Inscriptions and fantasies in the invention of Shona sculpture [1]

By Jonathan Zilberg

Evanston, IL: Program of African Studies, Northwestern University

An Institute for Advanced Study and Research in the African Humanities Seminar: Texts in
Objects, published in Passages, no. 7, pp. 13, 16, 1994
In this short critique of the creation of meaning in a modern yet "tribal" form of African
art, Shona sculpture, I question the ways in which a certain authenticity has been
constructed. In order to do so I consider the ascriptions of meanings to a limited number
of some of the early Shona sculptures exhibited at the Muse Rodin in Paris in 1971. In
the catalog which accompanied this essentially inaugural exhibition for this tradition,
Frank McEwen, the director of the National Gallery of Rhodesia and instigator of the
movement, attributed meanings to sculptures through publishing descriptive texts
alongside photographs of the works. These meanings have been reproduced as key
symbols in the literature on Shona sculpture ever since (cf. Kennedy 1992, Ponter 1992).
Through the re-presentation and analysis of a limited sample of these original inscriptions
I ask to what extent are they selected from any verifiable ethnographic reality? and in
what degree are they inventions emanating from European fantasies of Africa?
Through discussing the following inscriptions, given as explanations to sculptures in one
of the first and most prestigious presentations of Shona sculpture to the international art
world, I ask whether they might not be accurate descriptions, but rather highly motivated
mystifications. Despite this, most reviewers (and patrons) have accepted these meanings
and re-inscribed them, in effect creating a tradition heavily based in fantasy. Such a
discourse is particularly revealing as an example of the way in which African art has been
invented by the West (cf. Mudimbe 1989). I will argue that this is an unusually useful
case for the study of the relationship between the construction of the Other and the
authentic.
Skeleton-Antelope-Men and Skeleton Gods: Shona symbols
I have chosen to focus here on one of the original Shona themes inscribed in the catalog
for the exhibition at the Musee Rodin in 1971, namely the Skeleton Being. Although this
theme (and its variants) was one of the key Shona symbols (McEwen 1972), it is no
longer in use, and, as Marion Arnold has noted, there is no supporting evidence for these
claims (1981:107,129).
Before discussing these Shona symbols, it is important to note that many of the Shona
artists themselves have insistently furthered this discourse which asserts that Shona
sculpture is the revival of an ancient Shona tradition which involves revealing spirits and
culture in stone (cf. Kuhn 1978, Winter-Irving 1991). I do not pursue the problems with
this discourse here except to reassert, as I have argued elsewhere (Zilberg 1988, 1993),

that this is a hegemonic discourse compromising historical truth for the sake of a specific
authenticity. Suffice it to say that despite the rhetoric in this art world, the idea of a Shona
identity is a very recent construct and not a primordial entity (cf. Comaroff 1987, Ranger
1989). In addition, almost half of the sculptors exhibited at the exhibition held at the
Muse Rodin in 1971 were from diverse Central African cultural backgrounds. Yet the
marketing (and idea) of Shona sculpture as a revival of an ancient Shona tradition and a
culturally embedded practice grows stronger with every exhibition and text which reinscribes the myth and magic of the Shona people (cf. Povey 1991).
The first Shona skeleton sculpture was by Sylvester Mubayi who made Skeleton Antelope
Man, a highly unusual sculpture that was to stimulate other artists such as John Takawira
to produce a series of works based on the skeleton theme (cf. Froger Butler 1982). This
original work combined human and animal forms in a way which has come to be
described as quintessentially Shona. The idea here is that by sculpting part animal,
human, and skeletal forms, the sculptors are conveying their beliefs in the metamorphosis
of man into animal, and in the communication between the living and the spirit world
(Arnold 1981). On this level it can be seen that there is a certain basis for these "Shona"
symbols, but the problem in the inscription of meaning, the entextualization of these
sculptures, is in the extremity of the manipulation of this possibility. The myths of
Skeleton Gods, upon which these symbols are based, simply do not existthey are not to
be found in the extensive literature on Shona religion. Consequently, analysis of these
inscriptions reveals a fascinating case of the invention and imagining of Africa and of
contemporary African art.
While facets of Shona myth and ritualsuch as the belief in the spirit world and
possessionhave been selected, they have been deployed here in such a fantastic manner
that one has to work hard to find and disentangle possible origins for these themesthe
actual cultural beliefs upon which this authenticity has been built.
For example, in the Workshop catalog, Skeleton Antelope Man is described as
follows:
Here, by Sylvester, is a strange, lucid spirit image, fierce and alertskeleton
antelope-man (35 in.) become incarnate. Projecting possessive power, he lurks on
the frontier of the conscious mind. Ready to enchant or kill, or to fade and
become disincarnate (McEwen N.d. n.p.).
Similarly, in the catalog for the exhibition at the Rodin museum, there are three
interesting descriptions given to some of these works. "Vie Squelettique" is described as
an example which reveals the motifs of the skeleton myth:
This work is one of the motifs which represents the skeleton myth. It concerns
skeletons of men and birds, most frequently of baboons or birds ... Through
psychic force, exercised by the will of living initiates, perhaps also by the spirit of
the deceased, the skeleton is partially reincarnated for the purpose of
communicating with the living. Flesh and vitality are given to it momentarily. The

flesh allows it to move, standing upright or sitting and physically or spiritually

speaking with the medium in trance. Sometimes the sacrifice that is commanded
is prepared for the animal as a blood sacrifice which is necessary for this
transformation. "Vital Skeleton" (Vie Squelettique) is not then just animated but in
the process of becoming (McEwen 1971 n.p., trans. mine).
Similarly, Man-God Skeleton is described like this:
This incarnation is made through the force of rites, of the sacrifice of living blood
which gives the essence to the partial incarnation. The aim is always to affect a
communication between the spirits and the living (ibid.).
Here the Man-God Skeleton is made through rites in which blood sacrifices
provide for the communication between living and spirit beings.
There is no evidence, as far as I know, that the Shona believe in the incarnation of
skeletons, and certainly no documentation that they pour blood over their ancestors'
skeletons in order to animate them and communicate with the dead. Yet these "facts" were
established in this catalog as "true" and "immanent" and have been recycled ever since.
These particular descriptions that I have considered here are gross misrepresentations and
manipulations of funerary and post-mortuary Shona rituals and general beliefs about
communication with and possession by animal and ancestral spirits (for descriptions of
Shona ritual see Aschwanden 1989, Bourdillon 1976). In terms of untangling the possible
origins of these explanations, the closest ethnographic material which I have been able to
discern as a source from which the idea of blood sacrifice and incarnation may have been
derived is this:
The starting point for an ancestral shrine is the place where the body of a king or
great chief is mummified. There, one lets his 'blood' (cadaver liquid) soak into the
ground and builds a shrine on top of it, where one prays and sacrifices to the most
important tribal ancestors.... In this shrine, a clay totem-animal is often placed
which symbolizes the ancestor.... (Aschwanden 1989:239).
Another potential source for a similar theme is the Kurova Guva ceremony; I suspect this
to be the derivation because one of these "spirit sculptures" was labelled "Guwa." A year
after a person's death (one who had been married and had children), the Kurova Guva
ceremony is held in which the spirit is brought back to the homestead from the wild
through the sacrifice of a goat or a bull. In addition to this type of selection in the
inscription process, it is indeed true that the "Shona" peoples believe in the omnipresence
of the spirits and their influence on one's life (and of the possibility of them
communicating their wishes and dissatisfactions with their descendants through spirit
mediums), but again it is critical to note this is by no means specific to the "Shona." To
select from these general cultural practices and transform them into blood sacrifices over
ancestor skeletons, animating them so as to allow them to communicate with the living,
and then to propose that stone sculptures are not only representative of this but incarnate
of that experience is an extraordinary form of inscription in the construction of

authenticity. In fairness to Frank McEwen, however, this should be foregrounded by the

fact that Joseph Ndandarika, one of the original Shona sculptors, used to love telling such
tales. Do these inscriptions not tell us more about European perceptions of Africa as a
savage and magical Other than of anything else? Does this form of representation not
speak more to the history of ideological relations between Africa and the West than to the
factual basis for these inscriptions themselves?
Conclusion: Shona sculpture as a commodity fetish
The above description of specific examples of inscriptions through which Shona sculpture
has been imagined (invented) by attaching highly inventive and selective texts to works of
art could be seen to raise critical problems for ideas of authenticity and value based in
such representations. Do the artists really believe that there are spirits in these stones and
that they reveal them through a magically creative process? Rather, is this not a way of
speaking for gullible Europeans who think, as Hodza (1982) says, that anything made by
an African is magical?
In this type of construction of an authenticity, a primacy is given to meaning which I
argue speaks to the creative encounter between the European imagination of Africa and
the African's perception of that vision. This case study is useful for understanding
processes of objectification and the commodity fetish, specifically for examining how
such fictionsealities are perpetuated through authenticating discourses which select
particular forms of representation in order to satisfy Western perceptions of authenticity.
These necessarily fetishise this commodity to give it a cultural and therefore economic
value.
The point I am advancing here is that audience expectation is the driving force in this art
world, not a "Shona" zeitgeist (for similar critiques see Bernardi 1988, Cousins 1992,
Roberts 1982). The cycle of symbolic exchange that Jules-Rosette (1984:19) develops is
not so much a process in which the artists project symbolic meanings into the market and
then modify their production according to what is sold; it is a calculated selection, and
they have McEwen's original expectations as well as the consumer's expectations in mind
from the very start.
This accounts for the common critique of the aesthetic integrity of Shona sculpture today,
and can be seen as a process of reflection in which the artists create what they imagine the
consumer perceives as Shona and finds aesthetically pleasing (cf. Steiner 1990 for a
similar case in the West African art market).
These inscribed meanings would seem to bear out Marx's observations on the fetishisation
of human labor in the market: this is a case of "the fantastic objectification of
commodities" (their fetishisation) and "an illusion of a relation between things" taking
"the place of a social relation" (cf. Stewart 1984:165 for a similar process occurring with
representation of a Bambara mask). Similarly, Daniel Miller, in The Myth of
Primitivism(1991), using Said's concept of Orientalism as an "operation of ideology" in
explaining British textiles made in the "oriental style," writes this about the fetishistic

assumption of the Occident (exoticised Other) as a reality rather than as a constructed

fiction:
It is a design which has meaning only as an expression of the relationship between
the two societies. It may be said therefore to be an objectification in material form
of the concept of orientalism. On the one hand we have an immensely fluid
relationship comparable to Laing's model of 'What I think that you think I think'
etc., and yet this same hermeneutic cycle produces an increasingly fixed material
text.... To generalize from this example, there is a process by which objects as
objectifications come to fix as material forms images of the relationship between
societies, in which one society produces for the other an image that society has of
itself. Given time, the image may often be assimilated and act as a powerful
element in the self-conception of that other (ibid:60).
Consequently, perhaps it helps to think of the inscriptions considered in this paper as
representational strategies speaking directly to the imagining of Africa and the
manipulation of culture for the sake of a certain authenticity and therefore of a specific
form of value.
Acknowledgements
I gratefully acknowledge the opportunity to have pursued this research while a fellow at
the Institute for Advanced Study and Research in the African Humanities at
Northwestern, as well as the support for this research by grants from the Social Science
Research Council and the Departments of African Studies and Anthropology at the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. In particular, I thank Dr. Edward Bruner, Dr.
Anita Glaze, Dr. Alma Gottlieb, Viviene Jedeiken, Veronica Kann, Dr. Janet Stanley,
Patricia Sandler, Dr. Terence Ranger, Dr. Thomas Turino, Dr. Norman Whitten, Celia
Winter-Irving, Richard Wolf, my family, and the late Joseph Ndandarika.
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1. For a more balanced overview of "Shona" sculpture than that found in the extant
American literature on contemporary African art, see Williams (1991) and Walker (1991).
Shona sculpture emerged in the early 1960s through the first of the contemporary African
Workshop experiments (cf. Wahlman 1989). It is important to note here that Frank
McEwen created the idea of a Shona sculpture at the same time as coining the explicitly
derogatory and antipodal term "airport art" (cf. McEwen 1966). The invention of Shona
sculpture necessarily denied the diverse ethnicities of the artists and relied on a
primordialist rather than emergent notion of ethnic identity. It also notably involved the
omission of the fact that a number of the first and leading artists were introduced to art
through mission art experiments such as those run by Canon Edward Patterson at Cyrene
Mission in the 1930s and 1940s, and in Salisbury from the 1950s-70s, as well as through
Father Groeber's instruction at Serima Mission in the 1960s (cf. Plangger 1974).
Consequently, a number of key Shona artists said to have emerged spontanteously at the
Workshop school had already been introduced to art through these schools, through
experimentation in the tourist curio trade, or through relatives or acquaintances who had
variously become members of the loose association of artists comprising the Workshop
school.
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