African Art and Architecture

A

Materials

The materials a particular African culture uses to make art depend to a large degree on the materials available to it. Wood, plant fibers, and clay are abundant in much of the continent. Few sculptures are created from wood in parts of southern Africa, where wood is relatively scarce. Where riverbeds provide good clay deposits, as in the Niger River valley of Nigeria, pottery and ceramic sculptures are plentiful. Soapstone is readily available in Zimbabwe and northern South Africa, where the Shona people reside. The Shona carved soapstone birds as early as the 14th century, and they continue to carve a variety of animal and human figures in soapstone today.

Some materials are used not because they are commonly available, but because they possess special properties. For example, the Mijikenda of eastern Kenya carve grave posts from a wood that is especially hard as well as termite-proof; this ensures that the markers will last at gravesites for many years.

Other materials, including beads, cowry shells, and silk, are prized because they come from far away. In the past, among the Yoruba of western Africa and the Kuba of central Africa, the right to wear beads and cowry shells belonged to the king alone. The Kuba used blue and white glass beads and cowry shells to adorn items such as drums, masks, and costumes for use by the king and other royalty. A Kuba royal mask called the Moshambwooy is covered in a rich array of beads that attest to its importance and represent water or forest spirits. A trunklike appendage on this mask recalls the elephant, which symbolizes strength and financial resources. The Kuba also sewed cowry shells and glass beads onto cloth. One costume of the Kuba king bore so many beads and cowry shells that it weighed 84 kg (185 lb).

B

Form and Style

The form and style of an African art object depend primarily on the traditions and beliefs of the artist’s culture. This contrasts with European art, in which form and style often reflect the artist’s desire for personal expression or the effort to imitate nature’s appearance. An object of African art must first of all perform its function well. Beauty is an attribute that enables it to do so, especially when an object acts as an intermediary between the human world and the world of spirits. Beauty makes an object pleasing to these spirits. The qualities that African artists may strive for in order to achieve this beauty include balance, clarity of form, straightness, exaggeration or distortion, and stylized or symbolic depiction.

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Sculptures typically achieve balance through bilateral symmetry, which means that the right half and left half are mirror images. Balance and simplicity of form help convey meaning and aid clarity, and clarity helps the object carry out its purpose. Straightness, especially of the human figure, is a quality admired by a number of African cultures. For example, Baule spirit-spouse figures feature a straight, strong neck, which conveys the idea of an upstanding and upright person in both a physical and moral sense. Symmetry contributes to the stiffness of the figures.

When the hands, feet, head, or other parts of a figure are enlarged, it means that these parts are of particular importance to the society. Many Yoruba sculptures have enlarged heads, because the head is considered the location of a person’s luck, wisdom, and destiny, and the center of character. The Yoruba also enlarge the eyes because they are windows to the soul. Baule spirit-spouse figures have large, well-formed calves, which are a desirable physical characteristic for both men and women and indicate a hard-working person.

African figurative sculptures show an idealized or generalized version of a human being rather than a realistic representation of an individual. For this reason, they traditionally depict youthful figures, without signs of old age. Bronze heads from the Kingdom of Benin, for example, may represent older, wise people of high rank, but they are made to resemble someone about the age of 20, with flawlessly smooth, tight skin.

Within the boundaries of tradition, however, African artists do have freedom to innovate. One artist noted for the individuality of his carvings is Olowe of Ise, a Yoruba artist from Nigeria who lived in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Olowe is noted for his deeply cut carvings of human figures on doors and on posts that support verandah roofs. The doors that he decorated for a palace in Ikerre, Nigeria (1906?, British Museum, London, England), are divided into several panels, each of which records an important event in the king’s reign. One panel shows the visit of a British official. Olowe’s sculptures became so well known that Nigerians wrote songs of praise in his honor.

IV

Architecture in Africa

The architecture of sub-Saharan Africa is just as diverse as the art. Traditional architecture can be divided into two categories: buildings in rural settlements, and buildings in larger, self-ruling urban centers called city-states.

A

Rural Settlements

The way of life in Africa’s rural settlements determines the types of dwellings built. Settled farming societies have different requirements than herding societies, which are usually nomadic. Other rural societies in Africa are based on farming, hunting, and gathering in various combinations.

Of the many types of traditional rural dwellings, relatively permanent houses grouped in villages are found only in agricultural settlements. A typical farming village consists of a number of family compounds along with structures that serve the larger community. Each family compound may have separate structures for cooking, eating, sleeping, storing food, and protecting animals at night. Structures may be round, rectangular, or semicircular. Communal structures, for holding meetings and teaching children, are located in a prominent place in the village.

The Dogon people of southern Mali cultivate grain on a plateau at the top of the Bandiagara cliffs near the Niger River. They construct villages on the steep sides of the cliffs. Their rectangular houses are built of sun-dried mud brick and stone. The roofs are thatched, and the dwellings rest on ledges along the cliffs. The Dogon store and protect their harvest in granaries that have beautifully carved wooden doors and decorative locks. Figures carved on many granary doors represent sets of male and female twins, which symbolize fertility and agricultural abundance.

The Zulu of southern Africa, who cultivate grain and raise livestock, have traditionally built houses shaped like beehives. They arrange these houses in a circular, fenced compound, and they keep their cattle in the middle of the compound. Zulu houses are made of thatch that covers a framework of wooden strips and is bound together with a rope lattice.

Nomadic herders need homes that they can easily build and take apart when they move their herds to different ground. The Masai of eastern Africa, for example, construct homes using a framework of sticks that they seal with cattle dung.

Many rural societies in Africa adorn the outsides of houses with painted designs or with relief (raised) patterns worked into a soft clay surface. The job of decorating houses generally belongs to the women. Frafra women of northern Ghana decorate the walls of houses and other buildings with geometric patterns that communicate information about the social status of a building’s owner. Ndebele women in Zimbabwe and the northeastern part of South Africa paint the mud walls of their houses with geometric patterns based on the shapes of windows, steps, and other building features and everyday objects. Traditionally, Africans have used natural clays as paints, but today brightly colored acrylic paints are popular.

B

Towns and City-States

Towns and city-states may have buildings that are larger and more elaborate than those in rural settlements. These buildings serve the purposes of government, trade, or organized religion. In general, towns and city-states have developed where trade has brought people together or where conquest has merged neighboring ethnic groups. Consequently, these settlements were built for diverse groups of people rather than for family units.

A good example of a diverse community is Whydah (Ouidah), a coastal city in the former Kingdom of Dahomey (now southern Benin). In the 17th and 18th centuries slave trade with the Americas turned this city into a major trading and commercial center. The presence of foreign traders greatly influenced the architecture in Whydah, where indigenous mud-brick buildings stand next to buildings in South American styles. These styles were transported from Brazil to Africa in the 19th century by returning slaves of African ancestry.

As a result of trade across the Sahara, many towns developed along the southern edge of the desert, especially in Mali. Mosques, palaces, and houses met the needs of the inhabitants: Arab traders, rulers, and common people. Tombouctou (Timbuktu) in Mali is one of the best-known settlements in this area, but the city of Djenné was even more important. Djenné served as a center of Islamic learning and as a commercial center for the trade of gold, slaves, and salt. It boasts one of the oldest mosques in the region.

The Great Mosque of Djenné was built in the 13th and 14th centuries to provide Islamic traders with a center for prayer. The Djenné mosque consists of a main structure of baked mud with vertical buttresses (wall supports) that rise to pinnacles; on the roof is a flat terrace lined with palm fronds and wooden or ceramic spouts that drain water from the terrace. The eastern facade of the structure has three hollow minarets (towers from which worshipers are called to prayer) rhythmically interspersed between 18 buttresses. The Djenné mosque has come to represent Islamic style in this region and has been imitated in many of the mosques along the Niger River valley in Mali.

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