An amazing world of art from Tanzania

SHANGAA: ART OF TANZANIA

The main reason we almost never see art
from Tanzania, even in museums with
collections of African art, is as dismaying
and apparently arbitrary as so much else
about modern African history.
When the first collections of African art
were formed in Europe and America in the
20th century, tastes were overwhelmingly
Francophile. The French had extensive
colonial interests in northern, western, and
central Africa. Mainland Tanzania,
however, had been a German colony from
1891 until the end of the First World War.
So even among the growing number of
Western collectors and scholars interested
in African art, Tanzania’s art was almost
entirely overlooked. Germany’s loss in both
world wars, and its division in 1949, which
shelved several noteworthy collections of
African art behind the Iron Curtain,
entrenched the bias.
Tanzania’s own political fate didn’t help.
Even as the study of African culture boomed
in the 1960s and 70s, Tanzania — which
was formed in 1964 when newly
independent Tanganyika and Zanzibar
united (“Tanzania” combines the two
names) — was run according to a Maoist
program of African socialism. This left the
country largely isolated.
“As a result,” writes Gary van Wyk in the
first-rate, scholarly catalog accompanying
“Shangaa: Art of Tanzania,” at the Portland
Museum of Art, “only a few hundred
Tanzanian art objects have ever been
illustrated. Most are in black-and-white,
hard-to-find publications, published in
German.”
“Shangaa” is a serious attempt to remedy
the situation. It was organized by QCC Art
Gallery of the City University of New York
(CUNY) under van Wyk’s direction. It’s a
lively, beautiful, thought-provoking show
made up of sculptural objects, primarily
from German and US collections.
The display, which emphasizes education
over aesthetics, reminds us that these
objects were once used for healing, for
expressions of authority, for
communication with the spirits, and for
celebrations of milestones such as
initiation.
Is it OK to acknowledge that they are also,
in many cases, riveting to behold?
I assume so. “Shangaa” means “to amaze” in
Swahili, the primary shared language in
East Africa. Employing the word as the
show’s title is a nice way to emphasize the
role of “shangaa” within Tanzanian culture.
But it also reminds us that encounters
between different cultures can induce states
of awe and disturbance, and that this, as
much as edification, is part of what we go
to museums for.
Three Sukuma dance figures, one female
and two male, carved from wood and up to
5 feet high pulse with a shuddering vitality.
A carved wooden platter made up of
separate dishes symmetrically arranged and
connected by curving lines is superbly
refined. And in its compression and ghostly
expression, a Hehe mask with right-angled
cavities for the eyes and mouth and five
small teeth is surely some kind of
masterpiece.
“Shangaa” is out to put such objects into
some kind of meaningful context — and to
do a fair bit of debunking along the way.
One of the ideas it pushes is that Tanzanian
art traditions are today as vital as ever.
Several video screens showing, among other
contemporary performances, competitive
dance rituals involving dangerous snakes
bear out the point. It’s hard to look away.
We’re also reminded of how the makers of
these objects are constantly adapting to new
realities even as they continue old
traditions. Masks partly inspired by the now
global culture of Halloween, for instance,
are used in the same traditional
performances as much older masks.
Similarly, a new genre of masquerade
called “mang’anyamu” (meaning “animals”)
developed in 1994 by the sculptor Martins
Manjibula Jackson uses skin-covered animal
masks. In doing so it builds on mid-20th-
century male initiation masquerades which
used masks representing not only wild
animals but cars and airplanes. And these
in turn were adapted from earlier
traditions, in a corkscrewing line of
continuity and change which makes a
mockery of the idea of timelessness or
authenticity.
The other, related insight pushed hard by
the exhibition is irrefutable: Tanzania is
incredibly diverse. More than 120 ethnic
groups coexist within its borders. Most have
long histories there.
By the 13th century, in fact — thanks to an
East African gold rush — the coastal
territory of Tanzania was at the center of
what historians have described as the
world’s first global economy. The cultural
cross-pollination triggered by trade, along
with the relentless exploitation of resources
and military conquests it often invites, have
been hallmarks of the region ever since. New England, with its demand for piano
keys and billiard balls, was intimately
connected with the ivory trade well into the
late 19th century, when Connecticut was a
center for the processing of ivory. (By 1860,
elephants had been hunted out of what was
then still Tanganyika, so hunters pushed
farther inland.) Meanwhile, large shipments
of cloth bound for East Africa regularly left
Salem.
Three main caravan routes connected the
various tribes of Tanganyika with the
foreign traders, as well as with the
inhabitants of neighboring lands. So much
intermingling over such a long period
meant that, as van Wyk explains, the classic
African art history paradigm of “one tribe,
one style” simply doesn’t fit in Tanzania.
He goes further: Such classifications by
tribe tend to reflect, he says, “the colonial
powers’ need to . . . fix people to places, fit
them into ethnic categories, and then have
them see themselves through those
categories.”
And yet there are common convictions,
among them a belief in the interconnection
of the material and spiritual realms, and
common tendencies, including an
inclination to use sculptural objects as
instruments for the creation for communal
well-being.
As elsewhere in Africa, masks have always
played a special role: In performances
which integrate drama, dance, and music,
they have helped to teach ethical behavior.
They give order to the cosmos; They simply
entertain.
“Shangaa” is full of masks, almost all of
them mesmerizing. One especially
interesting row of them demonstrates both
the influence of foreigners and the impact
of modernity: A Makua mask representing a
Catholic novice or nun is placed next to a
Makonde mask of a Masai warrior, then a
turbaned Sikh, a Portuguese civil servant, a
Portuguese colonist, and a wrinkly old
European man. All date from the second
half of the 20th century, and reveal the
influence of Nampyopyo Kulombanungu, an
innovator in Makonde masquerades who
highlighted social and ethnic types.
One earlier Makonde mask represents a
hare, a “trickster” animal with special
powers. Another is a circle-shaped face with
the ears flattened beside the eyes. Both were
collected in 1906 by Karl Weule, a father of
German ethnography and crucial figure in
the Western reception of art from Tanzania.
Sponsored and directed by the German
government, which had brutally suppressed
the Maji Maji Rebellion only the previous
year, Weule spent six months researching
and collecting in southern Tanzania, a
region which was proving particularly
troublesome to the German government.
If his mission was to bring about greater
understanding, this, in the minds of his
superiors, was in service to a larger goal:
more effective colonial domination. The
German state, itself only 30 years old, was
trying on a new mask — a new idea of
itself. The world waited.