practices such as embroidery, weaving, dying, and jewelry (filigree), and painting of niominka pirogues (fishing boats) and cars

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17 Bacary Dième, Couple. 1978. Tapestry, 292 × 200 cm. Collection of the Government of Senegal. Courtesy of the Ministry of Culture.

rapides (local buses) were not art forms, but only examples of material culture, nonaesthetic in value. Attempts to situate this École within a broader framework presented a predictable spectrum of views. Sometimes, modernism’s hegemony over the politics of representation and its claims to universality served as the measure for the works’ success. One reviewer noted disappointedly that ‘‘the contemporary approach stops very much short of our sixties—there is little Abstract Expressionism as we know it and nothing at all of color field painting and the rest.’’ 129 At other times, writers tried to discern and praise the existence of separate, recognizable African traits within an ‘‘adopted’’ European modernist paradigm, thereby acknowledging an inherent hybridity. The following explanations may serve as examples: Their colour scheme with predominant hues of ochre and brown and their abstract and decorative qualities illustrate how a foreign technique can be a support to African inspiration. . . . while their paintings do reflect such art movements as cubism, a strong expressionism and even surrealism, they above all—are unmistakably African.130 We are accustomed to a particularly derivative contemporary African style in the visual arts in which, ironically, ‘‘modernistic’’ works stimulated by exposure to the heirs of the Cubists seem to prevail. While these tapestries clearly deserve a place within the mainstream of modern art, an unimpressionable, individualistic, and stylistically African set of formal values or style diagnostics is now clearly apparent.131 Finally, there were those who sought to preserve the authentic and pure African character of the works, maintaining, ‘‘The work of most Senegalese artists is so unmistakenly African in style, form, composition, and color that it is difficult to point to influences from the West.’’ 132 All of these approaches share an obvious tension in reconciling readings of mimicry with evidence that the invented artistic language and notions of Africanité presented by many École de Dakar productions were based on European primitivist ideas of Africa. The charges of mimicry can be understood as part of long-standing modernist approaches to the primitive. Hal Foster has reminded us that ‘‘the primitive is a modern problem, a crisis in cultural identity, which the West moves to resolve: hence the modernist construction of ‘primitivism,’ the fetishistic recognition-and-disavowal of the primitive difference.’’ 133 As previously noted, in order to uphold this notion of difference, the primitive has been situated, spatially and temporally, apart from Europe. This paradigm envisions primitive cultures as bounded and 94

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closed entities, spaces within which pure and unchanging artistic traditions flourished. Endemic to the colonial predicament was the notion that Europe represented the center and the primitive its dialectical, peripheral Other. Within this paradigm, modernists alone could appropriate artistic forms (like raw materials) from the periphery without jeopardizing their monopoly on originality (the irony, of course, being that modernism was an inherently derivative and syncretic cultural system). Western gatekeepers thus controlled the axis of appropriation; any non-Western artist whose creations were believed to result from appropriations from Western sources was deemed a mimic with a colonized mind, one blindly producing derivative artworks. Highlighting the paradoxical nature of the Negritude project, Michael Lambert asked, ‘‘How do Negritude writers return to a land which existed only in the collective imagination of the West?’’ 134 One could also ask, why did so many École de Dakar artists choose to caricature their own Otherness? In the poetry of Negritude, this reclamation of an imaginary Africa meant the privileging of rural village life, local myths and heroes, and efforts to recapture the rhythms and lilt of the drumming and dancing cadences of tradition. For the visual arts, the traditional objects chosen to represent a pan-African heritage were those preferred by the European primitive art market and modern artists. The reclamation and rearticulation of these motifs ‘‘was not preceded by any profound effort to enter into [this] African system of values,’’ 135 and it resulted in an indiscriminate mixing and matching of disparate artistic traditions (in the same manner as modernist primitivism). Moreover, unlike modernist appropriations of non-Western sources, which led many European artists to think in new ways about perspective, space, and volume, the reclamation by École de Dakar artists of African motifs from within the primitivist aesthetic did not seem to necessarily involve an adoption of the new politics of pictorial space asserted by the cubists. Bernard Pataux guides us toward reconsidering the disturbing relationship between European primitivism and the École de Dakar, claiming, in an article published soon after the 1974 traveling exhibition Art sénégalais d’aujourd’hui (Senegalese Art Today) that the artists ‘‘are torn between European academism and a certain ‘primitivism,’ and they are not sure if this primitivism is authentic or whether they are inventing it to meet our expectations.’’ 136 This relationship must be seen as more than simply a question of borrowing formal strategies or motifs from European primitivism, however. It also constituted a deliberate engagement with a very complex field of ideas about the primitive. The works of these Senegalese artists inevitably bePan-Africanism in Paint and Textile

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came implicated in a political struggle only occasionally directly addressed in their choice of iconography. We can use Edward Said’s work on Orientalism to understand the breadth of ideas informing European projections of the primitive. Orientalism is a distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetic, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philological texts; it is an elaboration not only of a basic geographical distinction but also a whole series of ‘‘interests’’ which, by such means as scholarly discovery, philological reconstruction, psychological analysis, landscape and sociological description, it not only creates but also maintains; it is, rather than expresses, a certain will or intention to understand, in some cases, to control, manipulate, even to incorporate, what is a manifestly different world; it is above all, a discourse that is by no means in direct, corresponding relationship with political power in the raw, but rather is produced and exists in an uneven exchange with various kinds of power, shaped to a degree by the exchange with power intellectual, power cultural, power moral.137 Since a study by Robert Goldwater in 1938, the most significant scholarship on primitivism in modern arts resulted from the 1984 Museum of Modern Art (moma) exhibition ‘‘Primitivism’’ in Twentieth-Century Art: Affinity of the Tribal and the Modern. The exhibition’s curator, William Rubin, produced an overwhelming display of modernist and ‘‘tribal’’ artworks and an extensive two-volume catalogue about the history of modernist interests in primitive arts, with contributions by well-known scholars such as Jack Flam, Rosalind Krauss, and Kirk Varnedoe. The show, and the critical debate it fostered, proved to be a watershed event in the long history of Western–non-Western (Other) relations. In his extensive introduction, Rubin quickly asserted an apolitical, formalist definition of primitivism, insisting that it was a Eurocentric concept—‘‘an aspect of the history of modern art.’’ 138 In Rubin’s formulation, primitivism was ‘‘entirely affirmative,’’ rather than any pejorative commentary on non-Western peoples and their arts.139 The show’s premise was to illuminate the relationship between ‘‘tribal arts’’ and modernist creations, claiming that this link could be described as an affinity. Much of Rubin’s argument concerns itself with defining the nature of this affinity and differentiating it from notions of influence and inspiration. The influence of so-called primitive works on European modernism was vigorously denied to the extent that much of the essay on Picasso’s oeuvre focused on constructing a precise chronology of the whereabouts of particular sculptures and masks—in museums, flea markets, private col96

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lections, and studios—to ensure that no direct influence could be proven. Instead, affinity was attributed to a kind of coalescence of the great modernist’s creative genius—apparently independently working toward certain plastic solutions—and the encounter with tribal models, objects acting only ‘‘as witnesses’’ to these historical changes. Agency in this account, then, remains the prerogative of the modern artist, not of the ‘‘tribal’’ craftsperson whose works are appropriated. The political ramifications of such an argument go unmarked by Rubin, perhaps because, as James Clifford contended in his review of the exhibition, ‘‘to tell the history of modernism’s recognition of African ‘art’ . . . would raise ambiguous and disturbing questions about aesthetic appropriation of non-Western others, issues of race, gender, and power.’’ 140 Critiques of this exhibition may be found in abundance elsewhere.141 I would like to turn briefly to that offered by Hal Foster, whose readings will help expose the political underpinnings of primitivism. Foster insists that in Rubin’s show, ‘‘the imperialist precondition of primitivism was suppressed, and ‘primitivism,’ a metonym of imperialism, served as its disavowal.’’ 142 Rubin’s account is still typical of written histories of modern art, which celebrate only the genius of the European male masters who ‘‘discovered,’’ and therefore legitimized, Africa’s arts. Until the controversy surrounding the 1984 exhibition, the broader global historical events of the period in which primitivism flourished remained largely ignored. And despite the criticisms following the exhibition, many Western undergraduate art history programs and museum offerings continue to speak of Africa’s arts only as an adjunct to the story of modern art. Foster asserts that with the greatness of high modernism under attack in the postmodernist period (as well as what Said would call the conventional ‘‘distribution’’ and ‘‘elaboration’’ of differences), Rubin’s exhibition must be seen as an attempt to bolster a faltering modernist agenda and to secure moma’s position within the art world establishment. Rubin’s use of a neologism like affinity-ism characterizes a kind of rear-guard movement that desperately seeks to maintain the prominence, authority, and claims to universalism of the modernist grand narrative in the face of postcolonial assertions of a ‘‘new cultural politics of difference.’’ 143 As Foster states, ‘‘If evolutionism subordinated the primitive to western history, affinity-ism recoups it under the sign of western universality.’’ 144 In actuality, this thesis about the universality of creative expression is based on formal similarities that modernists, and their proponents, saw between their works and the West’s construction of an imagined primitive. During the modernist period, tribal artworks were decontextualized and Pan-Africanism in Paint and Textile

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commodified as a direct result of the age of colonial expansion and imperialist exploitation. Despite the possibility that artists from varying cultural backgrounds could and do find similar formal solutions to creative problems, it is primarily the recoding and repositioning of so-called tribal arts within a modernist, supposedly universal, history that accounts for Rubin’s narrative of affinity-ism. The assertion of transcultural similarities denies the historical hegemonic relationship between center and periphery.145 So if primitivism acted as a disguise, displacement, or even an excuse for colonialism,146 it follows that to understand the École de Dakar’s flirtations with modernist tropes of Africa, the dynamics of the colonial moment require our attention. In his look at colonial India, Ashis Nandy suggests that one must move beyond the conventional interpretations of colonialism as a simple division between oppressor and oppressed to treat it, instead, as a site of shared conflict, consciousness, and emotion, involving and affecting both Europeans and the colonized. He insists: ‘‘Agency is never the monopoly of one player, for both are locked in a dyadic relationship.’’ 147 His views are indicative of recent scholarship on the colonial and postcolonial condition, which emphasizes the contradictory nature of such hegemonic systems. These works argue that when European liberal discourses were instituted in the colonies through illiberal means, the discrepancies undermined the authority and identity of the colonizer and cleared a space for the colonized to strategically and subversively engage with these discourses.148 As Nandy puts it, ‘‘The perversity of colonialism is thus measured not just in terms of the extreme exploitation of the other, but also in the contortion and constrictions of the self that were necessary to enforce such a relationship.’’ 149 The imported metropolitan discourse thus became ambivalent, hybrid, and double-accented.150 We have already seen evidence of this process at work within the cultural politics of Senegal’s four communes in which originaire politicians challenged metropolitan definitions of citizenship and utilized French political discourse for local purposes. The cultural products of this period are now also often understood as hybrid, the results of encounters, co-options, and manipulations of the Other’s discursive, political, and aesthetic frameworks. To theorize processes of cultural mixing, appropriation, and contestation within the diaspora, cultural critic Kobena Mercer has utilized the model of language developed by Mikhail Bakhtin in his Dialogic Imagination, which emphasizes the manner in which linguistic codes can be shared, borrowed, and reconfigured in a never ending power game. The contest over tropes of traditional Africa and measures of authenticity in postcolonial arts and politics can be thought of in a similar manner. Thus in the colonial period 98

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in Senegal, one marked by French indecision about assimilationist or associative policies, the oppressed and the oppressor shared linguistic codes, operating within a common discursive universe. Bakhtin writes: The word in language is half someone else’s. It becomes ‘‘one’s own’’ only when . . . the speaker appropriates the word, adapting it to his own semantic and expressive intention. Prior to this moment of appropriation the word does not exist in a neutral or impersonal language . . . but rather it exists in other people’s mouths, serving other people’s intentions: it is from there that one must take the word and make it one’s own.151 Recognizing the potentially revolutionary consequences of what Mercer calls the ‘‘social multiaccentuality of the sign,’’ 152 one can see how those involved with Negritude, through the literary or visual arts, could intentionally play with Western notions of primitivism to give a new accent to signs of traditional Africa and, in the process, unmask the imperialist genealogy of modernist primitivism. What some may dismiss as a naive, unmediated quoting could also be interpreted as evidence of ‘‘a resistant operation, by which the other [in this case, the African artist] might appropriate forms of the modern capitalist west and fragment them with indigenous ones in a reflexive, critical montage of synthetic contradictions.’’ 153 One could argue that the École challenged the relations of representation on several fronts. First, contrary to the wishes of Rubin and other devout modernists, African art’s direct influence on the development of modernism was quite openly celebrated in Senghor’s speeches and by artists working beneath him (and many artists continue to make this point today). For example, in his inauguration speech in 1966, Senghor claimed for Africa a coauthorship of modernism: It took Rimbaud to identify with Negritude, Picasso to be stirred by a baoulé [Baulé, an ethnic group in Côte d’Ivoire] mask, and Apollinaire to sing of wooden fetishes before western European art could accept, after some two and a half thousand years, the relinquishing of physeos mimesis, the imitation of nature. To a large extent, negro art is to blame—a fortunate and, in any case, productive burden of guilt—if western artists now draw their inspiration, like Bazaine, from the ‘‘most obscure labour of instinct and sensitivity.’’ 154 Second, in his writings on an esthétique négro-africaine and elsewhere, the president struck at the heart of the modernist movement, co-opting perhaps the quintessential modernist, Pablo Picasso, to act as a model for École Pan-Africanism in Paint and Textile

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de Dakar artists. In a piece called ‘‘Picasso en Nigritie,’’ 155 Senghor pointed to the painter’s ability to combine a respect for his roots in Andalusia with opportunities to learn and borrow from a diverse array of sources. In so doing, Senghor spoke of this modern icon not simply as a master but as a fellow artist whose lessons ‘‘his’’ artists could heed. Throughout the process of building a new aesthetic, the president/patron freely declared the need to combine research into traditions with invention and adoption in order to create what may have been hybrid but, nonetheless, authentic art forms. We must be ourselves, cultivating our own distinctive values, like those found when we went back to the sources of Negro art: those values which, over and above the underlying unity of their humanity, because they were born of biological, geographical, and historical particulars, are the hallmark of our originality in thought, feeling, and action. I say we must be ourselves (borrowing if necessary, but not existing by proxy) by our own efforts—and for ourselves. Without this, we will be nothing more than poor replicas of others in the musée vivant.156 Similarly, in his comments at a 1975 colloquium on African art and universal civilization, Papa Ibra Tall candidly discussed the process of imagining a new aesthetic built, ironically, on European conceptions of Africa. I’m trying to say that, perhaps in a negative sense, we benefited from a very special situation. That is to say that when we started our research, we were already cut off from our past, and we didn’t find ourselves, for example, in the situation of Europe, where there were official notions of the museum aesthetic. Consequently, there was a certain traditional opposition they had to fight. Whereas we arrived practically as virgins because none of us really feels a mask. And with the West’s valuation, a self-serving valuation because it is the West that collected all that is valuable; without this importance given by the West to Negro art, we would not have given it such importance. Because we are detached from it. Colonial intervention meant that we were cut off from our past; I believe that we haven’t made masks and that we are incapable of feeling them. We can decide to refashion them. In any case, it would never be the same as those in the collections. I say therefore that we enjoy a situation that permits us to be revolutionaries, in fact, without tiring us.157 Tall’s willingness to come to terms with the modes of valuing primitive arts within the art-culture systems of the West makes it all the more clear that the 100

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processes of mimicry, appropriation, and resulting hybridities in his works were intentional and ironic in nature.158

The Ironies of Tigritude The kind of self-primitivizing that resulted from an application of Negritude’s philosophical ideas into visual and literary expression brought perhaps the most criticism among African intellectuals. When Wole Soyinka made the now famous attempt to dismiss the negritude movement by pointing out that a tiger does not talk tigritude, Senghor . . . made an adequate reply, namely that the tiger does not talk. Perhaps, on account of its breathtaking simplicity, the depth of meaning of that answer was lost on many people. The Negro speaks! And talking is a measure of his humanity.159 For Soyinka, the agency of the Negro, his ability and need to speak and to be heard, were not in question. However, the language in which he was forced, or allowed, to speak was. Early in the postindependence period, Soyinka launched a critique of Negritude’s methods, and his attitudes remain a common reading of the movement. In his writings, he acknowledged that while the African did not speak in the language of the colonizer, even the lexicon of the pidgin language spoken was determined by the colonizer’s linguistic codes. Soyinka’s concerns return us to Sartre’s famous reading of Negritude as a minor term of a dialectical progression. Focusing on what he believed to be a ‘‘procedural’’ problem for Negritude advocates in their attempt to revive, reengineer, and rearticulate a racial psyche and African system of values, Soyinka criticized their adherence to a Manichaean system of thought, pointing to their assumption of a negative role in a Hegelian dialectic, which positioned Negritude as the antithesis of the European thesis.160 While Senghor’s famous assertion that ‘‘Emotion is completely Negro as reason is Greek’’ and Aimé Césaire’s exaltations to those ‘‘who had invented nothing, built nothing, conquered nothing’’ may have initially seemed confrontational and even revolutionary, they were mistakenly conceived and expressed within the bosom of the European epistemological milieu. As such, they served to perpetuate, rather than undermine, Western regimes of power. In this argument then, Negritudinists and, by extension, the artists of the École de Dakar are seen as playing the primitive, selling their Otherness, participating in a dangerous and disturbing practice of minstrelsy. Anthony Appiah has pointed out in his criticism of ‘‘nativism’’ in literaPan-Africanism in Paint and Textile

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ture a similar failing with ‘‘the establishment of a ‘reverse discourse’: the terms of resistance are already given to us, and our contestation is entrapped within the Western cultural matrix we affect to dispute. The pose of repudiation actually presupposes the cultural institutions of the West and its ideologues.’’ 161 Following on from his identification of Negritude’s procedural failings, Soyinka noted that the revolutionary tactics of the poets and painters linked to the movement could then be easily co-opted back by Europeans like Sartre who, in so doing, delivered an ‘‘ideological stab in the back,’’ ‘‘a kind of poetic justice.’’ 162 He writes, ‘‘Negritude, having laid its cornerstone on a European intellectual tradition, however bravely it tried to reverse its concepts, was a foundling deserving to be drawn into, nay, even considered a case for benign adoption by European ideological interests.’’ 163 We should briefly turn back to Kobena Mercer’s reading of Bakhtin’s dialogic model for a similar recognition of the dangers inherent to what he calls ‘‘the war of naming problem,’’ which designates a language game with winners and losers, a cultural and political contest in which subjectivity and identity are at stake, [in which] we have to recognize that the struggle over the sign does not come to a full stop. There is no definitive ‘‘answer word’’ to the master discourses of racism and ethnocentrism, because our Other can also reappropriate what we have ourselves already appropriated.164 If one accepts Soyinka’s critiques of Negritude’s failings, seeing the philosophy as a ‘‘diversionary weapon in the eventual emergence of a national revolutionary struggle,’’ then one is inevitably led to ask what the alternatives might be.165 It becomes clear that in his dismissal of Negritude as an elitist, misplaced practice, Soyinka assumes a ‘‘real Africa’’ beyond the Senghorian discursive and aesthetic reach, with a population ‘‘which had never at any time had cause to question the existence of their—Negritude.’’ 166 His alternative seems to be, then, a populist return to the ‘‘traditional African view of man’’ and accompanying indigenous social systems.167 Needless to say, this stance could be equally problematic for the ‘‘traditional,’’ static, unanimist, and pure Africa that it assumes.168

Concluding Remarks The cultural productions of the École de Dakar witnessed and contributed to a special period in Senegal’s postindependence history, and in world history more generally, when hope for new freedoms and universal brother102

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hood animated the political awareness of many previously subjugated populations. Moreover, the revolutionary potential ascribed to art encouraged Senegalese artists, for the first time, to pursue their craft in the service of their new nation. In this context, perhaps one can read the works of the École de Dakar artists as efforts toward a ‘‘strategic essentialism,’’ a necessary invention of shared traditions and identity at the historical juncture of decolonization and self-determination.169 This reevaluation does not seek to deny the elitist or indeed self-primitivizing character of the project, which was closely determined by the ideals of the Enlightenment and modern European capitalist structures. Nor does it ignore, for that matter, the variable quality of the artworks and the artists associated with it. Furthermore, it acknowledges the stultifying effects that the institutionalization of Negritude had on the formation of a distinctive field of cultural production in Senegal. This perspective seeks, rather, to give greater agency and historical awareness to the artists involved, and more weight to the subversive characteristics of the hybrid cultural products they created. The École de Dakar gains importance in the study of arts in Senegal not so much because it enables one easily to group individuals by their participation in a particular aesthetic, as there are clearly many ideas of this aesthetic, but because it identifies a realm of officialdom and a rhetoric of identity and art which instilled a particularly strong image of Senegalese arts at home and abroad. It has since become, in the collective memory and consciousness of artists working in Senegal, a label that connotes a variety of things— government interference in the arts; images of the artist as worker, spoiled child, or ambassador; a hierarchy of the arts and a set relationship between them; and a dated idea of how to express one’s Africanness. This ‘‘invented tradition’’ continues today to serve as a means through which to define oneself in Senegalese art history. In reflecting on his generation’s attitude toward the earlier Negritude-inspired forms, one artist, whose work was at one time considered a part of the École de Dakar, spoke of a second generation . . . who are currently making a timid foray on the international level and who want to be critical regarding a certain image of Negritude, not as a pure and simple rejection, but rather as a recognition of it as a historical phenomenon, and adding something else to it because this generation asserts that the cultural identity of a people cannot be nourished only by tradition: it must be also oriented toward the future.170 It is to the works of this second, and also third, generation that we will now turn our attention. Interestingly, their challenges to the certitudes of NegriPan-Africanism in Paint and Textile

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tude and the related structures of the Senghorian art world would find them confronting many of the same issues of cultural particularism, notions of traditionality and authenticity, and engagements with European modernist ideas that had occupied their predecessors. However, while most would seek more subtle strategies in defining the relations between their artistic practices and shifting conceptions of identity, they would find that the interpretation of their works within a broader international art arena would remain largely colored by primitivist and Eurocentric concerns.

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3 Laboratories of Avant-Gardism

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he success of the Premier Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres and the 1974 exhibit Art sénégalais d’aujourd’hui established a dominant image of contemporary Senegalese artistic expression both abroad and at home. The label of the École de Dakar, however debatable it may have been on stylistic grounds, gained currency and acceptance among critics, officials, and, crucially, artists themselves.1 It was important as a label not because it provided an apt description of a shared African expression but rather because it identified a common structure of patronage, demarcated a special field of production, and served a particular form of cultural politics. It was during this period, in the waning days of the École de Dakar, in which a group of visual artists, civil servants, writers, musicians, thespians, and comedians began to meet regularly at the Café Terrasse. Here, in the shadow of the Théâtre Daniel Sorano, a showpiece of the Senghorian cultural machine, they debated issues of artistic freedom and practice.2 This new set of artists, for the most part, had been trained at the Institut National des Arts du Sénégal (inas) under the guidance of the first generation of Senegalese modern artists in the 1960s and a number of French professors.3 Although they were only marginally younger than their Senegalese teachers, they sought to move beyond the stylistic and ideological traits of these mentors. Questioning the viability of the institutionalized art world created at independence, they challenged the symbolic capital of the École de Dakar and the ideological tenets underlying its patronage. Like a number of other critics of the time, they rued not simply Senghor’s seemingly naive return

to a ‘‘Negritude of the sources’’ but also the Gallic flavor of its institutional form within the national art-culture system, calling for a reindigenization of aesthetic practices and discourse. This chapter and the next will focus on members of these second and third generations, whose careers and artistic productions have represented and determined the art history of their nation from the days of Senghor’s patronage to the present.4 Beginning with the first decade after independence, the rules of the art world changed, as shifts in both local and global circumstances impacted the efficacy of a singular nationalist-driven patronage. By the late 1970s, Senegal had experienced one-party rule for over a decade and, despite relatively few major civil disturbances and a democratic reputation in the international arena, national cohesion and the African socialist dream of development were far from being a reality. The autocracy of Senghorian rule manifested itself clearly in the relative stagnation of artistic practice among academytrained artists, whose celebrations of African essence produced a sour taste in the mouths of many younger artists. The attempts to reinvigorate artistic practice and to free it from its Senghorian straitjacket became most evident in the activities of two artistic groupings of the time—the Laboratoire AgitArt and the Village des Arts. The former played the part of a classic avantgarde; the latter served as a crucible for expanding the use of indigenous materials and for reinventing the relationship between the artist, the state, and the community.

The Laboratoire Agit-Art The debates held at the Café Terrasse led to the establishment, in 1974, of an improvisational artistic laboratory, known as the Laboratoire Agit-Art. Youssouf John—comedian, thespian, and teacher at the inas—founded the Laboratoire, but he soon emigrated to Martinique and passed the grouping on to multimedia artist Issa Ramangelissa Samb.5 The main goal of the workshop, as the name would suggest, was to shake up or agitate the existing institutional framework, to question the tenets of Negritude, and to encourage artists to adopt a new approach toward their work. Its agenda, then, was based on a series of critiques of Negritude and its institutionalization in Senegal which mirrored those of Wole Soyinka, Ousmane Sembene, Stanislaus Adotevi, and others in the literary world whom Bennetta Jules-Rosette has labeled the anti-Negritudinists.6 According to the Laboratoire, the institutionalization of the arts had resulted in a blockage of artistic creativity or, to use Soyinka’s phrase, the artists ‘‘had tamed themselves into laudators of creative truncation.’’ 7 Working 106

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under government patronage, they were divorced from their indigenous material, their environment, their domestic audience, and their cultural history, relying instead on ‘‘a stock of particularisms’’ in a ‘‘banal search for exoticism.’’ 8 In addition, the structure created for the art world was largely an imported one, organized according to European criteria. The classical architectural form chosen for the Musée Dynamique, the layout of the national art salons within its walls, and the European design of the Théâtre Daniel Sorano, built for the 1966 festival celebrations, were held up as prime examples of the neocolonialist coloring of cultural policy. Issa Samb lamented that the theater’s auditorium, with its blocks of seats and large stage, encouraged a strict division between audience and actors and made ‘‘the African audience sit with their hands in their laps like Europeans.’’ 9 This reliance on and/or preference for European institutions and criteria extended to the heart of the art world’s structure—in the teachings at the Institut National des Arts du Sénégal, where students were instructed in the use of oil paints, paintbrush, and easel, and the Manufacture Sénégalaise des Arts Décoratifs, where the weavers’ techniques, machinery, and materials were all of foreign origin. As such, within the Senghorian field of cultural production, artists became inextricably dependent on imported materials and could not see the qualities and possibilities of indigenous ones. Despite the emphasis placed on African imagery and subject matter in the Section de Recherches en Arts Plastiques Nègres, the techniques of European easel painting—in oil, acrylic, or gouache—in other words, beaux arts, became the symbols of ‘‘fine art’’ in Senegal. Presidential patronage also encouraged a hierarchy among the arts, giving more attention to theater, literature, film, easel painting, and tapestry than to sculpture, dance, glass painting, graphic arts, and music. As a result of these preferences, a series of fixed relationships between the different media emerged, most notably a natural partnership between literature and painting.10 For members of the Laboratoire Agit-Art, the definition of the modern African artist advocated by the Senghorian art world was antithetical to Senegalese social life and history. Explaining the Laboratoire’s objections, Samb insisted that ‘‘people had confused the solitary nature of creation with the need for solitude of the creator’’ and that ‘‘without collaboration and artistic exchange, the arts could not flourish.’’ 11 European definitions of art and the artist inevitably instilled a vision of the modern artist as an individualist—usually male—gifted with an ingenious perception of life and creative capabilities that enabled him to feel, experience, and comment on his environment in a manner apart from the ordinary citizen. In this atmosphere, artists became alienated from the surrounding community. The LaboraLaboratories of Avant-Gardism

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toire’s critique of the Senghorian artist figure paralleled that made by Frantz Fanon of the native bourgeoisie. In The Wretched of the Earth, Fanon devoted many pages to exposing the artificiality of the populist rhetoric used by the native intellectuals to venerate the Volk (people). Like Fanon, Laboratoire Agit-Art members urged the Senegalese artist, who based his works on his people’s culture, to recognize that he could not ‘‘go forward resolutely unless he first realizes the extent of his estrangement from them.’’ 12 Senghorian government support had wooed young practitioners with promises of money and fame, producing ‘‘bureaucrats rather than artists’’ who thought they had the ‘‘status of a national treasure.’’ 13 This attention left them relatively unconcerned about the lack of informed criticism given to their work, and the resulting absence of a critical eye stifled artistic growth and innovation. Many artists of the second generation suggest that the acceptance and growth of the role of artists as the chers enfants de l’état (beloved children of the state), and their adherence to a frequently stale aesthetic, resulted from the youth and inexperience of the first generation. The majority of the artists who debuted at the 1966 festival had received only a primary school education before attending the École des Arts and began exhibiting and receiving both funding and acclaim at the tender ages of fifteen and sixteen. Even eight years after the festival, at Art sénégalais d’aujourd’hui, the average age of artists was only twenty-six. Thus many of this generation were given little time to explore their capabilities before being trained by and then becoming emblematic of Senghor’s system. Painter Momar N’Doye, now a professor at the École Nationale des Beaux Arts and an active organizer in artists’ associations, explained the differences between generations: ‘‘Unlike the first generation of Senegalese artists, members of the new generation are intellectuals as well as plasticiens (practicing artists). They reflect on what they are doing and why and on how best to manage the resources, especially intellectual resources, available to Senegalese art. They are now creative with their minds as well as their hands.’’ 14 Laboratoire Agit-Art’s members strove to find a means through which to produce and interpret art outside the boundaries of government control (plate 5). Furthermore, members of this workshop took exception to what they labeled a société des caresses, or a culture of the beautiful, manufactured by the state monopoly on the production, promotion, and criticism of the visual arts. Kalidou Sy notes that ‘‘Senegalese painting is poetry, it is a beautiful clear moon, it is never injury, injustice, anguish, or sadness. In this respect, the artists thought that the only way to sell was to skillfully arrange colors and forms.’’ 15 In the newly independent nation, art was thus

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designed to aid an emergent nationalism and thereby relegated to a largely celebratory and decorative role. In contrast, the Laboratoire hoped to promote a new kind of art that could be provocative and critical, disturbing in imagery or political in content (figure 18). The only means through which its members could demystify the reigning ideology supporting an École de Dakar was through reconfiguring the social roles for art in society. Therefore, Laboratoire Agit-Art’s primary goal was to ‘‘deblock’’ creative activities in Senegal at a political, social, technical, and artistic level. It chose to focus on the medium of theater, arguing that as one of the most favored of the arts, it was also one most in need of their attention.16 Moreover, with its acceptance of improvisation, theater provided a working environment in which artists could address a variety of media without it requiring a synthesis of all the arts. Its openness to innovation also ensured that the structure of Laboratoire Agit-Art could remain fluid enough to avoid institutionalization, a fate which would surely have led to its definition and destruction as a politically subversive body.17 The Laboratoire claimed to operate under a traditional structure, with the guidance of a council or a group of initiés (initiates).18 Each workshop had a maître d’atelier (head of studio). When the maître was in control of a performance or studio, he ruled with the autorité morale (moral authority) conferred by the respect of his peers.19 The group put on one large annual production and held a series of rotating workshops throughout the year. As such, it was the first body to introduce the idea of artistic workshops into Senegal. The annual ‘‘performances’’ were held in the open air and were, again, based on what the group defined as traditional models, which involved, on one level or another, all parts of the community. Thus there was no recognized division between actor and audience, and the audience, surrounding environment, and objects all became part of the experience. This turn toward a different kind of traditionalism rarely produced formal solutions comparable to those of earlier École de Dakar artistic productions. Rather, in many works by participating artists, or in collaborative ‘‘stage sets’’ used in the Laboratoire’s performances, one could detect only schematic, subtle references to recognizable traditional forms. A written script for performances was replaced by a langage des gestes (language of gestures).20 Issa Samb referred to this arrangement as la technique du cercle (circle technique) and l’ensemble du corps (whole body), insisting that the objects and individuals within this ‘‘manifestation’’ had no existence except in relation to their environment. Moreover, he asserted that the process of creation was ultimately more important than the finished prod-

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18 Issa Samb, Assemblages for the Laboratoire Agit-Art. 1994. Mixed media. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

19 Issa Samb, Assemblages for the Laboratoire Agit-Art. 1994. Mixed media. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

uct (figure 19).21 This substitution of improvisation and gesture for written script directly confronted the former president’s views of Africa’s arts. To Senghor, ‘‘all art—weaving, sculpture, painting, music, dance—in Black Africa is speech or, more accurately, language; in other words, poetry. . . . the forms and colors, hues and shades, movements and even materials used by artists are as effective as language as long as they have rhythm.’’ 22 The position taken by the Laboratoire in relation to Senghor’s patronage suggests a resistance to foreign forms and ideas and a preference for traditional materials and modes of production. However, Samb and his collaborators did not object to the assimilation or borrowing of ideas, concepts, and images from abroad—as long as these borrowings would not become the primary criteria by which to judge the quality of Senegalese artworks. It would not be accurate, therefore, to characterize the group’s attempts to recapture a traditional structure for and experience of artistry as simply an example of reactionary rear-guardism. For, even as its members spoke in nativist tones, one finds them referring to the philosophical writings of Russian Marxist critic Georgi Plekhanov,23 the dramaturgy of French avant-garde playwright Antonin Artaud, and the aesthetic strategies of European modernists’ readymades and objets trouvés.24 Laboratories of Avant-Gardism

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Sometimes these references are oblique. For example, Samb suggests not a direct influence of Plekhanov’s writings on the group’s workings, but rather a kind of confluence of ideas about community-oriented arts. Drawing on Plekhanov’s essays in Art and Society (1974), in which the critic writes about the rift between artists and their society, the functionality of art, and the importance of play in everyday life, Samb, as director of the Laboratoire, is able to apply these arguments to the challenges facing Senegalese artists attempting to break from the Senghorian field of production. In its process of reclaiming and inventing traditions obscured or overlooked by Senghor’s nationalist, pan-Africanist visions, the Laboratoire produces cultural forms to suit its own reading of contemporary realities. At other times, the referencing processes are strikingly direct. Samb’s terms such as langage des gestes, technique du cercle, and l’ensemble du corps, and his reference to theater as the group’s expression totale (total expression),25 resemble those used by Artaud. As early as 1929, for example, Artaud advocated the use of a spectacle totale (all-encompassing spectacle), a method of communication and performance that would supplant the supremacy of the written text by emphasizing a new theatrical language based on gesture, lighting, surrounding environment, costumes, and music (figure 20).26 Ironically, the Artaudian dramaturgy, on which the Laboratoire based its radical critique of Senghor’s exoticized, colonialist visions of Africa was itself a result of Artaud’s primitivist readings of Southeast Asian and Central American performances. In his Theater of Cruelty (1932), Artaud called for the development of ‘‘another form of civilization,’’ taking his inspiration from the Balinese theater he attended in Paris, Cambodian theater in Marseilles, and observations he made of the customs of Tarahumara Indians during a visit to Mexico.27 The parallels between Laboratoire Agit-Art’s recycling of materials and European modernist discourses on the nature of fine art material and construction, exemplified in the production of ready-mades and in the use of found objects, are more difficult to pin down. The practice of reusing, accumulating, and layering diverse and often disparate materials is not new to either African or European aesthetic practices. Laboratoire Agit Art members’ use of recycling is therefore both their own articulation of modernist debates about distinctions between high and low and elite and popular inherent in the Senghorian field of production and an intentional play on an international market that reads their works through a modernist lens. Thus the works of the Laboratoire represent not a simple mimicry of European forms but discrete appropriations of avant-gardist ideologies and practices and critical engagements with both local and global art discourses. Susan Vogel, in her discussions of African ‘‘digestions’’ of foreign materi112

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Issa Samb’s Dakar courtyard. Spring 1994. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

als, uses the term Westernism to refer to the appropriation of a ‘‘discrete element such as a motif, a style, or a technique.’’ 28 The Westernism thus appropriated represents a ‘‘projection’’ that may reflect ‘‘African visions and fantasies of Western culture,’’ 29 similar to the manner in which Orientalism or primitivism represent European projections of Otherness. Likewise, Marshall Sahlins, in his work entitled How Natives Think, refers to the ‘‘indigenization’’ of foreign materials by native artisans to suit local purposes.30 Neither of these models, however, would fully explain the Laboratoire’s cultivation of avant-gardist paradigms. In fact, the hybridity underpinning the Laboratoire Agit-Art discourse prohibits an easy classification of its activities by critics in the Western culture industry. In her article on Senegalese art history for Africa Explores, Ima Ebong offers us another strategy for understanding the aesthetic of Laboratoire manifestations, comparing their structure and workings to those of anti-aesthetic performance arts in 1960s Europe and North America. Her interpretation begins from an easy comparison of like forms across disparate cultural contexts, noting the Westernisms that Laboratoire Agit-Art has apparently ‘‘indigenized.’’ However, Ebong’s interpretation avoids the temptation inherent in Vogel’s and Sahlins’s models to view elements of the artwork as essentially Western or African. While she applies terms like antiart, which have their origin in a European reference system, she readily acknowledges that these terms acquire a unique meaning within a Senegalese context. The key members of Laboratoire Agit-Art might be well versed in the theoretical arguments underlying European avant-gardism, but the conception of ‘‘art’’ they were trying to subvert was that advanced by the Senghorian field of production. Of course, as noted above, European models strongly informed that conception of art, so it comes as little surprise that Laboratoire Agit-Art’s objections resembled those of the European avantgarde. All of these interpretive models can only comment on the borrowing of foreign ideas by Laboratoire Agit-Art and the Senghorian system. They do not address the workshop’s attacks on Senghor’s imaginings of traditionality (which they claimed were rooted in European visions of Africa) or, for that matter, their alternative nativist revisionisms. Ironically, Senghor’s efforts to fuse African artistic traditions with techniques from Europe are mirrored by those of Laboratoire Agit-Art, whose members seek to organize their structure along invented traditional lines, while allowing the artist to use whatever materials, images, and concepts are available in the surrounding cosmopolitan environment. What one sees, then, in the workings of the Laboratoire Agit-Art is a new amalgam of foreign and local forms and ideas, 114

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a replacement of one synthesis of ideas with another.31 Moreover, in their manifestations, art assemblages, writings, and rhetoric, one discerns a deliberate construction of ideas of traditionality. Pierre Bourdieu points out that every avant-garde is a parody of the tradition it opposes and, as such, is also respectful of it, reiterating that which it attacks.32 Thus Laboratoire was unable to transcend the Senghorian field of cultural production, but rather engaged in what Antonio Gramsci would call a ‘‘war of maneuver’’ within it—or, to use Bourdieu’s terminology, a process of ‘‘position-taking.’’ 33 Anthony Appiah’s eloquent analysis of cultural nationalism in literature speaks to the same issues surrounding anticolonialist critiques that find themselves mired in the very framework they seek to subvert, writing, ‘‘the emperor has ordered the natives to exchange their robes for trousers: their act of defiance is to insist on tailoring them from home-spun material.’’ 34 Thus one sees the members of Laboratoire AgitArt continuing to work, at least at times, on canvas, and certainly engaging with the gallery world, international art gatherings, French curators, critics, and the like. Moreover, despite their concerns about the alienation of the Senghorian artist figure from society, the central players in this laboratory fail not only to challenge the centrality of the artist but frequently seem preoccupied with cultivating personal, highly idiosyncratic artistic personalities for which they have become known.

Manifestations of the Avant-Garde Laboratoire Agit-Art’s first manifestation focused on Senghor’s dramatic poem ‘‘Chaka,’’ from the volume of poems he produced in 1956 entitled Ethiopiques. This series clearly illustrates the important role that the imagery of Africa plays in the poetry of the former president.35 And, as one glances through the musings of the warrior-hero Chaka, a romantic and proud vision of the continent emerges.36 ‘‘Chaka’’ tells the story of the Zulu king who led the resistance against the English in his homeland. Senghor’s poem is inspired by a historical novel, originally written and published in Sesuto in 1926 by Thomas Mofolo, and translated first into English and later into French. Mofolo depicts Chaka as a violent, crazed individual driven by an unsatiated quest for power, a portrait considerably modified by Senghor.37 Dedicated to the Bantu martyrs of South Africa, Senghor’s ‘‘Chaka’’ takes the form of a chant, read against the background of funeral drums. As critics note, Senghor’s version of the story is ‘‘less concerned with the crimes which those who have power may have to commit, than with the sacrifices of love and of their real creativity which they may have to make.’’ 38 Senghor’s Laboratories of Avant-Gardism

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drama focuses solely on Chaka’s state of mind, eschewing the action of Mofolo’s narrative. Thus the poet’s version presents a tale of honor and glory, delivered in a strong anti-imperialist tone. It is ultimately a tragedy about a man forced by circumstance and through the ‘‘love of [my] black-skinned People’’ to become a politician/warrior and to kill Nolivé, the woman he loves, in order to incite the people to revolt against the European invaders. The tale, an exchange between Chaka and an accusatory and condescending ‘‘white voice,’’ unfolds as the warrior lies dying. The rhythm of the funeral drums is pierced intermittently by the chants of a chorus, in praise of Chaka, and by the voice of ‘‘le devin Issanoussi’’ (the wizard Issanoussi). The Laboratoire’s choice of ‘‘Chaka’’ is significant in several respects. First, it is a classic example of the poet’s idealization of the African continent and her history and, as such, a good target for anti-Negritude critics. When asked why he led his people to revolt against the ‘‘pink ears,’’ Chaka proclaims: My cavalry. I saw in a dream all the lands to the far corners of the horizon set under the ruler, the set-square, the compass Forests mowed down, hills leveled, valleys and rivers in chains. . . . I saw the people of the South like an anthill of silence At their work. Work is holy, but work is no longer gesture Drum and voice no longer make rhythm for the gestures of the seasons. Peoples of the South, in the shipyards, the ports and the mines and the mills At evening segregated in the kraals of misery. . . . I saw one morning, coming out of the mist of the dawn, a forest of woolly heads Arms drooping bellies hollow, immense eyes and lips calling to an impossible god. Could I stay deaf to such suffering, such contempt? 39 At times the words of Chaka seem to recite the tenets of Senghor’s philosophical writings, such as those that speak of the need for a universal brotherhood or civilisation de l’universel: ‘‘It is not hate to love one’s people. I say there is no peace under arms, no peace under oppression. No brotherhood without equality. I wanted all men to be brothers.’’ 40 It is interesting to note that Senghor did not choose simply any warrior, but an individual well known, almost mythic, in Europe as well as in Africa. He symbolizes the Africa idealized by Europeans—an Africa at once savage and regal—and forever lost in the wake of colonialism. 116

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Second, the poem is often considered to have autobiographical elements. Like Senghor himself, Chaka is considered a poet who must choose between love and poetry and the leadership and defense of his people as politician and warrior.41 In his effort to defend his people, he has to abandon his role as a poet. At one point he says, But I am not the poem, but I am not the drum I am not the rhythm. It holds me still; it carves all my body like a statue of Baule. No I am not the poem that springs from the sonorous matrix No I do not make the poem, I am the one who accompanies it I am not the mother but the father who holds it in his arms and caresses it and speaks tenderly to it.42 Chaka himself defines the role of the poet as ‘‘the one-who-accompanies, the knee at the side of the drum, the carved drumstick.’’ 43 This characterization suggests the new role Senghor saw for himself as spokesman and political leader of his people on the eve of independence. Just before he dies, Chaka regains his poethood as the chorus declares, ‘‘Let the politician die and the Poet live!’’ Thus the poet, who died to give birth to the politician, is reborn as the politician dies. While one might easily see only tension between the two roles of Chaka and, by extension, Senghor the poet/politician, these roles might also be reconciled in the sense that both the poet and the politician are not the creators but the voices of their people.44 What better way to attack the mixing of politics and artistry than to focus on a work that so clearly reflects the dilemma of its producer as poet, politician, and patron of the arts. In its attempt to deconstruct Senghor’s tragic tale, the Laboratoire interpreted it as a comedy. Through a complete inversion of the original mood, Laboratoire Agit-Art sought to free the medium from its political and ideological chains. Like those of many of the original manifestations, the records containing descriptions of this event have now been lost or destroyed.45 This first manifestation took place at the Centre Blaise Senghor, one of the cultural centers created by the government to house art exhibitions, conferences, and performances. Here, the group could criticize the status quo from within an institution of the status quo. The choice of venue underscores the complex relationship between Laboratoire Agit-Art and officialdom, a relationship riddled with contradictions. For example, although the group was critical of the government’s meddling in the arts, it nonetheless benefited from the opportunities the latter offered. And while its members were troubled by what they saw as a narrow ideological program, they nonetheless Laboratories of Avant-Gardism

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21 Issa Samb, Untitled. 1990s. Ink on paper. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

received permission to perform this manifestation in a government space. In addition, a number of Laboratoire Agit-Art’s members were, in fact, civil servants within the very government they criticized. These individuals admired Senghor’s dedicated attention to the arts, but found his original projects outdated. This overlapping of allegiances provides just one example of the multilayered nature of artistic production in Senegal. In the early years of its existence, the Laboratoire produced several more workshops and manifestations based on Senghor’s writings and then turned its attention to those of fellow Negritude propagator, writer, and politician Aimé Césaire, a deputé (representative) from Martinique to the French Assembly from 1945 until the 1970s and one of the original contributors to the Parisian journal L’Étudiant Noir (figure 21). The Laboratoire reinterpreted Césaire’s La tragédie du Roi Christophe, a play that chronicles the rise and fall of a king in nineteenth-century Haiti. Césaire uses the turbulent history of Haiti to warn of the difficulties of selfrule and decolonization which many African countries were just beginning to face. Thus the play is both historical and topical, containing a strong moralistic strain. Published first in 1963, it was performed widely in Europe, making its debut at the Festival de Salzbourg in July 1964 and continuing on to Venice, Brussels, Berlin, and Caen. It made its African debut as a showpiece of the 1966 festival in Dakar’s Théâtre Daniel Sorano. In reinterpreting 118

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Issa Samb’s Dakar courtyard. Spring 1994. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

Césaire’s work, the Laboratoire began with the premise that the poet did not know how to write drama. This approach undermined the very purpose of Césaire’s choice of drama over poetry for this story. Although Césaire had written a number of political essays and poems, in this instance he had decided to voice his opinions in dramatic form because he wanted to reach a larger audience with his message. This concern was especially geared toward a less literate African audience. Despite the destruction of many of its materials in the early 1980s, the Laboratoire has remained active through the years, and boasted numbers of close to eighty members representing a large cross-section of Senegalese society.46 In 1989, the group chose the life and work of Pierre Lods, who had died earlier that year, as the subject for its annual performance. The attention afforded Lods underscores the extent to which he played an active role in both official and unofficial circles in Senegal. His personal workshop, held at his home and frequented by large numbers of Senegalese artists, promoted the kind of artistic freedom not to be found at the Institut National des Arts du Sénégal. Lods was sympathetic to all artistic initiatives that put the welfare and the voice of the artist before that of the establishment. Thus, after the formation of Laboratoire Agit-Art, he became a discreet follower of its workings and steered his best students in the Laboratoire’s direction. Laboratories of Avant-Gardism

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The very nature of the Laboratoire, with its emphasis on improvisation, process, and lived experience, makes it difficult to describe it accurately (figure 22). Its workings are best understood by those able to participate in one of its activities. As Issa Samb proudly states, in this way the Laboratoire remains ‘‘unseizable.’’ 47 The Laboratoire’s repertoire certainly borrowed from the happenings, performance work, and site-specific installation work that were popular in postmodern art circles in the West. But its unseizability also was based on a desire to expand political and cultural freedoms in Senegal during the Senghorian era.

The Oeuvre of Issa Samb Often referred to as the doyen or vieux (old man) of the Senegalese art scene, Issa Samb is a sculptor, painter, actor, philosopher, performance artist, writer, and critic. For many years, he has hosted the Laboratoire’s performances in a courtyard in downtown Dakar. This courtyard acts as gallery, stage, conference site, and living room and backyard to families living around it.48 In this operational space, Samb creates and displays an enormous variety of artworks. His large oil and acrylic paintings hang against dirty courtyard walls, collecting the fine red dust of Dakar’s breezes and fading in the intense sunlight and rains (figure 23). These largely figurative images, grouped in layered crowd scenes, threaten to burst beyond the confines of the canvas. They often address his concerns with the plight of refugees flooding daily into Dakar as a result of drought and lack of opportunities in the interior and of mass displacements caused by continuing famine and armed conflicts in other parts of the continent. In contrast to the works of many of his contemporaries, Samb’s make frequent references to political figures and social issues of his day. For example, in a painting just inside the gates of Samb’s courtyard-atelier-gallery, one confronts the eyes of President Abdou Diouf in a sliver of a sliced black-andwhite photograph. They stare directly at the viewer over a seething throng of figures painted in strong tones of blue, yellow, and red, which seem to bleed toward the bottom of the composition (figure 24). Samb makes regular use of the Senegalese flag, questioning the overbearing, complicated, often contradictory, relationship between the state and artistic expression in his nation’s history.49 In keeping with his readings in Marxist aesthetics, many of his sculptural assemblages take the paragons of revolutionary politics—such as Che Guevara, Amil Cabral, and Sekou Touré—as their subject matter. These objects, scattered throughout the courtyard, suggest the possibilities of harnessing the energy of visual arts in the name of proletarian struggle. 120

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Samb’s assemblages are often partially buried by piles of fallen leaves or left, half-worked, in disarray throughout the space. The ephemeral materials used for their construction, and their treatment within the Laboratoire, with its connotations of experimentation and process, question accepted notions of fine arts as durable, immortal objects separate from life. The Laboratoire acts as an open space, an interactive gallery of sorts, making works available to the surrounding community.50 Many of these works not only comment on the restrictive nature of the École de Dakar practice but also constitute leftover ‘‘props’’ from Laboratoire performances and workshops, possibly awaiting recycling. In his search to expand the creativity of Senegalese artists, Samb uses materials other than canvas and oil paints, experimenting with chalk drawings, old car tarpaulins, and tar-and–candle wax compositions on jute rice sacks. Samb constructs whole environments from battered corrugated iron sheets, which he systematically pierces to create a stippled texture. This manipulation of a material, used for cheap and shoddy construction and associated, in mass media images, with slum living, enables Samb to reinsert human narratives into a trope of the third world environment (figure 25). His use of objets trouvés from the streets of the surrounding city has helped him create an aesthetic that speaks directly to the experiences of artists and audience living in Dakar. In addition to déchets (trash), he and other members of Laboratoire Agit-Art work with materials such as chiffon, bottles and caps, cans, and discarded metal parts, found readily available in the large city markets and streets. In recent years, many scholars have turned their attention to the commodification of objects and the systems of exchange and definition surrounding their production, use, and reuse. Work in economic anthropology and considerations of transnationalism by scholars such as Nicholas Thomas, Arjun Appadurai, and Igor Kopytoff has envisioned objects ‘‘entangled’’ in highly complex webs of signification and networks of exchange. Africanists, notably Allen Roberts, Corinne Kratz, and the late Philip Ravenhill, have examined the cultural significance of artworks made from recycled, industrialized, or commercial materials, seeing them as ironic comments on the effects of the capitalist system, the asymmetries in the global economy, and the resulting politics and poetics of poverty in third world nations. One can utilize the models they have proposed in considering the ‘‘biographies’’ or ‘‘careers’’ of objects,51 as they pass through and participate in informal economies, to understand the phenomenon of recuperation (récupération) within the Senegalese art world. Poverty and lack of materials are just two of the many reasons why the use Laboratories of Avant-Gardism

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23 Issa Samb, Untitled. 1994. Acrylic on canvas, 3 × 4 feet. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

24 Issa Samb, Untitled, detail. 1993. Acrylic on panel, 3 × 4 feet. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

of found objects and the practices of collage and assemblage are currently so popular in Senegal. Imported canvas, oils, and acrylics are both expensive and in high demand. At the École Nationale des Beaux Arts, for example, students are encouraged to utilize materials they find on the surrounding streets, in part as a lesson in the properties of materials, in part as one in economy. But for many artists, not just those engaged in the Laboratoire’s direct assaults on the elitism of Senghorian aesthetics, récupération also offers a means of better engaging with the contemporary realities of postcolonial Africa which, as painter Fodé Camara has said, are ‘‘above all [about] amalgamation and recycling.’’ 52 Faced with questions about authenticity, from both home and abroad, a number of artists are taking another look at their surrounding environment and recognizing the legitimacy of materials found in their everyday life.53 In a sense, their récupération of imported and local, industrialized and natural materials constitutes a latter-day interpretation of Senghor’s esthétique négro-africaine—a true mixing of Africa and the West. However, this mélange takes the hybridization process further than Senghor imagined, as it also shatters the high-to-low art continuum. The growing popularity of recycling has brought with it new aesthetic discourses and, paradoxically, has opened up new spaces within the international art market. A politics of récupération involves a ‘‘piecing-together-ofleftovers,’’ or what francophone African filmmakers have called a process of Laboratories of Avant-Gardism

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25 Issa Samb, Untitled. 1994. Corrugated iron, variable sizes. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

mégotage (literally, the reuse of cigarette butts),54 necessary in a production arena marked by shortages and European control of access to a broader market. Critics scrambling for a means through which to categorize and market new visual arts have begun to speak of an école de récupération (school of recuperation). In the styles and different looks, these signatures reflect a new Dakarois movement. These artists have changed the role; they no longer work in the Villages producing sacred and ancestral art, but in the city for a mixed society. The found objects used give value to the plastic richness of urban waste. . . . This perception of African creation, very noticeable, is witness to the innovative spirit and vitality which reigns in Senegal.55 The obvious parallels with dadaist and surrealist uses of found objects, pop-art commentaries on the intersection of consumer culture and fine art, and, indeed, the appeal to postmodernist fascinations with pastiche, combine in the Western marketplace with paternalistic concerns for the poverty of African practitioners, supposedly visually evident in a récupération aesthetic. As Allen Roberts notes, this market continues to be fascinated with forms of ‘‘ethnic chic’’ artistry.56 Such an attitude has helped to forge a new exotics of indigence, presenting these pieces as miraculous accomplishments in an otherwise dismal African world. The enthusiasm for this new trend somewhat obscures the fact that assemblage and the use of objets trouvés are neither new nor distinctly African inventions. It also ignores, of course, a more complex set of artistic considerations and local debates that may inform these strategies of recycling.

El Hadji Moussa Babacar Sy: A Modern Griot? One of Issa Samb’s earliest and most eager collaborators in Laboratoire AgitArt was a young painter, El Hadji Moussa Babacar Sy (known as El Sy). El Sy attended the Institut National des Arts du Sénégal from 1973 to 1977, where he was trained as a muralist in the department of fine arts,57 which, by this time, had passed into the hands of French teachers, or coopérants.58 While at the Institut, he frequented Pierre Lods’s home atelier. Although Lods was still teaching at the Institut, at this stage, his greatest efforts were devoted to his personal atelier. Lods’s respect for artistic freedom and intuitive creation provided Sy with the basis for moving beyond both the academicism of his European tutors and the tenets of the École de Dakar. Although he would spend time with Lods, Sy insists that he was not one of Lods’s students, but

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one of his admirers and friends. Sy arrived at the Institut after attending the University of Dakar for a first general degree. Creating compositions that are ‘‘huge waves of colour,’’ 59 Sy as an artist experiments with a diverse array of materials. He has, throughout his career, been concerned with freeing the artwork, the artist, and the discourse around the arts from conventions imposed by the patronage of Senghor and the legacy of the École de Dakar. Sy joined the Laboratoire Agit-Art in the late 1970s (although he had been aware of their activities several years before) and has served as its artistic director. As he declared at an exhibit he shared with Senegalese sculptor Guibril André Diop at the French cultural center in Dakar in 1979, I have chosen, in effect, to break decisively with the established tradition which consists of writing according to the pictorial guidelines that became commonplace in the aftermath of the 1966 Festival of Negro Arts. I deliberately mark this rupture with an aging generation in my desire for honesty and for sincerity with respect to my works. The process and the materials used converge with the spirit of creativity in trying as much as possible to liberate painting from the stylistic, academic yoke that assails it.60 In protest to what he perceived as government interference in the arts and a codified aesthetic, El Sy began painting only with his feet and continued this practice for ten years until the state purchased one of the works (figure 26). He chose the foot as an artistic tool for several reasons. He began to reflect on the work of shoeshine boys in Dakar, whose determination and ambition to walk long hours and distances in search of customers found both his admiration and pity.61 They relied on the feet, both those wearing the shoes they polished and their own, to earn a living. Sy’s ambiguous feeling toward their plight prompted him to reexamine the role his feet could play in his own livelihood. To him, the foot seemed both universal and personal. Its print could act as his signature. He would spread the canvas on the floor and walk repeatedly on it, producing thick, agitated patterns and leaving traces of the process as he moved off the canvas, allowing the viewer to feel the ‘‘dance of creation’’ in the process of painting (figure 27).62 As a member of Laboratoire Agit-Art, Sy sought ways through which to expand the relations between different disciplines. Senghor promoted a marriage between poetry and the visual arts, but rarely a relationship between the body and paintings or between dance and the gestural strokes of the paintbrush. Sy thus became fascinated by the possibility of repositioning his body within his visual art practices. He found, 126

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26 El Hadji Moussa Babacar Sy, foot painting. 1977. Acrylic on paper. Photo courtesy of artist.

in the foot paintings, a perfect means by which to ‘‘kick’’ the invented traditions of the École de Dakar. The European preoccupations, adopted by the École de Dakar, which emphasized the identification of the ‘‘artist’s hand’’ and placed importance on the necessary harmony between hand and eye, could all be called into question by using his feet. In addition, the process of walking atop his work subverted the supremacy of the imported genre of easel painting. During his foot-painting period, Sy often added fake paper money to his canvases in order to underscore the relationship between the foot and its moneymaking role, adding to the agitated texture of these works (figure 28). Sy’s first gallery successes in the United States came during this time. His exhibitions of foot paintings in New York, Chicago, and Boston provided a strong contrast to the government-sponsored images touring in Art sénéLaboratories of Avant-Gardism

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27 El Hadji Moussa Babacar Sy, foot painting. 1970s. Acrylic on canvas, Photo courtesy of artist.

galais d’aujourd’hui to Washington, D.C., Toronto, New Orleans, and other cities throughout North America at the time.63 During this period, Sy supported himself by taking public commissions for murals, either in government structures such as Yoff airport or in private restaurants, hotels, and clubs. When discussing his work, Sy clearly wishes to separate his creations for government commissions from those produced by École de Dakar artists. In contrast to École de Dakar artists, he claims, he has control over the content and style of his commissions.64 El Sy’s relationship to official structures is important to note because, as one of the most outspoken critics of Senegalese government cultural policies, he nonetheless has worked with government commissions when it has suited his needs. His choices resemble those of many artists who situated themselves outside the École de Dakar and official circles but who, out of necessity, also worked in ‘‘official’’ capacities. Some artists claim that during the period of Senghor’s patronage, an enormous pressure existed to conform to the tenets of the École de Dakar. If one did not, they say, one was alienated and not eligible for government stipends.65 Despite this situation, varying degrees of compliance emerged; each individual found his or her own way to work with the system.66 After years of exhibiting his foot paintings in Senegal, at government and nongovernment venues, Sy abruptly stopped this period of production when 128

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28 El Hadji Moussa Babacar Sy, foot painting. 1981. Acrylic on canvas. Photo courtesy of artist.

the Ministry of Culture finally decided to purchase one of his works for the national collection. By the mid-1980s, Sy began to paint images on rough jute rice sacks (plate 6). He bought the old sacks and then opened and sewed them together with coarse fiber string to produce a large surface for his compositions. He then prepped the material, by wetting it with water, before applying his acrylics. In addition to the acrylics, he painted many of these works with black tar and candle wax, an influence from Issa Samb (figure 29). Sy was attracted to the roughness of the jute material whose porous texture retained his paints well. The dull gray-brown color of the sacks strikingly illuminate the brightness of his colors, and the vibrancy of his brushstrokes becomes accentuated by the regularized grid of the sacks’ weave. Furthermore, Sy sought a material ubiquitous in his society—an essential, everyday item in the Senegalese household. Thus the sack’s previous life, as a retainer of nourishment and a supplier of food, becomes important in the artist’s vision of his works. The ephemeral nature of the material also calls to mind, in the eyes of domestic and foreign viewers alike, a whole series of preexisting indigenous arts such as straw basketry, woodwork, and dyed and woven cloths typical of the nomadic peoples (Peul, Toucouleur, Wolof, and Bambara) who now make up the populace of the Senegalese nation (figure 30). In these rice sacks Sy found another surface on which to create monumenLaboratories of Avant-Gardism

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29 El Hadji Moussa Babacar Sy at work on his jute sack works. May 1994. Photo Elizabeth Harney.

30 El Hadji Moussa Babacar Sy, Untitled. 1993. Acrylic and tar on jute sacking. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

tal wall hangings commensurate with those emerging from the Thiès woolen tapestry workshops. As emblems of the elitism and excess of the École de Dakar, the tapestries made for a perfect target for Sy’s experimentations. He contrasted the expense and durability of the Thiès works with the minimal cost of sack materials and the ephemeral nature of the jute. To emphasize this point, Sy even sold his compositions on jute for the price of a sack of rice. While the technology of Thiès did not allow for the production of subtle variations of color and depth, Sy’s rice sack compositions presented robust, painterly forms, strong contours and contrasts, and strokes that sweep freely across the composition. Their size, theatricality, and stylized, curvaceous forms give these works the feel of stage sets fit to hang on gallery walls or to partake in the Laboratoire’s performances (figure 31).67 As with his foot paintings, Sy preferred to lay these compositions on the floor, rather than use an easel, during the painting process. In 1993–94, Sy began to apply acrylic paints to fiberglass kite material. This material, whose texture fell somewhere between that of tarpaulin and nylon, was imported to Dakar and thus expensive and difficult to find. Sy first began experimenting with this material as part of a video project for his friend, singer Youssou N’Dour. One can see his first complete kite compositions, which he referred to as ‘‘skites,’’ a word amalgamation of kite and sky, Laboratories of Avant-Gardism

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31 El Hadji Moussa Babacar Sy, Untitled. 1993. Acrylic and tar on jute sacking. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

32 El Hadji Moussa Babacar Sy, Skite. 1993. Acrylic on kite material. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

in N’Dour’s music video for the song ‘‘Chimes of Freedom.’’ These skites expanded the audience for his works, away from gallery walls to the sky open and accessible to all. He could fly his compositions, hang them, taut between poles, on a gallery wall, or hang them leaving the ends loose to flutter in the Dakar breeze like all the surrounding laundry lines making up part of his visual landscape (figure 32). Sy’s kite paintings intentionally drew links to the luminosity of sous verre forms, an artistry crucial to Senegalese religious life and also one serving as Laboratories of Avant-Gardism

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a medium for elite portraiture in the early part of the twentieth century.68 Although the methods and materials used in Sy’s kite compositions differed quite markedly from sous verre practices (for instance, El Sy did not paint in reverse on the back of his material or paint the details first), the two artistic pursuits nonetheless have visual affinities. Sy often hung his skites in windows, the lighting from behind suggesting a likeness to the glass compositions (figure 33). In his work with the Laboratoire Agit-Art, El Sy has continued to explore the relationships between different media and between the body and the artwork. In a painting workshop he organized in 1993, Sy combined his painting practice with theatrical action and gesture, mediating between painted image, actor, and performance. But rather than begin with the human movement and create a painting from it, he chose instead to create a series of canvases from which the actors could take their cues. The participating actors wore masks of papier-mâché, the design of which echoed the brushstrokes of Sy’s canvas. The mask’s material was dramatically stretched out to one side. The actors, their bodies wrapped in strips of cloth, giving them the look of mummies, made movements meant to extend the sweeping movements seen on the canvases. No words were spoken during the performance.69 As Sy acknowledges, this performance clearly referenced a kind of Artaudian theater, not simply by privileging gesture over language but also by searching for a kind of interart/intermedia dialogue through which to achieve a spectacle totale. Perhaps one of the qualities that distinguish the oeuvre of El Sy from that of his peers is the extent to which he deliberately weaves his personal demeanor and body into his artistic creations. The resulting artwork is endowed with a personality of its own. A critic familiar with the man and his work explains: In Dakar, a city rich with strong artistic personalities, El Sy achieves invisibility by disguising his appearance from day to day, never the same person, never the same expression or style. This to and fro from his person to his painting is what gives the question of stylisation in his art such mediatic and dramatised power. El Sy, a person of intense moods, is like the recurring, yet unpredictable patterns created by currents of water or air. He moves closer only to react against what he touches and throw a new set of perceptual conditions into play.70 In describing his own practice, Sy suggests that ‘‘when I am in my painting, I’m no longer aware of what I’m doing. I am not at all afraid to make changes, to destroy the image, because the painting possesses a life of its 134

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33 El Hadji Moussa Babacar Sy, Skite. 1994. Acrylic on kite material. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

own. What I want is to express my feelings rather than illustrate them. It is only after a period of reflection, so to speak, that I see where I have come to. I could just as well end up with a subject as with a problem.’’ 71 On closer examination, this explanation reveals much more than simply the artist’s working methods. It exemplifies Sy’s imaginings of his artistic persona, ones heavily entwined with myths of the genius masochistic figure.72 These words, printed in an exhibition supplement for a show in Dakar, directly quote those recorded by Jackson Pollock in an interview in 1947.73 Sy’s rejection of easel painting, the grandness, mural-like scale of his works, and the freedom he associates with artistic practice provide further comparisons with the practices of Pollock and place into sharp relief the manner in which Senegal’s artists engage with modernism’s myths and histories.74

Laboratoire Agit-Art on the Road On 25 September 1995, the Laboratoire Agit-Art was seen for the first time outside of Senegal at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, in the opening of the exhibition Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa, which formed part of the africa’95 season in Britain. Its performance, called s.o.s. Culture, took place in the section of the exhibition devoted to curator and artist El Sy’s personal reflections on Senegalese art history. The premise of s.o.s. Culture was that African cultures could provide a panacea for the world’s problems and a model for more humane interaction between individuals.75 Sy described his presentation as a ‘‘mise-en-éspace in the gallery in the form of an opera of dramatic and visual objects.’’ 76 He continued, ‘‘The area devoted to the Senegalese exhibition is made up of objects placed, suspended and hung, by authors Issa Samb and El Hadji Sy from the Laboratoire and the poet from Gorée, Souleymane Keita. The curator and author has chosen the works of art as illustrative objects, theatricalized objects, objects used to play, objectactors.’’ 77 The operational space of the Laboratoire had been transferred to a London gallery. Issa Samb’s corrugated iron sheets formed a wall, pierced by ghostlike figures, to block entrance into the Laboratoire through all but one doorway covered by floor-length strips of colored canvas (figure 34). Entry into the site immediately entailed interaction with the materials. The walls inside were adorned with Souleymane Keita’s large, circular canvases that told stories of the seas around the island of Gorée, on which he lives and works. Keita’s early works had been associated with the École de Dakar, and yet at the Whitechapel his newest compositions were hung as if engaged in 136

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34 Issa Samb, Untitled. 1995. Installation by the Laboratoire Agit-Art. London, Whitechapel Gallery. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

a dialogue with the productions of the Laboratoire. El Sy’s painted rice sack compositions, hanging in curled shapes, shared the remaining wall space with Keita’s canvases. The performance itself, featuring only Sy and Samb, had three stages.78 The first emphasized movement and sound, focusing the audience’s attention on Sy’s engagement with the object-actors. Sy descended a staircase to a large platform occupied by cloth dummies, metal objects, and textiles, brandishing a large wooden stick and intermittently letting out loud cries. Samb entered with a large basket atop his head, containing more object-actors, and proceeded to don a pair of red, plastic-framed glasses with paper lenses in a spiral pattern to survey his surroundings. The second phase began as Sy tossed his stick aside and took his position on a roundel on the floor. This roundel featured a blown-up satellite image of the world with the African continent at its center. Benedict Anderson’s writings on the importance of maps to colonialist visions of empire can help us understand the political implications of Sy’s act of recentering Africa here. As a vehicle that ‘‘profoundly shaped the way in which the colonial state imagined its dominion—the nature of human beings it ruled, the geography of its domain, and the legitimacy of its ancestry,’’ 79 the map naturally became ‘‘a powerful emblem for the anticolonial nationalisms’’ 80 seeking to redraw cultural hegemonies. The Mercatorian projection, which placed Europe at its center, coupled with the practice of coloring-in held or ‘‘penetrated’’ territories, resulted in the historical paradigm of ‘‘map-as-logo.’’ Within this Laboratories of Avant-Gardism

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model, colored land masses could become detached, floating signifiers of empire, ‘‘instantly recognizable, everywhere visible,’’ 81 and the politics of race, geography, sexuality, and empire could be reproduced again and again for metropolitan consumption. Sy’s plays on the politically drawn spaces of geography, therefore, have strategic as well as visual resonance. The circular picture also mirrored the shape of Keita’s works. While Keita’s images focused on life in the waters around one of the most significant and tragic sites of the African past, the slave fort at Gorée, the satellite photo presented a future role for Africa, now recentered in the world arena and ready to offer solutions. Taking his cues from headlines in Libération, the French daily newspaper, Samb began to lament, in English, French, and Wolof, the destruction and deaths in Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, and the Middle East. He then embarked on the slow process of mummifying Sy in gauze while the latter stood atop the satellite image. Once Sy was completely covered, his body served as a screen onto which slide reproductions of Senegalese artworks were projected. For those in the audience familiar with the history of Senegalese postindependence arts, this display signaled the death of the École de Dakar and the systems that had given rise to it. The process addressed the mummification of the African artist by Senghor’s cultural agenda and by European scholars’ search for authentic, traditional arts and society. In other words, it spoke of the ‘‘enforced hibernation of Africa’’ during the twentieth century.82 And for Sy and Samb, the act of mummifying commemorated the recent death of the founder of the Laboratoire Agit-Art, Youssouf John. In the third stage of the performance, as Sy was slowly unwrapped, Samb suggested Africa’s future role in world affairs. Sy emerged from the process wide-eyed and sweating. The reception and interpretation of the Laboratoire’s performance at the Whitechapel gallery brought into question its ability to address an international audience and to transfer its workings to a foreign setting. The organizing curator of the exhibition, Clementine Deliss, felt sure that this translocation would mark an important stage in the life of the Laboratoire. She wrote: While the original Laboratoire carries years of patina and traces of encounters, the curatorial transformation of its precepts in the gallery is an appropriate transference in today’s setting. You shift site, and in dislocating the stage you tighten its propositions and question the contraflow between the local cultural context with its own audiences, and the new engagement that may be possible with visitors to the gallery.83

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35 The Laboratoire Agit-Art. 1995. From Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa. London, Whitechapel Gallery. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

However, the Laboratoire Agit-Art’s emphasis on ephemerality, improvisation, and preference for communal over individual artistic process and experience were not easily transferred to this gallery setting (figure 35). The object-actors Sy had envisioned have since been described by critic Everlyn Nicodemus as ‘‘inert stage props which blocked any clear perspective on either Senegalese contemporary art in general or the paintings of his coexhibitor, Souleymane Keita.’’ 84 When asked to respond to Nicodemus’s comments, Deliss pointed out that the process of devaluing the artworks to the level of props corresponded exactly to the curator’s intentions. Sy had wanted to question European ingrained notions of ‘‘fine arts.’’ 85 The communal aspect of the Laboratoire’s work clearly could not be easily reenacted in the gallery setting. Critics were perturbed by what they saw as El Sy’s ‘‘high-handed self-promotion.’’ 86 Okwui Enwezor wrote a scathing review of the Senegalese section, complaining not only about the curator’s self-aggrandizement but also about what he regarded as blatant ‘‘nepotism’’ in the planning process of the exhibition and africa’95 in general: Curator El Hadji Sy’s pretentious, shallow and dunder-headed translocation of the site-specificity of Dakar’s Laboratoire Agit-Art’s active environment to an enclosed space was simply a travesty. Sy’s shameful ca-

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pacity for self-promotion meant that he had twice as many objects in his section than the other two artists combined. His minuscule essay was even more surprising, given the impressive history of modern Senegalese art. Add to this the unsettling feeling that nepotism played a role in Sy being awarded a section to curate, as well as the catalogue cover and all the images printed on the souvenir T-shirts and we have a very messy affair indeed (no pun intended). Why anyone would believe that Sy’s paintings on rice sacks along with Souleymane Keita’s mannered canvas confections, Issa Samb’s wire structures and other assorted detritus gathered in this section represents the ‘‘story’’ of Senegal, is an enigma to me.87 These criticisms seemingly harbored a certain unwillingness to consider the question of the Laboratoire’s transference to an international context. When given the opportunity to engage with the works in this section and with the concepts that underlay its structure, critics seemed instead to be more interested in fueling personal or professional animosities between themselves and the general curator, Clementine Deliss. Most reviewers ignored the performance aspect of the exhibition altogether. Their oversight may have resulted from the selective access to the Laboratoire’s gallery performance.88 Even those present at s.o.s. Culture arrived without having had the opportunity to read background information in the catalogue, released on the same night. For its part, the Laboratoire seemed to be either unprepared for or unconcerned with the diverse makeup of its audience in this new environment. Those watching the performance would largely have been ignorant of the Laboratoire’s history and original mandate to challenge an overbearing state patronage, ideology, and codified aesthetic. While some in the audience may have compared s.o.s. Culture to their experiences with European performance arts, they would not have grasped the full significance of the synthesis of local and international concepts that informed the Laboratoire. Although Enwezor complains of Sy’s small essay in the Senegalese section of the catalogue, he fails to mention that very important lectures and essays by Senghor, Lods, Diouf, Sy, and As M’Bengue, an early member of Laboratoire Agit-Art, were reprinted in the same publication. Both his and Nicodemus’s critiques of the section as an inaccurate telling of ‘‘the’’ story of contemporary Senegalese arts are disingenuous, given their certain awareness of the fact that the exhibition was committed to telling a variety of different stories through the eyes of artist-curators. No section of Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa was intended to present a definitive statement 140

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on the history of contemporary African arts. In Senegal, the Laboratoire had been an important avant-garde group challenging the beliefs of the past and suggesting alternatives for the future. During the 1992 Dakar biennale, the Laboratoire played a pivotal role in encouraging freedom of expression and the importance of experimentation. However, with its translocation to London into a context that provided many viewers with their first exposure to Senegalese arts, it risked not only being seen as ‘‘the’’ official story but also mummifying itself into an institution like the École de Dakar a generation earlier. This process of institutionalization, abroad and at home, may have heralded the end of the Laboratoire’s contemporary relevance in the Senegalese context. Certainly, as the careers of artists such as Viyé Diba, Cheikh Niass, Kan-Si, and others attest to, the Laboratoire represents but one aspect of the contemporary art scene in Senegal.

The Village des Arts In 1977 El Sy was the first artist to squat in the buildings of an abandoned military camp in downtown Dakar. The spot quickly became an operating space for artistic experimentation and home to some eighty practicing artists, acquiring the name Village des Arts. Sy made this move in a search for studio space and began to work in the buildings while they were still without electricity or running water. Despite the lack of amenities, the old Lat-Dior military camp made for an attractive spot because of its central location on the edge of the wealthy Plateau area, in the shadow of the large central Sandaga market, and next to a major bus depot serving all parts of the city. The art academy (École des Arts) had occupied parts of this site from 1961 until 1982 (by which time it was known as the Institut National des Arts du Sénégal). The two artistic communities overlapped physically and socially. The official art school sat near the impromptu grouping of artists, and often professors and students would wander over to the Village side of the camp to take part in performances or view the exhibitions and concerts.89 Soon after he arrived, Sy was joined by the sculptor Aly Traoré and the painter Moussa Tine, the latter of whom brought his family with him.90 Gradually the Village attracted other painters, sculptors, musicians, actors, photographers, cinematographers, writers, and comedians, many of whom brought and settled their immediate families with them. The importance of this voluntary artistic grouping, in a location not officially provided by Senghor’s government, was that it acted as a watershed, allowing practicing artists to take more control of their creative activities and unburden themselves of their label as the state’s chers enfants. In their words, the VilLaboratories of Avant-Gardism

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lage afforded them ‘‘the right to express oneself as a citizen of Senegal and the world.’’ 91 The Laboratoire Agit-Art, settled among the artist studios at the Village in 1977 and remained in residence until the Village closed in 1983. The atmosphere was one of exchange and community involvement. The ‘‘villagers’’ (villageois) were concerned not only with obtaining a degree of artistic freedom vis-à-vis the official structures but also with creating an arena for experimentations and a means through which to reach a larger audience through their works. For the first time, many of the artists began to experiment with different materials and alternative methods of production. Through exchange and mutual support, they built a community in which they could discuss and discover a whole realm of artistic possibilities.92 Over seven years, the Village served as the site of multiple outdoor musical concerts, plays, and art exhibitions, all of which attempted to involve the surrounding community. Although many cite painter Moussa Tine as the ‘‘chef ’’ of the Village des Arts, in reality the community functioned under the guidance of a committee or council. The independent establishment and functioning of the Village stood in stark contrast to the Cité des Artistes Plasticiens at Colobane, an artistic community established in the same year through government support.93 All the residents at Colobane were painters, working with oils and/or acrylics on canvas and displaying their works in government-sponsored shows and a gallery in the ground floor of the Cité.94 Those who lived and worked in the Village des Arts experimented with many different media and often displayed their works in one anothers’ studios or in the open air. The materials and subject matter seen in works of the villageois proved much more diverse than those pursued by the Colobane artists. In 1980, El Sy opened his studio to be used as a gallery and meeting place, calling it tenq (the Wolof word for articulation).95 Individuals such as sculptor and architect Babacar Traoré, working in iron, wood, stone, and objets trouvés in an attempt ‘‘to return art to its most important mission, which is to sanctify God and to show his power and benevolence,’’ exhibited annually in Sy’s atelier.96 Since his time at the Village, Traoré has produced a number of prizewinning designs for public monuments in Dakar and has exhibited internationally (figure 36). His working methods, which emphasize the creative process and the plastic possibilities of his materials coupled with his belief in art as a mouvement de l’immatériel (movement of the immaterial), equalizing human beings and celebrating divine beauty, fit with the ideas underlying both the Laboratoire Agit-Art and the Village (figure 37). Another frequent contributor to exhibitions at the tenq gallery was painter Serigne N’Diaye, who reworks the traditions of Senegalese glass paintings. 142

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N’Diaye is one of the few art-school trained artists who has taken a new look at the technical aspects of this tradition.97 During the first few years of its existence, the Village operated smoothly, at first beside the Institut National des Arts du Sénégal, and then alone on the site when the official school moved to another location.98 Although Senghor never visited the site himself, it is thought that he gave his tacit approval to its existence as evidence of the growth and maturity of the art scene he had helped foster. His government acknowledged but did not interfere with the workings of the Village. In fact, the acting minister of culture attended the openings of each of the tenq exhibitions.99 In 1980, three years after the flowering of the Village des Arts, rumors began to circulate that the government had plans to reclaim the military camp. Gradually, various official representatives began to frequent the Village, explaining that the buildings belonged to the government and were slotted for reoccupation. El Sy describes the tense meetings held with representatives of the Ministry of Culture before the eventual closure of the Village: After the visit of the top civil servants, the Minister of Culture, Abby Kaddy Fall, notified us that the Senegalese state consented to give the villagers a rent-controlled building belonging to the marabout Sam M’Backé, situated in the suburb of Bopp. But this building, from which the ‘‘second generation’’ of artists had earlier been evicted, then invited to stay at Colobane, was dangerous according to Housing inspectors. Basically, it moved and did not respect the norms of construction.100 Spurred on by these intrusions and fearful of impending closure, Sy appealed to Senghor in 1981, writing to him just a year after he had resigned as president. In his letter, Sy explained the plight of the villagers and requested that Senghor use his influence on the new president, Abdou Diouf, to save the Village des Arts. Sy received a reply in which Senghor reported that he had made a personal appeal to Diouf ’s government on behalf of the artists.101 Despite the words of support from Senghor, the villagers found no allies in the new government. Eventually, toward the autumn of 1983, the official visits ceased and were replaced by the appearance of government troops, who came to harass the residents night after night. After several weeks of verbal hostility, the troops in their tanks took action.102 On 23 September 1983, between two and three o’clock in the morning, government tanks rolled toward the Lat-Dior camp and evicted the residents, gathering, vandalizing, and destroying their works in the process.103 Large numbers of files, which recorded the workings of the Village and served as a log of its activities, as well as a whole series Laboratories of Avant-Gardism

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36 Babacar Traoré at work at Yorkshire sculpture workshop. August 1995. Photo by Rachael Townshend.

37 Babacar Traoré, Power/ Puissance. 1994. Glass, mirror, and other found materials. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

of writings about the activities of the Laboratoire Agit-Art were also lost or destroyed during the eviction.104 The threats to and eventual destruction of the Village seemed of little concern to members of the Cité des artistes plasticiens at Colobane. When asked to explain the happenings at the Village, several artists at Colobane suggested that the eviction had, in fact, been justified and been caused by the unruly, antisocial behavior of the resident artists. According to some at Colobane, the government had acted to clean up the Village to bring under control the excess drinking, use of drugs, and raucous parties of the villageois. One Colobane artist went so far as to describe the Village des Arts as a veritable ‘‘tower of Babel.’’ 105 The hostility between the residents in the two artistic groupings finds its roots in misunderstandings and professional jealousies. Whether one speaks with former residents of the Village or with Colobane artists, no clear and substantiated explanation for the closure other than that officially given by the government can be found. However, some suggest that the major political and economic changes occurring in Senegal at that period engendered it.106 In 1980, after twenty years in office, President Senghor resigned and passed the presidency to his prime minister, Abdou Diouf. Unlike Senghor, however, Diouf was neither a poet nor a philosopher.107 Rather, he was a politician more concerned with the economic crises of his country than with the promotion of culture. When he came into power, a new period in the cultural history of the country began, one marked by a slow decline of support and, many would claim, respect for the arts. Soon many artists were ruing the loss of Senghor’s ‘‘interference.’’ Some posit that the closure of the Village and, subsequently, of the Musée Dynamique constituted attempts by Diouf to distance and distinguish himself and his political priorities from those of his predecessor.108 The second major change was of an economic nature. In 1980, Senegal, along with Ghana, was the first West African nation to adopt the imf and World Bank programs of structural adjustment, a decision that required a major shift in government expenditure priorities.109 The creation of the Village had served as an important mark of independence for a large number of Senegalese artists. Its destruction marked a rite of passage, emblematic of the troubled and deteriorating relationship between the chers enfants and the state. It sparked artists to reorganize and to speak with a single voice in dealings with the government. In 1975, several years prior to the opening of the Village, a group of artists, lead by Papa Ibra Tall, had started the first artists’ association known as arplasen (Artistes Plasticiens du Sénégal).110 The organization identified a series of goals in its founding statutes. Among these were the expansion of 146

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art education, the promotion of artists, the circulation of indigenous works of art, the creation of an art library and a journal, the establishment of links between the various artistic media, the promotion of exchanges with foreign artists, and, finally, the assurance of representation of Senegalese artists in international and national forums.111 However, lack of funds, internal squabbling, and strained relationships with government institutions such as the Musée Dynamique and the Committee for Exhibitions Abroad in the Ministry of Culture crippled the efforts of the new association. The hopes for a fine arts journal and library were never fulfilled and, after several years of shaky existence, arplasen had become, for all intents and purposes, inoperative. However, with the newfound sense of community established at the Village, arplasen was renewed and Alioune Badiane, a former student of Papa Ibra Tall and a painter, tapestry designer, and academic, became its president. Badiane was soon thereafter named the director of the École Nationale des Beaux Arts. His appointment gave the association added legitimacy. With the destruction of the Village, the need for a strong and effective artists association became more important, and on 23 February 1985, arplasen became anaps (Association Nationale des Artistes Plasticiens du Sénégal). With El Sy as president, the new association immediately began to assume greater responsibility and control over the annual artists’ salons at the Musée Dynamique. In contrast to the salons previously organized by bureaucrats in the Ministry of Culture, the salons of anaps included a series of public lectures and studio meetings that took as their goal ‘‘to bring Senegalese art back to its public.’’ 112 After the closure of the Village, the residents sought compensation for the damage, destruction, and disappearance of their artworks, employing the services of a young lawyer, Bara Diokhane. Diokhane had been a frequent visitor to the Village over the years, a good friend to both Issa Samb and El Sy, and a member in the Laboratoire Agit-Art. Prompted to take up the case by his artist friends and encouraged by the sympathetic reporting in the local press, Diokhane had first to find a way in which to measure the damage and estimate an appropriate monetary claim. He explained the process: First the courts held an inquiry or preliminary hearing and recommended the selection and appointment of an ‘‘expert’’ who could assess the worth of the damaged works. This request presented great difficulties because there wasn’t anyone in the country who could really be called an ‘‘expert.’’ Eventually the courts appointed an accountant for the job. Of course, he wasn’t suited for the task. It was really a joke! The process couldn’t go much further, you see.113 Laboratories of Avant-Gardism

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Eventually, out of frustration and because of lack of funds, the artists abandoned the case. Until the present day, the former villageois have not received any compensation for the destruction at the Village or acquired knowledge of the whereabouts of the works that were carted off, presumably to become part of state and private collections. No apology has ever been given to justify the force used and destruction caused in the process. The death of the Village did not result in the destruction of its ideals or its working methods. Many former residents have frequently gravitated toward the Laboratoire Agit-Art, which continues its activities to the present day, growing from its experiences at the Village and providing an operational space away from official structures within which artists may work. As the following chapter will show, the artists’ links with the Village lasted. Individuals who had been part of the experiment were endowed not only with a new sense of freedom to explore diverse media and processes but also with a clearer realization of the complex relationship between art and government patronage in Senegal. In the aftermath of the Village, a new openness and readiness for varying forms of artistic expression permeated Dakar’s artistic scene, benefiting even those who had not experienced the Village and Laboratoire Agit-Art firsthand.

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4 After the Avant-Garde

T

he experimental attitudes at the Village des Arts and in the Laboratoire Agit-Art spread beyond the converted barracks of the old LatDior military camp and cleared a critical space within the Senghorian art world for a broader artistic practice. Other artists began to see the possibilities of recycling indigenous materials and started investigating different working methods that took them beyond the academic teachings of the École des Arts. They also began to explore their cultural heritage in ways more subtle than those of the École de Dakar. While some credit the workings of the Village for this development, it was probably inevitable that talented artists would tire of a restricted field of production. In her look at so-called international artists, Susan Vogel broadly defined them as those who ‘‘address an international audience, represent their countries in international gatherings. . . . most have been educated in Westernstyle art academies in Africa, but some have studied in Europe and America, or were trained under a European mentor.’’ 1 She then characterized ‘‘the search for expression’’ undertaken by these artists as geared primarily toward ‘‘national edificational glory’’ rather than ‘‘personal satisfaction.’’ 2 While this characterization could certainly be applied generally to artists working within the confines of the École de Dakar, by the 1980s, most artists neither exhibited much concern for the nation in their works nor seemed engaged in the same battle against the École de Dakar that had been waged so vehemently by El Sy and Issa Samb through the manifestations of the Laboratoire. Although many artists continued to be members of or itinerant

participants in the Laboratoire Agit-Art, they used this grouping more as a meeting place and support system, much like they had once used the Village des Arts, than as an instrument for anti-establishment activities. The maturation of this art scene mirrored important changes occurring within the broader global art world, which began, in the 1980s, to acknowledge alternative modernisms and local accents under the postmodernist mantra of inclusiveness. The expanding interests of the Senegalese artists were met by a quickly developing market and debate surrounding contemporary productions from the so-called third world. Exhibition venues for ‘‘global’’ artists were on the increase, especially in the late 1980s. In the early 1990s, Dakar became just one important site to host indigenous events centered around the importance of building viable infrastructures to support the arts. The avant-gardism of the Laboratoire Agit-Art preoccupied itself with challenging the restrictive, Eurocentric, and elitist nature of the Senghorian field of cultural production. Paradoxically, in the process, it was forced to fight its battles within that same elitist realm. But, like the works of avantgardes elsewhere and at different historical junctures, the productions of Laboratoire Agit-Art have undergone a process of incorporation into the mainstream. Moreover, as I have previously argued, the Laboratoire’s solutions to the failings of the École de Dakar were similarly based on adaptations of European ideas of artist and artistry. While Senghor’s essentialist identity discourse harnessed notions of a traditional Africa invented by European anthropologists, explorers, and the like, the Laboratoire Agit-Art’s nativist revisionism made use of Europeans’ avant-gardist explorations of exotic systems of thought and artistic practice. Despite its claims of redirecting relations between artist and audience, the works of visual artists remained in studios, galleries, and salons, alienated from the concerns of the majority of Senegalese. In most cases, artists featured within this chapter explain their use of récupération in terms similar to Issa Samb: as a conscious effort to relate to the surrounding community, environment, and traditions. These post–avantgarde artists continue to search for ways to make their art more meaningful to a larger audience, drawing on practices and materials popularized during the days of the Village des Arts and focusing on hitherto underrepresented art forms like sculpture and glass painting. They add to their quest for relevance at home a greater understanding of the place their works might find at the intersection of local and global systems of signification. One area that benefited significantly from the freedom from government control and the experimental tendencies of the Village was that of sculp-

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ture. Many practicing sculptors today—such as Babacar Traoré, Aly Traoré, Issa Samb, Pape Macoumba Seck, and Guibril André Diop (and the late Moustapha Dimé)—speak of their experiences at the Village as crucial to the development of their artistry (figures 38 and 39).3 As residents, these artists were given the space to experiment with materials, often employing, for the first time, the objets trouvés they collected along the shores of nearby beaches or from the surrounding markets. As we saw in the works of Issa Samb and others at the Village, récupération became a popular working method and aesthetic strategy. The sculptors were at the forefront of searching for, incorporating, and revaluing indigenous materials into mixed-media works. In the past three decades, the practice of recycling quotidian materials, which began at the Village, has become much more than a visual metaphor for a politics of indigenismo. The amount of foreign materials used to support the École’s productions and the curricula of the art schools has significantly decreased since the early 1980s. Récupération has thus become an aesthetic strategy of absolute necessity. The artistic arena of the Village also witnessed a growing interest by art school–trained individuals such as Serigne N’Diaye and Germaine Anta Gaye in preexisting glass painting traditions (known as sous verre in French or suweer in Wolof ), which were given no place within the fine art realm of the Senghorian patronage system but, rather, celebrated as folk expressions. The artists’ reexaminations of this medium have resulted in reworkings of earlier techniques and imagery into modern idioms (figure 40). Sculptors Moustapha Dimé and Guibril André Diop, glass painter Germaine Anta Gaye, and mixed-media artists Viyé Diba, Kan-Si, and Cheikh Niass have all operated between and beyond the Laboratoire Agit-Art, the academy, and the legacy of the École de Dakar. Considering these very different media and artists together, I do not wish to suggest that their artistic creativity and referencing was and remains tied explicitly to the Village experience. The very openness of the Village environment attracted individuals who were independently minded and ready for experimentation. Their careers and their explorations did not end with its closure. Rather, I attempt to illustrate the extent to which artistic pursuits and discourse were rapidly diversifying, even in the 1970s at a time when the Senghorian art system was still strong. These artistic initiatives beyond the École de Dakar thus must be understood as contemporaneous developments with the continuing practices of the establishment art world. The diversification process of the midto-late 1970s resulted in or was, in some cases, the product of nonacademy sources of art training. Sculptors and glass painters participated in appren-

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38 Moustapha Dimé, Bird/ Oiseau. Mid-1990s. Wood and metal. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

39 Guibril André Diop, Title Unknown. 1993–94. Recycled iron. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

40 Germaine Anta Gaye, Végétal series. 1992. Glass painting in wooden cabinet. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

ticeship systems established long before the rise of the academy. Those interested in experimenting with mixed media and récupération combined their experiences at the academy with a newfound appreciation for a variety of materials, alternative training, and working methods. While fewer artists have worked in sculpture than in paint in Senegal, their production is still significant, and their practice exhibits a wide range of forms, styles, media, and techniques. It is my hope that by looking at the works of a few key individuals, I will be able to address many of the issues surrounding the production and domestic and global reception of Senegalese sculpture. Scholarship on Senegalese sculptors, academy-trained glass painters, and mixed-media artists is meager at best (with the exception of studies on Moustapha Dimé’s and Viyé Diba’s works). This chapter, therefore, documents certain artists’ oeuvres and locates them in discussions of recent patronage, market opportunities, and domestic criticism. I also consider the nature of current postcolonial efforts to locate these works within a global paradigm, before concluding with an examination of the popular 1980s mural movement known as set setal, a visual phenomenon that crystallized many of the debates on traditionality, authenticity, and the role of art and the artist in society which have occupied us throughout this study (figure 41).

Sculpture in Postindependence Senegal Any discussion of sculpture in Senegal must first address the reasons why it seems to have played such a minimal role during the years of strong government patronage in the 1960s. While Senghor showed some support for its development, his speeches and writings concerning visual arts focused primarily on painting and tapestries. There can be little doubt, as one looks through the early catalogues of traveling shows or, indeed, at the 1966 festival, that these two media dominated the artistic output of Senegal. But as a medium whose size and form could serve as a public monument, sculpture should have found favor with pioneers such as Papa Ibra Tall or Senghor, both of whom frequently spoke about the need to develop a public-oriented and accessible art.4 As previously noted, the foundation of a national tapestry center resulted from just such an attitude.5 Given the extent to which the former president saw the artist as an ambassador and art as a symbol of the cultural and (eventual) economic development of his new nation, it is curious that he did not greatly encourage the making of public sculptural images. Furthermore, if one considers the iconographic makeup of the early paintings and tapestries After the Avant-Garde

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exhibited at the 1966 festival, it is clear that Senegalese artists drew heavily on the great sculptural traditions of the continent, or, at any rate, modernist appreciation of them, in their search to define their new African aesthetic. In his workshops, Pierre Lods surrounded his students with African sculptures. At the 1966 festival, the organizers amassed an enormous collection of artworks emerging from pan-African traditions, mainly sculptures, to create a centerpiece exhibition that, to this day, has never been equaled in size at a gathering on the African continent. These ‘‘traditional’’ sculptures were the ‘‘fetishes’’ that epitomized an exotic, savage, and sometimes edenic Africa for the European public. Along with the mask forms, figures constituted the quintessential primitive arts, or arts primitifs, valued in the European marketplace. Why, then, would their form and medium not become the target of Negritude’s reclamations and reversals? The reasons given for the dearth of sculptural practice in postindependence Senegal are plentiful, ranging from considerations of religion, politics, caste, and artistic techniques to economics. In light of Senghor’s aesthetic proclamations and the small practice that did exist, all remain largely unsatisfactory or incomplete. El Sy asserts that Senghor gave more importance to painting than sculpture because he wanted to ensure that a large number of artworks would become available quickly, to be shown when needed at international functions. This claim supports the notion that Senghor’s patronage was geared as much, if not more, toward appreciation outside of the country as within. Of course, given the extensive travel of Senegalese artworks under Senghor’s patronage, the physical difficulties of transporting sculpture, which could not simply be rolled like canvas, became important. Others have suggested that the president-patron’s preferences were simply indicative of his assimilated cultural self, the quintessential évolué. Certainly, Senghor was a francophile and as such, like the French, regarded painting as the highest form of fine arts. This explanation seems to parallel his paradoxical attempts to overturn European attitudes toward Africa and its cultures by employing European critical methodologies. Some scholars have suggested that the paucity of ‘‘traditional’’ arts (a label which in Africanist vocabulary frequently implies a reference to sculpted forms) resulted from the strong impact of colonialism and Islam in Senegal, prohibiting the fashioning of figurative forms.6 As a result, no existing traditions were available on which to build a modern, postindependent sculptural aesthetic.7 In the course of numerous interviews, Issa Samb insisted that Senghor’s preference for painting reflected practical political concerns that were, in turn, determined by the practices of religious bloc voting.8 As a Catholic 156 In Senghor’s Shadow

41 set setal sign in the Laboratoire Agit-Art courtyard. 1994. Wood, mixed media, and acrylic. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

president of a largely Muslim country, at the time of independence as now largely controlled by powerful local marabouts, Senghor did not want to offend a significant constituency by leaving himself open to accusations of encouraging a return to non-Islamic practice in the promotion of sculpture.9 Samb’s explanation, while an accurate account of domestic politics, seems at odds with the central concerns of many practicing artists today, who are often more preoccupied with defining a place for their work in the context of a Senegalese society, still affected by considerations of caste, than with addressing religious distinctions.10 Indeed, the majority of sculptors regard their work as a means through which to practice Islam and to praise Allah.11 Considerations of traditional arts in Senegal rarely take into account the active wood-carving practices of the lawbé or maabo Wolof caste who sculpt utilitarian objects such as mortars and pestles, drums, pirogues, seats, plates, and so on, or the tëgg, who are jewelers and blacksmiths. The tëgg remain, in many areas, essential figures in society. Like blacksmiths in other parts of Africa, they perform important political and religious functions as diviners, masters of ceremonies, counselors, and so on.12 Moreover, their material output of tools, household goods, and prestige jewelry remains crucial to the functioning of society. Since many scholars of Africa’s arts have regarded these practices as artisanal rather than artistic, their relationship to the production of fine arts in Senegal has remained largely ignored. Yet as a look at many of the sculptors working today shows, these practices provide important training grounds and references. Furthermore, as inherited caste professions, which operate through an apprenticeship system, they form part of an established cultural matrix that shapes the larger public’s regard for sculptors’ productions today.13 In the Anthology of Contemporary Fine Arts in Senegal, one contributor suggested that sculpture partially lacked popularity in Senegal’s fine arts world due to the ‘‘dirtiness’’ attributed to its production process. The text does not make clear whether this dirtiness is associated with issues of caste, with the cleanliness stressed by Islam, or both.14 In the same discussion, the author also reports that the teaching staff at the École Nationale des Beaux Arts found that students had trouble planning three-dimensional models and preferred two-dimensional representations. The art teachers I encountered during my field research in the mid-1990s did not advance these views, but suggested that these preferences could result from cultural conditioning, as it were. If one looks at the pre-independence arts of Senegal, aside from a small number of masked performances in the Casamance region (studied by Peter Mark), most of the visual arts of Senegalese peoples, such as textiles, jewelry, sous verre, and leather working, are of two dimensions. 158

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Evidence of small but important pursuits of sculptural activities in the first years after independence counter many of these explanations regarding the relative absence of sculptural practice and patronage in the Senghorian art world. Sculpture formed part of the curriculum in the early fine arts schools and continues to be taught today. In the early 1960s, instruction in sculpting formed part of the Section des Arts Plastiques under Iba N’Diaye. After N’Diaye left, it was taught by a series of French technical assistants and by an artist of mixed Senegalese and Belgian descent, André Seck, who, like many of the prominent pedagogical figures, Senghor had personally recruited in 1966. Like his French counterparts, Seck, who obtained his artistic training in Belgium, adhered to classical European models, tools, and techniques.15 Most sculptors operating within the elite art world of Senegal after independence came from noncaste families, sons of the petit bourgeoisie. Their fathers held government administrative posts, positions in the bureaucracies and schools of the Muslim brotherhoods, or found employment in business or other professions, some in the military. This profile remains similar today. As such, sculptors have often sought out apprenticeships with lawbé and their counterparts in other African countries in an attempt to acquire the technical skills and conceptual approaches not taught in the art academy. In Dakar, a number of practicing sculptors attended the Centre de Formation Artisanale de Dakar, an artisanal training center at Soumbédioune along the same stretch of coast as that of the Musée Dynamique. Most of them then continued on to study at the Institut National des Arts du Sénégal. In the 1970s, the period in which the artists under consideration here studied at the Centre Artisanale, a mix of French coopérants and Senegalese taught at the school.16 Now, it is run by Senegalese. The Centre Artisanale has played a vital role in continuing apprenticeship systems, which were beginning to break down in the urban context.17 There is some early documentation of sculptors practicing and developing their artistry under Senghor’s system. In his anthology, for instance, El Sy mentions that Senghor personally encouraged the work of metal-caster Cheikh Marone Diop.18 In an extensive interview on the occasion of the 1992 Venice biennale, sculptor Moustapha Dimé shed some light on Senghor’s engagement with Senegalese sculptors.19 He recounted: Senghor invited all the Senegalese sculptors. I had sold another piece to the Association of Architects, and they gave that piece to the president. So when he received us . . . he had put my piece next to a work of another young sculptor, and two other Zairian sculptures, traditional ones, to show traditional compared to modern sculptures. So he considered my After the Avant-Garde

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42 Djibril N’Diaye, Untitled, detail. 1994. Wood, ebony, sisal, and found metals. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

sculpture modern . . . and he asked me to explain my work. . . . A month later, I had written a letter to Senghor, and he received me for an audience. We talked about art and everything. He even suggested to me that I should have a scholarship to study in France. But at that time my preoccupation was to make study trips in Africa, to see sculptures in Africa. . . . Senghor had written to the minister of culture telling him to give me a grant of 300,000 francs for two months to go up to Bandiagara. So I went there. And Senghor chose two of my sculptures in a national group show that same year, and I sold them both.20 Two artists still active today, Ousmane Sow and Djibril N’Diaye, had their beginnings in the Senghorian system. The former, labeled by critics as the ‘‘African Michelangelo,’’ has only quite recently begun to receive attention for his robust, mixed-media figural series of African peoples, which he sculpts from a mixture of synthetic and vegetal materials applied over iron frames. The complexity of their assemblage is hidden beneath a veneer of mud, paint, and clay. He began exhibiting works as early as 1966, at the Premier Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres. Djibril N’Diaye, currently a professor of fine arts at the École Nationale des Beaux Arts, works primarily in wood and metals, and most recently with leather (figure 42). He showed his early works in Algiers at the Premier 160

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Festival pan-Africain in 1969, and in the Swedish exhibition Dix ans d’art sénégalais in 1970. Like Sow, N’Diaye works in series. In some of his most powerful works, he has played with the structure of Dogon granary doors, seeking to transfer their main compositional elements into new materials and form. Once the head of the department for fine arts at the École, and a major proponent of récupération, N’Diaye encouraged his students to work with the materials they found around them in the streets. His compositions incorporate used metal that still has evidence of its former life written on it (figure 43). At the national salons of the early 1970s, one witnessed a consistent and sizable entry of sculpture on exhibition. Artists like Aly and Babacar Traoré, Guibril André Diop, Djibril N’Diaye, El Hadji Mansour Ciss, Bassirou Sarr, and Ousmane Sow all contributed works to the 1973 or 1974 national salons. The Senegalese government’s special commission for planning exhibits traveling abroad used the occasion of the 1973 salon to choose artworks for the 1974 exhibit Art sénégalais d’aujourd’hui. Both Djibril N’Diaye and Babacar Traoré had works in the 1974 show at the Grand Palais. Senegal also sent several sculptors to exhibit at the festac celebrations in Nigeria in 1977. And in the early 1980s, artists such as Guibril André Diop saw their works travel around the United States on the American leg of Art sénégalais d’aujourd’hui. In 1979–80, the gallery of the French cultural center in Dakar, a major exhibiting venue at the time, hosted the landmark show entitled Le visage de la sculpture sénégalaise, with which it acknowledged the growing stature of the medium within the repertoire of Senegalese artistic expression. But it was at the Village gallery, tenq, where a large variety of sculptors found the most support.21 Sculptors working in postindependence Africa face different problems than do painters, at least partly because critics may not regard their craft as ‘‘foreign’’ in technique. Though a painter or tapestry designer may face accusations of producing a ‘‘derivative’’ or ‘‘foreign-inspired’’ artwork, the sculptor, in some senses, remains locked into the image of his or her continent as a place that produces sculptural masterpieces. Easel painting, as a foreign form, has the freedom to develop as it wishes, whereas sculpture cannot escape comparison with the traditional models (and all the social, political, and religious functions that accompany them) so sought after by the primitive arts market. Thus the reception of a sculptor’s work within a global milieu is affected by the continuing system of signification developed to deal with traditional and supposedly authentic models. One might argue that Senegalese sculptors are freer to experiment, approAfter the Avant-Garde

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43 Djibril N’Diaye, Untitled. 1994. Wood, ebony, sisal, and found metals. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

priate, and invent than those from other parts of West Africa who work in areas with very rich sculptural traditions, such as Benin, Ghana, Congo, or Nigeria. In the years after independence, Senegal’s sculptors, to some extent, found themselves in a similar position to those in Zimbabwe, which also had no preexisting sculptural practices on which to draw. Under Frank McEwen, Zimbabwean artists created works that used local mythology as subject matter but referred little to past forms.22 In terms of defining a broader significance and a patronage for their works, one could also draw parallels between an artist such as Francis Nnaggenda of Uganda and the sculptors at work in Senegal. All contended with preconceived notions of what African sculpture should be as they forged ahead to create amalgamations of past forms and more contemporary elements. In her discussion of Nnaggenda’s problems of patronage in his home country, Sidney Kasfir noted: Neither educated Ugandans nor expatriates, with very few exceptions, are willing to accept an art that is frankly experimental, however deeply rooted it may be in traditional African forms. Nnaggenda’s work does not satisfy most expatriates, who harbor quite clear notions of what East African contemporary art should be—pleasantly impressionistic glances at picturesque local scenes. . . . Besides this, his work is a threat to traditionalists, who rightfully regard their culture as a priceless gift, but mistakenly assume that it can stand transfixed in space and time.23 Like Nnaggenda, Senegalese practitioners worked in a climate that gave them little support, both in terms of indigenous market structures and critical evaluations.

Moustapha Dimé’s Assemblages in Retrospect The career of sculptor Moustapha Dimé, who recently passed away at age forty-nine, clearly illustrated the diversity of training and experience typical of Senegal’s sculptors. In both visual practice and spoken word, Dimé defied categorization, confronting such labels as elite, tourist, traditional, modern, and artisanal to reveal their shortcomings. Dimé saw his art as a search to understand himself and his place within Senegalese artistic and cultural history and within a larger, global art network (figure 44). Dimé was born in Louga, a small city in the north of Senegal, to a noncaste Wolof family. His father was an accountant and small landowner. As a child, Dimé had friends whose fathers were wood-carvers, and he would often play with the tools and wood in their courtyards. At this stage, he did not have any ideas of becoming an artist, though he was aware of his abilities and enAfter the Avant-Garde

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44 Moustapha Dimé, Serer Woman/ Femme Sérère. 1992. Bowls, mortar and pestle, 145 × 49 cm. Collection of Irwin Hersey. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

joyed working with his hands.24 However, as an activity associated with the lawbé caste, carving, and Dimé’s interest in it, met strong opposition from his family, particularly his father. He explained, ‘‘My father always refused to let me practice the profession of woodworking, since in Louga that is a kind of work done by caste people. And caste people are the most inferior in the social hierarchy. . . . My father said nothing at first. He thought it was just something I would get over.’’ 25 In 1966, at age fourteen, the year of the Premier Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres, Dimé finished school and left Louga for Dakar. Once there, he enrolled, against his father’s will, in the Centre de Formation Artisanale, where he learned to make furniture, jewelry, saddles, and ceramics: We had a professor of drawing, a professor of technique, a professor of math, of French, of literature, and also a studio professor. . . . [The professor of drawing] took African statues in general, not Senegalese in particular, to give us a model to draw from. . . . In the school they [the artisanal professions] weren’t regarded as caste professions, for the school was very French. But in cultural life out in Senegalese society it was considered that way. There are only artisans, and artisans are usually caste people. And caste people continue to accept their place. And that’s the problem.26 Dimé remained in Dakar, working at the Centre Artisanale for three years. Then, eager to see the world and to escape the familial pressures that continued as long as he insisted on pursuing caste-associated activities, he began to travel and learn carving skills by apprenticing with artisans in Ghana and the Gambia. In 1976, Dimé returned to Dakar, and in 1977, as a representative of his home region of Louga, he entered an artwork in a youth festival called Youth Quinzaine. It was on this occasion that the minister of culture, having seen Dimé’s work, offered him a scholarship to the École Nationale des Beaux Arts. Before this invitation, Dimé claimed to have never heard of the school of fine arts or to have seen ‘‘fine art’’ books of Western or African artworks.27 He accepted the offer to attend, but only remained at the École for one year because ‘‘after a year, my professor told me, ‘You’ve already learned everything, you’ve learned the essentials. Now the only thing to do is to try to develop your spirit, your mind, to learn how to compose and create.’ ’’ 28 After leaving the École, Dimé joined the activities at the then burgeoning Village des Arts. He remained a dynamic participant of that community until its closure in 1983, finding the friendship and support that he so needed in the absence of familial acceptance. While at the Village, Dimé’s works After the Avant-Garde

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were executed in rough slabs of driftwood, metal, and various other found materials. The atmosphere of the Village helped shape his attitude toward his practice and gave him the courage to pursue a variety of techniques. The rift created between the government and the artists after the Village’s forced closure, during which he had seven sculptures damaged, destroyed, or confiscated, instilled in Dimé a strong dislike of official structures and highlighted for him the importance of both artistic and personal freedom. Both of these ideas underlie his later works. In his early days at the Centre artisanale, Dimé became quite skilled with the chisel and produced finely crafted wooden furnishings and decor. During his time in the Gambia in 1973, he put his skills with the chisel to work in the fashioning of tourist-oriented images. These bas-reliefs had a smooth, polished patina and idyllic subject matter. While in Ghana in 1974, Dimé produced work for a European tourist market and local African bourgeoisie, sculpting fully rounded idealistic heads of women.29 On his return to Senegal, he began to produce large, rougher images of marginalized people in Senegalese society—lepers, vagrants, the homeless, and the unemployed— often rubbing dirt into the surfaces and rolling the wood in the embers of a fire to obtain a similar effect to branding wood with a hot iron. He explained his interest in this subject matter as a result of his own experiences of marginalization from his family and of alienation as an artist in Senegalese society.30 Dimé spoke of this time as one in which he began to ‘‘vomit acculturation’’ and, like others, to return, independent of Negritude’s ideological concerns, to the techniques and formal qualities of African sculptors, rejecting the use of the European chisel and French decorative tastes he had learned at the Centre Artisanale.31 He explained: I began to realize certain things, began seriously to learn, and to associate with traditional sculptors, to learn their technique with the adze. In school we were taught to use the chisel, because our studio professor was French, from Marseilles. But when I began to set out on my own, this really disgusted me. The adze, of course, is the traditional African tool. I said to myself, the best way to get your own balance is to immerse yourself in what people do in traditional African art. And I began to buy adzes, and to work with them. I learned that the adze is completely different from the chisel, that its material structure is completely different from the chisel. Two kinds of difference: a chisel is like a percussion, it’s struck, it’s a cutting thing you hit. Whereas the adze, in a traditional milieu, is thrown, or stroked.32

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After returning from his trip to Dogon country in 1980, Dimé began to fashion extremely delicate, smooth filiform figures; one might posit that these were a response to the openwork of Dogon masks and figures. However, the artist compared the productions of this phase to the fantastical and smooth forms of Makonde sculptures.33 His training with both chisel and adze enabled him to produce these sculptures with extreme ease and speed. In a relatively short span of time, Dimé was working in widely varying styles, simultaneously creating delicate filiforms and rough-hewn, charred images. Dimé’s residence at the Village des Arts in the early 1980s allowed him to expand further the production of unrefined images made with found objects, both natural and human-made. During this period, he saw his experimentations as a way in which to differentiate himself technically from others.34 In 1982–83, Dimé returned to carving the filiform images of the preVillage days. However, this time they turned out thinner, more delicate, and endowed with a shinier and richer patina. After the return to filiforms, the artist entered what he described as a period of artistic and spiritual crisis. He credited the beginning of this turmoil to the 1986 Salon National de l’anaps, taking as its theme art against apartheid, at which he realized an artist friend was blatantly copying his style and benefiting from the success of these delicate, stringlike images.35 Dimé’s sense of betrayal paralyzed him creatively. For the following year, he underwent a painful and tumultuous period of reassessment during which he joined the Mourides, the most influential Muslim brotherhood in the country.36 Mouridism held great appeal to the sculptor for several reasons. First, the brotherhood places great emphasis on manual labor as a means through which to show one’s belief in and respect for Allah. Their oft-quoted motto is ‘‘Devote yourselves to God and His Prophet, but work!’’ This sanctification of labor helped legitimize for Dimé his often difficult choice of career and enabled him to see beyond the concerns of the caste system.37 Second, Mouridism’s insistence on the Africanness of Islamic belief suited Dimé’s efforts at reclamation of African cultural heritage and artistic techniques. The Mouride brotherhood provided a freer form of Islam for Dimé and allowed a looser interpretation of text better suited to his pursuits. As a Mouride, Dimé could envision his artwork as a form of practicing Islam—an expression of faith in and of itself. I’m Moslem but not practising like the Moslems who go to the mosque every week. No, I don’t go to the mosque. But for me sculpture is a form of practising Islam. When Islam first came to Senegal, the Moslems destroyed Senegalese sculpture—anything related to sculpture they de-

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stroyed on the basis of the Islamic prohibition against figuration. But I think that is a shallow interpretation of the Islamic text, because God created visual beauty in the world. And there is nothing more beautiful than a work of art, so the work of art is very close to God, and should be a part of God’s sacred text, not a part of that which is destroyed for the sake of that text. Also, for me in religion we have someone whom we consider as a spiritual guide, who’s done a kind of African synthesis of the Moslem religion. And the essential of this is in your heart.38 His spiritual change, in fact, fueled his increasing attempts to acquire greater knowledge of his heritage. In the late 1980s, he began to travel throughout different regions of Senegal, sojourning in villages with native Wolof speakers and learning the nuances of his mother tongue and the mores of his people, his knowledge of which had faded in the French environment of Dakar’s schools. His later productions were informed by a broad knowledge and creative processing of visual forms not only from his homeland but from throughout Africa.39 His manipulation and thoughtful referencing of these traditions resulted from his keen interest not only in their form but also in their ethnographic purposes. His assessment of the originary circumstances of these works informed the manner in which he incorporated them into his own. This concern also made his appropriations or quotations of sculptural traditions qualitatively different from those of the majority of École de Dakar artists.40 From the latter half of the 1980s until his premature death, Dimé produced the kinds of mixed-media images he had begun to experiment with at the Village des Arts. He explained his use of natural and local materials partially as a result of his greater understanding of the role his art should play in the life of his community and partially as a result of a maturity and clarity he felt about his own artistic pursuits. His immersion in local traditions and adherence to Mouridism allowed him to be at peace with himself and his choices. His practice of récupération, through a reuse of household or everyday objects such as calabashes, mortars and pestles, or even prayer boards, enabled him to produce and maintain senses of tradition and identity with his community and ‘‘to return these materials to this environment (figures 45 and 46).’’ 41 I have to use material that allows people, or that leads people, to be closer to their own life. . . . It is very important for me to use materials that don’t alienate the society where I live . . . they have lived in the environment. There’s no difference between these materials and people. . . .

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45 Moustapha Dimé, Woman/ Femme. 1993. Wood, calabash, sisal, pestles, and jute sacking. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

46 Moustapha Dimé, Woman/ Femme, detail. 1993. Wood, calabash, sisal. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

Considering the level of development in Senegalese society, I think you should try to reach the whole population, to let them all re-educate themselves on an equal level.42 His subject matter dealt with both everyday life and metaphysical concerns. Entering his workshop, one could encounter, perched like a beacon on the tip of Gorée Island, an enormous dancing figure, with a skeleton of thin wire strips and leather-wrapped amulets and pagne cloth (wrap-around skirt), performing a vigorous xäg-bi, the favorite Senegalese dance to Mbalax (jazz) music. The dancer stood but a few feet away from an elegant image of a Serer woman endowed with breasts of curving calabashes that had a burned, partially engraved and cracked surface giving evidence of their former daily use in the household.43 The breast forms, often used by sculptors to emphasize the sustenance and necessity of motherhood in the life of any community, were represented by food vessels—vessels that affected the life of the household in much the same way as the mother’s milk. Dimé collected these calabashes in the marketplaces, where they had been discarded because they were cracked or warped and no longer useful in their former life. Hanging on a wall in his studio, just opposite the Serer woman, was a sculpture that paid homage to cultural historian Cheikh Anta Diop and his work on the history of Africa and her peoples.44 The form was outlined in the shape of several layered pyramids to recall Diop’s attempts to trace the links between ancient Egypt and sub-Saharan Africa. The wooden pyramidal relief was pierced by hundreds of protruding nails, reminiscent, in Dimé’s view, of minkisi (power figures) used by Kongo peoples. The pieces became, then, a fusion of sub-Saharan and Egyptian beliefs (figure 47). On a low shelf toward the front of this workshop, Dimé kept a solemn, haunting carved figure, about one foot high. It sat facing the open Atlantic, looking westward, as if contemplating the brutal history of the Middle Passage. Its hands were bound tightly behind it, and a metal plate silenced its mouth. The piece’s title: Esclave de la banque mondiale (Slave to the World Bank). This commentary on neocolonialism indicated Dimé’s concerns for art within a system of global capital. He explained, ‘‘The real battle over art is economic and ideological because the West has never accepted the true culture of the African world. But if the African continent develops, then things will change. If it doesn’t change, and if Africa continues to depend on others, then African artists will remain in their little ghetto.’’ 45 Dimé had strong opinions about being labeled both an international and an African artist. His words, which situate his life and his artistry within a transnational matrix, help us to rethink categories and boundaries of local

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47 Moustapha Dimé, Hommage à Cheikh Anta Diop. 1990s. Wood and nails. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

and global, of provincial and universal, and to confront the very foundations of a racist art market that pigeonholes non-Western artists into exotic boxes and perpetuates essentialist, one-tribe, one-style paradigms (figure 48). Dimé’s words eerily echo those of his predecessor, Iba N’Diaye, spoken some thirty years earlier, emphasizing the remarkable lack of change that has occurred in attitudes toward the productions of Africa’s artists: I am an artist, quite simply. People today see on television all that is happening in the world . . . that I am a member of a certain ethnic group,

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and that I must work specifically in relation to that ethnic group— that’s not right. I am not a representative of an ethnic group, I am my own representative—an individual. To work as an African—that is not correct, it is dishonest. I will never accept the West’s attempts to imprison me in this racist concept. I don’t try to work like an African. I try to work like Moustapha Dimé. I am a Senegalese artist among many Senegalese artists. No one can represent African art. One can say that the work of Moustapha Dimé has African roots. I have, more precisely, Senegalese roots, but I read books by Mao, books by French and African authors. If I go to the West, I will come back with something. Man is formed by his environment. But I do not want Westerners to imprison me in my African environment. So that you can be African, you create like this or that, no, I refuse. I am a part of the world. Creation is an individualistic pursuit.46 Like other sculptors working in Senegal, Dimé faced a number of obstacles concerning the interpretation and reception of and patronage for his works. The small local art market was more suited for two-dimensional objects, which did not require a lot of exhibition space. Moreover, much of the writing on Dimé’s work came from abroad or from resident foreign critics at the cultural centers who had a particular vision of the modern African artist and his or her production as imbued with a certain ‘‘primitivism and naïveté.’’ 47 Despite these constraints, Dimé had a great deal of success in Africa and abroad, winning the top prize at the 1992 Dakar biennale, taking part in both European and African workshops, making an impact on the contemporary art scene in New York City, and becoming a founding member of an artists’ working group Huits Facettes.48 And in 1994, devoting all his earnings from the cash prize of the Dakar biennale and receiving a substantial grant from Helsen, the cultural wing of the Swiss Ministry of Cooperation, Dimé opened his workshop in the refurbished ruins of an old Portuguese fort on Gorée Island. Surrounded by the sea, the artist found many of his materials as he walked on the rocky shore around his studio (figure 49).49 He was well known to the residents of Gorée who often visited to offer him old, broken parts of pirogues or other such materials for his works. Adopting the inclusive atmosphere of the old Village des Arts, Dimé encouraged a relationship between himself, his work, and the surrounding communities, leaving his doors open to all passersby.

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48 Moustapha Dimé, Bird/ Oiseau. Driftwood, metal, found objects. Made for tenq workshop in Saint Louis, Senegal, September 1994. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Pauline Burmann.

49 Studio of Moustapha Dimé, Gorée Island, Sénégal. 1994. Photo Elizabeth Harney.

Master of Iron Sculptor Guibril André Diop was a close associate of Moustapha Dimé at the Village. He, like Dimé, was a pioneer in his field. Born in Saint Louis, the son of a Wolof soldier and amateur photographer, Diop grew up surrounded by the black-and-white images in his father’s photo studio. His interest in and exposure to photography led him to consider painting and drawing and, in turn, sculpture. Diop currently teaches drawing at the Collège Notre Dame, a private girls school in the Plateau area of Dakar, where he also has his studio. The Senegalese press frequently refers to Diop as the ‘‘master of iron’’ (maître du fer) (figure 50). He was, in the mid-1990s, one of the few gallery-oriented Senegalese sculptors working in iron.50 Unlike his friend Dimé, Diop seems to transcend problems of caste and religious tenets in his artistic practice. Like Dimé, however, Diop spent time training at the Centre de Formation Artisanale at Soumbédioune and the Institut National des Arts du Sénégal in the 1970s, where he stayed for the full four-year course. While at the Institut, Diop worked in a wide array of materials. But under his European studio teacher Jean-Paul Fatout, he turned to iron sculpture and soon claimed a metaphysical connection to this material. Diop explains that because iron is an essential component of the human body’s constitu174

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Guibril André Diop with Cosmos. 1994. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

tion, he can respond to and manipulate it better than any other material with which he has worked. Furthermore, this physical attraction is reinforced and legitimized by his Islamic faith, in whose writings he has found passages referring to the importance of iron as an essential ingredient of life, one that ensures prosperity and justice (figure 51).51 Like Dimé, Diop sees his work as an exaltation of Allah. His productions speak to the greatness of Allah and, more generally, to the importance of higher spiritual beings, Muslim or otherwise. As one critic notes: With Diop, the artist’s illustration finds its true source in the faith in God. A practicing Muslim, he doesn’t miss the opportunity to explore ancient beliefs. He has also assimilated the teaching of other relevant religions. He gives the impression of having felt or sensed the convergence of all of these. . . . Since his first steps on earth, man has been in search of divine light so that he may return to his father. For Diop, artistic creation joins prayer.52 Diop’s five-foot work entitled Aspiration divine [Divine Aspiration] comments on humankind’s search for a link to heaven. This structure soars gracefully into the air, punctuated at three points by affixed triangles to indicate the spirit, the body, and the mind. Diop’s polytheistic repertoire employs symbols such as the triangle, to indicate the holy trinity, or the dove to After the Avant-Garde

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51 Guibril André Diop, Choreography ii/ Choréographie ii. 1994. Found iron and nails. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 52 Guibril André Diop, Cosmos. 1993. Iron. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

represent the holy spirit or one who carries the Prophet Muhammad’s words. Other works depict the flora and fauna of heaven and earth, in a manner reminiscent of Islamic renderings of heavenly gardens. Much of his work, then, is metaphysical in nature, focusing on the beauty and wonders of the universe and celebrating humankind’s religious faith. This focus underlies his thoughts behind a work like Cosmos, a kind of triangular patchwork display of small, irregular-sized pieces of iron, which depicts the earth’s continents. Above this quilt of sorts sits a miniature globe, slightly atilt and made in a similar fashion, with which Diop represents the whole cosmos. A small supporting piece of metal, welded to the bottom of this structure, acts as a vital support stand (figure 52). Diop chose to name this small, unembellished but essential element ‘‘Africa.’’ The political implications of this work are obvious. Its composition underscores the asymme176

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tries of cultural power and accentuates Africa’s historical lot as the exploited base of raw materials on which European empires grew. If one took away the African stand, then the whole composition would tumble. The formal structure of most of his works, which shoot upward to the sky, underscore Diop’s preoccupation with the relationship between heaven and earth. The etherealness of these works is all the more remarkable given the weightiness of the material used. Certain key elements provide Diop’s works with a feeling of lightness, the most obvious of which are the long, thin nails—collected from the discards of workshops and derelict building sites—that are made to resemble delicate fingertips in the hands of the sculptor. These sculptures do not have the strong, piercing feel of minkisi figures to which one might compare them. The nails in Diop’s works are not normally hammered into a solid mass, thereby doing violence to its surface, but rather serve to control the movement of his figures in space. In works such as Déploiement (Deployment) or Choréographie ii (Choreography ii), Diop does not create volume by subtraction or seek to capture and enclose space, but, instead, the figures pierce the surrounding environment with amazing elegance, making it part of the composition (figure 53). Diop’s works very rarely contain bright colors and, if they do, they are colors originally found on the object rather than ones applied later. Diop allows the iron of these found objects to rust, achieving a natural, mottled effect. Moreover, he does not attempt to hide the results of the welding process. He sees the strength in natural, somewhat subdued colors perhaps because of his training in black-and-white photography. The rusted iron gives evidence of a former life and, as such, provides another layer of interpretation. As a member of the Laboratoire Agit-Art, Diop shared its members’ interest in the process of production and in the workings of nature on materials. Diop’s récupération leads him to collect not just trash but also new industrial materials that have been discarded (figure 54). His studio is filled with objects that may at one stage or another be recycled into an artistic creation. In his work for the africa’95 workshop at the Yorkshire Sculpture Park in England, Diop created a giant tin-can tree by battering flat a panoply of colored soda cans and adding them to the side of an enormous tree trunk. From the top of this dead stump emerged new growth—a whole series of swaying cans secured at the ends of fiberglass sapling branches: a tree bearing the fruits of consumerism (plate 7 and figure 55). Unlike his friend Dimé, Diop faced no familial opposition to his pursuits, perhaps because he was a photographer’s son or perhaps because he came from the larger city of Saint Louis, where caste considerations were no longer as important. Diop sees no connection between his practice and After the Avant-Garde

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53 Guibril André Diop, Deployment. 1994. Found iron and nails. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

54 Guibril André Diop at work on Ecology Sculpture. 1995. Yorkshire Sculpture Park, England. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

55 Guibril André Diop, Ecology Sculpture, detail. 1995. Recycled cans and wood. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

that of a blacksmith, whose role and status he does not share. Nor, as a practicing Muslim, does he find a problem with producing figurative imagery, as abstracted as it might be. In fact, Diop adamantly rejects many of the problems for sculpture previously noted. For Diop the modern sculptor’s greatest obstacles are those of production—such as the accessibility to materials, space, and tools—and of the market (local and international), which remains largely undeveloped compared to that for painting.

Glass Painting as a Modern Idiom Sous verre artistry has been practiced in Senegal for several generations, but it has only recently begun to undergo a significant transformation because of its newfound place in a tourist market and because of the interest shown in it by academy-trained artists. This interest is matched by a recent surge in innovative young artists trained in a traditional apprenticeship manner who have begun to expand the repertoire of glass paintings. The technique of glass painting originated in western Asia (present-day Syria and Iraq) as early as 1500 bc. It came to Europe via Byzantium in the fourteenth century and reached its height of production and popularity in Europe between 1750 and 1850. The invention and spread of chromolithography in the 1830s contributed to the demise of the practice in Europe, by which time it had spread to the Middle East, China, and India. The first sous verre in Senegal were imported from regions of the Maghreb—Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia—by wealthy Senegalese Muslim pilgrims who had encountered them in the shrines at Fez, Marrakech, and Rabat at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. While the pilgrims had money to travel to see this new technique, the artisans of Senegal did not. Therefore the first generation of Senegalese glass painters was selftaught, faithfully imitating the imported Maghrebian images. Because it was not an indigenous practice, these artisans had to improvise with materials and tools, buying Chinese ink and paper, brushes, paints, and glass from the Syrian-Lebanese merchants in Senegal’s largest towns. These artists were often craftspeople skilled in other areas, either carpenters, masons, leather workers, or weavers. The majority were Muslim men who belonged to one of the religious brotherhoods. Though the practice began with a small patronage of Muslim faithful, it soon developed into a large profession, taken up by craftspeople all over Senegal who sought to fill the need of the growing faithful and to defy the French colonial administrative ban on Islamic literature and votive imagery.

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(Muslim themes were heavily influenced by the Shi’i tradition adhered to by the Lebanese merchants from whom materials were purchased.)53 As a result of this ban, sous verre paintings depicting stories of the Qur’an and praising the life of the Prophet proliferated. The spread of the sous verre practice also corresponded to the growing ease with which one could find inexpensive glass and paint at French trading houses. The production process of sous verre begins with a drawing or design made on the side of the glass away from the viewer, the reverse side.54 In this way, the glass simultaneously serves as the support and the protective covering for the image. An artist may use a stencil, a model, or some sort of tracing for the basic outline of popular images that are repeated again and again. Then the artist retraces the basic outline with a fine paintbrush, in ink or black paint, to produce a delicate black line. In the next step, the artist paints the details of embroidered clothing or inserts his signature before filling in the forms with oil paints. The background must be painted last, without the artist seeing the foreground figures. Mistakes are chipped off quickly with a razor or other thin blade. Sometimes the images are baked to ensure a greater cohesion of paint to glass. The plates of glass used are usually between two and three millimeters in thickness and have a surface area of forty by sixty centimeters. Bright primary colors are commonly used, and the forms are flat, emphasized with a strong contour line. The deliberate lack of perspective in these works underscores the meaning of their direct didactic messages. It is interesting to note the similarities between sous verre imagery and that developed by the tapestries of Thiès. The Thiès productions, too, frequently make use of bright colors. As happens with sous verre, the weaving process limits the composition, producing flat forms of solid colors, highlighted by strong contour lines. Both tapestry and sous verre makers must slowly build up their materials. And, finally, the subject matter is often similar, with its references to the history and mythology of Senegal’s peoples. The most popular themes for sous verre paintings take their inspiration from the Bible and Qur’an: Noah’s Ark, the sacrifice of Abraham, the Garden of Eden, and famous stories of the Islamic faith such as the night journey of the Prophet with Al-Buraq. Scenes of divination and Qur’anic schools are also sometimes produced. The Muslim subject matter also focuses on the triumphs of local religious brotherhoods—the Mourides, Tijannis, Quadiriyya, and the Layennes.55 Images celebrate the life and accomplishments of the brotherhoods’ founders and their successors. The most popular tell stories from the life of Amadou Bamba, the founder of the

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Mourides (1850–1927).56 The image of Bamba is always the same, showing his slight body engulfed in a flowing white caftan. He is also sometimes pictured with a small bird that brings him the word of the Prophet in a letter.57 His frequent expulsion from Senegal by the French who suspected him of subversive behavior made the legends and miraculous activities attributed to Bamba all the more appealing and colorful to the faithful. For instance, some paintings depict the visit of the French to Bamba, in 1891, to warn him of the severe punishments he would receive if found to be the instigator of a jihad. Others speak of Bamba’s suffering in exile from 1895 to 1902, when he was kept in a French army camp in Gabon, isolated from the outside world. It was during this time that the myths about his miraculous capabilities began among his devotees in Senegal. He returned from Gabon a hero. Numerous paintings depict the fantastic terrors faced by Bamba during exile. One series shows Bamba on an island full of snakes and devils. Another one shows the holy man caged with a hungry lion. And still another has the marabout buried alive. The humble holy man miraculously survived all of these extraordinary trials. The story of Bamba’s journey into exile, known as ‘‘Prayer for the Waves,’’ has also emerged as a very popular image. In 1895, while deporting Bamba to Gabon, the French captain of the transport ship would not allow the holy man to say his prayers. So Bamba threw his prayer mat overboard and, protected by angels, prayed on the surface of the water while the French looked on in amazement. Sous verre series also depict the triumphs of El Hadji Malick Sy (1855– 1922), the founder of the Tijanni brotherhood in Senegal, and those of Sheikh Ibra Fall (1858–1930), a disciple of Amadou Bamba and the founder of the Baye Fall sect of the Mourides.58 The portraits of Malick Sy are based on the only extant photograph of the leader, which shows him holding an umbrella and dressed in a caftan on the occasion of the opening of the mosque in Tivaouane, the sacred city of the Tijanni in Senegal. The growth of the sous verre technique enabled a diversification of themes and uses. In the 1920s and 1930s, when photography became a fashionable means through which the wealthy could document their lives, the sous verre technique was used to decorate photos. Portraits were placed on glass and framed by painted decoration of geometric and floral motifs (figure 56).59 Glass paintings also began to function as portraits in place of photographs for local well-to-do families. While in Europe the development of photography contributed to the demise of the glass-painting tradition, in Senegal artists and patrons turned to sous verre rather than photography because the latter proved too expensive and materials too difficult to acquire. Sometimes commissioned portraits would depict the features of specific individuals, but 182

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56 Anonymous, Seated Man. n.d. Photograph with glass painting. ©Africa-Museum Tervuren, Belgium.

more frequently, they would constitute idealized images of élégantes (female beauties) endowed with specific accessories of costume, hair, and jewelry to indicate their ethnicity and status.60 These women were pictured in direct frontal poses, like those common in the photographs of the day (figure 57).61 In addition to the images of the indigenous bourgeoisie, sous verre painters depicted the escapades of Wolof warriors and the tales of Muslim pilgrims. In a sense, then, these glass painters played the role of griots. Their craft, expanding beyond religious subject matter to incorporate legends, myths, and proverbs, embodied the cultural history of their people. Nowadays, with the growing tourist market, sous verre makers produce decorative vignettes of idealized villages, mythical scenes with jinn, and humorous situations from everyday life, some of which are imbued with a strong moralizing tone.62 The first self-taught painters remain anonymous in the history books. It was not until the 1950s that artists began to sign their names to their works. The first documented glass painters were Balla N’Diaye, Oumar Mousse After the Avant-Garde

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57 Babacar Lô, Woman with Libidor. n.d. Glass painting. © Africa-Museum Tervuren, Belgium.

Guèye, and N’Diaye Lô, who called their schooling l’école de la rue, the school of the streets.63 One could label their students, trained between 1910 and 1950, the ‘‘second generation.’’ The best known of these artists are Modou Fall, working in Dakar, and Gora M’Bengue, creating in Guediewaye, a populous suburb of Dakar. M’Bengue received his training in the city of Kaolack (southeast of Dakar) under a local master, Serigne Sarr, and eventually moved to the outskirts of Dakar to open his studio.64 He based his subject matter on Wolof oral history and his own dreams. Unlike other glass painters, M’Bengue did not work from set models or stencils, but drew with pen and India ink directly onto the glass, making each production an original. Toward the end of M’Bengue’s life, a number of galleries and museums at home and abroad showed his works.65 Self-taught painter Babacar Lô, who makes portraits of individuals in formal, frontal poses, is also of this generation. The third and current generation of sous verre artists includes individuals such as Amadou Diallo, Sea Diallo, Souleymane Dione, Gabou, Mor Guèye, Abdou Kane, Angele Billy Kock, Birahim Fall M’Bida, Alexis N’Gom, and Amadou Sane. These artists have striven to insert a sense of modernity into the subject matter, composition, and models used. They replace the stiff, stylized figures and limited color palette of their predecessors with greater 184

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movement, detail, depth, and color. The sous verre paintings of the newest generation have begun to move from the informal to more formal venues of art in Senegal, appearing in traveling shows, art galleries, and cultural centers in Dakar. One of the most successful artists of this group is Mor Guèye, one of Gora M’Bengue’s protégés. Born in 1926, Guèye is a descendant of Wolof nobility. His origins are important to note because they reflect an important shift in the backgrounds of practitioners. Previously regarded as an artisanal, caste-related activity, sous verre paintings are increasingly the products of artists from a diverse spectrum of Senegalese society. Before apprenticing with M’Bengue, Guèye would trace the black outlines of his images with a reed normally used for writing on Qur’anic prayer boards, known as a calame. M’Bengue encouraged him to use pen and India ink. In his choice of themes, Guèye is no great innovator. He primarily produces images of Mourides and élégantes. However, his rejection of opaque primary colors in favor of stark but striking contrasts of black and white is unique. Alexis N’Gom (b. 1957), a Serer who converted to Islam, also apprenticed with M’Bengue from 1975 to 1977, opening his own workshop in 1979. His ink outlines often make generous use of chiaroscuro, giving much greater volume to figures than did earlier practitioners. The relationship of official art patronage to sous verre production is difficult to assess. Glass painting techniques were never taught within the walls of the art academies, and only recently have galleries begun to exhibit these creations. However, by 1978 the government did support the founding of a workshop for sous verre painters in Thiès (as a small adjunct to the tapestry center). Arona Diarra, a practicing sous verre artist, directed this workshop from 1978 to 1990. Under his tutelage, a whole series of young painters learned the technique. Souleymane Dione, who signs his works as Jules (b. 1958), trained under Diarra. He has received attention for having attempted to introduce the painting of nudes into the sous verre repertoire, an action violently opposed both by other practitioners and Senegalese collectors.66 A contemporary of Dione’s, Gabou (Gabriel Balacoune, b. 1965) paints primarily Christian themes and has also experimented with nudes.67 Birahim Fall (b. 1950), known as M’Bida, produces works that are very popular with tourists at Dakar’s Kermel market, therefore having many imitators. In his works, the bright colors of his predecessors have been softened with tints applied in gouache, oils, or enamel paints. He often uses a black background for his narrative scenes, insisting that ‘‘it is the African night, the negritude which, in spite of its blackness, is full of color.’’ 68 Artist Sea Diallo, bored with the traditions of sous verre, has recently begun to fashion his favorite narrative After the Avant-Garde

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58 Germaine Anta Gaye at home. 1994. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

scenes about female powers over men by combining glass painting techniques with collage. His pigments are homemade from vegetable dyes of red sorrel, henna, and coffee. The last category of glass painters in Senegal is that composed of artists trained at the École Nationale des Beaux Arts, the most notable of whom are Germaine Anta Gaye, Serigne N’Diaye, Hassane Sarr, Souleymane Keita, and Amadou Sow. These individuals have all apprenticed with glass painters in and around Dakar. Germaine Anta Gaye (b. 1953) is one of the most successful academytrained artists producing sous verre today. Gaye, who began working in glass as a student at the École Nationale Supérieure d’Éducation Artistique (ensea) in the 1970s, brought a very personal agenda to the reclamation of this art form (figure 58).69 Gaye was born in Saint Louis into a wealthy Muslim intellectual family. Her mother, originally from Gorée, had attended the École Normale de Filles in the city of Rufisque. This school was the first colonial school for women and received the children of the African elite from throughout French West Africa. Gaye’s father, from Saint Louis, was one of the first to receive a baccalaureate in 1913 and became a veterinarian.70 As a child, Gaye was encouraged to read, write, and pursue arts, but always with the assumption that she, too, would have an academic career. Visual arts were seen as pursuits of one’s leisure time, an activity that encouraged an état d’esprit (spiritual state). Gaye attended Cheikh Anta Diop University in Dakar in literature studies and eventually earned a master’s degree in ‘‘modern letters,’’ for which she

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59 Germaine Anta Gaye, drawing of signare. 1993. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

documented the history of signares in colonial Gorée and Saint Louis (figure 59). Signares were African women who married or had sexual relationships with the first Portuguese traders in the fifteenth century.71 This practice was then continued with colonial traders from England, Holland, and eventually France. These women became very wealthy and influential during the colonial period because they acted as both business and sexual partners for their European companions. In Saint Louis, they emerged as key figures in securing business deals, through a network of relatives and friends, with the African populations living along the Senegal River valley.72 Those in Gorée performed similar business deals for their European partners. These women were treated, for all intents and purposes, with the respect afforded European wives. When a French businessman returned home or died, it was customary for him to leave a bequest in the form of a house and servants for his Senegalese wife or partner. The signares invested huge amounts of capital in servants, boats, and houses, all three of which could always be profitably rented. The women, enriched by marriages with Europeans, also amassed personal fortunes through their own trading contacts. It was not uncommon to have signares competing with the European company monopolies on products such as gum arabic. Travel accounts and company logs from Portuguese, French, Dutch, and English traders in Senegal abound with descriptions of these women. The women of the island (Saint-Louis) are, in general, closely associated with white men, and are there for them when they are sick in a

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manner that could not be bettered. The majority live in considerable affluence, and many African women own thirty or forty slaves which they hire to the Company. . . . The women have some of [this] gold made into jewelry, and the rest is used to purchase clothing, because they adore, as do women everywhere else, fashionable clothing. Their mode of dress, characteristically very elegant, suits them very well. They wear a very artistically arranged white handkerchief on the head, over which they affix a small narrow black ribbon, or a colored one, around their head. A shift à la française, ornamented; a bodice of taffeta or muslin; a skirt of the same and similar to the bodice; gold earrings; anklets of gold or silver, for they will wear no others; red morocco slippers on the feet;73 The subject of signares fascinated Gaye partly because it was an element of her personal heritage and partly because it represented a time in Senegalese history when women had great power and control over their own lives. After graduating from the university, Gaye enrolled at ensea to train as an art teacher.74 As a graduate of ensea, she became a civil servant, teaching at the École Mame Thierno M’Backe.75 In Gaye’s third year in school, she was required to choose a subject for her thesis. Eager to select a topic with relevance to her everyday life, Gaye turned her attention to the medium of sous verre because many, in the early to mid-part of this century, documented the lives of signares, whose demeanor and dress served as models for the images of élégantes. Gaye found the works of photographers from the 1940s, such as Mama Casset, Doudou Diop, or Meïssa Gaye, of great interest. These photographs, often embellished by painted details, depicted the lives of the descendants of signares, known as habitants.76 Her project, entitled ‘‘La parure chez la femme sénégalaise’’ (‘‘The Adornment of the Senegalese Women’’), drew on these extant old photographs and sous verre paintings. Initially, Gaye did not concern herself with the technique or qualities of the medium; the history they told held greater interest for her. She hoped her works would safeguard this history for future generations. It was her French art teacher who insisted that she could not complete her project without learning for herself the technique of sous verre.77 Gaye went to an area known as the Cour des Maures (the court of the Moors, i.e., Mauritanians) in Dakar to work with resident masters such as Mor Guèye, Modou Fall, and Babacar Lô. However, after learning the technique, Gaye found it too limiting and began to look for ways in which to expand her use of the medium. Slowly, she began to experiment, learning through trial

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and error the properties of glass. The stiff, frontal poses began to disappear. The details were expanded through etching on the surface of the glass and the flatness was removed by utilizing a montage effect. The series she produced during her third and fourth years at ensea began to acquire a life of its own. She fashioned these signares on glass, using water colors, as well as oil and enamel paints, textiles, and etching (plate 8). Gaye found that she could control the chemical reactions of the enamel on glass by applying bits of tape, allowing the paints to sit in the humidity over different periods of time and mixing them with gold leaf powder. Some compositions she left for up to fifteen hours to obtain the desired results, which were soft and mottled, having a spray-painted look. The tape removed bits in a rather unpredictable way, fracturing the traditional large masses of solid color to give more texture, movement, and subtlety to the compositions. Gaye enjoyed working in the medium ‘‘thanks to the accidents, the imprecisions’’ 78 one could create thereon. Although most of her early works on signares were figurative and endowed with meticulous and historically accurate details of costume, her more recent works are almost all nonfigurative, taking the surrounding environment as their theme (plate 9). These compositions, in which the artist has achieved a great degree of movement, are often placed within an item of furniture (figure 60). Several act as tabletops or as parts of cabinets. In this way, Gaye has expanded the use of sous verre in Senegal by making it an integral part of interior design (figure 61). The small number of art-school trained individuals working with the sous verre technique is bound to grow in the years to come as the nature of art education in Senegal undergoes further reflection and change. The effects of the 1994 currency devaluation were in evidence at the École Nationale des Beaux Arts, where teachers sought ways in which to give greater emphasis to local materials and methods, as those from elsewhere became prohibitively expensive.

Viyé Diba: In Search of an Authentic Signature In his works, Viyé Diba marries the mediums of sculpture and painting, employing the discarded materials he finds in his neighborhood on the outskirts of Dakar. He wraps and knots strips of cloth around and sometimes through his canvases, suggesting a three-dimensionality of form. These works are somber, created through a thick layering of paint in shades of rose, gray, green, and blue (figure 62). Yet their muted palette does not render

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60 Germaine Anta Gaye, glass painting in sewing table. 1994. Glass, paint, wooden and metal table. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

them lifeless. On the contrary, the highly textured pieces are filled with movement. Diba’s use of multiple materials and his repetition of vertical strips of canvas or pagne encourages the viewer’s eye to move around the image and suggests the aggressive stance the artist takes during the creative process. As the artist notes: I have a horror of caressing the material—I attack it, rip it open. That’s why I’ve said that I was searching to move beyond the poetic language of painting to end up with a confrontation, a combat between the material and myself. When you watch me work, you realize that I don’t use an easel; I work on the ground. Because I want to encounter a resistance; in this case the hardness of the ground. That gives me more energy to engage in combat with my work. I have told you that my support is at the same time my material. So I don’t caress it, I attack it, I destroy it, I question it. There is a dialogue between it and myself.79

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61 Germaine Anta Gaye, Birds/ Oiseaux. 1988. Glass painting and gold leaf powder set in table top. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

62 Viyé Diba, Title Unknown. 1993. Mixed media, 120 × 100 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

Throughout his artistic career, Diba has been interested in the relationship of humankind to his environment. He divides his work into three ‘‘generations.’’ The first generation, early examples of which are pen-and-ink sketches, consists of compositions that take a central figure as their subject and are concerned with the use of color, volume, and form. In the second generation, the central figure disappears and is replaced by a preoccupation with spatial relations between pictorial elements. Finally, the third stage or generation focuses on the development of a ‘‘signature’’ enabling the artist to address the problems in his environment while simultaneously reexamining past traditions. The formal preoccupations of the second and third generations seem to overlap, both employing the use of found materials in the process of récupération. Diba trained for eight years at the arts institutions of Senegal. He first entered the Institut National des Arts du Sénégal in 1973 and received a degree in fine arts. On graduating, he worked toward his baccalaureate, which he received in 1979. Then, from 1979 to 1983, Diba returned to art school and entered ensea to obtain a four-year degree as a teacher of art education. For this degree, he completed a thesis entitled ‘‘L’utilisation des matériaux de l’environnement dans l’éducation artistique’’ (‘‘The Use of Environmental Materials in Art Education’’). During this time, Diba had two major concerns: first, to find a solution to the lack of materials in the art schools, and second, to valorize everyday materials and thereby expand the artistic repertoire. He considered found materials important teaching tools because they could be touched and handled by the students, whereas those imported were rarely available and, when they were, students saw them immediately claimed by the artist-teachers for their own works. In his own work at this time, Diba made use of many vegetable materials and took a great interest in the formal possibilities of sand, seen in the works of the sand painters who produce idyllic images of Africa to sell to tourists at Dakar’s biggest hotels.80 It was not until 1983 that Diba seriously began to paint with oils and acrylic.81 When he exhibited for the first time in the 1985 Salon National, he presented brightly colored narrative images of marginals, such as the homeless lepers living on Dakar’s streets. These works studied the manner in which color creates, contains, and controls form. In the artists’ own words, ‘‘That which interests me with the handicapped is the effort they must exert with their crutches to move themselves. Their body undergoes a very interesting change. There is a complete transfer of energy which operates at the level of the shoulders, thereby offering a ‘plastic’ relationship worthy of interest.’’ 82 Diba’s interest in the interrelationship between form and color also led him to study the movements and dress of 192

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Senegalese women, who ‘‘know how to paint with their dress thanks to a judicious association of colors’’ and to express ‘‘their femininity with their hands and their gestures.’’ 83 Through the study of body language, the artist could depict an individual’s personality without needing to paint detailed facial features. In 1986, Diba received a scholarship to study for a doctorate in urban geography in Nice, France. His doctoral thesis, ‘‘Salubrité et esthétique nouvelle: Étude comparative de Nice et de Dakar’’ (‘‘Health and a New Aesthetic: A Comparative Study of Nice and Dakar’’), juxtaposed the environments of Nice and the Tilène market in the populous Médina quarter of Dakar, examining how the environment was altered by human activities in and attitudes toward it. Each environmental material carried with it some form of human signature, a trace of human action. In 1990 he had his first individual exhibition at the Galerie Nationale, entitled Environnement, témoin culturel (Environment: Cultural Witness). Presenting works of the second generation that made use of everyday materials, Diba began experimenting with spatial relations between elements within the compositions.84 As the figure began to appear less frequently in his works, the emphasis on line and geometry increased (figure 63).85 The composition entitled Situations, acrylic on paper, is representative of this stage. The artist explains the changes in his work: Finally, personages completely disappeared from my work, and I was only interested in this linear reading of the space. This is why, in my series Altitudes, you will see great games of lines that traverse, where the space is no longer worked. So I came to a flat painting, a flat composition that no longer retained the third dimension that I had moved beyond so as to retain only the linear effect which unites all the elements in space.86 Unlike others of his generation, Diba has deliberately chosen to engage with the history of the École de Dakar. He does so with the vocabulary and discourse of postcolonial studies. His thoughts on identity and artistry, différence and hybridity, and neocolonialism and globalism may be couched in different language, but they echo many of the same debates about racial essence, creativity, and the politics of representation explored by Senghor and his colleagues. Several years ago, in 1990, Diba’s materials, method, and approach changed considerably. He regards this change as the third and current stage of production, describing the beginnings of this period as a time during which he was ‘‘obsessed’’ with debates about the identity and authentic character of African arts and the African artist.87 He explained: After the Avant-Garde

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63 Viyé Diba, Géometrie vitale. 1993. Mixed media, 120 × 114 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

I heard people saying, ‘‘That’s African, that’s not African; when you paint like that, it is Western.’’ The problem was that I did not fit into the scheme. So I decided to stop working for three months and reflect and, starting from what I was doing [then], to find an alternative route that was fitting to me. So, during this period of observation, I went to the museum everyday. I passed before the masks and statues, and I examined them closely, I questioned them with my gaze. In fact, I wanted to uncover and understand this necessity to have an ‘‘African soul,’’ without having necessarily to copy these objects, I wanted to situate them in my cultural sphere; these were the kind of questions I was asking myself.88 This process of interrogating museum pieces in order to extract a quintessence from them and the treatment of them as metonymic devices that hold the key to unlocking a constellation of cultural mores have striking parallels with the discovery narratives of the early modernists. Diba must filter through many of the tropes about a traditional Africa that led to the appreciation and collection of these objects, and also their eventual reclamation by Negritude advocates. Through his work, Diba soon found a way with which to deal not only with recent, postcolonial attempts by critics and scholars to define his ‘‘authenticity’’ as an African artist but also to return to the Senghorian discourse of a shared âme nègre. He compared his investigations of African traditional arts and culture to those of artists in the École de Dakar, making a clear distinction between the blind copying of visual form and his approach, which reinterprets the formal elements on a conceptual level. His newer works, then, are based on this interpretation and rearticulation of the underlying properties of traditional statues. He takes as examples the use of proportions, the emphasis on rhythm (forms resembling movements of African dance), and the expression of closeness to the earth. This citation of rhythmic qualities recalls Senghor’s emphasis on rhythm as the ‘‘architecture of being.’’ 89 Diba states, ‘‘On the level of composition . . . I made a comparison between the statues and dance. I understood that the attitudes of the statues are the attitudes of dance. Because African dance submits the body to a break of equilibrium in order to create another which betrays the usual proportions.’’ 90 Diba takes the descriptive vocabulary used to speak of the museum’s sculpture to discuss his own work. His creations often contain a soaring space at the top of the composition and a cloth wrapped and knotted securely around the bottom so as to draw the eye downward and around the

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image. His division of the canvas into repetitive vertical sections underscores this feeling of spaciousness and rhythm. The artist calls this knotted wrap an esthétique kangourou (kangaroo aesthetic) because it produces a pouch in which the work can sit. In his composition entitled Rhythme kangourou (Kangaroo Rhythm), Diba produces what he calls a fetishlike image in which roughly hewn strips of wood are encircled by cloth. These strips of cloth, or pagne, look like bandages, at once concealing and protecting the pieces of wood beneath them. Some of them form small pouches stuffed with multicolored bits of material and sewn together by rough fiber cords, reminiscent of the multimedia objects used for divination, retribution, and healing among many African peoples (plate 10). In his latest stage of creation, Diba simultaneously acknowledges the flatness of the picture surface by applying thick layers of paint to create a tactile surface and negates its two-dimensionality by wrapping his images. In his efforts to supersede the notion of a painting’s surface as a screen, Diba on occasion has created works with moveable parts. Notably, in his Plantlike Evocation, Diba suspends a small framed image from a string, almost like a talisman, which can be moved to produce a continuously changing and interactive image (figure 64). In some ways, one could view Diba’s works as a modern rendition of Senghor’s esthétique négro-africaine, but they conjure up only faint memories of the earlier forms and speak strongly of the conditions in the surrounding metropolis of Dakar. For in creating this new aesthetic, Diba also reconsidered his approach to his materials, drawing again from the manner in which he believed traditional practitioners related to their works. He explains: In contrast to the West, in Africa, the support as support does not exist; the material is also the support. What’s interesting is to question why the support has become the material? Because it is not neutral, it is participatory. For me, it’s not a question of reproducing masks, because I am not living the realities of these masks. Rather, it’s a question of visualizing how, in relation to my formal preoccupations, I can reuse materials and give new value to them, elevate them to the dignity of a work of art.91 In his choice of local materials, Diba joined a number of other Senegalese artists, working in the generation after the height of nationalist fervor and Senghorian patronage, to call into question the supremacy of imported canvas and oil paints and the distinction made and separation encouraged between the arts. Diba’s working of materials, in which he often layers his paints to produce a rich, thick, and antique-looking surface, refers back to 196

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64 Viyé Diba, Plantlike Evocation. 1996. Mixed media. Collection of the National Museum of African Art. Photo by Franko Khoury.

the rich, encrusted patinas he observed in the museum, mocking the Western collectors’ penchant for antique surfaces and muted colors (figure 65). Diba is also active in the political side of the arts, serving as a vocal leader in the artists associations. He now teaches at the École Nationale des Beaux Arts, where he encourages younger artists to research and work with new materials and modes of expression that diversify the earlier teachings of the same institution when it was the testing ground for Senghor’s cultural development plans.

Kan-Si and Cheikh Niass: Postcolonial Plays with Structure and Vocabulary Like those of Viyé Diba, the works of his former students Kan-Si and Cheikh Niass blur distinctions between sculpture and painting.92 These playful and often disconcerting assemblages result from the manipulation of planes and the fracturing of the picture frame. Kan-Si’s series of multipart works from After the Avant-Garde

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Viyé Diba at work in courtyard studio. 1994. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

the mid-1990s—which employ wood, metal, ribbed cardboard, and paper— are often more rigid than those of Niass, whose thick and gestural brushstrokes reunite the broken surfaces of his compositions. Kan-Si came to art school after several unhappy years studying for a law degree at the University of Dakar. He describes his artistry as follows: I didn’t wake up one fine day to say that I was an artist. I think that I am an artist-painter and that I write because I have things to express in relation to the course my life has laid down for me until now. This need for expression is vital in me so that I don’t suffocate or explode. My guts have demands that must be externalized by the language of plastic arts. When I take up my brushes for painting, I do not question myself about an alleged authenticity that I do not live at all; my sole concern in these instances is to put together enough plastic elements (forms and colors) to give all the force that is necessary to my expression (so as to satisfy the demands of my guts). Now the question of knowing the coloration of my guts (African, Muslim, and Western) remains unresolved. Again, my art is indistinguishable from my life, from my environment, from my epoch, from my preoccupations, and from my spiritual quest. Since art does not lie, and if I am sincere in my artistic pursuits (as I believe I am), then all that will be transparent in my work (painting and writing).93 In his sketchbooks, Kan-Si often combines poetic musings in English, French, Wolof, and Arabic with studies in perspective and modeling. This coupling of written word and image recalls Senghor’s preference for a link between poetry and painting, and such an arranged marriage of media was exactly the dynamic that the first members of the Laboratoire Agit-Art sought to deconstruct. However, as the above statement suggests, Kan-Si’s pursuits are highly personal. He, like many well-educated artists of his generation, has been schooled in the Negritude writings of Senghor, Césaire, and Alioune and David Diop, but he also knows Frantz Fanon, Ousmane Sembene, Sekou Touré, and others. He is certainly not one to be impressed with poetic interpretations of his works, nor does he agree to have his practice subsumed by the ideological concerns of the establishment, of which he is both critical and suspicious. Although it abounds in his workbooks, one rarely finds text in his large multimedia assemblages. Nonetheless, his writings are filled with references to the formal aspects of his paintings. The angst and alienation he speaks of in many of his poems about Africa, as well as the repeated questioning of his artistic, cultural, and personal identity in others, do receive visual form. After the Avant-Garde

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In poems such as ‘‘Amère Afrique’’ (‘‘Bitter Africa’’), Kan-Si laments the fragile and confused state of his continent. Kinshasa, Lomé What a spectacle you still convey to me. . . . you hide behind your hand which you hold out to me again to humiliate me, to fleece me better.94 Similarly, in his series known as Déstructurés (Unstructured ), Kan-Si expresses his uneasiness and frustration through a play of dislocation of scale, a mixing and matching of materials, and a shattering of the picture surface to produce voids through which to see the surrounding environment. These voids not only enable him to question the two-dimensionality and integrity of the painted image but also allow the environment and the piece to act on one another (figure 66). The glimpse of the surroundings through the spaces in the work of art results in an image constantly transforming itself. This process of change and reinvention embodied in the artwork itself enables Kan-Si to comment on the constantly shifting and polyreferent nature of modern self and group identities. In this way, the déstructurés may be viewed as both products and shapers of the complex postcolonial reality of life in Senegal. As the artist suggests, they are of this historical era, ‘‘the moment when all seems to break and fissure.’’ 95 With the Déstructurés series, Si invents ‘‘a unity of signs that . . . reveal, perhaps, a new alphabet.’’ 96 Like members of Agit-Art, Kan-Si wants to use his creative capacity to expand the formal aspects of the media, as well as suggest alternative methods of display to suit his diverse audience. As multimedia images, his works’ ‘‘occupation of space will give them an allure of paintingsculpture that will be able to be exhibited everywhere (museum, gallery, public space)’’ (figure 67).97 In pondering the structure of his works, KanSi looks widely for inspiration. His Déstructurés series, and the experiments that have followed, often make deliberate references to European modernist vocabulary. He writes, ‘‘My work will have some points of convergence with the avant-gardists of Pop Art (Marcel Duchamp, and so on).’’ 98 In his rendition of Picasso’s Guitar, Kan-Si quite clearly connects his experiments with pictorial space to those of the cubist. His choice of reference also allows him to claim the African contribution to the development of European modernism in a much more direct way than that expressed by the École de Dakar.99 Quite apart from these multimedia assemblages, Kan-Si has created a whole series concerned with the central role of prayer in Senegal.100 His praying figures are faceless, united in their actions and in their devotion to 200

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66 Kan-Si, Destructured iii/ Déstructuré iii. 1992. Mixed media. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

67 Kan-Si, Destructured V/ Déstructuré V. 1992. Mixed media, 224 × 223.5 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

Allah (figure 68). With this series, Kan-Si speaks to the democratic ideals of Islam and flirts with the supposed prohibitions of his faith toward figurative imagery. Even at a young age, Kan-Si has earned the respect of important figures in the Dakarois art world. He has worked with Issa Samb and frequently meets with Ibou Diouf, the former École de Dakar painter and tapestry designer whom Kan-Si simply calls le grand (the great). He has been quick to take advantage of the opportunities for exchange offered through the foreign cultural centers in Senegal, attending ouag’art in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso, the Festival des Francophonies Internationales en Limousin in Limoges, and the Salon des Découvertes in Paris, all in 1994. In 1995, his works were shown in the africa’95 season of events in Britain. Kan-Si, too, has become a vital part of the artists’ group Huits Facettes, which now exhibits collaboratively throughout the world. Kan-Si views himself as both an international and a local artist, capable of addressing a wide audience. He insists, however, that like Dimé, he does not want to be forced to choose 202

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between the poles of provincialism and homogeneity so often presented as the options for admission to an international art market. Cheikh Niass, Kan-Si’s close friend and former classmate, refers to himself as un artiste du village planétaire (an artist of the global village). Niass collects much of his material on the beaches surrounding his studio in Joal, a small fishing town south of Dakar that had been an early stronghold of Portuguese influence and the hometown of Senghor. With his practice of récupération, Niass creates playful assemblages, shaping them into the form of masks, using the rubber soles of sandals, beads, empty plastic water jugs, and other refuse to invent a new aesthetic suitable to his environment and pertinent to his lifestyle (figure 69). He is most concerned with finding a way in which to contribute to a universal humanism. In that way, he sounds very much like the former president. Niass insists that the African artist, even given the limited materials he or she has available, may propose new and potentially unique solutions to formal problems, and perhaps also to social ills. His recycling of refuse occurs in recognition of this potential within Senegal. His earlier works were mostly in oils on canvas, often painted in pastel or marine tones. Already at this stage in his career one could detect his interest in spatial relations and his ability and desire to see beyond the conventional. These early works were executed on bits of canvas carved out into circular or curvilinear shapes and then reassembled to form a new multipart whole. The gestures of the brushstrokes imitated the overall shape of the canvas to which they were applied, producing highly dynamic images (plate 11). His new, large works resemble textiles, interweaving canvas, jute sacks, the textured bark of coconut palms, and driftwood. He first began to use these latticelike structures after seeing an old bed frame leaning up against a wall in his grandmother’s house (figure 70). He was immediately attracted to the texture and the play of space and light that resulted from the interweaving of wooden slats. Having the use of only one of his hands since birth, Niass struggled to find a way in which to technically imitate the lattice structure he had encountered. While he wants to be free to explore an international career, Niass also sees the need to bring his works to a larger Senegalese public that either feels uncomfortable in the gallery spaces of Dakar and Saint Louis or does not have access to them at all.101 In the courtyard of his family home in Joal, Niass has erected a monumental iron work, painted in the blues and greens of the surrounding sea, which he has devoted to his neighborhood.102 With the financial support of Joal’s mayor, Niass plans to create a whole series of these sculptures to serve as local bus stops. Like Kan-Si, he is extremely weary of After the Avant-Garde

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68 Kan-Si, Secular Ritual/ Ritual séculaire. 1994. Oil on paper, 85.5 × 92.4 cm. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

being stereotyped by those operating in the marketplace with neoprimitivist tendencies. Niass states that it should be made clear that there is no such thing as an underdeveloped art. Maybe one senses the milieu, one senses the preoccupations of that milieu, but one cannot sense, just by the mixed technique, by the contemporary plastic data that a certain artist is from an underdeveloped or developing nation. Senegalese artists give solutions to current problems. For example, there is Joe Ouakam. He said in the text for his recent exhibition, ‘‘Assemble local materials and strive to create a new order.’’ 103 The patronage and market options available to the young artists working today differ quite markedly from those of the country’s first president’s chers enfants. With a greater freedom of expression, but in the face of waning state patronage, they must contend with more uncertainty about their audience and their place within local and international paradigms of reception and criticism. As the discussions in the final chapter of this book will show, it is these young artists who are at the forefront of debates about the politics of identity and its relationship to the interpretation of African arts in an international arena. 204

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69 Cheikh Niass, Untitled. 1993. Mixed media, recycled materials. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

Walls that Talk: The Murals of set setal In 1988 and 1989, Dakar and, to a lesser extent, other Senegalese cities witnessed the birth, proliferation, and death of the mural movement known as set setal. The images produced took a wide variety of forms, ranging from flat, schematic figural scenes to voluminous graffiti and cartoon characters and to modeled, highly detailed, illusionistic compositions (plate 12). Wall surfaces were treated as enormous canvases, stage sets, billboards, and blackboards. Set Setalians, as the self-taught muralists came to be known, also applied their materials (primarily industrial house paints) to other urban surfaces like tires, sidewalks, manhole covers, street posts, doors, bus stops, benches, and tree trunks. The iconography of their works drew on a broad range of cultural, political, social, historical, and religious themes, often juxtaposed or combined in striking ways. set setal translates from the Wolof to mean ‘‘to make clean, to make proper,’’ and, as such, took as its main goal the cleaning of Dakar’s quartiers (neighborhoods) by local youth. In an effort to stamp out the filthiness of Dakar, a result of government neglect, the youth took to their streets to sweep up, burn trash, and gather funds to rebuild and repaint decrepit structures. This sanitation effort was both literal and metaphorical, seeking After the Avant-Garde

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70 Cheikh Niass, Untitled. 1994. Oil on canvas and wood. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

to cleanse Dakar of government corruption, prostitution, immorality, and delinquency. The immediate inspiration for this movement has been credited to numerous sources, one of whom is Mbalax superstar Youssou N’Dour, who, in his song ‘‘Set,’’ encouraged his fellow citizens to keep a clean environment and, by extension, a clean heart.104 He sings, ‘‘Cleanliness in your spirit; cleanliness in your acts. Thus, I urge you, cleanliness, oh cleanliness. Cleanliness in your soul, cleanliness in your body, cleanliness in your speech, cleanliness among your friends.’’ 105 A coalition of opposition political parties (known as sopi, ‘‘change’’ in Wolof ) and politicians, most notably the charismatic Abdoulaye Wade, former leader of the main opposition party, Partie Démocratique Sénégalaise (pds), also laid claim to the set setal movement and attempted to make political capital of it (figure 71). One also found a number of Laboratoire Agit-Art members, such as Issa Samb, Bouna Medoune Sèye, Babacar Traoré, and El Sy, claiming affiliation with and encouraging the young, selftaught muralists. El Sy recalled, ‘‘One day the kids who were working on murals just behind my studio came to ask for more paints. They all knew me as an artist and knew my studio. I gave them some paints and even went out for a few days and helped them work.’’ 106 206

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The community involvement in the creative process, which ranged from the supply of funds for materials to continual monitoring and criticism of the murals, appealed to Laboratoire Agit-Art sensibilities. Their collective production placed as much emphasis on the process as on the final product. Samb and his fellow artists were inspired by the muralists’ ability to make use of the surfaces and materials available to them and to treat the streets as a natural gallery. Moreover, the Laboratoire praised the spontaneity and the amateur status of its practitioners, crediting, in some manner, the efforts of their own manifestations and workshops with bringing about the practices they now witnessed in the city’s streets. Not surprisingly, as more and more youth took to the streets of their quar71 set setal mural, Abdou Diouf: Vive la Démocratie. Rebeuss, Dakar, 1991. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

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tiers to clean and paint, their activities were seen as a movement. Once this process of categorization began, all the parties eager to claim responsibility for and control over the imagery had little difficulty co-opting it. Both the government and the French Cultural Center tried to harness the energies and employ the services of the young artists. The government sought to encourage the local management of the waste its central services had failed to address; the French, on the other hand, were eager to be the first to promote an exciting, exotic, and new urban African culture flourishing in one of their former colonies. While this brief overview may capture the flurry of reception surrounding the appearance and proliferation of the muralists’ activities, the claims to ownership and origin of the ‘‘movement’’ need further attention as these activities are, in some ways, the culmination of long developing founts of discontent, indices of local political strife and disconcertion over the failed project of nationalism. They manifest the efforts of a younger generation to remap and reimagine a nationalist vision. Senegalese political historian Mamadou Diouf in his writings provides a very clear and convincing account of the historical events leading up to the sanitation and beautification projects.107 Since Abdou Diouf became president in 1981 and Senegal entered World Bank structural adjustment programs, the state has disengaged itself from the provision of health, education, culture, and sanitation, forcing ill-equipped and ill-prepared local authorities to manage these areas for the public. As a result, throughout the 1980s, Dakar’s streets grew filthier and more decrepit. In the same period, Sahelian droughts forced many rural inhabitants to flee into the cities for their livelihood. In February 1988, violent riots erupted during national elections as followers of sopi contested rigged voting and government corruption. These disturbances were put down by government forces and a nationwide curfew was enforced. In the following year, hostilities between Mauritanian merchants and native Dakarois exploded into rioting and looting. During the same period, continuous university strikes led to an année blanche, a missed school year for the students. Mamadou Diouf credits the combination of all of these factors for the rise of set setal. His arguments are echoed in an analysis by Issa Samb, who wrote, ‘‘set setal is . . . a victory of the out-of-luck, the out-of-work, the camisadas (comrades)—as one would say in South America—in relation to those on high.’’ 108 In their extensive study of set setal imagery, the French Cultural Center in Dakar compiled a detailed account of the paintings and pinpointed a number of key themes. They found that the largest percentage of works addressed historical themes and depicted heroes of Senegal, in particular, 208

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72 set setal mural, Lamine Guèye. Rebeuss, Dakar, 1991. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

and Africa and the rest of the world, in general. Like the iconography common to sous verre productions, one finds images of the proud Wolof warrior, Lat-Dior, who, as the last damel of Cayor, put up fierce resistance to French expansion.109 In most instances, Lat-Dior was pictured in profile, in the dress of the period, with flowing robes and saber, and beside his horse, Malaw. The Wolof kingdom, controlled and protected by a cavalry, known as the cëddo, was evoked time and again on the city’s surfaces. The cëddo are depicted as the epic defenders of Africa against the French. Civic heroes of the early colonial and postindependence period such as Blaise Diagne, Lamine Guèye, and Cheikh Anta Diop also found their place within the Set Setalian pantheon (figure 72). They were joined by images of After the Avant-Garde

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73 set setal murals. Dakar, 1991. Photo by Elizabeth Harney. 74 set setal mural, El Hadji Malick Sy. Dakar, 1990s. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

the former president, Léopold Senghor, portrayed with excerpts from his poetry, and of current president Abdou Diouf, surrounded by the colors of the Senegalese flag and the poignant and pointed plea ‘‘Vive la Démocratie!’’ (‘‘Long live Democracy’’). Also featured are religious figures, such as El Hadji Malick Sy, often pictured holding a black umbrella, or Cheikh Amadou Bamba, shown swathed in white flowing robes that conceal all but his eyes, as well as members of the smaller Layenne brotherhood with their characteristic black-and-white head scarves (figures 73, 74, and 75).110 Revolutionaries, political leaders, and other individuals who have fought for freedom throughout the globe made their way onto the walls of Dakar as well. In one section of the city, portraits of and quotations from Martin 210

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75 set setal mural, Cheikh Amadou Bamba. Dakar, 1990s. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, and John F. Kennedy complement a large and provocative image of the French colonial slave fort on the Senegalese island of Gorée in which stands a defiant, muscular figure, struggling to free himself from the weight of thick manacles (plate 13). In other sites, one can find the bust portraits of Mao Tse-tung and Lenin. In addition, the young muralists honored the legends of sports, music, and other forms of popular culture from Africa and elsewhere, producing portraits of Bob Marley, Jimi Hendrix, Mickey Mouse, Superman, Tintin, Muhammad Ali, Assane Diouf (a famous boxer), and Manga ii ( a champion wrestler). Some murals addressed serious concerns about the health and welfare of the population with didactic, often graphically disturbing scenes that spoke of the problems of aids, diarrhea, dysentery, and malaria (figure 76). Others were playful, fantastic, and romantic, featuring nostalgic scenes of the African countryAfter the Avant-Garde

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76 set setal mural (B. F. B and J. A. M., sponsored by enda Santé Tiers Monde), Speak of Aids in the School/ Parlons Sida en milieu scolaire. Médina, Dakar, 1991. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

side and rural life, portraits of the lion, emblem of Senegal, and visions of Mammy Wata (figure 77). What any observer of set setal productions will find most striking is surely the sheer diversity of forms and the eclecticism of sources and content that make up the collection of this urban gallery. Some artists and intellectuals, writing in the local papers or commenting in the course of oral interviews, characterized the polyvalent and hybrid nature of these productions as a disturbing reflection of the loss of traditional, shared culture among the nation’s youth. Academy-trained and longtime practicing professionals, suffering from the diminishment of state funding and exhibition opportunities, resented the attention afforded these muralists, citing the multiple referencing processes as evidence of naïveté, amateur status, and lack of talent. In contrast, Mamadou Diouf saw these murals as positive evidence that the younger generation was no longer consumed by what he called the ‘‘long quarrel’’ over the mixing and coexistence of African heritage and the trappings of modernity in urban Dakarois life. He writes:

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77 set setal mural. Dakar, 1994. Photo courtesy of Allen Roberts and Polly Nooter Roberts.

The reticence before the clear-cut oppositions, the exclusivities, or anathemas can be seen in the fact that the walls abound with throwbacks to tradition as much as the evocation of modernism. The two tendencies often add together and combine. It could well be that we are in a phase of getting past the long quarrel, and the acceptance, without complexes, by the ‘‘set-setalians’’ of African heritage as well as the contributions of the modern world.111 This ‘‘acceptance, without complexes’’ often resulted in playful, unorthodox pairings from disparate historical junctures (Lamine Guèye and Greenpeacerelated complaints against deforestation) and irreverent juxtapositions (e.g., Mickey Mouse beside Amadou Bamba). The open attitude taken by Set Setalians toward global and local, elite and popular histories and visual forms has obvious appeal to postmodernist celebrations of pastiche, to the concerns of cultural studies’ scholars about consumer and media cultures, and to the interests of urban geographers and postcolonial scholars in transnational flows of capital, peoples, commodities, ideas, imagery, and the like. As one critic put it, ‘‘set setal takes its roots in history, but also shows itself open to outside influences, the media, and advertising. . . . set setal relates the vibrant emergence of a youth open to a global civilization.’’ 112 The theoretical models of all of these interdisciplinary approaches could be brought to bear on the phenomenon known as set setal. However, in so doing, one must heed the historical specificities and local inflections presented in Diouf ’s account of the Dakarois political and social environment both preceding and accompanying the activities of the Set Setalians. Working from Diouf and the contemporary considerations of postmodern geographers about the uses and manipulations of urban space, one can understand these murals as constellations by which ordinary citizens claim and demarcate city space, articulating what Michel de Certeau has called a ‘‘poetic’’ as well as a literal local geography.113 The murals’ commentaries on national, ethnic, and international events and personages enable Dakarois residents to map the global onto the spaces of the local, indigenizing the globe, as it were. The murals often address themselves to the histories of particular quartiers and feature portraits of important figures within them. As such, they can also be seen as nodal points around which local Dakarois construct cognitive maps of the city and through which they measure and understand their daily experiences and collective histories. One of the murals even illustrates a chef de quartier (head of the neighborhood) giving his blessing to

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the Set Setalians: ‘‘Mane El Hadj Bakhe Yaye, as head of this neighborhood, I give you ‘carte blanche.’ . . . Eliminate all filthiness from this area!’’ 114 This claiming of space has several effects. Keeping in mind the importance that urban design, architecture, and demarcations of urban space had within the French colonial project and, subsequently, as a means of shoring up the powers of a small, native bourgeoisie,115 the Set Setalians’ activities could represent ‘‘a certain play within a system of defined places,’’ 116 making them ‘‘habitable’’ by establishing senses of ‘‘local authority’’ that act as ‘‘a crack in the system that saturates places with signification and indeed so reduces them to this signification that it is impossible to breathe in them.’’ 117 This process of habitation refers both to making them livable in a hygienic sense and giving them one’s own imprint. As Mamadou Diouf has argued, then, this remapping of urban topography enables the local populations, and most significantly the younger generation (in 1992, 57.7 percent of the population was below the age of twenty, born after independence),118 to replace the remnants of a colonially defined geography (most of the grand avenues in the Plateau region of Dakar are named after French colonial administrators and generals) and to challenge the centrality of nationalist monuments and the myths of peoplehood they embody. In this way, the murals may be viewed as articulations of a new Senegalese nationalist discourse. As Diouf asserts, the established discourse the murals challenged had been built on three major strains of thought: the intellectual pole of Senghor and Cheikh Anta Diop, the traditionalist-historical pole derived from the authority of ruling Wolof and Toucouleur families and their griots, and the Muslim brotherhood pole, characterized by cults of charismatic leaders and economic strongholds in the peanut economy. These three strains together formed the character of early cultural nationalism, producing the ruling fictions of African socialism, development and modernization, social justice, and democratic representation. The shortcomings or failures of these nationalist plans to provide for the unemployed, poor, sick, disenfranchised, and ill-educated portions of the population resulted in mass disillusionment and the subsequent organization of Dakar’s youths into Set Setalian groupings and activities. From this perspective, set setal must be seen, above all, as an attempt to undermine the Senegalese state’s rhetoric as a regime of truth. The Set Setalian movement’s attempts to reinscribe local perceptions and histories into the cityscape and the national consciousness led to a widespread involvement in imagining a community through artistic means.

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Ironically, this process was essentially the one Senghor had so encouraged in his rhetoric and poetry. His attempts at harnessing art and community in the search for a coherent cultural nationalism were ultimately doomed because of their inherent elitism. The nationalist visions seen in set setal were not based on the recognition of a shared, racially determined identity, like those which preceded them, but rather on the shared experiences of the fractured, uncertain, and contingent realities of life in a large cosmopolitan center, one marked as much by the vicissitudes of a global political and cultural economy as by its relation to its African heritage. Writing in a daily paper at the time, Issa Samb noted, Apart from its political character, set setal poses the problem of a basic artistic expression. In the neighborhoods, many people who worked on the walls were neither professional painters nor decorators. They are kids, adolescents who began to make use of color on the walls and thus among these young men of leisure sipping the tea of the unemployed, there were dormant talents that suddenly were put to work making the walls and streets talk.119 His comments occasion one further point about the significance of set setal. Ironically, the parallels drawn by Laboratoire Agit-Art members between the muralists’ activities and their own only exposed the limitations of the Laboratoire’s avant-gardist criticisms of the Senghorian system. Wed as they were to the high-art structures they sought to undermine, the Laboratoire productions never achieved the kind of aesthetic revolution and freedom that were the hallmarks the Set Setalians’ efforts to make the city’s ‘‘walls talk.’’ 120

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5 Passport to the Global Art World

W

ole Soyinka’s oft-cited essay ‘‘Climates of Art’’ aptly addresses the patronage options available to visual artists in Senegal, first under Senghor and then under Abdou Diouf. He wrote:

The title is of course deliberate. It is meant to trigger all those associative devices we all utilise at will, so that ‘‘Climate of Fear,’’ ‘‘Climate of Terror,’’ and so on, will surface in the mind without much conscious effort. These, I regret to say, are not inaccurate readings—from my local meteorological station—of the creative spaces we mostly inhabit in these times—in varying degrees of course. In some spaces, the climate is unrelentingly torrid. Artists suffer instant heat-stroke for opening their windows just to let an air of reality into their secretive closets of creative avowal. They are charred to cinders, atomised by the invisible laserbeams of state controls. . . . At the other extremes . . . the official temperature having been set at Minus Zero, the artist is frozen out of the productive world—sent to Coventry or Siberia . . . where he is at liberty to warm up his toes by setting a match to his canvases or manuscripts which neither the system nor the commercial controls approve . . . sooner or later they all discover that mere inspiration has distinctly limited combustion or dietary levels. The poor wretch is discovered, years later, in a lonely garret—death by hypothermia, which—translated in the dictionary of this talk—is death by the cold shoulder.1

The effects of Senghorian patronage may be likened to the ‘‘invisible laserbeams of state control,’’ while the eviction of artists from the Village des Arts under the Diouf government resulted from a violently ‘‘cold shoulder.’’ However, as the discussions in the previous chapters have made clear, the artistic climate was often much more complex than either of these two scenarios allow. Artistic patronage fluctuated like the seasons, cold snaps alternating with stifling heat waves. Artists have learned to adapt to this variable climate by taking advantage of the variety of opportunities presented to them and, indeed, by creating their own, in both domestic and global arenas. Although more than four decades have passed since the foundations of postindependence arts patronage were laid, the strength of those first structures remains vivid in the minds of government cultural workers, artists, and scholars. The legacy has been such that other forms of arts patronage, which either existed alongside government support or which have arisen to fill the needs that official support does not, have received little attention. After his appointment as president in 1981, Diouf proclaimed fidelity to many of Senghor’s policies, but he found himself and his government facing a quite different political and economic climate as the effects of the imf- and World Bank–imposed structural adjustment programs, which began in Senegal in 1979, started to take form. The change in personality and political practice from the socialist poet to the technocratic capitalist led to shifts in cultural policy. As it became obvious that the Diouf government could not sustain the level of support that had characterized the Senghorian system, and as the system came under attack from challenges such as Laboratoire Agit-Art and set setal, a space was cleared for the patronage efforts of foreign cultural centers, private galleries, and a small bourgeoisie. This chapter will sketch the contours of these new forms of patronage. While the new sites of support represented a welcome broadening of the Senegalese field of production, each had distinct limitations. In the aggregate, they could not fulfill the domestic patronage needs of Senegal’s artists. Foreign cultural center activities, in particular, presented difficult challenges. Often their involvement in local artistic affairs led to a neocolonial relationship. In Dakar, where the French Cultural Center has provided the most support for artistic activities, artists relied on the graces of French administrators to gain access to a European market, or, indeed, to other African markets, through grants giving them the opportunity to work under the auspices of centers in other former colonies. This chapter will also consider the means through which Senegalese artists have gained access to a global marketplace. In the early 1990s, claims to 218

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a so-called new internationalism and postmodernist celebrations of difference prevailed. These interpretive approaches to Africa’s contemporary arts bore striking resemblances to those of high modernism, with their eagerness to define European identity through comparison with and appropriation of Otherness. Since the mid-1990s, critics and curators have tried to subvert the persistent attention to difference and to move the debate away from considerations of a new internationalism. Instead, they have sought to nurture a color-blind globalism that focuses on shared experiences of transnationalism and world citizenship, as well as on notions of technological and political interconnectedness. The development of critical apparatuses to understand and interpret postindependence arts and the growth of an infrastructure to support them represent the greatest challenges to those involved with these artistic productions. These apparatuses need to provide what Everlyn Nicodemus has termed ‘‘navigational instruments,’’ 2 so that they can deal with a historical moment in which an ‘‘unprecedented penetration of local society globally by the economy and culture of capital’’ is evident.3 The marginality of postcolonial artists is the result not only of European hegemony in the marketplace and control of the art worlds’ organs of interpretation (most keenly illustrated in the ethnocentric coloring of universalist models of art) but also of the lack of opportunities in Africa itself for artists to share their works and support multiple and varied discourses surrounding them. The Triangle artist workshops, found throughout southern Africa (and now in Senegal) and the Africa-based biennales, the most enduring and healthy of which is Dak’Art in Senegal, are key institutions that have allowed for important artistic exchanges on the continent. The marginality of African artists in the global marketplace is enforced, and indeed sustained, by the ‘‘art writing’’ 4 that provides a ‘‘textual safety-net’’ 5 or legitimacy for the attitudes of the Western art establishment, controlling and defining the center while fetishizing marginality. As Stuart Hall has noted, ‘‘there is nothing that global post-modernism loves better than a certain kind of difference; a touch of ethnicity, a taste of the exotic, as we say in England, ‘a bit of the other.’ ’’ 6 As previously noted, the quality and quantity of critical writings on contemporary African arts have increased. However, they are largely published and read abroad. African expatriates produce the best of these works, as publishing houses on the continent cannot sustain the activity. These new avenues of assessment have significantly altered the essential mission of earlier criticism from the era of the École de Dakar. Rather than defining ‘‘what is African’’ in the visual arts and thereby justifying ‘‘Africanity,’’ the critics of today seek to prepare international audiences Passport to the Global Art World

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for a new kind of African art—one which is cosmopolitan, contextualized within a broader cultural environment and history.

Les Chers Enfants sans Papa: Patronage after Senghor Some artists argue that the forced closure of the Village des Arts in 1983 was a defining moment in the relationship between the Diouf government as patron and the practicing artists. The continued closure of the Musée Dynamique and the pathetic state of the Manufacture Sénégalaise des Arts Décoratifs, two of the most prestigious institutions showcased at the 1966 Premier Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres, further illustrated the austerity of the new official stance toward the arts. With its use of imported materials and its reliance on restricted patronage, the msad was a relic of a bygone era.7 The similar state of decay at the art schools made them shadows of the former École des Arts of the 1960s and 1970s. A downsizing of the Ministry of Culture led to the dissolution, in 1990, of the commission created during Senghor’s time to curate exhibitions abroad. Even the annual national salons (salons nationaux), which traditionally served as occasions for amassing works for a burgeoning national collection, became increasingly difficult to stage without adequate space or significant government funding. Beginning in 1985, these salons were organized in conjunction with the artists association anaps. Despite this rather dismal state of affairs, many practicing artists did not mourn the waning monopoly of government patronage. Rather, they viewed these changes as a healthy step toward the greater role that the private sector could and should play in the nation’s cultural activities. Advocates of Diouf ’s cultural policies insisted that the withering, discontinuation, or destruction of some structures were offset by the creation of new ones. Eight months prior to the closure of the Village des Arts, the Diouf government inaugurated the Galerie Nationale, a large display space in central Dakar, with a mandate to host two exhibitions a month. The artists association used this space to stage its salons in 1988 and 1989. In 1985, the Diouf government finally reopened the much-loved Musée Dynamique, and in the following year, the artists association used the space for the salon national. However, amid a storm of protest, the government reclosed the institution in 1988, subsequently giving it to the supreme court. The fate of the national collection once stored within its walls remains controversial. Public and private pleas for the reopening of the museum have continued to no effect.8 In 1990, the artists association successfully lobbied the government to create a series of monetary prizes to honor artistic achievement. The Grand Prix de 220

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la République offers awards worth a total of 3 million cfa francs, divided into an honorable mention (receiving 1 million cfa francs) and four prizes of encouragement worth 500,000 cfa francs each. Despite its checkered history, the Diouf government continued to view itself as an enthusiastic patron of the arts, yet one that had brought a muchneeded touch of pragmatism to Senghor’s fiscally unsound visions. President Diouf was still referred to as ‘‘the benefactor and protector of Letters and Arts’’ 9 whose role it was to promote Senegal as a ‘‘crossroads of beauty and spirit.’’ 10 In fact, much of the government rhetoric harnessed the symbolic capital underlying the infrastructure of the Senghorian art world. In his opening comments at the 1986 salon national, Diouf sounded remarkably like the former president: Despite the restrictions imposed by its economic and financial recovery, Senegal is duty bound to focus on its culture and, as a matter of priority, to develop the most representative manifestations of its originality. As I have said in other circumstances, ‘‘Defining a cultural policy which reflects our authenticity, and setting up functional infrastructures able to implement this policy, are a gamble which Senegal thought worth taking. Firstly, because it is its calling and, secondly, because it is its mission.11 This reliance on the glories of Senegal’s past cultural accomplishments was most clearly seen in the Diouf government’s efforts to stage international arts events. The first such event took place in 1990 on the occasion of the bicentennial celebrations for the French Revolution, for which Senegal was asked to contribute an exhibition for the Grande Arche de la Fraternité. The Senegalese Ministry of Culture curated Art sur vie: Art contemporain du Sénégal (Art on Life: Contemporary Art of Senegal ) which included the work of sixty-four artists working across media. This exhibition gathered together artists who had participated in all the various facets of the Senegalese art world from its early Senghorian patronage until the late 1980s. The tapestries of Alioune Badiane, an early participant in Tall’s workshop, were seen alongside the sous verre of Babacar Lô and Serigne N’Diaye, another art-school trained practitioner. The iron sculptures of Guibril André Diop complemented the rich impasto-like oil paintings of Mohammadou (zulu) and Kré M’Baye, both of whom had studied with Pierre Lods in his private atelier. In the introduction to the catalogue the then French minister of cooperation and development, Jacques Pelletier, acknowledged the debt he owed the 1974 Art sénégalais d’aujourd’hui. Thus Art sur vie was clearly to be seen, Passport to the Global Art World

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in both France and Senegal, as a successor to the earlier exhibition, which brought Senegalese arts to audiences around the globe. In 1974, in the cloisters of the National Gallery of the Grand Palais, the first exhibition of Art contemporain du Sénégal gave a chance for the larger public to discover the original works of young Senegalese creators. President Léopold Sédar Senghor had already recognized the great importance of creation and artistic production in defining a national cultural identity. President Abdou Diouf and his government follow him.12

The Emergence of Dak’Art The most obvious attempt to emulate Senghorian patronage took place at the Second International Biennale of Arts, known as Dak’Art ’92, which occurred in December 1992.13 This biennale would prove to be the first of a series of megashows held in Dakar in the last decades of the century. The growth and maturation process of the Dakar biennale, seen alongside that of similar gatherings held in Havana, Cairo, Istanbul, Johannesburg, and Brisbane, marked the beginning of a new era in the way in which non-Western artists participated within the global contemporary arts system. Ironically, as the arts scene in Senegal reached beyond the old strictures of Senghorian philosophy and infrastructure, it became, once again a site for international exchange, a nexus for debates about contemporary arts. Throughout the festivities of the second Dakar biennale in 1992, the government rhetoric drew links with the highly successful Premier Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres, held in 1966.14 President Abdou Diouf opened the biennale with a speech at the Théâtre Daniel Sorano, itself a symbol of the earlier festival, by evoking the memory of Senghor with a vocabulary drawn directly from the latter’s Negritude writings: ‘‘Wherever he is, his heart beats to the rhythm of the Biennale.’’ 15 Recalling the École de Dakar, Diouf continued: We want to tell him that the École de Dakar, this Dakar which gave birth to the famous Black encounter of 1966, carries his stamp at the end of the day. It is the synthesis of traditional and modern creativities, this mixing of forms and themes which makes each brushstroke a declaration of the universality of art. . . . contemporary art has the same spiritual, moral, and aesthetic value as our traditional art. It deserves the same respect, the same admiration, and also deserves to reach the same heights.16

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The Dak’Art 92, with an estimated budget of 300 million cfa francs, lasted for seven days. There were two central exhibitions of contemporary arts.17 One, which was international in scope, showing 130 works by forty-eight artists, was held in the gallery space at ifan (Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire). The other exhibition, which featured the works of Senegalese artists, took place at the Galerie Nationale. Additional smaller shows were held at the Lycée Blaise Senghor, where painter and graphic artist Serge Correa combined his talents with those of schoolchildren from throughout Dakar, and at the Alliance Française, where the works of sous verre painters could be viewed. The French, Italian, German, and American cultural centers all featured smaller exhibitions for the occasion. While the French gave space to Senegalese talents, the Americans, Italians, and Germans featured works by their own compatriots.18 There were two colloquia at the biennale. The first, ‘‘Permanences et Mutations’’ (‘‘Permanences and Changes’’), centered around the artist’s place within contemporary African society, the perception of African art in the international arena, and the relationship between popular and fine arts.19 The second, ‘‘Journées du Partenariat’’ (‘‘Days of Partnership’’), sought ‘‘to determine the ability of African art to influence International artistry; [and] . . . to analyze the conditions and possibilities for diffusion, distribution, and commercialization of works of African art.’’ 20 Of course, these two important conferences had precedents not only in Algiers in 1969 and Dakar 1966 but also in the Société Africaine de la Culture (sac)–sponsored gatherings in Paris and Rome in 1956 and 1959 respectively. The aim of both gatherings was to work toward creating a much-needed infrastructure for new arts within which artists could play an active role in the interpretation, presentation, and marketing of their works. If such a structure could be erected, perhaps artists whose works were becoming increasingly attractive to the Western marketplace could avoid the kind of encapsulation that so characterized the development of a lucrative market for Africa’s tradition-based arts. Ostensibly, the 1966 festival and the Dakar biennale had a number of similarities. Both featured a series of large international exhibitions, bolstered by smaller ones in cultural centers and galleries. Both hosted visitors (practicing artists and intellectuals) from Europe, Africa, and America. And both featured colloquia whose panels debated the state of artistic production in Africa.21 However, if one moves beyond these parallels, the differences come into sharp focus. These contrasts account, to a large extent, for the varying degrees of success achieved by the two events. While the 1966 gathering was heralded as a symbol of the successes of anticolonial struggle, self-

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determination, and hopes for a bright postcolonial future (despite the later ideological differences between Senghor and fellow African intellectuals expressed in Algiers, in 1969), the 1992 biennale seemed a somber reminder of the disappointments of early nationalist programs and the pressures of structural adjustment and economic dependency. The biennale’s woes were both conceptual and practical. They suggested, at best, shortsightedness, at worst, a grave misunderstanding of the needs of practicing artists. Unlike its predecessor, which extolled the virtues of pan-African creativity and humanism, the 1992 biennale paid little attention to pan-African interests in the broadest sense. While this approach might suggest a more sophisticated attitude toward the intersections of artistry and identity, it in fact only promoted a parochial, continental understanding of Africanness, ignoring its diasporic dimension. In 1966, a large African American presence had been evident. In 1992, it was minuscule.22 A broader agenda of pan-Africanism could have forged inter-African, interregional ties, thereby reducing the hegemonic hold European-American critics and dealers have had on the distribution of contemporary artists’ works. Instead, foreign art critics, gallery owners, patrons, curators, and scholars seemed to monopolize the conference proceedings. The colloquia looked as though they had been designed to seek solutions and legitimization from outside. While Senghor’s brand of pan-Africanism proved to be both too philosophical and too restrictive, it did suggest the possibility of creating a structure of understanding and communication that would challenge that of the former colonizers. The kind of pan-Africanism needed today is one of practical inter-regional contact.23 Rather than attempting to emulate the earlier festival, Diouf ’s government should have updated its agenda. The biennale inevitably failed to inherit the mantle of its infamous predecessor because it was operating in a vastly changed international climate and without the commanding presence of a public figure like Senghor. As a practicing artist himself, Senghor had been an individual who could galvanize other creative personalities and passionately and persuasively promote an agenda, even if that agenda proved unrealistic and ultimately debilitating for the arts. Sculptor Ousmane Sow complained of the Dak’Art 1992, ‘‘At the First World Festival of Negro arts, one sensed that there was someone who loved what he was doing: It is true that with his charisma, Senghor knew how to mobilize the necessary energies and men. With this biennale it is quite another story.’’ 24 The euphoria of the immediate postindependence era, accompanied by the fervor of the civil rights movement in the United States, gave a special flavor to the 1966 festival and Senghorian discourse. Thirty years after independence, not only 224

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was another festival on the same scale of 1966 virtually impossible for the present government to afford but it was also less fashionable. The practical problems of the biennale resulted from financial difficulties and slipshod organization. As one observer remarked, ‘‘Many artists felt betrayed by the organizers. Works had been lost, badly stored, damaged, or, more acutely, just neglected.’’ 25 In spite of, or perhaps because of, all of its failings, the biennale acted as a kind of wake-up call to artistic debate in Senegal. It brought to the fore many of the problems surrounding the domestic market and criticism that had been brewing since the destruction of the Village des Arts in the early 1980s and the rise of French Cultural Center dominance over patronage in the late 1980s. The boycott of the biennale by such influential characters as El Sy and Issa Samb underscored the dissatisfaction with the government’s attempts at monopolizing the interpretation process.26 The organizing committee of this first biennale struggled to learn from these first mishaps, boldly advancing their agenda to give more permanence and consideration to contemporary visual arts within an African context and an African-organized event. As the fortunes of other biennales (notably in Abidjan and Johannesburg) rose and fell, Dak’Art continued, even in the face of great financial difficulties, to mature and grow. The growing pains of its structure reflected the changes occurring in the debate, local and international, surrounding the definitions of African art, of contemporary African art, and of contemporary. The shifts in the event’s scope, mission, and programming give a good indication of the broader transformations in the field of contemporary art and African studies. While other exhibitions sought the limelight as sites for global contemporary arts, Dakar quietly settled into a respectable and important existence as a pan-African event.

Private Patronage, Neocolonialism, and the Local Art Market Financially, the most important nongovernmental patronage sources operating in former French colonies through the last several decades were the foreign cultural centers, and Senegal proved no exception. The programs of these centers are supported by the French Ministry of Cooperation and staffed by technical assistants. Their heavy involvement in the support, marketing, and criticism of contemporary arts represents, to some, a neocolonialist agenda. As one participant at the first Dakar biennale pointed out: On our continent, there does not exist what one could properly call an art market. The galleries who put up exhibitions here and there are not Passport to the Global Art World 225

really places of sales stimulation. The French Cultural Centers’ initiatives, which aim to encourage young talents or to welcome the works of painters, are more often than not driven by French aid or redistributive motives to exert a cynical control over the circulation of art products.27 The French Cultural Center, located in the center of downtown Dakar, has exhibited Senegalese and French artworks since the 1950s. In the 1980s and 1990s, it acquired a large building on one of the city’s busiest streets to open its Galerie 39 and began to play an increasingly significant role in Dakar’s cultural life. This space, which has since closed, was a typical white-walled, spotlit cube gallery. As one of the most reliable venues in Dakar, Galerie 39 hosted several group or individual exhibitions a month. As El Hadji Sy and Friedrich Axt noted in their anthology on Senegalese contemporary arts, ‘‘there is hardly any significant Senegalese artist who has not made use of the ccf’s [French Cultural Center’s] possibilities’’ (plate 14).28 In addition to its gallery, the center also acted as an important provider of grants and exchange opportunities with other centers in the former French colonies. It was the organ through which one gained access to Frenchsponsored inter-African workshops and francophone festivals.29 Its role as a meeting place for artists was at least as significant as the financial support it provided. In the early 1990s, before major renovations, the center had the air of a colonial governor’s office, featuring an open-air café at which artists could gather (figure 78). As in many other African countries, the German cultural center, or Goethe Institute, in Senegal has played a visible role in promoting exchange between Senegalese and German artists. The anthology by Friedrich Axt and El Hadji Sy emerged as the result of just such a collaborative effort.30 In 1994, the Swiss cultural center launched an administrative body known as Helsen in order ‘‘to foster artistic exchange between Senegal and Switzerland, to encourage private sector support in Senegal for the arts, and promote the decentralization of the country’s cultural politics.’’ 31 It chose to fund an art center on the island of Gorée, under the direction of sculptor Moustapha Dimé, for one of its first projects. Although this space initially served only as Dimé’s studio, it was envisioned as a site for international artistic exchange and training. Unfortunately, Dimé died young of cancer before the project could reach fruition. As a French-speaking nation without a history of colonial aggression in Senegal, Switzerland played a significant patronage role.32 The only private gallery space operating in Dakar in the mid-1990s that was of the same caliber as the French Cultural Center’s Galerie 39 was Gale-

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78 El Hadji Moussa Babacar Sy, Mural at French Cultural Center. Dakar, 1994. Courtesy of the artist. Photo by Elizabeth Harney.

rie Wiitef (8F), owned by husband and wife Nicolas (Sawalo) and Binette Cissé. Wiitef opened just prior to the 1992 Dak’Art biennale.33 It was unique as a display space because it operated as a full-time gallery, in contrast to all the others, which were either associated with cultural centers, the Senegalese government, or primary businesses. It played a crucial role in the promotion and display of new arts. Nicolas, a practicing architect and interior designer who frequently collaborated with sculptor and designer Babacar Traoré, trained at the art schools during the 1970s when the programs for architecture and fine arts were combined under the rubric of the Institut National des Arts. His longtime friends from art school served as advisors to his gallery. It was among his artist friends at Wiitef that former École de Dakar artist Ibou Diouf decided to exhibit his new works after almost two decades out of the public eye. Artist-teachers at the École Nationale des Beaux Arts also frequently exhibited at Wiitef.34 The gallery’s clientele consisted mainly of the Senegalese elite, fellow artists, expatriates, and tourists (it is minutes away from several of the large French chain hotels).35 The Cissés envisioned their gallery space as much more than simply a venue for display. While the gallery acted as a permanent agent and broker to an increasing number of practicing artists, fostering important links with foreign galleries, it also provided an important gathering place for artists.36 Most significantly, Wiitef provided local representation, shifting control of marketing and interpretation away from foreign sources. The Quatre Vents gallery opened during the 1992 biennale. An already well-established bookstore, the gallery served the Senegalese bourgeoisie and a large expatriate clientele. Its gallery was conservative in practice, exhibiting only those Senegalese artists who had considerable success at home and abroad. Although the gallery space itself was large and in demand, its exhibitions remained quite irregular.37 Galerie Lézards, part of a family-run framing business in operation since the 1960s, targeted its gallery showings at expatriates and tourists. It gave few chances to young artists, opting instead for established Senegalese (often meaning conventional École de Dakar) and European artists.38 Many of these exhibition spaces, established around the first Dak’Art, have become key venues in the official and alternative programming held to coincide with subsequent Dakar biennales. In contrast to the two aforementioned spaces, the small hair salon known as Art et Coiffure, situated just opposite the main Dakar cathedral, gave preference to younger artists. Its proprietor, Frenchman Michel Arrechea, was a hair stylist and regular collector of contemporary arts. His apartment across 228

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from the French Cultural Center acted as another frequent meeting place for artists. His salon clientele was almost exclusively European.39 There were two artist-run galleries in Dakar in the early 1990s. Two former weavers at the Manufacture Sénégalaise des Arts Décoratifs, Kalidou Kassé and Paulane, opened the first, Galerie des Artistes Réunis, in the mid-1980s. They funded their gallery through a subsidiary framing business on the same premises. Réunis operated primarily as a permanent show space for their works. But, as it was just down the street from the École Nationale des Beaux Arts, it also occasionally featured the works of students and recent graduates. Both artists worked in a romantic Negritude style, selling their works as interior design products to decorate civil servants’ offices. The second artist-run venture began in 1994 when two painters, Mohammadou ‘‘zulu’’ M’Baye 40 and Moussa Baidy N’Diaye opened a set of studios and a joint gallery known as Nietti-Güy (Wolof for ‘‘the three baobab trees’’). This complex was situated in a large house on the route des Almadies, famous for its fashionable hotels and stunning ocean vistas. It was the home of a wealthy European businessman who agreed to loan the space in exchange for a monthly payment of two paintings from each artist. Because Senegal is an important tourist destination, primarily for France and Belgium, the hotels in Dakar, Saint Louis, and surroundings also provide occasional exhibition opportunities.41 By the end of the 1990s, artists, as well as gallery owners, began to recognize the importance of encouraging patronage from private citizens. As the then president of anaps, Viyé Diba, explained: ‘‘Art promotion is not only about giving prices to artists but also about stimulating the environment for art through the adoption of conducive fiscal measures which would permit buyers and other collectors to benefit from tax breaks.’’ 42 Aside from government and cultural center support there was a small amount of private support coming from professionals such as doctors, magistrates, and business people.43 Many artists also sold their works to nonprofessionals, family, and friends, who paid for their purchases in monthly installments or by other means. A small but fairly regular set of expatriates attended exhibition openings in the cultural centers and private venues. These buyers rarely encountered artworks or artists outside cultural center or government milieus. Their collecting habits were, to a large degree, determined by the recommendations of these official bodies. While the decline of state patronage has freed the Senegalese artist from the task of contributing to a national aesthetic, it has also removed a large and reliable funding source. The current crisis in the Senegalese economy leaves little room for a rapid growth in private patronage or SenegalesePassport to the Global Art World

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run galleries. The artist of today must now rely more heavily on funds from foreign sources, be they local cultural centers or international exhibition committees, galleries, and museums. These patrons can practice a kind of overlordship in curating and marketing, which ostensibly mirrors that of Senghor in his relationship to his chers enfants, yet incorporates an insidious neocolonial dimension. In a search for greater opportunities, audiences, and experiences, some artists have chosen the option of emigration, or, in other cases, have been forced into exile for political reasons, usually to European cities. In leaving Senegal, they have participated in the transnational networks that characterize this moment of nomadology and deterritorialization. However, their choice is often impermanent and does not simply produce rootless ‘‘citizens of the world’’ so hybridized and displaced that they no longer participate in local networks. Rather, many of these individuals meet in Paris, London, or Berlin to work together and make frequent trips home, often spending the European winter months in Senegal, exhibiting in local galleries.

Exhibiting in an International Arena Any discussion of Senegalese artists’ experiences within an international artculture system must be situated within the debates about postcolonialism, globalism, and postmodernism which have dominated the art world from the 1980s to the present. Many of the current struggles over interpretation concern the tension between recognizing difference and identity and promoting a universal, contemporary aesthetic. More than a decade ago, Cornel West spoke of a ‘‘new cultural politics of difference.’’ He characterized its features as follows: ‘‘To trash the monolithic and homogeneous in the name of diversity, multiplicity, and heterogeneity; to reject the abstract, general, and universal in light of the concrete, specific, and particular; and to historicize, contextualize, and pluralize by highlighting the contingent, provisional, variable, tentative, shifting, and changing.’’ 44 Paradoxically, postmodernist approaches have emphasized, indeed, have fetishized differences and particularisms, while simultaneously claiming a new globalism or universalism that levels these differences and old colonialist hegemonies. Critics like West, Stuart Hall, Olu Oguibe, and Okwui Enwezor have warned of the ironies, inconsistencies, and dangers of postmodernist critical practice, asserting, Certainly, blacks are as ambiguously placed in relation to postmodernism as they were in relation to high modernism: even when de-

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nuded of its wide-European, disenchanted Marxist, French intellectual provenance and scaled down to a more modest descriptive status, postmodernism remains extremely unevenly developed as a phenomenon in which the old centre peripheries of high modernity consistently reappear.45 It is crucial to bear in mind that as the domestic situation in Senegal has shifted to force many artists to pursue greater opportunities abroad, the character of debates within the international arena about marginalized and postcolonial artists has also been in flux. Curators and scholars redefined categories and approaches to exhibiting in light of a growing sense of a new cultural dominant. As we shall discuss below, this celebration of Otherness, or tolerance for the periphery within the center, initially took the form of discussions about new internationalism. Although in the last half decade the works of Senegalese and other contemporary artists from Africa have become more visible within the global art arena, the terms of their acceptance and the process of canonization surrounding them remain highly volatile. Entry into this international art arena for Senegalese and other African artists has remained, to a large extent, controlled by those in institutions of art in the West, who have acted as gatekeepers, admitting participants according to their own ideas about African art and its place within definitions of internationalism. Curators have advanced these ideas in a series of large exhibitions over the past two decades, refining their interpretations, shaping the market, and advancing public scholarship, as well as their own careers and those of artists they represent.46 While the history of these exhibitions is well known, I revisit the discourse surrounding them in order to read them in relation to the longstanding debates on particularism and universalism within African modern arts history. These exhibitions have acted as crucial forums for questioning modernistderived understandings of art, artifact, authenticity, and the artist figure. Without doubt, the debates that have arisen as a result of these curatorial offerings have encouraged scholars and curators to reflect critically on the powerful roles they inhabit as cultural brokers in the global art world. In the 1990s, many began to publicly recognize the powerful role of the curator within the functioning of the global art arena. The need for processes of brokering and interpreting became all the more critical as offerings of the contemporary art world became more plural.47 Collaborative projects between Western and African scholars and curators increased, although sources of funding continued to come from the West. Even so-called

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alternative global biennales relied heavily on foreign funds and promotion to stay afloat. Though partially supported by the government, even Dak’Art in Senegal received significant funding from the French. Most scholars would cite the 1984 primitivism exhibition at the moma as the turning point in considerations of African arts’ acceptance in the global art world. While not contemporary in focus, this exhibition nonetheless refocused the art world’s attention on the complicated history of modernism and its engagement with so-called primitive arts, a category in which African materials predominated. By advancing an unabashedly Eurocentric and anachronistic approach to Africa’s ‘‘traditional’’ arts, privileging the Western male genius artist over the anonymous primitive, this exhibition found itself remarkably out of step with the truths of postmodernist and postcolonial scholarship. The debates surrounding this controversial retelling of modernism’s history focused greater and more serious attention on the arts of the Other. Magiciens de la terre, a multisited blockbuster exhibition held in Paris in 1989 and curated by Jean-Hubert Martin, offered a deliberate engagement with the tenets of the 1984 New York exhibition. It featured eighteen African artists, including Senegalese potter Seni Camara, displaying their works in what the curator proclaimed to be ‘‘the first truly international exhibition of worldwide contemporary arts.’’ 48 Adopting a postmodernist rhetoric and format, this exhibition attempted to erase the boundaries between the West as center and the rest as periphery by placing all the artists within a metacategory of ‘‘magician’’ and allowing the silenced to speak and the formerly invisible to be seen.49 However, by viewing art as a neutral forum of communication and the artist as an essentially spiritual being, the curators created a false allusion of equality between artists heralding from vastly different economic, political, and social environments. Moreover, this reliance on a formalist reading of global arts led to a further misunderstanding and misrepresentation of local artistic processes and systems of evaluation, classification, and consumption. The exhibition’s untenable globalist stance produced some unexpected and, at times, unwelcome responses in both written criticism and exhibition form.50 In its eagerness to accept and celebrate, Magiciens provided little guidance in the complex process of assigning value, both aesthetic and monetary, to these works of art that now circulate in a global art world. One critic provided a scathing attack on the timid evaluation of the art objects on hand: The exhibition gives us everything imaginable that comes from Africa —tout le monde is there; everything is artistic, worthy, valuable: ‘‘Gee, 232

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aren’t Africans artistic?’’ Is there, today anything African not worth exhibiting? Who has ever done a show featuring embroidered slippers from a remote village in the Abruzzi (where on earth is that?) and Jackson Pollock’s canvases? Is this an overcompensation for the evil done in the past? . . . Is the lack of unwillingness itself, to bring upon ourselves the responsibility to judge and select, not perhaps as discriminating and patronizing as the old colonial attitudes? 51 In stark contrast to the inclusive agenda of Magiciens de la terre, the Studio Museum of Harlem presented a modest exhibition in 1990 that only addressed the works of art-school trained, gallery-oriented artists, treating them with an approach as intelligent and sensitive as one would afford any other artist. To some longtime scholars of African arts, the Studio Museum show’s narrow focus did little to aid in the difficult processes of reassessment and refocusing required of the broader field. In Africa Explores, showing in New York’s Center for African Art in 1991, Susan Vogel sought to recontextualize recent African artistic expressions through the creation of a series of categories, or what she called ‘‘strains.’’ 52 The result was, unfortunately, a puzzling, often contradictory, analysis that served to perpetuate many stale ideas about African creativity, as well as fixed Eurocentric distinctions between art and artifact and high and low arts.53 Moreover, considerations of the local and international market, of patronage, and of criticism for these arts were based on modernist concepts that often did not apply to the African contexts. In her attempt to provide an easily digestible account for a Western art market and audience, Vogel created ‘‘through a grand narrative of categories, absolutes, and valorizations’’ what one critic viciously termed ‘‘a mega-fiction, a use-less exercise that belongs to a contemptible era in the construction and narration of Africa.’’ 54 This search for adequate and easy-to-apply criteria has also led to neoprimitivist curatorial approaches, privileging the self-taught over the academically trained artist in the hopes of ‘‘possessing the internal fire of creation.’’ 55 The comments of one collector, Jean Pigozzi, whose works have formed the bulk of these neoprimitivist shows in the last several years around Europe, serve clearly to illustrate this disturbing attitude: An extraordinary new art is currently being created by artists with strange names who I would imagine have no knowledge of Picasso, Klee, Michelangelo, Matisse, or Ryman. . . . These innovative and authentic artists live and work often in incredibly difficult conditions in places such as Kinshasa in Zaire, Jaipur in India, Peking in China, Alice Springs in Australia and in many other distant cities and towns, with Passport to the Global Art World

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names I don’t know how to pronounce or in countries I cannot situate on my large plastic globe.56 Such deliberations over definition often ignored the realities of artists under consideration. The aesthetic choices, cultural references, personal visions, and voiced opinions of African artists all but got lost in a morass of academic discourse. Skirmishes over semantics played to the needs of an international art market that relied on essentialist paradigms to fix value onto an exotic work of art, while ignoring the existence of local and varying systems of interpretation and assessment. The reality of contemporary Africa includes a variety of different art practices, methods of training, and approaches to the visual. Moreover, Africa’s artists, like those anywhere in the world, have the opportunity to address more than one audience and acquire diverse forms of patronage. In 1995, curator Clementine Deliss oversaw an enormous program of events that took place throughout Great Britain known as africa’95.57 This program celebrated Africa’s arts across a stunningly broad array of media, though it favored a focus on the continent itself, not its large and longstanding diaspora. In her contributions as coordinating curator of the contemporary arts show, Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa, held at the Whitechapel Gallery in London, Deliss attempted to develop a more workable system through which to present these art forms to a broader public with little knowledge of the history of artistic practice in modern Africa or of the artists whose works were on display. Her solution was simple. She gathered together a team of African consultants (artists, curators, scholars, and critics) to serve as cocurators for the project, each to narrate a story about the arts from one part of the continent.58 While the collaborative nature of this undertaking was surely commendable, the results were less than ideal. With vastly differing understandings of the agenda, the set of curators produced a rather unwieldy and unbalanced presentation. Moreover, the invitations issued from the funding body in Britain for visiting artists’ workshops and smaller exhibitions on contemporary practices served painfully to underscore the neocolonial dynamics of the undertaking.59 The blockbuster ‘‘classical’’ arts exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts eerily resembled the imperialist world’s fairs in the late nineteenth century and highlighted the difficulties faced by African visual artists in making a place for themselves within the global arena. The programs of africa’95 made clear the vast amount of public education needed before the art world’s oldest institutions were in a position to engage with visual cultures in Africa with any genuine or sophisticated approach. 234

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Also in 1995, Johannesburg hosted Africus, the first of two South African biennales set up to offer the global community positive images of a postapartheid democratic nation. While similar shows had been happening in São Paulo (1950s) and Havana (1980s), the expansion of these megashows to South Africa, Côte d’Ivoire, Egypt, and Senegal as alternatives to the traditional Venice biennale and the Documenta in Kassel, Germany, marked the beginning of the age of biennialism. Since 1995, interest in and attention to contemporary African artists has only increased. These global arts fairs have played a significant role in the story of contemporary African arts at the turn of the millennium. The importance of the debates they have engendered, the critical apparatus they have created, and the market that has grown up around them is not to be underestimated in this narrative. If we return briefly to the debates on internationalism in the early 1990s, we begin to understand the appeal and potency of these large global shows. Most critics would now argue that internationalism is a term of the past, one associated with curatorial choices in the age of identity-driven exhibitions and nationalism. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the celebrated differences of postmodernism have been challenged most effectively by expatriate African critics, scholars, and curators, and they have given way to another form of globalism, one which claims to deemphasize difference and identity in the name of a shared contemporary sensibility and one most commonly manifested through overarching conceptualist modes of artistic production. In 1994, the first symposium of the Institute of International Visual Art (iniva) in London gathered together curators, critics, artists, and writers to offer insights into a new internationalism, a concept that presumably would replace the ‘‘old internationalism’’ largely tied to the hegemonic frameworks of European modernism. I draw my analysis below from the comments, on this occasion, of art historian, artist, curator, and critic Olu Oguibe, who spoke about the character of internationalism. Within the arena of the arts, one associates the term internationalism with streamlined Chicago School visions of a shared modernist future and Bauhausian utopianism. This characterization developed in the late modernist era to reflect the cultural hegemony and imperialism of the United States, which saw internationalism or globalism as a process of extending its borders outward to accept those at the periphery into what Oguibe called a state of ‘‘vassalage.’’ 60 In other words, internationalism existed as a measure of Western tolerance, a good-natured invitation to the ‘‘brotherhood of man,’’ a certain kind of philanthropic largesse.61 As such, it assumed a monolithic form, an embodiment of a ‘‘supernatural heroic phenomenon issuing from Passport to the Global Art World

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the impeccable ingenuity of the West.’’ 62 Despite its claims to equality and broad-mindedness, often the only ticket to this internationalism came in the form of primitivism. In their incarnation as primitives representing the lost innocence of humankind in an otherwise highly industrialized and alienating era, African artists could gain admittance. For, as Oguibe reminds his readers, ‘‘to primitivise is to make more tolerable, more containable, less competitive, less threatening.’’ 63 Calls for a new internationalism, illustrated in the work of iniva participants and in the efforts of a number of talented young African and diasporic curators, sought to redefine or expand the ethnocentric parameters of internationalism not simply by decentering the discourse and the display venues for international gatherings but also by recognizing parallel internationalisms, other examples of ‘‘global and long-standing practice[s].’’ 64 As Oguibe explained, one must acknowledge ‘‘spaces, platforms, and premises outside the West. A new internationalism can only be proposed as an alternative if its object of negation is western internationalism.’’ 65 In theory, new biennales in Havana, Dakar, Abidjan, Johannesburg, and elsewhere were designed to provide at least temporary respite from the exoticization faced by Africa’s artists in Eurocentric international events. These occasions have allowed artists, critics, and curators from regions that share a history of colonial oppression to gather in forums away from the pressures of the Euro-American marketplace. Ideally, at these venues, one could begin to escape the dilemma of always being ‘‘spoken for’’ and instead actively construct a vision of global artistic expression that moved beyond a focus on difference. But as inherently political events, many of these biennales have been subject to the controls of local host governments and, like their European counterparts, have continued to impose on their participants national, ethnic, continental, or racial labels. Moreover, the selection process for participation in these events has led to a rather narrow understanding of a much more diverse terrain of practice. As Western curators, critics, dealers, and collectors flock to these events in search of new and different talents, curators present to them an elite, easily digestible set of artists set to tour the biennale circuit. An event that would account for the needs of local artists and their relationship to both local and international markets and criticism would be most effective. While these biennales seek to redress the hegemonic patronage structure presently at work in most postmodernist exhibitions, it is questionable whether or not the promotion of a separate but equal gathering is desirable in the longer term. Ultimately, these events should open opportunities for their participants to envision themselves as artists from Africa, not simply as African artists. 236

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And this difference between the experience of being confined by identity and being in control of it lies at the heart of defining the framework addressing these arts. Identifying an effective critical approach for interpreting the often complex, hybrid cultural productions emerging from the continent and its diaspora has been one of the key challenges within studies of recent arts from Africa. I have struggled throughout this analysis with this task—in discussions of the École de Dakar’s engagement with European primitivist tropes, in considerations of the avant-gardist borrowings of the Laboratoire Agit-Art, and in light of the continuing importance and prevalence of practices of appropriation, amalgamation, and récupération among Dakar’s artists. These practices often suggest easy parallels with postmodernist strategies of pastiche and parody, and yet to simply align them would be to ignore the complex particular circumstances that led to their adoption within the Dakarois milieu. Indeed, recognition of local manifestations of recycling and appropriation might begin to challenge Western ownership claims to postmodernism. As one critic has noted, ‘‘When postmodernism became the fashion, few voices pointed out that its strategies of pastiche, appropriation, and hybridity, were precisely those of subcultural and Third World survival, folk art, and artistic production; rather, with the term in place, the aesthetics were whitewashed and annexed, maintaining rather than dissolving the barriers between these disparate worlds.’’ 66 The development of a form of criticism free of the preconceived notions about Africa embodied in European modernist and postmodernist models would aid greatly in the process of securing consistent market opportunities for African artists. As the above discussion on the Senghorian field of cultural production has made clear, the role of the independent critic was not developed within this art world. Rather, ‘‘criticism’’ took the form of praise and nationalist politicking. If we return to Bourdieu’s characterization of a field, we find that the critic plays an active and important role as an arbiter of meaning, a ‘‘position-taker’’ who produces a legitimizing discourse around an artwork. Art criticism thus can be seen as engendering, primarily through written discourse, its own forms of authority and power. Focusing on what she calls the ‘‘knitting element and power’’ of textual criticism within European art history, art critic Everlyn Nicodemus wrote about the pressing need for an infrastructure to support the practice of art criticism in Africa.67 Modernist art criticism flourished within a new marketrelated public space in European bourgeois society, one that had knowledge of textually documented art histories. The critic thus acted as aesthetic judge, consecrator or defender of a particular artist’s work. The social situation in many parts of Africa, and certainly within Senegal, does not allow Passport to the Global Art World

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for such an individual to operate in any efficient manner, because there is a serious lack of printed, circulating, sharable information available on contemporary artistry and artists. Written criticism in Africa is thus a relatively recent genre. Nonspecialists, writing exhibition reviews in the daily papers, largely publish that which exists in Senegal in French. In 1991, Susan Vogel baldly remarked that she knew of ‘‘no Ivoirian critic.’’ 68 This astonishing comment reflected a common attitude of the time, expressed by both foreign and African sources. It suggested a narrow definition of the role and nature that criticism could assume in different cultural milieus. Surprisingly, many of the younger artists I spoke with in Dakar only cited Frenchmen such as Pierre Gaudibert, Jean-Loup Pivin, André Magnin, or Jean-Hubert Martin in the role as critic.69 Senegalese journalist Marouba Fall explained the problems of local criticism on the occasion of the 1992 Dakar biennale: In Senegal, one deplores, for good reason, the timidity of criticism. Some even speak of a total absence of criticism altogether. The potential critics—university professors and other specialists of the arts—take the pretext of often difficult or late access to artworks but especially of the intolerance of certain artists, to enclose themselves in an eloquent silence or to distill in selective manner rare points of view. The rule of the game then becomes: talk about the works one appreciates positively and pass the others by in silence—a dubious rule because those works that one should talk about are those whose authors/producers would gain from working harder to improve themselves.70 He continued: Some are convinced that local artistic criticism will not be able to imitate that of the West. That means that the Western artist places himself at a sufficient distance from his work, so that he never confuses a damaging opinion of the work as an attack directed toward him, as a personal affront. In Senegal, the man and the artist make up one body. The work of art remains the precious thing that is jealously protected and defended by its owner/author. And beware he who speaks badly of it! 71 As Fall suggests, both foreign and African scholars rely on European models of criticism and the market for assessing the circumstances they find in Africa. These models usually emphasize the genius of the individual artist, and the roles of art dealers, white-cube modernist galleries, and critical texts in monitoring artistic production. Authenticity is judged either by the art238

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work’s relation to traditional forms (usually implying precolonial origin) or by standards of European modernism that located value in the signature of an individual and his or her place within a larger artistic movement or -ism. The popularity and inaccuracy of the École de Dakar label is a case in point; the neocolonialist tinge to this situation is disturbingly evident. Abdoulaye N’Doye has emphasized the intimidating strength of foreign opinion: It is difficult in Africa. You can create a lot of problems for African artists. You come and you say, ah récupération, it’s in style. You say that right now all that is in fashion in Europe is récupération. And immediately people will follow your advice. And they will not stop to reflect. There is another problem. There are not a lot of artists who travel, who move to see for themselves what is happening in the outside world, and so all that you say to them they will accept. . . . So it’s not these artists who choose what they will pursue. They choose because this thing has been chosen by so and so, and everyone will jump on the bandwagon.72 While recent postmodernist claims of solidarity with ‘‘marginalized’’ artists profess a progressive universalism, the critical writings produced under this theoretical rubric have continued, with a few important exceptions, to perpetuate ethnocentric art discourses. To overcome this ‘‘narcissistically self-referential’’ politics of universalist criticism,73 one needs to focus, instead, on the manner in which local idioms can interpret specific art histories and experiences of the global.74 The local, in this sense, need not be spatially bound. Many of the most prolific and interesting contributors to more vernacular forms of art criticism write from positions of exile or migrancy, documenting the works of Africa’s artists in journals such as nka, Revue Noire, and Third Text.75 In Senegal, this kind of commentary would require an approach that considered the legacy of colonialism, the rise of postcolonial identity, the cosmopolitan lifestyle and diverse referencing of art school–trained artists, and their experiences with and workings within different modernist and perhaps postmodernist practices.76 It is within this context that the activities of the Laboratoire Agit-Art and practitioners working at the old Village des Arts gain significance. Their efforts to deliberately subvert the importance of the written text as both an inspiration and legitimization for artistic production,77 to emphasize process and ephemerality, and to engage in a shared artistic experience directly confronted European modernist critical predilections. Despite the ironies of a practice that had them appropriating avantgardist models, Laboratoire Agit-Art’s performances and workshops can be read as critical, alternative apparatuses addressing the legacy of the École Passport to the Global Art World

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de Dakar, acting as forums within which to construct and consider other notions of traditionality and heritage, and acknowledging and then rejecting the commodification and exoticization inherent in the international art market. While established European methods of criticism seem insufficient when dealing with African subject matter, their inadequacy should not lead to a total absence of critical discourse surrounding these arts. In this transnational period, the defining and refining of a local system of assessment rely, to some degree, on that which is practiced within the global cultural arena. Artworks need to be allowed into a public, discursive space. To deny them this possibility or to pass them by in silence because a local or vernacular alternative is not sufficiently developed does little to clarify matters. While one must surely welcome the passing of what Olu Oguibe has called the ‘‘intimate outsider,’’ the European expatriate or armchair theorist writing for the native artist, one needs also to be aware of the drawbacks of insiderism, which can also have a ‘‘ghettoizing effect’’ on the African artist.78 As Ibrahima N’Diaye Baidji, one of the few individuals who labels himself a critic in the Dakarois art scene, insisted, ‘‘It is not up to Africans to critique a work of African art. If there were only Africans to talk about ‘their art,’ there would be no more art. It is not right to ghettoize African artists in such a parameter.’’ 79 This study, while hardly purporting to have solved the problem, has provided materials to be considered in the development of new, more nuanced forms of criticism. These forms must acknowledge local particularities while also remaining conscious of the global and long-standing practice of cosmopolitanism within the works of Senegalese artists. Current debates about the place of contemporary artists from Africa within the global arts arena enable us to return and find precedents in Senghor’s ideas on a universal civilization. He envisioned this new kind of humanism as a ‘‘sense of complementarity in which African cultures could enhance the legacy of European civilizations [and] contribute unique elements to a new humanism.’’ 80 Negritude was, in part, a means to better prepare and clarify Africans’ contributions to this greater whole, so that, as Senghor explained, ‘‘we can answer ‘present’ at the rebirth of the world.’’ 81 Concerns over the workings of globalism and its relationship to local forms have reflected back on discourse and practice in Senegal itself. Africa’95 and other exhibition offerings have had significant repercussions, resulting in greater contact for Senegal’s artists in Europe and creating a ready European audience for the Dakar biennales. As active players in the global contemporary art arena, a select few of Senegal’s artists are producing works 240

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that they know will reach large and diverse audiences and will be considered within mainstream critical arenas. The notion of a universal civilization persists among young art school graduates, such as Cheikh Niass and Kan-Si, who anticipate contributing to a larger humanism. Niass has asserted: I must do my own research. If people are sincere, they will say that it is a very contemporary creation, very modern, and that it can be liked everywhere. On the shores of whatever neighbor, it can be valuable. To an American, Belgian, Ivoirian. . . . It can give its part to the meeting of civilizations, to everyone. Because I believe that art is the visa to this meeting. This meeting of civilizations, to give and to receive. Each will bring his own, something that would come from you, something that will come from art and that is worthy of being present. Poverty has nothing to do with creation.82 As the activities of Laboratoire Agit-Art, the set setal muralists, and other practicing artists have attested to, negotiating the meanings of local and global, of Otherness and Africanness, and claiming contributions to and engagements with modernism and its avant-gardist practices have continued to be central preoccupations of Senegalese artists.

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Notes

Preface

1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11

All translations, unless otherwise noted, are mine. Njami, ‘‘A Useful Dream,’’ 4. Diagne, ‘‘Now Is the Time,’’ 2. Enwezor, introduction to The Short Century, 10. Ibid. See Pollack, ‘‘The Newest Avant-Garde,’’ 124. Cotter, ‘‘Beyond Multiculturalism, Freedom,’’ 28. Ibid. Hassan and Oguibe, Authentic/Ex-centric. Jules-Rosette, ‘‘First Word,’’ 1. Fall, ‘‘Myth, Memory, and Concept,’’ 110. Konaté, ‘‘African Artists from Africa,’’ 142.

Introduction 1 O’Brien, ‘‘Saint Mor Faye.’’ 2 Spivak, ‘‘Three Women’s Texts,’’ 262. 3 The salvage paradigms which seek to rescue pure products of an earlier, precapitalist, non-Western age underlie the categorizations of traditionality and authenticity in the market for African arts and provide familiar structures for exhibition projects and museum collecting. 4 Danto, After the End of Art.

5 Much recent scholarly work focuses on so-called alternative modernities, operating throughout the former colonial world. See specifically Gaonkar, Alternative Modernities. 6 These forays within art history constitute the most recent manifestations of the slow shift that began to transform the discipline in the 1970s. Since that time, scholars have looked toward other disciplines (anthropology, sociology, literary criticism, and more recently, cultural studies) to consider alternative methodological and theoretical approaches (Marxist, feminist, poststructuralist, postmodernist) to challenge the longstanding Eurocentric, patriarchal truths of their field. This so-called new art history thus marked a crucial paradigm shift that gave greater attention to context, emphasizing issues of race, gender, class, and sexuality in the making, distribution, consumption, and interpretation of arts. The onset of so-called multiculturalism within the American academy, and public discourse more generally, allowed scholars such as Lucy Lippard, bell hooks, Coco Fusco, and others to make art historical concepts relevant to contemporary political debate. See Rees and Borzello, The New Art History; Lippard, Mixed Blessings; hooks, Art on My Mind; and Fusco, English Is Broken Here. This politicization of the discipline corresponded with important sociological contributions by scholars such as Howard Becker, Pierre Bourdieu, and Paul DiMaggio whose works exposed the power/knowledge games at work in systems of patronage, collecting, and criticism. Finally, art history’s increasing adoption of the theoretical and methodological concepts of reflexive anthropology led to fruitful exchanges that revisited debates on both the concepts and products of primitivism. See Becker, Art Worlds; Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production; and DiMaggio, ‘‘The Classification of Art.’’ 7 Thomas, ‘‘Collectivity and Nationality,’’ 273. Anthropology also has recently turned its attention to the study of contemporary arts on a global scale. As Nicholas Thomas has suggested, the anthropology of art has traditionally been concerned with ethno-aesthetics in small-scale, non-Western sites and/or in cross-cultural comparisons of so-called primitive or tribal ritual, collective arts. However, the Western/non-Western distinction on which this narrow focus was based is no longer tenable, if it ever was, and it has been rejected in other areas of anthropological inquiry. Furthermore, the practice of visual anthropology is expanding beyond its traditional focus on film and photography to incorporate the anthropology of art. For traditional studies of the anthropology of art, see Forge, Primitive Art and Society, or Coote and Shelton, Anthropology, Art, and Aesthetics. Scholars such as Fred Myers and George Marcus have begun to harness anthropology’s tools for reexamining the institutions, discourses, and methodologies of the Euro-American art world, regarding them as critical signifying practices, deserving of in-depth study. See Marcus and Myers, The Traffic in Culture. 8 Shohat, ‘‘Notes on the ‘Post-colonial,’ ’’ 108. 9 My work draws broadly on the research of pioneering Africanist scholars such as V. Y. Mudimbe, Mahmood Mamdani, Manthia Diawara, and Kwame Anthony Appiah, which reevaluates existing theories of comparative colonialism, complicates and localizes widely varying experiences of colonial violence, hegemony, psychology, and collusion, and refocuses our attention not simply on the ironies of mimicry but also on the multiple forms of strategic agency at work in the eras of decolonization, post-, or neocolonialism. See

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11

12 13

14 15 16

especially Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa; Mamdani, Citizen and Subject; Diawara, In Search of Africa; and Appiah, In My Father’s House. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic. Of equal relevance are recent studies of black experiences of and implications within modernity, as actors on the African continent and within larger diasporas. See especially Diawara, In Search of Africa; Jules-Rosette, Black Paris; Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle; and Enwezor, The Short Century. Some of the most innovative scholarly research on and curatorial interest in these artworks and artists have been spearheaded by a group of young African diasporic arts professionals such as curators, critics, and scholars Okwui Enwezor, Olu Oguibe, Octavio Zaya, Everlyn Nicodemus, Simon Njami, Chika Okeke, dele jegede, and Salah Hassan. The ascendance of this set of critical voices hailing from different parts of Africa and now operating primarily within the art world in Europe and America surely signals a maturation of the field of African arts history. Acting as interpreters or brokers within the global arts arena, these scholars and critics have thus allowed the hitherto silenced African artists a strong vocal and visual platform from which to be seen and heard. The success of this group of young, dynamic critics within the broader art world has revolutionized the field of African art history. Their work is complemented by that of many new younger scholars with recent doctorates (including Lauri Firstenberg, Jennifer Law, John Peffer, Moyo Okediji, and Sylvester Ogbechie) who focus their attention on the contemporary arts of Africa and the diaspora. Moreover, senior scholars, with distinguished careers in other aspects of African art history (e.g., John Picton and Barbara Frank) have turned their attention to the contemporary, greatly benefiting the development of literature in the area of inquiry. Sidney Kasfir, a scholar who focused on modern art long before it became legitimized by the larger field has also been a key player in nurturing this maturation process. The ascendancy of this group of scholars, curators, and critics should also be seen as indicative of a more global phenomenon regarding the growing importance of the curator as cultural broker and interpreter. The role of the international curator/critic will be further addressed in the final chapter of this book as part of a broader art-culture system at work around the productions of Africa’s contemporary artists. The writings of these curators, critics, and scholars have appeared primarily in journals such as Third Text and Nka, Atlantica, Revue Noire, in monographs, and in catalogue essays for both discreet and ambitious exhibition offerings of the past several years. See Oguibe, Uzo Egonu; and Hassan, Gendered Visions. Clifford, The Predicament of Culture; Foster, Recodings; Marcus and Myers, The Traffic in Culture; and McEvilley, ‘‘Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief.’’ For example, two recent, lengthy textbooks in the field only devoted one or two pages to contemporary practices at the end of each ‘‘regional’’ discussion, as though an afterthought. See also some of the classics in the field that attempted to deal specifically with modern arts, such as Vogel, Africa Explores; Graburn, Ethnic and Tourist Arts; Mount, African Art; and Fosu, 20th Century Art in Africa. jegede, ‘‘African Art Today’’; Enwezor, The Short Century. See specifically the earliest issues of African Arts, 1967–74. The authenticity of the ‘‘traditional’’ rests on several spatial, temporal, and aesthetic as-

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sumptions that serve to delineate a market and scholarship for it. It must be of precolonial origin, made from indigenous materials, geared toward a local patronage, and used in collective, often ritual/religious circumstances. Visual traces of its authentic ‘‘life’’ should be evident on the patina and in its condition. The relegation of traditional arts to the realm of an idealized, immutable past perpetuates not simply a false, ahistorical vision of the continent but also denies the process of change embodied in the traditions of any culture. In contrast, the term contemporary, as it has been applied to Africa’s arts, is equally problematic because scholars and those in the art market have employed it in such an indiscriminate manner. In European and Euro-American writings, if the term is used of the twentieth century, it is associated with modernist and postmodernist so-called fine arts, embodying all the connotations that differentiate high and low, popular and gallery arts. In the African context, however, scholars may use it to refer to a wide array of visual practices, arguing its applicability on purely temporal terms to speak of recent creations or to imply changes in material, technique, and subject matter, in regard to masquerade, textiles, pottery production, or indeed to describe a kind of paradigm shift to easel painting. Nicodemus, ‘‘Art and Art from Africa.’’ Picton, ‘‘West Africa and the Guinea Coast,’’ 344–45. Ery Camara, ‘‘Exchanged Glances, Crossroads,’’ 186. Clifford, ‘‘Of Other Peoples,’’ 126. See particularly Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth; Soyinka, Art, Dialogue, and Outrage; Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa; and Adotevi, Négritude et négrologues. There is no single definition of the École de Paris, but the label is generally used to describe a group of young artists, many émigrés in Paris, who worked in an informal, modernist painting style in the first decades of the twentieth century. The focus on new nationalist-oriented arts and on the productions of schools or workshops accompanied studies on tourism’s impact on the visual arts and the engagement of practitioners with the forces of international capitalism. Taking their lead from Nelson Graburn’s 1976 seminal work Ethnic and Tourist Arts, scholars such as Bennetta JulesRosette, Paula Ben-Amos, Sidney Littlefield Kasfir, Daniel Crowley, Ezio Bassani, and Christopher Steiner began to treat these visual productions seriously. While these objects were more often than not discredited by the majority of scholars, collectors, and curators as dreary reminders of the contamination and deterioration of traditional and authentic African cultural practices, these pathbreaking studies insisted on revaluing, or, at the very least, legitimizing, interest in the quickly proliferating forms. Scholars argued that the processes of object making themselves be seen as important systems of communication—as indicators of Africa’s participation in the broader political economy of the colonial and neocolonial periods and as fundamental shifts in cultural definitions of authenticity, canonicity, and patronage. Clark, The Absolute Bourgeois. See Wallerstein, ‘‘Elites in French-Speaking West Africa.’’ See especially the recent book by Tracy D. Snipe, Art and Politics in Senegal, 1960–1996.

Notes

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30 31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38

Krauss, The Originality of the Avant-Garde; Poggioli, The Theory of the Avant-Garde; Buchloh, ‘‘Theories of the Avant-Garde’’; Habermas, ‘‘Modernity.’’ Danto, ‘‘The Artworld’’; Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production. Research for this book was carried out during two stays in Senegal over a year and supplemented through further discussions with Senegalese and other African artists in residence in Paris and in London during the africa’95 season. The majority of the material is derived from multiple interviews with the artists. However, archival materials from the Université Cheikh Anta Diop (ucad), the Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire (ifan), and the Senegalese Ministry of Culture were also consulted. There are many informal and formal groupings of artists in Senegal. Most of my research was focused on Dakar, and within that milieu, I tried to work with artists with varied affiliations. The expansion of practice in the 1970s meant that artists began to work in a wide array of media. My choices of artists’ work in this study have also been concerned with acknowledging this diversity of expression. The scope of this study spans the early years following independence up until 1995, a year when two major global arts festivals put Africa and its contemporary artists in the spotlight—africa’95, in Britain, and Africus, the first of two Johannesburg global art biennales. The artistic, critical, and curatorial energy surrounding these events signaled a new age to come. In the time frame during which this study occurred, one could only hope for the successes of the Dakar biennales and the number of groundbreaking exhibitions featuring contemporary African artistry that became ever more frequent in the last decade of the twentieth century. Further discussion of the subsequent Dakar biennales, spanning from 1992 to 2002, can be found in the final chapter of this study. The American, Italian, German, and British cultural centers have also frequently supported local artists and have sponsored or cosponsored exhibitions of the works of their nationals and Senegalese artists. Money from the French Agence de Coopération et Technique (Cultural and Technical Cooperation Agency) has also played a key role in funding individual artists and larger group projects in Senegal. Since the time of this study, the French Cultural Center has closed its main exhibition space. Baker, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, 15. Shohat, ‘‘Notes on the Post-colonial,’’ 108. My use of contemporary follows that of others who have employed it to refer to artists engaged in the elite gallery sphere. Chinweizu, The West and the Rest of Us; Araeen, ‘‘Our Bauhaus Others’ Mudhouse,’’ 6–7. Ibid. Ibid., 7. Stuart Hall summarizes modernity as follows: the rise of ‘‘the nation-state and an international system of states; a dynamic and expansionist capitalist economic order based on private property; industrialism; the growth of large-scale administrative and bureaucratic systems of social organization and regulation; the dominance of secular, materialist, rationalist, and individualist cultural values; and the formal separation of the ‘private’ from the ‘public.’ ’’ Hall, Modernity, 427.

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1

However, beginning with Senghor and continuing through the administrations of his successor, art training was incorporated into local community centers and schools throughout the republic.

Rhythm as the Architecture 1

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Senghor spoke of the importance of the artist in the decolonization process: ‘‘Paradoxical as this may seem, writers and artists must and do play a most important role in the struggle for decolonization. It is up to them to remind politicians that politics and administration are but one aspect of culture, and that cultural colonialism, in the shape of assimilation, is the worst of all.’’ Senghor, ‘‘Eléments constructifs,’’ 279. James Clifford uses this term to speak of the cultural practices, exchange systems, and taxonomic shifts that have marked the collecting of tribal artifacts in the West. His identification of a broad ‘‘ideological and institutional system’’ in which cultural productions and meanings circulate provides a guideline for assessing the art network erected during the Senghorian period in Senegal with its own conceptions of art, artist, modernity, and Africanity. See Clifford, ‘‘On Collecting Art and Culture,’’ in The Predicament of Culture, 215–51. See Paul Gilroy for a discussion of black nationalist connections to European nationalist theory and rhetoric. Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 187–96. I borrow the term negrophilia from the writings of art historian Jean Laude, who coined the word in his investigation of the relationship between African arts and modern French painting. Laude, La peinture française. See especially Kesteloot, Black Writers in French; Moore, African Literature and the Universities; Adotevi, Négritude et négrologues; and Soyinka, Myth, Literature, and the African World. The lack of research on the visual arts can only be explained as a result of the biases in the developing field of African arts history at the time, which found scholars more concerned with documenting so-called traditional arts, seen to be rapidly disappearing. Moreover, many scholars at the time approached the visual arts of Africa through the lens of Western art historical paradigms and modernist assumptions about the nature of ‘‘primitive’’ cultures. Both views privileged wooden carvings, sculptures, masks, and the like over some of the more ephemeral and personal arts practiced by Senegal’s peoples until the advent of the academy painting school. As a result, the Senegalese region was perceived as a non–art-producing region. Césaire purposely adopted nègre, rather than noir, as the root of Négritude to address the racist implications of the term, similar to those of the word nigger. The term also intentionally linked his intellectual endeavors to those of the New Negro writers in Harlem in the 1920s. Césaire, qtd. in Irele, ‘‘Negritude—Philosophy of African Being,’’ 1. Césaire, Return to My Native Land, 99–101. The book was originally published as Cahier d’un retour au pays natal (Paris: Présence Africaine, 1939). Senghor, ‘‘Discours pronouncé à l’Université d’Oxford.’’

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Lilyan Kesteloot is particularly interesting on this point in her chapter entitled ‘‘Negritude: Some Definitions, Sartre’s Negativity,’’ in Black Writers in French, 102–15. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth. Senghor, Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie. Sartre, ‘‘L’Orphée noir,’’ xxix. Ibid., xiii–xiv. Ngu˜gı˜ Wa Thiong’o makes a similar point in Decolonising the Mind: ‘‘Economic and political control can never be complete or effective without mental control. To control a people’s culture is to control their tools of self-definition in relationship to others. For colonialism this involved two aspects of the same process: the destruction or the deliberate undervaluing of a people’s culture, their art, dances, religions, history, geography, education, orature and literature, and the conscious elevation of the language of the coloniser.’’ See Ngu˜gı˜, Decolonising the Mind, 16. Sartre’s interpretation anticipates works by Tzvetan Todorov, V. S. Naipaul, Edward Said, Stuart Hall, Homi K. Bhaba, Kobena Mercer, Ella Shohat, Robert Stam, and others writing on the postcolonial condition, the politics of representation, and postcolonial aesthetics. Sartre, ‘‘L’Orphée noir,’’ xl–xli. For an excellent critique of Sartre’s analysis see, Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 133– 35. Fanon noted that by treating Negritude as the minor term in a Hegelian dialectic, ‘‘I had been robbed of my last chance. I said to my friends, ‘The generation of the younger black poets has just suffered a blow that can never be forgiven.’ Help had been sought from a friend of the colored peoples, and that friend had found no better response than to point out the relativity of what they were doing. . . . Jean-Paul Sartre, in this work, has destroyed black zeal.’’ Powell, Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century, 20. For example, the famous Freetown speech, ‘‘The Idea of African Personality,’’ delivered by prominent scholar and diplomat Edward Wilmot Blyden and later reiterated by Sylvester Williams at the First Pan-African Congress in London in 1900, contained the seeds of many of Negritude’s tenets and also served as a model for Kwame Nkrumah’s ideas on ‘‘African Personality.’’ See Lynch, Edward Wilmot Blyden. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk. Ibid., 9. Three hundred thousand African American troops served in the First World War. The war functioned as a catalyst for a racially based cultural movement that sought to recognize the contributions of African Americans to the United States. Even after risking their lives for their country, African Americans were still not afforded civil rights at home. The war also brought some 175,000 black Africans, 1 percent of French West Africa’s population, to France. See Crowder and Osuntokun, ‘‘The First World War and West Africa,’’ 558. Beginning in 1918, the so-called great migration of African Americans from the agrarian South to the cities of the rapidly industrializing north resulted in large, concentrated black communities and fostered a greater sense of collective identity.

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Kaké, ‘‘The Impact of Afro-Americans,’’ 202. As Salah Hassan has noted, the first of these pan-African congresses to be held in Paris ironically coincided with the dates of a colonial world’s fair. It thus provided a forum for African voices in a climate that objectified the continent, its cultures, and its peoples within the colonial gaze. See Hassan, ‘‘Inaugural Issues,’’ 194–221. Pan-Africanist activism began in London in 1900 with the First Pan-African Congress organized by Trinidadian lawyer Henry Sylvester-Williams. In the 1910s and 1920s, W. E. B. Du Bois organized three more congresses. At this point, pan-Africanist philosophy was less militant and oppositional than Garveyism, advocating colonial disengagement but not revolution. In 1935, Italy’s invasion of Abyssinia reminded the world of the brutalities of imperialism. As C. L. R. James noted, anti-imperialists ‘‘now saw for themselves how [imperialism] operated with a nation hacking its way towards empire at the costs of everything sacred.’’ James, The Black Jacobins, 31. At this time, African and Caribbean intellectuals set up the International African Friends of Abyssinia; Amy Ashwood Garvey, Jomo Kenyatta, George and Dorothy Padmore, and C. L. R. James were some of its members (James was the only Marxist among them at the time). When Abyssinia was defeated, they set up the International African Service Bureau (isab) to further the cause of anticolonialism. Active membership in the isab was restricted to people of African descent. This association was the most radical of the various groups in London (including the League of Colored Peoples, the African Association, and the African Progress Union). Pan-Africanism turned leftward when George and Dorothy Padmore organized the Fifth Pan-African Congress in 1945 (this congress saw involvement of many future African leaders, Kwame Nkrumah among them). On this occasion, members called for the ouster of colonial authorities through mass popular mobilization in Africa and the Caribbean. James supplemented his political activities through drama and prose writing, producing the play Touissant L’Ouverture, in which Paul Robeson performed in London in 1936, and which later formed the basis for James’s 1938 book, The Black Jacobins. For more details on this political scene, see esp. Padmore, Pan-Africanism or Communism?, and Worcester, C. L. R. James. Garvey’s ideas and those of his supporters were distributed in a journal entitled Negro World. Garvey’s movement is the one best known for its campaign advocating so-called emigrationism among African Americans, but other similar ones preceded it. See Blackett, ‘‘Martin Delaney and Robert Campbell.’’ Langley, ‘‘Pan-Africanism in Paris.’’ Locke, The New Negro. See Baker, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, 71–81. Locke, The New Negro, xv–xvi. Locke, qtd. in Gaither, ‘‘Heritage Reclaimed,’’ 191. Countee Cullen, ‘‘Heritage’’ (1926), qtd. in ibid., 144. McKay, qtd. in Kesteloot, Black Writers in French, 69. Senghor, Liberté I, 116. Vaillant, Black, French, and African, 93. Ibid., 143.

Notes

37

38

39 40

41 42 43 44

‘‘We were in contact with these black Americans during the years 1929–34 through Mlle. Paulette Nardal, who, with Dr. Sajous, a Haitian, had founded the Revue du monde noir. Mlle. Nardal kept a literary salon, where African Negroes, West Indians, and American Negroes used to get together.’’ Qtd. in ibid., 57. In her biography of Senghor, Janet Vaillant also notes that Senghor was introduced to Paulette Nardal and her family through Aimé Césaire. The Nardal family then introduced Senghor to their cousins, the Achilles, another intellectual Martinican family. Louis Achille Sr. had been a professor at Howard University in Washington, DC, and he therefore had strong contacts with African American intellectuals. The Parisian apartment of the Achille family welcomed well-known figures such as Mercer Cook and Caribbean writers of an older generation such as René Maran. Visual artists were also frequent visitors to the Achille family. In these years, Paulette Nardal also organized groups of young students, including Senghor, to visit the Folies Bergères to see Josephine Baker perform. See ibid., 91. Paulette Nardal, letter to J. L Hymans, 17 November 1963, qtd. in Hymans, Léopold Sédar Senghor, 42. The Revue was a precursor to L’Étudiant Noir and the better-known Présence Africaine. The latter journal, however, served as a forum for developing political ideologies as well as cultural debates. Liberia declared itself a republic in 1847. It was first established in 1822 as a state for the resettlement of freed slaves, on land purchased by the American Colonization Society. Visual artists such as Henry Ossawa Tanner, Gwendolyn Bennett, Aaron Douglas, William H. Johnson, Palmer Hayden, James A. Porter, Archibald Motley Jr., Augusta Savage, Hale Woodruff, and Lois Mailou Jones studied in prestigious art schools such as the École des Beaux Arts, the Académie de la Grande Chaumière, and the Julian Academy, as well as privately with some of Europe’s most successful artists. Their travels were often assisted by educational grants from the Harmon Foundation, the Carnegie Corporation, and the Guggenheim Foundation, as well as through private patronage. Leininger, New Negro Artists in Paris, 21. Lewis, When Harlem Was in Vogue. See Baker, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. For many, the elegantly sculpted figure Ethiopia, depicted by Meta Warrick Fuller, best anticipated the optimism and pan-African consciousness that would come to characterize the interbellum period. This work from 1921 pictures an Egyptian woman stirring, cautiously preparing to shed her mummy wraps to move into action, providing a salient metaphor for the beginnings of a great pan-Africanist cultural renaissance. The style of this sculpture suggests earlier works in mid-nineteenth-century neoclassical statuary. Fuller had studied in Paris at the École des Beaux Arts, the Académie Colorossi, and privately with Auguste Rodin. According to Judith Wilson, another source of inspiration could have been a novel, Ethiopia Unbound (1911), written by the Gold Coast activist and pan-Africanist J. E. Casely Hayford. Fuller certainly had connections to pan-Africanist movements in Europe. Art historian Renée Deanne Ater has recently argued that this sculpture was, in fact, created for the American pavilion organized by Du Bois in the 1921 America Making Festival in New York. See Ater, ‘‘Making History: Meta Warrick Fuller’s Ethiopia,’’ 12–31. See discussion in Powell, Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century, 36.

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48 49 50 51 52 53

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The use of African motifs in African American artworks of this period and the one following is well documented in the works of painter Sargent Johnson, who reinterpreted Baule masks in his copper Masks series (1930s), and those of painter Aaron Douglas in his Aspects of Negro Life, a mural tracing the emergence of black American identity from its sub-Saharan roots to the modern day (1934). Powell, Black Art and Culture in the 20th Century, 42. See Valliant, Black, French, and African, ch. 3. In the 1920s, several years before Senghor and Césaire arrived, a number of small, politically active student groups of French-speaking West Africans began to operate in Paris. Their debates and their writings, published in a series of short-lived journals, were precursors of La Revue du Monde Noir and later journals like Présence Africaine and L’Étudiant Noir, each of which served as the organs through which Senghor would develop his philosophical ideas. This early French African participation in pan-African debates closely mirrored the activities of groups in the United States and the nationalist politics in North Africa and Indochina (many were engaged in anticolonial organizing in Paris). Between 1924 and 1936, three political organizations agitated for the establishment of a politically coherent great African state, for the beginnings of the process of decolonization, and for the overall improvement of the black condition and rights of the oppressed worldwide. Participants in these groups were frequently members of the Communist Party and of trade unions. Some were also Garveyists. In 1924, students from Dahomey, Senegal, and Sudan helped Togolese intellectual Tovalou Houénou found the Ligue Universel pour la Défense de la Race Noire (Universal League for the Defense of the Black Race), which published a monthly journal titled Les Continents, with reports on the colonies, precolonial histories, politics, Gandhism, and a regular column on African populations in the United States. Houénou, echoing the feelings of many European intellectuals at the time, was profoundly affected by the carnage of the First World War and saw his pursuits of decolonization and beliefs in the revaluation of non-European civilizational mores as critical. Because of its anticolonial politics and, especially, its personal attacks on deputy Blaise Diagne, the Ligue was driven underground. However, in 1926, it was succeeded by an even more controversial group, the Comité de la Défense de la Race Nègre (cdrn; Committee for the Defense of the Black Race), headed by the Senegalese student Lamine Senghor and, in 1927, by the Ligue de la Défense de la Race Nègre (ldrn), headed by Timého Garan-Kouyaté, who described the group’s mission as nothing less than ‘‘the political, economic, moral, and intellectual emancipation of the whole Negro race.’’ See Langley, ‘‘Pan-Africanism in Paris,’’ 69–94. Clifford, ‘‘On Ethnographic Surrealism,’’ in The Predicament of Culture, 117. Ibid., 120. Ibid. Said, Orientalism. Clifford, ‘‘Histories of the Tribal and the Modern,’’ 200. Ibid., 198–99. The writings of Picasso, Dérain, and Vlaminck all attest to the strong impact of African artworks on their own work. These artists first encountered African arts

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57 58

59 60 61

62 63 64 65 66 67

at ethnographic museums such as the Musée du Trocadéro (now the Musée de l’Homme) and in colonial exhibitions. For an engaged discussion on this time period and the rise of European primitivism, see the two-volume catalogue, Rubin, ‘‘Primitivism,’’ and the ensuing criticism in McEvilley, ‘‘Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief.’’ Also refer to Araeen, ‘‘From Primitivism to Ethnic Arts.’’ Clifford, ‘‘On Ethnographic Surrealism,’’ 136. Laude, La peinture française et l’art nègre (1905–1914). See also Archer-Straw, Negrophilia. In 1934, the British writer and heir to the Cunard shipping fortune, Nancy Cunard, published an enormous and controversial anthology of writings about African and African diaspora life entitled Negro, which featured the works of scholars such as Zora Neale Hurston, Arthur Schomberg, Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, W. E. B. Du Bois, René Crevel, George Padmore, Ezra Pound, A. Ade Ademola, Jomo Kenyatta, and many others. This volume attests to the growing interest among European intellectuals in African and diaspora cultural forms. Senghor, Ce que je crois (1988), qtd. in Deliss, Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa, 218. The Mission Dakar-Djibouti, undertaken in 1931–33 by Marcel Griaule, Michel Leiris, and their colleagues for the Musée du Trocadéro, was jointly organized by the Institut d’Ethnographie at the Université de Paris and the Musée National d’Histoire Naturel. This mission received financial support from twenty important French institutions. In their travels to French colonial West Africa, Nigeria, Cameroon, French Equatorial Africa, the Belgian Congo, the Anglo-Egyptian Sudan, Eritrea, and French parts of Somalia, the scholars worked, among others, in the fields of ethnography, history, prehistory, archaeology, botany, linguistics, bringing back with them over 3,500 objects for the Musée d’Ethnographie: Abyssinian paintings, Ethiopian manuscripts and amulets, and documentation of languages, dance, and music from throughout the areas visited. See a special edition of the Parisian arts review Minotaure, no. 2 (1933) for an account of this mission. One could also cite the whimsical tone of Michel Leiris’s account of his experiences on this mission in L’Afrique fantôme (1934) as evidence of the bonds between the growing practice of ethnography and surrealism. Laude, La peinture française, 529. Senghor, ‘‘Negritude and Marxism,’’ 341. Delafosse, Les nègres; Delafosse, ‘‘L’art ancien dans l’Afrique occidentale’’; Delafosse, Haut-Sénégal-Niger; Frobenius, Histoire de la civilisation africaine; Tempels, La philosophie bantoue; and Lévy-Bruhl, La mentalité primitive. Frobenius, Histoire de la civilisation africaine, qtd. in Kesteloot, Black Writers in French, 93. Kesteloot, Black Writers in French, 94. Ibid. Senghor, qtd. in Garlake, Kingdoms of Africa, 40. Delafosse, ‘‘L’art ancien dans l’Afrique occidentale,’’ 96. ‘‘The vocabulary of the ethnologists who were just beginning to unveil black Africa’s secrets was adopted: like them one spoke of life forces. . . . This was all the young Negro elite was asking for. . . . We had regained our pride. Relying on the works of anthropologists, prehistorians, and ethnologists, who paradoxically were white, we proclaimed ourselves

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68 69

70 71

72

73

74 75 76

254

in the phrase of the poet Aimé Césaire, ‘the eldest sons of the earth.’ ’’ Senghor, qtd. in Dathorne and Feuser, Africa in Prose, 341. Qtd. in Kesteloot, Black Writers in French, 15. Aimé Césaire, Cuban artist Wifredo Lam, and André Breton all escaped Nazi-occupied France on the same ship bound for Martinique. Their discussions of colonialism and African cultural renaissance led to the publication of the journal Tropiques. The paintings of Wifredo Lam, who is often referred to as a Negritude painter, owe much to surrealism, as do some of the writings of Césaire. However, Senghor has insisted that the Negritude movement ‘‘accepted Surrealism as a means, not as an end; as an ally and not as a master.’’ Senghor, qtd. in Finn, Voices of Negritude, 49. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 147–53. Through their French schooling, which consistently portrayed Africans as savages and nègres, Antilleans were indoctrinated with French colonial attitudes toward the ‘‘primitive’’ Other. As mentioned above, these attitudes were often heightened when West Indian elites were recruited to serve in the colonial service in Africa. Janet Vaillant notes that a position in the colonial service was one of the few professions open to an educated Antillean during this period. For their part, the majority of African students in Paris would only have encountered Antilleans in this colonial service milieu. They did not regard them as superior, but rather as ‘‘petty bureaucrats, supporters and lackeys of the French.’’ Vaillant, Black, French, and African, 100. For example, Félix Éboué, Senghor’s onetime father-in-law, was a Guyanese governor of French Equatorial Africa. René Maran, a prolific contributor to La Revue du Monde Noir, born in Martinique to Guyanese parents, also served as a colonial officer in French Equatorial Africa. In 1921, he wrote a book about African village life called Batouala, including a preface in which he virulently attacked French colonial endeavors. When released, the book created a scandal, eventually forcing Maran to give up his post in the colonial service. This work, and perhaps more important, the reactions to it, later served as significant catalysts for Senghor’s thoughts on African heritage. The first article he published in L’Étudiant Noir in 1935 was based on Maran’s writings. Maran formed part of a black cultural renaissance in the Caribbean which paralleled activities in the United States and Europe. ‘‘And the whole thing added up perfectly to a hideous nigger, a grouchy nigger, a melancholy nigger, a slouched nigger, his hands in prayer on a knobby stick. A nigger shrouded in an old threadbare coat—a comical nigger, with some women behind me sneering at him. He was comical and ugly, comical and ugly for sure. I displayed a big complicitous smile. . . . My cowardice rediscovered.’’ Césaire, Return to My Native Land, 86–87. Césaire, qtd. in Vaillant, Black, French, and African, 97. Phrase adapted from Ngu˜gı˜, Decolonising the Mind. Qtd. in Hymans, Léopold Sédar Senghor, 96. Senghor wrote, ‘‘Légitime Défense drew our attention to the problem of surrealism and to that of the primacy of politics. But, if we were induced to read the surrealists more attentively, the attitude of Légitime Défense led us, at the same time, to read them with a critical eye and in a defensive position. And because Léro and Ménil affirmed: ‘Politics first,’ we were pushed by temperament, and to

Notes

77 78 79 80

81 82

83 84 85

86 87 88 89

distinguish ourselves, to respond: ‘Culture first.’ ’’ Senghor, letter to Hymans, 5 December 1964, qtd. in ibid., 267. Early efforts include Robert Farris Thompson, Flash of the Spirit; Mintz, Caribbean Transformations; and Vlach, The Afro-American Tradition in Decorative Arts. Bhabha, The Location of Culture. Betts, Assimilation and Association. Jameson, Postmodernism, 4. Jameson uses the term cultural dominant when defining the dominance of postmodernism. Mindful of the dangers of periodization, he wishes to suggest not a set style but rather ‘‘a conception which allows for the presence and coexistence of a range of very different, yet subordinate, features’’ (ibid.). I suggest that the ascendancy of Negritude as state discourse should be regarded with similar subtlety. See his early collections of poems, Chants d’ombre (1945), Hosties noires (1948), and Chants pour Naett (1949). Senghor, Selected Poems. For a detailed discussion of the differences between the politics of assimilation and association, see Betts, Assimilation and Association. The rationale underlying the assimilation policy assumed that Africans were a kind of tabula rasa (both collectively and individually) on whom the French could write their values and civilization. Following from this theory, then, if Africans could be transformed into black Frenchmen through proper education, they could be afforded full political rights as citizens. Lambert argues, ‘‘The French never had a clear and unified definition of assimilation. In contrast, the Senegalese had a precise definition of citizenship. Perhaps the unified position of the Senegalese, as opposed to the many divergent interpretations of the French, can partially explain the success of the Senegalese politicians in their fight for citizenship.’’ Lambert, ‘‘From Citizenship to Négritude,’’ 242 n. 5. See also 241. In contrast, political participation in metropolitan politics was not open to other colonies in Africa until the passing of the Lamine Guèye Law in 1946. Crowder, Senegal, 98. See Donal B. Cruise O’Brien, The Mourides of Senegal; Donal B. Cruise O’Brien, Saints and Politicians; Gellar, Senegal; and Klein, Islam and Imperialism in Senegal. The colonial economy was based on cash-crop groundnut plantations largely worked by members of the Muslim brotherhoods in the interior. The leaders of these brotherhoods developed strong trading and business relationships with the French. For their part, the French initially sought to crush local Muslim leadership, but soon shifted this policy in favor of a more economically beneficial collusion. A large French military presence and settler community also generated a significant amount of the colony’s income. For study of the French in Senegal, see Rita Cruise O’Brien, White Society in Black Africa. Johnson, The Emergence of Black Politics in Senegal, 88. See Mamdani, Citizen and Subject. See chapter 4 of this book for the history of signares in the colony. Michael Crowder gives an estimate from 1865 suggesting that the colony of Senegal had 150,000 inhabitants, only 15,000 of whom living in Saint Louis and Gorée-Dakar were French citizens. Crowder, Senegal, 17.

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90 91

92

93 94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102

103 104

105 106 107

108 109

256

Ibid., viii. Ironically, his opponents at home, politicians like Lamine Guèye and Galandou Diouf, sought greater equality within the French system, rather than independence. This policy was changed by the Lamine Guèye Law in 1946, which ended both indigénat and corvée, granting a kind of French citizenship throughout the colonies. See Admolekun, ‘‘The Road to Independence in French Tropical Africa.’’ While the lobbying of important creole politicians and traders in the four communes in the National Assembly should not be underestimated, it should also be noted that the French administration was fully aware of the limitations of French assimilation policy. The vast quantities of territories their imperialist missions brought into the empire could not conceivably be dealt with adequately with the manpower available to them without huge cost. Idowu, ‘‘Assimilation in Nineteenth Century Senegal,’’ 205. Johnson, The Emergence of Black Politics in Senegal, 22–23; Hargreaves, ‘‘Assimilation in Eighteenth-Century Senegal.’’ Crowder, Senegal, 7. Naipaul, The Mimic Men. Johnson, The Emergence of Black Politics in Senegal, 198. This area, which derived much of its economy from the sea, had been in early contact with the Portuguese, who established successful missions there. Lambert, ‘‘From Citizenship to Négritude,’’ 240. Ibid., 235. Clifford, ‘‘Tell about Your Trip: Michel Leiris,’’ in The Predicament of Culture, 173. Biographer J. L. Hymans notes that Senghor was greatly influenced by the writings of French historian/philosopher Maurice Barrès, who advocated a feeling of rootedness based on closeness to the soil, to one’s province. His works were at the heart of the development of European nationalism. Senghor’s readings of Barrès inspired him to look more closely at and honor his ethnic roots in the myths and history of the Serer people in Senegal. Senghor, ‘‘De la liberté de l’âme ou éloge du métissage,’’ in Liberté I, 99. Miller, Blank Darkness. The notion of an edenic state of nature populated by ‘‘noble savages’’ predating the advent of ‘‘civilization’’ was a staple of French Enlightenment moral and political philosophy as well, most famously explicated in Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s Discourse on the Origin of Inequality. Fabian, Time and the Other, x. See Steiner, African Art in Transit; and Price, Primitive Art in Civilized Places. ‘‘Paradoxically, it was the French who forced us first to seek and then to reveal ourselves to ourselves. . . . Very early we had attested in ourselves the failure of assimilation: we had been able to assimilate French language and mathematics, but we weren’t able to slough off either our black skin or our black soul. Thus we were lead in search of a passionate quest for a Holy Grail: our collective soul.’’ Senghor, qtd. in Markovitz, Senghor and the Politics of Négritude, 52. Irele, ‘‘Negritude—Philosophy of African Being,’’ 4. Senghor, ‘‘For Khalam,’’ in Selected Poems, 57.

Notes

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111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120 121 122 123 124 125 126

127

128

129

See, for example, Senghor’s poems, ‘‘Nuit de Sine,’’ in Chants d’ombre (1945), ‘‘A l’appel de la race de Sabu,’’ in Hosties noires (1948), or ‘‘Congo,’’ in Ethiopiques (1956). The growth in scholarship on imperialism, race, and gender in the last few decades, in both subaltern studies and postcolonial studies, has led to a greater understanding of the ‘‘intimate enemy’’ that the system of colonialism engendered. In his work on notions of hybridity under the colonial system, Robert J. C. Young investigates the sexual tension inherent in the colonial encounter, while Anne McClintock situates her studies in the interstitialities of race, gender, class, and sexuality within the colonial field. Moreover, visions of both a mother and a virgin Africa, which must be penetrated and controlled, abound in colonialist writings, many of which Senghor drew on for his romantic and nostalgic characterizations of the continent. See Young, Colonial Desire; and McClintock, Imperial Leather. See also Gilman, ‘‘Black Bodies, White Bodies.’’ Qtd. in Hymans, Léopold Sédar Senghor, xiii. Senghor, Liberté I, 7. His discussion of the emotive nature of African societies echoes the work of Frobenius and Lévy-Bruhl on the same topic. Senghor, ‘‘L’esprit de la civilization,’’ 53. Senghor, Foundations of Africanité, 37. Senghor, qtd. in Irele, ‘‘Negritude—Philosophy of African Being,’’ 6. Sartre, qtd. in Kesteloot, Black Writers in French, 103. Senghor, qtd. in Markovitz, Senghor and the Politics of Négritude, 6. Senghor, Liberté I, 123. Senghor, ‘‘L’esthétique négro-africaine,’’ in Liberté I, 203. Senghor, ‘‘L’esprit de la civilisation,’’ 52. Miller, Blank Darkness, 88. Diawara, ‘‘Reading Africa through Foucault,’’ 188. Ibid., 190. For a discussion of Count Gobineau’s theories see Barzun, Race, 50–78. Senghor, Foundations of Africanité, 44. Senghor, ‘‘Le problème de la culture,’’ in Liberté I, 96. Kesteloot, Black Writers in French, 102–3. Kesteloot defines Césaire’s sense of Negritude as simultaneously a denotation for the color of skin, of a larger racial trait, a shared psychology, and an assertion of black rights. To an original shared sense of racial belonging, Césaire, in his Cahier, added the notion of a ‘‘community of suffering,’’ what Kesteloot describes as a kind of passion, evidenced in the scars of the Middle Passage, a search for equal rights, and a proud assertion of race. See ibid., 108–115. Senegalese scholar and senator Alioune Diop established sac and its journal in order to affirm ‘‘the presence, or ethos of the black communities of the world and to defend the originality of their way of life and the dignity of their culture.’’ Mount, African Art, 67. A number of scholars have studied the critical role played by this journal and its publishing house in the development of Negritude philosophy, pan-Africanism, and postcolonial cultural and nationalist politics. See Mélanges; Fiber, ‘‘Neo-colonialism and Présence Africaine’’; Mudimbe, The Surreptitious Speech; and Hassan, ‘‘Inaugural Issues.’’ American writers such as Richard Wright and West Indians like George Lamming, Frantz

Notes

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130 131

132 133 134

135 136 137

138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145 146 147 148

258

Fanon, and Aimé Césaire joined African intellectuals like Jacques Rabemananja and Cheik Anta Diop, as well as visual artists Ben Enwonwu, Gerard Sekoto, and Skunder Boghossian. Noted by Senghor in Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, qtd. in Markovitz, Senghor and the Politics of Négritude, 68–69. Senghor’s concept of a new, more just, world civilization formed through the particularities of different peoples echoed the thoughts of W. E. B. Du Bois in his speech to the American Negro Academy entitled the ‘‘Conservation of Races,’’ in which he referred to ‘‘[the various races] striving, each in its own way, to develop for civilisation its particular message, its particular ideal, which shall help guide the world nearer and nearer that perfection of human life for which we all long, that ‘one far off Divine event!’ ’’ Qtd. in Appiah, In My Father’s House, 45. Senghor, qtd. in Markovitz, Senghor and the Politcis of Négritude, 69. Senghor, ‘‘Prayer to Masks,’’ in Selected Poems, 7. His attitudes toward the culture of the French colonizer are typical of those discussed by Albert Memmi in his study of the psychological effects of colonialism, The Colonizer and the Colonized. Senghor, ‘‘Vues sur l’Afrique noire,’’ 93. See the discussion of Senghor’s speech ‘‘Picasso en nigritie’’ in Ebong, ‘‘Negritude,’’ 200– 201. This point will be further elaborated in the chapters to follow. Dennis Osadebay begged of the Negritude poets, ‘‘Don’t preserve my customs as some fine curios to suit some white historian’s tastes—there’s nothing artificial that beats the natural way, in culture and ideals of life.’’ Qtd. in Kohn and Sokolsky, African Nationalism in the Twentieth Century, 178. Frantz Fanon’s analysis of postcolonial realities in The Wretched of the Earth and in Black Skin, White Masks also contains critical readings of pan-Africanism and Negritude. See also Franklin, ‘‘La Négritude.’’ Of course, another key source is Adotevi, Négritude et négrologues. Okwui Enwezor and Octavio Zaya, ‘‘Colonial Imaginary, Tropes of Description: History, Culture, and Representation in the Works of African Photographers,’’ in In/Sight, 27. Paul Hountondji, qtd. in ibid. Sembene, ‘‘Novelist-Critic of Africa,’’ 1041. Ezekiel Mphahlele, ‘‘Remarks on Négritude,’’ qtd. in Hymans, Léopold Sédar Senghor, 281–85. See also Mphahlele, The African Image. Fanon, ‘‘On National Culture,’’ in The Wretched of the Earth, 223. See Vaillant, Black, French, and African, 243–71. Irele, ‘‘Negritude—Philosophy of African Being,’’ 6; and Markovitz, Senghor and the Politics of Négritude, 6. Senghor, qtd. in Markovitz, Senghor and the Politics of Négritude, 7. Senghor, qtd. in Garlake, Kingdoms of Africa, 40. For examples, see the paintings of Alioune Badiane, Boubacar Coulibaly, Bocar Diong, Ibou Diouf, Amadou Seck, and Chérif Thiam. ‘‘The image alone of material abundance is not a powerful enough lever of action. A mechanical world of automobiles, refrigerators, air-conditioners, television sets, a world

Notes

without theater, cinema, sport, without music or dance, books or records, a world without imagination or play, that is, without art—such a world would be a dead world which wouldn’t be worth the trouble to be lived. It wouldn’t be able to attract any serious effort for its realization. . . . And the most captivating games are the games of art which are those of the soul.’’ Senghor, qtd. in Markovitz, Senghor and the Politics of Négritude, 71.

2

Pan-Africanism in Paint and Textile 1

2 3

4 5 6 7

8 9 10

11

12 13 14 15

Senghor, introduction to Anthology of Contemporary Fine Arts in Senegal, 20. During my research, some artists who had enjoyed government patronage at the time cited this number as high as 30 percent. Senghor, ‘‘The Role and Significance of the Premier Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres,’’ 224. Franklin, ‘‘La Négritude’’; Cheikh Anta Diop, Nations nègres et culture; Towa, Léopold Sédar Senghor; Adotevi, Négritude et négrologues; Hountondji, Sur la philosophie africaine; Soyinka, Myth, Literature, and the African World; and Appiah, In My Father’s House. Anderson, Imagined Communities; Hobsbawm and Ranger, The Invention of Culture; Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa. Said, Culture and Imperialism, 214. It is this pan-African vision that Frantz Fanon ridicules in his chapter ‘‘On National Culture’’ in The Wretched of the Earth, 211–12. Chaterjee, Nationalist Thought and the Colonial World; Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780; Smith, Nationalism and Modernism; and others discuss the difference between a nation and a state, the former being a consensus on community and the latter being an internationally recognized territory. The problem of differentiation was particularly acute in Africa, where arbitrary political boundaries drawn at independence usually bore little or no relationship to any preexisting ‘‘nations.’’ Sembene, qtd. in Moore, African Literature and the Universities, 59. See Rita Cruise O’Brien, White Society in Black Africa. Note that the first African director of the École des Arts, Alioune Badiane, was not appointed until 1981. I refer specifically to the works in the arena of critical race theory, cultural studies, and postcolonial scholarship by individuals like Henry Louis Gates Jr., Addison Gayle, Zora Neale Hurston, Kobena Mercer, Richard Powell, Stuart Hall, and others who search for a black vernacular or Africanisms in diasporic cultural formations. Hall, ‘‘New Ethnicities,’’ 442. Recent revisionist writings on the relationship between art and political ideology have also been helpful in understanding the development of an École de Dakar. See especially Ades et al., Art and Power; Bown, Art under Stalin; and Steinweis, Art, Ideology, and Economics. Deliss, ‘‘A Man, a Moon,’’ 227. See Bhabha, ‘‘Of Mimicry and Man’’; Braithwaite, The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica; Hall, ‘‘New Ethnicities’’; and Said, Culture and Imperialism, 404. Foster, ‘‘The Primitive Unconscious,’’ in Recodings, 198. Anthony Appiah suggests that the promotion of Negritude and other ‘‘identity-defining’’

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16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25

26

27 28 29

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movements brought about a particular phenomenon: ‘‘We see the way in which an ideology of disinterested aesthetic value—the ‘baptism’ of ‘negro art’ as ‘aesthetic’—meshes with the international commodification of African expressive culture; a commodification which requires, by the logic of the space-clearing gesture, the manufacture of otherness.’’ Appiah, In My Father’s House, 253. Pataux, ‘‘Senegalese Art Today,’’ 26–31, 56–59, 87. Rubin, introduction to ‘‘Primitivism’’ in Twentieth-Century Art, 1–80. Baker, Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance, 49–52. This call for a closer reading of the resistant processes underlying Negritude-inspired arts parallels arguments advanced in Marxist texts such as Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class, or even Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll, which advocated serious consideration of social movements and expressions of identity formation as legitimate historical attempts at structuring the society. In this sense, a bottom-up historical approach argues that Senegalese art should not be understood merely as a reaction to dominant paradigms and aesthetics from the metropole but as a structured and mature art form in its own right that can stand up to art criticism and interpretation outside the long shadow of European modernism. Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 6. Danto, ‘‘The Artworld.’’ See also Danto, The Transfiguration of the Commonplace. Alloway, Network. Becker, Art Worlds, x. ‘‘La formation artistique au Sénégal,’’ 25. In June 1959, the Mali Federation was formed between colonial Senegal and the former French Sudan, but problems quickly developed within it. The Senegalese wanted to maintain close economic ties to France, while the former Sudan did not. While Senghor and the majority of Senegalese wanted a decentralized state, the Sudanese leader, Modibo Keita, sought to create a centralized one. There was squabbling about who was to lead the new political identity. Keita became president and Senghor head of the National Assembly, but their leadership styles differed profoundly. Senghor was a humanist and a democrat; Keita had strong Marxist leanings and an authoritarian outlook. In the summer of 1960, when Senghor came to Paris for an annual vacation, he was quickly summoned back home because rumors of a coup by Keita and his followers were growing. The Senegalese foiled the plan, arresting and deporting Keita and his followers. Senegal was declared a republic in January 1961. For more details on this period in the political history of the region, see Foltz, From French West Africa to the Mali Federation. 1958–61, Maison des Arts (ma); 1961–71, École des Arts du Sénégal (eas); 1971–77, Institut National des Arts du Sénégal (inas); 1977–present École Nationale des Beaux Arts (enba). Ebong, ‘‘Négritude,’’ 204. See also ‘‘La formation artistique au Sénégal,’’ 25–26. ‘‘Tapisseries de Thiès,’’ 61. Like Senghor’s views, Tall’s satisfied modernist tastes in that they spoke to both the bent in primitivism to return to nature and the emphasis in psychoanalysis on the unconscious and the rawness of creativity.

Notes

30 31

32 33

34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42

43 44

45

46 47 48 49

Papa Ibra Tall, interview by the author, April 1994, Thiès, Senegal. ‘‘When I was a student in Paris I was sort of an errand boy for the Negritude giants, Senghor, Aimé Césaire, and C. L. R James. They inspired me into exploring with my own ideas.’’ Tall, qtd. in Fosu, Twentieth-Century Art of Africa, 142. Tall, interview. Outside the realm of visual culture, some of the great anticolonialist agitators and revolutionary or nationalist heroes such as Amilcar Cabral, Sekou Touré, Kwame Nkrumah, and Frantz Fanon played with ideas of cultural authenticity in their rhetoric. Hobsbawm and Ranger, The Invention of Culture, 7. For a discussion of these matters, see especially Price, ‘‘Night Side of Man,’’ in Primitive Art in Civilized Places, 37–55; and Barkan and Bush, Prehistories of the Future. For an informative discussion on the social definitions of authenticity and the art market, see Spooner, ‘‘Weavers and Dealers.’’ Tall, qtd. in ‘‘Tapisseries de Thiès,’’ 61. Tall, qtd. in Preston, ‘‘Review,’’ 84. Fosu, 20th Century Art of Africa, 146. Silman Faye, former student of the Section des Arts Plastiques, interview with author, 16 February 1994, Dakar, Senegal. Iba N’Diaye, ‘‘À propos des arts plastiques,’’ qtd. in Sow Huchard, Iba N’Diaye, 49. N’Diaye was born to a Muslim father and a Catholic mother. In Saint Louis, a sizable number of practicing Catholics live alongside the Muslim population. He claims that the first time he saw religious paintings was in a church in Saint Louis, while he came across the work of David in one of his schoolbooks. ‘‘Interview with Iba N’Diaye,’’ 110. Iba N’Diaye, qtd. in Délange and Fry, introduction to Contemporary African Art, 8. Iba N’Diaye forms part of a large community of African artists living in Paris and acts as a mentor, a senior of sorts to a younger generation that comes to school in France and tries its hand in the galleries. He is involved in both the world of contemporary arts in France through his own work and in the scholarly world of ethnography through his wife, Francine N’Diaye, who is curator of the department of ethnology at the Musée de l’Homme. ‘‘Interview with Iba N’Diaye,’’ 65. The popularity of models of hybridity in the social sciences has grown rapidly in recent years as theories of postmodernism and postcolonialism praise the impure, the mixed, and the changing. The concept is on its way to becoming a cliché and because of this trend scholars have begun to take more seriously the implications of its use. See especially the discussions in Shohat, ‘‘Notes on the Postcolonial’’; and McClintock, ‘‘The Angel of Progress,’’ 84–98. I will further explore the issue of hybridity later in this chapter. These paintings had been well received in Europe. See Deliss, Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa for further background information on the Poto-Poto school. Lods, ‘‘The Painters of Poto-Poto,’’ address delivered at the Second Congress of Black Writers and Artists, Rome, 1956, reprinted in Deliss, Seven Stories, 220. Mount, African Art, 85. Art nègre et civilisation de l’universel.

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50 Mount, African Art, 85. 51 ‘‘La formation artistique au Sénégal,’’ 28–29. 52 Mohammadou zulu M’Baye, interviews with author, March and December 1994, Dakar, Senegal. 53 Stanislaus, Contemporary African Artists, 23. 54 Another exception, besides that in Senegal, to these two pedagogic strains was the Nsukka school in Nigeria, which did not develop around a European positive catalyst although Ulli Beier and Michael Crowder praised its founder Uche Okeke in the early days and it came to be supported by the French, Italian, and German cultural centers in Lagos and the British Council in Egunu. As Simon Ottenberg has recently pointed out, it arose as a reaction to British university training at Zaria, a sort of negative catalyst. For more on the Nsukka school’s history, see Ottenberg, New Traditions from Nigeria. I thank Simon Ottenberg for his insightful reading of this section and his editorial suggestions. 55 In this respect it is ironic that as head of a newly independent nation, Senghor should employ the help of just such a European teacher in his art school, thus reinforcing European stereotypes rather than combating them. 56 jegede, ‘‘African Art Today,’’ 37. 57 McEwen, ‘‘Modern African Painting and Sculpture,’’ 431. 58 These workshops should not be confused with the so-called New Sacred Art Movement also occurring in Oshogbo and surroundings and started by Ulli Beier’s first wife, Suzanne Wenger. An Austrian artist, Wenger arrived in Oshogbo in 1958 after several years of deep involvement in Yoruba religion. She was approached by Yoruba priests to help preserve the sacred grove of Oshun (a Yoruba river goddess and protectress of Oshogbo). The bricklayers and carpenters helping her soon began to add creative touches of their own. Wenger continued to restore ancient shrines in this way. 59 Beier, Thirty Years of Oshogbo Art. 60 jegede, ‘‘African Art Today,’’ 35. 61 Margaret Trowell first entertained the idea of opening an art school in 1937, after reading a review in the bbc magazine Listener of an exhibition of works in London by students from an art school run by Kenneth C. Murray in Ibadan, Nigeria. Murray (1902–72) had, himself, been influenced by the activities of a pioneer in Nigerian art production and education, Aina Onabolu (1882–1963). Onabolu is credited as being the first African to experiment with pencil, paper, oils, and canvas in Nigeria in the early part of this century. He was an accomplished portrait painter determined to prove that African artists could paint with the same skill as their European counterparts. After studying in London in the 1920s, Onabolu returned home to initiate a campaign for art education in Nigerian schools. Despite his talents, he was not hired by the colonial school officials, but was allowed to teach voluntarily in primary schools. In 1927 his campaign finally resulted in the appointment of British art teacher Kenneth C. Murray to King’s College in Lagos. In 1933, Murray moved his teaching to a government secondary school in Ibadan, which featured a special project for five artists within the general secondary school program, one of whom, Ben Enwonwu, later became well known after studying in London and engaging in pan-Africanist iconography. See Trowell, ‘‘The School of Art,’’ in African Tapestry;

262

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64 65

66

67 68 69

70 71 72 73 74

75

and John Picton, ‘‘Arts in Africa: Observers are Worried,’’ interview, bbc Radio Three, 10 September 1995. jegede, ‘‘African Art Today,’’ 23. Of course one could argue, ironically, that Senghor himself acted as a European catalyst, a black Frenchman, albeit African. The difference, of course, is that he never claimed not to have influenced the art of his artists, rather the opposite, and that he did much more than give materials to work with, establishing an arts infrastructure and discourse. Fosu, 20th Century Art, 150–53. The American government’s patronage of abstract expressionism as a nationalistic propaganda tool abroad could be usefully compared with the Senghorian agenda. See Guilbaut, How New York Stole the Idea of Modern Art; and Tagg, ‘‘American Power and American Painting,’’ 654. Tall, interview. Tall added, ‘‘And then, by accident, in 1962, I had an exhibition, and it was Senghor who came to open it—I had large canvases, and he fell in love with them. He said: ‘I can envision these in tapestry form,’ and I said, ‘fine, I can try that.’ ’’ It is ironic that the original reason for choosing the form of tapestry was to ensure the artist the role as a cultural worker in the development process because these productions were used by the state as gifts to foreign governments or as decor in government offices. They did little to enhance the lives of the average Senegalese citizen. The average cost of tapestries is approximately 400,000 cfa (4,000 French francs), well beyond the means of most Senegalese citizens. Tall, ‘‘Situation de l’artiste négro-africain contemporain,’’ 93. Axt and Sy, Bildende Kunst, 69. Ibid., 72. When I visited the tapestry school in the spring of 1994, only half a dozen or so tapestries were in the weaving process, and even fewer were being prepared for weaving because of lack of funds. The tapestries were only being produced for specific commissions. Tall, interview. Tall confirmed that President Senghor himself was sometimes involved in the selection process of models in the early period of the Manufacture’s productions. Tall, interview. ‘‘Tapisseries de Thiès,’’ 62. The festival ran from 1–24 April 1966. It should be noted that the 1966 festival was not, as many in Senegal would have one believe, the first of its kind. It was preceded in Paris by the 1956 Congress of Black Writers and Artists, and the Second Congress in Rome in 1959 (both organized by the Society for African Culture/Présence Africaine). Also, it was preceded on the African continent by the First International Congress on African Culture, held in 1962 at the Rhodes National Gallery in Zimbabwe, under the leadership of Frank McEwen. See Sultan, Life in Stone, 8. In that same year, Ghana hosted the First International Congress of Africanists (Accra, 11–18 December 1962), which featured panels on literature, history, and visual and musical arts, among others. See Bown and Crowder, The Proceedings of the First International Congress of Africanists. Léopold Sédar Senghor, ‘‘Discours inaugural du Président de la République,’’ 1.

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76 Senghor, qtd. in Deliss, Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa, 224. 77 Numerous French political and cultural luminaries were sponsors or participants in the proceedings of the festival, including Charles de Gaulle and Georges Pompidou. 78 The size of this exhibition was quite remarkable for the time. It brought artworks from fifty-two museums around the world and was, as of that date, the largest collection of traditional artworks for an exhibition on the African continent. It had been in the planning since 1963, not long after Senghor took the helm of his newly independent nation. This exhibition was fully subsidized by the French government, enabling the exhibition to then travel on to the Grand Palais in Paris in August 1966. The Musée Dynamique, positioned in a commanding site overlooking Soumbédioune Bay to the west of downtown Dakar, assumed the austere form of Greek temple architecture, underscoring the importance of its agenda. This museum, in its years of functioning, would host annual artists’ salons, individual exhibitions by select Senegalese artists, and traveling exhibitions of works by Messanier, da Vinci, and Picasso, among others. 79 Gaudibert, L’art africain contemporain, 155. 80 Frank McEwen spoke about pedagogy in Africa, and Jean Rouch addressed the health of filmmaking in the Negro world. Ekpo Eyo spoke of the need for protecting the continent’s archaeological heritage. 81 Jules-Rosette, Black Paris, 68–69. 82 Povey, ‘‘The First World Festival of Negro Arts at Dakar,’’ 25. 83 During this period, young African American artists, such as those involved in the AfriCobra movement, were eagerly looking to Africa for inspiration. Gaither, ‘‘Heritage Reclaimed,’’ 26–30. Michael Harris traces the development of the AfriCobra group, citing Jeff Donaldson’s description of the project as ‘‘African Diasporan imagery in a positive response to contemporary political situations.’’ See Michael D. Harris, ‘‘From Double Consciousness to Double Vision,’’ 45. 84 The efforts of this first festival were renewed in 1969 at Le Festival Culturel Panafricain in Algiers, at which artists from black and Arab Africa united, and then still later in 1977 when Nigeria hosted the Festival of African Culture (festac). See Gaudibert, L’art africain contemporain, 155. 85 Introduction to Premier festival mondial des arts nègres. 86 Ibid., 150. 87 Jean-Pierre N’Diaye, La jeunesse africaine, 49. 88 Adotevi, African Culture, 86–87. 89 African Culture: Algiers Symposium, 38. 90 Adotevi, African Culture, 85–87. 91 M. Houari Boumediène, qtd. in First Pan-African Cultural Festival, 9. 92 According to M. N’Gom, former head to the commission responsible for exhibitions abroad, the president himself had the final say in the selection process. M. N’Gom, interview with author, March 1994, Dakar, Senegal. 93 The establishment in 1979 of the Cité des Artistes Plasticiens in Colobane, a highly populated neighborhood in Dakar, underscored the government’s role as provider for the modern artist. At Colobane, the state placed a building at the disposal of thirteen pro-

264 Notes

94 95 96 97 98 99 100 101 102 103 104 105 106

107 108 109 110

111

fessional artists, housing not only their studios but also living quarters for their families. Originally, this establishment was to function on a rotational basis, allowing different artists the comforts of studio space. However, many of the original tenants remained and continued to be associated with a Negritude aesthetic. The Cité des Artistes at Colobane still exists, but it is in a state of serious disrepair and the ground floor public gallery is no longer open. Senghor, ‘‘Le Musée Dynamique: Inauguration Address,’’ qtd. in Deliss, Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa, 227. Bourdieu, Distinction. Qtd. in Sow Huchard, Iba N’Diaye, 41. Also, the North American/European system cannot be characterized as simply a slave to market measures as substantial government patronage programs are also at work. Steiner, African Art in Transit. Pataux, ‘‘Senegalese Art Today’’; Ebong, ‘‘Négritude’’; and Kennedy, New Currents, Ancient Rivers. Samb, ‘‘Criticism of Representation,’’ 129. Price, Primitive Art in Civilized Places, 60. Soyinka, Myth, Literature, and the African World, 131. Issa Ramangelissa Samb, ‘‘The Social and Economic Situation,’’ 118. Fanon, ‘‘On National Culture,’’ in The Wretched of the Earth, 210. Viyé Diba, qtd. in Sow Huchard, Viyé Diba, 31. Writings on art by feminists and social historians have been especially important in tracing the historical development of myths of the male artist genius. They have located the beginnings of modern ideas of the artist in the nineteenth century with the rise of capitalist market structures, urbanization, and industrialization. Kuspit, The Cult of the Avant-Garde Artist, 2. Mudimbe, qtd. in Diawara, ‘‘Reading Africa through Foucault,’’ 192. Soyinka, Myth, Literature, and the African World, 127. See LeyMarie, ‘‘The Role and Functions of the Griots,’’ 207. Various artists I interviewed sought to situate their work in the milieu of the griots, claiming to be the spokespersons and historians of their people. See work on traditional artists: Phillips, Representing Women; Abiodun, Drewal, and Pemberton, The Yoruba Artist; Aronson, ‘‘African Women in the Visual Arts’’; Barley, ‘‘Placing the West African Potter’’; McNaugton, The Mande Blacksmiths; and d’Azevedo, The Traditional Artist in African Society. Traditionally, writings on primitive arts and the native artist figure characterized the art world as follows: ‘‘Primitive art is highly socialized . . . in many respects it is the handmaid of technology. One of its great applications is the adornment of objects of everyday use—spears, post, adze handles, fish-hooks, boat. In a primitive community, art is used by the ordinary people, in embellishment of their domestic implements, and in their ordinary social gatherings. . . . All this means that the primitive artist and his public share essentially the same set of values. It means that, in contrast to what is generally the case in Western societies, the artist is not divorced from his public.’’ Firth, Elements of Social Organization, 171–73.

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112

113

114 115

116

117

118 119

120 121

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Having said this, I do not intend to present an argument as to whether the category of artist and Art were imported per se. While this question has occupied many anthropologists over the last years, and continues to be a debate within the discipline of art history, there does seem to be agreement that there are obviously indigenous systems of assessment, aesthetic evaluation, categorization, and reception amongst patrons of visual culture in Africa, and in Senegal in particular. El Hadji Moussa Babacar Sy’s productions offer a good example of the diversity of expression within and on the boundaries of the official art world. Although he took government mural commissions, Sy also experimented with foot paintings and multiple materials, often showing these at the government salons. According to Sy, Senghor found his works amusing and clever, but did not consider them collecting material. Senghor, qtd. in Deliss, Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa, 218. ‘‘Art is none other than the primeval activity of Homo Sapiens who, by making life known through the image-symbol, uses rhythm to intensify it and, by glorifying it in this way, gives it an eternal quality.’’ Ibid., 225. Fanon wrote of the pursuits of visual artists after independence, seeing them as mistakenly relying only on the past as a source for legitimate cultural forms while ignoring the realities of the postcolonial nation: ‘‘In the sphere of plastic arts . . . the native artist who wishes at whatever cost to create a national work of art shuts himself up in a stereotyped reproduction of details. . . . The artist who has decided to illustrate the truths of the nation turns paradoxically toward the past and away from actual events. What he ultimately intends to embrace are the castoffs of thought, its shells and corpses, a knowledge which has been stabilized once and for all. But the native intellectual who wishes to create an authentic work of art must realize that the truths of a nation are in the first place its realities. He must go on until he has found the seething pot out of which the learning of the future will emerge.’’ Fanon, ‘‘On National Culture,’’ in The Wretched of the Earth, 224. Myers, ‘‘Beyond the Intentional Fallacy,’’ 10. I would like to thank Fred Myers for drawing to my attention the possibilities of considering artistic criticism as an important site of cultural production and for recommending Arthur Danto’s writings on the art world. I will discuss, in greater depth, the challenges of intercultural curating and criticism in the final chapter of this book. For a good description of the École de Dakar artists, see Kennedy, ‘‘Artists of the Image and the Loom,’’ in New Currents, Ancient Rivers, 97–107. And for a brief discussion of the Poto-Poto school with excellent illustrations, see African Art Now. Ebong, ‘‘Négritude,’’ 202. ‘‘Their meeting was a long one, in which Lat Dior told the marabout that he had come to say farewell for ever, because, he said, ‘I want to have done with the white men at all costs today.’ Amadou Bamba promised to pray for him, so that peace might return. But Lat Dior persisted, asking the marabout simply for God’s blessing. The marabout offered him a robe of percale, then ‘spat’ some verses of the Koran into his hands before allowing him to depart.’’ A. Marokhaya Samb, Cadior Demb, 54. There is extensive literature on Amadou Bamba and the Mouride brotherhood. See Behrman, Muslim Brotherhoods and Politics in Senegal; Donal Cruise O’Brien, The Mourides

Notes

123 124 125 126 127 128 129 130 131 132 133 134 135 136 137 138 139 140 141 142 143 144 145

146 147 148 149 150

of Senegal; Copans, Maintenance sociale et changement économique au Sénégal; Dumont, and La pensée religieuse d’Amadou Bamba. Ebong, ‘‘Négritude,’’ 209. Ibid. Ibid., 202. Clifford, ‘‘Histories of the Tribal and Modern,’’ 193. John Mack disputes the bias underlying this assumption as it applies to studies of arts from Eastern Africa. See Mack, ‘‘Eastern Africa,’’ 118. Fosu, Twentieth-Century Art of Africa; Kennedy, New Currents, Ancient Rivers; Mount, African Art; and Pataux, ‘‘Senegalese Art Today.’’ Kay Kritzwiser, ‘‘Senegalese Art Mixes Roots,’’ Globe and Mail, 24 August 1979, 15. Ibid. Preston, ‘‘Tapestries from Senegal,’’ 84. Kennedy, New Currents, Ancient Rivers, 105. Foster, Recodings, 204. Lambert, ‘‘From Citizenship to Negritude,’’ 250. Soyinka, Myth, Literature, and the African World, 127. Pataux, ‘‘Senegalese Art Today,’’ 59. Said, Orientalism, 12. Rubin, ‘‘Primitivism’’ in Twentieth-Century Art, 5. Ibid. Clifford, ‘‘Histories of the Tribal and the Modern,’’ 193. Clifford, The Predicament of Culture; McEvilley, ‘‘Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief ’’; Price, Primitive Art in Civilized Places; and Torgovnick, Gone Primitive. Foster, Recodings, 183. West, ‘‘The New Cultural Politics of Difference.’’ Foster, Recodings, 189. In some ways, this denial allows one to draw parallels with similar debates on affinity from the history of anthropology. Up until the early part of this century, anthropologists like W. H. R. Rivers and Grafton Elliot Smith sought to explain seemingly similar ‘‘primitive’’ ways of life encountered by Europeans in disparate parts of the world as the result of gravitations, historical exchanges, migrations, or diffusions of customs and beliefs from a generative core. Alternatively, scholars like Edward Tylor saw these similarities as evidence of a shared human psyche or tendencies. Either way, new perspectives of postmodernist social theory now understand these transcultural similarities as attributes that ‘‘arise not from the collective unconscious of the primitive mind but from the collective arrogance of the Western gaze.’’ See Steiner, ‘‘Travel Engravings and the Construction of the Primitive,’’ 203. Foster, Recodings, 197. Nandy, The Intimate Enemy, xv. Bhabha, ‘‘Of Mimicry and Men.’’ Nandy, The Intimate Enemy, 7. Bhabha, ‘‘Of Mimicry and Men,’’ 131–33.

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151 152 153 154 155 156 157 158

159 160 161

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163 164 165 166 167 168

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Bakhtin, qtd. in Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle, 255. Ibid. Foster, Recodings, 201. Senghor, qtd. in Deliss, Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa, 225. Senghor, ‘‘Picasso en Nigritie,’’ inauguration address, Picasso exhibition, Dakar, April 1972, in Deliss, Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa, 228–30. Ibid., 226. Tall, ‘‘Situation de l’artiste négro-africain contemporain,’’ 98–99. Similar artistic strategies employing irony as a powerful form of critique in postcolonial settings may be found in the work of Cherokee artist Jimmie Durham and African American installation artist Fred Wilson. See Durham, A Certain Lack of Coherence; Corrin, Mining the Museum; and Corrin, ‘‘The Silent Message of the Museum.’’ Achebe, ‘‘Impediments to Dialogue between North and South,’’ in Hopes and Impediments, 24. Soyinka, Myth, Literature, and the African World, 134. Appiah, In My Father’s House, 95. He continued: ‘‘Nativist nostalgia, in short, is largely fuelled by that Western sentimentalism so familiar after Rousseau; few things, then, are less native than nativism in its current forms’’ (95). Appiah has elsewhere argued that the essentially reactive nature of the Afrocentrist movement in America shares a similar fate. It is ‘‘simply Eurocentrism turned upside-down’’ and because of its misplaced conflation of biology and culture, it serves to perpetuate many of the truths advocated by nineteenth-century European ideologies regarding Africa and the origins of Western civilization. His comments could certainly apply to the philosophical tenets advocated by Senghor and his contemporaries, which like ‘‘most cultural movements at full flood [were] a composite of truth and error, insight and illusion, moral generosity and meanness.’’ See Appiah, ‘‘Europe Upside Down,’’ 728–29. Soyinka, Myth, Literature, and the African World, 134. Also, Gyan Prakash has noted that anticolonial nationalism and third world revolutionary movements emerged within the framework of liberal metropolitan discourse and were thus limited by this association. See Prakash, ‘‘Who’s Afraid of Postcoloniality?’’ Gayatri Spivak makes a similar point regarding postcolonial intellectuals who ‘‘inhabit the structure they critique.’’ See Spivak, Outside the Teaching Machine, 281. Soyinka, Myth, Literature, and the African World, 134. Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle, 255–56. Soyinka, Myth, Literature, and the African World, 135. Ibid. Ibid., 138. His thoughts engage with broader debates on ethnophilosophy by African scholars such as Paul Hountondji, V. Y. Mudimbe, and Oderu Oruka. Like these scholars, he urges African intellectuals (and artists) to move beyond what Fanon would call the ‘‘governing fictions’’ of the discourse on Africa. For a discussion of ‘‘unanimism,’’ see Hountondji, ‘‘African Philosophy, Myth, and Reality.’’ Spivak, Outside the Teaching Machine, ix. Spivak writes in her early work on marginality

Notes

studies of a strategic use of essentialism in the process of seeking claims to agency for subaltern voices. 170 Mohammadou zulu M’Baye, introductory comments in the brochure of the Association Nationale des Artistes Plasticiens du Sénégal, which accompanied the Troisième salon national des arts plastiques exhibition held in Dakar at the Galerie Nationale in 1988.

3

Laboratories of Avant-Gardism 1

2

3

4

5

6 7

8 9 10

Most scholars and artists date the École de Dakar between the 1966 festival and 1976–77, the years that marked the last of the government-organized salons at the Musée Dynamique. Three years later, Senghor retired and the cultural landscape changed dramatically. These meetings about how to change and/or move beyond the cultural policies of the Senghorian government ironically parallel the meetings held some forty years before, when Senghor and fellow students met at cafés in the Latin Quarter in Paris to consider notions of identity, assimilation, decolonization, and Negritude. The École des Arts became the Institut National des Arts in 1971. More research should be conducted on the role of these French technical assistants in the arts schools of the former colonies. The labels second and third generation are used by most artists themselves. These labels, like that of the École de Dakar, vary in definition from one individual to the next. Generally speaking, however, the term second generation refers to those artists who began to exhibit at the national salons in the 1970s and in the traveling exhibits beginning in 1974. The label does not necessarily refer to a post–École de Dakar style and patronage. Many in this second generation began by producing tapestries for the msad in a decorative style that drew on traditional imagery; they then moved beyond this repertoire as their art matured. It is seldom acknowledged in accounts of their history that a number of the artists labeled as part of the École de Dakar in the 1960s and early 1970s continue to produce in the same style today. The members of Laboratoire Agit-Art form but one part of this second generation. The term third generation refers to those who were for the most part trained and began to exhibit in the post-Senghorian and often post-Village des Arts era. See below for a fuller description of the Village des Arts. Issa Samb is also called Joe Ouakam, taking the name Ouakam from that of a middle-class suburb of Dakar. Issa Samb is now responsible for the social, economic, and documentary aspects of the Laboratoire Agit-Art. El Hadji Moussa Babacar Sy serves as the artistic coordinator. See below for further details on his role. See Jules-Rosette, Black Paris, 71. Issa Samb, interview with author, 5 March 1994, 12 April 1994, and 14 May 1994, Dakar, Senegal. El Hadji Moussa Babacar Sy, interview with author, 5 April 1994, Dakar, Senegal. See also Soyinka, Myth, Literature, and the African World, 130. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 223–24. Samb, interview. Sy, ‘‘The Laboratoire Agit-Art.’’

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17

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Samb, interview. Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, 226. Kalidou Sy, interview with author, 6 March 1994, Dakar, Senegal. Momar N’Doye, interview with author, 1 March 1994, Dakar, Senegal. Kalidou Sy, interview. In ‘‘First Word,’’ the author recalls the performances he enjoyed at the Sorano theater during a visit to Dakar. One performance was Monsieur Pots-de-Vin et consorts, which he described as a ‘‘delightfully Americanized version of Gogol’s famous satire, The Inspector General.’’ The second play performed at the time was Shakespeare’s Macbeth. He noted that the accompanying program credited the artists at the Artisans’ Village (also known as the Centre de Formation Artisanale de Dakar) at Soumbédioune for creating all the costume accessories, while some ritual objects had been brought up from the Casamance region in the south of Senegal. See ‘‘First Word,’’ 2. The distinction between the group as an artistic body or a political one was crucial precisely because the arts represented such highly politicized symbols in Senghor’s Senegal. It was not until years later, in the 1980s, that Issa Samb and fellow Laboratoire Agit-Art collaborators sought to establish the eighteenth political party of Senegal. Sofi Rouchon, interview with author, December 1994, Dakar, Senegal. I use the word traditional here because Issa Samb used it to refer to what he saw as indigenous pan-ethnic Senegalese customs that were being abandoned. He referred to rites such as initiation, marriage, and naming ceremonies, which also involved the active participation of the whole community. Samb, interview. Although they chose the idea of an initiate from Senegalese cultural traditions, they did not, in fact, conduct an initiation ceremony for each individual. El Hadji Sy, interview. Samb, interview. Senghor, ‘‘The Role and Significance of the Premier Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres,’’ 226. Plekhanov, Art and Society. Plekhanov (1856–1918), called the father of Russian Marxism, was the founder of the Russian Social Democratic Party. See specifically Antonin Artaud’s writings on the theater and its double and the so-called Theater of Cruelty. See Costich, ‘‘In Search of a Theater,’’ in Antonin Artaud, 38–54. Samb, interview. ‘‘Every spectacle will contain a physical and objective element, appreciable to all. Cries, laments, apparitions, surprises, dramatic virtuosities [coups de théâtre] of all sorts, the magical beauty of costumes based on certain ritual models, splendorous lighting, the incantatory beauty of voices, . . . concrete apparitions of new and surprising objects, masks, mannequins several meters tall, and brusque changes in lighting.’’ Antonin Artaud, Oeuvres complètes, qtd. in Sellin, The Dramatic Concepts of Antonin Artaud, 84. Susan Sontag has noted that in his search for a kind of ‘‘total art,’’ Artaud denied the gap between art and life and viewed artistic practice as an instrument of revolution through which to overturn the lifelessness of European logocentric culture. Sontag, Antonin Artaud, xxxviii. Sellin, The Dramatic Concepts of Antonin Artaud, 84.

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32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45

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47 48

49 50 51 52

Vogel, Africa Explores, 28. Ibid., 29. Marshall Sahlins, qtd. in Seriff, ‘‘Folk Art from the Global Scrap Heap,’’ 14. I am not suggesting that Laboratoire Agit-Art’s invention of tradition was any more or less authentic than Senghor’s. As Benedict Anderson has noted, ‘‘communities [and presumably ideas of traditionality on which they are partially based] are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined.’’ Anderson, Imagined Communities, 15. Bourdieu, The Field of Production, 31. Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 6–7. Appiah, In My Father’s House, 96. See Van Niekerk, The African Image. Senghor, ‘‘Chaka,’’ in Selected Poems, 67–77. See discussion on Mofolo’s ‘‘Chaka’’ in the introduction to Senghor, Selected Poems, xv– xvi. Ibid., xv. Senghor, Selected Poems, 71. Ibid. In the original story by Thomas Mofolo, there is no mention of Chaka as a poet. Senghor, Selected Poems, 74. Ibid., 74–75. Introduction to ibid., xvi. The majority of documents concerning the early workings of Laboratoire Agit-Art were lost or destroyed in 1983 when the government confiscated, damaged, or destroyed the artworks and contents of the Village des Arts, situated on the old Lat-Dior military camp, Corniche d’Ouest, Dakar. An in-depth discussion of the history of this Village, at which Laboratoire Agit-Art was resident between 1977 and 1983, will follow. Other artist members of the Laboratoire included Fodé Camara (painter), Babacar Traoré (sculptor/interior designer/architect), El Sy (painter), Guibril André Diop (sculptor), Bouna Médoune Seye (photographer), Djibril Sy (photographer), Djibril Diop Mambety (cinematographer), Thierno Seydou Sall (poet), Moussa Diop (photographer), Pape Macoumba Seck (sculptor), Moussa Tine (painter), Kalidou Sy (director of the École Nationale des Beaux Arts and artist/painter), Amadou Sow (painter, now living in Vienna), Serigne N’Diaye (painter), and As M’Bengue (painter, based in Paris), to name just a few. Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production, 6–7. In the period preceding the 1996 Dakar biennale, the Laboratoire was to assume a more structured existence. Issa Samb now has plans to build a café, eatery, and a more permanent working center. Clementine Deliss, interview with author, March 1996, London. See Ebong, ‘‘Négritude’’ for a discussion of his use of the flag. The Laboratoire Agit-Art often provides alms to the sick and the poor of Dakar. Mary Nooter Roberts, ‘‘Does an Object Have a Life?’’ Fodé Camara, qtd. in Vogel, Home and the World, 11.

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53 One must acknowledge that the identification with the masses implied through these processes of recycling is still a discourse that emanates from artists ensconced within elitist arts power structures. Despite perhaps their genuine desire to speak to the general populace, these artists are not creating ‘‘popular culture’’ in any general sense of the term through the recuperative aesthetic, but rather a specialized form inspired by notions of proximity to the folk. 54 Guy Hennebelle, ‘‘Entretien avec Sembène Ousmane,’’ qtd. in Diawara, African Cinema, 167 n. 4. 55 Dessoh, ‘‘L’école sénégalaise en France,’’ 8. 56 Allen F. Roberts, ‘‘The Ironies of System D,’’ 90. 57 El Sy also considers himself a photographer, actor, and set designer. 58 Coopérants are employees of the French Ministry of Cooperation, given contracts to work in some form of development work. Until 1980, all the directors of the École des Arts or Institut des Arts in Dakar were coopérants. 59 Otro País, 157. 60 Sy, Exhibition Supplement. 61 Well-known Ethiopian artist Wosene Kosrof also took the fate of the shoeshine boys as subject for his artworks, creating a series while in Addis Ababa in the late 1990s. 62 El Hadji Sy, interview. 63 This exhibition was a reduced version of that shown at the Grand Palais in Paris in 1974. 64 This distinction could serve as a latter-day justification for working within a system he purports to disdain. 65 Mohammadou zulu M’Baye, interview with author, 18 March 1994, Dakar, Senegal. Others, such as Ibou Diouf or Papa Ibra Tall, deny that this pressure existed at all. Interviews with author, March and April 1994, Dakar, Senegal. 66 It must be said that some had a greater choice to stay out of the mainstream. To a financially troubled artist, a government commission, stipend, or sale could prove crucial to personal and often family survival. Someone such as El Sy, who comes from a large extended family with power and influence, may have had the luxury to reject stipends. Likewise, Issa Samb is a highly successful businessman as well as a practicing artist and has never been in need of government support. 67 For their display, Sy runs wooden dowels at the top and bottom. 68 Refer to chapter 4 of this book for a discussion of the history and use of sous verre paintings in Senegal. 69 Sy has also worked on theater sets and costume design in collaboration with designer Oumou Sy. See ‘‘Dakar-Sénégal,’’ 33. 70 Deliss, ‘‘A Man, a Moon,’’ 227. 71 Sy, Exhibition Supplement. 72 It is worth noting that despite Sy’s challenge to existing systems of hierarchy in Senegal’s art world, he does not seem to question the figure and role of the artiste. The assumptions of genius, intuition, and masculinity that make up the idea of an avant-garde artist in the modernist period go unchallenged in Sy’s imaginings of himself and his creations. 73 Pollock, ‘‘My Painting,’’ 79.

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74 El Sy served as the first president of the Association Nationale des Artistes Plasticiens Sénégalais (anaps), the largest and most influential of the artists’ associations. He has inserted his voice in the discourse surrounding the interpretation of contemporary Senegalese arts through his coediting of an anthology on the art history of his nation. He has also been active as a curator and critic of his country’s arts abroad, most recently with his involvement in the africa’95 program of events in Britain. See Axt and Sy, Bildende Kunst. 75 Their vision of African culture parallels that advanced by Senghor in many of his poems and also that imagined by European primitivists. This theme also extended Issa Samb’s concerns for global issues such as the plight of refugees, which he has often addressed in his own works. 76 Sy, ‘‘A Story from Senegal,’’ 96. 77 Ibid. 78 A third member of the Laboratoire Agit-Art was present in London at the time of the performance. Babacar Traoré, who did not have any of his own works featured in the exhibition display, had arrived on the day assuming that he would participate. A quarrel resulted when Sy refused to let him bring his works into the space and contribute to the performance. 79 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 164. 80 Ibid., 175. 81 Ibid. 82 Clementine Deliss, interview with author, March 1996, London. 83 Deliss, ‘‘7 + 7 = 1: Seven Stories, Seven Stages, One Exhibition,’’ in Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa, 19. 84 Nicodemus, ‘‘Art and Art from Africa,’’ 37. 85 Deliss, interview. 86 Nicodemus, ‘‘Art and Art from Africa,’’ 40. 87 Enwezor, ‘‘Occupied Territories,’’ 40. 88 Everlyn Nicodemus was not present at either the s.o.s Culture performance or the Royal African Society conference in October 1995, at which Issa Samb later spoke about the Laboratoire. Okwui Enwezor attended both occasions. 89 Several professors at the Institut National des Arts du Sénégal during this period also had studios at the Village, most notably, M. Paolucci, an Italian technical assistant and teacher at the Institut. 90 Aly Traoré for a number of years has been based in Rome, but he still occasionally exhibits in Senegal. He is the elder brother of sculptor Babacar Traoré. 91 Babacar Traoré, interview with author, 5 April 1994, Dakar, Senegal. 92 Former residents such as the late Moustapha Dimé, Babacar Traoré, El Sy, Guibril André Diop, and Moussa Tine all emphasize the importance of their time at the Village for the development of their oeuvres. 93 At the time the research for this study was conducted, Colobane contained the workshops of seven residents: Amadou Seck, Alpha Wouallid Diallo, Oumar Katta Diallo, El Hadji M’Boup, Maodo Niang, Chérif Thiam, and Phillipe Sène. Khalipha Guèye was a former resident.

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94 Painter Amadou Seck uses sand and natural pigments in his works, producing a gesso texture. 95 The gallery was open from 1980 to 1983 and featured the works of Serigne N’Diaye, Babacar Traoré, Issa Samb, El Sy, Pape Macoumba Seck, Moussa Tine, and Aly Traoré. 96 N’Doye, ‘‘Babacar Traoré,’’ 11. 97 See chapter 4 of this book for an extended discussion of the history of sous verre paintings and the modern adaptations of the form by artists such as N’Diaye and Germaine Anta Gaye. 98 The Institut National des Arts was relocated to the Bopp section of Dakar shortly before the Village was closed to make room for the government ministries. 99 Sy, ‘‘La Cité,’’ 108. 100 In 1984, a few years after the villagers refused the offer, the government moved the Institut National des Arts into the unsafe building, where it remained until 1986, when it took up its present location on the Boulevard de l’Est, Point E. See Axt and Sy, Bildende Kunst, 36. 101 El Hadji Sy, interview with author. Moreover, Sy insists that Senghor provided him with details of the site’s importance as a unesco-protected historical landmark. According to Sy, during the last few years of his presidency, Senghor had been involved in drafting elaborate plans for the building of an enormous cultural complex, which would have included the historic Lat-Dior military camp, to provide a ‘‘Cité des Arts.’’ Mohammadou zulu M’Baye claimed that the government had received substantial international backing for these plans, not only from the United Nations but also from the Mexican government, which was, at that time, looking to invest the revenues from its oil boom. Knowledge of this larger plan gave the villagers an advantage when government officials continued to harass them. Although fellow artists Issa Samb and Moustapha Dimé confirmed this story, I was not able to see the plans, supposedly stored in the Senegalese government archives, because they had not yet entered the public domain. 102 It was rumored that the timing of the assault was planned to coincide with a period when the president Abdou Diouf was abroad, so as to avoid immediate confrontation with the villagers. In addition, residents of the Village claim that the troops were, in fact, those of a regiment based in the city of Thiès, rather than in Dakar. 103 El Hadji Sy, interview. The buildings at the Lat-Dior camp eventually became the Ministries of Technical Administration, Water Supply, and Tourism. 104 It is thought that the forces considered these papers subversive materials. Samb, interview. 105 Colobane artist, interview with author, May 1994, Dakar, Senegal. 106 Some have also suggested that a controversial Laboratoire Agit-Art performance called Le lait s’est-il caillé? (Has the Milk Turned?), which addressed the story of a protester accused of plotting to assassinate the French president Georges Pompidou during his state visit to Senegal, exacerbated the tense standoff between government troops and the villagers. This protestor was reportedly jailed, tortured, and killed by Senghor’s government in a Gorée prison. The Laboratoire’s publicizing of the incident may have led to direct military action. Issa Samb and Babacar Traoré denied this claim. According to Laboratoire

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4

Agit-Art member As M’Bengue, this performance held great artistic as well as political importance for the Laboratoire. It ‘‘implicitly and explicitly led to a shift in perspective as far as acting was concerned. It gave rise to new ways of linking, on the one hand, oral expression and mime, and on the other, the acting order and dramatic discourse.’’ See As M’Bengue, ‘‘Recalling the Future,’’ reprinted in Deliss, Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa, 232–33. This piece is a manifesto of sorts, written just after the dissolution of the Village des Arts and the closure of the Galerie Nationale. Senghor retired to a villa in Normandy, returning for short stays in his mansion on Dakar’s coastline once a year until his death in 2001. After his retirement, he wrote little about his country’s visual arts, offering only the occasional inaugural speech or preface to catalogues such as the anthology coedited by Friedrich Axt and El Sy, Bildende Kunst der Gegenwart in Senegal. The Musée Dynamique opened in 1966, closed, temporarily, in 1977, reopened in 1985, and has been closed since 1988. Momar Coumba Diop, Sénégal, 114. Painter Amadou Seck, later to become head of the Cité des Artistes at Colobane, and Mamadou Wade, an accomplished painter and tapestry designer, also formed part of this first group of artists. Ben Mouhamed Diop, ‘‘Les associations d’artistes au Sénégal,’’ 99. Sy, qtd. in Sow Huchard, ‘‘Les salons des artistes sénégalais,’’ 76. Maître Bara Diokhane, interview with author, December 1995, Dakar, Senegal.

After the Avant-Garde 1 Vogel, Africa Explores, 183. 2 Ibid., 178. Her attitude parallels that expressed by Fredric Jameson in his well-known reading of postcolonial literature in which he argued that the private and public spheres of existence in the third world novel were not split as in industrialized capitalist societies, and consequently these novels (artworks) should be read as ‘‘national allegories.’’ See Jameson, ‘‘Third World Literature.’’ 3 There is now, of course, a younger generation of sculptors, most notably Ndary Lô, that has emerged from the art schools long after the Village closed. 4 Note that there are a number of public monuments on the roundabouts throughout Dakar nowadays. 5 Refer to chapter 2 of this book for a discussion of the tapestry school. 6 A series of studies has dealt with the juxtaposition of Islamic and non-Islamic traditions. See Bravmann, Islam and Tribal Art in West Africa; Bravmann, African Islam; Prussin, Hatumere; and Mark, A Cultural, Economic, and Religious History. Mark finds Islamic beliefs existing alongside non-Islamic ones in the Casamance region of Senegal. For a further discussion of Islam and arts in Africa, see Ådahl and Sahlström, Islamic Art and Culture in Sub-Saharan Africa. 7 See Pataux, ‘‘Senegalese Art Today’’; Fosu, 20th Century Art of Africa; and Mount, African Art. Studies on African sculpture make mention of Senegal only in reference to the small

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populations of Bambara and Malinke, both with sculpting traditions, living just within its borders. Senegal is also mentioned as forming part of the Malian Empire (twelfth to fifteenth centuries) and the Tekrour Empire (fifteenth century), both of which included peoples with evident sculpting traditions. Senegalese aesthetics are most often discussed in studies of body and nomadic arts, like those of their Saharan neighbors. Issa Samb, interview with author, April 1994, Dakar, Senegal. While Muslim preachers came as early as the ninth century to the northeastern section of the country (the Toucoulor people in that region were the first to convert en masse), the large majority of Senegalese peoples did not convert until the nineteenth century. The eventual conversion was spurred on by the greater expansion of French rule and the destruction of an existing social framework of the Wolof kingdoms. See Donal Cruise O’Brien, The Mourides of Senegal. In his pursuit of the parameters of a civilisation de l’universel, Senghor was deeply engaged in defining an Arabité and an understanding of Islam’s role in African culture. See Senghor, Négritude, francité et arabité; and Senghor, ‘‘Négritude et arabisme.’’ Caste distinctions remain important despite the diverse cultural formations that existed in the four communes and regardless of the effects of urbanization. Many painters, including El Sy, Kan-Si, zulu M’Baye, and Cheikh Niass, also speak of the connections of their works to their beliefs. McNaughton, The Mande Blacksmiths. At the top of the caste system stands the nobility, known as the géer, which, in turn, is comprised of two groups, the nobles (who are descendants of royal families of the various kingdoms that made up the territory of what is now Senegal) and the cëddo (warrior horsemen). Without professional specialization nowadays, this group generally has political functions, directing and organizing society and commanding the armed forces. The second caste was known as baadolo and was comprised of agriculturally based peasants, but not artisans. Historically, all the artisan classes were labeled neeno and worked for the géer. A reciprocal relationship existed between the géer and the neeno in their employment. Each noble family was obligated to compensate their neeno, often in the form of gifts for their services. The first artisan caste was the tëgg, jewelers and blacksmiths. The second artisanal caste were the uude, or leather workers, who were charged with the tanning and tinting of leather and produced both utilitarian objects, such as sandals and saddles, and aesthetic objects, such as amulets, bracelets, belts, wallets, and bags. The ràbb, or weavers, were the third and lowest artisanal caste, which also included the maabo or lawbé. See Jean-Bart, ‘‘Sculpture,’’ 145. My interviews, especially with sculptor Moutapha Dimé and mixed-media artist Kan-Si, confirmed the persistence of the taboos of working with one’s hands as a noncaste individual. Students enrolled in the Section de Recherches en Arts Plastiques Nègres under Tall and Pierre Lods concentrated solely on easel painting. The Centre de Formation Artisanale, also often referred to as the Artisans’ Village, was founded in the late 1950s by French coopérants working for the Senegalese government

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20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33 34 35

36 37

38 39

in an effort to encourage the continuation of traditional crafts and to provide a central location for sales to a local and tourist market. Both Moustapha Dimé and Guibril André Diop attended the Centre. Others, such as Djibril N’Diaye, now a professor at the École Nationale des Beaux Arts, have traveled to Mali, Ghana, and Côte d’Ivoire to apprentice with wood-carvers. Diop claimed that metal-casting traditions had been passed down to him by his ancestors who originated in Egypt. After his death, fellow artist Niawloo M’Boup continued his work and encouraged younger artists to follow. See Jean-Bart, ‘‘La sculpture,’’ 143. Guibril André Diop recalls this historic meeting at which he had the opportunity to lead the discussion for his fellow sculptors, explaining the difficulties of acquiring materials, studio space, and exhibition opportunities. Guibril André Diop, interview with author, April 1994, Dakar, Senegal. Dimé, ‘‘An Interview,’’ qtd. in McEvilley, Fusion, 42. From 1980 to 1983, tenq hosted the works of Moustapha Dimé, Bassirou Sarr, Babacar Traoré, Issa Samb, Pape Macoumba Seck, and André Seck. Sultan, Life in Stone. McEwen promoted sculpture with the same zeal that Lods promoted painting. Kasfir, ‘‘Nnaggenda,’’ 12–13. Moustapha Dimé, interview with author, April 1994, Gorée, Senegal. Dimé, qtd. in McEvilley, Fusion, 34. Ibid., 35. Dimé, interview. Dimé, qtd. in McEvilley, Fusion, 40. Dimé found a number of patrons at the Senegalese embassy in Ghana. See ibid., 37. Dimé, interview. McEvilley, Fusion, 41. Dimé, qtd. in ibid., 40. Ibid., 42. Ibid., 44. This artist friend was Tasfir Momar Guèye, whose entry to the 1992 Dakar biennale serves as a perfect example of the filiform figures previously produced by Dimé. See Biennale Internationale des Arts, 57. See Donal Cruise O’Brien, The Mourides of Senegal, for a detailed account of the Mouride brotherhood. In fact, a large part of the Mouride brotherhood’s appeal in this century was due to the crumbling of Wolof society and caste systems under French rule. Mouridism provided a new support system for members of society who felt uprooted after the defeat of the Wolof kingdoms. Note, however, that the manual labor referred to by the Mourides was that of rural labor on the groundnut farms of the marabout. Dimé, qtd. in McEvilley, Fusion, 51. Dimé’s interests and artistic knowledge extended beyond African arts. The artist made four trips to Europe, participating in international workshops (most notably in Toulouse)

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and attending the openings of the 1990 Art sur vie exhibition at the Grande Arche de la Fraternité, as well as the Venice biennale. He also traveled to New York City with the Venice biennale African exhibition, prepared by Susan Vogel from the Museum for African Art in New York in 1995. On each trip, he tried to visit as many museums and galleries as possible. As part of his interest in understanding traditional techniques and forms, Dimé often visited the collection of local magistrate, Marie José Crespin, who comes from a wealthy creole family on Gorée Island and owns a sizable collection of sculptures and art books. Dimé, interview. Dimé, qtd. in McEvilley, Fusion, 48. The Serer are possibly the most ancient ethnic group in Senegal, founding the southern provinces of Sine and Saloum. The Serer people maintained non-Islamic beliefs in the face of advancing Islam. Many, living along the coasts, were then converted to Catholicism by French and Portuguese traders and missionaries. Former president Senghor was of Serer origin and often celebrated his peoples’ myths in his poetry. Sculptor Babacar Traoré and the young painter Serge Correa have both paid homage to the historian in their works. Their attention to his writings represents a significant shift in the intellectual climate of Senegal. Now that the prevalence of Negritude ideology has faded, individuals have begun to look to multiple and varied sources to understand the history of the African continent. Dimé, interview. Ibid. Ibid. In 1994, the moma in New York purchased one of the pieces Dimé had exhibited at the Museum for African Art in New York earlier that same year. He also had his works at the Venice and Johannesburg biennales. Dimé had asked fellow sculptor Guibril André Diop to instruct metal work in a new training center he wanted to accompany his studio, and painter friend Abdoulaye N’Doye to teach basic knowledge of color and composition. Given Dimé’s own early experiences, in which he had to resort to stealing tools in order to work, he was reluctant to charge any tuition for his workshop. While Diop is the most successful and well known of metal sculptors in Senegal, there are several others. Most notable is Moussa Traoré, cousin of Babacar Traoré, who collects and assembles old manufactured, mechanical parts with heavily stained and ingrained patinas. Traoré’s works are compact and muscular, enclosing the space within them. His son, Pape Youssou N’Diaye, works with mass-produced household objects such as forks, knives, plates, and metal serving trays, used often to serve the staple dish of fish and rice known in Wolof as ceebu jën or French, tiéboudienne. Moussa Tine also uses metal to sculpt. Finally, there are the works of mixed-media artist Serigne M’Baye Camara, who created a series of large iron plaques endowed with small, flat, and faceless dangling figures. He regarded these figures as a means through which to create his own signature. Iron (hadid, in Arabic) is mentioned in the Qur’an, 57:25. ‘‘And we sent down iron, which carries great power and other benefits for people.’’ Hadid means ‘‘power’’ or ‘‘might,’’

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55

56

more precisely ‘‘political power’’ and ‘‘military might.’’ Iron is regarded as the emblem of physical force that may lead to the establishment of justice and equality. In this sense, it is regarded as a potential blessing. Although it is a material extracted from the earth, it is said to be ‘‘sent down’’ as a blessing from Allah. See Mir, Dictionary of Qur’anic Terms and Concepts, 108. Ndao, ‘‘A la rencontre de l’art moderne.’’ In fear of expanding Muslim control, the French found the growing array of engravings, lithographs, and other votive images imported by Syrian and Lebanese shopkeepers threatening. Therefore, in 1908, the governor-general of French West Africa, William Ponty, took action: ‘‘Syrians and Moroccans have penetrated the colony with abnormal quantities of publications of all nature written in Arabic as well as crude colored engravings depicting scenes of Muslim religious life. . . . Magazines, brochures, diverse images destined for marabouts, literate talibés [disciples] or would-be individuals who may assure the sale of these engravings. . . . All the publications and engravings which present a hostile character or are simply susceptible to be in favor of maraboutic action will have to be destroyed. . . . One cannot deny how marvelous this instrument of propaganda seen here is in the propagation of thousands of examples of these crude engravings, strong in colour, presenting the defenders of the only true religion, the most favored.’’ See Peintures populaires du Sénégal, 14. In her 1994 catalogue on sous verre, Anne-Marie Bouttiaux-Ndiaye notes that the use of the term fixés sous verre, which is also often used, is, in fact, misleading. It suggests a pasting of imagery behind glass, a practice only followed on rare occasions when photographs were pasted behind glass and given a painted decorative frame, or when the chromoliths, which gave the inspiration for so many sous verre paintings, were placed within the image. The term suweer, the Wolof for the French sous verre, is more accurate; it translates as ‘‘behind or under the glass,’’ thus acknowledging the actual practice of painting on the back of a pane of glass. It is also interesting to note that the term suweer is also sometimes used to describe culinary delights with a great variety of ingredients and tastes, for instance in the phrase, ceeb suweer, describing the rice-and-fish dish ceebu jën. See Bouttiaux-Ndiaye, Senegal behind Glass, 11. The Layennes were founded by Limamu Laye (1843–1919) and, strictly speaking, are not a brotherhood. They began in a northwestern suburb of Dakar, in a neighboring village known as Yoff, at end of nineteenth century. Their members were drawn primarily from that region, the majority of whom are Lébou fishermen, the original inhabitants of the Cap Vert peninsula. The Lébou still hold many of their non-Islamic beliefs. Many paintings associated with this brotherhood use two symbols: the flower of the prickly pear tree, and the phaeton bird. The Layenne founder is also featured with a turban of white and black. The Qadiriyya brotherhood is the most orthodox of all brotherhoods in the country and has the smallest following. It is connected to a brotherhood in Iraq, founded by Abd El Qadir el Jilari (1079–1116). It came to Senegal through Morocco. Images based on this brotherhood consist solely of portraits of its leaders. The Mourides are also associated with the Qadiriyya brotherhood in Iraq.

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57 58 59

60 61

62 63 64 65 66 67

68

69

This depiction of Bamba is also frequently found in murals throughout Dakar, Thiès, Touba (the seat of the Mouride brotherhood), and Saint Louis. The Tijanni brotherhood in Senegal is primarily Wolof and has its roots in the Tijanni brotherhoods of North Africa. El Hadji Malick Sy, the founder, is of Toucoulor origin. During a special month of exhibitions celebrating the art of photography in Senegal at the French Cultural Center in the spring of 1994, painter Mohammadou zulu M’Baye and photographer Moussa M’Baye drew attention to these earlier traditions in their collaborative works which featured zulu’s decorative floral designs atop M’Baye’s finished photos. These women were known as diriyanke in Wolof. See Bouttiaux-Ndiaye, Senegal behind Glass, 19. There is now a small but growing amount of scholarship on photography in Africa. Most of the studies on Senegal, Mali, Guinea, and Burkina Faso have been published by Revue Noire or French cultural foundations such as Afrique en Créations. See also Enwezor and Zaya, In/Sight. There has even been a proliferation of sous verre images depicting tales from the Tintin comic books. ‘‘La formation artistique au Sénégal,’’ 6. Ibid., 7. Schissel, ‘‘Coloring History.’’ Gora M’Bengue’s work was featured in the most recent traveling exhibition of Senegalese art, Art sur vie, in Paris in 1992. Bouttiaux-Ndiaye, Senegal behind Glass, 32. Many of these artists sell their works at a tourist shop/gallery on rue Mohammed V in the plateau area of Dakar. This venue sells not only imitation traditional artifacts but also sous verre works and, on a much smaller scale, oil paintings by individuals such as Kré M’Baye (a former Lodsian). Birahim Fall, qtd. in Bouttiaux-Ndiaye, Senegal behind Glass, 27. Other glass painters mentioned in Bouttiaux-Ndiaye’s catalogue include Ibrahima Sall, Mallos (Maleyni Sow), Azu Badi (Amadou Seck), Paco Diagne, Metzo (Ahmed Diagne), Moussa Lô, and Cheik N’Dao. Germaine Anta Gaye is one of the few female artists who exhibits her works frequently in the galleries of Dakar. Others include Nafissatou Fall (painter, batik artist), Penda Guèye (painter), Aisha Djionne (textile designer, painter, and batik artist), Josephine N’Doye (painter), Seynabou Sakho (painter), and Milène (painter). In her recent survey of sous verre artists, Bouttiaux-Ndiaye omits any mention of Gaye even though she has been exhibiting her sous verre works since the late 1970s. The École Nationale Supérieure d’Éducation Artistique, or ensea, is the institution for training art teachers. It shares the same location and staff as the École Nationale des Beaux Arts. Staff usually numbers between twelve to fifteen instructors, all Senegalese. The former emphasis on Negritude ideology and aesthetic is no longer evident in these institutions, which struggle to obtain any government financial help. These two schools squatted in dilapidated structures in the Point E section of the city during the time of this study.

280 Notes

70 71 72 73 74

75

76 77 78 79 80 81 82 83 84

85 86 87 88

89 90 91 92 93 94 95

In the 1930s and 1940s, the degree of veterinary medicine was one of the few open to African students from the colonies to study in France. The term, signare is derived from the Portuguese senhora. In Portuguese Guinea, these women were called nhara, and in the Gambia, senora. Marcson, ‘‘European-African Interaction,’’ 13. See also Brooks, ‘‘The Signares of SaintLouis and Gorée.’’ Pruneau de Pommegorge, qtd. Brooks, ‘‘The Signares of Saint-Louis and Gorée,’’ 23. Gaye had difficulty enrolling in ensea because she was beyond the age limit of twentysix for state stipends, which all students were to receive. Her insistence and dedication convinced the director to admit her without the stipends. It took her the four years at ensea to convince her parents of the worthiness of this decision. Her father came to the preparations for her first exhibition after graduation, saw her talent, and finally offered to pay for all the framing of her works. From that moment on, her family has supported her career choice. The Parisian art journal Revue Noire has published a series of collections of photographs from the early part of this century. See particularly Mama Casset. Her teacher was Daniel Corvisy, a coopérant with the French Ministry of Culture sent to teach in Senegal. Germaine Anta Gaye, interview with author, 14 April 1994, Dakar, Senegal. Viyé Diba, qtd. in Sow Huchard, Viyé Diba, 42. Ibid., 38. Ibid. Diba, qtd. in ibid., 39. Ibid. In this respect, his concerns mirror those of sculptor Moustapha Dimé, whose use of old household materials enabled him to address his works to a large audience and to suggest the formal artistic qualities of the surrounding environment. Diba, interview with the author, March 1994, Dakar, Senegal. Diba, qtd. in Sow Huchard, Viyé Diba, 41. Diba, interview. He referred to problems with the agenda of Magiciens de la terre (1989) and Africa Explores (1991), as well as the bias of French critics such as Pierre Gaudibert. Diba, qtd. in Sow Huchard, Viyé Diba, 22. Diba visited the collection of masks, figures, textiles, and other artworks from throughout the African continent which is housed at the Institut Fondamental d’Afrique Noire (ifan), formerly the Institut Français d’Afrique Noire, located at Place Soweto in the plateau area of Dakar. The images typical of this period are part of two series entitled Altitudes (Altitudes) and Rapports (Relationships) from 1993. Diba, qtd. in Sow Huchard, Viyé Diba, 24. Ibid. Kan-Si’s full name is Amadou Kane Sy. Kan-Si, 7 x 7 facettes, exhibition supplement, Dakar, Galerie 39, 6–17 April 1993. Kan-Si, ‘‘Amère Afrique,’’ 1993. Kan-Si, personal notebooks, 1993, 16.

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96 97 98 99 100 101 102

Ibid., 4. Ibid., 14. Ibid., 16. Kan-Si, interview with author, December 1994 and December 1995, Dakar, Senegal. Kan-Si’s father is a respected imam of a suburban mosque in Dakar. Cheikh Niass, interview with author, June and December 1994, Joal, Senegal. Coincidentally, Cheikh Niass’s family home sits on a lot diagonally behind the childhood home of Senghor, which has now become a popular tourist site in this picturesque town. As the tourists approach the former president’s house, they cannot avoid seeing Niass’s courtyard sculpture in the distance. Niass, interview. Mbalax is the Wolof word for Senegalese jazz. Youssou N’Dour and his group La Super Étoile are credited with the invention of this new musical form. Qtd. in set setal, 6. El Hadji Sy, interview with the author, March 1994, Dakar, Senegal. In his account, Diouf also cites earlier government attempts at organizing sanitation programs. See Mamadou Diouf, ‘‘Fresques murales et écriture de l’histoire.’’ set setal, 22. A damel was equivalent to a king or ruler in the historical Wolof Kingdom of Cayor. Cayor stretched from the area of present-day Dakar up to the northern region of Saint Louis. It was, at the time of French expansion, one of the strongest areas of resistance. This image of Cheikh Amadou Bamba is based on the only extant photograph of the holy man. set setal, 69. Mamadou Diouf, qtd. in set setal, 36. De Certeau, ‘‘Walking in the City,’’ in The Practice of Everyday Life, 105. set setal, 18. See Wright, The Politics of Design in French Colonial Urbanism. Also see King, Colonial Urban Development. De Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, 106. Ibid. See Diagne, ‘‘L’avenir de la tradition,’’ 282. Joe Ouakam (also known as Issa Samb), qtd. in set setal, 32. Some artists, most notably Issa Samb, have continued to collaborate with some of the set setal muralists.

103 104 105 106 107 108 109

110 111 112 113 114 115 116 117 118 119 120

5

Passport to the Global Art World 1 Soyinka, ‘‘Climates of Art,’’ in Art, Dialogue, and Outrage, 247. 2 Nicodemus and Romare, ‘‘Africa, Art Criticism, and the Big Commentary,’’ 55. 3 Dirlik, ‘‘The Global in the Local,’’ 28. 4 Carrier, Artwriting. 5 Nicodemus and Romare, ‘‘Africa, Art Criticism, and the Big Commentary,’’ 54–55.

282

Notes

6 7 8

9 10

11 12 13 14

15 16 17 18

19 20 21

22

Hall, ‘‘What is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?’’ 467. The cost of purchase was 375,000 cfa (3,750 French francs) per square meter following the devaluation of the cfa in 1994. Deliss, ‘‘A Man, a Moon,’’ 227. These pleas have come most notably from its former director, Ousmane Sow Huchard. During the 1992 Dak’Art biennale, Sow Huchard wrote in one of the local newspapers, ‘‘Our greatest wish, Mr. President of the Republic, is that the artists and cultured Senegalese, as well as friends of our country here and elsewhere, who will never be resigned to the definitive disappearance of the Musée Dynamique, this jewel of global culture, will not hold an image of you as the protector of Arts who transformed ‘a dynamic space’ into ‘a static space.’ ’’ Sow Huchard, ‘‘Plaidoyer pour le musée,’’ 7. M. Diop, mayor of Dakar, qtd. in ‘‘Dakar en fête,’’ 11. Moustapha Ka, minister of culture, qtd. in ibid. Senghor was also referred to as the ‘‘benefactor and protector of Letters and Arts.’’ In his oft-quoted speech outlining his concept of universal civilization, Senghor refers to Senegal as a ‘‘crossroads open to the sea and the land . . . where winds blow from all points of the compass.’’ See Senghor, ‘‘Négritude and the Concept of Universal Civilisation.’’ Diouf, ‘‘Art against Apartheid,’’ 236–37. Pelletier, ‘‘Messagers d’une culture,’’ 4. The first Dakar biennale took place in 1990 and was devoted to literature. Since the research period for this book, biennales have occurred regularly, in 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2002. There are a small number of good reviews on the offerings at each of these biennale events. While it is beyond the scope of this study to investigate the details of each of the biennales, a broader analysis of its effect on the art scene in Senegal and the developing canon of contemporary African arts will be addressed. See Biggs, ‘‘Dak’Art 96.’’ Diouf, ‘‘L’art,’’ 8. Abdou Diouf, inaugural address at the Biennale Internationale des Arts de Dakar, qtd. in ‘‘Fraternité, métissage, dialogue des cultures,’’ Le Soleil, 15 December 1992, 10. Unlike its predecessor in 1966, which had exhibitions devoted to tradition-based and contemporary arts, the biennale featured only contemporary arts. The American Cultural Center hosted an exhibition of works by five African American abstract painters entitled Crossroads: Synthesis in African American Abstract Painting, featuring the works of Mary Lovelace O’Neal, Mildred Thompson, Frank Bowling, Joe Overstreet, and Leonardo Drew. The American ambassador’s residence also supported a small joint Senegalese-American exhibition. Tambadou, ‘‘Le colloque,’’ 4. Ibid., 8. In 1966, the colloquium was entitled ‘‘Colloque sur Picasso: Art nègre et civilisation de l’universel . . . Pourquoi?’’ (Colloquium on Picasso: Black Art and the Civilization of the Universal . . . Why?’’). The proceedings were later published in Art nègre et civilisation de l’universel. See especially the contribution of Papa Ibra Tall, ‘‘Situation de l’artiste négroafricain contemporain.’’ Deliss, ‘‘The Dakar Biennale 92,’’ 138.

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23

24 25 26

27 28 29

30

31

32 33

34

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As I mentioned above, this need surfaces in the recent success of the inter-African Triangle workshops in southern Africa, instigated by European artists and patrons Anthony Caro and Robert Loder. By the end of 1994, the African continent had seven workshops modeled on the Triangle workshop formula. The original Triangle workshops, held in upstate New York, were envisioned as two-week retreats where intensive work could be accomplished. They are all artist-led. These first ones hosted American and English artists (though the South African David Koloane had attended several). The first African Triangle workshop, Thupelo, was organized in Johannesburg by the late Bill Ainslie and David Koloane. The Pachipamwe workshop in Zimbabwe (1988), organized by Tapfuma Gutsa and Berry Bickle, soon followed. From there, the idea spread to Botswana with Thapong (1989–), Mozambique with Ujamaa (1990–93), Zambia with Mbile (1993–), Namibia with Tulipamwe (1994–), and finally to Senegal with tenq (1994–). Sow Huchard, ‘‘Dak’art, c’est scandaleux,’’ Sud-Hebdo, 17 December 1992, 2. Deliss, ‘‘The Dakar Biennale 92,’’ 137. In place of participating in official events, Sy collaborated with Revue Noire to create a special issue on the arts in Dakar. Revue Noire receives a significant percentage of its money from the French Ministry of Cooperation. Racine Talla, ‘‘L’Art et l’Argent’’ in Sud-Hebdo, 17 December 1992, 11. Axt and Sy, Bildende Kunst, 93. These include the Festival des Francophonies Internationales in Limoges, the Salon des Découvertes held each year in Paris, or workshops such as those held in Burkina Faso and Niger in 1994, called ouag’art and Bivouac des Artistes, respectively. In 1994, Rundek, an artists’ group based in Berlin with several Senegalese members, held a symposium of some thirty practicing artists in Senegal with the financial aid of this center. The organizing committee of Rundek included Bassirou Sarr, Ben Mouhamed Diop, and Amadou Dieng. For six weeks, this mix of French, Japanese, Senegalese, German, Greek, and other sculptors worked in wood, stone, iron, and mixed media, often using the objets trouvés from the beaches surrounding the workshops. The studio of Gérard Chenet, a Haitian sculptor who is a longtime resident of Senegal, served as their base in the small beach resort of Toubab Diallo, south of Dakar. The works produced were first exhibited at the Galerie ifan and then out of doors at the Place de l’Indépendance in an effort to make them more accessible to the public. Yamar Diop Jr., ‘‘Exposition d’art plastique: Le banc d’essai de Helsen,’’ Le Soleil, 17 January 1994, 4. Helsen also funded an outreach project that enabled Senegalese filmmakers to show their works to rural communities. The Italian cultural center had a small gallery space in central Dakar, but the center closed in 1995 because of financial problems in the Ministry of Cooperation in Italy. The estimated cost of renting a space such as that for the Galerie Wiitef, in prime real estate, central Dakar, was 250,000–300,000 cfa francs (6000 French francs) before the 1994 devaluation. See ‘‘Le prix de la passion,’’ Sud-Hebdo, 18 July 1993, 2. Artists who have exhibited in the Galerie Wiitef, from its opening in December 1992 until December 1994, include Amadou Sow, Kré M’Baye, Ahmadou Moussa Diallo, Babacar Lô, Souleymane Keita, Moussa Diop Samba Laye, Ibrahima Kebé, Peter Weins, Moussa

Notes

35 36

37

38 39 40 41

42 43

Tine, Vincent Michea, Ibou Diouf, Annick Doherty, Viyé Diba, Amadou Bâ, zulu M’Baye, Pape Cissé, Djibril Sy, Bouna Médoune Sèye, Abdoulaye N’Doye, and Babacar Traoré. A new exhibition was mounted every two weeks. The gallery paid for the framing, hanging, and opening expenses of each exhibition, taking 20 percent commission on sales. Most galleries operating in Dakar estimate that on average twenty out of the fifty or sixty works exhibited are sold. See ‘‘Galerie,’’ 2. The gallery’s role as a broker was crucial because it gave the artists a certain leverage over and distance from the prospective buyers. In this way, the artists were able to avoid what one labeled the insidious ‘‘studio-price syndrome,’’ which occurred when buyers waited until after the closing of an exhibition and then arrived at an artist’s studio to snatch up unsold works at discount prices. More often than not, the artist sold at this lower price to survive. Moussa Diop Samba Laye, mixed-media artist, interview with author, December 1994, Dakar, Senegal. In 1994, several exhibitions were organized to coincide with a French-sponsored monograph series on contemporary Senegalese artists. Viyé Diba, Souleymane Keita, and Iba N’Diaye were those first featured. N’Diaye’s book, however, was not accompanied by an exhibition. neas–Sépia Éditions published these monographs, with financial support from the French Ministry of Cooperation. The owner suggested to me that the local artists are unreliable and limited in talent, so that every chance she has to receive European artists, she does. Young artists such as Cheikh Niass or Kan-Si have shown here. This space has also had shows by artist-teachers such as Serigne M’Baye Camara. For a discussion of Mohammadou zulu M’Baye’s works, refer to chapter 1 of this book. In Dakar, the Sofitel, Teranga, and Savannah hotels are the most frequent venues for exhibition. The large European hotel chains at the resorts on Almadies, north of Dakar, in Sali Portugal, just south of the city, and further to the south in the Casamance region also provide occasional opportunities. Viyé Diba, Sud-Hebdo, 24 January 1994, 2. Senegalese collectors with whom I made contact or to whom I was referred are few. These included Habib Diene, architect; Abdoulaye Rahim Agne, deputy; Nicolas and Binette Cissé, architect/interior designer and gallery owners; Ousmane Sow Huchard, museologist/curator; Marie José Crespin, magistrate and descendant of a very old and prestigious creole family in Gorée; Fara N’Diaye, businessman; Siby Faye, doctor; Bara Diokhane, lawyer; Mme. LeConte, gallery owner; Libasse Thiam, businessman; Boubacar Diallo, businessman; Massamba Lam, director of Musée d’ifan; Mamadou Diouf, professor of history and sociology; Serigne Babacar Sy, descendant of leader of El Hadji Malick Sy, founder of the Tijanni brotherhood in Senegal; Michel Arrechea, French gallery owner; François Belorgey, former head of the French Cultural Center; Kalidou Sy, director of the École Nationale des Beaux Arts; Serigne N’Diaye, painter who has one of the largest collections of early sous verre paintings; and Mourtala Diop, international businessman, based primarily in France, who has made his fortune through the sale of traditional African sculptures, but has recently turned his attention to contemporary works. An exclu-

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47 48 49

50 51 52 53

54 55

56 57 58

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sive private school, Le Cour de Saint Marie de Hann, is one of the largest collectors and supporters of artists in Dakar today. Its director, Vincent Cabrita, has opened its doors to many young Senegalese artists to sponsor workshops for children and private gallery space. West, ‘‘The New Cultural Politics of Difference,’’ 19. Hall, ‘‘What Is This ‘Black,’ ’’ 466. The proliferation of large, international exhibitions geared at categorizing, interpreting, and creating a market for these ‘‘new’’ works is perhaps the result of a growing global awareness, but it may also be seen as a continuation of an earlier practice of displaying African material that has its roots in nineteenth-century colonial exhibitions and world’s fairs. See Coombes, Reinventing Africa. The modernist and postmodernist art market’s constant need for the new, coupled with the fear that conditions for the crafting of traditional African arts no longer exist, have also contributed to the interest shown in these works. For further discussion of the increased importance and central role of the curator see Brenson, ‘‘The Curator’s Moment.’’ Martin, ‘‘Entretien.’’ This recentering and relativizing project translated quite literally into a remapping of the globe. In the catalogue, each artist’s home provided the center point for a world map. Moreover, each individual, regardless of race, class, gender, or nationality, was afforded a single column of space to explain his or her creative approach. The controversy surrounding this exhibition can best be traced in a series of articles that appeared in Artforum in the same year. See McEvilley, ‘‘Doctor, Lawyer, Indian Chief.’’ Poppi, ‘‘From the Suburbs of the Global Village,’’ 94. This exhibition’s catalogue included a significant article on the École de Dakar by Ima Ebong and the works of painters Fodé Camara and Iba N’Diaye. One of the most disturbing aspects of this exhibition was that it perpetuated a narrow definition of Africa by including only arts from sub-Saharan Africa and ignoring the Maghreb, white South Africa, the diversity that the south Asian diaspora brought to the continent, and the importance of the black diaspora. Oguibe, review, 20–21. For further criticism of this exhibition, see Picton, ‘‘Desperately Seeking Africa.’’ Magnin, Africa hoy, 186. The concept of this exhibition, which used naïveté as a criterion for judgment, originated in Magiciens de la terre. The lack of serious critical structure in the Magiciens resulted in the exoticizing elements of Africa Hoy and exhibitions that have followed (mostly of the Pigozzi collection) such as Africa Now (London, 1991) and Big City (London, 1995). Ibid. Deliss, Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa. The Senegalese section of this exhibition was curated by El Hadji Moussa Babacar Sy and included the works of El Sy, Issa Samb, and Souleymane Keita. As mentioned in chapter 3, this installation was opened by the first foreign performance of Laboratoire Agit-Art.

Notes

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70 71 72 73 74

75 76

77 78 79 80 81 82

Sculptors Babacar Traoré and Guibril André Diop took part in the various workshops set up around Britain. Oguibe, ‘‘A Brief Note on Internationalism,’’ 52. See Sally Price’s chapter on the universality principle for further arguments. Price, Primitive Art in Civilized Places, 23–36. Oguibe, ‘‘A Brief Note on Internationalism,’’ 53. Ibid., 57. Ibid., 53. Ibid,. 54. B. Ruby Rich, ‘‘Dissed and Disconnected: Notes on Present Ills and Future Dreams,’’ qtd. in Enwezor, ‘‘Redrawing the Boundaries,’’ 4. Nicodemus and Romare, ‘‘Africa, Art Criticism, and the Big Commentary,’’ 53. Vogel, Africa Explores, 191. An art column does appear in two of the four daily newspapers in Dakar, Sud Quotidien and Walfadjri, written by Bara Diop and Maxine Dessoh, respectively. However, these journalists offer little more than a fleeting glance at the most recent exhibition openings and operate on almost purely formalist grounds, continuing the poetic praise of the Senghorian era. The weekly paper, Le Débat occasionally features more interesting articles on collectors, the art market, and the effects of the decentralization of government funds for the arts. Marouba Fall, Walfadrji, 18 January 1994, 7. Ibid. Abdoulaye N’Doye, interview with author, May 1994, Diamalaye, Senegal. Enwezor, ‘‘Redrawing the Boundaries,’’ 5. In parallel debates in the field of literature, scholars, critics, and writers have sought out a so-called vernacular form in an attempt to do away with the colonial or dominant culture’s linguistic and cultural codes. One thinks of Ngu˜gı˜ wa Thiong’o and Onwuchekwa Chinweizu, in this respect, but also of Henry Louis Gates Jr., Toni Morrison, and Houston Baker Jr. in the African American context. I refer specifically to the critical and curatorial work of, mainly, Salah Hassan, Olu Oguibe, Octavio Zaya, and Okwui Enwezor. Stuart Hall and Anthony Appiah, among others, question the currency of postmodernism in places where paradigms of modernism are young. Hall et al., Modernity; and Appiah, ‘‘Is the Post- in Postmodernism.’’ See chapter 2 for a fuller description of the Laboratoire Agit-Art and the Village des Arts. Oguibe, ‘‘In ‘The Heart of Darkness.’ ’’ Ibrahima N’Diaye Diadji, Le Soleil, 16 December 1992, 9. Senghor, Liberté iii, 341. Qtd. in Vaillant, Black, French, and African, 266. Cheikh Niass, interview with author, 12 May 1994, Dakar, Senegal.

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africa ’95, 1, 136–40, 177, 234 Africanité, 2, 9–10, 12, 13, 22–23, 27, 31, 33, 39, 42, 48, 53, 63, 82, 92, 94, 103, 219, 224 Âme nègre, 40–42, 46, 195 Artaud, Antonin, 109–12, 134 Art criticism, 80, 219, 224, 237, 240; in Africa, 219, 237–39; Modernist, 237; in Senegal, 83, 225 Art-culture system, 19, 106 Art education in Africa, 66–68, 163. See also Art schools in Senegal Artists’ associations, 15–16; Artistes Plasticiens du Sénégal (arplasen), 146–47; Association Nationale des Artistes Plasticiens Sénégalais (anaps), 147, 167, 197, 220 L’art primitif, 10, 49–50, 54, 80, 85–86, 92, 96 Art schools in Senegal: Centre de Formation Artisanale de Dakar, 159, 165–66; coopérants and, 51, 105, 159; École des Arts, 55–63, 141, 220; École Nationale des Beaux Arts, 54, 123, 158, 165, 186; École Nationale Supérieure d’Education Artistique, 186, 188–89, 192, 197; Institut

National des Arts du Sénégal, 105, 107, 119, 143, 192 Art sénégalais d’aujourd’hui, 52, 78, 95, 108, 129, 161, 221–22 Art Sur Vie, 221–22 Art world, 15, 55 Assimilation policy, 34, 36, 53 Authenticity, 8, 59–61, 94, 161, 193–96, 199, 238 Avant-garde, xxiii, 13, 114–15, 150, 216 Bamba, Amadou, 37, 85–86, 181–82 Biennales, 14, 219, 222, 232, 235–36 Black Artists and Writers Congress, 65 Black Atlantic, 6, 23, 52 Black Orpheus. See L’Orphée noir Black soul. See Âme nègre Caste, 81, 159, 163, 165, 177 Césaire, Aimé, 9, 21, 32, 38, 73, 101, 118–19 ‘‘Chaka’’ (poem), 115–17 ‘‘Chers enfants,’’ 52, 108, 141, 146, 220 Cité des artistes plasticiens de Colobane, 142–43, 146

Civilisation de l’universel, xxiv, 43–44, 240–41 Clifford, James, 27–30, 38–39, 92 Colonialism, 9, 50, 80, 97–98 Committee for Exhibitions Abroad, 147 Contemporary African art: definitions of, xxv, 4, 225; exhibitions of, xxiii, 139– 41, 231–34; market for, 219, 230, 235–37; scholarship on, 6–8, 239, 240. See also Patronage

Dak’art, xxiv, 219, 222–25 Decolonization, xxiii, 6 Delafosse, Maurice, 30 Diagne, Blaise, 24, 209 Diba, Viyé, 141, 189–97 Dimé, Moustapha, 163–73, 202 Diokhané, Bara, 147 Diop, Cheikh Anta, 51, 170, 209, 215 Diop, Guibril André, 126, 151, 161, 174–80 Diouf, Abdou, 12, 51, 120, 143, 146–47, 210, 217–18, 220–21 Du Bois, W. E. B., 23–24

Ebong, Ima, 84, 89–90, 92–114 École de Dakar, 10–11, 128, 202, 237; analyses of, 49–104, 108–12, 138, 149, 193–95, 222; critiques of, 84–85, 126–29, 149, 219–20; École de Paris and, 10, 50 Enwezor, Okwui, xxii–xxiii, 139–40, 230 Esthétique négro-africaine, 38, 46–47, 68, 99–100, 123, 196 Ethnographic surrealism, 27–29 L’Étudiant noir, 32

Fanon, Frantz, 22, 50, 108 Faye, Mor, 1–4 Festival Culturel Panafricain, Algiers, 76–77, 223 Field of cultural production, 54, 66, 78–79, 112, 149, 237

314 Index

First World Festival of Negro Arts. See Premier Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres Foreign cultural centers, 13, 218, 223, 226; French cultural center, 161, 208, 225–26; Swiss cultural center, 172, 226 Foster, Hal, 94, 97 Fosu, Kojo, 61, 84 Four Communes: habitants in, 36; originaires of, 35; politics of, 34–38, 98; signares of, 36, 187–88 Frobenius, Leo, 30 Galerie Nationale, 193, 220 Galleries in Dakar, 227–29 Garvey, Marcus, 24 Gaye, Germaine Anta, 151, 186–89 Glass painting. See Sous verre Huits Facettes, 172, 202 Hybridity, 53–54, 64–65, 114, 212, 230; in art, 100–101, 123 Internationalism, 204, 219, 231, 235–37 Islam, 35, 37, 92, 158, 175–76, 180, 200–201; Mouridism and, 167–68, 181–82, 210; other Muslim brotherhoods and, 181–82, 210 Jules-Rosette, Bennetta, xxiv, 106 Keita, Souleymane, 136, 138–39 Laboratoire Agit-Art, 12, 106–20, 199–200, 207, 216, 218, 239–40; africa ’95 and, 136–41 Légitime défense, 31 Locke, Alain, 24–25 Lods, Pierre, 65–66, 119, 125–26, 156 Magiciens de la terre, 232 Manufacture Sénégalaise des Arts Décoratifs (msad), 68–70, 131, 181, 220 McKay, Claude, 25

Mercer, Kobena, 98–99, 102 Ministry of culture, 12, 143, 220 Mission civilisatrice, 28 Modern artist, 11, 52, 80–82, 107–8, 156, 166, 193–96, 203, 217, 230, 232, 234 Modernism, 5, 200, 214, 219; European and primitivism, 95–98 Musée Dynamique, 2, 74, 107, 146, 220

Présence Africaine, 43 Primitivism, 11, 17, 50, 52–53, 64, 94–101, 204, 233–34, 236, 237; exhibition at Museum of Modern Art, 96–97, 232

National Salons. See Salons nationaux N’Diaye, Djibril, 160–61 N’Diaye, Iba, 2, 56, 63–65, 74, 79 Negritude: critiques of, xxii, 41–42, 45, 51, 76–77, 83; differences between Caribbean and African, 31–33; origins of, 21–31, 34– 38; racialism and, 20, 41–42; Senghor’s brand of, 9–11, 30–31, 38–48; Socialism and, 46, 83. See also Senghor, Léopold Sédar Negrophilia, 20, 26–31 New negro, 24, 26–27 Niass, Cheikh, 141, 203–5, 241 Nicodemus, Everlyn, 8, 139–40, 219, 237 Njami, Simon, xxii

Saint Louis, 36, 186–88 Salons nationaux, 161, 167, 192, 220 Samb, Issa Ramangelissa, 106, 120–25, 136, 204, 216, 225 Sartre, Jean-Paul. See L’Orphée noir Sculpture, 150–80 Sembène, Ousmane, 51, 83. See also Negritude: critiques of Senegal: history of, 76, 180–81, 209–10; politics of, 51, 146, 206. See also Four Communes Senghor, Léopold Sédar: as patron of arts, xxi–xxii, 5–6, 12–13, 45–47, 49, 52, 77–82, 107, 126, 156–57, 216, 218, 224; philosophy of, 9–11, 19, 30–31, 43, 45–48; poetry of, 40, 44, 115–17; political biography of, 34–38, 51. See also Negritude Serer, 34, 39 set setal, 155, 205–16, 218 Si, Kan, 141, 197–203, 241 La Société Africaine de Culture (sac), 43, 223 Sous verre, 79, 151, 180–89 Sow, Ousmane, 160, 224 Soyinka, Wole, 45, 80, 101–2, 106, 217 Strategic essentialism, 50, 83, 98–103 Sy, El Hadji Moussa Babacar, 16, 125–36, 141, 225

Oguibe, Olu, xxiv, 230, 235–36, 240 L’Orphée noir, 22–23 Ouakam, Joe. See Samb, Issa Ramangelissa Pan-Africanism, 23–26, 224–25; aesthetic, 46, 59, 95; congresses of, 24 Patronage, 13, 105–6, 185, 218, 220–21, 225, 229, 230, 234. See also Senghor, Léopold Sédar: as patron of arts Plekhanov, Georgi, 111–12 Post-avant-garde, 13, 149–216 Postcolonialism, 17, 50, 53, 59, 98, 200, 219, 230–31 Postmodernism, 12, 219, 232, 237 Post-Negritude era, 13 Poto-Poto school, 65, 84 Premier Festival Mondial des Arts Nègres, 2, 49, 70–76, 156, 165, 220, 222, 224

Récupération, 112, 121–25, 150–51, 168–69, 177, 203 La Revue du Monde Noir, 26

Tall, Papa Ibra, 56–63, 80, 84, 85, 146, 155 Tenq, 142 Thiès tapestry workshop. See Manufacture Sénégalaise des Arts Décoratifs (msad) Toucouleur, 35, 88, 129, 215

Traditionality, 7, 156–58, 161, 166, 195, 223; Laboratoire Agit-Art and, 109, 114–15, 150; Negritude and, 39–40, 50, 74, 85, 114, 127, 238–39; and traditional-contemporary debate, 7–8, 232–36, 238–39 Traoré, Babacar, 142

Universalism, 42, 51, 203, 230–31, 239; École de Dakar and, 94 Village des Arts, 12, 141–48, 165, 220, 225, 239–40 Wolof, 34, 35, 63, 88, 129, 205, 209, 215

316

Index

Elizabeth Harney is Assistant Professor of Fine Arts at the University of Toronto. She was the first curator of contemporary art at the National Museum of African Art at the Smithsonian Institution, and she is the editor of the book Ethiopian Passages: Contemporary Art from the Diaspora. Library of Congress Cataloguing-in-Publication Data Harney, Elizabeth. In Senghor’s shadow : art, politics, and the avant-garde in Senegal, 1960–1995 / Elizabeth Harney. p. cm. — (Objects/histories) Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-8223-3385-6 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 0-8223-3395-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Modernism (Art)—Senegal—Dakar. 2. Avant-garde (Aesthetics)—Senegal—Dakar—History—20th century. 3. Art and state—Senegal. 4. Negritude (Literary movement)—Senegal—Influence. 5. Senghor, Léopold Sédar, 1906– —Influence. I. Title. II. Series. n7399.s4h37 2004 709'.663'09045—dc22 2004009126