Professor Christopher D. Roy

The University of Iowa

Our agenda in using the cycle of life in Africa to teach about African art is to increase understanding of Africa, to increase appreciation for the power and beauty of African art, to increase understanding for African systems of thought, and to increase respect and tolerance for the different ways peoples around the world do things differently than we do.

Art is the most eloquent statement any people make about themselves. People all over the world have, for millennia, used art to represent their systems of religious belief, their ideas about political power, to record their history, to describe important events in their lives and the lives of their communities. Art reflects social, economic, and educational systems. This is as much true in Europe and America as it is in Africa. The result is that, by studying art we are able to understand a great deal about the people who made it, or commissioned it. Art is a primary document for understanding other people, both our contemporaries and our ancestors. It is as valuable a resource as are the written documents of the past for understanding why people do things as they do.

We understand that to most students, Africa and especially African art seem very different, very strange, very abstract, and often very difficult to understand. We have been exposed to the popular literature, films, and television news about Africa as much or more than the students we want to reach, and so we understand what the common misconceptions are about Africa. The greatest barrier we face in overcoming these misconceptions is the idea that African art is exotic, strange, abstract, incomprehensible. Because these works of art don't look like the kind of art students are used to seeing in popular media or in our own museums, students assume that they can never understand what they are seeing, what the objects mean, or who made them.

What is context? It is everything that is missing from the work of art when we see it in an American museum-costume, song, dance, performance, audience, heat, smell, light, dust. In addition to the text, which describes in words what the object is used for, we use two techniques to recreate context: video and photographs of the objects in Africa. Throughout the program you will see a small camera or filmstrip icon at the bottom center of the screen. When you click on the camera a photograph appears that shows Africans using the same type of object, sometimes with costume, with audience, in a village or a room in a building. The only element that is missing is the performance, the dance steps, the athletic movements that bring the object to life. This is recreated by the video, which shows the object in action, a dynamic, kinetic, living work of art. The video allows us to see how the performer interprets the character of the spiritual being the art embodies.

We recontextualize African art to make it accessible-so that students will understand that these objects have meaning, that they communicate ideas. Each object had a role to play, a function to serve in the community in which it was created. The information we need to understand the meanings of these objects is not communicated to us directly by the object. We must gather data about the people who made the object, who commissioned and paid for it, who used it. Again, this is not unique to African art: we must have access to the same information if we are to understand our own art. Each object was made for a specific social, religious, educational, political, or economic context. It was worn or handled in some way, it was addressed in some way by those who owned it, its power may have been activated by means that left the object altered, with an accumulation of materials or a worn surface. Without understanding the processes the object was subjected to, we cannot fully understand the forces that determined the form we see.

We use the theme of the cycle of life to make African art approachable. If students are to understand art and through art understand the people who made it, we must first give them the information that makes art meaningful. We must overcome the idea that African art is strange and exotic. We think the best way to do this is, first, to tie African art to the important steps in African's lives they must take to become productive members of society. Second, we must compare the important transitions of life in Africa to the changes American students and adults experience in their own lives. The first is our job, the second we feel is most effectively done by teachers. We feel that a natural part of the use of this program is the study of our own systems of birth, education, politics, adulthood, religions, healing, and death. The more students are able to see the connections between the lives of Africans and their own lives the better they will understand both.

I began lecturing on the theme of the way Africans use art at important thresholds in their lives twenty years ago in dozens of places around the state of Iowa. I found that as I pointed out to my audiences that Africans must overcome obstacles and solve problems that are very similar to those we deal with in our own lives, they began to understand that in some ways Africans are less different from us than popular media represent. As I explained the many ways Africans create art to commemorate these transitions in their lives or to use as tools in overcoming adversity, the members of the audience occasionally examined the tools they create in their own lives to deal with adversity. In some cases, art is helpful to contemporary Americans in expressing or communicating important ideas, but even when this was not the case for the members of the audience, people soon saw the logic of the ways Africans solved their own problems. I began using the same theme as the organizational structure for my course "Introduction to Africa Art" ten years ago, and I had the same results with university students that I had with audiences around Iowa. The material became much more accessible. Students began to investigate how objects were used by people to deal with everyday events. They began to look for meaning where they had earlier assumed there was no meaning to be learned. They de-exoticized African art and African life, and left the class with an increased understanding that other people do things differently than we do for very logical and carefully thought-out reasons.

The theme of Art and Life in Africa means that we recontextualize African art in the cycle of life. We learn about the important changes that take place in an African person's life from birth to death, and how those changes are marked or commemorated through the making or use of art. We learn how Africans use art to overcome obstacles or solve problems they encounter over the course of their lives. These steps naturally follow the sequence of birth, childhood, education, graduation, courtship, marriage, parenthood, adulthood, elderhood, and death. At each of these moments people must deal with the unknown; they must find answers to questions for which no one else has the answer, and so they turn to religion. People must deal with disease, accidents, misfortune of all kinds, and so they turn to healers. Finally, Africans, like most people around the world, do not believe life ends with death. They believe that death leads to new life and that the spirits of the honored ancestors live on in the spirit world and continue to play an active role in the affairs of their living descendants.

To make this plan visible, to provide a visual expression of the idea that life is a cycle and not linear, we have used the metaphor of the Kongo cosmogram. This symbol of the course of life takes many forms in the thought of the BaKongo of western Zaire (Congo). Sometimes it is represented as a cross with circles at the ends of each arm, sometimes a cross with straight lines connecting the ends of the arms. We have used the cross within a circle as the symbol of our plan and as the table of contents of our program. The BaKongo believe that the life of an individual person begins on the far right, at birth, as the sun rises in the east. The person goes through childhood and education, leading to adulthood and the creation of the family at the apex, or top, as the sun reaches noon in the sky. The person declines in strength and passes through adulthood, ending with death on the left, as the sun sets in the west. But just as the sun continues its journey (or the earth rotates), life continues in the underworld, as the spirits of the ancestors live on in a world that is parallel to ours, and intervene in our affairs. Because this is the land of the ancestors, this is also where we deal with the art of the ancestors, the ancient arts of Africa. The spiritual realm is the place of healing, of nature spirits, a sacred space, a place we can communicate with through the diviner, the ritual specialist, the pastor or the priest. Finally, as the sun rises again in the east, new life is created from the old, and the cycle begins again. The arms of the cross represent the intersection of the spirit world and the natural world. The horizontal line is a frontier or boundary, while the vertical line is a connector or link between both worlds.

This program is organized into eleven chapters. It is natural to begin on the right, or in the east, with fertility and birth in the chapter we call "Abundance." This particular step is not just about human fertility, but about the fertility of the fields, prosperity, good harvests. The next step is "Education/Initiation." In most texts about Africa this is usually titled initiation because those who go through it are sworn to secrecy, and must undergo physical tests and hardships. Yet this most closely corresponds to our own system of education in which we, like Africans, learn the skills we will need to survive in adult society, and learn the rules for the moral and ethical conduct of life we must observe if we are to be respected members of the community. Next is "Everyday Endeavor" which describes the useful arts that Africans may have around them everyday-furniture, pottery, clothing, architecture. At the same position on the cosmogram is the chapter titled "Key Moments in Life" which both summarizes the entire program and focuses on the actual transitions people go though at moments in their lives. This is a short version of the full program. The fourth step is "Governance" or political art. This is the art both of kings, and of more democratic, less hierarchical societies. These are the African equivalent of the portraits of kings and presidents we find in our national portrait galleries.

The last step above the line of life is "Death," the final threshold in the passage of life. This is the point where we enter the world of spirits, the spiritual world of ancestors and god. Through prayer and other techniques, art is used in "Healing." This includes objects that embody power that can be used to effect a cure, and objects that represent the devotion to god. In the section on "Divination" we study objects that are used to communicate with god, as well as the techniques the pastor, priest, or other spiritual leader may use to help us speak with god. This is also where we look at the art of the ancestors, the art of "Ancient Africa." "Ancient Africa" is particularly important because it gives historical or chronological depth to the program. It provides evidence that Africans have been making use of art for millennia, and that the history of art in Africa can tell us much about Africans. The places where Africans encounter the spirits, or where spirits are honored are described in "Sacred Spaces." These spaces include shrines, mosques, and churches. Objects from shrines that represent the spirits and the thresholds where people experience transitions in life are described. The next step is back to the beginning, for death leads finally to rebirth. The final chapter is titled "Cultural Exchange" and it is, of course, located at the crossroads of the horizontal line of life and the vertical connector. This chapter deals with the exchange of ideas between peoples, the ways these encounters lead to the use of new ideas and materials, the reuse of materials to create new forms, and the idea that tradition often means change, and the invention of new forms of expression.

To conclude, the program places art in the context of people's lives so our students will understand how important and effective a tool art is in solving problems and overcoming adversity. The student will recognize that Africans sometimes face problems that are similar to his own, and while the solutions Africans create may look different than ours, they are logical and effective.