Sea Breeze Journal of Contemporary Liberian Writings

Abdoulaye W. Dukulé

Art in Liberia Sea Breeze Journal of Contemporary Liberian Writings

It is much easier to point to various art forms in Liberia than to grapple with constituting an ensemble that could be termed a coherent creative movement. Art usually transcends the various divisions in a society to form part of the cement that holds the social fabric together. In Liberia, what is considered art is far from being representative of any form of national cultural identity.

Art is always a reflection of the society that produces it. A few years ago, Dr. Amos Sawyer, in a conversation, said that Liberia lacked a national cultural identity beyond the manifestations that have grown out of our common national experience, and which could be reduced to a certain accent and a few culinary creations. Unlike countries like Mali, Guinea or Ivory Coast, he said, art has never flourished in Liberia to include film, drama, and literature.

Most nations can point to something that constitutes a part of their national heritage and can be claimed to be an intrinsically unifying factor. The Thiwara of the Bambara or the Dogon dance masks are as Malian as Monet and Renoir are French. But in Liberia, one can hardly point to a Toma mask or Warri board as constituting an integral part of national artistic expression: the Tankagle is as much Ivorian as Liberian, and the Sowei mask of the Mende is also found in Sierra Leone and cannot be classified as a typical artistic creation of Liberian culture.

Further, if art is to be reduced to masks, cultural and ethnic entities such as the Dan, the Toma, the Gio, the Krahn and the Sande society have produced their share. However, these creations were conceived and are still made as religious and cultural totems. This leads us to a certain definition of art in our modern world culture: art is an aesthetic object or text whose value is to be found in its capacity to stimulate our senses and our minds. Religious objects, therefore, however aesthetic and pleasing, should not be the sole representations of a nation’s art. Picasso, Derain and other European artists were influenced by the African religious masks that inspired the Cubism Period in Europe, and in turn served as a fertile ground for European cultural and artistic expression beyond the confines of religion.

Many African societies that have developed their art have either been parts of large kingdoms and empires that span many centuries of existence. Such is the case with the Dan, the Toma, the Poro, etc. whose people are found across all West African colonial borders, thus being a part of a cultural cohesiveness that Liberia has never had. Also, European colonization had two important impacts on other African societies, different from what occurred in Liberia. In places such as Mali, Nigeria, Zimbabwe or Senegal, European colonizers and missionaries sought to denigrate traditional art; conversely, however, the colonizers also appropriated the artistic expression of the colonized as part of the colonial hegemony. In response, the local art gained international value on the one hand, while it became a place of refuge on the other for those who resisted colonial alienation. It was so that masks from Benin, Guinea or Mali found their way into British, French or other European museums, stripped of their religious value but seen as valuable works of art.

In Liberia, the overemphasis on Christian evangelization as a precondition for the status of a “civilized nation” relegated traditional cultural expressions to mere paganism. A conscious and well organized effort by the African-American colonizers to suppress indigenous culture led to the marginalization of local artistic expression. Many native Liberians, embracing Christianity, became ashamed of their ancestry, burying it as deeply as possible. This has had a great psychological effect on the society as a whole. Throughout the country’s history, this cultural annihilation could be traced by the almost total absence of local artistic expression outside rural communities. Clothing was from America. Drama was Western. Radio stations played the latest songs from America or a few high-life hits from Ghana, Nigeria or Kenya, but there was rarely a Liberian voice. Lonely voices such as Miatta Fahnbulleh’s were drowned in the cacophonic cultural invasion. James Brown and The Temptations were more Liberian than Miatta Fahnbulleh in the 1970s. A lone sculptor from Clay Ashland, Vanjah Richards, attempted to create an image of Liberia through his grandiose creations that went mostly to decorate official sites. Young painters in the 1980s had to use the pages of newspapers to showcase their art as political commentary. Literature and other artistic creations mostly originate from the same social context.

The lack of a true national literary movement in 160 years, the total absence of a national repository of literary or artistic expression—a library or a real museum—point more to the total suppression of Liberian native creative life than any political discourse. Art is borne out of memory, sad or joyful. Liberia seems to cultivate the art of forgetting, leading to a lack of collective memory.

The post-war period in Liberia has given rise to an unprecedented creative movement, both in literature and in music. Liberians now dance to Liberian tunes, and women wear traditional African outfits to attend church on Sundays. This re-grounding in Africanity is one way for Liberians to regain their native soul and reflect a cultural spirit. Maybe one day soon we can speak of the Liberian national identity reflected in art. For now, we can only speak of art in Liberia.