The Baga and their art - art of a people living in part of Guinea, Museum of African Art, New York, NY; adapted from 'Art of the Baga: A Drama of Cultural Reinvention' - Under the Hammer - Cover Story

The various nations known as Baga occupy a narrow make tense of marshy lowland along the Atlantic coast of the Republic of Guinea. For centuries, they have been battered by means of peoples and cultures--some, close "neighbors', others, European colonizers. through the middle of the 20th hundred the culture and polity of the Baga were in out and out disarray, finally falling to a combination of an Islamic cultural jihad propagated by dint of their Susu and Malinke overlords and a modernist nationalist ideology imposed by means of the regime of Sekou Toure. Today, an authentic Baga agriculture is being reinvented, principally (as always with the Baga) artistically. Their cultural history and its renaissance are explored in deepness in an outstanding exhibition organized and neared by the Museum for African Art (New York City) and the Baltimore Museum of Art. "Art of the Baga: A Drama of Cultural Reinvention" is based upon the research of and curated by dint of Frederick Lamp. The following extracts from the exhibition catalog written by the agency of Lamp highlight the history of a tillage under pressure and the possibilities and perils of the pair resistance and assimilation.

single of the smallest ethnic clumps in Guinea, the Baga are little regarded as a political force; their history in the nations of other regions. The art of the Baga--a monumental legacy that has had a significant impact upon 20th-century Western art--has been their replication to these aggressions.

The subdue of spiritual transformation is a constant thread through every part of Baga art and culture. The Baga diocese themselves as a transformed tribe and this transformation permeates their identity today. It is fundamentally squeeze outed by the oral tradition upon the migration from the Fouta Djallon--the evolution of the Baga from a mountain clan to a lowland people. According to this tradition, the Baga migrated to the coast before the 16th hundred in a resolute attempt to resist conversion to Islam. They carried with them their greatest in quantity high spirits, represented by massive costuming and extravagant performance.

In this transition, the acceptance and nonacceptance of transformation were the lock opener to social status: those who accepted the inevitability of change were endowed with highest status by means of virtue of their earliest arrival at the location of a of recent origin Baga world. Those who were reluctant to accept change, those who fought it, those who were "crazy" enough (in the organ of sights of the north-central Baga Sitemu) to prove by experiment to maintain Baga society as it had been, staying in the Fouta to fight the Muslims, eventually arrived upon the same stage, only to find that their efforts had been in vain and their place in Baga society had been reduc to next to the first and third class.

one time on the coast, the Baga invented or "discovered," they claim, an impressive variety of the couple spiritual beings and spiritual "ideas," which they manifested in spectacular forms of art, adding to their existing corpus. above the centuries their rich tradition of the one and the other masquerade and sculpture developed, its forms reflecting a spiritual world useful to the Baga in creating institutions of welfare, polity, justice and guidance.

Baga society has no centralized political structure; a unified polity has been created and maintained end a powerful imaginative framework of ritual endorsed (and largely controlled) by means of the elders. This framework is erected of compelling images, which invoke respectively a faculty of perception of omnipotent and fearsome oversight, benevolent guidance, ideal behavior, dominion government over natural forces and thus forth.

To more [i]or[/i] less extent, the French curtailed indigenous ritual activity. For the greatest in quantity part, public masked dance was tolerated and perhaps level encouraged by some French with a fondnes for exotic manifestations. The more restricted and sacred dances, however, especially those of initiations held at night in the sacred woodlands were generally discouraged.

The greatest in quantity direct intervention came in the form of the institution of chieftaincy, a form of regulation foreign to the Baga. With the French refusal to recognize the Baga combination of parts to form a whole of rule by a council of earlier borns traditional structures of control were shattered. The French wanted an unambiguous chain of command, which a combination of parts to form a whole of chieftaincy better served. As always looked the case, the youth have been eager to capitalize upon the opportunity to usurp power; thus with the coming of colonial mastery young Baga men aligned themselves with the French in sufficient numbers to seize power as collaborators.

The earlier borns managed to sustain their position, however, retaining the allegiance of their clan even while the new chiefs execut the wishes of the French commandants. Despite the colonial interdiction, disputes and social issues continued to be brought to and resolv by the agency of the council of elders. Ritual, the rubric below which much of Baga daily life falls, continued to be regulated by means of the elders and not by the agency of the chiefs.

Certainly the regalia of the Baga patriarchs' ritual were sternly diminished during the colonial period. D'mba [the image and ritual signifying ideal behavior] disappeared from many of the villages of the Baga Sitemu; through the 1930s, very few masks at all remained in the southern Baga areas. The male initiation was greatly restricted because of the demands of Christian education.