From "Life-Water" to "Death-Water" or On the Foundations of African Artistic Creation from Yesterday to Tomorrow

Abstract

The question of water crosses all African cultures—water as the critical factor for a happy life (life-water) or water mastered as a source of malediction (death-water). The aquatic nature of such a civilization appears then as the foundation of shapes and contents of African artistic expression. An analysis of various forms of creation shows that, without a lucid understanding of the power of water in the constitution of Africa's identity, it is impossible to interpret correctly African art from yesterday to tomorrow.

The foundations of African art have been the subject of numerous attempts at definition and analysis. In determining the "Year One" of African art, some begin in 1921 [1], with the publication of the novel Batouala, by René Maran, while others refer to 1906, the year in which the South African writer Thomas Mofolo published his novel The Traveller of the East[2]. In some instances, even colonial administrators, such as Charles Béart, the former director of l'École Normale William Ponty in Senegal, have proclaimed themselves as "the initiators and principal sources of inspiration" of art in Africa! To anyone who might believe him, Béart stated that it was he who was "the kindly godfather of African theater" [3], that it was he who had taught his African students to understand theater. These contradictory accounts have produced conflicting results, as each analyst would speak of "sources," "origins," "foundations" and "first creators," reflecting a crypto-personal bias.

Nevertheless, according to Joseph Ki-Zerbo, there have been sufficient historical evidence and facts regarding African arts and civilizations to establish an identity of their own. As he points out, it is peoples of the black continent who

gave birth to civilization for the longest period of World History. . . . When "Antiquity" began, Africa was, via Egypt, the locomotive and the teacher of the world, introducing writing, centralized power, the pyramids and monumental architecture, sciences, etc. Moreover, the mother of Egypt is Nubia and its sub-Saharan extensions [4].

This powerful remark clearly establishes Africa's place as an authority in the arts and allows for the foundations of African art to be studied from a viewpoint different from the simplistic approach of dates and places of works published during the colonial period.

Three approaches may then be used in determining the possibility or impossibility of defining a single source of African artistic production: the first establishes the aquatic nature of African "being"; the second illustrates the power of water in artistic content and forms; the third suggests cultural constants that may enable a better reading of African arts in the future. I will discuss these three in the following pages.

Of the Aquatic Nature of African Existence

To speak of African "being" is to refer specifically to an ontology that precedes revealed religions, such as Islam and Christianity. In this Africa, the living and the dead are joined in a powerful reality named "existence." The living being is just as the dead; in other words, in this reality, the being—whether human, vegetable, animal, mineral or stone, whether it lives or dies—is always animated by a force. Each force has its place within a hierarchy, rising from a grain of sand to God, from the visible to the invisible, from the audible to the inaudible. Father Placide Tempels had correctly recognized this specificity when he wrote:

We Westerners see power as being an attribute of being, and we have elaborated a notion of being which is separate from the notion of power. It seems to me that primitive peoples did not interpret reality in this way. Their notion of being is essentially dynamic. . . . To them, power was a necessary element of being [5].

It is unnecessary to elaborate upon the Reverend Father's use of the word "primitive," loaded as it is with exclusionary meaning, as the author's thinking was well in line with colonial ideology. Let us, however, give him credit for recognizing Western ignorance of a profound truth in Africa, a truth that Birago Diop...