Baoulé art, or how the consumer society is extinguishing a centuries-old tradition

Princess Abla Poku belonged to the royal family of Asante empire in the 18th century, in West Africa. But royalty is no guarantee of anything. As soon as a greedy brother ascends the throne and decides to murder all of his father’s children to ensure that he will have no competition for power, royal blood serves as a sentence, as happened with Princess Abla Poku and her brothers. . Abla Poku had to flee to save his life: Accompanied by a delegation of faithful, she set out in search of another of her fugitive brothers from present-day Ghana to the territories that today make up the center of the Ivory Coast, hoping to find herself safe there.

It was during this escape that the Comoe River came into the path of the procession, practically impassable due to the fury of its waters and its wide flow. The princess had to consult a magician, reflect, make decisions, and finally offered her son as a sacrifice to the river, so that the trees on the bank would bend as if by miracle and create a kind of bridge through which to cross and conclude the terrible adventure. When he crossed to the other shore, Abla Poku turned, looked towards the waters that had swallowed his son and exclaimed:What again?! Whose translation would be “the child is dead!”. And this is how a handful of fugitives adopted a new name, baoulé, a new founding story interwoven with the sacrifice of the child and a new differentiated identity that is still maintained today in the territories of central Côte d’Ivoire.

Among the gifts that bless the Baoulé, one of them curiously stands out above the rest. It is her well-known mastery of wood carving. Generalizing, if some African ethnic groups stand out for their cattle-breeding (peul) or hunting (hadza) tradition, the Baoulé are pointed out as, probably, the best wood artists in West Africaif not from the entire continent.

A centuries-old art

Female masks to decorate the dance accept, statuettes representing ancestors, vengeful spirits and funerary decorations. Objects where the dry hands of the carver transmute the divine into wood, living nature is transformed into dead wood, memory is transformed into wood and family and spirits, what cannot be touched, end up converted into compact wood. It is important to understand that the true baoulé carver (knowing that, obviously, not all baoulé work with wood) does not limit himself to shaping a work of art without rhyme or reason. Kplékplé type masks, for example, follow disc-shaped aesthetic patterns in place of the face.; They also borrow the symbols of the Mande community, such as the cult of Goli, reinterpreting it and turning it into material thanks to the famous masks they carve for their dances. Even the figurines, depending on what they represent (ancestors, spirits) must meet exact measurements. In the same way, a mask carver will not be able to carve spirits, and vice versa.

Anyone who believes that Africa was devoid of civilization until the arrival of colonization could take the risk and learn in depth the ins and outs of baoulé art, converted into a strict discipline that is transmitted from parents to children with the severity of what is important. This is explained by Siriki Diabate, a Baoulé sculptor in the town of Bouaké. and awarded as the best sculptor in the city in 2013, who lives and wears out his hands with the same craft that his father, his grandfather and his great-grandfather had before him. Although this does not mean that a stranger can venture to be part of the valued trade, even one who does not belong to the Baoulé community, even a white person, but to do so they must comply with tradition, as Siriki explains: “they must sacrifice an animal for benefit “If the Baoulé carver’s family accepts him as a pupil, he must clean, work hard, learn and listen to what the teacher wants to tell him until he is ready.” It may take years for the master to give him the approval to become an independent carver.

Siriki was trained to do fetishes. And making fetishes, mystical sculptures, she explains, is not like carving a random sculpture of those made in waves on the African continent to sell to tourists. He must choose the appropriate wood, listen to the family that commissions him to know the traditions that frame his family divinity, and tradition indicates that Siriki can only carve fetishes within the protection of the sacred forest. The sacred forest is his workshop. “Most of the decorative figures take one or two days to make, maybe three. But I have to think carefully about fetishes, sometimes I spend weeks deciding on the right way.” He answers that it usually takes about three months to finish a fetish. The time it takes to carve it, and its effort, added to its spiritual value in the solitude of the forest, make these types of figures deeply valuable. Where a tourist piece of a god or an animal sells for 10,000-30,000 CFA francs (15-45 euros), “personalized” fetishes for local families can reach 300,000 CFA francs (456 euros). Or more.

The first Baoulé sculptures were made of dark wood and of intricate beauty, marked with the symbols of their civilization as if they were mathematical symbols, immovable, entire. It would not be until the second half of the 20th century that the shapes were simplified, as were the hairstyles that gave the figureswhile natural pigments (dark, like blood from the earth) gave way to the bright tones that modern paintings brought from abroad allow.

We thus enter a new evolution of baoulé art as a consequence of external influence. Those colors that came and the tendency to simplify the details have become this:

Cultural shipwreck

Siriki confirms, carving a woman with bulging breasts that he will sell to tourists, that “our (Muslim) religion does not conflict with fetishes.” He reinterprets Islamic law by stating that it prohibits physically representing Allah, but says nothing about third-party gods, while excusing himself by saying that a man’s office should not be a religious impediment. However, he acknowledges that “There are some young people who lately criticize the use of fetishes because they consider it blasphemy.. They say that fetishes are demons and that Muslims who keep them in their homes are not true believers”. Siriki is not worried, but he is not as calm as he would like. The strong demand for tourist sculptures, added to the growing attitude of rejection shown by some young people against the animist tradition of the baoulé, makes it increasingly difficult to find time (or clients) to dedicate their skills to fetish carving. He now earns more money, it’s true, carving figures every two days, because “each fetish is different and it’s complicated to make them but decorative sculptures are all the same, you understand, and they are easier to make.”

He does not hide it: he prefers to carve decorative figures. We are facing a cultural shipwreck seen from the front row. Fetishes (culture) require a significant investment of time and money that does not always achieve the benefits needed to live in the Ivory Coast in 2023, and forces the artisan to travel from village to village to offer their services to potential clients. . Siriki hasn’t worked in the forest for a long time, “six or seven months.” He limits himself to creating identical figures in the Bouaké carvers’ area, like a mass manufacturer, accompanied by artisans of different ethnicities and mixing each other’s techniques as a result of their coexistence and chatter, until an expert eye could see Siriki’s works and compare them with those of an Akan artist from the neighboring stall, without finding a difference between the two. The simplification of details that began to occur in the last century is thus approaching its peak in Bouaké: the disappearance of details.

To the disappearance of the art of baoulé wood as a unique and differentiating element of their culture, capable of impressing even those who a hundred years ago called the ancestors of Siriki savages. At the birth of a paradox when retail civilization of the Baoulé is buried and disappears at the hands of those who belittled them, as if civility were melting into a sea without fixed contours, carrying out a process inverse to the cultural development that is technically expected with the logical passage of time.

What happens with the baoulé sculptures is not exclusive to them. It applies to all of Africa; to everyone, even to the Talavera de la Reina ceramics. The loss of forms, the rise of polish, was already treated as the cancer of artistic representation by the Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han in his work titled The salvation of the beautiful: “The polished, neat, smooth and impeccable is the sign of the current identity […]. Beyond its aesthetic effect, it reflects a general social imperative: it embodies the current positive society. Polished and impeccable things do no harm. It also offers no resistance. Get the likes. The polished object nullifies what it has of something placed in front of it.” This decline also infects African “art,” abruptly transformed into “craft” as a consequence of tourism and excessive consumption devoid of fixed cultural roots.

Siriki Diabate, trapped in his Ivory corner, hypnotized by something as understandable as money, daily abandons the traditions that made his ancestors unique to purposefully merge with his companions at the Bouaké craft market. Can we now talk about a countdown to the end of the tradition of baoulé carvers? And who is responsible now?