No condition is permanent

Abstract

The very term “African art” is intimately connected with the history of Europe's colonial relationship with Africa. Until recently, reports on African art were overwhelmingly “for the West.” They emphasized what was of interest to Western audiences and remained silent about, or were ignorant of, anything else. A Renaissance interest in African musical instruments and dancing gave way, in the early 20th century, to a liking for the masks and statuettes, which could most easily be exported and collected as “art objects.” This in turn gave way to a more recent interest, stimulated by anthropology and ethnology, in the ensemble of mask, costume,‐ dance and ritual as a total art form. In the complex contemporary world, different interest groups vie to create an image of African art: Western museums which are still largely preoccupied with “traditional” art, émigré artists from Europe who settled and created “schools” of artists in some African countries, collectors seeking the ethnic and exotic, and the tourist industry catering to a suburban notion of the “primitive.” Of course these attitudes cannot all be equated, and there have always been sensitive and honest researchers. But what, in different ways, all these groups seek is an “African essence,” outside time and history; or to put it more precisely, based on a schizophrenic view of time and history, which assigns Africa eternally to the “pre‐modern,” while representing and interpreting it according to the latest Western tastes and notions. As Amilcar Cabral so aptly put it: “The colonialists have a habit of telling us that when they arrived in Africa they put us into history. You are well aware that it's the contrary—when they arrived they took us out of our own history.” Therefore an acute awareness of conditions and changes of social reality, and an African view of history, are necessarily part of the whole process of decolonization. This is already quite well‐known in the work of an intelligensia of African writers, film‐makers, musicians, poets. But recently it has been augmented by reports of the vigorous new popular cultures growing up in the towns and cities since independence: African art for an African public.

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