Exile a common thread for struggling African artists

Donna Bryson

LONDON — It’s a story of frail hopes pitted against harrowing dangers.

When West African composer Ze Manel collaborated on an opera about desperate African youth seeking better lives in the West, he was telling the story of many African artists.

Some, like Manel, who is from Guinea-Bissau, leave because dictatorships and war stifle creative life. Others are pushed out because paintings and sculptures are luxuries many Africans can’t afford.

Underfunded universities on the world’s poorest continent can’t offer the salaries on which a Western artist might depend between commissions. High illiteracy makes it tough for writers to find audiences.

“My home, I think, is where I have peace, where I can do my work,” Manel, 49, said in a slight California drawl acquired after years of living in Oakland. “In Africa, I cannot have peace of mind to work. So how can I call that home?”

The result is a flight of ideas and idealism. Without its artists, a continent struggling to lift itself out of poverty and repression will also struggle to understand and renew itself.

But the exiles can also be among Africa’s most influential emissaries. They are interpreting Africa for a world that is becoming increasingly aware that the continent’s poverty and strife can have far-reaching security and economic consequences.

As they put its stories on bestseller lists, its rhythms on the world’s airwaves and its motifs in international galleries, artists remind the world that Africa has the creative energy to match, and perhaps conquer, its crises.

During the apartheid era, South Africa’s white government stripped artists like Miriam Makeba of their passports. The efforts of Makeba and others to focus world attention on the injustices of apartheid are credited with helping bring revolution.

Makeba can sing again in South Africa. But gravel-voiced legend Thomas Mapfumo, who once sang out against the white rulers of Rhodesia, now decries Robert Mugabe’s increasingly autocratic Zimbabwe while living in self-imposed exile in Oregon.

South African artist Moshekwa Langa was never stripped of his passport, but he too left his homeland, taking a scholarship to a prestigious Amsterdam art academy. Ten years later, the 31-year-old has a life in Amsterdam and an enviable career he believes would not have been possible had he stayed at the tip of Africa, far from the art centers of Paris and London.

Photographs he will exhibit in England in June show that Langa misses home. They are of rooms in the homes of relatives and friends in Bakenberg, his rural hometown in northeastern South Africa.

Langa took the pictures during a visit he had envisioned as a chance to catch up with people he hadn’t seen in years. Instead, he found many had moved on.

“It was very disturbing for me ... arriving and finding there was nothing to go back to other than empty rooms,” he said.

Artistically, the result is a powerful sense of longing palpable in much of his art. Personally, exile can mean dealing with being an eternal outsider.

Langa is keenly aware of standing out as the “black boy” on his Amsterdam street. A policeman once followed him home when he was out after midnight, convinced he was a burglar until he saw Langa put the key in his door.

“I have been made to be aware,” he said, “of my difference every time I walk through the neighborhood.”

He draws on that tension in his work.

Along with photos, Langa works in video and in installations of scribbled notebooks, discarded sacks, bubble wrap, coat hangers, cooking fat. It can be unsettling for anyone who expects African art — or modern African life — to begin and end with baskets and quaint village scenes.

Alain Mabanckou paints modern Africa through prose, not room-size collages. Mabanckou is a prize-winning novelist and poet born in the Republic of Congo, educated in France and now teaching literature at the University of California, Los Angeles.

He is at work on the last of a trilogy of novels. In 2005’s “Verre Casse,” or “Broken Glass,” he argues that attention must be paid to the poorest of Africa’s urban poor.

“Memoire de Porc-epic,” or “Memoirs of a Porcupine,” appeared last year and won the Prix Renaudot, among the most prominent of French book awards. It calls for Africans to take responsibility for their own lives, set in a traditional landscape of fables and witchcraft, but with a thoroughly modern, ironic sensibility.

The third novel, he said, will explore the sex industry, a crucial topic in the age of AIDS.

Implicitly or directly, African leaders are blamed for the woes in Mabanckou’s novels. He fears he would not be able to address politics so freely if he were living in his homeland. But economics also played a role in his choice to leave: he has no publisher in the Republic of Congo.

Mabanckou acknowledges that he would not be the global writer he is had he never left home.

“For writing, you have to lose something,” he said. “I wouldn’t say to people: ‘Lose your country in order to write.’ … [But] at the same time, it’s very interesting to live far from Congo and far from France. It gives me a kind of distance to create … to see things from another point of view.”

Musician Manel makes much the same point: “Life is experience and exchange — the more things you hear, people you know, the more you give and receive.”

Manel left Guinea-Bissau on a music scholarship to Portugal in 1983, not realizing at first that he would never return to live. He had released an album in 1982 challenging what he saw as the repressive tendencies of a postcolonial ruling class. As the political situation continued to deteriorate, his departure became permanent.

Now, Manel wants to bring home some of the lessons he learned abroad. He has spoken with officials in Guinea-Bissau about mounting a cultural festival that might bring jobs and attention to his homeland, in hopes economic development will lead to political stability.

“Culture makes the country move,” Manel said. “When you bring art back, everybody starts to come back.”

(Associated Press)