African Art

The vision of African art and handicraft as a product of a primitive and elementary society, translated in culturally rooted western stereotypes, has supplied support and justification, reaching  recent times, to the simple antiquarian value of the single objects, stripping it of every recall to history and relegating the social-cultural and religious aspects of the various ethnics to traditional circles to which they belong. Only recent more arranged studies tend to re-ordinate the values of this art, trying to re-establish the threads, intentionally broken, with an intricate historical canvas that sends back to the kaleidoscope of ethnics that have produced it, many of which rapidly in extinction.

Thus with effort the ancient history of Ife, XIII-XV century, is recreated, from which the Yoruba and the Benin Kingdom ethnics descend, created from this ethnic from the XV century in a wide territory today comprised between Nigeria and Benin. Organized on social chastes, of which the dominant ones were those of the knights and of the dignitaries of court and on the supreme authority of the king, often represented in statues and bronzee plaques that adorned the royal palace, exalting the divine ancestries, these reigns were at their apex between the XVII and XVII century, on the commerce of the slaves with the Portugueses, Spanish and English, who controlled the coasts even with fortresses like El Mina.

Matrilinear societies, in which the cult of fertility is widely diffused, are reminded by objects of the Ashanti of Ghana, producers of particular wood apotropaic statuettes, called A' kuamma, propitiatory of fecundity and known also for the production of objects connected to the commerce of gold, as testified by small zoomorphic weights and refined bronze spoons exhibited in the section.
On the chiefdom, the social organization, still widely diffused today, was based the small ethnics of D’Ngese of Congo, and in the scarcely known religious traditions the cult of the king seems to prevail, often represented by characteristic wooden statues loaded with elements possessing a symbolic value that exalts the supremacy of the monarch.

And, although strongly touched by the Arab-Muslim culture, small agricultural-pastoral societies with a segmented apparatus are still present in sub-Saharan Africa, in which the shamanistic animistic role is still strong together with the role of the old people, to which the wise government of the various villages was entrusted, like near the Dogon of Mali, regulated by a superhuman world coming from sidereal spaces, of which the old people possess astonishing astronomical cognitions, that the western world acquired only in 1900's; and the Gouru of the Ivory Coast, that include elegant anthropomorphous tambour pulleys among their characteristic handicraft production.