YORUBA MAN WITH A BICYCLE

-Essay about Continental African Identity-

by Raul Cazan
Master of Arts in Political Science

2001
 Introduction

More than three decades of post-colonial Africa gave birth to a continent of

confusion. African culture and African national politics became a hybrid heritage of the

colonialism. The call for African unity after the fall of colonialism needs even today a

strong continental cultural basis. In this essay I am trying to focus on the cultural

determinations of African continental identity and to make a broad synthesis of the main

strands supporting this type of unity. Postmodernist concepts such as neotraditionalism or

ethnophilosophy and also the main culture based ideas about common and traditional

religions, history, art and philosophy, explaining the long road towards African solidarity

might clear the cloudy skies of the ‘black continent’.

Neotraditionalism

Browsing an exhibition organized at the Center for African Art in New York

and called "Perspectives: Angles on African Art", Professor Kwame Anthony Appiah set

his eyes on a piece of sculpture that will be his touchstone in explaining post-colonial and

post-modern black Africa. The piece was labeled by the museum 'Yoruba Man with a

Bicycle'. This object belonging to contemporary African art served as point of entry to the

theme of today's African cultural identity. Moreover, for Appiah this sculpture means "the

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articulation of the post-colonial and the post-modern" (Kwame Anthony Appiah – 'In My

Father's House – Africa in the Philosophy of Culture', Oxford University Press, 1992, 139).

The funny sculpture was described in the catalog as follows: "Yoruba, Nigeria

20th century. Wood and paint H. 35 ¾ in. […] The influence of the Western world is

revealed in the clothes and bicycle of this neotraditional Yoruba sculpture which probably

represents a merchant en route to market". The word 'neotraditional', thinks Appiah,

provides the fundamental clue.

What is incredibly striking about the Yoruba Man with a Bicycle is that it was

presented to an exhibition concerning Primitive African Art! What is so primitive about a

bicycle? Trying a post-modernist grasp into explaining the existence of the little piece of

art, Appiah states that “post-modernism can be seen … as a new way of understanding the

multiplication of distinctions that flows from the need to clear oneself a space” (Appiah,

145). A modernist approach, based on reason, would deny an African sculpture containing

a bicycle. It is simply not African, would cry out a modernist. Post-modernism, however,

rejects that claim. It allows, even in the field of theory, a multiplication of distinctions we

see in the cultures that it seeks to understand.

Nobody knows when and by whom the Yoruba Man with a Bicycle was

sculptured. However the term ‘neotraditional’ implies that the piece was made after 1960,

that is the year when Nigeria gained its independence. Besides, the Westerners are asking

themselves whether the little sculpture belongs to the ‘high culture’ or to the ‘mass

culture’. But in Africa those questions do not make any sense.

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 Approaching this piece of art with modernist tools leads us nowhere. Appiah

thinks that Yoruba Man with a Bicycle was made for the West. The piece is traditional

because the artist used pre-colonial techniques. But, on the other hand, it is neo- because “it

has elements that are recognizably from the colonial or post-colonial in reference, has been

made for Western tourists and other collectors” (Appiah, 148). Art critics, following

modernity’s criteria, were trying to find an ‘Archimedean point’ outside their cultures in an

attempt to penetrate the esthetics of the little Yoruba Man. Conversely, for post-

modernists, Appiah included, this kind of works can be understood, but “not legitimated by

culture- and history- transcending standards” (Appiah, 148).

Simplifying, the Yoruba Man with a Bicycle is purely a question of Africa’s

cultural identity. The African artistic expression functions as a pendulum with two remote

amplitudes: one is the old African traditional art and the other is the Euro-American

exhibition. Therefore, we are entitled to ask ourselves: is there a core of African cultural

identity? No, answers the post-modern. But it is obvious that post-colonial African identity

presents itself as a duality consisting in a pre-colonial aesthetic heritage and a colonial ad-

stratum.

Pan-Africanism and African Identity

Yoruba Man with a Bicycle, as it was shown above, represents a distorted

mirror image of African soul in the West. Also, claims of an underlying pan-African

aesthetic are to be viewed as highly contentious. African pre-colonial art was functional.

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This means that most of the sculpted artifacts were made with a certain practical use in

mind, not art for the art’s sake as artistic creation is apprehended in the West.

The piece of sculpture that I am writing about encounters, somehow, both

paradigms. It is true that it belongs to the culture of the West-African Yoruba tribe. Thus it

contains an ancient African aesthetic expression. Therefore, it should have some

functionality. In contrast, the bicycle denies any kind of functionality. This type of element,

belonging to colonialism (or post-colonialism), is a factor that differentiates contemporary

African pieces of art. Those factors, ad-strata of British, French, Portuguese or Belgian

origin dissolved in the African tradition and created new, artificial cultural identities.

In an unifying attempt to build a continental black African identity, Pan-

Africanism starts from three premises. Obviously, the first premises of Pan-Africanism are

the shared grievances of the African peoples during colonialism. Second, given the

demands of colonial administration, new political identities were imposed from the

outside, from the metropolis. The only separating lines between African peoples were the

languages such as Yoruba, Efe, Igbo or Kikuyu. These peoples (the term ‘tribe’ has been

also imposed by colonialists) were transformed in political entities carrying the name of

their language (The New Encyclopaedia Britannica, Volume 13, Macropaedia,

Encyclopaedia Britannica Inc., Chicago, 1992, 123).

And third, the 20th century is thought to be a period in which the range of

options available to the artist has increased as new cultural and social institutions have

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developed. This development has been a consequence of the impossibility of maintaining a

distinction between traditional and modern (colonial) African art.

From those new premises and realities, African peoples, freed from

colonialism, constructed new identities. Their pre-colonial cultures, not completely lost in

the past, gained eclectic forms. The Yoruba Man with a Bicycle is an example of this kind

of cultural eclecticism. African artistic expression was minimized by Western modernists

and even considered satanic by the Christian missionaries. African sculpture, for instance,

until the 1960s was equalized with primitive art.

The distinguished Italian ethnographer, Vinigi Grottanelli is among the first

who 'deprimitivized' African sculpture. In considering that African art is not 'savage' (nor

created by primitive people), says the Italian, "we are not confronted by primordial

gropings, any more than by the spontaneous self expressions of a suppositional (but non-

existent) 'natural man'" (Basil Davidson, "The African Past – Chronicles from Antiquity to

Modern Times", Penguin African Library, 1966, 363).

Those sculptures are the outcome of ancient and most elaborate traditions.

Works of African art are "the products of a conscious and thoughtful maturity… They are

not points of departure, but points of arrival" (Davidson, 363).

Grottanelli wrote these words in 1961. Since then, however, colonialism in its

classic form disappeared from the black continent. Meanwhile, Africans, as Appiah

underlines, "invented histories, invented biologies, invented cultural affinities" to build up

their post-colonial political entities (Appiah, 174). Pan-Africanism, black solidarity, could

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be a force with real political benefits. Nonetheless, a continental black African identity can

not be built without inevitable mystifications.

Recognizing the constructedness of any identity, Appiah gives a warning: the

continent will be (still) drowned in blood if Africans constantly re-define "tribal" identities

just to meet the economic and political exigencies of the modern world. On the other hand,

the Pan-Africanist view of the continental black identity based on race and history is totally

unproductive. African art, African culture in general is the only sound premise of a

continental identity. And the roots of this culture are definitely not the 'tribes', but regional

and sub-regional organizations (Appiah, 180). And, extending, the point of arrival which

Grottanelli was writing about (although only in the realm of African sculpture) means

continental identity coming into cultural and, consequently, institutional identity.

Yoruba Man without a Bicycle

Appiah's solution for a culturalized Pan-Africanism is still counter-attacked

from the trench of scholars who defend African ethnicities and African nationalities.

Metaphorically, they try to deprive the little Yoruba Man of his bicycle. Specifically, thee

scholars stand for a struggling political Pan-Africanism, usually from a Marxist

perspective. Kwame Nkrumah's "Africa Must Unite" is an example in this sense. All

European and, lately American, influence is ignored. There is no place for diversity.

It is a true fact that Africans feel a historical necessity of African culture.

Frantz Fanon, in the mid-1960s, wrote that this necessity "in which men of African culture

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find themselves to racialize their claims and to speak more of African than of national

culture will tend to lead them up a blind alley" (Frantz Fanon, "The Wretched of the

Earth", Penguin Books, London, 1963, 172). African Negro-ism was broke up into

different entities because every culture is first national, and maybe then continental, thinks

Fanon. This limitation to nationality belongs to the phenomena of the formation of the

historical character of men. Therefore, the cultural problem existing in ex-colonial

countries gives rise to serious ambiguities, says Fanon (Fanon, 174).

For Frantz Fanon the movement for African culture should be directed

towards national cultures as to be related to political events. Fanon's stated belief in a

national culture is an ardent and despairing turning towards a secure anchorage in the

realities of the 1960s. He also states that "in order to ensure his salvation and to escape

from the supremacy of the white man's culture the native feels the need to turn backwards

towards his unknown roots and to lose himself at whatever cost in his own barbarous

people (!)" (Fanon, 175). As a Marxist, Fanon obsessively precipitates himself against the

idea of an African continental culture, defending the idea of strong national states, maybe

inspired by Kwame Nkrumah's "Africa Must Unite".

Today, however, the idea of a cultural Pan-Africanism, based on the useful

cliche 'unity in diversity', which Appiah advocates, is simply the only non-violent solution

to construct an African identity. But, there is also a bit of truth in Fanon's critique of the

native African intellectuals. They thrown themselves greedily upon Western culture, says

Fanon. "Like adopted children who only stop investigating the new family framework at

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the moment when a minimum nucleus of security crystallizes in their psyche, the native

intellectual will try to make European culture his own" (Fanon, 176). This was true for the

African literature, but it is quite a counterexample as far as it concerns the vivid African

arts.

A similar contempt for the native African intellectuals at the dusk of the post-

colonialist era shows another Marxist, the Tanzanian historian Walter Rodney. He believes

that the intellectual elite is the result of an "education for underdevelopment". In his view,

post-colonial African intellectuals lived in a foggy Euro-African culture, showing

disrespect for national political and economic realities (Walter Rodney - "How Europe

Underdeveloped Africa", Bogle-L'Ouverture Publications, London, 1972, 261).

As Yoruba Man with a Bicycle shows, in Africa exist conflict and tensions of

cultures in dialectical interaction with each other. The contact of the African continent with

the Islam, on one hand, in the north lead to a process of culture contest. In the name of

Jihad, the Holy Muslim War, Islam has imposed itself over African worldviews. The

contact with the Western culture, however, is a more complex phenomenon.

Ali A. Mazrui shows in his book "The Africans - A Triple Heritage" that

Western culture is more evenly distributed in the African continent and "has shown a

remarkable capacity for both conquest and disruption" (Ali A. Mazrui, "The Africans - A

Triple Heritage", Little, Brown and Company, Boston, Toronto, 1986, 257). The result of

this disruption is a cultural confusion. Africans are torn by contending forces and they lose

their psychological equilibrium. Consequently, as an attempt to escape this state o

9
confusion some Africans are fighting for cultural revival, for "a restoration of authenticity",

while others capitulate to the new civilization, "engage in cultural surrender" (Mazrui,

257).

Indigenization

As a first remedy for Africa's "cultural malaise" Mazrui proposes the therapy

of indigenization or domestication. Europeans in Africa, whether they were administrators,

traders, missionaries or educators shared the assumption that Western cultural values were

indisputably superior to those they found in the black continent. That was the fundamental

ideological justification of the colonialism.

African nationalist movements did not strive for political equality, but for

political independence. Total separation assures equality, believed African liberators. In

cultural questions, however, the question was at the opposite pole: "how both to assimilate

and preserve, how both to be universal and to be oneself, how to modernize without being

Western" (Immanuel Wallerstein, "Africa - the Politics of Independence", Vintage Books,

New York, 1961, 122).

For organizational purposes, the nationalist movements and lately the new

African states began to find much virtue in cultural revival, says Wallerstein. African

leaders began to "rediscover and praise the heroes of ancient Africa" and to build myths.

Also they tried to re-legitimate traditional practices. Kenyan leader Jomo Kenyatta shocked

the British colonists and metropolitans when he made an open defense of the Kikuyu

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custom of female circumcision. The African cultural revival, according to Wallerstein, had

three strands: religion, history and philosophy.

I. The revival of African traditional religions is still a painful need of the

African people. African religions are "communal and non-universalistic", says Makau

Mutua (Makau Mutua, "Returning to my Roots" in "Proselytization and Communal Self-

Determination in Africa" edited by A.A. An Na'Im, Orbis Books, New York, 1996, 172) .

They just do not relate to the notion of "converting the other". For instance, the same term

'Yoruba' designates the people living in south Nigeria, their religion and even their

language. Furthermore, as Mbiti (quoted by Mutua) says, "in African traditional society

there was no dichotomy between the secular and the religious, no distinction between the

religious and the irreligious and no separation between the material and the spiritual".

Monotheistic religions such as Semitic and messianic cults (Christianity, Islam

and Judaism) were supposed to be hierarchically superior to those polytheist and animist,

terms used to describe African religions. Today, thinks Mutua it can be observed a

phenomenon of religious counterpenetration in Africa. And there are Africans who still

adhere to their dying beliefs in an attempt to use some of their conceptions to construct

new identities. “Many of the movements utilize African religious thought although they

combine it with elements of Islamic and Christian theology”, reveals Mutua (Mutua, 175).

A strong example in this matter, among others, is the Ethiopianist movement. Ethiopian

churches are regarded in some aspects as “positive repudiations of Christianity” because

they use the “scaffolding of the Christian church to erect new structures for the self

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expression of the traditional religion”, says Mutua. At the same time, the author praises the

new law in Benin through which the state constitutionally acknowledged the voodoo

religion shared by the overwhelming majority of its citizens.

II. The revival of African history requested a massive effort all over the

continent. One of the pillars of colonial rule has been that "Africa has no history."

Wallerstein reminds us that in the schools of the colonial era the African schoolchildren

were taught the history of the colonists. A hilarious reality of those times is that the history

schoolbooks in French colonies began with the syntagm "Our ancestors the Gauls…" The

archaeological finds, the works of art and pieces of oral history were products and remains

of black civilization. Colonists managed to deny all those historical sources using

ridiculous suppositions and attributing them to Hamites, Hittites, Phoenicians, Arabs, Jews,

Berbers and even Greeks (Wallerstein, 125).

After World War II, European, American and mainly African scholars

significantly changed the atmosphere. Slowly, the myth of white superiority, even among

the colonists, lost its effectiveness. However, even today, African nations have a short past

as nationalities. "The concept of loyalty to the nation has absolutely no roots in tradition"

(Wallerstein, 127). African historians at the beginning of the post-colonial era specialized

in cultural nationalism, meaning, "the interweaving of new [revolutionary] myths and old

myths", says Wallerstein. At the same time, given the facts that the psychic foundations of

every primordial human community are the myths of origin and the collective uniqueness

and that Islam and Christianity are universalistic and monopolistic, African intellectuals

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have constantly constructed (or preserved) Africa's own uniqueness and Africa's own

myths of origin (Mazrui, 256). Thus, one of the first premises of Pan-Africanism came to

surface.

But the historical problem, which rose the greatest interest among the scholars, is

the question of Africans' origin. From where did the Africans as a whole originate?

Wallerstein believes that the most ambitious attempt to reconstruct African history lies in

the writings of the Senegalese scholar Cheikh Anta Diop. In Diop's perspective there are

two kinds of peoples on the world's scene: the Aryans (all Caucasians) and the Southerners

(the Negro-Africans). The Southerners, says Diop, are matriarchal; the women are free and

the people peaceful; there is a Dyonisian approach to life, religious idealism and no

concept of sin. Their main characteristics as opposed to those of Aryans (materialist

religion, sin and guilt, xenophobia, the tragic drama, the city-state, individualism and

pessimism) are xenophilia, the tale as literary form, the territorial state, social collectivism

and optimism (Wallerstein, 130).

Ancient Egyptians "who were black Africans" are the ancestors of the

Southerners, states Diop. This hypothesis, taken from W.E.B. du Bois, has enough

supporting data. Skeletons and skulls from ancient Egypt's tombs have been checked and

studied to see if they had 'Negroid' features. "Noses in ancient Egyptian paintings have

been examined to see if they were flat", laughs Mazrui (Mazrui, 26). Wallerstein points out

the interesting effect of inverting Western cultural assumptions by means of this

hypothesis. Diop argues that "if the ancient Egyptians were Negroes, then European

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civilization is but a derivation of African achievement" (Wallerstein, 130). For Mazrui,

however, to insist that "nothing is African unless is black", consequence of Diop's logic, "is

to fall into the white man's fallacy" (Mazrui, 26). This problem, thinks Mazrui, arose only

because Europeans regard their continent as unipigmentational. 'Black Africa' is a racial

definition of the continent and this would be contrary to the new culture-based paradigm of

Pan-Africanism discussed earlier.

III. The question if there is or there is not an African philosophy should be

circumstantiated. Evidently, in Africa there is no such thing as philosophy in the European

sense of the word. However, the concept that it is at stake in this matter is that of

ethnophilosophy.

The first text of ethnophilosophy is "La Philosophie Bantue" written by the

Belgian missionary Father Placide Tempels in 1944. The Catholic priest tried to

characterize the essential features of the thought of the Bantu-speaking people in central

and southern Africa. According to Appiah, Tempels argued that "the Bantu way of thought

had at its center a notion of Force, a notion that occupied the position of privilege of the

notion of Being in Western (Thomist) thought" (Appiah, 94). Wallerstein stresses that

Tempels discovered that Bantu cosmological ideas are highly complex, and fundamentally

monogamous in spirit. "One could talk of Bantu ontology, a Bantu psychology, a Bantu

ethic. These 'discoveries' made it necessary to revise basic European attitudes toward the

African" (Wallerstein, 131).

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 Appiah discusses in detail the question of African ethnophilosophy. When

prereflective beliefs about the nature of humankind, about the purposes, and about other

knowledge of and our place in the cosmos are not subjected to systematic and critical

analysis, we speak of "folk philosophy". But in Western academic philosophy, this concern

with the issues, which are topics of folk philosophy, is not sufficient. It is needed a critical

discourse in which reason and argument play a central role. No culture could have social

norms without concepts like good, evil, right or wrong. And no culture without norms

could possibly exist. Every society (or culture) has views about something like mind and its

relation to the body. And every culture has a concept of divinity. "In every culture there is

work for a philosopher to do", concludes Appiah (Appiah, 86).

However, the only tools with which one can approach folk philosophy are those

of the West. African intellectuals find themselves in the situation of being rooted in

African traditions and having also a strong European philosophical education (Continental

or English). In this respect, Appiah underlines that many African societies have as much in

common with traditional societies that are not African as they do with each other.

Therefore, using Western philosophical method and discourse in discovering African

conceptions about universe or life is not a dangerous attempt against African identity.

Appiah also rejects the idea of 'black philosophy'. Its defense depends on

"essentially racist presuppositions of the white philosophy" (Hume and Hegel thought that

the intellect is the property of men with white skins). Therefore, if the African philosophy

15
could not be racial, its source of problematic could be found in the African environment or

the African history, both mental products of the cultural revival.

Finally, Appiah says that "in one life, at one time, there can be sometimes space

only for one philosophical system". That system does not have to be either Western or

traditional African. "It can take elements of each and create a new one of its own", no

matter the degree of hybridizing in that system, concludes Appiah (Appiah, 95).

Mazrui proposes a second group of therapies to revive African culture:

diversification and interpenetration. African states should be more receptive to different

kinds of cultures not only theirs and the Western. The other group of therapies,

interpenetration refers to the spread of African culture among the African peoples, from

country to country and region to region. Interpenetration is possible even outside the

continent: many people all around the world are reading now Soynka, are listening to

Congo jazz and admire Yoruba sculpture (Mazrui, 259). The same Mazrui ends in an

advisable manner:

"In Africa we should look at aspects of various ethnic cultures which could be

nationalized, at sub-regional cultures which could be regionalised and at regional cultures

which can be Pan-Africanised" (Mazrui, 259).

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 YORUBA MAN WITH A BICYCLE
Essay about Continental African Identity

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