Richard Fardon will illustrate some propositions.
- Many African languages have a parsimonious basic colour terminology, including Chamba, a Nigerian language and culture he has worked on intensively, from which he borrows some of his examples. Chamba colour terms can be translated approximately as black/white and red/green contrastive pairs. Given only four terms, Chamba red (as an African red) has to cover more than European red typically does.
- Historic African symbolic systems draw on a colour triad (red/white/black) in relation both to ritual practice and to metaphoric expression. Of these three colour vehicles, ‘red’ transports the most ambiguous freight, notably through association with the shedding of blood.
- As a natural environment, West Africa is brightly colourful: in relation to red birds, the fire finch and fire-crowned bishop speak for themselves, similarly flowers, berries […].
- Few naturally occurring bright red materials lend themselves to ornament. Bird feathers are not so used as far as he is aware (a possibility demonstrated by Hawaiian feather garments), nor any bright coloured gem stones. This is not principled reluctance, bright red abrus seeds (abrus precatorius) encrust masks and figures.
- Like other pre-industrial colourists, Africans found permanent, brilliant reds difficult to source. Vegetable and mineral reds – camwood or clay derived, or copper alloys – produce brown-red colours.
- Also like other pre-industrial colourists, African consumers and artists over the long term were enthusiastic to acquire and use imported brightly coloured goods and tints.What might this juxtaposition of propositions tell us about the specific conditions under which a desire to amend absence is created?
Richard Fardon is a social anthropologist; his writings over the last thirty years have concerned anthropological theory or the ethnography of West Africa, or often the relationship between the two. Art has increasingly preoccupied his work of the last decade. This lecture draws some of its examples from: Column to Volume: formal innovation in Chamba statuary (with Christine Stelzig, Saffron Press 2005); Lela in Bali: history through ceremony in Cameroon (Berghahn 2006); Fusions: masquerades and thought-style east of the Niger-Benue confluence, West Africa (Saffron Press 2007); Central Nigeria Unmasked: Arts of the Benue River Valley (with Marla C. Berns & Sidney Littlefield Kasfir, The Fowler Museum at UCLA 2011); Tiger in an African Palace and other thoughts about identification and transformation (Langaa 2014). He is currently completing Learning from the Curse: Sembene’s Xala (drawn by Sènga la Rouge).