MEMORY LINES: ART IN THE PAN-AFRICAN WORLD

Working on the premise that culture-making is memory-making, this essay explores the cognitive character of memory in creative expression in the works of three artists whose visual language and politics of creation validate an African conceptual scheme. It examines the ways knowledge is preserved and historically transmitted through the artists' chosen processes and styles of production, their idiom of understanding, their usage of iconic forms, and their deployment of creative expression in reconstituting identities and announcing new realities. Since the socio-metaphysical context under which the identified artists create activate psychic vortices, art making becomes more than a simple production of physical objects; it is a process of transforming prayers into objects with which they become synonymous. Within the global Pan-African world, that is the subject of this essay, art production psychically re-members identities through validating and refreshing experiences. The pivotal argument here is that through art, histories and traditions are vivified and become vessels of memory.

MEMORY AND PAN-AFRICANITY

In the critically acclaimed Black Athena vol. 1, Martin Bernal, following the lead of James Africanus Beale Horton (1868), and George James' Stolen Legacy, addresses the ways in which, from the seventeenth century onward, the white intellectual structure of knowledge and its racist model of interpretation distorted global history. In Race in North America, Audrey Smedley makes a similar argument, tracing the origin and evolution of the racist Eurocentric world-view through "popular (folk) beliefs about human differences" from the sixteenth century to the twentieth century (1993, 13-35). While she acknowledges the force of biological arguments that race is not a legitimate scientific category, she is very much aware of the preeminent status of race in organizing social reality in the United States along lines of racial hierarchy. This institutionalized ideology of racism causes her to conclude that the prescribed epistemologies and conceptual structures maintains an enervating position of inequality for those, whom peoples of European descent in the United States, perceive as alien.

Within the race-inscribed intellectual scheme highlighted by Horton, James, Bernal and Smedley, the Aryan Model of knowledge is recognizable by its hegemonic tendencies, its emphasis on racial difference, the unscientific reasons adduced to justify racism and colonial domination, its unrelentingly linear evolutionary view of history, and its production of fragmented histories for peoples' it had othered as subhuman and alien.¹ In the Model's treatment of Africa and its diaspora especially, the reproduced historical distortion obscures and subsequently erases extant lines of continuities between Africans on the continent and those in diaspora in the Americas and Europe.² The underlying rationale for the erasure is the pernicious assumption that the world is knowable only to the rational mind (read: white Western/European male mind), and that whatever it fails to address either is not worth knowing, or does not exit.

A rejection of this assumption requires making visible the lines of continuities that Cheikh Anta Diop, the Senegalese Egyptologist, nuclear physicist, and historian symbolically referred to as the "uncut umbilical cord" that links those whom the "ocean currents" have dispersed to different parts of the Atlantic Ocean (Van Sertima 1986, 15-16).³ In a 1985 lecture at Morehouse College, Atlanta, Diop undermines the legitimacy of the discontinuity thesis by underscoring the kinship ties of African communities on both sides of the Atlantic (ibid., 322-351). In making this clearly Pan Africanist move, he was aware that the full significance of African based cultural practices in the New World cannot be grasped without reconnecting it to the African side of people's history. Although Diop was well aware of the historical and sociological implication of the over 200 years separation of New World Blacks from the continent, he wanted to highlight the resilient nature of human cultural consciousness that derives from ties of ancestry. These are the ties that acculturationist and syncretist accounts of Blacks in America have tended to underplay.⁴ The point he was anxious to convey is that regardless of the temporal length of a separation ancestral ties are not easily nullified or erased. We do not cease to be related simply because we are separated by an ocean.

In suturing the split between Africa and the New World, Diop secured the ground for making the claim that Isabel Castellanos did when she states that, "the deeper one digs into the Afro-Cuban system of beliefs, the more one is confronted with a surprising fidelity to the essence of their original sources" (1996, 48). Additionally, he more firmly drew the outlines of a new intellectual history that predates European global history, and that highlights the extensive reaches of Africans' global contributions. Thus, his historical reconstruction of Africa's early history and Africans' presences in the New World must be seen in this light. It puts into perspective the long reach of Africa's history, the impact of its early civilizations on world cultures, and the reasons for its present state of decline. In his view, an extensive historical timeline creates a deep intellectual space for understanding the cyclical movement of time, the waxing and waning of civilizations, and for apprehending the truth that reemergence, growth and full maturity follows the waning process. A cyclical, rather than a linear, conception of time is the appropriate time-line to use in forecasting Africa's future prognosis as we view the present state of the continent's intellectual decline. It enables us to see our way out of the present morass by putting European imperialism and dominance in its proper place.

European imperialism and dominance are not coterminous with the inexorable laws of nature. As with all human activities they emerged at a certain period in time and place. Prior to 1603, the Webster's Dictionary (10th edition) establishes that the word `European' did not exist, while the Oxford English Dictionary gives 1632 as the first recorded date of use.⁵ The idea of Europe as a geographically concrete entity, composed of particular nation states and civilizations that have always existed is a historical fallacy. We need to remember and factor in the significance of the strident efforts of the ancient Greeks and Romans to distance themselves from, and to deal with the northern barbarians. From the eighteenth century onward, Bernal documents the concerted efforts that were made to rewrite the history of Europe, to cover up the iniquities of the Middle Ages, and to appropriate Greek and Roman civilizations as the basis of a Pan-European (read: Aryan) culture. In constructing the idea of a Pan-European culture, European scholars adopted a linear and cumulative sense of time in which the ideology of the interpretive frame was hidden behind naïve epistemologies. This ideology of oneness enabled all Europeans to share in civilizations to which they were not directly connected by virtue of kinship, and to embrace the belief their culture occupies the leading cultural position in all ages and for all times. The point here is not simply that European history was constructed by occluding a myriad of other competing and disruptive histories, or that it is false. But rather that it came into being by deploying a fatuous notion of kinship that does not even meet the minimum bar of the proper sense of kinship that Diop used in describing the historical relationship between Africans on the continent and those in the New World.

The term "Pan Africanity,"⁶ as used here and by some artists, draws from the more precise notion of kinship and community implicit in the Diopian idea of family. One is a kin by virtue of bloodlines of descent even though some are distant relatives, and even though the social experiences and existential conditions of the lives of relatives may differ. Naturally, this family imagery draws from the expansive notion of family operative in many cultures in Africa, not from the European notion that too tightly draws the limits of a family. The imagery may be troublesome for those who believe a) that it does not sufficiently accord the right sort of emphasis to shared narratives and from which the notion of family derives its usefulness; b) that it does not sufficiently recognize the fundamental sociocultural and national differences in the realities of the so-called relatives; and c) that it misguidedly privileges biological/racial ties over sociological/cultural ties and national identities. In addition, such an expansive notion of family would be vehemently resisted by those who either find Africa and African identity distasteful (especially given the present sorry state of the continent), or who want to celebrate, as Michael Echeruo put it, "the dissolution of identity in pluralism and multiculturalism" (1999, 17).

Yet, to recognize ties of kinship in Diop's expanded sense is not to nullify the legitimacy of peoples' present histories, or their contemporary identities and experiences. Rather, it is to highlight the lines of narratives to be remembered in peoples' complex identities; it is also to speak of a shared identity with others in an inclusive sense that recognizes expressions of us in their multifaceted selves. In Wittgensteinian articulation, the principle of family resemblance allows for the classification of a loose dissimilar type of entities that defies the precise clear logic of simple classification. Nonetheless, a sufficiently intelligible classification results because the underlying relationship between the items is what gives meaning to the objects in the category; not their relationship to things outside of the category. It bears restating that the strong intellectual reaction against according substantive recognition to the African elements of the New World culture is not unconnected to the postmodernist project of simultaneously dissolving certain identities in discourses that facilitates the retooling of specific Eurocentric prejudices for Euro-American imperialism. Living under Euro-American cultural dominance we need to become more knowledgeable of the intractable ways racism is embedded in the structures of knowledge, and the ways these biases are retooled for new projects.

Since the ascendancy of European intellectual and political authority over peoples with vastly different beliefs and norms, the world of ideas was correspondingly restructured along racially ranked lines. As Smedley's analysis reveals, racialization and race- thinking are automatically activated when intellectual discourse is conducted within such racialized parameters. This occurs because any attempt to resist the injunction of the race- encoded intellectual scheme by giving substantive recognition to African kinship automatically registers as an illegitimate invocation of race as a legitimate category of analyses.⁷ Yet, a close examination of the Pan- Africanist anti-race resistance shows that that basis of the political response is not biological differentiation, but sameness. In contrast to the European racialization ontology, the basic premise of the argument by Africans since the nineteenth century is that they are part of the human species and ought to be treated as such. Read in the context of the discourse of the times, the Pan Negro and Pan African theses of Frederick Douglass, David Walker, W.E.B. Du Bois, Edward Blyden, Mojola Agbebi, Casely Hayford, and James Johnson all make this point. The emphasis of their writings is about that which makes us human, rather than that which makes Africans different. In their own limited ways, they attempted to assert Africans' membership in the category from which Aryan ideology relentlessly sought to bar us.

Given this sociopolitical contestation, we need to see that "Pan Africanism" is not exactly a racial concept. Olisanwuche Esebede's definition of Pan Africanism correctly underscores this point. According to him: "Pan Africanism is a political and cultural phenomenon which regards Africa, Africans and African descendants abroad as a unit. It seeks to regenerate and unify Africa and promote a feeling of oneness among the people of the African world...it inculcates pride in Africa's values, past and culture" (1982, 3-4). More to the point we need to remember that African is not a race, as construed by U.S. popular imagination. It is a geographical space, subdivided into cultural zones. Even if, as W. E. B. Du Bois claims, Pan Africanism was predicated on an "Africa consciousness of a wider racial unity" (1973, 30, my emphasis), the crucial element of his argument is that it enumerates the relevant properties, sets of beliefs, psychological attitudes, and sociological traits which makes anyone, including Africans, human. Though couched in the race frame of U.S. intellectual history, we see his statement as an affirmation of an aspect of his heritage that his European side devalued.

Thus, as utilized in this essay, Pan Africanity neither refers to the historical movement of the early twentieth century, nor is it defined by a sense of inferiority, oppression or relative deprivation, nor engaged in an uncritical idealization of the past. Rather, it refers to critical moments of encounter with Africa's past and present histories, the global dispersal of Africans and African cultures through the slave trade and by voluntary emigration, knowledge of these histories of dispersal and emigration, interrogations of self-defined and externally imposed identities, knowledge of the histories of domination, and an understanding of the kinds of relationships that exist between peoples of Africa, and with those in Diaspora, as well as with peoples of other ethnicities. Included too in this use of Pan Africanity is an awareness of the historical roots of people's of African descent that set the basis of Europe's racist construction of black as other. Because there is great variability in the cultural experiences of Africans in diaspora and those on the continent, Pan Africanity is inherently open, allowing for multiple identities and sociologically diverse histories. What unifies the experiences is not the concept of race or race consciousness, but people's varying narratives of connections to Africa's historical, sociological and cultural-spiritual practices.

Experiences make up history and history is constituted by memories. Some experiences rather than others are privileged and make it into historical narratives. Why? Michel-Rolph Trouillot convincingly shows in Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History that in dealing with the complexity of human ambiguity, silences enter into historical production at four critical stages resulting in specific dialects of history.⁸ To ensure that the previously silenced Pan Africanity thesis of history emerges, we need to shine the light into the crevices of received history to elicit information that lies buried in the gaps. In recognition of this fact about historical selectivity, this essay explores the role and process of anamnesis both in culture-making and identity formation in the works of three artists: African American female artist, Evangeline Montgomery; African American (of Caribbean descent) male artist, Ademola Olugebefola; and Nigerian, United States resident, male artist, Moyo Okediji. Viewing creative expression as rites of historical narrative and recollection, one begins to grasp how the works of these four artists simultaneously activate and inscribe on memory, and by so doing, strengthen historical consciousness. The visual language and philosophical beliefs of these artists preserve the diverse sociological specificity of their lives, while diffusing specific cultural ideas about Africa. Because the socio-metaphysical conditions under which these artists create activate psychic vortices, art-making becomes a ritual in which cultural genealogy is revitalized, new realities are constructed, and new identities are announced.⁹

EVANGELINE J. MONTGOMERY: building altars to ancestors

In theorizing the epistemological limits of Pan Africanity in the last decade of the twentieth century, proponents of this view do not subscribe to a simplistic view of history and tradition, nor do they conceive of their own subjectivity as fixed. Subjectivity is a dynamic process that enables them to engage, rethink, and redefine themselves and their histories. Having been written out of history as a result of racist and economic (labor) considerations, African American artists are very much aware of the conflicted ways Americaness mediates cultural memory and existential experiences. "I'm black and proud," is not merely a musical slogan as it is a loaded political commentary on U.S. race relations. African American artists of the pre-1990s generation possess a multivalent, discursively dynamic view of history that rejects the fixity and closure implicit in the White construction of history as a stable set of true statements about events. Historically discriminated against because of their ancestral roots, Africa has loomed very large in the consciousness of African Americans. Sterling Stuckey, the eminent African American historian, effectively undercuts any ideas that this Africa-identification is a recent twentieth century phenomenon. He contends that "large numbers of African Americans have for centuries identified with Africa" (1994, 120-137), and that such "identification has been reflected in Back-to-Africa movements, missionary efforts, historical-cultural references...and the affirmation of one's African origins" (ibid. 120).¹⁰

Concurring, Barry Gaither, the director of National Museum of Afro-American Art, traces this African-centered consciousness to the eighteenth century when African Americans consciously identified as African.¹¹ He outlines a dynamic Pan-African world stretching through Africa, North and South America, the Caribbean, and Western Europe, and in which people are tied together by the common bonds of ancestry and struggles against racial oppression.¹² While exploring the channels through which Africa's artifacts circulated in the African American community in the late nineteenth century, Alvia Wardlaw reveals that missionaries like William Shepperd "spread(..) firsthand knowledge about the ancient cultures of Africa while recruiting missionaries" (1990, 33).

Though historical evidence confirms that Africans in diaspora maintained contact with Africa and Africans long before the end of the nineteenth century, definite social transformation occurred as a result of global dispersal. These occurred in both the sociological character of their lives in new regions, their ideas about Africa, and the attitudes and value their new realities fostered. Grace Nichols, the Afro-British poet memorably and accurately represents this existential transformation when she reminisces "I have crossed an ocean / I have lost my tongue / from the root of the old one / a new one has sprung" (1983). Still, even with this acknowledgment of change, the notion of continuity remains a vital part of Nichols poetic conceptualization of the "long memoried woman" and of the experiences of Africans in the Americas. This continuity is reflected in the comments of Lydia Cabrera's informant in El Monte whose father was Congo and mother was Yoruba. "At home I had to speak Yeza and Congo, and just as I would learn the catechism and the prayers, I would also learn how to pray, salute, and worship in lengua (an African language).One would master that which was here, but knowledge about "other there" was also required" (cited by Isabel Castellanos 1996, 44).

Most poignantly, the imagery of "a long memoried woman" and the insistence to learn about "other there" captures the idea of linkage that explains the survival of African traditions and value. The traditions of cabildos (Cuban ethnic associations), Òrìsà worship, and Macumba affirms the passionate outburst of new songs, polyrhythmic music, dances, and carnival-masking that "sprung" from African rhythms, symbolic systems and practices, beliefs about life and death, and creativity and art. Research in many African diasporic communities reveal that the metaphysical and spiritual symbols of the BaKongo, Akan, Yorùbá, Fon, Igbo and Efik, were preserved in specially defined community spaces and practices - Òrìsà worship, the Haitian omphor, Abakua, and Macumba - that reinforce historical and cultural ties.

Identity is constructed in a dynamic complex of action and change. Montgomery's fiber sculptures, Duality Principle I and II and Spirit Mother (figs. 1), make allusions to this construction by identifying two relational poles - one in the U.S. and the New World, and the other on the continent. These two poles reflect the histories of two groups of people who have different social histories at the phenomenological level, but share cultural histories at the ideological level. While everyday reality stresses a history of dissonance and difference, continuity is underscored at the ideological level both through particular and select rites and rituals, and through self-reflection and cultural recollection.

Continuing in the diasporic practice of ancestral recollection and refiguring of contemporary identity is Evangeline Montgomery, a sculptor, jeweler, printmaker, photographer, and mixed media artist, presently living in Washington, D.C. Between 1965 and 1973 while living in San Francisco, an avalanche of personal problems created fissures in her psyche that gradually realigned her on a Pan African axis. Subsequently, galvanized by the liberation ideology of the Civil Rights cause, Montgomery confronted the multifaceted forces in her life including the reasons for the disenfranchisement of African American artists in publicly funded art institutions. Becoming an arts advocate, she led the fight against their under-representation in the Bay Area, and through exhibitions successfully mediated between the Oakland Museum of Art and the Black arts community (Andrews 1975, 64-66). Appointed as the Ethnic Art Consultant by The Oakland Museum, Montgomery curated eight exhibitions for the Museum that showcased both established and newly emerging Black artists. These exhibitions include New Perspectives in Black Art (1968), Black Untitled (1970), Sargent Johnson Retrospective (1971) (fig. 2), and William H. Johnson, Painter.

Writing in the heady days of the Civil Rights' and the Black Nationalist movement in the arts, Samella Lewis, the doyen of African American art, contended that the "aesthetics of a people is directly tied to the mainstream of their existence" (1969, vol.1, vi-v). In the 1960's and 1970's, artists in the African American mainstream were cogently responding to the pressing issues of Black cultural identity in the U.S. Many like George Smith felt "a spiritual and visual closeness to the principal forms of traditional art in Africa...[believing]...that in order for an artist to create and develop truth in his art he must draw strength from his heritage... Hence]...I look to Africa" (1968, 20).¹³ Carraway asserts that "[i]n 1957, I decided to reassess and redirect my energies in painting because the forms I painted...were not related to the direction I had in mind. This meant going to Africa... My exposure to the Makonde sculpture caused different forms and ideas to take shape in my mind and lead me towards a new and positive approach to painting" (ibid, 22).

Montgomery's articulation of an Africa-identified personality and a new aesthetic voice were facilitated by two other significant events in her life: a prolonged period of residency in Nigeria from 1962 to 1965; and her extensive discussions on the iconography and philosophy of African art with artist friends, Arthur Carraway and Arthur Monroe. Together with other artists in the National Conference of Artists in different parts of the United States, she searched for an Africa-based aesthetic forms and visual language that did not degenerate into a literal copying of the icons, but meaningfully extended the abstract stylistics of African art. Selecting forms that "spoke" to them, they retranslated the forms to take advantage of existential conditions in the U.S. Faith Ringgold puts it eloquently that they made these forms American so that they became African American art (her emphasis,1991). So, in 1978 when her world was falling apart: the end of a marriage, the loss of a mother, no job, no family, no financial means of support, Montgomery intuitively did what diasporic Africans did in Brazilian Candomblé, Haitian Vodun, Jamaican Pukuminia, Cuban Lucumi, and the Hoodoo cultural rites of Southern United States. Like her Old World and New World ancestors, she enacted the historic practices of invoking one's ancestors, a rite that is still performed by many contemporary Fang, Mende, Igbo, Bakongo, Yorùbá, Akan, and Ibibio.

Establishing sympathetic affinity with the artistic tradition of the BaKota of Gabon, Montgomery drew from that heritage to invoke her ancestors, producing in the process an honorific, semi-oval bwiiti reliquary figure, that was wrapped in a long continuous strip of white bias tape.¹⁴ Typically, the BaKota traditionally produced two distinct types of metal-covered reliquary guardian figures of which, the one chosen by Montgomery is known as bwiiti. Anxious to reconnect to an ancestral African heritage, yet needing to assert her American experience and difference, she constructed her bwiiti with fabric strips rather than with metal wires as do the BaKota and the Fang of Gabon (figs. 1c). In substituting cloth for metal strips, even though as a metal smith she could easily have produced a metal object, Montgomery reinterprets the iconography of this ancient sculptural form. She translates the concept into a new American environment, yet preserving its underlying Kota philosophy.

Aesthetically, the use of white cloth visually conveys a haunting sepulchral quality that conceptually identifies Spirit Mother as an icon of purification. Although dealing with corporeal death and the transmutability of life, the white colour of Montgomery's bwiiti does not signify the cessation of life. Created as an essential part of a rite of transition, it speaks profoundly to death or transmutation of an old self - an old life, a broken marriage, loss of a family, and the corporeal death of a mother. At the same time, it speaks eloquently about the resurrection of a newly purified self, of a phoenix rising from the ashes. The white feathers, sprouting at the apex of Spirit Mother, references ugbene ugo (eagle feathers) which Igbos of Nigeria and Native Americans treat as a symbol of spiritual triumph and validation (fig. 1b). Thus, in signifying the successful completion of a rite of passage, Spirit Mother culturally links the indigenous cultures of Africa and the Americas in a sacred tribute to the centrality of mothers in life.

While reflecting the idea of personal identity similar to, and inherent in, ikenga (Nigeria), a conceptually related object of self-validation, Montgomery synthesizes a range of cultural beliefs into Spirit Mother, and still preserves the essential BaKota idea of afterlife resurrection. Fusing all facets of her past and present identities, she placed seven beaded hearts in the central stem of her white bwiiti, a form whose extreme departure from naturalistic representation appealed to her inner sense of being, just as Leon Siroto claims, it had influenced the Cubists (1968). Drawing on the bwiiti's symbolic relationship to ancestors, and the sheer force of its iconic power, Montgomery used the seven beaded hearts to honor the seven daughters her biological mother bore; six sisters she never met. Six women she had to validate before, she the last, can truly come into her own.

In this rite of assuaging the spirit guide that surrounds her and of recreating a new identity in the context of contemporary American life, the layer upon layer of white fabric strips overlay the inner semi-oval core of the bwiiti, and form evenly-spaced parallel lines that invoke the process of identity formation. Year after year, her past experiences had built up a residual core that fashioned the identity of the woman who today is known as Evangeline Juliet Montgomery. At another level, the continuous strip of white fabric that overlays this core parallels the lifeline of her experiences, and invokes the central life-line of her destiny. The wrapping, winding process employed in fashioning the fiber sculpture, re-choreographs the long winding line of personal experiences that wraps itself into a personality-schema. Linking her biological mother to the woman who had been her mother (by adoption), and whose death she was then mourning, Montgomery recollected and drew together all the loose uncommemorated strands in her life, in a rite of validation. She fused her present with her past to usher in the future, in a rite that neutralizes the negative power of past experiences and sublimates it for good.

Additionally, the functional character of this Pan African conception of art is optimally rescued by Montgomery as she consciously uses her creations to come to terms with the emotion and grief accompanying the loss of a loved one. Re-creating an altar in impersonal exhibition spaces transforms the environment, and highlights her relationship to the multiple fragments of her life as she deals with traumatic experiences. Mindful that a bwiiti is not a direct representation of a deceased but rather an abstract visualization of the spirit of the dead, Montgomery's translation of the concept into a museum environment constitutes an extension of the old into the new. It marks a coping strategy that had once helped others to overcome cultural alienation. Although bwiiti figures are usually kept in special enclosures where they guard the bones of the ancestors, Montgomery's Spirit Mother publicly emerged in installations to rechoreograph the relationship envisioned by the BaKota at the 1992 exhibition, Celebrating African Art: Politics of Icons of Representation in Toronto, and in 1997 at the Life After Life exhibition in Washington, D.C. In each occasion the sculpture solemnly stands as a powerful memorial, guarding Montgomery's metal mojo and ancestral boxes in much the same way these figures historically guarded the mojo baskets and vessels bearing the bones of the BaKota ancestors.

Before embracing the African side of her ancestry in her art, before coming to this deeper psychological understanding of the role and power of art, Montgomery could be described as a typical American artist, whose consciousness was steeped in an impersonal ideology of doing her "thing in metals and enameling, with other crafts and photography running a hot second" (Black Artists, 1969, 86). At this period, prior to the Black aesthetic movement, her inspiration came essentially from nature first and second from the twisted rubble and discarded forms left by humans against the beautiful forms of nature. She used materials in the state they are found, and created jewelry of stunning angularity. Meticulously smoothened, the earrings and pendants were effectively topped off with either pearls or gold tear drops. As she gained deeper knowledge of the significance and essence of art, Montgomery connected her cultural identity with her art and began to create cast metal mojo boxes that are symbolically-functional rather than decorative. Made of richly textured cast sterling silver or cast bronze surfaces, the two-inch ancestral boxes are carefully set off to perfection either with fastidiously smoothened geometric patterns, pearls, or gold tear-drops.

At first glance Montgomery's work appears to establish the truth of the theory of acculturation. Created within the mainstream "white" artistic tradition, the boxes appear to have no visible African and African American traces and influences (figs. 2). They could easily "pass" as innocuous craft works with no special distinguishing cultural trait if one lacks familiarity with African American reality, and the role of mojo boxes in that scheme of things.

The language and syntax of Montgomery's anamnestic art is grandly allegorical and allusionary. Shifting from personal memorials to political memorials, Montgomery deployed the two-inch mojo boxes to subvert official histories that seek to erase African American histories and identities. In preserving elements of African American history the mojo boxes took on historical significance with the growing importance of the Civil Rights movement. Ancestor Box 1, Justice for Angela was one such exquisite sterling silver box produced to preserve the memories of women's collective participation in the struggle (figs. 3). With the ever-dominant figures of high-profiled male activists like Medgar Evers, Reverend Martin Luther King, Ralph Abernathy, Malcolm X, Stokely Carmichael, Eldridge Cleaver, Rap Brown, Fred Hampton, Mark Clark, Amiri Baraka, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale, Montgomery recognized that the movement was in danger of being historically reconstructed as an all Black male movement, with Black women reduced to the subsidiary role of helpmates. Knowing that such a sexist characterization would reinforce the sort of silences that Trouillot discussed, and would be an affront to black women's activism in the struggle, she created and dedicated Ancestor Box 1, Justice for Angela to all women participants involved in the emancipatory struggle.

On the political front, women like Fannie Lou Hamer, Shirley Chisholm, and Angela Davis stood firm against the force of white institutional power, maintaining an unbroken line of women's achievements from Sojourner Truth and Harriet Tubman to Rosa Parks. In the arts, artists like Faith Ringgold and Sonia Sanchez in the New York area, and Montgomery and Samella Lewis in California played vastly different but equally vital roles in confronting racism in art institutions. Although actively engaged in research and organizing of shows, she was unwilling to allow historical reconstruction to erase women's names or belittle their accomplishments. Slipping into her artist-identity, Montgomery resisted erasure, enacted and validated history through creating a bronze mojo boxes including, Ancestor Box 1, Justice for Angela. The latter invokes tradition, silently preserving for the next generation, the visions, voices, and memories of these warrior women.

The anamnestic role of the mojo boxes transforms each sculpture into a mnemonic device and counter acculturationist thesis. Each box preserves both ancestral and personal memories that underscore the validity of another artistic legacy. Each box is full of "historical texts" to be voiced to others in narrative rites of remembrance. This idea of boxes as sites of ancestral preservation is very much a feature of African cultural life that survived in diaspora. Hence, on seeing Montgomery's boxes at an exhibition, Baba Kone, a Mende woman temporarily living in California in the early seventies, responded in spirit, and in accordance with the aesthetic principle of call and response. Heeding Montgomery's sculptural "call" of ancestral validation, she scripted the following "response" poem:

VISUAL CULTURE AND THE DISCONTINUITY THESIS

Throughout Western intellectual history, the relationship between Africans and those in diaspora in the Americas has consistently been portrayed as a lengthy period of fracture, and of loss of identity. The rigid idea that is vigorously defended is that Diasporic Africans have been dislocated from Africa far too long to retain any meaningful memories on which a legitimate thesis of continuity can be established.¹⁵ In a recent rebuttal of the contemporary variant of this old discontinuity thesis, Regina Perry (1982) following the pioneering lead of a long line of scholars - Jean Price-Mars (1983), Carter Woodson (1936), W. E. B. Du Bois (1939), and Melville Herskovits (1941), James Porter (1943), Cedric Dover (1960), Judith Wragg Chase (1971), and Samella Lewis (1978)¹⁶ - restated the evidence of cultural survivals in the United States. Providing further support for her views are the writings of Richard Dozier on African-based influences and innovations on American architecture (1989),¹⁷ Robert Farris Thompson (1969) on Afro-American folk art, and John Vlach (1991) on Afro-American folklife of the 18th, 19th and 20th centuries. The works of Harold Courlander (1996), Stuckey (1994), and Gladys-Marie Fry (1991) on slave narratives, songs and folklore¹⁸ substantially contribute to a growing corpus of literature that collectively assert the continuity of African artistic practices and traditions in the diaspora.

In the context of purposive human life, rites, histories, and traditions are conceptualized as dynamic, reflexive and open-ended. As Alex Haley's Roots portrays and Fry demonstrates about southern Black life in the nineteenth century, families are the nexus where traditions are thematized and lived, and where narratives facilitate anamnesis of historical legacy for people who have been barred from writing their history. Bringing cinematic light to these previously effaced spaces, Julie Dash's film, Daughters of the Dust (1992), dramatically reveals the oral, gestural and ceremonial structures of remembrance of the Gullah. While cultural transformation is expected and noticeable, uncommonly strong memories of Africa survive in the oral histories and in the adaptive rituals and words of the Sea Island communities (off the Southern coast of the United States). Other evidences of Africanisms in southern United States are the Low Country basket styles of South Carolina; the Bajan, Virginia, Georgia and Carolina Afro-pottery traditions from which Dave-the-Potter emerged; the wrought iron grills and gates of New Orleans.

Important as are these identifications of Africanisms, the extent and range of recognition is handicapped by scholars' limited experiential knowledge of Africa's cultural realities, and by the conscious concealment of the significance and cultural heritage of some of these practices. Where it is possible to bring an extensive knowledge of Africa's cultural experience to an investigation of America's material culture, as has been done with the Jamaican Obeah, the Haitian Vodun, the Saramaccan Winti (Surinam), the Cuban Santería; and the Brazilian Candomblé and Macumba, and one searches with African-centered eyes, there results a proliferation of iconic forms, gestures and speech patterns, symbolisms, and geometric designs that resonate as African. Looking with African rather than Western eyes, scholars would note, as did Eugene Genovese, Nathan Irvin Huggin, Abdias do Nascimento, Michael Mullins, and Stanley Arthur, the Africanisms that are concealed in the heart of white Americas,¹⁹ including some that had previously been passed off as European-derived.²⁰

For example, at a 1991 exhibition of Herbert Gentry's 1970-77 lithographs at Capital East Graphics, Washington D.C., I was startled by the Yorùbá-type faces of the women in Gentry's lithographs. Rendered mostly in profile, the similarity of these faces to those carved either by Lamidi Fakeye, Olowe of Ise, Bamgboye of Odo Owa, or Bamgbose of Osi Ilorin was too close to be coincidental. Visibly prominent was the typical Yorùbá stylistic treatment of bulbous eyes, rotund cheeks, flared well-defined aquiline nose, and full sharp mouth. The compositional imagery too was particularly striking. In all the works in which this Yorùbá -type female form featured, a bird was noticeably positioned nearby in the picture. The woman/bird symbolism is rich with allusions to Àjé, the most powerful, highly dreaded and revered women's cult in Yorubaland. In Yorùbá popular culture as well as in many West African societies such as Onitsha-Igbo, and among the Dogon, the night bird, is the symbol of àjé (witch, Yoruba) and amaosu (witch, Igbo).²¹

Increasingly looking with African eyes, one discerns in modernist art in the Americas the different geometric, zoomorphic and skeuomorphic designs of Africa which were, and are still being inscribed on the landscape. Dipping into the liturgical mysteries of the Candomblé, "Master Didi" (Deoscoredes Dos Santos) of Bahia drew from a long unbroken line of family legacy to create Òrìsà-inspired sculptures that preserves his Ketu-Yorùbá history (Walker 1984, 4-9); "Master Abdias" (Abdias do Sacramento Nobre) retranslates the centuries old Yorùbá aso oke (strip woven cloth) into the Brazilian pano da Costa (de Carvalho 1990, 22-31); and Wilfredo Lam draws extensively from Lucumi motifs and emblems in his "surrealist" art.²² The Surinamer Maroon carver, Awagi Anikil, creates intricately designed, bas-relief Saramaccan doors, drums, stools, trays and calabashes that evoke the epigramic adinkra designs of the Akan of Ghana and Ivory Coast. In the Caribbean, the vigorous sculptures and inventive copper masks of Ken Morris' captures the vitality of Afro-Caribbean culture; and Sundiata Stewart obtains spiritual influence from African sculpture which he treats as the mother of his art (Black Art 1989, 27).

A construal of works of art as nuggets of history directs critical attention to the preferred stylistics and migratory patterns of artists in the Pan African world. Crossing national boundaries in cross-Atlantic emigration the Ghanaian-born, Cruzan resident painter, Nii Ahene Mettle-Nunoo, embeds kente colors and adinkra visual epigrams into the artistic landscape of the Virgin Island. Emigrating from St. Thomas in the Virgin Island to the United States is Olugebefola who draws heavily from Senufo forms, Egyptian hieroglyphics and Yorùbá metaphysics to reshape his Harlem-based art. In a reverse move, Valerie Maynard leaves New York for St. Thomas for extended periods of residency, and Jamaican-born, Kofi Kayiga, emigrates to Boston after residing in England and Uganda. His vivid abstract paintings contemporizes the allegorical symbolism of Baganda and Rastafarian metaphysics.

In the United States, California resident artist, Arthur Carraway, embeds adinkra patterns and Makonde (Tanzanian) forms in the colour-saturated canvas of his Primeal and Language series. The Ethiopian-born, U.S. resident painters, Skunder Boghassian and Acha Debela, inject Ethiopian Coptic stylistics into the American landscape. New York sculptor Mel Edwards expands his creative horizon through occasional visits to Idumuje Igboko, Nigeria; and Boston-based artist L'Mercie Frazier travels to Bahia after which she adopts the forms and colour symbolism of the Candomblé as the basis of her art. In San Francisco, Cheryle Riley etches a large Bakuba-inspired abstract design on her massive Bakuba Griffith Table; and in his early and mid-career works, Houston Conwill captured the spirit and character of Dogon cosmology in the evocative forms of his Juju Boxes.

Africanized forms are also to be found in the modern art landscape of Canada. Jamaican-born Winsom creates Òrìsà-inspired art; American-born, Vancouver resident Khadejha methodically copymachines fictionalized Yorùbá forms in her painted-printed fabric drapes; and Haitian-born Canadian Roland Jean blends Vodun symbols with the icons of European art in an audacious statement of counter appropriation politics. Next, Canadian-born Jan Wade deploys the symbolism of the Santería and South Ontario Black religiosity; Trinidadian-born, Carlyle Matthew captures and intertwines the sculptural spirit of Africa and the Haidas in his blend of copper and redwood masks; and lastly Dennis Awang revitalizes stained-glass design with the stately carriages of Oya, the Yorùbá divinity of the whirlwind, and Sàngó, the Yorùbá divinity of lightening and thunder.

A few months after my encounter with Gentry's work in Washington D.C, I came across the voluminous canvas drapes of Sam Gilliam, of the famed Washington colour-field school, in an exhibition catalogue. The drape painting Untitled (1970) is highly evocative of a flapping Onidan Egungun (Òyó-Yorùbá ancestral spirit known as the "owner of miracles") in the actual motion of transformation (Drewal et al. 1989, 177). Created less than three years after the 1966 First World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar, Senegal in which Gilliam had participated, Dakar (1970) like Mazda (acrylic on canvas, 1990) was described by Jane Livingston, as "invok(ing) a Cardinal's robe, or the costume of the Ku Klux Klansman" (Livingston 1990). Although the shape of the drape evoked a stylized Senegalese boubou or Nigerian babanriga,²³ Livingston assigned it a cultural referent that failed to consider the possibility of another cultural source given Gilliam's travel to Senegal. ²⁴ Not only did Livingston's presumptive assignment reveal the narrow range of her evaluative scheme, it also raises critical questions about the efficacy of an interpretive framework that completely misses the African impact on American art and artists. As well, it raises the relevance of a knowledge framework that ignores the significance of the politically charged debates on art and aesthetics among African American artists and others in the Pan African world of the 1960's and 1970's. That Livingston ignored the probable influence of Africa-inspired forms on American art and African American artists of this period reveals how uninformed mainstream American is about the politics of cultural identity in African American communities.²⁵

In the rush to prove discontinuity, and to limit the scope of the Pan African world, it is often ignored that not all Africans in the Americas arrived four hundred years ago, in the early 1520's in the United States,²⁶ 1534 in Argentina,²⁷ 1628 in Canada, ²⁸ and 1668 in Surinam.²⁹ Though the greatest number came between 1600 and the 1800's, they were shipped in successive waves up until the early 1800's in the United States, and the late 1880's in South America.³⁰ The periodic shipments ensured a higher rate of retention since later arrivals replenished and revitalized the stock of Africanism. Searingly traumatic as the Middle Passage was, those who survived it were definitely scarred, but they did not loose their language and cultural values and practices. Nor did they loose their craft (weaving, goldsmithing, basketmaking, carving, or black smithing) skills which they had learned after long years of apprentice-ship.³¹

Mary Jackson, the renowned African American basket artist, from Mount Pleasant, South Carolina, provides evidence of this cultural continuity, even as the early Africans adapted to their new surroundings. In a telling account of the basket-making tradition in the Low Country, Jackson elaborates on the processes by which the Africans in the region revitalized and passed on their memories of ancestral Africa in an unbroken line of history:

Unequivocally, Jackson's oral narrative recollects history and reveals that loss of skills and cultural identity did not necessarily occur with adaptation.³³ Her account establishes that the production of artistic objects temporally and spatially extended people's memory and an awareness of who they really are. In the course of their harsh plantation life, ancestral memories systematically interwove with the people's immediate reality to temporally extend their cultural identities in ceremonials of production. Elaborating on this process, Jackson reveals that artistic inspiration is drawn from old traditional basket forms and facilitates the transmission of history to the younger generation. Specifically, in her own case, she meditates on the old baskets and visualizes a totally different shape emerging from that base, which she then reproduces as further extensions of the ancestral forms. This process of consciously reassembling the new in the context of the old figuratively "catches" and passes on the memory of her Old World ancestors in each new basket style created in the United States.

A further testimony to the survival of memory in the context of creative production was provided by the African American artist and art historian, David Driskell, while describing the mat weaving skill of his paternal grandfather, William Driskell. Years after "acculturation" was presumed to have taken place, this displaced African, like many others in the United States, displayed the error of the thesis. They demonstrated the resilience of cultural memory by recurrently remembering and performatorily-reassembling their identity in an art-making, culture-transmitting ceremonial. In so doing William Driskell reenacted and validated his African identity that many presumed he had forgotten. According to Driskell his grandfather:

The problem with the acculturation thesis is that it assumes a unidirectional path of change: Africans are represented as having lost their identity through assimilation into the dominant culture, never of having retained their own culture or of reshaping the dominant culture to adapt to their cultural mannerisms. Although memories of pre-twentieth century Africa survived in syncretized forms in the social practices of formerly enslaved Africans in the United States, sometimes survivals rather than syncretism was the primary outcome of adaptation.

Though it is important to focus on the history of dispersal through enslavement, it is also crucial to emphasize the new migratory trends of the twentieth century that is rapidly diversifying and Africanizing the older African American population. The new cultural formations that are developing in the United States as a result of interaction with contemporary Africa have most radically undermined the legitimacy of the discontinuity thesis. These last waves of Africans to the Americas are largely immigrants of solid educational background and professional accomplishment with extensive and extended family ties in the different nations of Africa. "American Africans," a term coined by the eminent Kenyan scholar, Ali A. Mazuri, to describe this group of immigrants, are injecting their names, religion, values, languages, cultural practices and philosophies into the metropolitan environment of New York, Miami, Washington D.C, Atlanta, Chicago, Dallas, Boston, and Los Angeles.

With a steady stream of migration from Africa and the Caribbean to the United States, and with African Americans increasingly traveling to Africa, Europe, the Caribbean and South America, a clearly identifiable African geo-cultural zone has emerged all around the perimeter of the Atlantic Ocean. The existence of these multi-directional, multinational lines of interactions establishes that the discourse of Africanism no longer depends exclusively on the old arguments of pre-twentieth century contact. An exploration of the works of Olugebefola and Okediji will take place against this migratory context of transnational cultural practices that is reshaping and diversifying the African American population. The conscious reconstruction of self-identity reveals how historical preservation occurs through art.

ADEMOLA OLUGEBEFOLA: themes from an ancient song

Originally from the Caribbean, Olugebefola is an African American artist whose work underscores African histories, culture, religion and symbolisms (fig. 4). These orientations came about as a result of migration, lectures and publications on the Pan African world, and participation in Òrìsà Temples. Four years after his birth in 1941 in St. Thomas in the Virgin Island, his family moved to New York City where his interest in the arts was nurtured in the vibrant art community of Harlem . The major visual artists' of the times were Norman Lewis, Roy De Carava, Charles Alston, Bob Blackburn, Ernest Crichlow, Selma Burke and Jacob Lawrence. Olugebefola studied at the Fashion Institute of Technology, and worked briefly in the industry after the completion of his studies. He played bass professionally for five years, and later joined Pomusiart Inc, a research organization which promotes the idea that visual art is a vital part of poetry and music. "Jazz art," the name of this fusion of poetry-music-art fusion is described as visual sound. Exemplars of this style are Olugebefola's painting Blues for Nat Turner Suite (1966), the ink drawings Music and Motion (1975) and Jammin' At the Grinnell (1982), and the woodcut Sweet Echoes of Monk, Miles, Max and Paul (1980).

Living in New York, as a visual artist, jazz musician, fashion and set designer, Olugebefola established fruitful working relations with literary artists Sonia Sanchez, Ed Bullins, and Amiri Baraka; sculptor Otto Neals, painters Bill Howell, Abdul Rahman, and Jim Sepyo. In the late sixties, at the height of the Civil Rights movement, he joined a group of New York based Black artists and established the Weusi Artists Cooperative of Harlem in 1965. He became the spokesperson of Weusi (Swahili for 'blackness'), and in 1967, the cooperative opened the Nyumba Ya Sanaa (Swahili for "house of art") gallery to exhibit the works of Black artists, who at this time were still shut out of the publicly funded art institutions. Negroes - as African Americans were then called - demanded social justice, and through sit-ins and legal challenges, successfully ushered in affirmative action programs and a new kind of political consciousness. Blacks, as they increasingly began to be called, created a lexicon of slogans that reappropriated the identity of Black Americans from racist social constructions.

For a number of reasons not unconnected with the race and cultural politics of the period, Olugebefola decided that ancestral validation would become the central philosophy of his creativity, and that African iconic forms would shape his art. At a time when it was unfashionable to radically deviate from white America's normative construction of art, history and culture, Olugebefola³⁴ boldly declared his African stance. In 1965, the symbols of his visual idiom shifted to capture the ideas of this expanding metaphysical consciousness. He painted the Monk's Dream (1965) and Shango (1969) to invoke the extraordinary power and energy of the Òrìsà for the African American struggle. An allegorical reference to cultural resistance and triumph, Shango is a symbol of an activated historical memory. Fusing a Senufo and a pharaonic head, Olugebefola situates a swirling atom inside the head to represent solar biological energy that is generated when African peoples recover their ancient history (Untitled). Boldly proclaiming that "we had the first civilization in the world," Olugebefola re-presents history to emphasize Africa's contribution to the world, and to underscore the commonality of the cultures of ancient Egyptian and the rest of Africa. Thus, the swirling atom in the inner head speaks to an awakened historical consciousness and the replenishable abundant energy that is available to self-conscious individuals.

From 1966, Olugebefola became a member of the Yorùbá Temple in Harlem and was inducted into the Ògbóni. His search for spiritual and cultural identity proceeded under the guidance of Oladele Fann, the Òbàtálá High Priest in the Temple, who helped him resolve many metaphysical questions and conflicts. During this period of immersion in Yorùbá mystical philosophy, Olugebefola's iconography was influenced by the symbolisms of Sàngó, gèlèdé masks, and Ifá cosmological narratives, which he utilized in a coded fashion to address contemporary issues of equity and social justice in the United States.

The first major exhibition of this experimentation was in 1971, at the Act of Art Gallery in West Village, New York. Olugebefola unveiled his Orionic philosophy in Reflection Orion, an exhibition of painting, prints and drawings devoted to ushering in a new order, to awaken the àse in the head (Evolution in Color, 1976, 9). Passage Through Time and the Orion Series constituted the centerpiece of the exhibition in which mask-heads and ritual forms were used to reference mystical ideas of cosmic time. From this period onwards, he deployed his art to raise the consciousness of his African American audience at two levels: the historical and the metaphysical.

At the historical level, Olugebefola's visual usage of Egyptian-based forms asserts that conventional European representation of Egypt constitutes fictive history. Buttressing this intellectual position are the writings of Woodson, Du Bois, and James' that have widely exposed the Aryan plagiarism of the intellectual ideas of ancient Egypt. Since ancient Egypt is the world's oldest civilization, and since it was a relatively familiar concept in Black America's consciousness in the 1970's, Olugebefola's utilization of the symbolic forms of Egypt was less concerned with informing his community of that culture's premier status in cultural progress. His goal was to visually confront the post-Enlightenment appropriation of Egypt and the corollary construction of Greece as the seat of human intellectual tradition and the world's premier civilization. Because Olugebefola sees racism as pivotal in this fraudulent assignment of Egypt's intellectual achievement to Greece, his paintings revisit and thematize African history to disrupt racist narratives. From his perspective, Europe's imperial appropriation of the proceeds of an ancient African heritage is all too reminiscent of European Americans' imperial appropriation of the creative efforts of Africans in the United States and the Caribbean.

At the more important metaphysical level, however, Olugebefola's Orionic forms capture the images he perceived in dreams and spiritual meditations, which Fann, the Òbàtálá priest, had interpreted. To bridge the ancient African traditions and his "New World" realities, Olugebefola coined the term 'Orionic' that derives from orí, the Ifa conception of inner head. In Wande Abimbola's presentation of the Ifá philosophical scheme, orí delineates the inner head that is chosen by each individual in òrun (the spirit world) preparatory to being born. Orí, the inner head, is an aspect of Orí, the Òrìsà of predestination, individuality, and free will.³⁵ As an enigmatic concept for both choice and predestination, orí, for Olugebefola, is the appropriate representation of the concept of the solar biological energy or free will that facilitates the dispersal of negative energy. Borrowing heavily from New York-Ifá metaphysical ideas, he completes the restructuring of his identity and centers his orí through exemplifying the energized will of an African American Ògbóni initiate. In his view, the Orionic principle is a catalyst that awakens and releases àse (life force) in the head (orí), thus enabling an African American mystic to break down the oppressive barriers in his or her contemporary life.

As an artist and Ògbóni initiate, Olugebefola's creative vision is mediated by ideas that enable him to see human beings as physically unbound in the physical world since they have come from afar. He sees the home of human beings as lying in the Orion constellation, the same constellation in which the Dogon star of Sirius has its home. Attending closely to the Ògbóni's account of origin and cosmic migration, Olugebefola contends that "we have evolved from another space,...another universe, and that in our evolving from this other space we lost some of the overt mind powers that we once possessed" (1976, 11).³⁶

Transforming himself into a transcendental artist means positioning his imageries to speak to ideas that are both "really new and old simultaneously," and about a time when "we were in a higher state...than we are now in physically" (ibid, 11). That his Orionic conception of time alludes to cosmic time rather than to earthly time becomes obvious when he identifies this period as "possibly trillions of years, which really is just a second ago in terms of what time is really about" (ibid, 11). Although these statements about human evolution would seem far-fetched on a Newtonian conception of time and space, they correlate to the conditions of relative space defined by Albert Einstein's theory of relativity. Also, theoretical correlation exist to the "super-logic" conception of time that Diop asserts is possible when we transcend the limitations of classical logic and the experiences validated by microphysics and astrophysics (Diop 1981, 170).

A deep understanding of Olugebefola's Pan African conception of creativity reveals a tradition of art in which the central creative principle is the concept of transformational change. For Olugebefola, this transformational dimension of the concept of art stretches from pre-dynastic Egypt through such phenomena as the ritualistic dismemberment, assemblage and transformation of Osiris; the charged destructive-creation vortex of Ògún, the Yorùbá divinity of metal; and the life-death-resurrection interplay of the art of "spirit manifestation," unfortunately known as masking. Incidentally, the metaphoric ideas of dismemberment and reassemblage, destruction-creation vortex, life-death-resurrection interplay, inherent in the conception of radical change all resonate in African American history and consciousness. As a people violently separated from their home communities in Africa, dispersed in the diaspora, and who experienced "death" under enslavement, the subsequent reconstitution of the diverse aspects of their cultural identities powerfully reenacts the Orisis ritual of resurrection.

Color is another significant element in Olugebefola's art. At a profound esoteric level, Olugebefola's conception of colour diverges from the Eurocentric view of art around which his formal training at the Fashion Institute of Technology revolved. In accordance with his African beliefs, he holds that images, colors, and forms have latent powers, which must consciously be released if the rite of creation is to be completed satisfactorily. His conceptualization, simultaneously esoteric and aesthetic, recollects the ancient metaphysical view of colors as possessing energy, a view that is held by Candomblé, Lucumí and Vodun devotees in the Americas, and in Africa by the Dogon, Igbo, Ibibio, Akan, Mende, Yorùbá, and Ewe to name a few. Within these ancestral Pan Africanist traditions, colour symbolism is exceedingly important, since colour is richly coded with allusions of energy, powers and roles that any misapplication has disastrous conceptual effects. For example, extreme care is taken to represent items of Òbàtálá in white, the colour of the Òrìsà. Red is scrupulously avoided since it is held to unleash energy charges that is antithetical to the soothing calming force of Òbàtálá. To this end, the colour surfaces of Olugebefola's work are designed:

Thus, when Olugebefola talks about colors in relation to releasing latent powers, he is not merely speaking about emotional responses as European and EuroAmerican modernists do. He is drawing from a long ignored heritage, and is invoking the legitimacy of an older metaphysical conception of art in which images, colors and forms possess vital force.

With physical and spiritual reality colliding in his consciousness, Olugebefola's visionary apprehension of a higher reality for humanity is exemplified by Emerging Spirit. In accordance with this philosophy, Olugebefola treats creativity as a process of vivifying physical objects with energy. Works like Emerging Spirit, Time Lines,, Dawn, Night in Tunisia, and Legacy 1 become power-charged pictographs like the Egyptian hieroglyphics, and the nsibidi (Igbo) motifs of the Ekpe that is featured on the sacred ukara cloth. To Olugebefola, these works are "visual equations,"³⁸ that lay "a foundation of future rituals which will begin to unite people" (Scott 1993, 2). In Ancient Yet New, a triangle within which two triangles are embedded is placed at the center of the canvas. In mystical and numerological circles, the triangle is a powerful energy symbol. Visually, it is a simplified schematic image of a pyramid, that harnesses energy from four points on the earth's surface, compresses and channels it up to an elevated apex. Like the three triangles in Pyramidal Equation I, Ancient Yet New invokes the power and intensity of compressed energy. Olugebefola amplifies the power of the triangles by placing them in a heavily textured yellowish energy field. The yellow colour is a visualization of the vibrational current he associates with radioactive energy and the brown fuzzy patches and bluish serpentine lines streaked with magenta evoke the exploding electromagnetic tensions of that cosmic field. In Ancient Yet New, Olugebefola strives for the difficult balance between deliberate organization and spontaneity, between controlled order and freedom. Since it is the transformative impact on viewers' mind that is of utmost importance to him, his central problem lies in ensuring that each time he strikes the right visual harmony to achieve the desired impact.

Historical memory is the faculty for self-definition since it is what enables us to make use of our experiences as building blocks for our identity schema, and to translate knowledge into usefulness. Seeking psychic liberation, Olugebefola's spirit-infused vessels and artistic framework disrupt the prevailing Eurocentric notion of art as fixed objects that are things-in-themselves. His chosen context of self-retrieval enables Olugebefola to disrupt the colonized view of identity and art that is constantly reinforced when people look at, think of, and expect works of art to lack utility, and to be distinct and separated from human life. Thus, his mixed media creations, The Prophesy and Manifestation II, are spirit vessels positioned to subvert the legitimacy of the Euromodernist "criterion of uselessness" that naturalizes a limiting ideological perspective. For him, to circumscribe the multi-modal and multifunctional nature of artistic activity is to artificially contain the universe, and to deprive people of the knowledge of the myriad of powers and possibilities that images, colors, and words have; powers and possibilities which, he believes, should be used for the betterment of humanity.

Those who are familiar with Olugebefola's work may find what they take to be an element of repetitiveness in his recurrent use of the following iconic forms: pharaonic head, spiraling energy symbol of the third eye, masks, triangles, and stylized chameleon. For example, the pharaonic head of Pharaoh's Journey (oil, polymer, 1966-71) was given a stylized treatment in Forward (pen & ink, 1970), before appearing again in Inner Chamber (pen & ink, 1972), then in Black Man (drawing, 1977), and again in Sweet Echoes of Monk, Miles, Max & Paul (woodcut print, 1980). On a unilinear model that validates change qua change, this repetition would be frowned upon as connoting stagnation. But repetition is a mnemonic device that recalls and re-presents ideas in the process bringing about their preservation and transmission. Though visually similar each occurrence is formalistically different, having been re-translated to produce something new. So what appears as repetition in Olugebefola's works is really an indicator of a visual vocabulary in which the symbols like hieroglyphics meaningfully proclaim a set of formulae and laws for the new age.

Nonetheless, the prevalence of a stock of forms must not be taken to imply that Olugebefola is antagonistic to change. He believes that life must move forward. But while he agrees that change is developmentally desirable, having gone through a number of styles at the early stage of his career, his point is that there are a lot of relevant concepts and imageries, symbols and ideas that have misguidedly been discarded in the insatiable craving for newness. In his view, these ancient power symbols need to be urgently recouped to transform our present condition: "We must work on àse to restore some of those ancient powers of an ancient past" (Interview, 1994). He feels, however, that the relevance of new ideas ought not to promote change at the expense of the stable processes that sustain life. His underlying point, as reflected in the work Ancient Yet New, is that a unilinear view of time and progress ignores the important dictum which he aims to restore: Not all that is old (such a ritual symbols) is antiquated nor bad, not all that is new is commendable.

MOYO OKEDIJI: in the studio of Òbàtálá

Since the focus of the essay has been on diasporic artists, it is time to explore the character of anamnesis and historical transmission in the work of an African artist. To what extent is the issue of recollection relevant to African artists who are located within their specific cultural milieu. How does one recollect when one is immersed in one's ancestral culture? Under what conditions would a need for recollection arise?

In 1971 while Olugebefola was declaring his political position in the Reflection Orion exhibition, Nigeria had just emerged from a traumatic civil war and was in the process of ethnic reconciliation, rehabilitation and massive reconstruction. With a notable novelist in Yorùbá for a father, and a Yorùbá wall painter for a grandmother, Okediji was just about to commence his art education at the University of Ife, whose art department, with its all-Nigerian teachers, focused on bridging indigenous and Western artistic traditions. Raised in a home in which Yorùbá language, rites and rituals played dominant role socialization, Okediji moved to Ile-Ife between 1973 to 1977 to study art at the University of Ife. There, he met and interacted with a broad range of students from different parts of Nigeria, and with African American artists and students who either had come to study Nigerian art, or were on personal pilgrimages. The 1970s were an exciting period in Nigeria's social, economic and cultural history. Awash with petroleum dollars communities engaged in cultural revival, and the Federal Military Government initiated grandiose construction projects designed to accelerate the pace of modernization. An indigenization policy was also promulgated to expedite the transfer of economic resources and means of production into Nigerian hands. A kind of indigenization policy occurred in education too. In Ife, historians like Obaro Ikime, Segun Osoba, Akintoye, and Philip Igbafe emerged to interrogate and re-think history, and to produce a body of critical writings that restored agency to Africans, and presented African history from the agents' perspective. In the visual arts, Ben Enwonwu, then professor of Fine Arts at Ife laced his critiques of students' work with ideas on African Personality and consciousness. Meanwhile Agbo Folarin, in sculpture and textile, and Ige Ibigbami, in ceramics, pioneered the incorporation of Yorùbá stylistics in their respective media.

Between 1973 and 1978 Nigerian economy boomed as oil revenues poured into national coffers. Everything seemed possible. Intent on celebrating the cultural richness of black people globally, Nigeria audaciously hosted a cultural extravaganza named FESTAC `77. Held in Lagos, then capital of the country, this Second World Black Festival of the Arts and Culture was a follow up to the 1966 First World Festival of Negro Arts held in Dakar, Senegal, and the 1968 Pan African Cultural Festival held in Algiers. FESTAC provided an extraordinarily impressive homecoming of global proportions for African and Diasporic artists, performers, writers, and musicians. The conference and celebrations made the pointed statement that Africans are a global people, and that wherever they are, they have made important contributions in reshaping and enriching cultural heritages around the global. The polyglot debates on creative expression and cultural identity that occurred at the conference provided extremely valuable cultural and artistic connections between artists from different parts of the Pan African world - Caribbean, Africa, Europe, and the Americas.

While crucial cultural links were being built, FESTAC proved to be an economic fiasco. The vast economic mismanagement that accompanied the feverish construction of venues, the staging of the cultural extravaganza resulted in harsh economic restrictions. Internal political discussions on the fragile state of the economy, and on the dangers of Nigeria's growing dependency on imported goods resulted in a sweeping imposition of import restrictions by the Federal Military Government. Ushering in an austere period, the "Low Profile" lifestyle that followed was designed to curb Nigerians' desire for foreign goods. Unfortunately, the policy impacted negatively on art students, whose programs depended largely on imported art materials that were suddenly banned. Except for the few programs on ceramics, many art programs had no alternative resources in place for their students. Consequently, many promising students in painting who could not afford the high black market cost of oil paints abandoned the program and moved into other areas of art. Creative ones like Okediji, sought alternative solutions that resulted in their rediscovery of indigenous art-making traditions.

Though located in their indigenous culture, individuals are often inattentive to the details and specificities of their cultural tradition and practices. Recollection, however, occurs when queries are raised that challenges one's knowledge of history and traditional practices, and forces cultural tradition to be learnt in the context of purposive action. At moments like this individuals seek out elders who are widely perceived to know, as Okediji did with his grandmother, Madam Oyewùnmí Okediji, when he needed to learn about Yorùbá painting tradition during the research for his master's thesis.

Upon completion of his Bachelor's degree at Ife, Okediji moved to the University of Benin to commence a MFA program with Clara Ugbodaga Ndu, the premier female art educationist. The MFA program provided Okediji with the requisite opportunity to study the painting techniques of his Yorùbá heritage. Before beginning to paint indigenously, Okediji had to learn about the colour qualities of differing soil types (clay, kaolin, and laterite) and abandon pictorial conventions in painting. To succeed in his new endeavor he had to locate favorable places to mine his supplies. From the Òrìsàìkirè and Olúorógbó women shrine painters, he learnt about the three-colour groupings of pupa (redness and yellowness), funfun (whiteness), and dúdú (darkness) as well as the principle of composing with close gradations of soil colors (Okediji 1986). While Okediji liberally borrowed the stylistics and shrine iconography of the muralists to articulate an alternative contemporized medium of expression, he differed from the women in two ways: he contemporized the technique by adding binders into his colors to give them permanency; and he expanded the range of media by executing his compositions on cotton cloth, woven jute fibers, and raffia mats rather than on walls. His new earth palette of dark indigos, hues of soot-blacks, ochre, reddish sienna, and silvery hues of kaolin gave a certain earthiness to his creative output.

Recollection is a process to knowledge and self-knowledge. Okediji's major work of the period was the circlescopes series, which utilized the circle as the primary shape of creative exploration. Striving to become visible to himself as a conscious subject of history, he defiantly abandoned the rectangular surfaces of hardboards on the ground that such shapes force us to conceptualize the world as necessarily square. His selection of a circle as the appropriate shape of creation is intimately connected to the pre-figurement of the moon and sun in his psychic imagination, and in Yorùbá folkloric tradition. Under awakened consciousness, the circle becomes a relevant medium for presenting planetary events since the Yorùbá conceptual scheme takes the spherical rotund form of the calabash as the shape of the world. Opting for circular canvases of cloth, jute or raffia to create this optical effect, he confronted class biases with his unconventional style of painting. This bias was further amplified when he irreverently tacked his paintings onto the ubiquitous round flat basket trays used by tomato and pepper sellers for hawking their wares.

Nearly all the paintings in the circlescope series are free-flowing abstract designs that are sometime evocative of El Salahi's linear style and sometimes of Obiora Udechukwu's Uli drawings. Though some of Okediji's works have a geometric quality, others are fluid images suggestive of human beings, Ifá divination paraphernalia, trees, lizards, faces, bicycles, combs, and houses (Series Figs. 5-15). These are either juxtaposed against each other, or superimposed one on top of the other.

Reconnecting with his local history, Okediji's series on Yorùbá Genesis portrays an anamnestic dialogue with the metaphysical roots of his reality. The seven clay/mud paintings in the series are pictographic narratives of different stages of Yorùbá cosmological account, beginning with Olódùmarè, the Supreme Force of the universe, moving over the watery void to commence creation fig. 5, to the last stage when archetypal Ife became inhabited. The anamnestic objective of this work is to assert the centrality of Yorùbá conception of the world, and to check the rapid erasure of Yorùbá values and beliefs by either Christian or Islamic ideas. Explaining the series, Okediji states:

The paintings in this series affirm a cosmic principle of relatedness of life. It establishes vital connections between the Òrìsà, the animal and vegetal kingdoms (fig. 8 & 9), between geography and identity, between life force and power, and between creation and art. The mud-paintings visually present the salient stages of the creation process, as well they raise important philosophical questions about the relationship between art and life.

The multivocal layers in Okediji's itàn (narrative) reflexively introduces a discursive element of the concept of itàn that, Olabiyi Yai charged is usually neglected by scholars of Yorùbá culture (Yai, 1994). He contends that accurately represented, Yorùbá attitude towards tradition and history are not stable or static as is routinely supposed. It is not a narrative of stable facts, but an interpretive history of events that reflects a set of shifting sometimes conflicting interests. Okediji successfully captures this element in his visual itàn since he is aware of competing versions of the cosmological narrative. Like Wole Soyinka from Western Yorùbá land, Okediji, an Òyó indigene, accords greater emphasis to the creation narrative that gives greater importance to Ògún whom, is portrayed as superseding Òbàtálá and Odùduwà, the preeminent Òrìsà in Ife. This Òyó-based counter-narrative differs from the conventional account in eastern Yorùbá land including Ife, where Odùduwà is heralded as the preeminent Òrìsà that successfully completed the expedition to Ife. Although both accounts treat Olódùmarè as the Supreme Creator, the First Principle, and the primary organizing force of the universe, the points of divergence in the narratives occur at points where different political states utilize specific deities to promote spiritual legitimacy and to anchor certain historical narratives and political developments. Though on the one hand, Okediji's narrative seems to discursively counter the dominant tradition in Ife. On the other hand, regional challenge is discursively muted in the Ife version since the Oòni's propitiation of Ògún during the Olojo festival of rededication seemingly anticipates and domesticates this counter history.

Invariably, while Okediji's cosmological narrative subtly engages in a meta-level discourse on the genesis of Yorùbá. It also illuminates cosmic issues about creativity and art to which the verb tàn (to tell, narrate) alludes. The content of his visual representation grounds creativity on a metaphysical plane in which the Supreme Creator is an ungendered, non-individuated Being and the basis of creative order. This Supra-Force Olódùmarè is identical to the ungendered creative Ra in Egyptian cosmogony, but different from the gendered Jehovah/God of the Judeo-Christian faith.⁴³

In Okediji's account, as it is in biblical account, creation is initiated through sound and it has two moments or characteristic traits: the first moment, emphasizes collaboration and functionality; and the second moment, highlights the infusion of life-energy into matter to bring the creative process to a completion. This comes across in the following account:

In this first moment of the Yorùbá notion of art when Olódùmarè asked Òbàtálá to create the human body. Olódùmarè sets creation into motion by means of vocalization or the word. Okediji addressed the metaphysical resolution of matter and spirit since human beings are constituted of both spirit and matter. Olódùmarè's utterance to Òbàtálá constitutes ofò the power word or utterance that makes things happen. This notion of power sound or utterance is identical to the concept of Ka (in ancient Egypt), the logos (in Heraclitian philosophy), and the Word (in Judeo-Christian religion). Not only is creativity a divine attribute in these traditions, it is an activity with transformatory consequences. Olódùmarè creates the world in collaboration with other forces: Òbàtálá and Àjàlá expand creation by producing humans and orí; Ògún leads the way to ayé to populate it; people extend creation by recreating themselves as we saw in the art of Montgomery.

In the second movement of the notion of art, human beings have the potential of becoming fully realized beings on the provision that they obtain an orí inscribed with a specific ìwà (character) by Orí the Òrìsà of destiny. In this complex network of interdependency, a divine model for creativity unfolds with spirit being infused into matter for creation to terminate. Possessing ìwà (character or being), each object attains actuality in the context of use, where its efficacy is evaluated. This stage occurs for humans once the spirits move to ayé to function according to the ìwà (character) of their orí. This principle of functionality is crucial to Yorùbá conception of art, and begins where art conceptually ends for the Eurocentric mind. Thus the currently privileged Eurocentric view of art as consisting of inanimate objects and events without utilitarian value is a very limited view of art. Within the broad life-oriented framework of Yorùbá artistic scheme, art possesses the principle of multifunctionality which, interestingly, displaced Africans in the New World retained, and are invoking when works are produced as a means of (re)membering themselves.

CONCLUSION

The character of creativity in the Pan African world is explicated by utilizing the concept of anamnesis to explore the vital links between art, memory, aesthetics and form. Shifting the ground of discourse to anamnesis facilitate a better understanding of how artists write themselves into their works, and transform the latter into objects of history within this world-view. Art (painting, quilting, weaving, sculpting) functions as a process of retention: of writings on the walls of memory, experiences that derive from, and speak cogently about individuals, history, identity, heritage, community, and cosmos.

The theses of discontinuity and acculturation are usually upheld when one ignores the extraordinarily high level of trans-Atlantic interactions between Africans and peoples of African descent, or disingenuously presupposes that knowledge can only be preserved and transmitted in written forms, never by objects or art forms. The epistemological flaw in this is not just the assumption that textuality is the only mode of knowledge preservation, but that the assumption illegitimately imposes the knowledge conditions of textuality onto that of orality, and in the process erases the mnemonic-dependent nature of anamnesis. The error of mapping the textual model of preservation on the oral model is that it ignores the vital differences in the knowledge coding-process in the two environments: one strives for fixity and permanence; and the other strives for the discursive conditions of process.

Knowledge coding and transmission operates differently in the two cognitive contexts (fig. 10, Ifá Divination Tray). In the literary context of knowledge, memory is devalued as passive memorization, and lacking epistemic reliability; while in the orality context, it functions as symbolic systems, offering numerous possibilities of meaning, and demanding discursive interpretation. Thus, once the cognitive criteria of a literate context are invoked as a model, evidences of survivals in an orality context are automatically misnamed and subsequently erased. This erasure of African and diasporic artistic contribution from global art history proceeds from such methodological sleight-of-hand and is not entirely unintentional as it might seem.

Conventional art history text books like H. W. Janson's History of Art (1986) and Edward Lucie-Smith's The Story of Craft (1981) exclude African art from global art history to perpetuate the Enlightenment agenda of Aryan dominance. Thus, they continue a tradition of devaluing African creativity and achievements.⁴⁵ As Diop (1981) and Bernal (1987) note, this agenda is an important part of an intimate dynamic of the larger politics of denial of African contribution to human thought and progress.⁴⁶ This Aryan politics of erasure continues to be played out in the twentieth century in the silences and the uneven recognition accorded to African and diasporic artists. Anamnesis, the process of self-remembrance provides a means to subvert official narratives that construct European artists like Picasso, Matisse, Braque and Klee as "geniuses," while the Baga and Fang carvers whose sculptural forms these European "geniuses" appropriated and copiously utilized in their paintings are represented as nameless, and caricatured as unimaginative.

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	South America constitutes a prime example of the sorts of fragmented histories produced by the Aryan Model. In his review of race relations and the condition of black people in the Spanish American republics, George Andrews uncovers a disturbing pattern of censure and deletion of blacks from the cultural history of Chile, Venezuela, Columbia, and Argentina. Citing Magnus Morner and Leslie Rout, he establishes that the Negro dropped out completely from historical accounts once abolition was achieved. The invidious effacement of the history of Afro-Argentines of Buenos Aires involves not only their connectedness to Africa, but also their role in Argentina's cultural, economic and military histories has been carefully erased. Thus today, little is known about the African mutual aid societies that pre- dated those of European immigrants, nor about the black writers, artists, intellectuals, and journalists who made Buenos Aires a vibrant cultural center. This disinterest in researching and including Negro contributions to the economic and cultural history of these societies is attributed to the pervasive dominance of the Aryan Model in scholarship (1980, 6-7).


	Prior to recent focused studies two themes predominate, namely, acculturation (or assimilation) and syncretism. Detailed studies of such cultural phenomena as the Òrìsà , Abakua, the Santer?a and Candombl? underscore the limitations of the two earlier themes. As a result the thesis of continuity over time, involving historical transformations is increasingly becoming a plausible interpretive strategy.


	One of the things that Migene Gonzales-Wippler and Isabel Castellanos writings have show is the centrality and depth in which Yoruba concepts of orisa and reality defined and shaped the rites and rituals of Santería. Recognizing this means rejecting the sorts of explanations about the religion that tries to place it more within the European scheme of interpretation, and that gives the Catholic Church the dominant role in understanding the rituals.


	This section draws from some of the ideas developed by Nicolas Veroli, a doctoral student of the Philosophy, Interpretation and Culture (PIC) program of Binghamton Univeristy, in the essay "For an Archeology of Europe: Hegel, Development and the Primacy of Greece," submitted for the class "African and Asian Origins of Philosophy."


	The term "Pan-Africanism" is believed to have been introduced by a Trinidadian barrister practicing in London, Henry Sylvester Williams. He convened the first Pan-African conference in London in 1900 (Langley 1973, 27).


	Ironically, this derivation ignores that it is eminent European theorists, politicians, generals, scholars, philosophers, and scientists who, in the first instance, racialized and confined Africans to a subhuman category. Interestingly, the flip side of the derivation is the denial of intelligence and proper rules of epistemic propriety to Africa-centered and Afrocentric challenges to the Western position. It does this by problematizing the interrogation of Western versions of histories, epistemologies, norms, and realities.


	These are a) fact creation - the establishment of sources; b) fact assembly - the making of archives; c) fact retrieval - the making of narratives; and d) retrospective significance - the making of history).


	Conscious of the ideological power of the Aryan Model and the seductiveness of the discontinuity thesis an exhibition was curated by the author in 1992 at A Space, Toronto (the oldest artist run gallery in Canada) to explore how the creative philosophies of artists in this Pan-African world. Set against the 1592 backdrop that marked the inception of Africans' enslavement in the Americas the exhibition, Celebrating African Identity: Politics and Icons of Representation, explored the intersection of culture, memory and identity. It began on the premise that if art making is culture-making and culture- making is a mnemonic device that aids recollection and cultural survival, then works of art constitute a valid reference point from which to undertake an investigation into the processes of cultural identity formation. In the works of the twenty three artists participating in the exhibition, the interaction between personal memory and collective history reveals the role of symbolic and artistic forms in preserved identities.


	Gaither gives the examples of Phillis Wheatley (possibly from the Senegambia region) who titled her poem to Scipio Moorhead to "S.M., An African Painter," and the pre-fixing of "African" to Methodist Episcopalian, Zionist, Baptist churches (1989, 19).


	As Gaither correctly recognized, despite European American efforts at repressing the African past, by the second decade of the 20th century, global political events had created a Pan-Africanist consciousness in leading American, Caribbean, and African intellectuals like Edward Blyden, Casley- Hayford, Blaise Diagne, Alione Diop, Mojola Agbebi, Duse Mohammed Ali, Marcus Garvey, William Esuma Gwira Sekyi alias "Kobina Sekyi," W.E.B. Du Bois, Carter Woodson, Alain Locke, Arthur Schomberg, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Kwame Nkrumah, Leopold Sedar Senghor, Aim? Cesaire, George Padmore, and Paul Robeson.


	He participated in an exhibition, New Perspectives in Black Art, curated by E. J. Montgomery, then President of Art-West Associated/North, Inc., at the Oakland Museum Art Division, Kaiser Center Gallery in 1968.


	This is the basic view of writings that claim the Negroes contributed nothing to American culture. Typically, the claim is underwritten by the popular view either that Negroes lacked a significant culture; or that they arrived with nothing. Interestingly, a similar argument is never made about Jews who have been in dispersal in far-flung regions of the world for a much longer period of time. Nor is the emotional connection of diasporic Jews to the state of Israel questioned, even though many have no experiences of life in the state of Israel, and they have other citizenships.


	Information contained in Richard Dozier's presentation at a symposium on defining African American craft art, sponsored by the National Museum of African American Art and Cultural Center, at Dayton, Ohio, November 1993. Also see Dozier (1989).


	The scholarly use of oral narratives as a means of constructing the history of southern blacks has greatly highlighted the existence and structural patterns of these private family spaces in the coding preservation of histories and memories (Fry, 1991).


	In his conclusion of the character of "Life in the Big House," Eugene Genovese asserts that the African legacy was carried "into the cooking, the folklore, the religion, and the sensibility of whites who have not ceased pretending that southern culture comes straight from Europe and the white experience in America" (1974, 364). Nathan Irvin Huggins search for the African voice of slaves revealed an Africanized southern White culture (1977). In his comparison of the acculturation process and the nature and periodicity of slave revolts in the United States and the Caribbean in 1736 to 1831, Michael Mullin reveals the extent and different processes of Africanization of white culture in the two region (1992). Stanley C. Arthur undertook a revisionist history of Louisiana ironworks in his Old New Orleans (1936).


	The wrought iron gates and grills in the early history of New Orleans were produced by enslaved Mandinka who were reputed to be knowledgeable in black smithing. The geometric patterns are typically assumed to be European even though those same designs are pervasive in much of Africa where they have symbolic meanings. The assumption that everything is of European origin rests on the false premiss that technologically, Africa lagged behind Europe in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. For further analysis on this point see Nzegwu 1993, 2-14.


	An interview was not possible with Herbert Gentry who was then living in Sweden. The owner of the Capital East Graphics, Helen Jackson was not in a position to respond to my observations. Since this incident, I have come to learn that many African American artists are more familiar with African art either through exhibition catalogues, visits to the museums, travels to different parts of Africa, artist residencies and/or courses in a college. What is important though, is not so much that artists like Gentry are using African art forms, but that African interpretive frames could legitimately be utilized in evaluating their art.


	In a conversation sometime in October 1992, the notable African American artist and art historian, Floyd Coleman, described some of Gilliam's drapes as evoking the washerwoman's tent of sheets that one frequently encounters in Mississippi. Some of the drapes he sees as evoking the encrustation of African ritual ground, and others the Mende tie-dye cloth. A 1971 exhibition of African textiles had familiarized African American artists with Africa's textile styles.


	At a panel at the 1995 College Arts Association conference in San Antonio, Texas Howardina Pindell disclosed how she was influenced by African textile motifs and forms in early 1970's, after visiting an exhibition of African textiles in New York. Subsequently, she produced a body of works that drew on the forms of the motifs. This candid revelation is very striking since such information is usually absent from reviews and art historical analysis of the principle of abstraction in African American art, in particular, American art, in general.


	Irving Sloan sets this date for the following reason (1977, 1). The first slave revolt in the United States took place in a settlement in present day South Carolina in April 22, 1526. From this he deduces that the decade of the 1520's marked the beginning period of African residency in the United States.


	According to Andrews "[t]he first royal permit to import slaves into the Rio de la Plata region was granted in 1534, two years before the founding of Buenos Aires." By 1595, 233 Africans had been imported into the city. To meet the colony's demand for Africans, a royal concession or asiento was given to Portuguese slaver Pedro Gomez Reynel to import 600 Africans a year for a period of nine years. Unable to meet his quota, a new asiento was given to another Portuguese merchant in 1602 (1980, 23).


	Olivier Le Jeune is believed to be the first black slave in New France, now Quebec province. He was brought there by David Kirke when he was eight years old. Information obtained from Black Cultural Society, Dartmouth, Nova Scotia showed that by late 17th century there was a significant rise in the number of Black Slaves in New France or present Quebec province.


	This does not ignore the fact that the history of Africa in the Americas has been pushed back to the pre-Columbian period given the works of Leo Weiner, Alexander von Wuthenau, Ivan Van Sertima, and Samella Lewis. Lewis reached this conclusion after researching Chinese and African influences on the pre-Columbian Belem-Brazil pottery. This information was in the lecture she presented at the Africanity II Conference of the Michigan chapter of the National Conference of Artists (NCA) in Detroit, March 23-25, 1995.


	Personal communication September 3, 1993. The basketry style and the rice-growing skills of Africans in the Low Country has enabled cultural historians to identify the Senegambia/Mende region as the dominant ancestral place of origin.


	Uncritically accepting some of the benign racist assumptions of anthropology, Porter states in his book Modern Negro Art that "slaves lost many of their tribal habits and customs, along with their technics, through a process which anthropology terms acculturation" (1992: 4).


	Born in St. Thomas, Virgin Islands, co-founder and director of Art seven, has promoted Black Culture in New York, directed the Jazz Art Development and Research Project with Pomisicart Inc., and executed the first jazz paintings for the famous Nat Turner Suite in 1966.


	Some sources say that it was Odùduwà, the first monarch of Ile-Ife, that stepped forth to take the mantle of leadership. However, there seems to be greater legitimacy to Okediji's account since in the re- dedication ceremonies of the Oòni, the Ògún festival is necessarily performed prior to Odun Oba in the Olojo festival. This sequence of events, which in the grand scheme of things also rechoreographs the cosmological story, strongly suggest that Ògún completed the expedition after which Odùduwà must have assumed ruler-ship.


	This correlation of Olódùmarè and Ra follows Diop's characterization of Ra as a non-gendered, non-specified Primordial Force, a characterization that differs from the masculinized, anthropomorphic God of the Christian faith (Diop 1981, 310-312, and 328-330).


	Janson's construction of African art as primitive art, and its assignment to the chapter on prehistoric man, is designed to prove that the creative imagination and level of African artist are at the rudimentary level of human development (1986).


	Examples are such eminent European scholars as Von Humboldt, John Bagnell, Comte de Gobineau, and Rhys Carpenter. For other references, see James (1989), initially published in 1954; and Diop (1956).

Ijele: Art eJournal of the African World (2000)

ISSN: 1525-447X