This issue of the African Studies Review is devoted to research in the African humanities. The appearance of new approaches to the study of literary texts, oral traditions, and the popular arts has inspired us to assemble this collection. Recently, the African humanities have been neglected as an important area in which new empirical and theoretical advances have been made for the study of oral texts, art, and performance.

The articles in this collection by Robert Cancel, David Coplan, Bennetta Jules-Rosette, and V. Y. Mudimbe were presented at the Conference on Popular Arts and the Media in Africa held at the University of California, San Diego from May 17-19, 1982. This conference was sponsored by the Joint Committee on African Studies of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies. We would like to thank the Joint Committee for their support of this conference and our initial efforts to develop a research synthesis for the African humanities.

This collection begins with V. Y. Mudimbe's commentary on the nature of African art and the limitations of research models used to study it. He questions the role and position of African arts, especially visual arts, in the post-colonial world. He suggests that the time has passed where most of these works can be judged simply as self-enclosed cultural referents, isolated from the effects of the last two hundred years of history. The process of “aesthetization” that he describes is one which, in various transformations, informs each of the papers that follow. When Fanon suggested that to take on a language is to “take on a world,” he foreshadowed the ideas that acknowledge the development of Africa's humanities in a context of cultural interchange with other world traditions. This is not to accept the Victorian pronouncements that credited all African achievements to various forms of Western influence. Rather, it is a movement towards the view that African culture, always fluid and dynamic, has been responsive to all manner of influences, both local and foreign.

What I would like to present is a broad theoretical framework which could account for the significance of present-day African culture, particularly of African art, as a result of a process of “aesthetization.” I use this concept in the precise sense defined and illustrated by J. Baudrillard (1972) in his Pour une Critique de l'Economie politique du Signe. As a preliminary to the analysis of this concept, I would emphasize F. Fanon's (1967) statement about the ethnocentrism of European culture: “the unilaterally decreed normative value of certain cultures deserves our careful attention. One of the paradoxes immediately encountered is the rebound of egocentric, sociocentric definitions.”

African culture, and more visibly African art, are historical products of a complex process: the metamorphosis of concrete realities into abstract categories and, complementarily, the possible transformation of those realities into cultural objects with a financial value. In other words, African realities become, within anthropological frameworks, objects of knowledge; they are understood, classified, and defined as cultural signs from the perspective of the Western cultural and epistemological tradition. Subsequently, according to the socio-cultural rules of this new perspective and its matrix of cultural values or, more generally, from what is considered as a general and universal set of cultural values, some of these realities are given a financial value and, thus, become part of an economic process.

Thirty-five years ago, Présence Africaine, along with many other institutions, embarked on a path to correct colonialism. In its role as an agent of change, the journal has continued over the years to reflect and inform the values of Black nations. Yet today, when former colonialist oppression has not infrequently given way to control by multinational businesses or inter-governmental consortia, the very term “neo-colonialism” addresses a new problematic for Présence Africaine. It is a problematic whose complexities lead to the following question. Simply stated, who is the oppressor now? This essay will examine that question in light of the journal's own history. How has its editorial policy changed? What writers are represented? What shifts in subject matter and author have captured the readers' attention and imagination? Indeed, has the reading public itself changed, representing new constituencies, both geographically and politically? What, finally, are the implications of its history in an age of neo-colonalism?

The definition of colonialism underlying this study is the following: “Colonialism denotes a relationship of domination and, like other forms of oppression, it is a structural system of hierarchically ordered and ranked relationships between at least two parties (Martin and Cohen, 1980: 21-60). An instance of oppression at work in francophone literature is found in the Pléiade edition of Histoire des littératures (Gallimard, 1958). The sanction of the Pléiade, most will agree, is one of the standards of admission into the privileged canon of French letters.

In her remarks on Makombo Bamboté's novel in the Dictionnaire des oeuvres littéraires négro-africaines de languefrançaise, des origines à 1978 (1983), and going back to opinions already expressed in her African Literature in French (1976), Dorothy Blair points out that “Princesse Mandapu reveals a disquieting, hermetic, and at times oneiric action, which advances by fits and starts, on the strength of a jerky, elliptical, half-familiar and half-poetic style. It's up to the reader to fill in the gaps, to find out transitions and to interpret silences” (1983: 468). This essay proposes a possible way of “filling in the gaps” and “interpreting silences” after having made what I, as a Centrafrican reader and also a student of African literatures, have to assume are correct guesses about transitions in Bambote's novel.

Attempts to further the study of popular culture in Africa face the difficulty of defining “popular” as distinct from traditional or folk culture on the one hand, and elite or dominant culture on the other. The features that emerge most often from the discussion of these distinctions center on the relative degree of separation between performers and audiences, and on change from gemeinschaft to gesellschaft as a basis for social interaction (Bigsby, 1976: 18). These contrasts have frequently been identified with movement from a rural to an urban social world, where communal, multidimensional relationships give way to associative forms characterized by a segmentation of roles, divided loyalties, and the primacy of hypothetical or contractual relations over categorical and personal ones. Thus we value traditional or rural folk culture for its idealized capacity to give integrated expression to all aspects of human life, and symbolic representation to the essence of the human condition. In contrast, the sociology of urban art forms focuses on the relations between class and culture, the artist and his work, market organization and cultural production (Barbu, 1976: 47, 55). As anyone familiar with its urban scene should recognize, these distinctions are not workable for Southern Africa. Yet their very inapplicability highlights the importance of both the struggle for cultural integration and the flow of people and communication between urban and rural areas in contemporary Africa.

The concept of aesthetics is a “red herring” in the study of contemporary art. Often aesthetics is equated with technique (cf. Henri, 1960: 88) or with adherence to the dominant themes of a particular school of art. In the case of “tourist” and “folk” art, the concept of aesthetics is generally salvaged by introducing the notion that artistic preferences are culturally relative and are influenced by the conditions under which the particular art form is produced. Warren d'Azevedo (1973: 7) thus qualifies: “The apparent absence of these factors [i.e., formal aesthetic standards], as well as the lack of clearly explicated concepts equivalent to art or aesthetics in most non-Western cultures, has caused us to suspect that the expression of artistry may be somehow fundamentally different from our own.”

This and similar assertions have led to the development of the approach of “ethnoaesthetics” based upon the internal standards of judgement and criticism generated by the values of the artists and the audience in non-Western cultures. Here I shall argue that neither the conventional notion of aesthetics nor the new concept of “ethnoaesthetics” (cf. Crowley, 1966; Thompson, 1968; Silver, 1979: 289-292) adequately explains the complex relationship between the production and reception of tourist art. Moreover, I shall introduce an analysis of aesthetics which defines tourist art objects as media of communication between the new art producers and their audience. Therefore, it is necessary to begin with a basic definition of tourist art in Africa.

In his article “Language and the Media in Zambia,” Graham Mytton (1978) points out that: “Radio is the supreme medium of communication in Zambia, and the only one reaching a majority of the population.” The Zambia Broadcasting Services provides two groups of programs, the “Home Service,” in English and the seven national Zambian languages, and the “General Service,” which is mostly in English, with a bit of programming in Bemba, Nyanja, and, until 1980, Shona and Ndebele, the latter two languages being directed at listeners in Zimbabwe. The first station in Central Africa to broadcast programs directed almost exclusively towards African listeners, this Lusaka-based operation was from the beginning embroiled in the controversy over which Zambian languages should be used in programming. Each of the seven national Zambian languages actually represent larger linguistic groupings, often consisting of fifteen or even twenty distinct languages or dialects (depending on the way language is defined in a given context). Nearly each of these subgroups represent ethnic identities, with their own cultures and philosophies. The clamor for greater representation on the airwaves has historically come from such smaller groups who feel passed over, or neglected, by official news and cultural programming. The radio service, as well as government officials, counter such demands by stating the nationalistic and nationalizing goals of unifying, rather than fragmenting, the country's numerous ethnic groups.