In Senghor's Shadow: Art, Politics and the Avant-Garde in Senegal, 1960-1995

by Elizabeth Harney
Duke University Press, Durham NC, 2004
344 pp., illus. 78 b/w, 14 col. Paper, $26.95
ISBN: 9-8223-3395-3.

Reviewed by Michael R. (Mike) Mosher
Saginaw Valley State University

mosher@svsu.edu

Among the former French colonies of West Africa, Senegal had the advantage that the French colonial government assiduously trained a managerial and governing class before independence. Yet Senegal was also unique in that the new nation had an aesthetic vision behind it. A post-colonial artistic modernism was proposed and promoted by Léopold Sédar Senghor (1905-2001), independent Senegal's first president, in power from 1960 until 1980.

Negritude, a call and strategy for black artists from European colonies to celebrate their blackness, was first articulated in the 1930s by the poet Aimé Césaire of Martinique. Like Senghor, Césaire had studied in the Paris of the 1920s and 1930s where Caribbean, African, Asian and African American students all met. Césaire noted the city's enthusiasm for black artistry, as African artworks and motifs were influencing European artists, poets, dancers and composers (much as the Harlem Renaissance invigorated culture in New York). Senghor, an accomplished poet, was a major theorist of Negritude but with an African variant; his Africanité looked to the African continent's past more than Césaire did. While the Caribbean cosmopolite celebrated the diversity of black people, their experiences and creativity, the Senegalese African romanticized the essentialism of their unique "emotive" and "rhythmic" souls to contrast to dry European Cartesianism and the West.

Upon independence, this Africanist aesthetic served a nationalist function, energizing local artists and intellectuals, promoting unity and establishing a relationship between the new nation and the colonialist powers that were the capitals of the art market. The new nation offered support for artists, and president Senghor devoted 25-percent of the state budget to culture. He established art schools, a national museum, festivals and touring exhibitions. Africanité was agreeable to Pan-Africanism, and in 1966 the World Festival of Black Arts was held in Senegal’s capital city Dakar. At the new École de Dakar, professor Iba N'Diaye emphasized technical training and was skeptical that emphasis on Africanness wouldn't lead to dismissal of African artists as "noble savages". His colleague Papa Ibra Tall, though himself Paris-educated, discouraged all European influences on his students. Tall founded Senegal's national tapestry school, where works were produced by Badara Camara, Moussa Samb, Ibou Diouf, Samba Balde, Bakary Dieme, Amadou Dédé and Modou Niang.

Senghor's aesthetic philosophy also had its critics, including celebrated filmmaker Osumane Sembene (who also criticized his repression of political opponents). Some artists disliked the president's patronizing attitude––he called artists his cher enfants––as he bestowed patronage. Younger artists chafed under Senghor's definitions of acceptable art and found them reactionary. In the 1970s meetings among actors and artists at Dakar's Café Terrasse birthed the Laboratoire Agit-Art. Its leader, Issa Ramangelissa Samb, favored mixed media sculptures assemblages, studied and adopted ideas by Europeans Georgi Plekhanov and Anonin Artaud, and cited political events in southeast Asia and Latin America beyond Mother Africa. The Laboratoire Agit-Art deconstructed and restaged one epic Senghor poem as a comedy, as well as a Césaire work. They favored a street-level pop sensibility, works created with trash and commercial packing materials or bottle caps found in the marketplace. This American reviewer is reminded of New Yorkers, Claes Oldenburg and his Store in the early 1960s, and Jean-Michel Basquiat in the 1980s. Among Samb's graffiti-like painting was a Che Guevara portrait evincing black bloodlines and a confused expression.

El Hadji Moussa Babacar Sy often sold his paintings like stage backdrops on jute sacking material for the price of a full sack of rice. Sy created painted figurate "Skites" kites. Sy used his own footprint as a painting motif, much as did California painter Mike Henderson. To compare the Senegalese artists to American ones is not to say they are unfavorably derivative: It is to acknowledge that the Africans became full participants in a global dialogue. Sy and his friends, sculptor Aly Traoré and painter Moussa Tine, squatted in an abandoned military camp in downtown Dakar in 1977. Soon joined by actors and other performers, musicians, photographers, they named the camp Village des Arts. Sy established a gallery and meeting place there and called it TENQ, the Wolof word for articulation. Suspicious government officials began visiting in preparation for reclaiming the base, offering an unsuitable building in a suburb Colobane where some artists had settled. In September 1983 the Village des Arts was attacked by troops in tanks, the residents were evicted and many artworks and the Village archives destroyed.

Under president Diop the World Bank imposed strictures in the early 1980s that caused Senegal to cut support of health care, education, and street cleaning, diminishing the quality of life for most of the citizenry. Inspired by Youssou N'Dour's song "Set", and a Wolof word for clean and proper, an urban mural squad called Set Setal flourished in 1988 and 1989. Many of their painted walls resemble urban murals in the United States in the 1960s and early 1970s, imagery of power and resistance to slaveries, whether economic or spiritual. Set Setal murals depicted nationalist or historic content (including the slave trade at Gorée), civic campaigns combatting AIDS, diarrhea, dysentery and malaria, and portraits of Senghor or the second president Abdou Diouf. They also painted Mao and Lenin, religious figure Cheikh Amadou Bamba, prizefighters Assane Diouf and Manga 11, and Bob Marley, Jimi Hendrix, Mickey Mouse and Tintin. Critics of Senghor's cultural policies saw Set Setal murals as evidence that the younger generation were happy to incorporate world influences with African ones. The French Cultural Center, where Sy has painted a mural, was another enthusiastic supporter of Set Setal.

In the 1990s there have been impressive sculptures in wood and metal by Gubril André Diop (whose treelike "Ecology Sculpture" of 1995 employed recycled beverage cans) and Moustapha Dimé, who reconciles Islam with figuration in his studio in Gorée. There have been mixed media works by Djibril N'Diaye, figurative paintings by Sedou Barry and Ousmane Faye, and nonrepresentational paintings of Kan Si and Viyé Diba. Alpha Wouallid Diallo created history paintings from photographs of battles and events in the founding of the nation of Senegal. Pre-independence traditions of sous-verré glass painting have been revived by Germaine Anta Gaye. She has combined glass painting with wood or gold leaf, and used it to boldly celebrate signares, African women who had intercourse (business or sexual) with Portuguese traders in the fifteenth century.

International notice came early to Senegal's artists, and in the 1960s France's Minister of Culture André Malraux said the best of them "match the greatest European artists for stature". Mor Faye, a painter who died at 37 in 1984, was celebrated by New York critics as the great outsider, "a poor black Picasso," "a solitary medicine man". Sy, Samb and Souleyman Keita showed in London in 1995. Dak'Art, the international art bienniale, has been held in Dakar for over a decade.

This reviewer studied with the Africanist Perkins Foss (the first grad student of Robert Farris Thompson) and hungers for more investigations of contemporary African culture. In Senghor's Shadow is a subtle exploration of Senegal's artists, their motivations and their relations to the government's cultural policies. Elizabeth Harney presents the political contradictions inherent in national cultural policy, between encouragement of raw and provincial local talent versus rigorous training to world-class standards designed for the discourse of the world's cultural capitals. The book deals with the question of authenticity in a globalist age, the contradictions of the artists' support system, both private patronage and that of the former colonizer. The author has provided us with a satisfying study of one nation's cultural aims and artistic achievements.