Oruku Tindi Tindi : Museums and the Pseudo-Aesthethics of Primitivism

Books Discussed:

Museums and the Community In West Africa, by Claude Daniel Ardouin and Emmanuel Arinze, eds. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution P; London: James Currey, 1995.

African Art: An Aesthetic Inquiry, by Mohamed A. Abusabib. Uppsala: Uppsala University, 1995.

Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, by Eilean Hooper-Greenhill. London: Routledge, 1992.

An insidious strain of primitivism is assiduously cultivating its generous plot in the horticulture of Afrocentrism. Mushrooming into a metastasis, it theoretically threatens the aesthetic core of the study of African art with its pseudo-aesthetic dogmas. In a lecture delivered on 11 April 1997 at Wellesley College, Wole Soyinka spoke against that malignant cell of pseudo-ethnicity currently proliferating in the West, under the ideologies and rhetorics of Afrocentrism.

"I am not an Afrocentrist," he reveals in a voice echoing his tigritude rebuke. Warning of the danger inherent in the strain of ethnocentrism that projects and protects "primitivism," in all its ramifications, as the image of Africa, Soyinka specifically addressed his message to his kin in the Diasporas, insisting on the need to move beyond the "danshiki" groove. His oracle should have saved some of that divination for his in situ kin, based on the content of the above three books, two of which were written by Africans, and the third of which has an image of Africa gracing its front cover, even though it was written by a European. I could picture the brooding laureate, with his extravagantly white sartorial halo, breaking into the following Yoruba proverb as he contemplates the transAtlantic panorama of Afrocentrism and African studies: Oruku tindi tindi; Oruku tindi tindi; Oruku bigba omo, gbogbo won ya aje: Oruku, "the formidable one, who mothers a zillion offsprings, and all, without exception, turn out to be witches."

Oruku—of whom more will soon be divulged—apparently anchors these three books together in the quays of the Atlantic ocean, from Florence to Washington, DC, to Ile-Ife. Begin with the ridiculous, National Geographic-inspired Smithsonian Press cover of Museums and the Community in West Africa. Behind the ceramist's pendulous breasts (sucked dry by countless babies and multiple infant mortalities) hides an ocean of texts, whose visual rhythm represents the riddle of transAtlantic, triangular relations of the last five hundred years. During that period, and with the triangular trade, emerged a triangular aesthetic attitude, altogether nourished in disproportionate hegemonic imbalance, that links the shores previously plied by the slave ships. That aesthetic attitude, Atlanticism, ebbing back and forth, willy-nilly, in the sanguinous hues of the Atlantic, secreted the pseudo-aesthetics of primitivism, along with other -isms including modernism. In Atlanticism, where the Black meets the White Atlantic, the South couples the North, and the East transgresses the Western coasts, resides Oruku. Even now that the slave and master have abandoned the Atlantic slave ships, these monstrous vessels have not disappeared from their psyche. Thus the museum, the primary bind between the three volumes discussed here, was born and raised in the bellies of the evergreen slave ships, within which the treasures of Europe multiplied.

The museum is a manner of thinking, a political attitude, and an economic risk, not merely an edifice filled with objects. Its inaugural curators were white, and black bodies were not infrequently cased in its name within the dark dank holds of the slave vessels. It is on these same slave ships that Oruku went into labor, while the likes of Caliban were born and promptly displayed as an anthropological curio, in the literary archives of Atlanticism.

One could tell from their names, even though the book lacks any notes on contributors, that the writers and editors of Museums and the Community in Africa are all black Africans, perhaps with only one exception. In a continent where images are as crucial to the people as writing to Westerners, pictures stir the human imagination, become a bank of memory, and stimulate nostalgia...