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I am currently a lecturer in Classics (Greek, Latin and Classical Civilization) at the University of KwaZulu-Natal in Pietermaritzburg.

I am interested in the relevance of the study of ancient European cultures to South African students and explore the similarities and differences between aspects of ancient Greek and Roman and traditional African cultures (e.g. Zulu culture). For example, in a course on comparative religious systems, I explore ancient Greek sacrificial ritual and Zulu ancestral sacrifices, and ancient Greek, Roman and Zulu marriage and funerary rituals, taking care to situate each rite in its full cultural context.

This movement between the logic and grammar of cultural systems contributes (in, I hope, a challenging and creative way) to the debate about the content of curricula and syllabi at South African universities.

I entered the Picasso and Africa essay writing competition precisely because it seemed to me to foreground, in a public forum, essential features of the debate about the contacts between European and African cultures and the ideologies which underpin perceptions of these contacts. I chose not to write a formal academic essay (because I am tired of these and do it all the time!), but an allusive, semi-autobiographical piece, which suggested which questions were raised by the exhibition and the manner in which it was displayed in the gallery space. The dialogue between works of art, gallery space, putative viewers, curators and organizers impinges directly on how ‘works of art’ are thus designated, perceived and interpreted. In South Africa, this dialogue cannot be separated from our history and that of intellectual colonization and the difficulties involved in negotiating identities as South African artists.

Apart from academic publications (we have to churn out one a year!), I have entered one other competition—a Commonwealth short-story competition for radio broadcast (2002). I won an award for a story which also explored, in a satiric manner, the interface between African and European cultures.

In the Standard Bank Gallery in Johannesburg, masks and sculptures from Central and West Africa throng the central exhibition space. Masks of wood; sculptures of wood, copper and nails; masks, sculptures, of wood and skin. All by unknown artists; all in South African collections; all severed from the contexts in which they were rooted and took their primary meanings. I do not know what beings they represent or incarnate; I do not know what rituals they evoke; I do not know what magic they bestow. I do not know what hands caressed them into shape.

Some seem functional, like the stool in the BaPende style; others appear to be elongated fertility figures with assertive breasts; some suggest an aggressive masculinity; others an inscrutable androgyny, their narrowed eye-sockets guarding a world beyond; some are like the masks, the personae of Greek tragedy; others refuse any classification and are labelled ‘dance masks’—the last resort of any ethnologist, desperate for categories.

I move from the central space to the flanking wings of the gallery, studded with Picassos. The rhetoric of the display forces me into a dialogue with the African pieces. Extracts from Picasso’s own reflections on the influence of African art on his creative process, on Cubism and his époque ne_gre, are cleverly placed on the walls.

I learn of his visit to the Trocade_ro museum in 1907. The smell of mould and neglect depressed him, but he forced himself to stay, to examine ‘all these objects that people had created with a sacred, magical purpose, to serve as intermediaries between them and the unknown, hostile forces surrounding them, attempting in that way to overcome their fears by giving them colour and form’.

Then Picasso claims that he understood what painting really meant: ‘It’s not an aesthetic process; it’s a form of magic that interposes itself between us and the hostile universe, a means of seizing power by imposing a form on our terrors as well as on our desires. The day I understood that, I realised that I had found my path’ (Madeline and Martin 2006, p. 200).

I line up to gawk at some of the studies for Les Demoiselles d’Avignon (1907). The queue is wonderfully representative of South Africa at leisure (on a Sunday morning). A woman in front of me labours at explaining the work to her adolescent son who is not impressed by Picasso’s bad drawing. An art critic manqué launches into a very complicated account of modernism in which the word ‘discourse’ rumbles discursively. A child of the struggle is visibly angry: ‘how dare this old imperialist steal his ideas from Africa? They appropriated us, then our art; now they want dialogue.’ Whatever the point of view, the queue shuffles reverently, convinced that the old master will work his magic. No-one hurries past the works.

‘Can you see the Congolese masks—or the ones from the Ivory Coast, I forget which—in the Three Figures under a Tree (1907)?’
‘Yes, I can, but Picasso transforms them into art’.
‘What do you mean?’
‘Well, he takes ritual objects, I cannot call them art, and somehow isolates pure form and gives it colour and rhythm…and makes it beautiful…’
‘So you do not consider the masks beautiful?’
‘Not really. They’re frightening and strange…very ‘other’……’

I finally reach the drawings of the bulls. A clever study in Picasso’s development from representation to essence. A visual Platonic journey.

I think of Spain and bull-fighting and rituals of masculinity. I remember my holidays spent in Ma_laga and my visits to Picasso’s birthplace there and to the Picasso museum near the great Renaissance cathedral. Above the cathedral, on the hill overlooking the city, is a Moorish fort. Below that, a Roman theatre; outside the city, the excavations of a Phoenician settlement. Ma_laga is, originally, a Phoenician name of Semitic roots.

I remember the fragments of Iberian, Visigothic and Greco-Roman art carefully placed behind perspex in an underground carpark, exactly where they were found. I recall the ornate processions of the Virgins during Semana Santa (Holy Week)— remnants of ancient mother goddess worship and Moorish rites from Africa and mediaeval Christianity.

This is the multi-cultural environment into which Picasso was born, in which borrowing was not theft or cultural vandalism, but the very lifeblood of creativity. Then he went to the ancient city of Barcelona, named after the Barcas, the North African family from which sprang Hannibal, the terror of the Romans, and where they speak catala_n, a creative blend of French and Spanish.

Ma_laga and Barcelona, both ports, open to the sea and to the world, and to migrants, merchants, soldiers and artists from Africa. Picasso did not have to go to the Trocade_ro to understand what painting meant. He had been living in a museum of artistic trafficking all the time, where he must have learnt of the magic that interposes itself between us and the hostile universe. He must have understood how one seizes power by imposing a form on our terrors; this is precisely what Hemingway’s study of bullfighting forced him to realise. Picasso’s visit to the museum in 1907 simply compelled him to see, to look closely at his roots: a Spaniard, with one of his mother’s surnames, in Paris, looking at his own ‘otherness’ in a dusty museum of masks from Africa and Oceania.

I decide to buy the impressive exhibition catalogue. Most of it a dreary rehearsal of ‘-isms’ and conscientious footnoting which would have made Picasso giggle and the masks tremble. But there is one gem. Le_opold Senghor’s speech at the opening of a Picasso exhibition in Dakar, Senegal, in 1972, a year before Picasso’s death. The philosopher of ne_gritude gets to the heart of the problem immediately: why Picasso in black Africa? Senghor deliberately calls Picasso the ‘Andalusian’, thus situating the artist in his context, the province of Spain named al-Andalus by the Islamic Moors, who lived there for centuries. The magic, argues Senghor, that set of visual procedures, ‘to tap the cosmic forces and trap them, using analogical but rhythmical images’ (Madeline and Martin 2006, pp.146-147) was sought and found by the Andalusian ‘among his Mediterranean ancestors, going back to the earliest, the Iberians’ (p.147). Senghor traces Picasso’s creative journey from the Iberians to the Etruscans, the art of the Aegean and the Egyptians, whose early art was ‘nourished’ by Saharan art: Africa, after all, suggests Senghor, is the mother of his invention.

Senghor, steeped as he was in French literature, makes another important connection in his speech. He refers to the similarities between Picasso and the poet, Rimbaud, who, inspired by ‘primitivism’, invented a radical poetics in which he tried to erase the boundaries between word and colour, sound and sense.

I think of his sonnet Voyelles in which he assigns colours and sounds to the five vowels: A is black, E blue, I red, U green and O blue. As Rimbaud paints the sea green using his verbal palette, so, argues Senghor, Picasso erases the boundaries between form and content, between representation and essence, in the manner of pre-colonial African art. It is the commonality between text and image, artist and poet, European and African which Senghor celebrates in Dakar: ‘the Andalusian artist teaches us—Arabo-Berbers and black Africans—that there is naturally no such thing as art without the active assimilation of foreign contributions and, above all, no such thing as original genius which is not loyal to its ethnicity. I do not mean its “race”, but its national culture’ (p.148).

I leave the exhibition with my friend and we plunge into conversation. She has a painterly eye and dismisses some of the Picasso doodles as ‘simply bad’. They are—but, I argue, they are part of a process we have to see. ‘Why?’ she retorts. ‘We were not given that chance with the African pieces’. An anxious car guard accosts us and warns us not to walk around the streets of Johannesburg on a Sunday morning. ‘If you want to talk, you must go into the underground car park’. We enter the underworld, with the car guard as our guide. The garage is completely full. ‘It’s because it’s free’, he says.

I fly home to Pietermaritzburg that evening. My first class on Monday morning is a Latin class: we are reading Book 6 of Vergil’s Aeneid, that great central book of the Roman epic, in which the hero, Aeneas, journeys to the land of the dead and meets, inter alia, the wraiths of his lover and his father, who reveals his destiny to him. At almost every line, I have to pause and comment: here Vergil echoes Homer’s Iliad, here he directly refers to the Odyssey, here he quotes Apollonius Rhodius, here he deliberately cites the early Roman poet, Lucretius; here he refers to his own works. I read the Latin aloud and am struck by the swing of the hexameter line, by its sonic brilliance, by the mere placement of a word which cuts to the quick. No wonder T.S. Eliot regarded him as the greatest poet ever. And yet his originality lies in the way in which he engaged with the literary tradition before him. Tradition and originality: was this Picasso’s secret? That he discovered how to hold these in tension, without being drowned by tradition or stranded by his imagination? I keep thinking about the exhibition.

I go on to the next class, a classical civilization course on the origins of democracy in Athens. Today we are exploring what the Athenians themselves felt about their political system, unique in the ancient world. We turn to Pericles’ magnificent funeral oration in the pages of the historian, Thucydides. In his praise of the democratic spirit, Pericles links Athenian achievement in the creative arts with Athens’ openness to the world. The ancient Athenians constantly constructed the world in polar opposites. Opposed to the openness of Athens, in the mind of Thucydides, is the closed, tradition-shackled community of Sparta, whose artistic achievements were correspondingly meagre. We discuss how cultures, narcissistically trapped by their own reflections, wither and die. Our discussion broadens to include university curricula and Africanisation. Some courses have adopted radical revisions: out with Eurocentric literature or ‘cultural production’. In with African literature or African literature in translation: the African Renaissance must be rooted in a re-discovery of Africanness. I discuss the exhibition with them. We know that the Italian Renaissance needed the re-discovery of the Greek and Latin classics to spark it into being. Once again, encounters with tradition give birth to originality. ‘But does Africa need European traditions? Our Renaissance can be sparked into being by a re-discovery of African traditions.’ ‘But which African traditions? Africa is not a homogeneous entity’.

I return to my office. The postmodern thought-police, ever vigilant, have learned of the perpetration of a ‘grand narrative’ in the classroom. Clickety-clack creak the Derridean laptops, clogged with text. I receive a cerebral email.

‘Have you been suggesting that there is some sort of truth about creativity—that the truly inspired creativity is the result of some sort of magical encounter with tradition? Deconstruct, deconstruct, deconstruct. Where are your hermeneutics of suspicion? Picasso and Africa indeed. Look at the catalogue. Forewords by Chirac and Mbeki. How can you be so naïve? Think of their hidden ideological agenda: you have fallen into the trap and ended up believing what those hegemonic patriarchs want you to believe. The European Union, with a guilty conscience, courts the Rainbow Nation, flirting with its partner in trade. What about the colonised subject gazing at European pillage in the centre of the gallery, while the European conqueror from the metropole gazes back at the colonised subject from the walls and says ‘thanks for the memories’? This exhibition raises crucial questions about African identity, power and the creators of art history: what artistic language do I speak as an African artist, when I have been intellectually colonised by the West? Who has assigned colours to my voyelles?’

It takes me a while to ‘unpack’ the email. I begin tentatively, and perhaps predictably. Mbeki often moves between worlds, between the centre and the periphery, wherever you wish to locate these. He peppers many of his speeches with citations from European literature. Like Senghor, he engages with traditions both European and African. He fervently believes in the African Renaissance, as Senghor believed in ne_gritude. Perhaps he has learned, like Senghor, to negotiate between European and African, without losing the best of both, without being colonised by the past, however vicious that may have been. In the closing words of his foreword, Mbeki stresses that exhibitions of major international artists, ‘particularly when there is an acknowledgement of an African influence’ are essential to the ‘fostering’ of a South African cultural identity, ‘critical’ to the process of nation-building (p.9).

How does the ‘living dialogue’ (to use Chirac’s words) between Picasso and the African art on display ‘foster’ cultural identity and promote nation-building? By simply suggesting that Africa was seminal to the work of a great European artist? By demonstrating how cultural exchange is essential to creativity? By suggesting that a South African identity has to be forged in a multi-cultural crucible in which Africa and Europe have to learn to respect and acknowledge their historically-shaped inter-dependence? And how does this position embrace the African Renaissance, which seems to tug away from multi-cultural diversity with centrifugal energy?

Like the Heraclitan bow which holds in tension two opposing forces, Picasso and Senghor managed to hold in balance tradition and originality, openness to the world and intense individualism, ‘loyal’ to their national cultures. Is this what we must do to forge a South African identity, a ‘rainbow nation’, shimmering with all the colours on Rimbaud’s palette? In our history, the bow has often snapped.

This will not do. I have to return to the exhibition. I have renamed it ‘Africa and Picasso’. This time I discover the Picassos grouped in the centre of the gallery without labels of any kind. The African masks and sculptures have been moved to the two wings. Some have been placed on the walls. Dogged research has uncovered the exact provenance of a few of the works. Interpersed with the masks are paintings by Sekoto and others: I see Dumile Feni’s African Guernica (1967). There are no texts explaining the creative process, or the traditions involved, but a French-speaking griot from West Africa has been employed by the gallery to guide visitors through the collection. I approach the first of the masks. The griot draws near and points, kindly, at my hands. He wants me to touch the mask. I feel a little awkward: what if I am one of Makgoba’s baboons after all? I reach out to touch the mask from the Congo. I want to feel the magic’s transforming power. I look back at the Picassos. I catch the eye of the only other person in the gallery. I recognise her because I heard her speak at graduation on the role of the humanities in Africa. She is Elizabeth Costello’s sister, the nun from Marianhill. I wonder if she too will retire to Australia. Slowly, I turn my back on the Picassos and reach out to the mask.

REFERENCES
Madeline, L. and Martin, M. 2006. Picasso and Africa. Cape Town: Bell-Roberts.

Keywords: African, Biography, Competition, Michael Lambert, Picasso, Writing