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Heroes: Principles of African Greatness by Kevin D. Dumouchelle

2024; UCLA James S. Coleman African Studies Center; Volume: 57; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1162/afar_r_00758

1937-2108

Mark Auslander,

Leadership, Courage, and Heroism Studies

Conceived of in conjunction with the exhibition (2019-2022) of the same name at the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art, curator Kevin D. Dumouchelle's handsome book Heroes: Principles of African Greatness, is a significant stand-alone contribution to the popular study of African art (see Bourland 2021). This dynamic large-format volume reads diverse objects in NMAfA's collection through the concept of the heroic, sensitive to the tragic and contradictory dimensions of the concept of the Hero in African and global cultural repertoires. Although especially geared towards engaging teens and young people in African social and art history, the book is illuminating and thought-provoking for specialists and nonspecialists of all ages.In many respects, the volume is an homage to the grand tradition of comics and graphic storytelling in twentieth century Africa, which creatively reworked the visual vocabularies of Anglo-American superhero comics, French graphic novels such as Tintin, and Japanese manga—in light of indigenous narrative aesthetics (often embedded in song and music) and anticolonial cultural politics. The overall tone is set by the catalogue's exuberant comic-style cover by the Brazilian graphic artist Butcher Billy (Fig. 1). Haitian revolutionary hero Toussaint Louverture, arms akimbo, is flanked by Black male and female figures breaking their chains, with silhouetted background images of uplifted arms, as rays radiate towards the viewer from the background. "Choose your own adventure," the banner text proclaims.As in many forms of African popular storytelling, the catalogue's recounting of epic and mythic history encourages reflection on the proximate challenges of coming of age and fashioning the self. The project equally emerges out of the political and cultural ferment of the #BlackLives-Matter moment, as museums have sought to recognize a long history of oppression directed against communities of African descent while also stimulating a sense of creative optimism in younger generations embedded in a new era of hip-hop-savvy street protest. The medium is the message here: bright colors, flashy imagery, comic book-style fonts, and commentary in the style of LP record liner notes evoke what Robert Farris Thompson (1973) dubbed an "aesthetic of the cool," a distinctive pan-African sensibility that is polyrhythmic, highly immersive, and predicated on the free-flowing circulation of intersubjective experience and energies between audience, artist, and performer. Dumochelle cleverly integrates the familiar genre of the art catalogue with the look and feel of a graphic novel, recalling the dynamism of superhero comics series. The book also has the look and feel of some of the greatest African and diasporic musical albums, from Fela Anikulapo-Kuti's Black President and King Sunny Ade's Juju to Bob Marley and the Wailer's Exodus. Appropriately, the volume is presented in conjunction with an irresistible musical playlist, available on Spotify, YouTube, and Apple Music, all integrated into a dynamic multimedia platform on the africa.si.edu website: https://africa.si.edu/exhibitions/current-exhibitions/heroes-principles-of-african-greatness/The pivotal art work in the book, as in the exhibition, is Ousmane Sow's monumental sculpture, Toussaint Louverture et la vielle esclave (1989) (Fig. 2), in which the standing revolutionary male hero gives comfort to a kneeling newly liberated older woman. Dumochelle writes that the entire project emerged through his desire to bring back on display within the museum Ousmane Sow's towering rendition of Louverture, in conversation with several old and new works in the collection. Sow's vision of upright African-descended dignity resonated for Dumouchelle with Bob Marley's lyrics "Get up! Stand up!"—a kind of global anthem of Black self-affirmation, and spoke to the curator's personal background in public diplomacy and community-based activism. The Louverture figure, echoed on the book's cover, is equally intertwined with the text's celebration of anticolonial theorist Franz Fanon, foundational to Black Consciousness, for whom heroic revolutionary violence might catalyze self-realization among previously colonized peoples.To be sure, for many viewers Sow's sculpture uncomfortably reproduces a patriarchal spectacle of masculine domination over a dependent female and echoes a classic trope in which historical agency is focused on a few (generally male) heroic individuals while the masses (including women) are relegated to being acted upon by History. In the project's defense, it should be noted that the Louverture image is primarily a jumping off point for Dumouchelle and that he develops the concept of "the heroic" to extend far beyond singular individuals as the deciding fulcrum of history; rather, the heroic here is a common heritage bequeathed to all humankind, to be mobilized creatively at moments of challenge, injustice, and crisis.In so doing, Dumouchelle deftly evokes the cosmological and ritual dimensions of leadership in diverse African societies, in which the sovereign embodies a kind of living portal between the visible world of mortals and the invisible world of the Dead and the hidden powers. The museum's soaring Benin odudua mask inaugurates the book's fourth section, which explores the motif of the ancestral grove, in which the Living and the Dead collaborate to reproduce future generations. El Anatsui's relatively early figurative The Ancestors Converged Again (1995), which, the artist notes, can be rearranged each time it is newly installed, evokes the endlessly fluid functions of the ancestral Dead, when called upon in changing circumstances.Notably, Dumouchelle's curatorial vision is not limited to the life-sustaining function of the Dead in conventional models of the social order. The book's opening work, paired with Ousmane Sow's sculptural homage to revolutionary antislavery leader Toussaint Louverture, is coffin-maker Paa Joe's haunting large-scale model of Fort William-Anomabu, the notorious site of no return for innumerable victims of the Atlantic slave trade. A vast symbolic coffin, the sculpture arguably functions as a ritualized ancestral womb world, out of which millions of heirs of the Middle Passage were historically birthed. In turn, the martyred women's rights activist Funmilayo-Ransome Kuti, murdered at her son Fela Kuti's compound when raided by the Nigerian military regime, is honored midway through the book, along with her son's famous dirge for his mother and the tortured body politic of the nation, "Coffin for Head State": "Them kill my mama / So I carry the coffin."Indeed, taken as a whole, the project embodies what might be thought of as the diarchic, gender-integrated cosmology of leadership in African societies, in which male and female principles of sovereignty are inextricably interwoven. Throughout the book, we encounter juxtaposed imagery of masculine and feminine agency. The Edo ododua mask is followed by an Akan nsodia commemorative feminine head and memorial sculpture that could be read as evocative of such figures as the queen mother Asantewaa, who led Asante anticolonial resistance to British occupation. Liner notes on the martyred Ken Saro-Wiwa of Ogoniland are followed by a striking wooden female figure, likely an Urhobo Edjo ancestress figurine, honoring powerful women in the history of Nigeria's Delta region. In a similar vein, Gora Mbengue's glass painting of Sheikh Amodou Bamba, the anticolonial Sufi founder of the Senegalese Mouride brotherhood, is followed by Ghada Amer's polished steel The Blue Bra Girls (2012), celebrating women activists in the 2012 Tarhir Square protests against the repressive military regime in Cairo. Male-oriented visual celebrations of Ethiopian imperial rule, in turn, are paired with the Queen of Sheba. (Even Ousmane Sow's fraught sculpture of Louverture and the elderly woman could be read as embodying a principle of bigendered sovereignty, in which leadership of the nation depends on joint rule, classically shared between king and queen-mother.) The central unit of the volume, Section Five, is entirely devoted to "Women Warriors," linking classical works such as the collection's Kongo Phemba maternity figure to Liberian woman peace activist Leymah Gbowee and Sokari Douglas Camp's kinetic sculpture, Small Iriabo (Clapping Girl) (1987). The net effect is a liberatory vision of African cultural production and historical agency that cuts across conventional gendered dichotomies.I have only a few reservations about this exemplary volume, which is skillfully designed with high production values throughout. Overall, I was surprised by the relative paucity of African photographic art or African artists' books in the volume, rather puzzling given the exemplary collections in the museum's Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives and Warren M. Robbins Library. A chapter devoted to post-apartheid South Africa is strong in terms of liner notes on major South African political and cultural figures, but rather weak on art work per se, perhaps reflecting limitations in NMAfA's current collections. Two 1996 works by Willie Bester (Apartheid Laboratory and The Notorious Green Car) are painfully tragicomic. There are fine mid-1990s works by Kay Hassan and Sue Williamson, and a clever conceptual piece, Prison Sentences (2010) by William Boshoff. The chapter concludes with a 2018 acrylic and mixed media work by Dada Khanyisa, the youngest artist in the catalogue, which rightfully honors emergent LGBTQ+ artists. Yet, a reader unfamiliar with more recent South African art would get little sense of the extraordinary vibrancy and derring-do of the nation's art worlds over the past two decades. To take one example, a double page entry on Steve Biko lacks any of the potent art created in his memory: surely borrowed images of some of these important visual works could have been incorporated.A fascinating closing essay by Kevin Dumouchelle details the process through which the Heroes exhibition was conceived and developed. The overall project, he explains, was informed by the work of scholars such as David Friedberg and Alfred Gell, who have emphasized that the power of images, which far exceeds artists' initial intentionalities, is enmeshed is a complex historical choreography of endlessly shifting interpretations and political contestation. Works of art, in effect, take on complex lives and afterlives in often tumultuous new contexts. This graceful autobiographical commentary would serve as an excellent stand-alone reading in a museum studies course on contemporary postcolonial curatorial practice. (In hindsight, the chapter is also, if I might be permitted a plaintive aside, an elegy for the prematurely removed Heroes exhibition, which was unfortunately closed by NMAfA's former director during her short, controversial tenure at the museum.)Mirrors and reflective surfaces have a venerable history in African divinatory practice. At times embedded in mortuary and power figures, mirrors call upon the beholder to enter into revelatory dream worlds that may be destabilizing but which are, at the end of the day, deeply transformative. We glimpse puzzling images of those who have come before intermingled with fragmented refractions of our own visage, hinting at where we and our posterity might be headed. Such operations depend on degrees of didactic shock—in James Fernandez's felicitous phrase, on "edification through puzzlement." Holding open this large, engaging, and provocative volume in our hands is, I suggest, rather like holding up a large mirror, which calls us into the mythic dreamtime of African spiritualities and enduring struggles for collective liberation. As we page through these magnificent works of creative genius from across the Mother Continent and the Black Atlantic, we are given back a prophetic gift, seeing whom we, as individuals and as communities, might yet become.