By Gobira

        INTRODUCTION - FOLLOWING THE SIGNS

As soon as I arrived in England for the first time, in February 2001, my first desire was to visit the museums and galleries of London. My idea was to see things that were not possible, or very difficult to see in my country. Apart from the biennial of contemporary art in São Paulo and other exhibitions of modern and contemporary art, there are a few opportunities to see collections of objects from different parts of the world in Brazil.

        One of the first places I visited was The British Museum, and my initial experience started from the back door in Montague Place. One of the first galleries I visited was The African Galleries. I remember that before I entered the Gallery I found myself excited about the idea of encountering objects related with Brazilian African objects; the result of four hundreds years of slavery and transatlantic trade.
African culture is extremely important in the formation of Brazilian society and I was amazed to see original objects that could be associated with Brazilian history; although I didn’t find the written clues I was expecting, hence I made my own associations with African Brazilian culture; and after visiting others parts of the Museum I wondered if The British museum was interested in such relationships, or even if they do know something about them.


        As I decided to write about African Galleries I revisited the web site of the British Museum and in the first page I found this statement: “The Museum exists to illuminate the histories of cultures, for the benefit of present and future generations” (British Museum site). Does it happen in the context of African Galleries? Why does it not throw light on the slavery trade and on the history of relocated African people from Africa to North, Central and South America? What about the histories of African colonies?

I will not analyse texts or labels in particular but discuss the group of words related to the Gallery in books and web site and the ones inside the African Gallery. I want to invite the reader to make a journey with me; a journey that starts before we enter the gallery, maybe in our home, in front of a computer, on a web page or the pages of a book, a British Museum guide for example.

        TELLING AFRICAN STORIES: An educational choice

        If you have a London guide like the one I have, published in England by Dorling Kindersley Limited, you will not find any reference to African artefacts or African Art in The British Museum. If you visit the British Museum web site and explore “world cultures” you will find “Africa”; inside “Africa” you find icons transferring you to six other pages, and interestingly, one of them is Egypt, though when you are redirected to the page of Egypt, there is no reference to Africa, as if it was another world. It is part of another department at The British Museum and there is no reference to Africa on this page, no possibility of gaining access to Africa via Egypt in the British Museum web site.
Once inside the Museum, you can obtain a map at the information desk. Looking through the map, you will see that there is no reference to the African Galleries; nevertheless, if you are aware of their existence and are persistent, you can ask for the African Galleries at the information desk, hence they will tell you that it is in room 24, close to other rooms reserved for World Cultures. With the map in hand you start your journey inside the museum and you will notice a sign indicating the direction to follow.

        Arriving in the part of the museum reserved for “World Cultures”, there is another sign (Africa: The Sainsbury African Galleries), indicating that you must go downstairs.
Already on the stairs there are two pieces of contemporary art, one in wood and another in textiles; the two works have labels informing the visitor of the names of the artists, date of production, material and the cultural context. Apart from the labels of these two pieces, the first text encountered is not about Africa but about the relationship between the Sainsbury family and the English sculptor Henry Moore. Why is this text positioned here? It goes on to inform the reader of the relationship between Henry Moore, the Sainsbury family and the British Museum. Moore attributed importance to ethnographic objects in the British Museum, especially carved African sculptures and he introduced them to Sainsbury family. In the British Museum A-Z Companion I found the following quote attributed to Henry Moore.

“The museum was a revelation to me. I went at least twice a week for two or tree hours each time, and one room after another caught my enthusiasm. The wonderful thing about British Museum is that everything is stretched out before you and you are free to make your own discoveries.” (Caygill: 1999: 214)

        For someone who doesn’t know anything about Henry Moore, perhaps it is not of great importance, but what does it mean to English visitors? What sort of thinking comes to their mind? Is it the interest of the sculptor in African artefacts? Is it his commitment to art, exploring all the possibilities of a museum? Is it his importance to British art? Or is the focus here on the Sainsbury Family, how benevolent they are, and the importance of Moore who introduced them to the museum
Probably the intention was just to pay homage to Henry Moore, accordingly with the position he occupies in the British culture, although it seems to me that Henry Moore is projected in the African galleries as being more important than any of the people, anonymous or not, whose objects are inside that space.
At this moment the museum is telling you the purpose of the museum and for whom and why the African objects are illuminated.

        “The Museum is teaching – expressly, as part of an education program and an articulated agenda, but also subtly, almost unconsciously – a system of highly political values expressed not only in the style of presentation but in myriad facets of its operation. The banners in front of the building tell the visitor what really matters before he or she has entered the display. The museum communicates values in the types of programs it chooses to present and in the audiences it addresses, in the size of staff departments and emphasis they are given, in the selection of objects for acquisition, and more concretely in the location of displays in the building and the subtleties of lighting and label copy. None of these things is neutral. None is overt. All tell the audience what to think beyond what the museum ostensibly is teaching. (Vogel, 1991: 200)

The ideology and the educational purpose of the gallery are explicit in that small piece of text. The African collection is there to help English audience to look at other cultures, but theirs is still a colonial gaze, and as Hooper-Greenhill correctly points out that “the establishment of collections, like the drawing of a map, is a form of symbolic conquest.” (Hooper-Greenhill, 2000: 18)

        UNDERSTANDING THE ETHNOGRAPHIC ARTEFACT

        With the A-Z Companion of The British Museum in hand I noticed that the Museum divided the different collections mainly in two categories, Ethnography and Antiquities. Classified as Antiquities for instance are the collections of Greece and Rome and Egypt, and as Ethnography are among others Africans and Americans. The Antiquities collections are subdivided in departments: Greek and Roman Antiquities, Japanese Antiquities, Oriental Antiquities, Ancient Egypt and Sudan, Ancient Near East, Medieval and Modern Europe, Prehistory and Early Europe. Under the Ethnography department are: Africa, Americas, Oceania and parts of Europe.
The thoughts that has come to my mind when I first noticed such organization, was that the difference were that Egyptian and Greeks civilization were technically more advanced than African, south of the Sahara, explaining why they are in different categories; or maybe it was because the objects from Egypt, Rome and Greece had different material values from African objects. It begs the question, who is responsible for giving value to objects? In my search for a definition of Ethnography I found this from Kirshenblatt-Gimblett:

        “Ethnographic artefacts are objects of ethnography. They are artefacts created by ethnographers. Objects become ethnographic by virtue of being defined, segmented, detached, and carried away by ethnographers. Such objects are ethnographic not because they were found in a Hungarian peasant household, Kwakiutl village, or Rajasthani market rather than in Buckingham Palace or Michelangelo’s studio, but by virtue of the manner in which they have been detached, for disciplines make their objects and in the process make themselves.” (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett, 1991: 387)

If I understand this correctly, it is more about who classified and defined the objects and less about the historical importance of the material or the artistic value of the object. It is more about the way it is organized and assembled with other objects, like fragments of a mosaic, set together from someone who is an expert.

        Considering that, presumably the African collections have been taken from Africa by different people, on different occasions, by specialists or not, donated or sold to The British Museum, and then the objects were organized by an expert in Africa.

        What does this mosaic teach us about Africa? Is it possible to apprehend the culture and understand the Africans as a group of people or a spread of cultures through our visit to the African Gallery? Or following the statement of the web site that: “museum exists to illuminate the histories of cultures”, can we say that Africa history and culture are illuminated?

        I doubt this, because to represent a large continent like Africa and have a very good and balanced picture of it would require the work of more than one museum, no matter how prestigious. Visiting the Galleries with a friend she raised the following question: Why are there so many objects from Nigeria? Having a careful look, one can say that there are objects from all over Africa, but without doubt Nigerian objects have a special place. Perhaps the explanation is the close relationship between England and Nigeria, a relationship between coloniser and colonized.

        Another point for me is the removal of Egypt from the context of Africa. I do not think that is possible to explain Africa without Egypt, nor Egypt without the rest of Africa, a question that I will discuss further in this text.

        Kirshenblatt-Gimblett wrote that “perhaps we should not speak of the ethnographic object but of the ethnographic fragment” (1991: 388) and Vogel defines ethnographic objects as fragments detached from physical places and cultural ties:

        “Ethnographic objects are fragments because they are products of detachment – not only from a physical place of origin but from deep cultural ties. The objects that we call African art are all fragments, segmented and dissociated. They are the portable portions of faraway cultures. Following their introduction into the new culture, they may navigate “from curio to specimen to art, though not necessarily in that order.” (Robert and Vogel, 1994: 47)

        As a result, we could say that the fragments, inside African Gallery, certainly are forming one picture. The question is what sort of picture is it?
Any arrangement of objects shows us a picture and tells us a story, if this arrangement is followed by text in the form of labels or explicative text, the story has more details, and any story has an ideology behind it, even when the writer says that the text is impartial and pretends only to expose ‘ facts’ and ‘truths’.

        “…texts: like affirmative sentences, they make a statement – describing situations and events, characters and objects, places and atmospheres. Like newspaper reports – a narrative genre – all narratives sustain the claim that ‘facts’ are being put on the table. Yet all narratives are not only told by a narrative agent, the narrator, who is the linguistic subject of utterance; the report given by that narrator is also, inevitably, focused by a subjective point of view, an agent of vision whose view of the events will influence our interpretation of them.” (Bal, 1994: 98)

        The picture that the African Galleries draws is quite a complex one, and in order to understand the picture produced by The British Museum I will analyse a few aspects of the exhibition, considering the position of the objects, the way they are lit, and the texts related to them.

        Below ground: a place for the dead?

        One of the first feelings that I had when in the African Gallery was that of darkness, of being in a place with little illumination and I found difficult to read the texts, find them and make connections between labels and objects.

Near the main door of the Gallery is a sculpture by the contemporary Nigerian artist Soukary Douglas-Camp. It has one incredible similarity with one of Gods of the ‘candomble’, a Brazilian African religion, and I was immediately attracted by the figure; and I tried to learn more about it; however I had to look for a few minutes for the label; it is positioned behind the sculpture, without illumination. The label explains the material it has been made, country, name of the sculptor and date and cultural context. I doubt if the public without a great interest will read that label.

        I found myself disappointed with the lack of reference, and with the absence of history, although I did not give up. Later I found on the Internet the following text about Douglas Camp and her work:

        “Douglas Camp invests her sculptures with dynamism partly as a reaction against, what she feels is a western tradition of isolating such objects as the masquerade headdresses from their performative function. "Masks don't come on their own," she explains, "they come with music and costumes. They are part of a performance, and performance, not sculpture, is the highest form of art in West Africa. That's a foreign concept in the West". As such she sees herself as "a native talking back" against a eurocentric understanding of African culture.” (http://www.bbc.co.uk/arts/tate/century_city/lagos/sokari.shtml Visited 12/07/04 11:45)

        I did not find the information I was looking for; and regarding the statement in the British Museum on Douglas Camp, I am not sure that the way it is presented in the African Gallery contributes to a better understanding of her work, or more than that, informs the visitor of the way Africa’s live, pray for their gods, and so one; and it is necessary to say that Camp’s sculpture is related to a small segment of African culture and does not engage with ways of life from other parts of the continent.

        Side by side with the “masquerade” of Douglas Camp are other objects by contemporary artists. What is the purpose in having contemporary objects outside the gallery and at the entrance to it? What kind of story is behind this curatorial policy, and what kind of value is the museum ascribing to such objects?

        “Though a museum’s acquisition of an object is generally taken as a proof of the object’s value, at the same time, paradoxically, it signifies that the object has been decommodified, taken out of the market, and out of time. Transplanted to the synchronic, simultaneous temporal frame of the collection, the object is reclassified. Any specific collections effectively destroy an object’s earlier contexts at the same time that it creates a new one. The new contexts stands in a “metaphorical, rather than a contiguous, relations to the world of everyday life… The collections replaces history with classification…thereby making temporally a spatial and material phenomenon”. (Robert and Vogel, 1994: 48)

This statement helps to think about the contemporary objects, and raises other questions. How does the audience perceive objects if they do not read the labels? What happens with the objects when they are positioned as windows on the past? On the other hand, what happens with the objects from the past?

        These complex issues can lead to confusion. Certainly if some of the objects in the gallery are unique and original, maybe others can be “easily” found and bought in Africa. Could they not? After seeing the numerous objects, maybe the viewers do not know which ones are the rare objects and which are not, which are from the past and which are contemporary. As ethnographic objects the level of differentiation in the curatorial practices is minimal. What matters is how Africans can be seen and perceived as a group of people.

        “This stronger sense of interests becomes painfully obvious when, as tends to be the case, the object of gathering is ‘the other’. For then, objects of cultural alterity must be made ‘not-other’. Clearly, the act of collecting then becomes a form of subordination, appropriation, de-personification.

        This process of meaning-production is paradoxical. The ‘not-other’objects-to-be must first be made to become ‘absolute other’ so as to be possible to all. This is done by cutting objects off from their context. It is relevant to notice that the desire to extend the limits of the self – to appropriate, trough ‘de-othering’ – is already entwined with a need to dominate, which in turn depends on a further ‘alterization’ of alterity. This paradoxical move, I will argue, is precisely the defining feature of fetishism in all senses of the term.” (Bal, 1994: 105)

        In order to make connections between past and present, there are video presentations showing the process of making artefacts nowadays in Africa, and by this means extending the past of Africa to the present. Africans are still doing things as they did two hundred, three hundred, and five hundred years ago. The vision of the European is implicit to the way African culture is projected.

        “We are reminded that archaeological and ethnographical collections emerged out of a specific set of political and pedagogical aims in the history of anthropology; that collections and exhibitions cannot be divorced from the larger cultural contexts of philanthropy and ethnic or national identity formation; that anthropologists and “natives” are increasingly engaged in a dialogue out of which cultural identity emerges; and that museums contribute to the larger process by which popular culture is formed.” (Appadurai, and Breckenridge, 1999: 405)

        Another consideration to be taken into account is the great number of objects grouped by themes, their respective labels, and videos:

        “If individual objects are complex in relation to meaning, exhibitions – groups of objects combined with words and images – are more complex still. Here, meaning lies in the relationships between the objects and other elements; it is combinatorial and relational. The ideas that displays have been mounted to communicate are sometimes (but not always) clearly suggested in the texts of the exhibition, which may offer a preferred interpretation of the various visual elements. However, experience of the visual is not the same as experience of the text; it is more open, and at the same time more difficult to talk about. (Hooper-Greenhill, 2000: 3, 4)”

        An object that drew my attention on the occasion of my first visit to the exhibition was a t-shirt. Initially, I thought it was a football shirt, then it became apparent by the labelling that it was a Kenya World Cup cricket t-shirt. It was a green t-shirt with a shield occupying the front of it. The t-shirt is positioned side by side to shields used in the past by African warriors. Once more the attempt to present symbols of the past could be seen in this case constructed by Africans and reinforced by the museum.

        OTHERNESS: Experiencing the different

        After being confronted by contemporary objects made by artists living Africa, Europe and North America, the visitor has to choose between two routes through the exhibition - one to the left, the other to the right. On the right side, in a corridor that leads to a bigger room, there is a group of objects called “masquerades”, they are not protected by glass and have just a general description about them, without particular information for each one. In the big room there are four different groups of objects: Fabrics and clothes, personal adornments, objects in ivory, bronze casting. Walking to the left from the main door, the exhibition presents: ancestral and funerary and objects of prestige, forged metal, a group of weapons, knives, shields, pottery, wood carving. In the whole gallery most of the objects are inside glass cabinets, the exception for the contemporary works and pieces in the masquerades, the cast brass plaques, ceramics and other objects. Most of them have labels indicating year when they were made, the materials they were made of and the country of origin. Most of them are confined to little space and piled one on top of the other. In order to help to identify one object in relation to others, the labels are numbered and positioned close to the group of objects, but not far from other group of objects, but as a friend said to me “you need a manual to connect object to the label”.

The Gallery offers the public the opportunity to see different objects from different parts of Africa on a journey trough the continent. Despite some attempt to create a coherent connection, the objects are not organized geographically, and as Appadurai, and Breckenridge have pointed out:

        “Museums provide an interesting contrast with travel, for in museums people travel short distances in order to experience cultural, geographical, and temporal distance, whereas contemporary tourists often travel great distances in short spaces of time to experience “otherness” in a more intense and dramatic manner. But both are organized ways to explore the worlds and things of the “other”. (Appadurai, and Breckenridge, 1999: 412)

        Reflecting again on my friend’s observation about the quantity of objects from Nigeria, and considering the maps present in the gallery I am not sure that this curatorial concept allows the visitor to effectively “travel” through Africa acquiring information about the different people living there.

        Where is Egypt?

        There are three maps in the Gallery; looking at them I wondered why Egypt is almost excluded from the African Galleries. Is it out of Africa? All right there is one gallery dedicated entirely to Egypt, but does it make sense to separate the Egyptian galleries from the other African Galleries? The history of Egypt is closely interlinked with the history of the rest of Africa. The Nile River crosses thousands of kilometres of continental African land. Egypt of the Pharaohs is also Egypt of the slave trade, especially from North Africa - the Egypt of African trade. Nevertheless there is almost no mention of Egypt in the African Galleries. I am not saying that it is necessary to have objects placed in the African galleries from Egypt, but if the purpose of the museum is to teach, what kind of message are the curators giving when there is no reference to Egypt in the African Galleries?

         MYSTIC AND EXOTIC: A magic world from the south

        Since the fifteenth century, when Europeans started to explore the continent of Africa and exploit its peoples, the African continent has been described as primitive, and frequently its inhabitants have not been afforded the right to be called human beings. This degrading of the black subject was used as a justification for slavery in European colonies, black peoples from Africa being transplanted to another continent to work in the plantation fields and treated like beasts.

It is also is worth to remembering that South African Apartheid ended not long ago, and until 1970’s many European countries still possessed colonies in the continent. Some consideration of all these questions is central to an appreciation of Africa that Europeans have had until now. It is also important to remember that the artefacts in the British museum are objects assembled by a European vision.

        Much of the African Art in museums today derives from eras and places removed and remote from the present that to retrace its history is nearly impossible. Many objects arrived in the West as the trophies, souvenirs, and testimonies of colonial imperialism - the religious conversion and commercial exploitation of Africa from the fifteenth to the mid twentieth century. Documentation of these “entangled objects” is often poor or completely lacking. Their exposition in the West reflects the historical attitudes of Westerns toward them and their makers – starting with turn-of-the-century constructions of Africans as “exotic others” (Robert and Vogel, 1994: 37)

        Despite my admiration for the objects made by contemporary artists, and also recognizing that, maybe, they reflect some of the reality of life in African today, I cannot avoid thinking that when they are assembled together with the result of centuries of colonialism, in some instances they are reduced to the same level as the other objects. Instead of being seen as objects of contemporary art, they are products produced by primitive and exotic African people. They are not establishing a dialogue with contemporary art of Europe, USA or other countries; their dialogue is located within the frame of primitivism in which they are positioned.

        Returning to the text about Henry Moore in the entrance of the Gallery, why we don’t have one of his sculptures dialoguing with African Art for instance? Giving to the audience the opportunity to make their own connections.

        “Western culture has appropriated African art and attributed to it meanings that are overwhelmingly western. We are aware that the meanings we give to the objects visiting in our homes and museums are not those that inspired their creators. We may be less clear about what the original status (art? Craft? Sacra?) and meaning might have been. (Vogel, 1991: 192)”

Conclusion         Visiting the African Galleries it is possible to notice that there is a clear objective to transmit a contemporary view of African Culture, mixing the new and the old and considering what Hooper-Greenhill said about culture:

        “Culture is frequently though of as having two fields of reference. The first refers to the arts and higher learning – sometimes expressed as the ‘best of what a society produces’. This is a tightly defined area, buttressed by a range of social institutions and practices. The second field of reference is much more holistic and inclusive. It adopts a more anthropological approach: life-ways, patterned events, and belief systems are all understood as part of culture.” (Hooper-Greenhill, 2000: 10)

Although the written material of African Galleries is not clear, it sends contradictory messages, as I have said before the contemporary objects are presented more like a continuation of the past and is less as a dialogue with the present. There is nothing wrong to use symbols of the past but the insistence in drawing an image of Africa continent mainly related to the past is worrying.

        Bearing in mind that the British Museum serves a plural community, I did not find any text in the African galleries, which illuminate the history and culture for every one, not least, the British Public. A mission of the British Museum should be one of returning to the world much of the knowledge accumulated over hundreds of years of European colonialism and exploitation. Specifically, talking about the African Galleries, the objects exhibited there should be displayed in a manner that takes into account the immense contributions of African peoples and cultures to the world. In so doing they should challenge the construct of African as exotic and primitive, a construct still sadly present in the African Galleries today.

        Thanks to Paul Dash (Goldsmith College), Pam Meecham and Claire Robins (Institute of Education).

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E-mail: Ailtomgobira@aol.com