Secrecy: African Art that Conceals and Reveals Edited by David Frankel, 1993, Prestel, The Museum for African Art, New York.

The Visual Language of Secrecy: Insight, or, Not Seeing is Believing by Allen F. Roberts

Bwa Plank Mask

Coding

Many initiations often encode knowledge. Bwa plank masks, for example, dance in public to celebrate boys’ initiation. To women and children, their geometric designs seem purely decorative, to initiates, the designs codify secrets: family histories, myths, moral lessons the initiates must learn. These brightly painted masks do not hide what they communicate: the receptor either finds the meaning, or does not.

Lukasa Memory Board, Luba

Congo

Everything is there plain to see, but we have to know what to see – as in artists portraits of themselves with the canvas faced away from the viewer; if you know about painting (initiated) you can make a reasonable guess at what is on the other side of the canvas.

Luba royal arts hide secrets in their engraved patterns. The lukasa memory board, which mnemonically assists the recall of a constellation of facts about the Luba kingdom, is used and understood only by officials of a powerful secret association. It’s triangular and lozenge shaped patterning refers to secret knowledge. Encoding may be applied, incidentally, to practical lore as much as to esoterica: the lukasa concerns spirits, heroes, and kings, but the Bamana cloths may record, say, cures for illness.

Allen F. Roberts points out that among Tabwa and Luba peoples the verb “to scarify” also means “to draw, paint, or design” – and more recently “to write” (1988a:41).

What distinguishes these texts from writing is that they are not standardized, and their meanings are usually flexible.

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 Accumulation



Ekpe Association Emblem



Accumulative objects, laden with cloth bundles, feathers, nails, tortoiseshells, snakeskin’s, and other materials, are often charged with medicines and other compounds that reflect secret or specialized knowledge. Accumulation can take the form of collage, assemblage, or bricolage: Ekpe association emblems may appear as random conglomerations of bones, twigs, leaves, and mud, but to the initiated they are careful combinations of significant objects.

Fon Bochio

Accumulative figures protect against malign forces in ways understood exclusively by their owners or by the specialists who prescribe them to clients. A person may also commission a figure in order to transpose illness onto it: the bocio of the Fon, for example, is a kind of medical file, charting the ailments  that have afflicted its owner while providing relief by taking those ailments into its own skin. The secrets of the owner’s emotional state are subtly opened to view and overcome.



Material on an objects surface may signal the presence of something inside it. (Thus strategies of accumulation and containment are implicitly linked.) A Kongo nail figure is covered with metal blades and nails, all intended to activate ingredients within. Nail figures were sometimes used by oath takers, who licked the nails before driving them into the surface of the figure.

Boli Altar

Accumulation may sometimes be a metaphor for the layering of knowledge in the initiation process. The carving of a sculpture is only one step in its life, as its surface may receive many later applications to increase its efficacy and its secrecy. A boli altar, for example, receives new layers of material with every initiation. The work is like a canvas, ready for the offerings and blessings of it’s owner’s use. Whether as medical coatings, organic empowering substances, or miscellaneous accretions that render the object ambiguous, accumulation is one of the most visually dramatic means of conveying the presence of a secret.

(Giacometti woks in the opposite way – pairing the figure down until it almost crumbles into dust, in order to show its true inner being)

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Containment

Bembe figure containing
ancestors breath

Where accumulation makes secrecy evident, containment allows a secret to be hidden in an artwork in ways only known to its maker or user.

African art allows different kinds of containment of the secret. These are secrets one knows exists, for their presence is made clear by, a swelling or protrusion, or a mirror over a cavity. Other containments are concealed. Caught inside a Bembe figure is the breath of an ancestor, kept for personal protection and empowerment.

Often, the art object is merely a distraction from what is inside it.

Yet as David Freedberg stresses (1989:82-89), the value of a sculpture’s inner content does not diminish the importance of its outer form. Hans-Georg Gadamer argues that an artwork’s visual structure has its own signifying function, which determines its supernatural potential (in Freedberg 1989:97). Most African artworks follow strict formal rules in order to “work”. The Luba, for example, say that the spirits respond favourably to women, so almost all Lube sculptures take female form.

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