FIRST WORLD FESTIVAL OF NEGRO ARTS

COLLOQUIUM

"TRIBALITY"

William Fagg.

I will begin this report with two assumptions, which to me appear self-evident, but which could be readily justified in argument by art historians and anthropologists respectively. The first is that the tribal art of Africa does not belong to Africa any more than ancient Greek art belongs to Greece. Both now belong to the world, and both are more appreciated and, above all, more fruitful of inspiration for the artists of today and tomorrow outside their countries of origin than within them.

The second assumption is that there is more difference between the tribal African and the African intellectual than there is between the African intellectual and his white counterpart. It is possible that this greater difference is more evident to a white man, provided that he is not excessively preoccupied with skin colour, than it is to an African since to a large extent Africans undergo this change subconsciously.

'African Art in the Life of the People' is the subject enjoined for our Colloquium, and the question which I wish first to consider is 'which people?'. If this were a Congress of Ethnologists, I should feel bound to speak about the place of art in tribal societies. Certainly there is much to be said in detail on this subject, and much more still to be investigated. Yet for the purpose of this meeting, all that needs to be said can be said in a single sentence: tribal art is completely integrated

/in....

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in tribal life and society. Those at least who have studied it in the field know that it is a working part of the social machine and not a mere luxury or a method of escape from the machine, as art is, alas, in a great part of the world. Therefore a thorough study of the art of a tribe will also be a complete study of the whole society; and, moreover, the place of art is different, subtly or grossly, from one tribe to another, so that infinite variations would have to be recorded among the hundreds of art-producing tribes in Africa. Such matters are certainly deserving of long and intensive study, and of the fullest discussion in colloquia consisting of specialists in this field, but we here are engaged in a dialogue between many diverse arts, including several which are essentially arts of western civilization. Moreover, and this is a point to which I shall return, the art of the Afo of Northern Nigeria has significance in the life of the Afo, numbering a few thousand people, but is irrelevant to the life of the Nupe or the Ibo; and similarly the art of the Baule has no importance or interest for the Dogon, and would probably shock their ascetic souls.

Yet we must never forget, as we pass on to other aspects of art in the life of the people, that this appreciation of its own art by a people for whom it is not a luxury but an integral part of life is the ideal relationship between art and society, and one which we enjoyed for some centuries in Christian Europe before the Renaissance. But western civilization has long ago lost this relationship and Africa is in the process of losing it. Whether this loss - which I venture to call the loss of Africanism - is absolutely inevitable, and if so, whether Africa must simply follow Europe, is surely the greatest question before this Colloque.

/I......

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I shall be speaking about the art of the past - for
there are few places where it is not at least moribund -;
but I shall not concern myself much with the people of
the past, for whom that art was made, because that would
be difficult or impossible for the reasons which I have
already given. In any case, the people of the past are
not here with us today, and I prefer on this occasion to
address myself to the people of the present and the
future, who are.

Please do not imagine that I am offering compliments
to my audience. I am simply looking at the situation from
my position as a student of tribal culture and art, and
dividing Africans into those who still live, work, think
and create within the tribal matrix - and can therefore
appreciate their tribal art in the ideal manner, as a
part of belief -, and those who have become alienated
from that matrix, or, to use an old-fashioned term,
detribalized. This latter class, though probably not
yet in the majority of all Africans, includes all the
intellectuals, all the élites, all the ruling groups,
civil or military, and all the oppositions, and is
therefore very worthy of attention.

The process of alienation is a subtle one, and pro-
bably in most cases entirely unconscious. This is not
surprising, for the tribalist is not conscious of belonging
to a *tribal* way of life, but merely accepts the life into
which he was born, unaware that it is something so volatile
that it can depart from him almost overnight. In exchange
he adopts, again subconsciously, the basic premises of
what is called civilization, premises which again are
unconsciously held by most members of civilization, and
which I am certainly not competent to define in detail.

/Along......

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Along with much that is good, the 'package deal' of civilization includes some elements which are of dubious value, among them materialism, the aesthetic impoverishment of mass production, and the incidence of mental distress. Perhaps it would have been useful to call Professor Lambo of Ibadan as an expert witness before this Colloquium, to testify that neurosis and psychosis are almost non-existent in tribal society because the therapy needed to prevent, and if necessary to cure, these states is a built-in part of the tribal way of life. And if you ask what psychosis has to do with our subject of 'Art in the Life of the People', I answer that one of the prime functions of tribal art is indeed therapeutic. Masks, for example, so often regarded as meant to frighten, far more often have the function of exorcizing fears of the unknown by concretizing them. And I may add that I have known cases in which the study and collection of tribal art have been prescribed, and prescribed with great success, by psychiatrists in the western world.

In the western world, art no longer, I believe, performs this therapeutic function to any great extent, and this may be because it is both romantic, expressing the private vision of the individual artist rather than any common values of society, and over-intellectualized, so much so that a recent fashion, known as 'op art', which is essentially a kind of illusionism, could be done much better by computers than by human beings. I mention these facts to show that we also in the western world are suffering from alienation, and our tribal origins are much farther away.

This brings me back to my opening premise, which was that African art is not the property of Africa any more, but belongs to the world. I do not think that

/'Art.....

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‘Art in the Life of the People’ should be understood too narrowly as referring only to the people of Africa, for many of the problems to be considered are the common problems of humanity. It seems to me that, by the extent to which they have accepted the values of civilisation, the African *evolusés* have, in principle, put themselves in the same position towards their ancestral arts as Europeans and Americans.

When I first began to study African art, I used to think - perhaps under the influence of romantic notions of the Negro soul - that any African would be able to divine the significance of a piece of African sculpture, at least of his own people, with an intuitive understanding far deeper than any European could achieve. But I soon discovered, when I began to work in the field, that only the men of the bush, those still living within the tribal matrix, enjoyed this advantage over us whites; for the others, the ability to distinguish even between traditional carving and that made for the Europeans was one of the first to disappear in the process of alienation.

So I believe that we here are all in the same boat. In the face of tribal art we are all equally novices. It is true that the Africans among us may sometimes have a linguistic advantage which may make their field work easier and perhaps also more successful. But on the other hand all but a very few educated Africans are, it is clear, afflicted with a positive antipathy towards the art of the bush. This can be easily documented from the experience of most of the universities of Europe, America and Africa: students, as well as diplomats and journalists, are almost invariably absent from lectures and exhibitions designed to honour the traditional arts of Africa, even

/when......

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when great efforts have been made to interest them.
In part, this may be due, as some say, to an irrational
malaise in the presence of the ancestral images; in
the main, it is certainly due to an entirely rational
and conscious belief that association with the things of
the bush, of the old, 'savage' Africa, may tend to frustrate
their efforts to graduate as proficient members of western
society. Of course this is a mistaken view, even though
there still are some Europeans and Americans who think of
Africans and their art as savage. But it is apparently
an almost universal view among educated Africans, except
in this assemblage, which by definition takes a more
favourable view.

(There is of course one kind of African art which is
exempt from this hostility or indifference, and it is the
exception which proves the rule: I mean of course the
bronzes and terra-cottas of ancient Ife, which are
immediately acceptable to everybody as the artistic
equivalents of classical and Renaissance art in Europe).

Perhaps the saddest result of this hostility is the
almost complete absence of African scholars proficient
in the study of African art. A few years ago, at the
first meeting of the International Congress of Africanists
at Accra, grand speeches were made thanking European
scholars for their past efforts in the study of African
history and culture, granting them honourable retirement,
and saying that Africans would henceforth take over these
tasks. In history, which is not subject to the kind of
mental block which I have described, there are of course
eminent African scholars; but in the field of art and
antiquities, I know of only one person (a member of this
Colloquium) who has reached the necessary academic
standard in the whole of Anglophone Africa.

/European......

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European scholars will certainly continue to give
unprejudiced support to the idea of the high value of
African art, but it is for the educated Africans to
overcome their revulsion from it, and I do not doubt
that they will eventually do so. (It may be noted
here that virtually all the effective conservation of
African antiquities so far has been, and still is,
carried out by Europeans acting on behalf of African
countries during the past 20 years).

It is very possible that the classification of
African art as 'primitive' has been a major factor in
bringing about this revulsion of the intellectuals. If so,
it is based on a misconception. Those people in the
western world who use terms like 'primitive culture',
'primitive religion' or 'primitive art' do not,
normally at least, use them in a pejorative sense, but
as a convenient and neutral way of classifying certain
kinds of cultures and arts which are different from those
of the 'high civilisations'. And the term 'primitive
art' was first coined and popularized by the modern artists
of Europe who were sated with the over-intellectual and
academic arts of the western world and turned in admiration
and relief to the African and Oceanic sculptures which
till then were of interest only to ethnologists. Long
before that discovery was made, artists such as Gauguin
and van Gogh were corresponding with each other in vague
terms about their yearning for 'le primitif'. Africans would
be showing a more mature understanding of western
civilization if they did not take umbrage at the use of
this term by persons of good will.

Yet, even if the term is defensible on social,
scientific and art-historical grounds, it is also ambiguous

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and of uncertain meaning and lends itself to abuse by racialists. I myself abandoned it some twenty years ago, and have never regretted doing so. In any case, I could not, in honesty, use one term when talking to the English and Americans, and avoid it in favour of another when talking to Africans. (Even if African scholars could bring themselves to accept it, they would have constant difficulty in explaining their use of it to politicians and general public.) Recently, there has been some serious, if inconclusive, discussion of this problem of terminology in the pages of *Current Anthropology*. Of those contributing, a few strongly rejected the term 'primitive', others were indifferent to the problem, or felt no need of a term to distinguish this kind of art from that of the 'high civilisations', while a small number positively defended 'primitive', though not on any grounds depreciatory of its creators. It was noticeable, however, that those who did not feel the need of a better term were on the whole those whose studies were of objects rather than of people, and for whom the name was therefore largely a matter of convenience.

I adopted long ago the term 'tribal art', not so much because of African objections to 'primitive' (though I was glad to take account of these) as because, unlike 'primitive', it exactly and clearly describes the context in which this art is produced (the art itself cannot be described in a term, since its main distinguishing feature is its infinite morphological variety). I have remained absolutely ready all these years to abandon the term 'tribal art' if it could be shown to be erroneous or a better term should emerge. But these things have not happened. Many other people have adopted the term, while of those who avoid it some at least appear to be moved by trepidation before nationalist opinion against tribalism - a subject to which I shall return. It does not seem a strong enough argument for the suppression of truth.

.../Tribal art is

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Tribal art is produced only by tribes, and disappears when detribalization sets in; nor is this kind of art ever produced outside tribal society. Furthermore, every tribe is, in principle, a separate artistic universe, its art self-sufficient, intelligible to its members but not to those of other tribes, since it is an expression of the system of philosophy and religious belief peculiar to the tribe (which also forms a barrier to appreciation of the beliefs and arts of other tribes). These generalizations need to be qualified to take account of the fact that tribes, and therefore tribal styles of art, are not static but dynamic entities, subject to fission, fusion and other forms of change. This is why we find some areas, as among the eastern Ibo, Ibibio and Ekoi in Eastern Nigeria or the Dan-Ngere tribes of the Liberia-Ivory Coast border, where styles are to some extent shared or where two styles can co-exist and be 'mutually intelligible'.

I have recently produced a book - *Tribes and Forms in African Art* or, in French, *Sculptures africaines: les univers artistiques des tribus de l'Afrique noire* - in which I have sought to illustrate this quality of 'tribality', as I call it, and the immense variety of sculptural forms to which it has given rise, by showing 122 characteristic sculptures from the same number of tribes. That influential weekly, *West Africa*, in reviewing the book, seized upon my word 'tribality' (first used, I think, in my *Nigerian Images*, 1963) and set it off against 'tribalism', as a means of distinguishing the beneficent from the politically unacceptable aspects of the tribe. Politics are rightly excluded from this Colloquium, but I hope that you will allow me to mention them briefly for the express purpose of recommending a way of avoiding them. The tribe is under attack in many quarters of Africa nowadays by those who believe that as a political institution or pressure group it is incompatible with the modern African

.../states, with their

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states, with their institutions of various European
types,

Now we have in my country a rather inelegant proverb,
which says: 'Don't throw out the baby with the bathwater'.
To the student of African culture it is evident that all
that is indisputably African in Africa derives from the
formerly universal, but multifarious, tribal societies;
whereas the unifying elements in the modern scene, such as
language, law, popular music, tourist art, surrealist
poetry and government buildings, are extra-Africans in
origin. It is for African men of culture to ensure that
such unity as can be agreed upon is not achieved at the
expense of the African birthright.

We have had this problem in my own country, where
the Scottish and Welsh tribes fought for centuries against
the English to maintain their political and cultural
separateness. Unfortunately, by the time the political
settlement was reached, a considerable degree of detribalization
had taken place, but enough tribal feeling remained to
ensure the vigorous survival of the special character of the
Scots and Welsh (and even to stimulate revivalism in
rather pathetic and absurd forms such as the Welsh
National Eisteddfod). And this cultural differentiation -
which could well have been greater still - is maintained
without the slightest threat to the political stability
of the United Kingdom.

I should like to argue, therefore, that the con-
cept of tribality - as distinct from tribalism - should
be closely examined as a possible means of sublimating
tribal feeling and consciousness, and thus not only
preserving what is truly African, but also perhaps
drawing off some of the heat from national politics by
providing alternative and harmless outlets.

Scholars

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would devote themselves to studies of tribal cultures,
local groups would record surviving traces of tribal
crt and ritual, archaeology would be encouraged as it
has been in Britain in recent years. Clearly safeguards
would have to be devised, perhaps by legislation, to ensure
that cultural organizations did not engage in political
activity (as has been known to happen in parts of Africa
in the past). But I am persuaded that the adoption of
such a policy by the African élites and by Governments
would bring great benefits to Africa, not least in the
mitigation of that sad process of alienation of which I
have spoken.

The concept of Négritude has grown out of the deep
desire of the alienated Africans to retain, or to recover,
some African consciousness. But if it is to be more than
a great aspiration, it must surely grow roots in the
tribal culture of Africa. Unless it does this, it will
be in danger of becoming a romantic myth like the
eighteenth-century myth of the Noble Savage.

# APPENDIX

## On Preservation and Protection

A clear distinction should first be drawn between Art and Commercial Art. Art may then be subdivided into Tribal Art and Contemporary Art. Commercial Art may be subdivided into Handicrafts, Tourist (or Airport) 'Art', and Forgeries or Fraudulent 'Art': none of these three categories qualify as art in the proper sense.

### I (a)(i) Preservation of Tribal Art

It is clear that this should be done, as it has been done in Nigeria, by setting up a system of national and regional museums, with adequate staff both for collecting and for conservation. However, more should be done to record not only the exact place of origin, name of carver etc., but also the interpretation and function of the work; this calls for well trained ethnologists not excessively devoted to any one school of interpretation. In some countries it may already be too late: Mali, for example, seems to have been stripped of almost all its genuine antiquities in the past 10 or 15 years (almost entirely by Africans, be it said).

### I (a)(ii) Protection of Tribal Artists

This is hardly possible, since no government will attempt to arrest detribalization, the sole condition on which they could continue as tribal artists. Nor is this a matter for concern on humanitarian grounds, since they are normally farmers as well: when there was plenty of carving to do, their farms were worked for them by their patrons as payment in kind; as the commissions tail off, they become full-time farmers. The only possibly viable method of keeping the practice of tribal art alive that is known to me is its 'conversion' from pagan to Christian

/liturgical...

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liturgical use in the manner pioneered by Father Kevin
Carroll, S.M.A., among the Yoruba of Western Nigeria
during the past 18 years. To be permanently successful,
this would need secular support from the artists' own
village communities (rather than from outside sources).
Full use should be made of the traditional apprenticeship
system. Such an enterprise depends for its success not
on formal organization but on guidance by a person of
extraordinary knowledge of and sympathy for the local
culture.

The 'adoption' of tribal artists by European
patrons is nearly always fatal to their real artistic
qualities, as in the sad case of the great Yoruba carver
Bamgboye, who for 35 years has carved nothing but
pedestrian exercise pieces.

I (b) Contemporary Art

The question of preservation hardly arises as yet,
since this kind of art is still near the beginning of
its life, and is in an experimental state (as indeed is
the International Style in modern art, of which it is a
part). It may even be that too much will survive.

Clearly each country needs a Gallery of Contemporary
Art, but this should be in the first place a 'dynamic'
rather than a 'static' gallery, not maintaining more than
a very small permanent collection of works of indisputably
high quality, chosen strictly by the highest international
standards. A healthy contemporary art does not call so
much for government support (which tends to lead to a
situation in which an oligarchy of 'approved' artists
become more or less civil servants) as for the growth of
interest among the indigenous middle classes. Where
artistically discriminating persons exist, they ought to
be given a major part in the foundation and supervision of

/the

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the gallery.

So far as the encouragement of young artists is concerned, the art school of European type, already introduced into Africa on a large scale, should be avoided at all costs, at least as a method of encouraging the emergence of true artists. In Europe, only about one or two per cent of entrants prove to have original talent, while the rest become commercial or industrial artists. The fundamental fact is that art cannot be taught, though principles of design can (as can, of course, the history of art); the term 'school of art' should in any case not be used.

What is needed is the provision of the conditions - principally space and materials - in which really promising young artists can work, without tuition, but in association with other artists in a congenial atmosphere. The Workshop organized by Frank McEwen at Salisbury, Rhodesia, is the outstanding example of this method, and is perhaps the only centre of African contemporary art to have produced a large body of sculpture and painting by many hands which has met international standards while remaining distinctively African. This has been largely due to the inspiration, though not the tuition, of Frank McEwen himself, and the Colloquium is fortunate to have before it his admirable paper on the subject.

It is of course useless to attempt to revive in contemporary art the tribal art of the country. The two kinds of fundamentally different kinds, and revivalism is rarely if ever healthy in art. On the other hand, some groups of artists go too far in rejecting utterly any influence from the tribal art; they are imitating the 'revolutionary' character of the early modern artists in their revolt against academicism, but that battle has been fought and won - with signal help from African tribal art.

/In...

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In these days of complete eclecticism in international art, it would be strange indeed if Africans alone among contemporary artists refused to learn from the formal mastery and originality of their own tribal artists. It is to be feared that in some quarters 'protest' is considered the only legitimate motivation for the contemporary artists, whereas the sight of a group of competent artists in search of something to protest about is among the most pathetic to be seen. The criteria of art are artistic.

## II. Commercial art

This is really a part of commerce rather than of art and is to be justified by commercial rather than artistic achievement, though the latter may conduce to the former. The laws of supply and demand should be allowed to operate, and it seems to me that government support should be granted only on the basis of realistic economic considerations. I do not feel that this Colloquium should be greatly concerned in this matter (except, negatively, under the third subdivision below).

## II (a). Handicrafts

An excellent and successful example of the development of local handicraft is the pottery established at Abuja in Northern Nigeria (with a branch under the wing of the Museum at Jos) by the British art potter Michael Cardew, who developed the local skills, introducing more advanced methods from outside, but using local materials. This is administered by the Ministry of Commerce.

## II (b). Tourist art

This is essentially a response to the less discriminating European taste and for this reason is of a

/uniformly...

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uniformly debased standard and style all over the continent,
the characteristic effect being of sentimentality. In
some countries it is no doubt an important source of
income (e.g. in Kenya, where orders for as many as 5000
identical mass-produced copies of the same subject are
received from America), but its effects on foreign opinion
about African artistic achievement are probably regrettable.
It also exerts a strong attraction for the less successful
contemporary artists.

## II (c). Forgeries

This is a more serious problem, which should be of
concern to African countries from the point both of their
good name as trading nations, and of the proper estimation
of their ancient arts. It is mainly in the last ten years
that there has been a graduation from the mild deceptions
practised upon the unsophisticated European traveller to
the production of thoroughgoing forgeries intended to
deceive the international art market. At Benin, for
example, more or less skilful copies are fabricated
not only of old Benin work but of ancient Ife bronzes
as well (some of them done in good faith by the
traditional brass-casters to the commissions of African
dealers); they are then expertly patinated, by natural
or chemical means, and in some cases can be detected
as fakes only by a small number of experts in the world.
The most important centres for the systematic faking of
wood sculptures are in the Senufo country of the northern
Ivory Coast and in the Bambara country of Mali; in the
former especially, descriptions are available of factory-like
conditions in the bush, with specialization by individual
craftsmen in particular sections of the process of
patination, with the help of fire, mud, oil, termites and
other aids.

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I take it that all African countries have laws prohibiting the fraudulent sale of goods under false descriptions. But I have not heard of these being invoked against those who procure and knowingly offer for sale these forgeries. I do not think that we should try to encourage the genuine art to which we are all devoted unless we are also prepared to use our influence against these fraudulent industries.