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Prehistory. History. Post-history. It is evidence of the arrogance of Occidental culture and
In both cases what comes out very clearly, despite the fundamental differences that define and preoccupy the discourse on the fate of History, is the consignment of the rest of humanity outside the Old and New West into inconsequence. For Gehlen, who had a better and stronger sense of history as well as intellectual integrity than Fukuyama can claim, the entirety of humanity was victim to a universal syncretism that subverts the essence of history. For Fukuyama this universality is to be taken for granted, although the majority of humanity is indeed, factually and historically speaking, hardly strictly subject to liberal democracy. For Fukuyama and many others Humanity, to a great extent, is synonymous with the Group of Seven and Eastern Europe. Under Reaganism-Thatcherism even the spatial definition of history severely retracted to the Pre-Columbian. The contest for History is central to the struggle for a redefinition and eventual decimation of centrism and its engendering discourses. Without restituting History to other than just the Occident, or more accurately, recognizing the universality of the concept of History while perhaps leaving its specific configurations to individual cultures, it is untenable and unrealistic to place such other temporal and ideological concepts as Modernism, Modernity, Contemporaneity, Development, in the arena. If Time is a colony, then nothing is free.
Of course one may well be wrong here. Yet it is to be recognized that, like the entity and idea called Europe, the specifics of which are still in the making and the collective history of which does not date earlier than Napoleon – the idea of Rome and Greece is dishonest – Africa is a historical construct rather than a definitive. Many have argued, prominent among them the Afrocentrist School, the antiquity of a Black or African identity, an argument which falls flat upon examination. On the other hand, history reveals the necessity for such unifying narratives in the manufacture of cultures of affirmation and resistance. The danger in not recognizing the essential fictiveness of such constructs, however, is that a certain fundamentalism, a mega-nationalism, emerges – all the more dangerous for its vagueness – which excises, elides, confiscates, imposes and distorts. Some will argue that history, after all, is perception, in other words, distortion. But if we were to accept this wholesale and without question, we would have no business trying to 'correct' history, unless, also, to correct is merely to reconfigure, to counter-distort. We already recognize the dangerous potential of such fictions in the hands of the invading Outsider. The spate of pseudo-scholarly interest in “African” life, culture and art during and immediately after colonialism illustrates this. While in the beginning the totalizing construct was employed to underline the peculiarity of the “savage” mind and thus justify Outsider intervention, it has continued to be in use in justifying the changing face of that mission. From redemptive Christianity to salvage anthropology, it has remained essential to maintain this invention. Indeed, the need seems greater now than ever before as the collapse of colonialism and the rise of contesting discourses place anthropology, the handmaid of Empire, in danger. Anthropology's crisis of relevance, coupled with characteristic Western career opportunism, has necessitated the gradual re-invention of a singular and unique Africanity worthy of the Outside Gaze. The new manufacture finds ready clients in scholars, policy makers, non-governmental and aid organizations seeking objects of charity. Unless there is a singular Africanity, distinct and doomed, how else would they justify the pity which puts them ahead and on top? If the Other has no form, the One ceases to exist. It is in order to retain and maintain this Other that recent Western texts on African culture remain only extensions and mild revisions of existing fictions. To undermine the idea of The African is to exterminate a whole discursive and referential system and endanger whole agendas.
It is sufficient not to question this intent here, but to point out that the signifying register proves grossly inadequate. Not only does it wholly ignore the impossibility of hard edges between cultures and societies in the region it describes, and the long history of Arab-Negro interaction , together with all the subtleties and ambiguities of racial translations, indeed the impurity of designates, it equally ignores internal disparities within the so-called “African” cultures. To play on the surface, it is never quite clear where East Africa fits on this cultural map of Africa, given not only the territorial problems of locating Somalia below the Sahara, but also of eliding Zanzibar's long history of Arabization. In a significant sense, then, the construction of a “sub-Saharan” Africa not only ignores geographical inconsistencies but equally ignores accepted discursive positions in the West which not only recognize the triumph of History as the Impure but underlie the construction of Europe. We see double standards here, but that is hardly the most important point. We also find that essential tendency to ignore indigenous historical perceptions and constructs. The Outsider, whether Occidental scholarship or Diaspora Negro discourse, quickly established delineations without acknowledging the possibility that these may not be shared by those whose histories are at the center of discourse.
Needless to say, White people in South Africa, Asians in Uganda, as well as other Diaspora populations and communities, fall outside of this narrow, Negro-specific definition, although in the specific case of South Africa, the settler minority, like the Europeans in Australia, has been able in the past half century to negotiate its way back into Europe. At any rate, cultural Africa may no longer be contained by the lame composite, sub-Saharan, which now would require a further qualifier: “excluding White [South] Africans” in order to make sense. Then again, how would the Outside justify its condescension toward Africans, or its employment of The African to satisfy its need for the exotic, if Arabs, with their “long history” of civilization, or White [South] Africans, were to be included in that construct? On the political front, however, arguments have been stronger on the side of an all-embracing Africanity that supersedes disparities and differences and aspires towards the construction, not invention, of a new and credible Africanity. This is the position of Nkrumah's Pan-Africanism, and remains the ground argument of the Pan-African movement. Culturally, the argument is to recognize a plurality of Africanities but aspire towards the active formulation of a singular African “identity”, somewhat along the lines of Pan-Europeanism and the construction of the West.
For the African cultural historian, the problems here are plenty. For instance, based on the above construction of Africa, it is increasingly fashionable to begin the history of “modern” or so-called contemporary art in Africa from the turn of the last century, that is, from the Nigerian painter, Aina Onabolu. However, earlier practitioners of “modern” art exist in the Maghreb and Egypt, and strains of “modernism” are discernible in the art of White South Africans from earlier than Onabolu. Also, if “African” is a race-specific qualification, it would be proper to remember that artists of Negro descent were practicing in the contemporary styles of their time in Europe and America much earlier than the turn of the century. Where then does one locate the break with the past that the idea of a “modernism” insinuates? In discussing “modern” African art, does one continue to exclude half the continent? Is it realistic, otherwise, to discuss a modern culture that defies existing invented boundaries? Are there grounds in the present, which did not exist in the past, to justify a unifying discourse, or is it safer to pursue a plurality of discourses? Along what specific lines must such discourses run? Or shall we merely conclude, like Anthony Appiah, on the fictiveness of a singular cultural identity?
“Transition” from “antiquity” to the modern ceases to amaze and eroticize or evoke voyeuristic admiration or pity because antiquity ceases to exist. The supposed distress of Africans caught in a no-man's land between Europe and their “authentic” selves becomes a lot more difficult to locate or explicate. Ethnographic categories usually applied with ease to sequester “African” culture into temporal boxes are no longer easy to administer. What, for instance, would we qualify as “transitional” art in contemporary Egypt or Cameroon that we cannot locate in Spain? What is “client-driven art” – to use an infamous tag introduced a few years ago by American museum practitioners – within the minority community of South Africa that is so peculiar it may not be found in Soho, New York? How easily would we lament the “corrosive influences” of Europe on the Somali of the Northern East African coast if we turned our backs on the obsession with “sub-Saharan” Africa? That is to pull one leg from the stool. In strict discursive terms, of course, none of the
To employ the “problems” paradigm in discussing modernity and modernism in Africa is simply to buy into existing structures of reference, which not only peculiarize modernity in Africa but also forebode crisis. What needs be done is to reject that peculiarization and all those structures and ideational constructs that underlie it. VII To reject the exoticization of Africa is to destroy an entire world-view carefully and
Otherization is unavoidable, and for every One, the Other is the Heart of Darkness. The West is as much the Heart of Darkness to The Rest as the later is to the West. Invention and contemplation of the Other is a continuous process evident in all cultures and societies. But in contemplating the Other, it is necessary to exhibit modesty and admit relative handicap since the peripheral location of the contemplator precludes complete understanding. This opacity is the Darkness. Modernity as a concept is not unique. Every new epoch is modern till it is superseded by another, and this is common to all societies. Modernity equally involves, quite inescapably, the appropriation and assimilation of novel elements. Often these are from outside. In the past millennium the West has salvaged and scrounged from cultures far removed from the boundaries that it so desperately seeks to simulate. The notion of tradition, also, is not peculiar to any society or people, nor is the contest between the past and the present. To configure these as peculiar and curious is to be simpleminded. It is interesting, necessary even, to study and understand the details of each society's modernity, yet any such study must be free from the veils of Darkness to claim prime legitimacy. To valorize one's modernity while denying the imperative of transition in an Other is to denigrate and disparage. The West may require an originary backwoods, the Heart of Darkness against which to gauge its progress. Contemporary discourses hardly depart from this tradition. However, such darkness is only a simulacrum, only a vision through our own dark glasses. In reality, there is always a lot of light in the “Heart of Darkness”. Notes |
Olu Oguibe graduated from the University of Nigeria
and subsequently received a Ph.D. in Art history from the University of
London. He has since taught at several universities in Europe and America
including the University of London and the University of South Florida
where he served in an endowed chair in the Arts of Africa and the African
Diaspora. As an artist, Oguibe’s work has been exhibited in museums
and galleries around the world. He has also curated major exhibitions
for spaces and institutions such as the Tate Gallery of Modern Art in
London, the Museum of Mexico City, and the later of the Venice Biennale.
Oguibe is an award-winning poet and author of many books, the latest of
which is The Culture Game (University of Minnesota Press, 2003). George Zogo is a sculptor, painter and
designer, born in Cameroon. He currently lives and works in Florence.
His paintings on canvas show a linear abstraction that revives and e reworks
the motives of traditional architecture of its home Country. His more
recent works, reproduced here, represent a sort of short notes of a visual
logbook, at the crossroad between his African memory and his current life
in Italy. Georges Lilanga is a Tanzanian sculptor
and painter. Born in Maasi (Tanzania), he lives and works in Dar-Es-Salaam.
He has held art exhibitions all over the world. He is considered as an
absolute genius of Swahili painting.
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