Abstract
To colonise the African continent and later on expand its domination upon the rest of the world, Europe has denied history and by so doing history of art to Africa. This denial has infiltrated into all the fields of Euro-African relations and to some extent all human endeavors along the centuries.
Standing from a decolonial point of view, this paper aims at questioning the art historical discourse on Africa so as to show how African art history moved from colonialist discourse to the need for decolonisation. First of all, this scientific work discusses how the discourse on African artistic productions aimed at vilifying the continent in the first centuries of western modernity in order to justify the colonisation. Further, it exemplifies how by heathening Africa, the latter has been dispossessed by organised exportations of her arts for the benefit of western museums. Finally, the paper provides some steps for decolonising African authentic aesthetics.
I would like to thank Dr. Ulrich Hindeme, senior lecturer at the English Department in Faculté des Lettres, Langues, Arts et Communication (FLLAC) at Université d'Abomey-Calavi for reading and providing useful comments to a previous version of the paper.
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Notes
- 1.
The domination of Southern Europe by the Arabs for more than two centuries is marked by the presence of mosques in several cities in Spain and Portugal. The region of Andalusia is one of the cultural centre of this arabo-european historical episode.
- 2.
Spices were so important and rare in Europe that a street in the Eastern part of the city of Amsterdam (The Netherlands) is named Peperstraat or the street of peper in English. And the name remains till to date.
- 3.
- 4.
Robert Cornevin wrote the only book on the history of Republic of Benin, La République du Bénin des origines danhoméennes à nos jours (1978 and re-edited in 1981). He later became professor at Institut International d'Administration Publique in Paris where most of the administrators of the francophone postcolonial world (African countries, Vietnam, etc.) of the first decades of independence were trained. This changing of positions, from adminitrator that had written colonial reports and known the country in depth to professor, helped sustain the perception the coloniser wanted to promote about the former colony and its history. The same strategy was adopted in British colonies and a good example is Professor Anthony Kirk-Green who spent several years in Northern Nigeria before relocating back to UK to serve as professor at Oxford University.
- 5.
It is from the traditional education that the workshops of the families of Hountondji for ironwork, Yemadjè for applique making, etc. have emerged in the time of the kingdom of Danxomè. While these are disapearing in Africa because the religion as social software has changed, there still exist families, makers of religious objects in Italy and other European countries while those in Africa are diminishing drasticly (see Effiboley 2019).
- 6.
Even the health system suffered the same change. Africans stopped using progressively traditional medecines for the imported ones. In this time of the pandemic of COVID-19, I wrote two short essays where I coin the concept of African medicality that is the specific relations Africans previously had with the health, which is more a matter of daily maintenance in contrary to Europeanised medecine fundamentally based on the use of (chemical) drugs.
- 7.
The case of South Africa needs to be highllighted because it was previously a colony of settlement like the then 13 colonies that gave birth to the United States, Australia, New Zealand. And after the formal colonisation accross the world, the former settlers in South Africa indigenised themselves to the extend that they would have more rights than the real locals. That is what gave birth the apartheid regime.
- 8.
To some extent, curricula in many African countries are still to a certain degree in their colonial state. If not, they are redesigned with foreign aid like in Benin Republic and then with no consideration for the societal well-being (of its people).
- 9.
For more details, see (https://debalie.nl/programma/the-european-museum-a-shared-colonial-past-12-10-2020/accessed on 18-10-2020).
- 10.
In addition to this big volume, several artists accross Europe composed a lot of pieces of music to celebrate the brilliance of the continent and its conquest by European colonialists. Among others, there are Gioacchino Rossini (1792–1868) with L'Italienne à Alger, 1813, Jakob Liebmann Meyerbeer (1791–1864) with L'Africaine, posthumous 1865, etc.
- 11.
Those having interest in the separatedness and the dismantling of the continent are still at work and are promoting the idea of pluralisation of the continent. In France for instance, there is a research laboratory called Les Afriques dans le monde. This doesn't bode well for the future of the continent.
- 12.
The conference in Johannesburg, coupled with an exhibition intitled Black Modernisms, was the third conference and the conclusion of a five year research project aiming at explor[ing] what might be called the ‘ other histories’ of modernism in art, focusing particularly on indigenous modernisms from Africa, Oceania and the Americas. The participants, a distinguished group of art historians from Europe, North America, South Africa and Australasia, [documented and analysed] the diverse lives that modernism had across these regions during the twentieth century, which have been left out of the standard histories. An ambitious and comparative re-imagining of the cross-currents constitutive of modernism globally, [brought] new research on artists’ lives, works and travels together, toward that aim; https://maa.cam.ac.uk/multiple-modernisms/; accessed on january January 14th 2021). Adding to the fact that this research project ignored possibilities of modernism in other parts of the continent, several Black South African art historians argued the still partial or/and biaised narratives on modernism on the continent. Dr Nontobeko Ntombela and her colleagues provided their views on the following website: https://soundcloud.com/keleketla-library/black-artists-white-labels-1; accessed on January 14th 2021.
- 13.
This is a decision of national sovereignty. As a matter of proof, when the Russian minister of culture, Olga Lioubimova, came into service early in January 2020, she decided that half of the film programmes in Russia should be made of Russian films. In my point of view, this decision is a logical one. A country that fails to achieve that is subject to a progressive disappearance. Unfortunately, national programmes in several countries in Africa are dying out. As a result the perception of the youth will definitely be exogenised.
- 14.
While the leaders of ECOWAS are accepting Morroco in West Africa with no consideration to geography, countries like Chad, Mauritania or Cameroun, that are closer to ECOWAS’ territorial borders are ignored.
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Effiboley, E.P. (2023). Decolonizing African Aesthetics in a Globalised World: A Way Forward. In: Ott, M., Diop, B.M. (eds) Decolonial Aesthetics I. Ästhetiken X.0 – Zeitgenössische Konturen ästhetischen Denkens. J.B. Metzler, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-662-65899-4_5
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