Visual Presence and Competition in Urban Africa

Notes

• Studies in art history show a tendency to adopt the first perspective and concentrate on the individual artist. Anthropological studies more often adopt the second perspective and focus on societal creativity. Compare, for instance, André Magnin, ed., Arts of Africa: Jean Pigozzi's Contemporary Collection (Milan: Skira, 2005) with Bogumil Jewsiewicki and Barbara Plankensteiner, An/Sichten: Malerei aus dem Kongo 1990–2000 (Wien: Springer, 2001).
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• Here I adopt W. J. T. Mitchell's distinction of pictures as visual, often material manifestations, from images as mental representations. W.J.T. Mitchell, Picture Theory: Essays on Verbal and Visual Representation (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994).
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• I understand visual culture in a wide sense as everything that is seen, that is produced to be seen, and the way it is seen. See the comparative discussion of approaches in Margaret Dikovitskaya, Visual Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006).
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• According to the 2007 edition of the Encyclopedia Britannica, Bamenda has 298,500 inhabitants. http://www.citypopulation.de/Cameroon.html estimates its population at 316,100 inhabitants [10 October 2007].
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• There are no recent statistics for Korhogo. According to http://www.citypopulation.de/CotedIvoire.html, it had 142,093 inhabitants in 1998 [10 October 2007].
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• This number is based on an initiative to establish a professional association of painters in Bamenda. Four other workshops were not included as they did not produce any figurative arts. These four workshops produced only script for banners and signboards.
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• Yamoussoukro is the natal village of the former president Félix Houphouet-Boigny, the “founding father” of the Ivorian nation. During the thirty-three years of his reign, the village grew into an administrative center with many imposing buildings, among them the basilique de la paix, a catholic cathedral nearly the size of St. Peter's in Rome.
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• See my description of the 1992 festival in Zerrissene Entfaltung: Alltag, Ritual und künstlerische Ausdrucksformen im Norden der Côte d'Ivoire (Köln: Köppe, 1997), 559–564.
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• I have no explicit information on the reasons, but I guess it is because of the investments one has to engage in before receiving a reasonable amount of money. Most painters I met would not have been able to pay on a regular basis when starting a new workshop in such a city. They could do a month or two without selling anything.
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• This was out of eight painters with whom I worked during the 1990s. My selection is not representative, for I was looking for painters who actually had some kind of knowledge of the international art world and modern art in general.
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• In his introduction to the catalogue for the Africa Remix show, Simon Njami writes that he met, “numerous African artists who say they never want to leave their native land.” Simon Njami et al.., eds., Africa Remix (London: Hayward Gallery, 2005), 18. Unfortunately, Njami does not base his statement on any empirical inquiry. He probably refers to his overall impression. His statements do not fit my own findings. However, my fieldwork data might be slightly biased because of the difficult historical and economic situation of both countries: Cameroon is more or less paralyzed by a presidency that most of my interlocutors described as oppressive and corrupt, while Côte d'Ivoire was, in the late 1990s, in a very similar situation until the overt breakout of the crisis around 2000. The general climate in both countries was or still is one of deception and disappointment by the politicians, a situation that pushed many people to look for better opportunities elsewhere.
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• A typical genre painting in Bamenda as well as in Korhogo was, “The village on the river in the days of old.” This type of painting seems to be part of a wider African bourgeois culture. For the Congo, compare Johannes Fabian's writing on the work of Tshibumba Kanda Matulu and other popular artists, in Remembering the Present: Painting and Popular History in Zaire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996), 17.
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• Martin Dah' Ndah' attended boarding school from 1948 to 1958 (his information, 2002). At least one of his teachers was British, and it appears that he had been the one to discover Martin's talent.
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• The drawings were published as postcards and promoted under the heading Kinderkirche (Children's Church). The connotation of “childish” art is also addressed at http://home.t-online.de/home/kinderkirche/kamerun_in_frame.htm [30 July 2003]. The money collected was for “Kinder in der Sonntagsschule in Kamerun,” but not for the artist (who complained about not getting any fees for the reproductions).
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• Personal communication, December 2002. Information on Fanta's personal style was collected between January 2001 and November 2005.
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• More research needs to be done on this topic. Most bourgeois paintings are owned by the customers, who display them in their own living rooms or in their offices. It is an art confined to private rooms, which makes it difficult to access the pictures.
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• Susan Vogel, ed., Africa Explores (New York: Museum for African Art, 1991). See also, Till Förster, “Figuration et publicité. La figuration et les enseignes publicitaires,” in N'Gone Fall and Jean Loup Pivin, eds., Anthologie de l'Art Africain du XX^e siècle (Paris: Éditions Revue Noire, 2001).
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• Bennetta Jules-Rosette, The Messages of Tourist Art: An African Semiotic System in Comparative Perspective (New York: Plenum Press, 1984); Bennetta Jules-Rosette, “Rethinking the Popular Arts in Africa,” in African Studies Review 30, 3 (1987); and Karin Barber, ed., Readings in African Popular Culture (London: The International African Institute, 1997).
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• Unfortunately, I lost contact with Soro in the late 1990s, before I could inquire into more details of his work. At the time of the 1999 coup d'etat, he no longer lived in Korhogo.
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• It should be kept in mind that Mamadou said this some time before the coup of December 1999.
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• “Les gens ne regardent plus comme avant.”
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• These “clubs” are small cinemas, normally not bigger than an ordinary living room, and equipped solely with a VCR and a TV set. Compare Till Förster, “The Act and Art of Seeing Visual Media in West Africa: TV and Video in Northern Côte d'Ivoire,” in Film International 5, 4 (2007).
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• “Tu peux pas simplement peintre ce que tu vois. C'est trop simple. Tu n'allais pas attirer quelqu'un. Tu peux plus faire ça comme avant.” Here and below are all literal citations from personal conversations in 1998 and 1999.
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• “Il te faut prendre en compte ce que les gens vont voire à côté, imaginer comment ton tableau sera dans l'environnement que ton client a choisi pour ton travail. Il faut que tu lui donnes quelque chose à regarder. C'est comme un repas. Un bon image te dit: viens manger!”
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• “Il te faut aussi penser à ce que les gens voient sur l'écran. Il serait bon si nos tableaux pourraient bouger comme les choses là—mêmes parler!”
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• “On ne joue pas ici. C'est très sérieux. On ne joue pas s'il faut gagner sa vie.”
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• The period to cover by such qualitative methods is probably a question of debate. One might be able to cover three or four decades, that is, the era of postcolonial society. However, there is good reason to be more pessimistic for the longue durée.
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• Johannes Fabian, Moments of Freedom: Anthropology and Popular Culture (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1998), 17.
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