African Art. Maurice Delafosse

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      I was obliged in the course of the preceding chapter to almost exclusively use the hypothetical mode. In this one and the following, I will again be forced to have very frequent recourse to it, so rare are the documents on which we can rely with sufficient confidence to make deductions from them. Until now, in fact, Negro Africa has revealed to us no monument except for some ruins which do not recount their history or their creators, and some tombs which might go back from fifty to five thousand years, in which everything is found except precise indications, unless an Arabic inscription informs us that we have to do with modern burial places. The Negroes have written nothing with the exception of rare works in Arabic, the most ancient of which we possess dates from the 16th century. Marginally copied one from the other, they do not contain more than a few pages on the history of the country and whatever may be true is obscured by legend and the pains taken to relate everything to Islam and the family of Mohammed.

      Much more numerous and rich are the traditions conserved orally among the natives, but they become very confused as soon as they relate to facts going back several centuries and, without in any way denying their value, this source of information cannot be used except with the utmost prudence.

      From the Greek and Latin authors, bits of documentation, often contradictory and supported by nothing very solid, can at least furnish some vague and incohesive indications, sometimes a few benchmarks. The names of the countries, localities, and peoples are generally difficult to identify and when they are examined impartially it is found that they all refer to countries, localities and peoples belonging to North Africa and not to Negro Africa. When, by chance, geographical or ethnical information seems to refer to the Negroes or to their country, it is drowned in an amalgam of impossibilities or obscurities from which it is extremely difficult to obtain any light.

      For the period of the Middle Ages, we are a little better informed by Muslim geographers and historians of Berbery, Spain, Egypt, and the Arabian Peninsula, and by some works later re-edited in Arabic by the Sudanese, to which I have alluded above. This information is also very imperfect and entirely fragmentary, being limited to the borders of the Sahara and the west coast of Africa which were in more or less direct relations with the Arabs of the Mediterranean or the Gulf of Oman. Concerning the more distant Negro peoples, those of Guinea, of the Congo, of southern Africa, there is almost absolute night up to the day when they began to be visited by Europeans, that is to say, up to the 15th century CE. In the preceding chapter we saw how much we are permitted to conjecture as to the situation of the African Negroes at the time of Herodotus. We have also seen – according to the testimony of this author – that Egyptian civilisation was not without influence on that of the Negroes in the region of Meroe. It may be admitted that the influence of ancient Egypt went still further and penetrated even into the upper part of the valley of the Nile. Perhaps, gradually, it made itself felt as far as the Great Lakes, as certain artistic manifestations seem to testify by recalling the manner and processes of ancient Egypt. It is even possible that, transmitted indirectly from people to people, infiltrations of an industrial or religious order, having their point of departure at Memphis or Thebes, had gained the farthest lands of the Nile, probably without ever having been in direct relations with Egypt, such as certain regions of the Gulf of Benin or the neighbouring lands.

      Head (Sokoto), c. 200 BCE-20 °CE.

      Nigeria.

      Terracotta.

      Private collection.

      Sokoto sculptures are sometimes limited in ornament. The delicate features and heavy brow combined with a fine beard offer a severe aspect. The thin pottery walls of this head bear witness to a highly developed technique.

      “Aggry Beads”

      One meets nearly everywhere in Africa, either in the tombs or in the tumuli reputed to be ancient, or on the bodies of the living who claim to have received them from their most distant ancestors, beads to which the Negroes attribute a very great value which strangely resemble in form, colouration and material, analogous beads worn by the Egyptians and with which they often decorated their mummies. In the 16th and 17th centuries, this sort of bead, generally cylindrical, was the object of an active commerce on the part of English and especially Dutch navigators, who bought them from the natives of the countries where they were relatively abundant and sold them at a profit in the countries where they were rarer. These navigators gave them the name of “pierres d‘aigris” or “aggry beads”, the exact origin of which is not known. At various times the glassworkers of Venice and of Bohemia have manufactured counterfeits by which the Negroes did not allow themselves to be deceived.

      However it be, the presence among the African Negroes of these certainly very ancient beads, the value which they represent in their eyes and the mystery which surrounds their original provenance are not sufficient for forming a conclusion as to the existence of commercial relations between the Egypt of the Pharaohs and western and central Africa. On the one hand, in fact, Assyrian and Phoenician tombs contain identical beads, so that we are left perplexed as to the place of their manufacture and, in consequence, as to the point of departure which might be sought at Nineveh or Tyre as well as at Memphis. On the other hand, they have been found in northern Europe and eastern Asia, which indicates a considerable area of dispersion, certainly out of proportion to the limits which might be reasonably assigned to the influence of Egyptian civilisation.

      In most of the countries where, even today, the Negroes find “aggry beads” by ransacking ancient burial places, there is a tradition that these beads have been imported by long-haired men of light colour who, according to legend, came from the sky and whom their congeners interred after decorating their corpses with the beads in question. At first this tradition suggested to me the possibility of caravan relations between the ancient Egyptians and populations as far removed from the Nile as those, for example, of the Gold Coast and the Ivory Coast. I have reflected since, that, if it be admitted that men of the white race, carriers of “aggry beads”, advanced at one time as far as those distant regions, it would be much more probable that they came from Berbery – in the geographical sense today given to the word – than from Egypt. It has not come to our knowledge that the Egyptians had a great amount of commerce with the Negroes, except those of the Nile valley from among whom they procured slaves for themselves, while at all times, as at the present, the inhabitants of what Herodotus called Libya and what we denominate as Berbery or the Barbary Coast (Tripoly, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco) have not hesitated to cross the Sahara and to adventure as far as the Negroes to buy from them principally goldpowder in exchange for various sorts of merchandise. Among this merchandise, Arab geographer, Yakut mentions copper rings and blue glass beads as being very much in honour at his time, that is to say, at the beginning of the 13th century. More recently, the Negroes most admire and value “aggry beads” made of blue glass.

      Statue, Katsina region, 1st-4th century CE. Nigeria.

      Terracotta, height: 295 cm.

      Protruding eyes and rounded features characterise the terracottas of the Katsina region. Here, the elongated neck emphasises its majestic head.

      Jonyeleni female figure (Bamana).

      Mali.

      Wood, cotton, beads, string, iron, height: 65 cm.

      Musée du quai Branly, Paris.

      Statue, Kambari style (Dogon).

      Wood, height: 34 cm.

      Typical of Dogon art’s Kambari style, this statue represents an important time of a binu СКАЧАТЬ