SOPHIA OLIVIA SANAN

After a seminar I attended recently, I fell into conversation with a much loved figure on the Stellenbosch University Campus: Kopano Ratele – teacher, thinker and professor of Psychology. The term ‘African art’ came up in relation to my PhD research which traced the history of the African Art Collection at the Iziko South African National Gallery. As we began talking I unloaded a barrage of disclaimers about the term and the politics of its potential deconstruction and, or reconstruction within our contemporary context. The crux was the baggage carried by this category (associated with colonialism and extractive capitalism): should it be jettisoned entirely or carefully unpacked (and repacked)?

Kopano seemed bemused (I think) and invited me to ponder about these politics of naming in relation to his thinking about African psychology – something I know very little about. However, since I nurture an interest in thinking about art and its place in our tenuously unequal world outside of the confines of art-worlds and art-discourses, I eagerly took up the invitation. A few written exchanges later, Kopano beautifully rallied some of the overlaps in our concerns: “how we might draw from art and psychology, that is how to think with these from the location of a place in Africa (as Kwasi Wiredu, might parse it) to contest, reimagine and rework race structures and the racialised self. It is not one place from which we speak Africa, of course, but rather places and temporalities in Africa; and it is from these we have to think race ideology and racialised subjectification”. With this framing, we invited an audience to a public seminar at the Centre for the Study for the Afterlives of Violence and the Reparative Quest (AVReQ), in which we explored some of our respective ideas on the limitations of language, on African art, black subjectivity and African psychology. These are my seminar notes.

On the one hand, the term African art shows how the very discipline of art history (which has never been able to bridge links between the now and ‘deep history’ regarding African art) and the industries of arts and museums remain normatively structured around ‘Western’ epistemes. Valentine Yves Mudimbe^{[1]Mudimbe, VY. 1986. African art as a question mark. African Studies Review 29(1): 3 – 4. doi} argued that the term emerges from a Western epistemic project of order and categorisation, rather than a cross-cultural engagement with aesthetics, histories, and epistemologies. Mudimbe argues, “(w)hat is called African art covers a wide range of objects introduced into a historicising perspective of European values since the eighteenth century” (1986:3). Consequently, he wonders whether “understood in their initial form and significance, [these objects] would not have created a radical “mise en perspective” of Western culture” (Mudimbe, 1986: 3).

The epistemological potential of African art, which has been systematically evacuated by dominant knowledge economies, lies in the fact that recognising ancient traditions of art and visual culture in Africa (and the ontological and epistemological consequences that follow from them) challenges the false premise that African history begins only after the colonial encounter and challenges racial hierarchies and racialised justifications of colonialism. Historically, museums played a substantial part in maintaining this false premise – displaying and interpreting art and cultural objects from Africa within the frame of ‘natural history’, frozen in an endless ethnographic past, until as recently as the 1980s (and even into the present). This helped the discipline of art history (as it emerged from Europe) to largely side-step the potential epistemic disruption posed by African art by relegating the study of African material culture and art to the discipline of anthropology. What has this meant for the term African art?

Artworks discussed in Anthony Appiah’s 1991 essay: ‘Is the post- in postmodernism the post- in postcolonial?’

There are arguments against African art having to carry the burden of undoing the problematic ways that this term has been constructed by Western modernity as the embodiment of ‘otherness’ (for example by Kwame Anthony Appiah)^{[2]Appiah, K.A. 1991. Is the post- in postmodernism the post- in postcolonial? Critical Inquiry. 17(2): 336-357.}. Following from this logic, refusing to talk of ‘African art’ as a special category is one strategy against this normative system and epistemic injustice. Refusing to use this term can be about refusing to endorse the silently racialised structure of dominant aesthetic theories (as philosopher Nkiru Nzegwu argues)^{[3]Nzegwu, N. 2019. African art in deep time: de-race-ing aesthetics and de-racializing visual art. JAAC Special Issue: Aesthetics and Race 77(4): 367-378. 10.1111/jaac.12674}. Evidence of this racialised structure is ample in the field of art history as it has been historically constituted – which has supported fabrications such as Africa having no history before the colonial encounter.

The new museum of Yoruba Culture in Lagos identifies a disavowal of the very notion of tradition as it has been institutionalised in the museum as central to its project: “(t)he key thing about the centre is a refusal to talk about the idea of the traditional. When you talk about traditional African art, it’s a very Eurocentric view of African art, it’s a historical notion. Rather, what we’re doing is looking at the traditions of Yoruba culture” (Dehghan, 2024)^{[4]theguardian}. Here there is a disinvestment in an ‘African art’ that has been capitalised, commodified and trivialised (by de-historicising it) and a response: we are not talking about African art, we are talking about Yoruba traditions.

Globally there are other categories gaining purchase. In international institutional art spaces like the Documenta contemporary art festival in Germany and the Venice Biennale in Italy, there is a new interest in the concept of the ‘Global South’ that has superseded the conceited and patronising ‘applause’ marking the arrival of African and Asian artists to the world stage. The Global South idea carries its own problems: there is a temptation to valorise the idea of the Global South particularly considering the hypocrisy and ethical corruptness of much of the Global North’s response to the genocide in Gaza. But that also risks overlooking the violent and repressive autocracies proliferating in the Global South.

But we are already moving away from artists having to carry a badge of specificity, given that many artists want to be accepted as already speaking a universal language, and be rooted in the authenticity of their own cultural locality in the world. Thinkers like VY Mudimbe, Salah Hassan, Rasheed Aareen have been considering these questions for many decades.

Q (Kopano Ratele): The term ‘African’ in the context of South Africa always carries multiple meanings. One of these is of course racial: the African is the black/Bantu/native. There are several things to be drawn from this multiplicity. One of this is that what is meant by African is frustratingly contextual, not just across African nations, but also within a space like South Africa. As you observe, there are times where there “seems to be a clear need, (certainly in a country like South Africa with its settler colonial history), to speak, think, theorise and make in the name of an African aesthetic or art, to name and foreground African creative histories as well as African artists who have been side-lined until fairly recently.” Given the multiplicity of and need to think Africa/African, is it possible that we may too hastily move away from the work of making sense of being African/Africa if we start talking of things like ‘Global South’ art; how does the history of African art help (or not help) in this sense-making work (esp. in making sense of ourselves)?  

Response (Sophia Sanan): As a sense-making tool, a focus on African art histories in South Africa retains a strong political potential and requires attention and care. There is no quick route to a ‘Global South’ ethic, identity, consciousness that bypasses longer processes of unearning implicit in working through this term ‘African art’ or ‘African art history’. Especially in a place like Stellenbosch and perhaps also Cape Town – where someone from Germany might feel more at home than someone from Cameroon – I think we agree that the very notion of African art and aesthetics is one that should be foregrounded.

In terms of what kind of aesthetics are dominant in a place like Stellenbosch, Cape Town (I don’t want to make blanket statements about ‘white aesthetics’ or ‘black aesthetics’) there is a visual preservation of historical settler aesthetics overlayed with a kind of elite global aesthetic of wealth – expressed in pared down luxury and ‘heritage chic’. This is a slight digression, but I want to add some visuals to the context in which we are thinking about the valence of a term like African art. I wonder about the kind of imaginative space possible within the cultural economy of this university town in which there is a corporatisation of aesthetic life that fits neatly with a history of white settler culture in defining beauty. Within this context, African art can comfortably appear in well lit, spotless gallery spaces. It may be positive to move beyond the long shadows of Pierneef, but there is reason to retain some cynicism here.    

Thinking from a South Asian perspective, Rustom Bharucha^{[5]Bharucha, R. 2002. The ‘new Asian museum’ in the age of globalization.  In The third text reader on art, culture and theory. R. Araeen, S. Cubitt, and Z. Sardar, Eds. 290-300.} (2002: 295) suggested that the increased appetite in the global art market for contemporary Asian art may be a “camouflage for the diffidence in dealing with loot”. South African art writer Ashraf Jamal^{[6]Jamal, A. 2021.  Beyond skin? Ashraf Jamal reflects on Serge Attukwei Clottey’s recent solo. Art Africa magazine. 21 May. Available here. [2021, May 21].} argues that in the contemporary art market, black artists are hyper-visible and Black portraiture has become “the defining current trope of taste and value” (Jamal, 2021: unpaginated). Noting dominant cultures’ capacity for contradiction, Jamal is wary of how to interpret the prominence of Africa on the global art market at the same moment that the West begins to acknowledge the cultural implications and legacies of its extractive colonial past. “A case of reconciliation? A need to right a historical wrong, reboot the art canon, ensure diversity and inclusivity?” asks Jamal (2021), or perhaps the brokering of black portraiture is an effort to “save face, not only to right a wrong”. This is where the links between the now and ‘deep history’ regarding art in Africa remains an intellectual area in need of more production and thought, the important work in this regard is happening outside of the periodic and sequential logic of traditional art history.

In terms of more conscious and perhaps political aesthetic projects in South Africa, there have been strides in re-centralising ‘black art’, black histories, black aesthetics (perhaps more so than an investment in ‘African’ aesthetics). For example: the exhibitions ‘When Rainclouds Gather – Black Women Artists in South Africa’, 2021, Norval Foundation; ‘A History of Black Figuration’, 2022, Zeitz Museum of Contemporary African Art, ‘Black Aesthetics’, 2019, The Standard Bank Gallery. Critical scholarly work studying South African art collections remains charged with the responsibility to address the racialised legacy of the periodisation and canonisation of (South) African art. In his seminal publication ‘Postcolonial Modernism’, Chika Okeke-Agulu^{[7]Okeke-Agulu, C. 2015. Postcolonial Modernism. Duke University Press} powerfully dismantled the spurious idea that colonial education and Western influence should be seen as the genesis of an African modernist aesthetic. Instead, Okeke-Agulu, traces the influence of philosophies and social movements (such as Pan Africanism and Négritude), as well as the struggles against colonial oppression, as a more illuminating lens through which to read 20th Century aesthetic histories in Africa.

Closer to home, is the trajectory of Gerard Sekoto, today recognised as South Africa’s most celebrated modernist, but during apartheid racial prejudice meant that he was given a marginal place in formal South African art history. The intellectual and institutional work to revisit and re-interpret Sekoto’s legacy through an historical lens that is not distorted by racism is a project that is still underway. This is but one example of the epistemic injustices that mark the field of African art history, and the production and circulation of art in South Africa. These legacies are evident in the machinations of the art-market, the economies of knowledge and artistic production and the development of epistemic frameworks through which to interpret, historicise and value art created by Africans.

But the political and epistemological work of thinking about ‘African’ as multiple identities, localities, solidarities – I contend that is somewhat more fractured in South Africa right now. Here I think about Thabo Mbeki’s ‘I am an African’ speech in 1998^{[8]Mbeki, T. 1998. South African deputy President Thabo Mbeki speaks at the United Nations University. Place, 9 April 1998. Available: archive [2023, July 13].}. References to art from the African continent played a strong role in bolstering Mbeki’s proposal of an African Renaissance. Mbeki said “(t)he beginning of our rebirth as a continent must be our own discovery of our soul, captured and made permanently available in the great works of creativity represented by the pyramids and sphinxes of Egypt, the stone buildings of Axum, and the ruins of Carthage and Zimbabwe, the rock paintings of the San, the Benin bronzes and the African masks, the carvings of the Makonde and the stone sculptures of the Shona” (Mbeki, 1998).

The long lineage of African aesthetic history that Mbeki draws on in part responds to the ways in which African creative and technological accomplishments had been erased, ignored, appropriated, or subsumed by Western civilisational narratives. In this way, Mbeki’s invocation of a classical African art canon is resonant with the ways in which art and aesthetics were central to Leopold Senghor’s philosophy of Négritude. Questioning this invocation, William Jethro Mpufo (2022)^{[9]Mpofu, W.J. 2022. Thabo Mbeki’s Decolonial Idea of an African in the African Renaissance, in The Thinker, Vol. 93 No. 4 (2022): Quarter 4 – 2022 / Volume 93. orcid} asks why “being human, and African, in Africa is an idea under question that must still be declared or defended in the post colony” (Mpofu, 2022: 37). Mpofu argues that Mbeki’s insistence on an African humanism is indicative of the fragility of being African in the African post colony because “the post colony is that uneasy place where colonialism has not really died, while liberation from colonialism struggles to be born” (Mpofu, 2022: 37).

It is within this ‘uneasy space’ that Mbeki calls for an expansive, inclusive, and non-racial conception of an African. For Mpofu, Mbeki proposes an “African that sees and believes in the utopia of forgiveness, reconciliation and liberation”, that the “African Renaissance itself is an awakening is based on the reality that there was a colonial wound to heal and a colonial slumber from which Africans must wake” (Mpofu, 2022: 37). The ‘I am an African’ speech is a call to historicise being an African in Africa by reaching back much further than the colonial encounter, but crucially to also include the colonial encounter and the scars it has left. Should the history of erasure be dignified with a response: ‘we have art, we are human’, must the burden of proof lie with those whose cultures have been undermined, erased?

For Mbeki the response was an inclusive African-ness – what has happened to this political vision? Since the late 1990’s I would argue that the African Renaissance dream as central to the arts and heritage sector was challenged by state investments in more nation-centric narratives of anti-apartheid struggle and liberation. Within these dominant (and as some argue exceptionalising) narratives, the potential of a more expansive continental African art to be constructed as an important symbol of African humanism in a democratic South Africa was not realised. The sense of being part of a continental discourse of cultural practice has not been at the forefront of cultural development. At the same time, a steady withdrawal of the state from the development of cultural infrastructure and investment in the arts, left a vacuum filled by the logics of neoliberalism.

The development of the arts and culture ‘sector’ as an accessible social good for the South African public over the last thirty years has shrunk, and made way for private capital (imprinted with apartheid power dynamics) to lead in terms of the development of cultural infrastructures and social (consumer) behaviours. Hence the cynicism about neoliberalism ensuring that art remains elite and commercial in character, is reproduced only in shiny galleries or convention centres. (Visual) Art can also be present in people’s homes, classrooms, community halls, places of worship, places of mourning. As Ariella Azoulay^{[10]Azoulay, A. 2019. Potential History. New York: Verso.} argues: “it has become unimaginable to think of art that is not displayed as a detached commodity, bereft of the disaster that produced it as art, not recognised as new in a world made solely of objects salvaged for eternity, and whose modality is not defined by globalised systems such as museums, the media, and the market” (2019).

Q (Kopano Ratele): African psychology, like all other psychology, concerns itself with mental and emotional life. If the category of African art is worth keeping, at least some of the time, what does or what might it offer to those who work on mental and emotional and behaviour in (African) psychology or from a/n (African) psychological perspective?  

Response (Sophia Sanan): Art making is being human, so it is about sense making. It happens outside of categories. Africans, people in Africa, have been making art and continue to do so as long as there have been societies. In fact, though the field of archaeology and ‘rock art’ it has its own contentious issues and complexity in the South African context regarding how knowledge is produced in these fields of study, research in places like the Blombos caves in South Africa show evidence of the first ‘art-making’ of any humans available to us in the historical record at 70 000 years old, predating earlier estimations from 40-50 000 years ago in Europe.

The harm that western civilisational narratives, and dominant structures of knowledge creation have done to how we are able to think, interpret, study, create knowledge out of the African context and experience is immense. This is at the heart of the projects to decolonise curricula and at the heart of problems with ‘African art’.

For Mbeki, the African Renaissance was about “the hard work of African intellectuals and political leaders ‘re-membering’, in the sense of re-assembling the organs of an African continent and African people that were ‘dismembered’ by colonialism. This intellectual and political work is frightening to Africans themselves and is threatening to those who have benefitted from a dis-membered Africa” (Mpofu, 2022: 41).

The dis-membered Africa – in art making and art history I think about the idea of ‘incarcerated objects’ – for example the ethnography displays in the Stellenbosch Museum. The problem is not in the making, but in the showing and seeing.

What are the conditions to see, how are we conditioned to understand, place value, see beauty, feel, and experience art? This is where race, class distinction, inequality is baked into the conditions of engaging with art. It is about the language that we have to help explain what we are seeing and feeling.

I will end with a look at the image that Kopano brought to the discussion. Johannes Phokela has been quoted as saying: “most of my work is a contemporary take on Old Dutch and Flemish Masters where I take on what is perceived to be Europe’s grandiose history of art as a medium to convey values and ideals represented within a global context of cultural elitism.”^{[11]Dlamini, Ndaba. 2006. ‘Phokela exhibition celebrates mentor’. [Online]. Available: joburgnews (this site has expired), the citation can also be found in The Life and Work of Johannes Phokela. 2009. The Standard Bank Learner Series. Philippa Hobbs & Emile Maurice. Compiled by the Heritage Agency CC, with assistance from Nhlanhla Ngwenya. You can download the PDF here.} Thembinkosi Goniwe argues that Phokela is concerned with the dilemma of black subjects in modern European art history (and through a history constructed through painting).^{[12]Goniwe, T. 2017. Contemporary South African Visual Art And The Postcolonial Imagination, 1992 -Present. PhD Thesis: Cornell Theses and Dissertations, here.} For Goniwe, within this visual history, there are two key issues: first, the exclusion of black subjects in master narratives and second, the denigrating ways in which black subjects are depicted in rare moments (Goniwe, 2017: 50).

Goniwe reads European painting itself as site of veneration and narcissism and an agent in the Eurocentrification of historical discourse (Goniwe, 2017: 52). Painting is understood as an exercise of power.

Phokela is reinterpreting and excavating European self-understanding, recovering hidden and suppressed histories in the grand narrative of Europe as modernity.

In Phokela’s painting (As the Old Sing, so the Young Pipe, 1998) there is a severed head of a black man in the basket looking at the dancing woman, and an African mask in the left corner alcove, these are the only two signifiers of an African presence. The other characters appear to be European, perhaps many generations of the same family. Phokela, in a signature fashion, plays with implications of looking and knowing in this scene. What first looks very familiar and known starts to look strange. This makes me think of Kopano’s idea about looking to find stolen and supressed knowledge in European and African art.

By working with Dutch and Flemish visual traditions as expressions of history-making, Phokela engages with the broader myth of Western civilisation as an identifiable arc that followed from Ancient Greece to contemporary Europe. As Salah Hassan and Iftikhar Dadi argue, European modernism rests on the achievements of other cultures and civilisations, a fact that has been wildly distorted by western hegemony^{[13]Salah Hassan and Iftikhar Dadi (eds.), “Introduction” in Unpacking Europe: Towards a Critical Reading (Rotterdam: Museum Boijmans Van Beuningen and NAi Publishers, 2001), 15.}. In a way, Souleymane Bachir Diagne’s^{[14]Bachir Diagne, S. 2020. Museum of Mutants. Esprit 7-8: 103-111.} notion of mutation to understand art from Africa helps to respond to this historical Western hegemony, not only through critique but through creative rethinking and new experiments with language:

“A word about the radical rupture that most often would have been the forced migration to the museums of the colonial scientific expeditions, the ethnographic museums and, finally, the museums of the primitive arts. However, this is only a mutation whose possibility was indeed carried by the work in its infinite plasticity. These transplanted objects did not become mute in spite of this. Their mutant quality was expressed in the language of the ›negro revolution‹. Who will say that it was a misappropriation, that these works were made to speak against the intention that gave birth to them? The term primitivism renders them inert by making them the creation of Europeans who, weary of ‘their ancient world’, sought out a primitive that was in part their own invention. No, these objects acted as mutants and found their own way into a modernity they helped to create”.

(Diagne 2020: 109–110)

What is clear when surveying the field of African art history and considering the contemporary valence of this term, is that the deconstruction of limiting paradigms, and the reconstruction of more productive analytic tools, is an ongoing project and a crucial one to partake in.