Reviewer: Kofi Akosah-Sarpong in Ottawa, Canada

One of the troubles of colonialism is that it demeaned the locals’ art and craft, sometimes steals them, or appropriate without giving credit to their source. Since Africa in contact with Western world this has been the case. Italian portraitist Pablo Picasso even borrowed heavily from Africa, and others have done so unknown to local African artists. But as mass communication boom and negative propaganda against Africa exposed, such deliberate wrongs are coming in the open.

This book, in a way, set to tell us that African art, despite the colonialists encounter, is progressing—sometimes unknown to the larger public. As the blurb at the back of the book tell us, "This pioneering history examines the major themes and accomplishments in African art from the past fifty years, achieving an impressive balance between the critical re-examination of frequently discussed artists, groups workshops and the introduction of less publicized or more recent material. Postcolonial art in Africa has built seamlessly upon already existing structures in which the older, pre-colonial and colonial genres of African art were made.

"It is in this sense, and in the habits and attitudes of artists towards making art, rather than in any adherence to a particular style, medium, technique, or thematic range, that the art is recognizably ‘African." Beginning in the early 1950s, the transformations in patronage, training and literacy brought about the birth of new genres which have been propelled onto a world stage."

Unlike other published works on African art, such as Frank Willett’s African Art: an Introduction, this glossy book is organized around more limited time frame—1950s to the 1990s—and broader artistic geography. It also has the artist as the focus and the process of artmaking, as are patrons who have been bringing African artist to the world stage. He recognizes that the 20^th century and the advent of colonialism disrupted traditional African institutions such as art. "It has been commonplace to treat this period as a time of decline and disintegration in traditional arts, but this book assumes that even as old forms of art patronage that served indigenous authority were being suppressed, new avenues of artistic expression were opening up," argued Kasfir.

Kasfir’s major concern is with today’s African art, but he is quick to note that today’s African art cannot be separated from pre-colonial traditional art forms and artistic practices, which have been transformed by the colonial intrusion. But in all cases, as the chapters demonstrate, the author allows African artists to speak for themselves.

From flipping through the various paintings, drawings, sculptures and other African artistic works in this book, one is bound to ponder how the degree of breath that has gone into covering the continent as culture diverse as Africa. Writes the author, "While colonialism and post-colonial state-building have attempted to weave eight hundred or more language groups into fifty-plus national identities, there is still a major problem in trying to write about the art in the second half of the twentieth century in so broad region." For this reason, recent studies have tried to deal with this problem. Some have focused on seven or eight best-known workshops or by dividing Africa’s recent art forms into categories based mainly on patrons for the African art is made rather than on history or geography.

Also, recently others have selected 60 African artists from all over the continent and divided them into 3 groups: "Territory," "Frontier," and "World," according to the artist’s scope of vision. But, yet still, others rejected any categorization all together. However, despite the good intensions of all these patrons, they are all non-Africans attempting to categorize African art. The reason is that most African artist depends on foreign or local European patronage.

Kasfir grapples whether African art is post-modern as it is post-colonial. He comes out that, "it is neither postcolonial nor postmodern." Is there new art map of Africa? Kasfir says yes! This is despite the demonstration that while the sculpture-producing regions of West and Central Africa continue to copy or revise older forms, new African art forms have sprang from elsewhere. Still, while the old types came from social order of kingship-centred based on traditional patterns of authority, the new ones occur in urban contexts, fuelled by emerging class structure.

The new African art forms are being produced in two categories—cities and several regions in Africa, which have not being major sites of pre-colonial image-making. Zimbabwe, Senegal, South Africa, Kenya and Uganda are major locales for the production of new forms. On the other hand, Mali, Nigeria, Sierra Leone, Cote d’Ivoire and the Congo continue to produce traditional sculpture—mask and figures—some for local use and world market. The later countries, too, produce new art but within the hybrid of the older forms. Examples are: John Goba’s (b. 1944) well-known Ode-lay masks paint-store pigments and porcupine quills—used by the Ode-lay society, in masquerades in the 1970s in urban Freetown—to the sophisticated reworking of adinkra (hand-stamped Akan funeral cloth) and kente (strip-woven Akan royal cloth) designs in the relief pieces of Ghanaian sculpture, El Anatsui.

Readers will read about such giant African artists like Mali’s Seydou Keita, Ghana’s El Anatsui, the Democratic Republic of the Congo’s Tshibumba Kanda-Matulu, Sierra Leone’s John Goba, and many more. The book reveals that one of the reason why Africa is still on course, despite the wailing and mayhem, is most of these artists as well as the unknown ones, are unrecognized therapists of Africa: helping to sooth the much troubled African soul. This is a must read and a textbook for African schools, more in the era of the African Renaissance process, which attempts to revive the Africa culture as the key to the continent’s reconstruction.