New York African Studies Association! Newsletter

! NYASA Newsletter No. 66! Winter/Spring 2014! ISSN 0148-7264

Dr. Oyeronke Oyewumi Named Distinguished Africanist

Oyeronke Oyewumi, Associate Professor of Soci-ology at SUNY Stony Brook, will be receiving the Distinguished Africanist Award at the 39th An-nual Conference of the New York Africana Studies Association being held at SUNY Cortland, April 4-5, 2014. She also will be the keynote speaker at the conference. Last year’s recipient was Lock-sley Edmondson, Professor in the Africana Studies and Research Center at Cornell University. Among other recipients have been such distin-guished scholars and writers in the field of Afri-can Studies as Chinua Achebe and Ali Mazrui.

Dr. Oyewumi was born in Nigeria and educated at the University of Ibadan and the University of California at Berkeley. Her scholarship is widely recognized and she was the recipient of the American Sociological Association’s 1998 Distin-guished Book Award in the Gender and Sex cate-gory for her 1997 monograph, the Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses.

She has garnered a number of research fellow-ships, including Rockefeller fellowships, a Presi-dential Fellowship, and a Ford Foundation grant. Oyewumi’s most recent research award was a Rockefeller Humanities Fellowship on Human Se-curity managed by the National Council for Re-search on Women.

Her areas of interest include sociology of gender; sociology of knowledge; sociology of culture; comparative historical sociology; feminist theory;

transnational feminism; social theory; social in-equities in local, regional, and global systems; African studies (post-colonial studies); and mod- ernities.

In addition to her prize-winning 1997 mono-graph, published

by the Univer-sity of Minne-sota Press, she has edited two books: Gender Epistemologies in Africa: Gen-dering Tradi-tions, Spaces, Social Institu-tions, and Iden-tities, Palgrave M a c m i l l a n , 2010; and Afri-c a n W o m e n and Feminism: Reflecting on the Politics of Sisterhood, Af-

rican World Press, 2003.

The Department of Sociology at SUNY Stony Brook, where she is a faculty member, ranks 23 in the U.S. based on the Academic Analytics Faculty Scholarship Productivity index and has 16 full-time faculty serving over 50 graduate students and about 500 undergraduate majors.

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Dr. Oyeronke Oyewumi

Interview with Seth Asumah, SUNY Distinguished Professor and Chair of the Africana Studies Department, SUNY Cortland, 31 October 2013

By Roger Gocking, Emeritus, Mercy College

Q. You have recently returned from Ghana where you attended the African Studies Con-ference: Revisiting the First International Congress of Africanists in a Globalized World. Could you tell us about this conference?

A. It was held at the University of Ghana at the Legon Campus from 24-26 October 2013. The conference was presented as a sequel to the first International Congress of Africanists which was held at the University of Ghana in 1962. At that time President Kwame Nkrumah and other Afri-can leaders wanted to do something for African studies. In general, Nkrumah had proclaimed that the independence of Ghana was meaning-less unless linked up with the total liberation of the African continent.

In this spirit they [the organizers] had decided on a conference of Africanists from all over the world to look at the question of what was the African self in the European order. Colonialism had badly distorted the African sense of identity and it was necessary to determine what were truly the different parts of an African identity. The conference was opened by Ghana’s president, John Dramani Mahama, in the University of Ghana’s Great Hall. There were three other guest speakers: Dr. Carlos Lopes, the United Nations Under Secretary General and Executive Secretary of the U.N. Economic Commission for Africa (UN-

ECA); Professor Fatou Sow, an associate member of the Centre d’enseignement, de documenta-tion et de recherches pour les étudesféministes (CEDREC) in Senegal and France; and Professor Ngugi wa Thiongo, who is currently Distin-guished Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of California at Irvine. There were also two representatives from the Af-rican Union.

There were scholars from about 35 countries who gave papers, with the South African contingent being the largest. There were discussions about how African studies developed on the continent from what had initially been a focus on econom-ics and European literature. There had also been an increasing concern with the study of African languages. There had also been some pre-conference events. Professor Ngugi had pre-sented a public workshop and had gone to local high schools. The Under Secretary had met with Ghanaian economists, and there had been other workshops. At the end of the conference there had been a fashion show and an artist on the Le-gon campus had designed a special cloth for the event. Ghanian corporations had also generously supported the event by providing food and drinks.

Most of the panel ses-sions were held at the Institute of African Studies which was also celebrating the 50th anniversary of its founding in 1962. The conference was organized by the In-st itute of Afr ican Studies whose direc-tor is Professor Ako-sua Adomako Am-pofo. She is currently

a visiting professor at SUNY Cortland. The Institute is extremely

self-contained. Nearby it has its own accommo-

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Institute of African StudiesUniversity of Ghana

Akosua Adomako Ampofo, Director, Institute of

African Studies

dation, the 47-room Yiri Lodge. In the northern Ghana language, Dagaare, Yiri means a home. In addition to having its own library, the Institute also has its own dance ensemble, and they pre-sented a lively drumming performance when President Mahama arrived to open the confer-ence.

What was the most important outcome of the conference? A. In 1962 there was discussion on how to con-

tinue with what the conference had begun, and there had been talk of forming a Congress of Af-ricanists, but this did not go very far. In 2013 there were representatives from 29 different Afri-can countries and also people from outside the continent from the Americas, Europe, the Middle East, and Asia. The result was the formation of a new association, the African Studies Association of Africa, ASAA. I suggested that this new asso-ciation should affiliate with the ASA in the United States and also NYASA, which would be diaspora affiliates.

Nelson Mandela (July 12, 1918 - December 5, 2013)

by Thomas Nyquist, Chair, Nyquist Foundation

Nelson Ro-l i h l a h l a M a n d e l a was a South African revo-l u t i o n a r y , po l i t i c ian , and philan-t h r o p i s t who served as president of South Af-r i c a f r o m 1 9 9 4 t o 1999. He was South Africa’s first black chief execut ive ,

and the first elected in a fully representative democratic election. In working to free his coun-try from racial division, he led an essentially peaceful revolution, culminating in his release from prison in 1990 and the post-apartheid elec-tion of 1994.

He was a Xhosa, born into the royal house of the Thembu people. His father, Gadla Henry Mphakanyiswa, was a descendant of a 19th cen-tury Thembu monarch, Ngubengcuka, but through the so-called “left-hand house,” which did not stand in the direct line of succession. His mother, Nosekeni Fanny, was the third of four wives, and Rolihlahla was the youngest of his fa-

ther’s four sons.

Mandela was born at Mvezo, near Umtata, 120 miles northeast of East London, in the native re-serve of the Transkei, Eastern Cape. At the age of seven he went to school, the first of his family to do so. On that first day he was given the name of Nelson. Each child had to have an English as well as an indigenous name.

He was nine when his father died of a lung dis-ease. According to Nelson’s sister, Mabel, the father made a dying bequest to the Thembu re-gent, David Dalindyebo, giving Nelson into his care. The bequest took Nelson to the Thembu capital, Mqhekezweni, the “great place” where he became part of the royal family.

In the family tradition, he was groomed to be-come a counsellor to the future king, Sabata. He was sent to a Methodist mission school, Clarke-bury, 25 miles southeast of Umtata. At 19, he moved to another Methodist school, Healdtown, in Fort Beaufort, and then to nearby Fort Hare University College, at that time South Africa’s only black university.

In 1940, in his second year at Fort Hare, as a member of the student representative council he was expelled for his part in a rebellion over poor quality food. He migrated to Johannesburg, where he was to be introduced to the future ANC leader, Walter Sisulu, then running an estate agency. Sisulu took him to a local law firm, Wit-

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Nelson Rolihlahla Mandela

kin, Sidelsky and Eidelman, and they agreed to employ him on as a clerk while he completed a University of South Africa B.A. by correspon-dence.

At the office and at Sisulu’s home Mandela began mixing with more radical members of black soci-ety and he also met his first wife, Evelyn Mase, a cousin of Sisulu. They married and had two sons and two daughters. The marriage broke up in 1956, after Evelyn, a Jehovah’s Witness, reput-edly demanded that Mandela choose between her and the ANC.

In 1943 he began a part-time law degree at the University of the Witwatersrand. The following year he became publicly active as a founding ex-ecutive member of the ANC Youth Wing, which was established to challenge the staid leadership of the ANC.

1948 was a watershed year in South African poli-tics, with the Afrikaner Nationalist Party coming to power to institute its policy of apartheid across South Africa. Among those forces seeking to challenge its hegemony was a rejuvenated ANC led by Chief Albert Luthuli, with Mandela as his deputy.

That same year, Mandela, now qualified as an attorney, set up a law partnership with the man who would stand in for him during his long years of imprisonment, Oliver Tambo. The firm of Mandela and Tambo was South Africa’s only partnership of black lawyers, so its services were in great demand.

The rise of the Nationalist Party led the ANC to seek alliances with communist and Asian groups to organize civil disobedience campaigns. By 1955, with the removal of the black population of the Johannesburg suburb of Sophiatown, Mandela became convinced that the ANC had no alternative but to take up armed resistance. “A freedom fighter learns the hard way that it is the oppressor who defines the nature of the struggle, and the oppressed is often left no recourse but to use methods that mirror those of the oppressor. At a certain point, one can only fight fire with fire.”

Further action by the ANC was preempted when in December 1956, the government arrested Mandela and 155 other activists for high treason on the grounds that the Freedom Charter, drawn up in June 1955 by an ANC-led rainbow alliance, implied communist revolution. Mandela was released on bail within two weeks, but not before his wife, Evelyn, left him permanently.

The state had difficulty in making its case, and it took until January of 1958 before the magistrate committed 95 of the defendants for trial at the Transvaal supreme court. During this period Mandela meet Nomzamo Winifred “Winnie” Ma-dikizela. They got married in June of 1958 and in August he was back in court.

The trial was still in process when on March 26, 1960, 69 Africans demonstrating against the pass laws were shot dead by police in Sharpeville, 35 miles south of Johannesburg. This massacre be-came a rallying cry for the ANC. Surprisingly, despite the increasing tension throughout South Africa, those brought to trial by the government, including Mandela, were acquitted.

Mandela immediately went underground and by June of 1961 had persuaded the ANC leadership to pursue a course of active resistance. He be-came the head of Umkonto we Sizwe (Spear of the Nation), the armed wing of the ANC, which made its presence felt through explosions at government installations in December 1961.

Mandela was finally captured in August 1962, while masquerading as a chauffeur. He was ini-tially sentenced to three years for incitement, and another two years for leaving the country without a passport. Then, in October of 1963, he was brought to court again as the “number one accused” in the Rivonia trial, alongside those ANC leaders arrested at a farm that July.

He was accused of treason, and the expectation of many was that the trial judge, Quartus De Wet, would sentence him to death at the gallows. In his now famous defense statement, that took four hours, Mandela concluded by saying, “Dur-ing my lifetime I have dedicated myself to the struggle of the African people. I have fought against white domination, and I have fought

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against black domination. I have cherished the ideal of a democratic and free society in which all persons live together in harmony and with equal opportunities. It is an ideal which I hope to live for and achieve. But if needs be, it is an ideal for which I am prepared to die.” In the end, he was sentenced to life imprisonment.

It is said that Mandela and the ANC believed that the liberation of black Africa could be expected within a a few years. But it was to be 26 years before his release from prison. During that quar-ter of a century, the fortitude that he exhibited would have given pride to his elders. Among the most painful experiences were the separation from his family, the loss of his eldest son, Madiba “Thembi” Thembekile Mandela, in a car crash in 1960, and the peccadilloes of his wife Winnie that included rumors of love affairs.

He was finally set free on February 11, 1990, only to observe in the year that followed his wife pillo-ried in court on kidnapping and assault charges relating to the death of the 14-year old township activist Stompie Moeketsi Seipei in 1989. A six-year sentence was reduced to a fine on appeal.

Mandela and Winnie separated in 1992 and di-

vorced in 1996. Soon after the divorce he be-came a friend of Graca Machel, widow of the Mo-zambican president and ANC ally, Samora Ma-chel, who had died in an air crash 15 years ear-lier. Marriage followed in 1998, on Mandela’s 80th birthday.

After Mandela’s release his stoicism developed over 26 hears in prison provided a figure of dig-nity to lead a new South Africa - described by an English journalist as a “tall, slim, stony-faced figure...surrounded by the white generals who had fought so hard to destroy his cause, taking the salute at the presidential inauguration in May 1994.” (Dave Beresford, The Guardian, December 5, 2013)

As the first post-apartheid leader, Mandela’s greatest gift was to provide a peaceful transition from a society where Africans of various ethnic nations - along with Asians, Coloureds, and oth-ers - suffered under a political and economic sys-tem dominated by a European minority. The South African people, exhausted by a struggle against one another, and within themselves, had the need for a “unifying figure to give them a vision of nationhood.” (Beresford)

Religious Art in Haiti: the Interaction Between Roman Catholicism and VoodooBy Roger Gocking, Emeritus, Mercy College

Over the last 14 years I have been fascinated by the way in which Christ and Christian personae have been represented in Third World countries where Christianity has been a relatively recent import. Mostly this concerns Roman Catholic and Anglican churches and to a lesser extent Lu-theran churches which have in varying degrees a well-developed tradition of religious art. For Catholics, for whom statues, paintings and arti-facts in general are essential components of any Catholic church, religious art has been highly developed beginning as early as the second cen-tury AD. It probably reached its peak in the Ital-ian Renaissance from the 14th to the 16th centu-ries AD. Inevitably, when Catholic missionaries came to spread Christianity to Africa, Asia, or what was known as the New World, they brought representations of this art with them to adorn the church buildings they constructed.

At the NYASA Annual Conference in 2010 at SUNY Binghamton, I presented my most up-to-date findings on how this tradition has devel-oped in Ghana. I looked at the influence of an Afrocentric challenge to the portrayal of Chris-tian personae in what had been an almost exclu-sively Eurocentric artistic tradition. Last year at the NYASA annual conference in Binghamton I looked at how this was developing in Jamaica, West Indies, with similar findings. At the end of 2013 I spent three weeks in Haiti looking at a particularly unique situation as there is also con-siderable interplay between Roman Catholicism and Voodoo, the name that is given to the belief systems that slaves brought from Africa during the long era of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Significantly, Voodoo has been much more will-ing to borrow from Roman Catholicism than vice versa and this very much extends into the realm

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of religious art. In contrast. I think it is fair to say that mainstream Catholicism has been very am-biguous about Afrocentrizing the important per-sonae of the Christian past as it has seen this as conceding ground to Voodoo which has been, and continues to be, its most important religious competitor. Unfortunately the devastating earthquake of January 2010 has added an additional complica-tion to the study of religious art in Haiti. The earthquake was particularly devastating for churches, and many of the most important in the Port-au-Prince area, where the earthquake was worst, were destroyed and much of the art in them reduced to rubble.

The Church of Sainte-Anne in downtown Porto-au-Prince was one such casualty. All that remains is part of the sanctuary and adjacent walls. On one of them is a mural depicting the Ascension which well reflects the ambiguity on the part of Haitian Catholicism towards Afro-centricity. The disciples are portrayed by the local artist who did this work in a “racially unspecific” manner, not unlike much of the religious art of America’s most prolific religious artist, the African-American, Henry Ossawa Tanner. The nearby, but equally, badly destroyed Episco-pal Church of Sainte Trinité, was far more famous for its nativistic murals. All but two of the twelve murals were destroyed in 2010. They were painted by Haitian artists between 1950-51 and depict mostly scenes from the life of Jesus. Bishop Charles Voegeli, the American-born Epis-copal bishop, was away during the painting of the murals but on his return expressed thanks that the artists had “painted Haitians.” The Bap-tism of Jesus by Castera Bazile is an excellent ex-ample of this “indigenization.” It also locates the baptism itself in what could be a very Haitian en-vironment: it could well be taking place at the Saut d’Eau in the valley of the Artibonite River, which is an important site for both Catholic and Voodoo pilgrims.

The Nativity by Rigaud Benoit combines nativism with somewhat Byzantine features which have had considerable appeal to Haitian Catholics. The open thatched structure has been compared

t o V o o d o o tonelle where its ceremonies t a k e p l a c e . O n c e a g a i n there is a wa-terfall in the painting that could well be S a u t d ’ E a u , which is a pil-grimage site in Hait i associ-ated with the Virgin.

Much of the early support for art in Haiti in general has c o m e f r o m

European and American expatriates. The Ameri-can writer Selden Rodman played a major role in planning, organizing and financing the Sainte Trinité murals, and a grant from the New York philanthropist, Mrs. Vincent Astor, was critical for finishing the project. In contrast, what Rodman described as Haiti's "timid bourgeoisie" had "greeted the unveiling of the murals" with "arti-ficially stimulated public outrage." (Rodman 1974: 54)

Instead, religious art in most Haitian Roman Catholic churches is very much in the mode of what has been described as “L’art Saint Sulpice,” which some critics have described as represent-ing the “lowest quality in the entire history of Christian art.” [Lehmann 1969:20] It is invaria-bly “the international style of Church art in the 20th century” and highly Eurocentric [McDannell 1995:170]. In a similar fashion to Jamaica, churches in Haiti are locked when there is no service scheduled but at least they are standing and in good condition once you get outside of the area around Porto-au-Prince and Jacmel. The earthquake was quite localized.

The Cathédrale Notre-Dame de l’Assomption in Les Cayes built in 1908, about 125 miles away from Port-au-Prince, is a very good example of this international style. On the wall behind the

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Mural of Sainte Trinte:Baptism of Christ by Baizle

sanctuary there is a large painting of the Ascen-dant Virgin Mary. Above the altar is a statue of Christ on the Cross with Mary kneeling in prayer below. She is dressed in traditional colors, blue and white, with, significantly, the latter repre-senting her purity and virginity and the former the color of Heaven. In the garden outside is a mural of the Last Supper àl la Leonardo da Vinci. When I asked my guide, an elderly Haitian lawyer who had received his training in the US, whether he thought Jesus and his disciples had indeed looked like this he was quite adamant that they had been “Black Men.” At least for him there was obviously a considerable disconnect between what the official Eurocentric portrayal of Christ and Christian personae consisted and his own beliefs.

The Cathédrale Sainte Louis Roi de France in Jeremie, about 6 0 m i l e s northwest of L e s C a y e s , which was built in 1877, has s i m i l a r l y o r-thodox relig-ious art with one minor dif-ference. The main picture of the Virgin is very Byzantine in its features.

One of the most unique works of art in the main Roman Catholic cathedrals in Haiti are the Sta-tions of the Cross in the Cathédrale Notre Dame de L’Assomption du Cap-Haitien. They were done by a Haitian sculptor, who I believe was from Port-au-Prince, and have been cast in aluminum. They are quite unusual, but, nevertheless, the physiognomic features of the figures in the four-teen stations are clearly Caucasian.

Haitian buses, known as tap taps, which means literally “quick, quick,” are often ornately painted and often this artwork is very religious in its significance. Significantly, portrayals of Christ

are invariably that of a Caucasian, but in the painting on this tap tap the most famous words from the cross: “Father forgive them for they know not what they do” are in Haitian Creole. This is somewhat unusual as French is over-whelmingly the language of public signage. Undoubtedly influenced by Roman Catholicism’s use of religious imagery, Voodoo has also taken to representing its pantheon of spirits, known as the lwa, as Christian personae. Shops sell such imagery and this is an example from a shop in Cap-Hatien that was selling all sorts of religious paraphernalia that could not easily be distin-guished from being for a Voodoo or Catholic cli-entele. It is of the Voodoo Lwa, Ezili Danto, who

is usually represented as a Black Madonna. Sig-nificantly, there is a Byzantine quality in the physiognomic representation of her features as well as indicated by the manner in which she holds her child. Byzantine art had a major influ-ence on Ethiopian religious art. Hector Hyppo-lite, one of Haiti's most famous artists in the 1940s, may have even visited what was then

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Station of the Cross The Second Fall

Bus art in Croix des Bouquets

Lwa Ezili Danto portrayed as a Black Madonna

known as Abyssinia after the First World War (Rodman 1974:28). Whether or not he did, clearly Ethiopian religious art has had a major influence on Haitian artists. Lwa Ezili Danto is one of the most celebrated of the lwa of what is known as the Petro family of lwa, the family of lwa that have been identified as coming from Haiti itself rather than from Africa. She is also considered to be mute and with facial scars. She represents motherhood and supposedly fought in the Haitian Revolution and had her tongue cut out so she could not reveal slave secrets. There are also sculptural representations of both Ezili Danto and Ezili Freda, other lwa sometimes represented as a white Virgin Mary. In one such example that I saw, the sculpture was all in white and can be seen as representing the Virgin Mary, but even so its byzantine qualities were still ap-parent.

Given this appropriation of aspects of Christian art in Haiti it is not hard to understand why mainstream Catholic churches have sought to maintain their distance from much in the way of indigenization, or what has since Vatican II been described as “inculturation.” Nevertheless, there have also been subtle changes evident in some of the more recent art in some of Haiti’s Catholic churches. A stained glass window in the Church of Saint Pierre in Pétionville, a wealthy suburb of Port-au-Prince that was spared by the 2010 earthquake, is a good indication of changes that I have also seen in Ghana. Jesus, the fisher of men, is no longer portrayed as a Caucasian, but nei-ther is he black. Instead, there has been a com-promise. He is brown rather than white but his racial characteristics are rather unspecific.

It is inevitable that the push toward inculturation that presently has so much momentum in the Catholic Church will have an influence on main-stream Haitian religious art. Two of the Sainte Trinité murals survived the 2010 earthquake, and they are being carefully restored with the inten-

tion of having them once again publicly dis-played. Clearly they remain as an example of what can be done in the realm of indigenous re-ligious art and have the potential to move relig-ious art in Haiti away from what has been its con-servative focus.

At the end of my three weeks in Haiti I traveled into the mountains of the Massif de La Selle that lie to the south of Port-au-Prince. In the small

village of Furcy, at about 5,000 feet in elevation, there was a small circular Catholic Church, Saint Michael, that luckily was still open after an early morning service. Behind the altar was a wonder-ful nativistic portrayal of the Crucifixion very much like Sainte Trinité. There was no one in the church to ask who had been the artist and when the work had been done. However, much of the inspiration for the work was easy to determine. I had been up early to view the sun rise on the mountains of the Massif de La Selle which were visible from outside the church. As the sun had risen, glowing yellows, greens, browns, blues and purples had infused the magnificent land-scape outside. The artist had obviously sought to capture this very Haitian reality in this painting which is often the case in the Haitian nativistic style. It is inevitable that this is so as it is no ex-aggeration to say that mountains dominate the Haitian landscape. As the Creole aphorism ex-presses it: dèyè mon, gen mon (beyond the moun-tains, more mountains).

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Co-editors: Roger Gocking and Thomas Nyquist. The NYASA Newsletter is published by the New York African Studies Association, SUNY New Paltz 12561-2493. Contents may be reproduced with attribu-tion. Membership is NYASA $25. Back issues of the Newsletter are available for $10 each.

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Crucifixion in St. Michael’s RC Church