17 - Art for Life's Sake

Summary

A CONSTANT TROUBLE FOR THE FAMILIAR ‘OUTSIDE’ VIEW OF AFRICA has lain in its insistent defining of dissected beliefs and activities. This view has tended to take the cultures of the past painstakingly to pieces, and then examine each part in isolation from the whole. It has thought of religious belief in its own terms, as being somehow extraneous to real life, and has consequently mistaken the place and meaning of religion in traditional society. It has studied witchcraft in detachment from the total structure, and all too often seen nothing but mumbo jumbo. It has looked at African masks in museums, and found them primitive or absurd. In the same way it has constructed theories about the arts, seeing them in isolation and asking, What did they do? What were they for?

A familiar answer has been that the arts of Africa were meant to make things happen. You drew an antelope on a wall of rock so that your arrow should afterwards find one. You performed a ceremony in order to make rain fall. The arts were a branch of magic as though these antique Africans, to quote Mary Douglas, were so many ‘populations of Ali Babas and Aladdins, uttering their magic words and rubbing their magic lamps’ in happy confidence, but against all the odds of actual experience, that the heavens would open and cornucopias of wealth pour down. Alternately, these arts were orgiastic, even in the solemn sense of worshipping the gods: they were meant to placate, flatter or otherwise imitate the supernatural powers. Or they were there to express ‘primeval’ terror, joy and other wild emotions evoked by the ‘unknown’.

All these kinds of definition are more or less worthless, either because they are flatly wrong or because the arts die and lose their meaning when dissected from the context and embrace of life. We shall get at an understanding of the arts of Africa only by an arduous effort at grasping the totality of this civilisation. The effort is difficult because our cultures of urban industrialism have moved us far away. Rarely now can we experience ‘cultural manifestations’ which still reflect, even if distantly and partially, the rounded attitudes and approaches of a different age.