From: Secrecy, African Art That Conceals and Reveals, Mary H. Nooter, "The Visual Language of Secrecy," 1993, Museum for African Art, N.Y.
Secrecy's Grammar
Art that signifies the secret does so according to a visual grammar. African artists working with secrecy turn to particular devices, notably coding, obscurity, accumulation, and containment - strategies that permit them simultaneously to suggest the presence of the secret and to camouflage it. As Georg Simmel writes, a secret always has two faces: the knowledge of its existence and its unknown content (1950).
The control of knowledge in Africa differs from that in the West. As Sarah Catherine Brett-Smith writes, "We (Westerners) write books to disseminate knowledge: the Bamana paint cloths to conceal knowledge" (1984:127). For the Bamana, the ability to obscure meaning is a communication skill. Knowledge can be dangerous; in the wrong hands, it can be used for personal gain, to the detriment of society as a whole. The liberal disclosure of knowledge is considered irresponsible. Joseph Nevadomsky writes, "Where knowledge is of absolutely crucial importance to the survival of the [Benin] kingdom and the well-being of its caretakers, secrecy is paramount and precautions against reckless revelation are uppermost" (1984:42).
The title of this chapter follows Beryl Bellman's phrase "the language of secrecy" to describe procedures - in Poro initiation and elsewhere - for disclosing the presence of concealed information without revealing the information itself (1984:50). The artworks illustrated here demonstrate how African artists have managed this paradox, which underlies the power of their work.
Coding
Secrets are often encoded in art through the graphic systems of design and pattern (Adams 1989:38) - through irregularities in a geometric scheme, say, or through abstractions of naturalistic motifs. Kuba raffia-pile cloths from Zaire and Bamana resist-dyed textiles from Mali, both made by women, codify secrets in their bold geometric forms. Actually, men and women cooperate to make Kuba textiles: men weave the cloth, women embroider the designs (Adams 1981:232). Both Bamana and Kuba women's exclusive knowledge of the signs' meanings may be a form of power, and a factor in gender relations and competition.
Masks for initiations often encode knowledge. Bwa plank masks, for example, dance in public to celebrate boys' initiation. To women and children, their geometric designs seem purely decorative. To initiates, the designs codify secrets: family histories, myths, moral lessons the initiate must learn. These brightly painted masks do not hide what they communicate: the receptor either finds the meaning, or does not.
Luba royal arts may hide secrets in their engraved patterns. The lukasa memory board, which mnemonically assists the recall of a constellation of facts about the Luba kingdom, is used and understood only by officials of a powerful secret association. Its triangular and lozenge-shaped patterning refers to secret knowledge. Encoding may be applied, incidentally, to practical lore as much as to esoterica: the lukasa concerns spirits, heroes, and kings, but he Bamana cloths may record, say, cures for illness.
Scarification is common on African sculpture. Clémentine M. Faïk-Nzuji has similarly analyzed Lulua figures of the type shown in cat. 18: she stresses that they must be examined as systems of language (1992:121). Allen F. Roberts points out hat among Tabwa and Luba peoples the verb "to scarify" also means "to draw, paint, or design" -and more recently "to write (1988a:41). In his essay below, Gary van Wyk relates writing to the geometric patterns on Sotho-Tswana houses.
Codification appears in graphic systems everywhere in Africa. Since 1904, among the Ejagham and related peoples, scholars have studied nsibidi, ideographic patterns on masks and other paraphernalia of the Leopard Society (Kubik 1986:77). Robert Farris Thompson argues that nsibidi were an agent of memory in the transport of the Ejagham Leopard Society to the Americas in the late 1800s. Their secrecy was largely responsible for the movement of an entire institution across the Atlantic, and for its survival in its new locale (1983). Gerhard Kubik has identified pictographs and ideograms from Liberia to Malawi (1986). The regularity and repetitiveness of the abstract patterns on the walls of rock shelters in Tanzania suggest that they may have been used in teaching (N. Nooter 1992); similarly, Dogon rock murals refer to the knowledge, called the "secrets of the masks," taught novices during initiations (Hoffman below).
What distinguishes these texts from writing is that they are not standardized, and their meanings are usually flexible. A design may refer to a number of proverbs, which can be invoked in varying combinations (Reefe 1977, Nooter 1991). As Bellman notes of Kpelle culture, secrets are communicated indirectly (1984).There is no one-to-one correlation of sign to signified; readings may change, depending on the setting, the participants, and the text's purpose. And the secrets themselves are always changing, for they depend on their social context (Roberts below, Barth 1975). Coding provides an authoritative but fluid way of documenting them.
Obscurity
Not surprisingly, objects associated with secrets are often connected to night and darkness. Obscurity is deployed as an aesthetic means of handling the dangerous yet creative powers of the unseen. Among the Bamana, Patrick McNaughton has found the concept of obscurity operating in domains of knowledge and power such as the Komo association. An important Komo emblem is the boli, an enigmatic object, deliberately obscure in form, composed of layers of organic materials. Komo maks are called "an affair of obscurity" (1979:44). The Bamana word for "obscurity" is dibi, which refers literally to darkness and night, metaphorically to obscurity, ambiguity, and power (McNaughton 1982:58). The most potent art forms harness the power of dibi, a task the boli accomplishes through sacrifices, which constantly renew and thicken its surface with fresh coatings of organic matter.
The most important sacra of Bangwa night society in Cameroon, a strong political organization, are its dangerously powerful masks. Bangwa masks may appear for public daytime ceremonies and funerals of kings and society officers, but members usually hold meetings in the dark of night (Northern 1984:184). Not only do they act in obscurity, the masks are obscure themselves, with encrusted surfaces and hollow eyes, distortions that inspire fear. Night-society masks are Janus faced, to see in all directions.
An aesthetic of obscurity is often matched with one of clarity (see Roberts below). Visible daytime masks have auditory nocturnal counterparts (Lifschitz 1988, Peek forthcoming), blackened emblems are the power behind public gold-covered regalia, Bwa darkened altar masks are opposed to painted initiation masks from the same society. All of these examples use contrasts of light and dark to convey the dialectic inherent in secrecy, of knowledge that is simultaneously concealed and revealed.
Accumulation
Accumulative objects, laden with cloth bundles, feathers, nails, tortoiseshells, snakeskins, and other materials, are often charged with medicines and other compounds that reflect secret or specialized knowledge. Accumulation can take the form of collage, assemblage, or bricolage: Ekpe association emblems may appear as random conglomerations of bones, twigs, leaves, and mud, but to the initiated they are careful combinations of significant objects.
Accumulative figures protect against malign forces in ways understood exclusively by their owners or by the specialists who prescribe them to clients. A person may also commission a figure in order to transpose illness onto it: the bocio of the Fon, for example, is a kind of medical file, charting the ailments that have afflicted its owner while providing relief by taking those ailments into its own skin. The secrets of the owner's emotional state are subtly opened to view and overcome (see Blier below). Material on an object's surface may signal the presence of something inside it. (Thus strategies of accumulation and containment are implicitly linked.) A Kongo nail figure is covered with metal blades and nails, all intended to activate ingredients within. Nail figures were sometimes used by oath-takers, who licked the nails before driving them into the surface of the figure. A systematic and secret approach may dictate the attachment of accumulations, particularly those that are herbal or medicinal.
Accumulation may sometimes be a metaphor for the layering of knowledge in the initiation process. The carving of a sculpture is only one step in its life, as its surface may receive many later applications to increase into efficacy and secrecy. A boli altar, for example, receives new layers of material with every initiation. The work is like a canvas, ready for the offerings and blessings of its owners' use. Whether as medicinal coatings, organic empowering substances, or miscellaneous accretions that render the object ambiguous, accumulation is one of the most visually dramatic means of conveying the presence of a secret.
Containment
Where accumulation makes secrecy evident, containment allows a secret to be hidden in an artwork in ways known only to its maker or user. Many works in this exhibition are containers for hidden things.
African art allows different kinds of containment of the secret. There are secrets one knows exist, for their presence is made clear by, say, a swelling or protrusion, or a mirror over a cavity. Other containments are concealed. Caught inside the Bembe figure in cat. 27 is the breath of an ancestor, kept for personal protection and empowerment.
Luba kabwelulu figures were originally attached to calabashes containing the testimony of oath-taking, such as nail parings and special crystals. Fang reliquary figures from Gabon hold the relcs of important ancestors, yet only initiates see the relics themselves; the sculpture acts as a sign keeping the uninitiated away. In architecture, artworks outside a house announce the presence of secretes contained within. The wooden stools of the Akuapem and the stone thrones of the Dangme both serve as receptacles for secrets. Often, the art object is merely a distraction from what is hidden inside it.
Yet David Freedberg stresses (1989:82-98), the value of a sculpture's inner content does not diminish the importance of its outer form. Hans-Georg Gadamer argues that an artwork's visual structure has its own signifying function, which determines its supernatural potential (in Freedberg 1989:97). Most African artworks follow strict formal rules in order to "work." The Luba, for example, say that the spirits respond more favorably to women, so almost all Luba sculptures take female form.
Ambiguity
Coding, obscurity, accumulation, and containment are interrelated rather than exclusive aesthetic strategies. Together they constitute a visual language of secrecy. All strive for ambiguity, blurring the value of the sign, ensuring that the message is not evident.
In accompanying essays, the concept of obscurity is explored by Roberts, and abstraction and coding by van Wyk. These studies describe particular societies, but often resonate with other arts and cultures.
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