Objects from Africa displayed in galleries leave us bemused. We hesitate to use the word 'art' - this is not Giorgione or the Barbizon School or Howard Hodgkin - and hedge our bets with polite words like 'artefact' or 'decoration'. African narrative and music have done better. World-music impresarios can market the virtuoso kora players of the western Sahel; we have the kitsch academic term 'orature' to soothe our anxieties about the fact that the greatest story-telling and poetry from this vast continent had nothing to do with pen and paper. But ritual masks, pots and cloth, or forged metal that crackles with military prowess - how are we to decipher and project these as the aesthetic truth of a continent?

LRB 10 May 2001 | PDF Download