MY DEAREST COMPANION said as we were leaving the stunning exhibit-hall: “It’s terrible that we never learn about this, while we’re told so much about ancient Greek and Roman civilizations.”
Students of Africa’s peoples and cultures know – to their great frustration – just what she was talking about. But now there’s some redressing of the appalling imbalance whereby the so-called ‘dark’ continent of Africa (the very phrase is symptomatic) and its rich, deep and complex history have gotten widely ignored in favor of European antiquity, or even that of India and China.
The redressing comes, mercifully, with an enthralling show just opened at New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art called Sahel: Art and Empire on the Shores of the Sahara, which runs until May 10th. At a gathering last week to mark the show’s opening, the museum’s curator for art from Africa, Oceania and the Americas, Alisa LaGamma, gave us a fulsome introduction to the 200 or more historic artifacts assembled from a great sweep of legendary sub-Saharan empires. They date from 300AD up to the 19thcentury, but had unjustifiably “remained largely outside our historical frame of reference”.
I was reminded of other instances of the sidelining or dismissal of African culture. British 19th century colonists around 4,000 miles further south, in what they called Rhodesia, blindly insisted that the massive hilltop buildings of Great Zimbabwe couldn’t possibly have been erected by “the locals”. Some of them even preposterously attributed that gigantic fortress to long-distance adventures by ancient Jewish or Egyptian architects.
But today in the here and now, what powerful claims on our attention the Met’s spectacular selection of items produced by Nigeriens, Malians, Senegalese, and Mauritanians are exerting. Right from the outset, as visitors enter the dedicated space on the Met’s ground floor (accessed from between the ranks of familiar, classical Greek statues, pointedly enough) our gaze is instantly arrested by a three-ton megalith from the eighth century (right), a monumental representation in carved rock of a harp-like African lyre, on loan from Dakar in Senegal. The French-speaking Senegalese archeology professor who is the standing-stone’s permanent custodian described its emplacement in New York – after an almost superhuman feat of curatorial telekinesis, it seems – as “Formidable!”
In utter contrast is an intricate, filigreed gold-working evident in an exquisite 12th or 13th century chest-decoration, or pectoral – just over seven inches in diameter (top of page). It was excavated along with 5 tiny, equally beautiful gold beads in Rao, also in Senegal. The area would then have been on the cusp of two successive empires, Ancient Ghana (circa 300–1200) and Mali (circa 1230–1600). The gold pieces had originally been placed in a burial tumulus, a fact that reflects the complex, ambivalent – and sometimes warring – relations that the region’s largely animist indigenous peoples developed with the incoming religion of Islam. Such decidedly pre-Islamic practices as erecting tumuli to honor important dead people continued long after Islam’s arrival in the late 7th century and its later widespread adoption.
THE EXHIBITION AS A WHOLE as a whole embraces visual art and sculpture in wood, stone and fired clay … artifacts in bronze and other cast metal as well as gold … woven and dyed textiles … illuminated manuscripts … and even architecture, epic poetry and music.
Architecture is represented in panoramic photography, plus a striking video of the truly vast Great Mosque of Jenne, in Mali. That wildly idiosyncratic edifice, made entirely of banco (the Sahelian equivalent of adobe) undergoes a necessary re-surfacing every year, because of degradation inflicted by seasonal rains – and thousands of ordinary citizens (left) join in the effort. It’s an exuberant example of a society that makes a powerful virtue out of impermanence.
It’s sad and ironic that such a rich cultural legacy emanates from a region known these days more for its instability than its creativity. Archeological digs, for instance, are now virtually abandoned across much of the Sahel because of security concerns, mostly the result of violent jihadist attacks. Too typically, in line with the Western world’s limited view of the territory, my own experience there as a reporter has been restricted to covering on television a distinctly shaky peace treaty between viciously warring factions in Niger.
The delights, on the other hand, of this current show are underpinned musically with a looped acoustic duet, relayed non-intrusively over loudspeakers and recorded by kora-players Toumani Diabaté and Ballaké Sissoko. And at at the celebratory preview I’m glad to report there was a stirring live performance by master kora-player Yacouba Sissoko (no relation to Ballaké) and his trio, in the august Euro-setting of the Met’s Petrie Court (below) alongside an 18th century French sculpture representing the element of Fire.
Sahel: Art and Empires on the Shores of the Sahara © The Metropolitan Museum of Art 2020 Installation views photography by Anna-Marie Kellen
