TRIBES OF PLANET EARTH: July 2010

ASIA

Carved ivory pagodaCanton (Guangzhou), south China, 19th centuryAccession Number1981.876.123

Chinese craftsmen are famous for their ivory carving. In the past ivory was imported from Africa, India and parts of Southeast Asia.
The Chinese began to export ivory carvings to Europe in the early 18th century. By the 19th century Canton (Guangzhou) was the centre of ivory production for export.
The Canton school of carvers was famous for making concentric balls carved from a solid block of ivory. These balls are extremely complicated and difficult to carve. Some have 18 spheres, one inside the other. It took a carver up to three months to create a large one.

Carved ivory ball

Canton (Guangzhou), south China, mid 19th century

CHINA

China is one of the world's oldest civilisations.
China had good trade links across the Silk Road. This great route linking China to the Mediterranean lands was named after the valuable Chinese silks traded along it.
By the 12th century China had strong links with its neighbours - Korea, Japan, South East Asia and Tibet.
China was trading with Europe from the 1500s. By the 19th century Liverpool merchants were an important part of the China trade.
Liverpool families who were involved in shipping offered many exported Chinese objects to this museum. You can see some of them here.
Follow the links in the navigation panel to explore more of these collections.

Pair of imperial burners in the form of qilin

Asia traded in silk, cotton, spices and porcelain.
The trade in spices made a great deal of money. By the 16th century, merchants from Europe controlled the trade in South East Asia. Between the 17th and 19th centuries, they imported huge cargoes of porcelain and tea from China to Europe.
Europeans formed a picture of Asia from these goods.
Asia fascinated Europe. In the 18th century European designers combined Chinese, Japanese and Indian designs with Western styles to create a new fashion called 'chinoiserie'.
Sir Douglas Crawford collected some of the objects you see here in the 20th century. They show the continuing interest in Asia and Chinese art.

CENTRAL AFRICA

Baga, Guinea, late 19th centuryAccession Number 20.8.97.20
Baga mainly live along the coastal regions of Guinea but this d’mba figure was collected in Sierra Leone, probably through Temne middlemen. We know very little about this type of figure, even though Pablo Picasso owned two like it.
“I have felt my strongest artistic emotions when suddenly confronted with the sublime beauty of sculptures executed by the anonymous artists of Africa. These works of a religious, passionate, and rigorously logical art are the most powerful and most beautiful things the human imagination has ever produced.”Pablo Picasso

We or Bete, Côte-d’Ivoire, before 1967Accession Number 1967.327
The We live in small communities without powerful chiefs. They have a wide variety of masquerades that play important roles in regulating and policing the community. This mask would have been worn in one of those masquerades.
The European artists, critics and connoisseurs who helped to reassess the value of ethnographic artefacts as ‘art’ knew very little about the original meaning and function of these objects. They analysed them according to Western ideas and viewed them as heroic, yet anonymous, expressions of universal aesthetic values. This led to an expansion of the Western category of ‘art’ to include artefacts produced by diverse peoples across the globe. Although this is widely seen as a positive move, it does not help us to understand African artefacts as unique cultural achievements in their own right .

20th Century European art and African sculpture

Senufo, Côte-d’Ivoire, before 1968.

This pulley holder would have been used with a narrow strip loom.

Its design is probably purely decorative and shows a buffalo mask.
“I often used to pass … a curio shop called “Le Père Sauvage”... There was a whole corner of little wooden statues of Negro origin. I was astonished to see how they were conceived from the point of view of sculptural language. … Compared to European sculpture, which always took its point of departure from the description of the object, these Negro statues were made … according to invented planes and proportions.”Henri Matisse

Lagoons, S E Côte-d’Ivoire, about 1905
This figure from the Lagoons region of S E Côte-d’Ivoire may have been made as a spirit companion figure or as diviners’ helper.
European colonial attitudes during the late 19th century viewed other cultures, particularly African, as unevolved. Seeing themselves as highly evolved, Europeans claimed moral and cultural superiority. But as knowledge of European atrocities against Africans became widely known, some Europeans began to question the moral and cultural superiority of the ‘civilised nations’.
Artists like Picasso and Matisse became interested in African artefacts during the first decade of the 20th century. They were astonished that such objects, generally detested or thought valueless, revealed complex sculptural ideas that suggested new ways of making images. They drew inspiration from African artefacts in order to revitalise European art with new visual, psychological and spiritual meaning.

Agwe and Lasirèn are water spirits - the king and queen of the sea.

Agwe is often shown as captain of the boat Imamou that transports the dead to their ancestral home.

He is one of the chief spirits of the ‘cool’ Rada pantheon.

Lasirèn is depicted as a mermaid and is usually placed with the ‘hot’ Petwo spirits.

What are Minkisi?

Kongo, Mayumba, Gabon, late 19th century

According to our records, this nkisi was used to cure a particular illness. Its various visible parts include the horn of an antelope, tail quills of the forest porcupine, and the skin of a genet cat.
Minkisi] receive … powers by composition, conjuring and consecration.

They are composed of earths, ashes, herbs, leaves and of relics of the dead …

These are the properties of minkisi, to cause sickness in a man and also to remove it.

To destroy, to kill, to benefit. … The way of every nkisi is this: when you have composed it, observe its rules lest it be annoyed and punish you.

It knows no mercy.‘Simon Kavuna, around 1915 Nkondi minkisi ‘power figures’
‘We don’t insult the [Christian] reliquaries of the medieval period by labeling them fetishes. Indeed, we see them as part of a complex of ideal moral gestures.

And so we are coming to view nkondi. We see them not as “exotic” (a bourgeois term for the culturally complex and strange).

We see them as ringing with elements from a parallel language of moral vision.’

Robert Farris Thompson, Professor of African Art History, Yale University, 1987
You can learn more about nkondi minkisi in this special interactive feature based on the world cultures gallery.

Nsemi on minkisi‘

Nkisi is the name of things we use to help a man when he is sick and from which we obtain health; the name refers to leaves and medicines combined together. … an nkisi is also something that hunts down illness and chases it away from the body. Many people therefore compose an nkisi … It is a hiding place for people’s souls, to keep and compose in order to preserve life.‘Nsemi, Cahier 391

Kongo, Mayombe, Dem. Rep. Congo, about 1899

This remarkable nkisi is composed of hook, knife, mirrors, model arrows, spoons and boat-shaped implements all set in ‘medicine’ packs. There are also iron bells and cloth packages attached to it. People wore minkisi like this one on the arm to protect themselves from harm while travelling through the bush.

Nkisi nkondi Kozo

Kongo, Landana, Cabinda, late 19th century
Many Kongo and other Central Africans believe that spiritual powers derive from communication with the dead. Most of the figures on display in the gallery were made to commemorate important people after their death and to serve as a focus for communication with them. Ordinary people did not usually communicate with the dead, as this required special knowledge and preparations that were available only to chiefs, witches and ‘baganga’ [singular ‘nganga’].
‘Baganga’ were (and still are) ritual specialists, healers and diviners who defend people against witchcraft and disease. In order to ensure the effectiveness of their work they used powerful objects [‘minkisi’, singular ‘nkisi’] containing forces obtained from the graves of the dead. All the nail-studded figures displayed in this section would have been operated by Kongo baganga.
BaKongo say that dogs have ‘four eyes’ - one pair for this world and another for the supernatural world. This may be why this dog figure has two heads. Dogs are also hunters and have a special ability to seek out and attack prey. This dog’s prey was probably witches and other wrong-doers.

Ivory Madonna

Kongo, Democratic Republic of Congo or Angola, 19th century

European views of Africans were mainly positive in the 15th to the 17th centuries.

In the 16th century the Kongo Kingdom adopted Catholicism as the state religion from the Portuguese.

The ruling class already had a good relationship with European missionaries and traders. Catholicism only strengthened their cooperation and mutual respect.
However, in the 17th century the slave trade and political interference by the Portuguese helped split the Kongo Kingdom into small chiefdoms.

Europeans gradually began to view Africans as uncivilised savages.

These new views were used to justify slavery and colonial rule.

Europeans colonised Central Africa during the late 19th century.

The region and its people were brutally exploited as Europeans forced Africans to harvest wild rubber. Europeans portrayed exploitation of African labour as a civilising influence, even though it caused great suffering to Central African peoples.
One reason why traders, missionaries and colonial officers enthusiastically collected African artefacts was because they wanted to destroy Kongo power, making it easier to impose European control over the people.
A Kongo ivory carver made this figure of a Madonna for a Catholic mission over 100 years ago. The Portuguese made their first Kongo converts to Christianity over 500 years ago.

GABON, AFRICA

Headdress
Fang, Equatorial Guinea or S Cameroon, late 19th century
Both men and women who had gained high status wore this kind of headdress. The ability to accumulate, through exchange, enough beads, buttons, brass wire and tacks in order to make a headdress was an important indication of a person’s social standing.

Beaded Belt

Mpongue, Gabon, about 1882
The niece of an Mpongue chief called Ngarlay made this beaded belt. The European buckle suggests that the belt would have belonged to a wealthy person who traded with Europeans.

Mask
Probably Fang, Gabon, about 1898
Our records say that this mask was used in ‘pleasure dances’.

The white colour and heart-shaped face are like the masks of the fearsome ngil association maskers that served to punish wrong-doers and carry out death sentences against witches and sorcerers.

The peoples of the tropical rainforests of Gabon

didn’t settle in one place for long.

Their social life was largely regulated by initiation associations and ancestor ‘cults’ that functioned without powerful rulers.

Although missionaries largely destroyed their ancestor cults, most groups still retain rich oral, musical and masquerade traditions.
Coastal peoples like the Mpongwe tried to monopolise the trade between Europeans and inland groups.

They told Europeans exaggerated stories about the savagery and cannibalism of the Fang. Yet, missionaries’ and explorers’ first accounts of the Fang from the 1840s and 50s contradicted these stories.

The missionaries admired the physical bearing, health and apparent virtues of the Fang they met with and feared the effects that the ‘vices of civilisation’ would have on these ‘noble savages’.

The Fang moved steadily towards the coast to trade with Europeans throughout the 19th century.

CAMEROON, AFRICA

Royal Stool
Bali Kingdom, Grassfields, Cameroon, 1916

From 1884, Cameroon had been a German protectorate but during the 1914-18 World War it was divided between the British and French.
This royal leopard stool belonged to the Fon or ‘King’ of the Bali kingdom.
In 1916 he gave it to King George V as a diplomatic gift.

Royal Helmet Mask

Bamum, Cameroon, late 19th or early 20th century

This royal mask has a prestigious beaded cap.
A royal official would wear it at the annual public festival that marked the end of the main harvest. It was brought to Liverpool by a member of the Holt family who were involved in the West African trade from the 1860s.

Buffalo Mask

Duala, Cameroon, before 1908
This mask may have been intended to portray Njona – a dangerous water spirit that resembles a buffalo. It would have been worn with a costume by members of the male initiation associations called Losango. The masker would have appeared in public at funeral ceremonies and to perform policing functions within the community.

The Kingdoms

There were many independent kingdoms in the Grassfields.

Each king’s power was balanced by councils of nobles and palace masquerade associations. These palace institutions still function today in many kingdoms.
Complex trade relationships encouraged craftspeople to develop special skills in different areas of the Grassfields.

Kings often commissioned stools and other royal objects from craftspeople in other kingdoms.
Trade routes linked the Grassfields with the Cameroon coast.

Since the 17th century, the Duala acted as middlemen between Europeans and groups inland. They initially transported ivory, then slaves and then palm oil, down river to European ships anchored off the coast.

They distributed European goods, like guns, gunpowder and beads up river along the same routes. Prosperous traders became spokesmen and leaders.

Their families were raised to positions of influence and helped change Duala society.

ALTAR HEAD

Edo, Benin City, Nigeria, 15th century

This realistic head dates from the earliest period of Edo court sculpture, before European contact in the late 15th century, because bronze sculpture progressed from a naturalistic to a more formal style. It is small and finely cast because bronze was scarce.

OBA FIGURES

Edo, Benin City, Nigeria, 19th century

These two Oba figures are wearing beaded coral crowns of a type introduced by Oba Osemwede who reigned from 1816-1848.

Each holds a ceremonial sword eben and a brass staff.

They may have hung on royal altars by the twisted metal rings at the top.

THE QUEEN MOTHER

Head of Queen Mother

Edo, Benin City, Nigeria 16th century

Oba Esigie established the powerful position of Iyoba, Queen Mother, in the early 16th century in honour of his mother Idia who helped him defeat an invading army.

The Iyoba lives in her own court with its own chiefs at Uselu outside Benin City.

Only altars dedicated to previous Obas and previous Iyobas have commemorative heads cast in brass.
Only the Oba, the Iyoba and one hereditary war chief are permitted to wear coral headgear to denote their exceptional status.

This head has a peaked headdress of coral beads worn only by the Iyoba.

MILITARY ART

Edo, Benin City, Nigeria, 16th century

Oba Ovonramwen (who reigned from 1888-1897)

gave this sculpture to John Henry Swainson, a Liverpool trader, when he visited Benin with a British diplomatic expedition in 1892.

Such figures were placed on royal ancestral altars and may have commemorated the military power of a particular Oba.
Purchased with the assistance of The National Art Collections Fund.

THE EDO KINGDOM

Oba, Ovonramwen.
Photograph by the Ibani Ijo photographer J A Green.
From the Howie photo album in the archives of the Merseyside Maritime Museum

Towards the end of the 19th century, the British saw the Edo kingdom as an obstruction to their colonial expansion and their increased need for palm oil.
After British emissaries were killed on their way to Benin City in 1897, Britain sent a ‘punitive expedition’ to take over the Edo kingdom.
The reigning Oba, Ovonramwen, was deposed.
This photograph shows him with guards on board ship on his way to exile in Calabar in 1897.
The unusual gown he is wearing hides his shackles.
Bronze, brass, ivory and wood artworks - never seen before in the West – were removed from his palace and sold in London to help pay the costs of the expedition.
Such an injustice...