II.

Origins and Sources

Art in Africa has found expression in a range of media from architecture, sculpture, and pottery, to music, dance, textiles, body adornment, and epic poetry. Each of these has its own complex and in many cases unresearched local history of stylistic development.

Tracing the history of African art and architecture is made problematic by the fragmentary state of the evidence. Archaeology in Africa has made great strides in recent decades but remains under-financed and often hindered by unauthorized digging at key sites. Until the mid-19th century, most European contact with sub-Saharan Africa was in many areas limited to coastal regions, although the accounts of the kingdoms of Benin and Kongo provided by 16th- and 17th-century traders and missionaries mainly from Portugal are useful exceptions. Arab scholars are also a source of some valuable information, particularly concerning the medieval African empires of Ghana, Mali, and Songhay, but also with regard to the East African coast. While a few symbolic writing systems were developed in areas of sub-Saharan Africa in the pre-colonial period, they were not used to preserve historical records. Except in Christian Ethiopia, and a few areas where Arabic chronicles exist, local conceptions of history were preserved by oral transmission, often by a specialized group of griots, or bards. The combination of these various sources, together with inferences drawn from late 19th- and 20th-century data, has allowed scholars to identify what appear to be some of the major building blocks of a history of art in each of the regions of sub-Saharan Africa, but it is clear that many questions remain to be answered.

Although the nature of the complex history of interactions between Egyptian art and architecture and artistic traditions elsewhere on the African continent is controversial and will only be clarified by continuing archaeological research, the development of Nubian civilization is an important aspect of a wider engagement between sub-Saharan Africa and the Mediterranean world that belies the familiar cliché of isolated tribal cultures. The Coptic Christian culture that developed subsequently in both Sudan and Ethiopia struggled to maintain these links, although the Islamic conquest of northern Africa in the 8th century left the Ethiopian Church effectively cut off from the rest of Christendom for long periods. The trans-Saharan trade routes, already centuries old, provided the means for the introduction of Islam to West Africa, beginning a long process of expansion and conversion that still continues. The impact of Islam on the artistic traditions of sub-Saharan Africa has been less profound than might have been expected: African Islam has generally been accommodating to much local practice and indeed in West Africa some Muslim groups treasure and employ images of their holy men.

An African response to the earliest European presence in West Africa is apparent in the depiction of European merchants and soldiers in the cast brass plaques made in the 16th century in Benin, as well as the finely carved ivory salt cellars and hunting horns brought back by sailors from Kongo, Benin, and the coast of Sierra Leone. Increasing European involvement on the African continent over the following centuries has had a far-reaching impact that continues to be felt today. It would, however, be a denial of the creative agency of African artistic responses to changing circumstances to see this impact as wholly negative.