I am deep into a book on Picasso and Africa, and one of the things that scholars of that material were saying about a decade ago is that different theoretical vantages work for some topics and not others, i.e. semiotics is key to understanding Picasso and Braque but not Cezanne. In a way that also makes my point (and really complicates the way we have often come to theory) — but in a way, like animals, some theories are better to think with in terms of certain problems.

I am speaking here of goods that were traded or carried and influenced works, most likely, around the time they arrived. African Historians, and others, have begun to move beyond more narrow ethnic or regional vantages to think about exchanges across the continent in earlier eras. The facts on the ground (and yes I also am interested in “facts”) provide ample evidence of the movement of goods and populations across Africa in earlier eras, these cross-currencies shaping culture and politics in critical ways.

To answer your questions specifically: Damietta robes and other textiles mentioned by Leo Africanus were NOT second century C.E. examples, most likely, but contemporary Coptic exemplars from Leo’s era. The Copts continued to be a dominant force in Damietta and in certain other parts of Egypt much longer than once was thought. Damietta indeed is still a Coptic center! The Tada figure’s robe looks very similar to Coptic robes I have seen that are dated to the fourteenth-fifteenth century C.E. – and indeed also in some way resemble robes worn by Coptic patriarchs today. Coptic weavers were producing textiles for both Muslim and Christian patrons, but most of the examples of textile medallions and other forms I have seen with Gorgon and related imagery have been identified by specialists as Coptic (i.e. Christian). It is my belief that while Nubian and Coptic goods reached parts of West Africa at various earlier times, the work(s) that seem to have been a source for the Ife ram fragment probably arrived around the period that the work was made, i.e. late thirteenth to early fourteenth century. Remember that Ife was a very wealthy center, based in part on its bead exports (and possibly gold) and Egyptian and Nubian goods were being sold as relics during this same era to Europe.

What specific evidence do we have for metal, textiles, books, and art arriving in West Africa during this era, you ask? First I have been able to date the larger corpus of ancient Ife art corpus to c. the late thirteenth to early fourteenth century period. So my examples will focus on that period. Ray Silverman has documented a sizable number of large metal Mamluk (Egypt, 14th century) basins at sites near the gold fields in Ghana (where they were integrated into shrines and carefully preserved). In Ife specifically, we have visual references to metal crotals. Textiles, alas, have not survived, but at a site of royal retreat near Ife, silk worms were being harvested into the late 20th century, the silk being woven into ritually important fabrics — suggesting to me that Ife may have been part of the Silk Road perhaps as early as the early fourteenth century, i.e. in the decades after Marco Polo’s return. Textiles at Ife are identified with King Obalufon who ruled in this era. At this same time silk factories were being set up in Italy and France among other places. (The only other place in Africa I know where silk worms were harvested is Madagascar; I think there also was silk production at this time in Egypt.)

For books (manuscripts): several Yoruba and other scholars have identified a group of Arabic texts as a partial source for Ifa divination. The authors of these manuscripts are praised by Yoruba diviners and healers today as part of rituals; one of best known of these Muslim authors lived and wrote in the fourteenth century, and his writings are said to show evidence of ties to both Persia and China.

Of course, in the end, in the broader sphere of things, these foreign forms matter little to what we know to be the larger Yoruba “cultural matrix.” Similarly, Mami Wata is simply one of many religious personae who are worshipped.

Much like animals, outside forms are domesticated (civilized) into the belief system and visual culture itself. Yet the care, in Ifa divination for example, with which the name of the original source was retained half a millennium later, suggests how important it was to acknowledge this source.

In the end, nowhere else in the world do we find the special brilliance of art and thought that came to distinguish ancient Ife. Ife was (and is) truly unique, but part of that uniqueness, I believe, was its broad commercial and cultural reach, as well as its interest in the world outside.

Thus Akin Ogundiran decries the suggestion that Yoruba [recognizing that this is a 19th century colonial construct in itself] artists from Ife and Owo in particular incorporated into their work visual information that not only may have come from elsewhere but also may be seen to be important over a long period of time. I would agree with Suzanne Blier that it’s a mark of the cosmopolitan nature of a culture to incorporate new ideas into their visual culture for their own expressive purposes. At the same time, I would agree with Akin Ogundiran on the importance of understanding the Yoruba discourse – in this case linked to ‘animalia,’ – not that this was ever questioned. I use the example of Okpella’s Elders’ masquerade to underscore both the ideas of disrupting humanity with animal imagery for dramatic expression and the human capacity for incorporating strong, but foreign, imagery into a culture’s visual vocabulary without threatening its originality. That problematic idea is ours.

Jean M. Borgatti
Research Associate, Clark University
Visiting Lecturer, Boston University

Not snakes and noses, but ‘mother’ and ‘monster’ are united in the Okpella Elders’ masquerade.[3] This masquerade is the result of a commission made in the 1930s from a foreign artist, an immigrant Igbo. He took the headdress and costume of a recognizable senior female character with old, flat breasts that show she has nurtured many children and a ‘load of children’ on her head (figure 1) along with the face of another known masquerade figure, a bush monster (figure 2), supplementing these with embroidered panels suspended from the brim of the headdress. The combination — shown in figures 3 and 4 — remains visually and socially dramatic, and the appearance of the Elders’ Mask represents the climax or visual high point of daylight celebratory dancing marking the successful ritual purification of the village for the new year.[4] Though not originating with an Okpella artist, the mask was named by Okpella elders. They called it Efofe — “The More You Look, The More You Have To Look. You will
Never Fully Understand It, So You Must Keep Looking At It.” The name communicates the visual tension created by the combining things that don’t go together, at least not in the same figure, and that is what renders this image so compelling to the Okpella audience. Nor were the elders of Okpella hesitant about recounting the history of this form. They did not see their commissioning work from outside the community as anything but a strategy to bring something new and original into play.

Jean M. Borgatti
Research Associate – Clark University
Visiting Lecturer – Boston University

[1] Suzanne Blier wrote a short essay on this based on the published literature and focusing on Igbo and Ibibio forms: “Beauty and Beast” in Douglas Fraser (ed.), African Art as Philosophy, NY: Interbook, 1974, 107-113.

[2] Research in Nigeria was carried out from 1971 to 1974 under the auspices of the Nigerian Federal Department of Antiquities and partially funded by the following agencies: Museum of Cultural History, UCLA-Ralph Altman Fund; Regents of the University of California-Patent Fund; and NDEA Title VI grants awarded through the African Studies Center, UCLA.; in 1979 with the support of an ACLS –SSRC grant under the auspices of the University of Ibadan, Institute of African Studies, and in 2002-2003 by a Fulbright-Hays Teaching and Research Fellowship and the University of Benin, Benin City.

[3] See Jean Borgatti, “Okpella Masking Traditions,” African Arts IX, 4, 1976 and From the Hands of Lawrence Ajanaku, Museum of Cultural History Pamphlet Series Vol. 1, No. 6. UCLA. 1979.

[4] L-R All photographs by Jean M. Borgatti – viewable http://www.clarku.edu/~jborgatt/Animalia%20Response1.pdf
(Fig.1) ‘Mother’ Masquerade (Odogu) with child partner from Okakagbe Ensemble. Masks and costumes made by Lawrence Ajanaku of Ogiriga-Okpella, 1973. Photographed in Jattu-Uzairue, 1973. Slide 73.06.24. (Fig. 2) Bush Monster Masquerade (Idu). Made by Idawo prior to 1962. Photographed in Azukhala-Ekperi, November 1972. Slide 72.36.27. (Fig. 3) Elders’ masquerade, Okpella. Photographed in Ogiriga-Okpella, 1972. Slide 72.18.21. (Fig. 4) Elders’ masquerade, Okpella. Photographed in Iddo-Okpella, 1973. Slide 73.23.31

I am happy you picked up on what I had hoped would be one of the more controversial elements of my essay – the Issue of origins, meanings, and symbolic hierarchy. My larger aim was to emphasize multiplexity, with local and newer forms becoming part of the whole cultural matrix – much as Mami Wata is imbedded with earlier mud fish symbolism. But to respond specifically to you on the point of sources: Considerable evidence suggests that the thirteenth to fourteenth century African, European, and Asian worlds were marked by notable Internationalism and travel (witness Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta, Mansa Musa, as well as Ethiopian group who travelered to the Avignon to offer support to the Pope in fighting Islam). Indeed I believe that Battuta is describing Ife in his early fourteenth century reference to a kingdom to the west of Mali, notable in part for its extraordinary wealth. Ife in this era seems to have had an international “pulse.” The famous blue-green Ife glass beads were found as far away as Mauritania, Mali, and Ghana. At Ife itself there is evidence of cowries from the Indian Ocean and crotals (an ancient bell form) which have early prototypes in southeast Asia, India, north East Africa (Egypt) and Europe as prestigious decorative items for humans and horses. For other examples of international trade in this broader region one can point to a Nubian work discovered Niger to the north of Ife and Coptic language forms that today are common in the Hausa area. In Ife itself, a stone pendant unearthed by Ekpo Eyo at the royal burial site of Lafogido (along with the famous “royal” animals) bears a Maltese (Coptic) cross, similar to one that also appears on the robe of the standing copper alloy figure from the Niger River crossing site of Tada.

Interestingly, in the early sixteenth century, Leo Africanus describes meeting a merchant from Damietta (the Nile-Mediterranean Coptic textile manufacturing center) in a kingdom in West Africa that was notable for its wealth. Scholars debate the identity of this West African kingdom, but I believe it most likely was located in the Niger-Benue river confluence area near Tada and Jebba. Among the gifts this trader presented to the local ruler was a royal robe. The Tada standing figure wears a robe that seems clearly to reference a Coptic model, complete with textile sashes, and what appear to have been embroidered motifs (loop winged birds among these) . The interlace circular medallion found on this figure (and the related figure from Jebba island) are also characteristic Coptic textile forms. The remarkable fourteenth to fifteenth century Tada copper alloy standing figure wearing this robe was housed in the same shrine as the famous Ife seated figure in copper – as well as another Yoruba-linked copper figure displaying the characteristic gesture (left fist above right) of Ogboni, the Ife and broader Yoruba association dedicated to (among other things) the promotion of regional commerce. Ife’s early identity with this key Niger River crossing point clearly was central to its thriving economy. Similar robes and textile elements from Damietta and other Coptic sites show an array of animalia exotica: sirens (notable in part for their outward fish form legs), harpies (with unusual loop-form snake-like wings) and gorgon heads (featuring serpents exiting facial orifices and/or hair), motifs that also have a rich and complex history in the Mediterranean, African and European worlds. Much like the mudfish, clearly these animalia motifs had important local symbolism and when/if new motifs were circulated here as textile motifs or other forms, they would have only resonated locally if they made sense in terms of existing forms (visual and social) already in place, with new and older forms becoming part of the larger visual matrix.

Let me end with another example familiar to many, the lion. This feline, a prominent royal symbol in Great Britain (and other European monarchies), has its political and iconographic roots far away (in time and place): the Ancient Near East; the lion’s native African habitat also is far removed from European royal centers. The very foreignness of the lion (its ties to a temporally remote and powerful empire)made this animal an especially potent symbol. Significantly in West African art (in Ghana and Dahomey for example), the lion comes into prominence especially in the Victorian era via gifts and other prestige items originating in England and other European capitals.

My main point, however, in terms of this footnote, is that at Columbia, as elsewhere, departments (and schools) have different sets of disciplinary requirements, languages, etc. for those earning Ph.D.s specific to these fields. As with the central thesis of my essay, African art scholars – like others – come to our fields from many backgrounds and points of view. Inherent therein are different disciplinary frames that emphasize varying types of “core” knowledge (some relatively “standard” in each field) as well as distinctive ways of questioning related data. Of course, each of us also defines/expands/engages with our fields in unique ways as well!

“Iseniyan seranko, iseranko seniyan” is pregnant with multiple meanings but I would propose that this statement seeks to explain the sameness in human and animal worlds. It appears to me that it is in the animal world, in animal behavior, that the Yoruba often try to make sense or to explicate their own human condition. Not because they see the human material world as the same as the animal material world. Rather, they recognize the transformative powers of the different species of animals, their qualities, and indeed their adaptive superiorities and predictabilities that often result from the over-specialization of these animals to specific environments. The human world lacks these specializations, yet our material world is roughly an amalgam of these animalia qualities. Hence, the mudfish, for its ability to hibernate in periods of droughts/dry conditions, and to become “alive” and active in times of wetness, is an equivalence of death and resurrection with powerful healing powers in the material existence of humans. Likewise, the lizard is often depicted in arts and other domains to evoke and harness its powers of spontaneity, awareness, and agility. Snakes are also revered for their regenerative qualities. Crocodiles are revered as antidote to hardship; and the slow, deliberate, qualities of chameleons easily translate to the powers of reflections, patience, and calmness – the very foundation for iwa pele – good character which the Yoruba consider to be the equivalence of ultimate beauty. There are many other examples.

In 1997, I excavated a 13th-16th century burial site that revealed the remains of a decapitated individual. Buried with the individual is the skull of a sheep/goat/ram and a snail, among other animals. Since I‘ve also noticed the prolific presence of ram in Yoruba arts, I was curious to know the “meanings” of ram in Yoruba religion and beliefs. I talked to Professor Wande Abimbola (Ifa priest, professor of Literature, and Agba Omo Oodua) who offered that, in Yoruba cosmology, the ram is the gatekeeper between the heaven and earth. Now, to fully understand what this means, one needs to know the social construction of the “gatekeeper” in the inseparable Yoruba world of materiality and spirituality. What is fascinating in the contemporary Yoruba world, as well illustrated by Suzanne, is the recurrence of the same animalia themes in the ancient art, present-day rituals, and contemporary oral texts.

Ontologically, a sharp boundary between the Yoruba world and the animal world is unthinkable. Powerful and knowledgeable people (awo) are said to turn into animals and have the ability to transform other people into animals, and vice versa. Likewise, some animals are believed to have the spiritual powers to become human. The African Paradise Flycatcher bird (okin) that Blier mentions in her essay, “notable for their bi-morphism and for rarity and distinctiveness” are frequent imageries that adorn Yoruba great crowns – the ultimate symbol of royal power. Iconographically, the dense attributes of okin that juxtaposes the bird’s biology/ecology as well as the ascribed Yoruba cultural qualities of the bird, offer multi-layered explanations of the power, prestige, and meaning of Yoruba kingship. Thus, the understanding of the distinctive qualities of Yoruba kingship is not complete without understanding okin. Likewise, we are unable to figure out what okin is without reference to the Yoruba kingship institution. Hence, the saying: okin loba eye (the okin bird is the king of the avian kingdom). And, in Ifa Divination text – the Yoruba wisdom text, some past kings are referred to as okin. The birds on the Yoruba beaded crowns however mean more than the okin bird. Those beaded avian representations also represent the power of the “Mothers” – wise women. Ultimately, the Yoruba king rules with the approval and protection of these women who have the power to act singly and collectively for good and for bad.

I am not convinced though that these Yoruba iconographic practices have foreign roots in the Greek, Coptic, and Early Medieval European idioms as implied in Blier’s essay. It seems to me that the intellectual project of seeking the origins of the “meaningful icons” of the Yoruba (and of other Africa south of the Sahara) in the esoteric world of the Greeks, Romans, Egypt, etc. has not moved beyond mere declarations in the past 100 years. Leo Frobenius and other scholars after him have only made assertions of foreign origins of Yoruba icons, they have not proved it. Professor Blier asks: “Since the ram,…the mudfish and bi-morphic birds, is so closely integrated into the fabric of Yoruba belief, does it really matter where these motifs originally came from, when they arrived, or how?” My answer is: YES it does matter. These are important questions but the Yoruba discourse of animalia can only contribute meaningfully to the humanistic inquiry of human conditions, as a process within the overall evolving animal kingdom, when we jettison the oft-repeated a priori assertion that the animalia motifs in the Yoruba world originated from the outside world, especially the Mediterranean Basin.

For, as long as we continue to seek foreign origins for the motifs, thoughts, and reflections that have come to define what we know today as the Yoruba world, we will be unprepared and unable to see what is glaringly there: that these animals have been local participants in the creation of the Yoruba world. As co-inhabitants of the Yoruba environment – physical, social, and cultural – these animals have played critical roles in the long journey of the creation of the Yoruba, beginning ca. 500 B.C – 500 A.D. In fact, some contemporary Yoruba thinkers might say these animals are Yoruba. The central role of the animalia in the discovery of the Yoruba selves, and their understanding of the world as is and as it should be; their intellectual project of building cultural institutions, of transforming wilderness into cities, of developing political hierarchies and authorities, of creativity and aesthetics, and of everyday living are important (and potentially rewarding) loci of inquiry for the contemporary scholar. The Yoruba leave us with massive artistic data as well as textual references regarding the animalia. Professor Blier’s essay should elicit vigorous efforts to make sense of the Yoruba discourse in arts and texts about the sameness of the animal and the human. Perhaps, if we start from unlocking the meanings of “Iseniyan seranko, iseranko seniyan” we will be able to begin making sense of this Yoruba discourse as a critical contribution to the theory of animalia. Thanks to Suzanne for drawing our attention to this subject.