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National Museum of African Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., 1994. Distributed by the University of Washington Press, Seattle. x + 60 pp., 13 b/w & 24 color photos, 1 map. $9.95 softcover.
Reviewed by Dominique Malaquais
Although common in many fields of art history (Medieval or Renaissance studies, for instance), book-length monographs focusing on a single object are comparatively rare in the realm of Africanist art history. Texts dedicated to one specific work of African art usually appear in the form of scholarly articles, entries in a catalogue, or short essays published as museum pamphlets. Christraud Geary's The Voyage of King Njoya's Gift is an exception. Here one piece takes center stage, bringing to the fore not only the importance of the object itself but also the general value of looking more closely, in greater detail and with more sophisticated tools than we might otherwise employ, at individual works in the vast corpus of African arts. The author's new findings regarding the age and identity of the piece, the theoretical issues she brings into play, and the questions she raises about the role of art in the colonial relationship between Africans and Europeans make this book a significant addition to the literature on African art.
The subject of Geary's study is a life-size male figure from the Bamum kingdom in the grasslands region of present-day Cameroon, a work currently on view at the National Museum of African Art. Carved in wood, the figure is entirely covered in glass beadsthousands of white, red, and blue beads in various sizes and shapes embroidered onto a sheath of linen-like cloth stretched taut and pegged over much of the sculpture's surface. Only the face (with the exception of the eyes), hands, feet, and base remain unbeaded. The first three are covered with thin sheets of brass; the last is of unadorned wood. The intricate embroidered designs-some representational, others purely geometric-give rise to an elaborate costume: a sumptuous shirt and leggings that recall the white-on-blue indigo cloth (ndop, duop) made famous by the Bamum court and its Bamileke neighbors to the east; a stunning headdress, necklace, belt, bracelets, and arm- and leg-bands rendered in an array of reds and blues; and an ankle-length loincloth, also in red and blue, embellished...