Highlighting the Contributions of Africans to the Arts

Charged with the statutory responsibility of directing attention to matters of concern to Black and African peoples across the world, the Centre for Black and African Arts and Civilisation, CBAAC, recently held a public lecture to highlight the contributions of Africans to the Arts during the commemoration of Black History Month Celebration. Chiemelie Ezeobi reports 

Last month was the 2023 Black History Month Celebration and to commemorate it, the Centre for Black and African Arts and Civilisation (CBAAC), recently organised a public lecture at the ICT Main Conference Hall of Obafemi Awolowo University (OAU), Ile-Ife, Osun State. 

Themed “The Contributions of Africans to the Arts”, the event was chaired by Professor Michael Olufemi Awodiran with the guest lecturer as the Director of the Institute of Cultural Studies. Professor Gbenga Fasiku.

CBAAC as Viable Platform 

In her speech, the Director General of CBAAC, Hon. Oluwabunmi Ayobami Amao, said over the years, “as part of our statutory responsibility, the Centre for Black and African Arts and Civilisation has used the platform to direct attention to matters of concern to Black and African peoples across the world. 

“By the same token, we have also carefully instituted this event to celebrate and appreciate Black and African history, as well as re-echo the giant strides of Africans over forces of domination, discrimination and exploitation.”

Annual Black History Month

 Black History Month celebration began in the United States as Negro History Week and was instituted by the renowned African American historian, Dr. Carter Godson Woodson. The sole aim was to protest the exclusion of the contributions of African Americans from history textbooks in the United States.

Since it began nearly a Century ago, the celebration of the Black History Month has grown and gained global acceptance.

According to Hon. Amao, “Our celebration of the Black History Month is also geared towards showcasing to the world the tremendous contributions of Black people to world civilisation. It is against this backdrop that we have carefully chosen the theme of this year’s celebration to be “The contributions of Africans to the Arts”.

“I had the opportunity of watching the performance of one of Africa’s finest pop musicians called Rema at the World largest football Award ceremony, the 2023 Ballon d’or and indeed it was a very proud moment for me as an African and a Nigerian. I watched with admiration how Rema held his audience spellbound at this prestigious event. 

“Indeed, this was a typical example of the contributions of Africans in the area of Music and it is little wonder, that many believe music is Africa’s and Nigeria’s biggest export in the creative industry.

“Just like in the sciences and engineering, black Africa has made giant strides in the arts and its different facets such as Music, Literature, Fashion, Filmmaking, Performing Arts and many others in the modern world and it is only right that we continue to recognise, celebrate and honour Africans who have made significant contributions not just in the arts but the various facets of live.”

Advocacy for Children to Take Pride in Black Identity 

On why children were in the audience , the DG said it was deliberate because they are the leaders of tomorrow, which was why they needed to be part of the conversation. 

“By this, we have undertaken to use this platform for advocacy to our children to take pride in their Africanness and Black Identity as well as to bring to their consciousness that their African identity is never a limitation to what they can achieve and become in life. 

“We would also listen to them speak to us on what Black History Month means to them. The initiative behind this is for the children to begin to acquaint themselves with African History,” she added.

Metamorphosis of Black History Month 

In his paper on The Contributions of Africans to the Arts, Prof. Gbenga Fasiku, said what is today celebrated as the Black History Month metamorphosed from the activities of a group named Association for the Study of Negro Life and History (ASNLH) formed in 1915 after the abolition of slave trade in the United States of America by the son of a slave, Carter G. Woodson, who was privileged to be trained in Harvard University. 

“The organisation is now known as Association for the Study of African American Life and History (ASALH). One of the aims of the Association was to research and promote achievements of Black Americans and other peoples of African descent. 

“In 1926, the Association chose the second week of the month of February to celebrate what was called National Negro Week. This developed into African American History Month, and in 1976 it was recognised by the 38th President of the United State of America, Gerald Ford, who officially designated the month of February as the Black History Month.

” The event, which was originally an opportunity to  present the visible accomplishments of the black in every areas of human endeavour with a deserved honour, has developed into a big global movement, the annual event of which is marked by organisations and institutions all over the world.”

Commending CBAAC for the role its playing, he said: “Noteworthy is the fact that CBAAC has always been in the front role of celebration of the African exploits all over the world. That we are gathered here attests to the fact that CBAAC is not left behind in this movement of acknowledging the important roles of Africans in history.

“What occupies the central theme of The Black History Month in 2023 is Black Resistance, and this is aimed at exploring how “African Americans have resisted historic and ongoing oppression, in all forms, especially the racial terrorism of lynching, racial pogroms and police killings,”  which has now become a global affair. Also, as earlier noted, many organisations and institutions devout their resources to marking this important month every year. 

“One of such is The Black History Magazine whose theme for the 2023 celebration of the Black History Month is “Celebrating Our Sisters.” This theme was carefully chosen in order to honour African girls, ladies and women, whose contributions had been ignored, whose ideas had been appropriated, and whose voices silenced. 

“The Magazine is also aimed to “highlight the crucial role that black women have played in shaping history, inspiring change, and building communities.” This resonates with CBAAC’s theme, namely “The Africans Contributions to the Arts”, which is apparently to bring to the fore the contributions of Africans to the development of the arts, that may have been ignored, appropriated, and silenced.”

The Origin and Foundation of African Arts

Africans a have rich legacy of artistic creativity, the professor said. ‘This can be seen in various works of arts discovered and dated by archeologists on African continent.

” The source of the ideas that inform the forms and contents of these arts is the African soul. In African metaphysical understanding of a human being, the soul is an embodied element. The African soul is embedded with external elements such as other minds, other bodies, environmental factors and entities play causal and constitutive roles in defining the essential nature of the soul. 

“There is a deep sense of relationship between the Africans’ soul and the environment that defines and explains their cosmology and cosmogony. It is the kind of bi-directional relationship that defines the idea of being an African, “that is, to live, to exist, to be alive or active in a geographical space called Africa through the agency of its present participle, being.” 

“It is this sense of being that is emotionally represented and projected in the works of African architect, fine artist, craft maker, musician, dancer, fashion designer, etc. This is why, Leopold Sedar Senghor, the first president of Senegal, sees “the critical standards of African art as originating from the nature of the black soul, and the black soul as originating from the environment that gave it life.” 

Therefore, it is safe to argue that an African artist derives inspirations from the nature and nurture of his environment. To stress the same point, the African souls, which explains to us the African art, religion and society “is deeply steeped in its surroundings: in the primitively pure light that crosses the savanna, and in the far reaches of the forest, where civilisations are born. It is steeped in this raw and scrutinising light that brings out the essential and the essence of things, or in this climate whose fierceness both exalts and sub-dues.” 

“Since African natural and social environment present unique entities and properties, so are the African arts in every sense of the word, “which do not exclude the fields of history, archaeology, anthropology, performance (drama, music, dance, fashion), literature, politics and, perhaps, statistics”. 

“Presenting it more succinctly, it is noted that the African “music, like sculpture and dance, is enrooted in the nourishing soil. It is filled with rhythms, sounds and noises of the earth. That is not to say that it is descriptive or impressionistic. It also conveys sentiment, though it is not sentimental. It brings the necessary lifeblood to a Western music that is diminished by its foundation and its reliance on rules that are abstract and often too rigid.” 

“Thus, from the inner mind of an African artist, oozes his sculptures, paintings, drawings, dances, music, etc to depict the true essence of an African environment, vegetation, animals, social relations, etc.”

He added that what could be categorised as another foundation of African arts is the distinctive culture of Africa. “As I argued elsewhere, culture is understood as a complex phenomenon, which is embedded in both visible and invisible elements… They are the beliefs, traditions, convictions, knowledge, etc formed in the mind of a people, about who they are, and their essence. The empirical visible elements of culture are some behavioural and social patterns with which a people are, in an ostensive and unique way, distinguished and recognised.

” I have argued that the invisible elements of culture are the basis of the visible elements. It means, therefore, that the forms and contents of behavioural patterns, social organisations, artistic expressions are informed by the invisible elements of culture. In Africa, as noted by Bewaji, African arts are merely expressions of the invisible elements of African cultures.

” This explains why for the Africans, “the essential function of sculpture is to represent the Ancestors and spirits with statues that are both symbolic and a receptacle. The idea is to capture, to feel their individual soul as a clear form of will, to reach the surreal through human representation, specifically through the representation of the human form, the most accurate reflection of the soul”. 

“In other words, for the Africans, the nature and essence of the art is that it is neither a game, nor a pure aesthetic delight, but it signifies something beyond what is empirically displayed. Thus, the masks of egungun of the Yoruba are not just carved images, they signifies some beliefs, ideas, feelings, etc about the ancestors, which are revered and celebrated. “

African Contributions to the Arts

Africa is a continent of numerous cultures and possibilities, spread across 54 countries that covers an area larger than China, Europe, India and the United States combined. The contributions to the arts from this gigantic continent would involve enormous flows from diverse confluences of ideas and activities culminating in forming and understanding of shared historical connectedness, identities and prides of true Africa.  Monica Blackmun Visonà in her 2017 “Gifts from Our Elders” quoted Arnold Rubin as saying that “Africanist art historians would overturn entrenched paradigms and revolutionize the study of art.” I make bold to say that this prophesy of Arnold Rubin has been fulfilled. From the African contributions to global music, which reverberates and “pulses in the packed stadiums of London or New York, where African musicians like Burna Boy, Davido, Ashake, etc, are storming the world of pop” with excitements; the popularity of the African movies outside the shore of Africa; the center place of African fashion all over the globe; the intellectual legacies of African writers such as Wole Soyinka, Chinua Achebe, Chimamanda Adichie (all from Nigeria), all testify to the unstoppable revolution as projected by Arnold Rubin. In fact, describing Africa as a cultural powerhouse, Declan Walsh of the New York Times, in October 28th edition of the Magazine, gave an elaborate account of the exploits of African in the arts industry, which is fully reproduced here as follow: 

When the Nigerian star Burna Boy stepped out before an adoring crowd at New York’s Citi Field this summer, he confirmed himself as pop royalty. Weeks earlier, in London, he had filled an 80,000-capacity venue. In New York, he became the first African artist to sell out an American stadium. He sang his new single, “Sittin’ on Top of the World.” It was yet another milestone for Afrobeats, a West African musical genre that is becoming a global sensation. Afrobeats songs were streamed over 13 billion times on Spotify last year, up from eight billion in 2021; the genre’s biggest hit, Rema’s “Calm Down,” was a fan phenomenon at the soccer World Cup in Qatar. Countless TikTok dance challenges were born. “It’s a great time to be alive,” said Laolu Senbanjo, a Nigerian artist living in Brooklyn. “Whether I’m in Target or an Uber, I hear the Afrobeats. It’s like a bridge. The world has come together.” African artists seemed to be on red carpets everywhere this year — at the Grammy Awards, which added a new category for Best African Music; at the Met Gala, where the Nigerian singer Tems (Temilade Openiyi) came fringed in ostrich feathers; and at the Cannes Film Festival, where a young French-Senegalese director, Ramata-Toulaye Sy, was a breakout star. African fashion had its own shows in Paris and Milan. In Venice, Africa is the focus of this year’s Architectural Biennale. Last year, an architect from Burkina Faso won the prestigious Pritzker Prize. In 2021, Tanzania-born Abdulrazak Gurnah won the Nobel Prize in Literature. “Africa’s not just one place,” he said in an interview. “It’s complicated and complex; differentiated, contrasted.” Long viewed in the West as a niche interest — or worse, exotica — African culture has become the continent’s soft power, and, increasingly, a source of hard cash. The world’s fastest growing music market is in sub-Saharan Africa, according to the main industry body. By 2030, Africa’s film and music industries could be worth $20 billion and create 20 million jobs, according to UNESCO estimates. Young Africans are honing their talents, sensing an opening.

He continues:

Scriptwriters and animators are shaking off the clichéd image of a continent defined by famine and conflict to tell new stories — frothy reality shows, gritty gangster tales and even children’s cartoons, made in Africa by Africans, that have aired on streaming services like Disney+ and Amazon Prime. This summer, “Supa Team Four,” a cartoon series about teenage superheroes from Zambia who save the world, aired on Netflix. The theme is power — girl power, teen power but also plain electricity: The chief villain tries to knock out the city power grid. Malenga Mulendema, the show’s creator, worked with a team across six African countries, and said that the movie “Black Panther,” when it came out in 2018, “paved the way” for new depictions of Africa. “People want to box us in,” she said. “But when you have multiple shows like this you can’t box in, anymore, what it means to tell an African story.” The commercial potential of Africa’s cultural might is only starting to be realized. Netflix has spent $175 million in Africa since 2016, but has plans to invest $2.5 billion in South Korea. It was not until 2004 that a work by an African artist sold for over $1 million at auction, according to Hannah O’Leary, the head of modern and contemporary African art at Sotheby’s. Since then, another 11 have passed that bar‌. “But the market is still hugely under-realized,” she said. Foreign companies are looking to cash in. This year gamma, a music company owned in part by Apple, set up an office in Lagos, hoping to discover the next Burna Boy, or even a host of smaller stars. “We’re going straight to the source,” said Sipho Dlamini, a gamma executive. Born in Zimbabwe but raised in Watford, outside London, in the 1980s, Mr. Dlamini remembers being bullied because of his background. “We were called names,” he said. “All kinds of names.” Now, “African” is a badge of pride. “Historically, the image was what people saw on TV: kids starving, kwashiorkor and flies,” he said, referring to a severe form of malnutrition marked by a swollen belly. “Now they will tell you they are dying to come to Cape Town, to Mombasa, to Zanzibar. It’s cool to be African.” 

The above provides a lengthy but an executive summary of the array of contributions coming from the Africanists, it is indeed correct to assert that Africa has reshaped (and are still reshaping) the narrative of art history over the last fifty years and brought novel, interdisciplinary, Africa-centered approaches. All these have changed the face of global arts as we used to know it.

The African Arts and African Identity

He went further to shed light on African arts and identity. The guest lecturer said one of the features defining the identity of a people is an intellectual consciousness derived from elements of cultural knowledge that are shared in common. 

Quoting Felix Olatunji, he said: ‘the understanding of cultural knowledge in Africa is rooted in the belief system of the people, … which binds the culture together and anchors individuals firmly within as it guides actions and molds institutions of the society. It (belief system) also gives a cohesive view of the world and serves to integrate the various parts of the culture in forms of cosmology, values, myths and rituals”, and to this list I would add, arts. 

“This belief system, as earlier argued, is a part of the mental element of the people’s culture; which is also the basis of cultural consciousness of the people; it is what is now manifested in every identifiable elements of culture, which are consciously invented, scripted and structured as empirical evidence of their identity…

 “This explains the peculiar arts of the African, which are distinctively displayed in sculptures, music, dance, fashions, drama, food, etc. Notwithstanding the drive for civilisation and urbanisation of the African cities, towns and villages, the African arts remains as the symbols of African identity that distinguish Africa from the rest of the world.

” It is instructive to note that African arts play a dual roles, first, it serve as a source of aesthetic pleasure to the artists; and second, as expressions of the artists’ inner being, that represent the African’s shared identity. Therefore, African sculptures are distinctively or peculiarly African, because they represent the soul of Africa.”

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Our celebration of the Black History Month is also geared towards showcasing to the world the tremendous contributions of Black people to world civilisation