by Lizza Littlewort

Simon Njami is the curator of a big show central to this art fair. Let’s hope you noticed it. If not, you should get over there right now. Because Simon Njami is a massive big deal in the artworld, and he’s been brought out here specially because he is the reigning world expert on a huge thorny contradictory and guttingly painful chunk of global culture: curating contemporary African art. And here we are at the first contemporary African art fair in history.
Of course, even as I write these words I can hear the daggers being unsheathed by those in vehement disagreement, who think someone else knows better than Simon Njami. And there is a sharp edge given to their disagreement by the fact that Africa is a very, very complicated place. And something about the sheer self-serving intellectually frothy uselessness of art tends to foreground Africa’s complexity until it’s shouting in your face.
I asked a friend who knows a lot about contemporary African politics to let me know what she thought about art in Africa, and she had this to say:
“Art from Africa is necessarily going to be troubled by the commodification of suffering - off the top of my head, it sounds like there are two angles here: one is the skewed (and essentially colonial) relationship between the first and the third world, resulting in producers from Africa getting a pittance for efforts that would be rewarded a hundred times more were they produced in Europe/America etc, purely as a result of an unjust global economic system, with all its injustices and abuses and resulting trauma.
“The other angle is the representation aspect - representations of Africa and how this is distorted to fit the first world’s sensibilities, and therefore how this affects how art is produced on the African continent (i.e. because Africa is disadvantaged economically, Africans must make art that appeals to a European’s idea of African Art (pictures of starving children, joyful natives hoe-ing their way through cassava fields, clay pots etc). There is therefore less space for more ‘honest’ art, whatever that may be - this seems to be the preserve of those with a lot more economic power (e.g in SA the white middle classes, who essentially have gained their wealth through a colonial relationship with Africa anyway, or Africans who are living in Europe) who seem to use this opportunity to wank off, for the most part. Alas.
“Then I guess there’s the colonial/first world psyche and its need to imagine Africa in certain ways so as to cement and reinforce all its own ideas about itself....
“Sorry, I could go on for hours. And you know all this.
“Vomit/cry here.”
So Simon Njami is someone who takes on the arduous task of finding the way through and beyond all of this, and a lot of what he does consists of challenging stereotypes by introducing new ways of understanding Africa, and breaking down the separation of Africans from everyone else. Especially Europe, home of the imperialist nations. And yet one of the reasons Simon Njami is trusted to do this is that for many years he has lived in France, a major imperialist nation, so he is able to talk to Europeans through the medium of their own culture. And this is why they deem him sophisticated enough to do the job, which wouldn’t be trusted to a mere peasant from Africa. As the French president famously stated recently: “The African peasant, who for centuries has lived according to the seasons, whose ideal is to be in harmony with nature, has known only the eternal renewal of time via the endless repetition of the same actions and the same words. In this mentality, where everything always starts over again, there is no place for human adventure, nor for any idea of progress.”

And so the contradictions continue, and Simon Njami has his work cut out for him, and the daggers continue to sparkle as they catch the light.

Labels: Joburg art fair, Simon Njami