Magazines - Tribal Art Summer 2007

By Georges Meurant, painter he has written extensively on the traditional arts of Africa. He contributed to the Ubangi exhibition accompanying book.

Introduction:
This study expands on the concepts about Ubangi art and culture put forth by J.-L. Grootaers in the preceding article. Several hundred artifacts collected in the Central African Republic (CAR) and southern Sudan, as well as a few thousand from the northern part of the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), testify to a homogeneous sculptural tradition in these regions. The term Ubangi, which is a broad identifier for this tradition, encompasses a variety of peoples with similar beliefs and languages who have been in the Congo Ubangi River Basin from as early as the sixteenth century. Interestingly, the internal characteristics of this culture area may contribute somewhat less to the nature of its sculpture than the external (fig. 9). This is due to outside pressures, such as that of the Bantu cultures that either pushed the Ubangi peoples north of the Ubangi/Mbomu River or absorbed those that remained in the south.
Ubangi sculpture is the last significant regional art style in sub-Saharan Africa to be identified and studied. Colonial ethnographers found the aesthetic of this region of little interest and accorded its sculpture scant attention. When pieces did begin to gradually appear in important private collections in the early twentieth century, they were considered unrefined and decadent. The absence of dedicated studies and collections in this area resulted in the neglect of artwork by cultures we now recognize as significant, including the Banda of the CAR (fig. 8) and the Mbanza of the DRC. In fact, only a few examples of Mbanza (and Gbaya) carvings from CAR survive today, and these are in German museums.