Ecran d'ancêtre

Ancestral Screen

The impact of African art on that of the West has been obsessively documented while the effect of Western forms of representation on Africa has only recently become a matter of interest. The Kalabari are a people of the Niger delta who, from the seventeenth century on, became important middlemen between Europe and the African interior. In the course of this contact, they went from an impoverished life as fishermen to extreme wealth and reinvented themselves completely using objects and rituals derived from the West. Initially involved in the slave trade, they adopted many slaves into Kalabari society by a process involving the shaving of the slaves’ heads, circumcision and the giving of a new name. If the slaves failed to master the Ijaw language and thrive, they would be either executed or sold on. Kalabari society was a forcing house for entrepreneurial flair. In the course of time, men of slave origin rose to positions of high rank and this posed a dilemma since they could not approach the ancestral shrines that were a source of great power. The solution found was to adapt foreign objects for these ‘foreign’ Kalabari.

The Pokia family that provided the pilots for Western ships created the ancestral screen form based on the naturalistic Western portraits and – later – photographs that they saw on European vessels. Typically, it incorporates a frame, seated figures and the imported cloths worn by chiefs. [1] Such a screen would be commissioned to commemorate a leader – often many years after his death – and be kept in his meetinghouse as part of a complex shrine installation to which regular offerings would be made and new house-members presented. [2]

The central figure wears the headdress of the alagba masquerade that he performed in life as the public face of the house. Flanking figures are supporters while the heads at the top of the screen are normally seen as house-members and that between the legs as an opponent killed in war. [3]

[1] It is created using the exclusively male technologies used in carving and the making of fish traps.

[2] It constituted the ancestral capital of the house.

[3] While such screens are still important in contemporary Kalabari life, they now pose a new dilemma since Christian house heads increasingly find a conflict between their religion and the making of offerings to the screens.