Two Men in a Pontiac

Anyone who has given the British Museum’s Sainsbury Gallery of African Art anything more than a very brief visit (in and out to gawk at the Benin bronzes) will surely have admired the extent to which the curators have attempted, through a series of short films on loop, to show how some of the artefacts on display have been used – and the lives they continue, in many cases, to lead in West and Central Africa in particular. Viewers can learn about pottery, bronze casting, the rivalries between asafo banner-bearing Fante youth companies in Ghana and, most memorably for me, about the extraordinary masquerades performed by secret societies.

Watching the vivid, chaotic spectacles on film, then turning to see some of the masks and headdresses featured, I was struck by the tension between these catalogued things behind wire cordons or glass, and the social and spiritual functions they perform in dusty village squares or family compounds across the equatorial African grasslands. As Jean-Baptiste Bacquart suggests in his informative and well-illustrated The Tribal Arts of Africa (1998), ‘African tribal art is not just about an aesthetic, it is also about meaning and function. African objects were almost never created as “art for art’s sake”, rather these objects always related to magical or social rites – to the supernatural world . . .’ We all know the electrifying jolt administered to Western European art by the effect of African masks on artists like Braque and Picasso. But what they encountered were the things – collected, displayed out of context, arrayed for the gaze of polite metropolitan gallery-goers. In 1934, an eccentric young Englishman, Geoffrey Gorer (1905–85), set out to traverse West Africa, among other reasons to see for himself how these objects were used in dances and ceremonies, to witness the rich spiritual and aesthetic lives with which they were so intimately connected. Gorer, born in London and educated at Charterhouse and Cambridge, and later known for anthropological studies of the Himalayan Lepcha people, as well as Americans, Japanese and the English themselves, had no plans to make the trip until, returning from Morocco in 1934, he spent some days with friends in Paris. There he met a Senegalese ballet dancer, Féral Benga, a star of the Folies Bergère, who had appeared as the Black Angel in Jean Cocteau’s 1930 film Le Sang d’un poète. They quickly became friends, and the idea of a three-month expedition with Benga across West Africa soon took shape. ‘I had never been anywhere where there wasn’t some sort of hotel,’ Gorer explains in the introduction to his subsequent account of the journey, Africa Dances, but he was game for a challenge. Before the journey, he confesses, he had only ‘a slight knowledge of, and great admiration for negro carvings’, but he had been aware of ‘very fine and exciting photographs of negro dances and enthralled accounts of the private performances of West African dances that had been given at the French Colonial Exhibition in 1931’. The expedition, through several British and French colonies in West Africa, turned out to be eye-opening and dispiriting in almost equal measure, and Africa Dances is, in part, a record of one man’s dawning awareness of the destruction caused by European imperialism, written with a sensitivity steeped in and indebted to the wonder and openheartedness with which he encountered the region’s peoples and customs. Greeted by the Sunday Times as ‘one of the most remarkable travel books of our time’, Africa Dances was republished in paperback by those intrepid revivers of out-of-print travel writing, Eland, in 2003. It is written with a refreshing specificity often lacking even today in discussions of African cultures and countries, and is never less than riveting. Though he had originally hoped to concentrate exclusively on the more picturesque aspects of African life, ‘particularly dancing and magic relations’, Gorer initially found himself frustrated by bureaucracy in colonial French West Africa. He consequently felt compelled to focus first on the political and economic, on ‘the churlishness of certain administrators’ who impeded his investigations, and some who actively prevented Africans from performing the very dances Gorer and Benga hoped to see. Gorer characterized these civil servants as having to shoulder ‘too much work with inadequate pay’, and being corrupted by ‘too much power with too little responsibility’. The system, he concluded, discouraged European officials from ‘bother[ing] to get to know the language or customs of the people they were set over’; it seemed designed simply to bring in taxes and pacify indigenous populations. Africa Dances is thus, in part, a scathing indictment of the colonial project, by an initially ostensibly apolitical observer. Amidst the cruelty and frustration, however, Gorer found some welcome levity. His description of a Monsieur Ferari, owner of a hotel in blazingly hot Kayes (briefly the capital of French Sudan, now Mali), offers an evocative glimpse of local colour. Ferari kept a tamed lion called Toto, a warthog as well-trained as any dog, and an ostrich called Josephine Baker, who fell ‘violently in love with one of the chauffeurs and spent her time stealing cola nuts which she would bring to him in her beak’. While in Ouagadougou, Gorer and Benga visited the emperor of the Mossi people, the Moro Naba (or Mogho Naaba). Each morning, he ‘prepares to ride forth to war against his hereditary enemy’ but is convinced not to do so in a kind of daily pantomime. (The ceremony is, reportedly, still performed every Friday.) The emperor also drinks a pot of beer every fifteen minutes during the day, and is constantly accompanied by a band of boy servants, sororés. It is only towards the end of the book and the journey (after an amusing diversion through the Gold Coast, where Gorer subjects the English colonials to the same kind of anthropological gaze he has previously turned on Africans) that Gorer and Benga are able to see dances to the extent they had hoped. At last, in Côte d’Ivoire and Upper Volta (today’s Burkina Faso), Gorer revels in the spectacle of the magical and ceremonial dances which were the point of the trip in the first place, and in describing which he displays a keen lyrical touch: ‘Africans dance. They dance for joy, and they dance for grief; they dance for love and they dance for hate; they dance to bring prosperity and they dance to avert calamity; they dance for religion and they dance to pass the time.’ The dances he observes are described in exquisite detail. A small and representative example comes from a dance by the Nouna (or Nuna) people in Upper Volta – a group with a wonderfully rich tradition of anthropomorphic masks – in which ‘a dozen masked men’ participate, with an orchestra of ‘narrow drums’ and ‘flute-like instruments’ to accompany them:

Besides perfectly enormous and very lovely masks, highly stylised and coloured red, white and black, the masked dancers were dressed in loose raffia pyjamas coloured brown and black, very bulky; attached to the mask was a mop of brown raffia, falling over the head and shoulders to the waist. The masked men carried two long pointed sticks, which they used somewhat after the manner of ski-sticks, making enormous jumps with them; these sticks had a band of metal jangles round the middle.

Even here, however, he senses the fragility of these traditions which taxes, military service and distant work have begun to erode or to destroy altogether – missionaries forbade dancing as heathenish and colonial officials ‘stopped dancing because it disturbed their sleep or prevented people working’, with the result that the people no longer possessed the kind of physical strength necessary for the dance. Although he is specific about the various groups he encounters (Wolof, Bambara, Peulh and so on) his language is also of its time – he refers throughout to ‘negroes’ and ‘natives’, and some of his reactions to African physiognomy and racial characteristics are predictably politically incorrect by today’s standards. He is, however, equally conscious of using what he calls his ‘pigment prestige’ to ease the gears of bureaucracy:

I never got over the shame of taking advantage of my colour, but it was so useful and saved so much time that I constantly traded on it. For anyone who has not a naturally Imperialist constitution this is one of the most disagreeable facets of African travel.

While Gorer’s project is ultimately anti-imperialist, he is, nonetheless, frequently and unsurprisingly unable to understand the people he encounters except in imperialist terms, only occasionally crediting the dances and other cultural practices he encounters with the kinds of complexity and philosophical value modern readers might think they deserve. Africa Dances is nonetheless a captivating and rewarding travelogue, with occasionally waspish sparks of humour, fascinating anthropological detail and evocative descriptions of dance and spiritual beliefs. And it is fascinating, too, for what it does not say. Although Féral Benga is featured at the beginning of Gorer’s account, he is notable by his absence from large parts of the narrative. He seems an absent presence, despite Gorer’s frequent use of ‘we’, until the final chapter, when the Senegalese dancer is described having an altercation with abusive French administrators. Gorer makes a point of sharing accommodation with Benga whenever circumstances allow, often to the bewilderment and outrage of hoteliers, but they are frequently reliant on the hospitality of locals, which means that Gorer is put up by European colonists, while Benga is left to lodge with Africans. It is an extraordinary picture, evocative, moving and sad, which lingers suggestively in the mind: two rather sensitive men, unlikely friends, one black, one white, perhaps unable to display quite how close they may have been, being driven across colonial French West Africa in the mid-Thirties, by two chauffeurs, in an open-top Pontiac.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 25 © Patrick Denman Flanery 2010