African Art and the Colonial Encounter: Inventing a Global Commodity (review)

Studies of African artistic expression have demonstrated that even the most enduring art forms are seldom unchanging. Invention is intrinsic to processes of artistic creation even when intended to uphold longstanding cultural practices and values. Yet change can come about for other reasons as well, sometimes as a response to dramatic social upheaval. For many African artistic traditions, colonialism and the subsequent related phenomena of modernity, tourism, and globalization have been the most transformative of interventions. In Sidney Kasfir's recent book, African Art and the Colonial Encounter, all of these factors are considered in an ambitious comparative study of two very different, geographically distant regions of the continent whose cultural expressions and art forms underwent pronounced change in response to colonial mandates from the 1880s to the 1930s, followed by the effects of a globalized trade in art and artifact during the colonial and postcolonial periods.

Sidney Kasfir has engaged in deep and sustained field research in two very different areas of Africa over the course of her scholarly career. Her dissertation (1979) addressed the Idoma region of the Lower Benue Valley in Nigeria, where she conducted field research on masquerade and sacred kingship, focusing on migrations, rituals, and Fulani and British interventions that led to the formation of a modern Idoma identity. In 1991 she began research in East Africa among Maa-speaking Samburu peoples of the North Rift Valley in Kenya, specifically on their encounters with modernity. Whereas the Idoma are sedentary agriculturalists organized into small chiefdoms with a structured political organization, the Samburu are pastoralists, herding cattle in a seminomadic existence that does not subscribe to hierarchies of authority beyond an occasional chief or "headman." Yet, two factors make this study rich and rewarding as a point of comparison: both groups practiced warriorhood (albeit in very different ways) as a form of social rank at the time of the partitioning of Africa by Europeans in the late nineteenth century, and both endured the impact of British colonial inscriptions upon this cultural institution and its symbols. Although the Samburu were subject to direct rule while the Idoma were under indirect rule, the British imposed legally sanctioned prohibitions on both. The British outlawed headhunting practices by Idoma warriors in 1917 (punishable by hanging) following imposition of the Pax Britannica, which suppressed traditional practices as part of a broader "civilizing mission"; in Kenya they banned the use of spears in 1934 following a controversial murder by Samburu warriors of a white man. Yet the warriors, artists, and blacksmiths of both groups responded not by cessation of the outlawed practices, but rather by inventive reimagining of their traditions and art forms, which ultimately led to the development of new audiences for their works and even stimulated their commodification. The result was that the British became inadvertent patrons of the arts, as Kasfir states, engendering entirely new forms of social performance and discourse in the process.

Through detailed and thorough research, Kasfir deftly documents how the "cultural script" of these groups was deconstructed, and "warrior theater" refashioned, as a result of British sovereignty. Idoma skulls of slain enemies had been a critical iconographic element in the Oglinye masquerade, which employed decorated human crania. Once these practices were outlawed, the Idoma recast the masquerade not as a literal demonstration of head-taking, but as a more general metonymic statement about warriorhood writ large, in which carved masks came to replace actual skulls as a collective representation of manhood. Likewise, when the British outlawed the use of spears in Samburu-land, the Samburu migrated to a border region where they began making spears for the neighboring Turkana and Rendille. In both contexts, colonials and eventually tourists in East Africa stimulated markets for these newly modified works, in Nigeria as mementos or trophies of the colonial experience, and in Kenya as souvenirs of a "vanishing Africa...