Afghanistan from the inside, Iowa City, Iowa, November 16, 2010

- [Dave Martin] So today's program has been made possible through the cooperation of the University of Iowa's international programs and the University of Iowa Honors Program. And we also wish to thank AW Wealth and Briscoe Insurance Inc. for their generous contribution and support of today's program. Today's speaker is Dr. Christopher Roy. Chris received a BA from the St. Lawrence University in 1970 and a PhD in 1979 in African Art History from Indiana University and currently he is Professor of Art History and the Elizabeth M. Stanley Faculty Fellow of African Art History at the University of Iowa. Chris teaches courses in African, Pre-Columbian, Native American, and Pacific Islands Art and his research focuses on the art of Burkina Faso and West Africa. His first visit to Africa was as a student in 1966 when he traveled from Paris to Jerusalem by traversing North Africa and he served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Burkina Faso from 1970 to 1972. Recent publications include a book, Land of the Spinning Masks: Art & the Culture of Burkina Faso published in 2007. Kilengi, if I'm pronouncing that right, African Art from the Bareiss Collection, 1997, Art and Life in Africa: Selections from the Stanley Collection in 1984. And Art of the Upper Volta Rivers in 1987. He's written two chapters on Africa: Ancient and Contemporary for the undergraduate text. Art History, which is edited by Marilyn Stokstad for Prentice Hall Abrams and in 1994, 1997 he created a CD-ROM program titled Art and Life in Africa that has been distributed to colleges and high schools across this country. In the last seven years he has made 10 research trips to Burkina Faso and Ghana to gather material for 17 DVDs of African art in social context marketed for classroom use. Professor Roy is founder and director of the Program for Advanced Study of Art and Life in Africa Which provides scholarships for graduate coursework and research in Africa as well as for conferences and publications on African art. The Program for Advanced Study of Art and Life in Africa has hosted 12 international conferences on African art at the University of Iowa since 1979 and continues to educate students and professionals alike on its history and publications. Please help me welcome Dr. Christopher Roy. - [Christopher Roy] Thank you very much Dave, it's a pleasure to be here it's a pleasure to see so many friends. I almost said old friends. But I bit my tongue at the last moment. So many people I've known for so long and to share with you some of the material that I've enjoyed teaching about for the past 32 years at the University of Iowa. I gave I think my last lecture for just this semester yesterday and to a large undergraduate class. I've been pleased all of my career at how much interest there is in Africa here at the University of Iowa and in Iowa city and my undergraduate class has 288 students in it so clearly a lot of people either enjoy my classes or can't get into anything else. I'd like to thank Dave Martin for the introduction, I'd like to thank Alan Brody for arranging for this. He originally contacted me and he's in Malawi I think now so he couldn't be here, I'm sure he misses the cold weather. And thank you all for coming out on such a gray, cold day to look at images of Africa. We'll see if we can't turn the overhead lights down a little bit. There'll be lights for the television anyway but maybe if we turn the overhead lights down there'll be enough, yeah that'll help and I'm dealing with technology I'm not quite used to but I think things will work out okay. When Allen and I first talked about me coming to speak, he mentioned that there was interest in African culture and African art and I said that I was pleased because over the course of my career of course, so much bad news has come out of Africa, there's always it seems an article in the newspaper about some terrible problem, some issue with healthcare or disease or coup d'etats or violence in Rwanda or some other kind of event that upsets people rather badly. And I said that I was interested in sharing the kind of work that I do that I'm interested in which is sort of 180 degrees opposite all of those stories about sadness and conflict from Africa because what I've been studying ever since I was a kid are the good things that come out of Africa, the art, the creative culture, the beauty of the people and their villages and the art that they make, their warmth and generosity and hospitality. That doesn't mean that I'm some sort of a Pollyanna who ignores the fact that Burkina Faso where I work is one of the three of four poorest countries in the world, Burkina Faso ranks right up there with Mali and Bangladesh and goodness knows what other country for its incredible poverty, its lack of development, lots and lots of struggle, of difficulties. The same kinds of things that you read about in the newspapers everyday, but on the other hand Burkina Faso also is incredibly wealthy in terms of its culture. I remember giving a lecture at the University of Ouagadougou once and talking about how Burkina Faso was one of the poorest countries in the world in terms of development and one of the richest countries in the world in terms of culture. And I think that the people in the audience who were all Burkinabe enjoyed that, for those of you who don't know by the way when you guys were in school, it was called Upper Volta but in 1983 there was a change of government, a coup d'etat as violent as any other change of government in West Africa and they decided that they had had enough with Haute-Volta which is half French and half Portuguese and so they changed their name to Burkina Faso which means the land of nobles. And it is two words from the principle languages in the country Moore and Dyula. So the country since 1983 has been called Burkina Faso. It is a land-locked country about the size of the state of Colorado, lets see is that the pointer. Just north of Ghana so you can see Ghana is down here and Burkina Faso is right there, Ouagadougou is the capital and you can fly to Ouagadougou non-stop from Paris in fact the only way you can get there from here is through Paris which is one of the sacrifices that I've had to make for nigh on 40 years. I also always make it a point to stay overnight in Paris without fail. The country is landlocked and there are almost no natural resources unless you count red clay as a natural resource during the dry season which is now, Burkina Faso looks like the world's largest clay tennis court, bright brick red as far as the eye can see. Dust clouds stirred up by the winds of the dry season. It rains from May to October and they grow very nice crops of corn and millet and sorghum, peanuts, sesame. Burkina Faso is the world's largest exporter of sesame seeds and they do export quite a lot of sesame seeds, but the life expectancy from birth is about 50 years and the average per capita income is about three, $400 a year so it's a quite a poor country. The population's pretty big simply because it rains enough to support a fairly dense population. In fact it's the second most densely populated country in Black Africa after Nigeria. It's populated by about 80 small ethnic groups or about 30 larger ethnic groups depending on which way you decide who a people are and this map shows some of the people that I'll be talking about. I'm just trying to figure out if there's a button that's not the button, all right. Almost all of the images I'll show you today are from Burkina Faso, they mostly live here at the center Ouagadougou is the capital, these are the people that I studied first for my own doctoral dissertation. But many of the images you'll see coming up are from a town named Tougouri which is right there where Nora and the kids and I lived in '83, '84 and '85. A lot from the Bwa people who live right here just next to them, these are all farmers and as we'll see they create a lot of art that's used all through the course of the dry season to honor the spirits that watch over the fields, that watch over them and that protect them from harm and accidents of all kinds. This is what a typical village looks like, this is a town named Bansie right on the main highway, this actually used to be the main highway. That strip of clay that you see here was the road. Now the road's been paved and it's about 100 feet farther south but I can remember driving down that road many, many times as a Peace Corps volunteer in the early 1970s. Like every other village in Burkina Faso, it's mostly made out of adobe brick, out of sun-dried clay brick and when you first see these villages, they look just as they are, quite impoverished. But when you go into the village and see the kinds of activities that are going on there everyday you suddenly realize that these are busy people who are busy earning a living taking care of their families and creating brilliant art. This is one of the streets of the town, the famous hills of Bansie in the background. You can see the strange sort of anachronism on the top of the hill which is a microwave transmission tower because this is the highest point between the two big cities in Burkina Faso, Ouagadougou and Bobo-Dioulasso. They've used this for telephone transmissions for years and years, you can see the architecture is very, very simple, very plain, sun dried clay brick, piles of firewood piled up outside the houses to be cut up for the kitchens which are inside the houses which make the inside of the houses very, very smoky and people suffer often from lung problems because of the dense smoke. And another street scene. This is a town that I visit every year. I've been going back to Burkina Faso since, well, since Nora and I started in the Peace Corps there in 1970. I love going to the country. Only about 20% of the people in the country are Christian and maybe 30 or 40% are Muslim which means that all of the rest of the people are still practicing, thank goodness, the religions of their ancestors which involve the spiritual beings from the wilderness that are represented by masks and other art forms. And it's because of those religious characteristics that a lot of art persists and flourishes in Burkina Faso that has long since ceased to exist in other countries in Africa. There are vast areas of Nigeria for instance, southern Nigeria where everybody is Christian and almost no art appears or northern Nigeria where everybody is Muslim and no art appears. So there are some countries unlike Burkina Faso where you are hard pressed to find any evidence of cultural creativity. Sometimes the villages as poor as they are, are pretty picturesque. People have taken care to plant trees because they shade the houses and keep the streets cooler. A lot of the trees are good sources of food. A lot of them bear fruit which is collected, the most important of which besides sesame, not a tree, are shea nut and Burkina Faso produces a huge amount of shea butter which is exported to France and to the United States and turned into cosmetics. Shea butter which is sold widely by the French company L'Occitane, it's good for your skin, it's good to eat too by the way. Here you see Nora with a bunch of her friends. Again, it's hard for me to emphasize strongly enough how warm and hospitable and generous these folks are. They always receive you very pleasantly and openly, they're never critical, they're always hopeful that you can find someway to be helpful to them even if it's only by identifying the name of their village on a map. And in a lot of the villages, there are three principle villages that Nora and I visit every year. Dossi which is where this photo was taken where the women are especially fond of Nora and the men are blacksmiths and good friends of mine and where we try to help as best we can with development. Ouargaye where Nora and the kids and I lived and Bansie which is the last village I'll show you which is the focus of a development project that I'm actually involved in right now. There is healthcare in Burkina Faso, there's public healthcare which is adequate actually but hard to come by because there are so few doctors and so many people who need help, if you are patient enough and get to see a physician, the physicians are quite competent and take good care of people. However if you're in a hurry and you've got a little bit of money, more commonly people who've got some income go to private doctors. And the private doctors are excellent, they've been trained the best training in Paris and all over the world, United States, so they get good healthcare. This is at the same medical center where Nora taught as a Peace Corps volunteer and this center has grown from 1970 when Nora and I first went there. When it consisted of about three of four Catholic priests who were physicians and a few nuns, it's now huge. Huge facilities, modern facilities with x-ray machines with good obstetrics care and pre and post-natal care. Really quite, quite terrific and it serves a very, very large public population, so this particular place is one of the really outstanding centers for healthcare in Burkina Faso. HIV/AIDS have been a big problem all over Africa as you know. In Burkina Faso they've had very good education programs which have reduced the incidence of HIV/AIDS rather dramatically in the past 20 years. I can remember one of my best friends died of HIV/AIDS in 1984 and since then there was an explosion in the mid to late '80s but since then people have been educated about the sources of HIV and things have turned around rather dramatically at least in Burkina Faso if not in other parts of Africa. Women work hard. Women all over the world work hard. I often joke about the fact that in Burkina Faso the women are farmers, they grow crops in the fields. They grow little plots of cotton and peanuts, they take care of their babies, they grind the millet up, they make pottery, they repair the houses. They spin cotton thread to make cloth and in their spare time they go to the market. Here you see a bunch of our friends, Nora's friends and mine grinding millet on a grindstone. They don't have in this village, they don't have a diesel generator to run a machine so they still do it the way they've been doing it for millennia all over the world which is to grind by hand. They're actually grinding millet here to be used to make millet beer because millet bear tastes better if it's been ground by hand instead of with more modern equipment. You all know that at the University of Iowa we're not allowed to turn in reimbursements or receipts for alcohol. So many of you have taught or worked here you know that very well, some of you've been administrators here. But the travel office never can figure out why my reimbursements always include 100 pounds of millet. 20 pounds of sugar and five pounds of yeast. People are very creative, the women make pottery and they're very good potters and I've enjoyed studying their pottery for years, these are a group of Nora's and my friends carrying unfired jars to the firing where they'll all be fired together to make large jars for storing water, for brewing millet beer and for cooking. This is a lady named Maria Kofundo in a town just south of Ouagadougou, you can see how brilliant the pottery techniques are, they're really extremely adept, very, very skilled, forming an earthen pot. This lady was so good that one of my PhD students Barema Giamatani called up and said the people from Taiwan wanna do, they're doing a conference on pottery and they wanna do a demonstration. I said well you should get Maria Kofundo from south of town and take her to Taiwan so he did and got her a passport and they piled on a 747 and flew via Paris to Taiwan. And she got off the airplane, some of you may know that I've lost a lot of weight in the last couple of years and she got off the airplane in Taiwan and looked around and said where's that big, fat man. Anyway and she made quite a bit of money and then she came back to Burkina Faso and she's been enjoying life back in her home village ever since. This is the firing, it's just in a shallow depression in the ground, these are people who don't have much resource, they don't have fancy equipment but they make good use of what they have and turn out wonderful objects, wonderful materials, very efficiently making minimum impact on the environment. This is in the same town, this is in Diviner named Dbaga an elderly man whose job it is to help people communicate with God to find out from God what the problem is, what sacrifices and prayers need to be made. Sort of a pastor, leader of a congregation but I was about to say unlike Pastor's in our own community who don't wear funny looking costumes when they preach. He wears an elaborate robe that marks him out and that enhances his spiritual power, these are the kinds of things that I enjoy visiting and seeing and going to a shrine and seeing his alters with all sorts of carved wooden figures on them like the objects that I teach about in my classes and seeing him perform sacrifices and prayers and then watching him perform and dance in these kinds of celebrations that make it easier for people to communicate with God. The other way that people represent the spiritual beings is through masks like the ones that you saw here. This is in the town of Ouargaye which is the second village Nora and I go to all the time. We were there when Nick was seven and Megan was three and we had a very good time there, the kids remember it vividly especially 'cause it's 250 miles to the nearest electricity. And they remember it being very, very hot. But these are people who reenact in a kind of theater the encounters between the ancestors and the spiritual beings that watch over the community and they reenact those encounters through the use of masks that represent the spiritual beings and this is just such an example, this mask with two big curling horns. One of the things about Africa and African art is that African art is so abstract and you've all know that, you've seen African art almost everybody knows how abstract African art is and that's because African's have been such great geniuses for centuries from millennia understanding full well, long before artist in our own culture did that when you're representing an idea which is abstract that is the idea of a spiritual being. A being that is invisible, unknowable, untouchable, unseeable, the most logical way to represent that abstract idea is through abstract art. So unlike Michelangelo or Raphael or Leonardo in our own culture, Africans don't create God in their own image they instead create God using abstract images and it's one of the things that makes African art so fascinating. Children play a big role in all of these communities. They have lots and lots of kids. When Nora and I were married in Ouagadougou in 1970, what's that, I think 40 years ago and one month, we were given a, a little gray card that had our names and our birth dates and then it had little squares marked out for 16 children with the birth dates and the death dates for each child. Infant mortality is high in Burkina Faso, I won't pretend it isn't but they get much better medical care now than they did in 1970 when Nora and I first started going there and a lot more kids survive to adult hood. One day in Dablo, Nora and I were sitting around, watching one of our friends making pottery and we noticed a little girl with her carved wooden baby doll and these dolls are quite famous in the history of art. There are lots and lots of publications that includes these dolls and I turned to one of them and said in their language 'cause Nora and I both speak Moore the language of these people. Any of you've got dolls at home come back with them and I'll take your photographs. And it didn't take five minutes before there were about 250 kids with their baby dolls and indeed I took photos of all them and printed them up at my printer in Seashore Hall and the next year brought them back and gave them to their mothers and to all of the kids. So you see all these wonderful little kids, we hope they'll all grow up to be healthy and strong and be future leaders of Burkina Faso because God knows the current leader of Burkina Faso is a complete jerk. His name is Compaore and he was very, very involved in the blood for diamonds trade with Charles Taylor. I can remember only a few years ago, seeing Russian airplanes on the tarmac at the Ouagadougou airport. Aleutians and like that had flown in from Libya carrying Kalashnikov and other small arms which were then flown to Liberia and Sierra Leone and the arms were exchanged for diamonds which were flown back through Ouagadougou to Europe. So the government of Burkina Faso has been unfortunately, way too deeply involved in some really nasty stuff. But so I guess the moral is I hope one of these lovely kids grows up to be a proper democratic and responsible leader of Burkina Faso some day in the future. The spiritual beings are represented by all sorts of different kinds of masks and the history of the changes that take place is quite interesting. 79 AD just before Vesuvius erupted in Pompeii the Roman historian Gaius Plinius Secundus wrote Ex Africa Semper Aliquid Novi, 'cause I know you all had four years of Latin in high school you all recognize that, that means there's always something new out of Africa. In fact things are always changing in Africa, new art forms are being created, new ideas are being created, new problems are being solved. And the kinds of change that's constantly going on in Burkina Faso is represented by masks like these. These are probably the oldest type of mask that people have used in Burkina Faso to represent the God of springtime, the God of new life, when the rains begin in May and the mask are made out of leaves that are tied on to the bodies of the performers. First the performer's body is wrapped up in a kind of network of vines of kind of a body stocking and then bundles of green leaves are tied to that body stocking and eagle feathers are stuck in the crest and the mask come in to town from the east with the rising sun and perform all day long and then go out. Here you see the man getting dressed and as you can see he doesn't wear anything underneath the costume. So this is during the rainy season. This is in June when it's been raining long enough now so that it's really quite lush and the crops are quite high and what they're doing here is preparing the mask, cutting the leaves and binding them to the vines that surround his body. While you're watching this I'll tell that after the performance he leaves by going out the west side of the village towards the setting sun where the mask is cut off with a sharp knife and burnt. So the life of the art object is only six, eight, 10 hours and I was really quite amused one day, standing there watching them cut the mask off after it burned and his friend was cutting with a knife a little bit lower, a little bit lower, a little bit lower, a little bit lower and the performer said, "Careful now!" So that's probably enough of that and here this is actually you can see that a lot of my photos span a long period of time. This photo was taken in 1985, that film was taken two years ago, so I've been pretty consistent going back to Burkina Faso, I haven't found another country in Africa that I enjoy or love as much as Burkina Faso. So I've never seen to, to much reason to change, I have spent a lot of time in Ghana and Nigeria as well but I've really enjoyed going to Burkina Faso. Here's how the masks are carved. They're carved out of the wood of the Ceiba pentandra tree, the silk cotton tree, which grows in this country, it only grows in the south and it's very much like pine, it's soft enough to carve easily but dense enough to hold a good shape. And he's gone out in the bush and cut down a ceiba tree and he's carving it, he's actually carving out the hollow part in the back that will go over the performers face. And he's carving a mask that represents a crocodile. The tools are simple. It doesn't take sophisticated tools to make great art, if that were the case then of course, the Japanese would be the greatest artist in the history of the world and Michelangelo and Raphael and the Van Eyck brothers whose tool kit is very simple would not be considered as great as they are. What it takes is imagination and thought and training and considerable skill. So you're seeing a mask being carved. I use these films in all of my classes all the time. Again I think the students enjoy not only seeing images of Africa and films of Africa but seeing films of Africa their teacher actually made. How we doing for time Dave? - [Dave Martin] Okay about 10 minutes. - [Christopher Roy] Okay good. So carving a mask and this is the kind of mask he's carving and these are the new kinds of mask in those same villages, this is the same village where you saw the leaf masks. They'd use the leaf masks up until 1897, in 1897 they had a terrible times, whole series of catastrophes. They had droughts, they had insect plagues, injuries, slave raids by the Fulani riding their horses down from the north to catch slaves out in the fields farming. But the worst disaster of all, the straw that broke the camels back, the disaster that convinced them that God had finally totally abandoned them, was the arrival of the French. You have to imagine the reaction of my audience in Ouagadougou when I said that line, they just about split a gut. Anyway they decided God had abandoned them, that those leaf masks weren't working for them anymore and they turned to their neighbors to the east who were much more successful and things were going much better for them and they said obviously your God is working better for you so we're gonna change congregations. We'd like to join your congregation and they did and they started making wooden masks like the ones that you see here. That led to conflict, there was conflict between the people who follow the leaf mask and the people who follow the wooden masks. In fact in 1983 when I was in Boni all of these people got in fights, they were singing songs that were insulting for each other. So America is not the only place where there's religious conflict and the state police were called and they came and broke up the fight and said okay from now on the leaf mask can appear on one day but the wooden mask have to appear on a different day, you can't dance on the same day to try and prevent that kind of religious conflict. The patterns that you see are a system of writing, these are graphic patterns that communicate from one generation to the next. People's ideas about the moral and ethical conduct of life, these are religious laws. The zigzag pattern is called the path of the ancestors the If we want God and the ancestors to bless us we need to do the best we can to emulate the ancestors to follow in the path of the ancestors which is not easy to do which is why it's a zigzag pattern not a straight line. These are the same kinds of religious laws that people all over the world follow and in our own culture. We have The 10 Commandments, the graphic patterns were originally written in Hebrew, our religious laws are written in Latin script but here they take the form of the red, white and black graphic patterns that are carved on these masks. So those remind people of how they need to behave and what they need to do to be upstanding moral members of the community. This is the crocodile mask and the fish mask and they're telling a story which is the story of the ancestors who were saved when you see the people in the background going like this, do you see that? What they're doing is they're metaphorically emptying a pond of water, the ancestors had arrived at a pond, they were lost, they were hungry but they found a huge fish in the pond and so the women started to empty the pond of water with their buckets. And they were finally able to catch the fish and eat it. So at the end of this performance, I don't think the video goes that long, the fish, yeah actually. The fish rolls on the ground and gives itself up to be captured and eaten by the family. And so that became a protective spirit for this family the Gnoumou family in the town of Boni. That by the way is the same crocodile mask that the man was carving in one of the previous videos. Whoops, not not leper mask, sorry. Here is one of the plank masks, this is in a private collection in New York City, the black and white rectangles by the way represent ideas about knowledge, about education. In our own culture we associate black with ignorance and white with understanding and knowledge. The Unitarian Church, the symbol of the church is a lamp, the lamp, the light of knowledge, right. The ideas, the universities are about ideas we associate that with white, in Africa where people are black, they turn things around so the black squares represent the importance of life long learning, they represent the black goat hides that senior people like me sit on during mass performances that have become black through decades and decades of being rolled up in the rafters of the kitchen where they're kept safe from insect damage. While the white rectangles represent the young people who've just started their education, who's goat hides are still white from the tanning process. The masks are very heavy, they weigh anywhere from 40 to 60 pounds. You can see the people are fairly well dressed, mostly because they get a lot of second hand clothing or a lot of remainder clothing in big bundles from China and from the United States, which doesn't help the local weavers out very much but at least people have adequate clothing now. The music comes from drums and from percussion instruments called Balas which are like a xylophone. The costume is hemp, shredded hemp that's been dyed red with a local dye. And here you see four of the masks, the one in the middle is the serpent mask which is about 15 or 20 feet tall, one of the most impressive of mask they perform with. So this is the giant boa constrictor. The musician, the drummer, is giving the performer directions they communicate back and forth all the time, those are young women dancing off in the background. Women and men both participate in these mask performances there's no segregation by gender because the mask belongs to families, the mask belong to families, not to secret men societies unlike other parts of Africa And so women participate as fully as men do, they don't wear the masks because their skeletal strength isn't up to wearing the mask but they are involved in the mask performances in every other possible way. This is the fish mask in the village of Dossi just across the street, this is a village for which, these are villages for which I've developed a project now that you'll see towards the end of my presentation, where the villages sits on almost astride the main highway as I explained to you. And that means a lot of tourist go through the town everyday and yet there's no infrastructure for tourism if tourist could stay in the village overnight they would enjoy their visit to the village a great deal more, be able to see more and perhaps even leave behind a lot more money buying food, staying in a hotel. So I'm working on building an adobe brick, a mud brick hotel in this town which would have rooms for five couples or 10 people with a restaurant and good clean water and showers and that sort of thing. Here is the, you've seen this before actually. You've already seen that video. Here is the bush pig, bush pig is always one of my favorite characters. What I guess in this country we call them a warthog. Now that's in Gurincey Town south of Ouargaye and here is the butterfly mask, front and back from a private collection and you can see the black and white rectangles that represent knowledge and ignorance. And here you see it performing in the town of Dossi again this is a very large, very heavy mask. Butterflies are associated with rainfall in the spring because when the first rains begin to fall, they leave puddles in the eggs of the butterflies hatch and you always find clouds of white butterflies gathering around any pools of water that are left behind by the rain. And then there is even such cultural diversity in Burkina Faso that you see dancers from Tahiti. This is at the opening of the Festival panafricain du cinema which is held every second year in Ouagadougou. This is a very, very big international film festival Burkina Faso, Ouagadougou especially is considered sort of the Hollywood of West Africa and I'm not joking. And people come every other year to a big film festival where films about Africa are shown, films from all over the continent are shown and this particular year 07 when Megan, our daughter and I were there. They had a guest group from Tahiti would come. Tahiti as you know is still part of France and so the links colonialism, Africa, Tahiti, Polynesia and that sort of thing are still quite strong. So this shows how Burkina Faso the government, the people of Burkina Faso are making an effort to reach out to other parts of the francophone world. What I'm working on now is to build a rest house, like this one, using what's called which is an arch structure, rather than having a flat roof made of corrugated tin and wood. Wood is very expensive, corrugated tin is expensive and besides that buildings with tin roofs in Africa get incredibly hot, instead and it's much cheaper to build a rest house like the one you see here. That's the mosquito net in the background, this is one of the rooms and here is the outside of it so that people who travel through this part, these villages can stop and stay over night or even stay a couple of days at low cost and have clean beds to sleep in and a nice cool shower to wash off in. And good healthy food to eat and enjoy themselves and to bring a lot of development to the village. The village has good schools, good wells, clean water a modest amount of healthcare, it's not to, to far from one of the big cities where they can get better healthcare but throughout Burkina Faso as rich as the country is culturally, the one thing that's hugely, hugely lacking is any kind of infrastructure for tourism for culture. So I'm working on that with the help of the multicultural business student association in the college of business. We're raising money to build one of these structures, quite cheaply actually, five rooms for about 10 or $12,000. This town actually, this is a town some distance away, it does have electricity and that's the last slide. So thank you and I'll be happy to answer question I guess you have. - [Dave Martin] So Chris the first question is are masked dancers shamans? And if so are they similar in religious or healing services as those in the Pacific islands? - [Christopher Roy] No, the only shaman that you saw performing was the man I called the diviner the one with the costume, the only shaman was the diviner wearing the costume with the birds beak and the Cowley shells. He was absolutely a shaman just like Pacific Islands, just like North American Indians, just like Mexico. The other performers wearing the mask are just the very fit and muscular, young sons of the family, usually the senior, the male head of the family picks out whichever of his sons and grandsons shows the most talent and designates him to use the mask in performance. And it's quite funny because whenever you go into these towns you can always tell who the performers are when you see them even if they're, of course they're not wearing any masks, you can tell who they are because like football players in Iowa their neck size is bigger than their hat size. But they perform from the time they're 16 until they're maybe 20, I have seen other performers older. Especially the men who actually own the mask sometimes perform with them even if they're getting advanced in years. But usually by the time a person is 40 or 50 or 60 years of age they stop performing and turn it over to a younger sibling. - [Dave Martin] Okay, next question the men in the masks are priests or religious leaders I presume, what services do these priests perform when not dancing in their masks? - [Christopher Roy] They offer, not every person in the village is a priest but there are a lot more performers wearing the masks than there are pastors, I like to use the word pastor better. And the pastors, my favorite pastor is a friend of mine named Nwaga in the town of Dablo, Nwaga in Moore means chicken and that's because he is the one who slits all the chicken's throats and he repeats very long elaborate, very moving prayers if I translated the prayers you'd be astonished. They sound exactly word for word like the prayers you hear in any church in America. God watch over us, God protect us, God help us, God provide us with healthy children. Bless this food to our use and us to thy service but they don't use the name Jesus much. So the prayers are just like ours but the are very specific people who are responsible for those people who are designated people who have been doing it for a long time, not by any means all of the mask performers. - [Dave Martin] Next question, it appears folks feel comfortable with cameras, is that the case? - [Christopher Roy] Yeah, they're very comfortable with cameras especially after I've been going there for 40 years. They know exactly what cameras are, they're not at all confused about cameras, they love photographs, all of them have photographs of their own that they've had made over the years. A lot of houses you go to especially in Bonie and Dablo in Ouargaye people have dozen of photos that I've given them over the years, stuck up on the walls of their houses. And they're quite fine with cameras, I always though ask permission before I take many photographs, just 'cause it's polite, you have to deal with African people the way you do with any people anywhere else in the world. You have to be polite, you can't just shove a camera in their face and say take their photograph. But by the time after all of these years going to some villages people expect me to take photographs and they know what I'm doing and they know what the results will be. And it's not a problem. A lot of them have actually, some of them, have a few copies of my books too. Just last March I was visiting one of my friends, a man named Yamu Erico who is my age and he was a young man when I was a young man in 1970 and now he's 63 and he had a mask and I took a photo of it with his permission of course and I said Erico this is a brand new mask, you just had it carved but it looks like it's old, he said yeah that's 'cause I wanted it to look like the one in your book. - [Dave Martin] This question is your specialty is West Africa and you spoke of the artistic barrenness of Nigeria, can you compare West African art with southern African art? - [Christopher Roy] I can. I teach the art of the entire continent, I even include Egypt in my art of Africa Kings class, and I really didn't mean to over state it, I didn't mean to imply that Nigeria was barren of art. I just meant because there are a lot of scholars who do wonderful research in Nigeria on art now. It's just that in Nigeria the contemporary art forms take a different shape than they did 20, 30, 50, 100 years ago. Nigeria is not bereft of art. In southern Africa art forms are different, they emphasize music a lot, body art a lot, costume a lot and the contemporary arts in southern Africa are very, very strong in great part because of the impact that apartheid had up until 1991 on the people of southern Africa. So there's a very, very strong tradition of art made in studios by people who were trained in the west, in Europe, in the United States, trained for that matter in South Africa 'cause they have very good art schools in South Africa. It tends to be rather more colorful and to include a lot more bead work than the art in West Africa does. West Africa has been more famous for a long time for its sculpture, probably because of the impact West African art had on people like Picasso and Matisse and Flamencan Duran the period from 1907 to 1912, 1914 even up until World War II. So West Africa has gotten a higher proportion of interest because of the impact on Western, on European artists but the art of southern Africa and east Africa is quite rich too. There was a long period when people thought there wasn't any art in east Africa from about 1960 until about 1987, they thought there wasn't any art in east Africa. The reason was because after Independence under the leader of Tanzania, Julius Nyerere, people hid their art away because Nyerere was very, very opposed to what he called tribalism and didn't want people using the kinds of art objects to identify ethnic groups and so they kept things hidden away, but when he retired, suddenly a great deal of art started appearing and that art is actually the subject of a book that I wrote called Kelengi the Bareiss collection which was published in Munich. - [Dave Martin] What is your current opinion of the work of the Peace Corps in Africa or USAID? - [Christopher Roy] I think it's absolutely superb, it's absolutely terrific. I think Peace Corps is one of the greatest experiences Nora and I ever had, it has totally, totally determined the course of our lives. Everything that we do, even to this day almost, is a direct result of our fantastic experience in the Peace Corps. I recommend any of my students who are even a little bit interested in Peace Corps, I recommend Peace Corps very strongly to them. I think it's a superb experience. Just last March I was in Ouargaye again, a town I've been going to for a long time but Ouargaye had never had a Peace Corps volunteer and I was in church, it was the Catholic church. I like going to the Catholic church 'cause they have great music. And there was a young American Peace Corps woman there named Lorena Rodriguez from Chicago and I talked to her about her experience in Ouargaye, she was having a fantastic time. She was one of the most accomplished bright, interesting people you could possibly imagine. A tremendous ambassador for American young people for American culture in Africa, the people in the village just adored her, she was working as a teacher. There were Peace Corps volunteers like her working in villages all over Africa. Peace Corps is an absolutely superb experience and as we all know the Peace Corps volunteers almost always take away from their experience much more than they ever possibly could contribute themselves. They work very hard to do a good job but their experience that they bring back with them when they come back to this country is what's really, really important and which really makes a contribution to life in America. AID I really don't know all that much about, I know they've tried hard to do good works and they're invested all the time in Africa, the AID presence Burkina Faso isn't as high as it used to be when Nora and I were in the Peace Corps in the '70s, there were hundreds and hundreds of AID officers. Most of them had just finished up a term in Saigon if you know what I mean. But nowadays I think AID has somewhat smaller presence in Africa than it did in the 1970's. I have no reason to criticize AID. Again I don't do the kind of work Allan Brody does but I've never seen any evidence in Burkina Faso that AID was doing anything but good work. - [Dave Martin] Is there female genital mutilation in Burkina Faso? - [Christopher Roy] Yes unfortunately there is. And it varies from group to group, the government has long since has forbidden it, they've passed draconian legislation to ban it. There are big education programs to try and stop it, there are parts of the country like the southwest for instance where people are heavily, heavily monde. That means they belong to a cultural, they're in a cultural area Where female genital mutilation has been important historically. Where one in 20 women die in childbirth because of FGM and it's absolutely horrifying. There's a village Nora and I like to visit named Seguenega which is the village of one of my PhD students Barema Giamatani. Where 20% of the women die in childbirth from hemorrhaging and we had been there for quite a while and we had went back to Bobo-Dioulasso a big city and we were meeting with a obstetrician there, a famous old physician and his wife who is a mid-wife. And I said whenever I see these women who are so strong and work so hard and try so hard to survive and raise their families and then they die of hemorrhaging in child birth, it makes me cry and he said, "Professor Roy if every time we "in Africa came across problems like that we cried, "we'd be crying all the time." And it's true but there are other parts, in Ouagadougou in Burkina Faso now there are big education programs to prevent it and the education programs actually are being successful. They actually publish a telephone number that girls can call if they're being threatened, if they're afraid they're about to be kidnapped and taken out in the bush. You might think that's kind of silly, a joke except 90% of the people in Ouagadougou have cell phones and there is a famous story of a group of a dozen little girls who were being loaded on a truck by their grandmothers, it's usually not their parents, it's their grandmothers who do it. And one of the little girls had a phone and she called the police and the police stopped the truck at the edge of town and arrested the elderly ladies and let all the girls go back to their families who are happy to have them back. So these kinds of things actually do sometimes work, people in Africa recognize that it's a serious, serious, serious problem and they're trying to end it. But it's no easier to end that than it is for us to end drug abuse for instance in our own culture, we don't have any problems in our own culture do we that are difficult to solve, so. - [Dave Martin] One more here, this question is regarding Dick Simon's Ibage figures, - [Christopher Roy] Yeah, yeah. - [Dave Martin] Is there a possibility of his collection being featured in a book? - [Christopher Roy] Yes who would like to pay for it. We would like to publish it and I hope I will be able to publish it, it's actually online. You can see it online if you go to my website which is Art and Life in Africa, you scroll down partway on my website you'll see area Begee. It's Art and Life in Africa which is also the title of the catalog at the Stanley collection I wrote in 1985 and 1991. And if you Google me or you Google Art and Life in Africa, I'll be at the top of the list. I get more hits on my website than the college of liberal arts gets on their website, I do I'm not joking because it's an NEH recommended website for K through 12 education and I have a huge amount of information on people's of Africa and on African countries and so every K through 12 student in America in the 7th grade who's doing a report on Africa goes to my website. And if you go there you'll see Dick Simon's wonderful collection. Professor Simon as you know is a generous but not a hugely wealthy man. After all he was a University professor for 40 years and if he could afford to he would love to publish it, the museum would love to publish it but times have been hard for the museum too in the last few years, so some day we'll find the benefactor and be able to publish that collection because it is a very, very fine collection. If Max and Betty Stanley were still alive they'd be absolutely delighted to see the way the interest in Africa and African art here in Iowa city has brought in so much more contributions, so much more interest, so much more classes, donations of art objects, purchase of art objects, publications, all sorts of things including Dick Simon's collection. Those of you who don't know, Professor Simon has actually promised that collection in writing to the University of Iowa if he ever dies. - [Dave Martin] So we've reached the time to conclude our program and on behalf of the Iowa city of Foreign Relations Council, I wanna thank you Professor Roy for his presentation on African Art. I also want to thank our sponsors, the University of Iowa's international programs, University of Iowa's honors program and AW Welt Ambrisco Insurance Inc. for their generous support. And as a modest token of our appreciation Chris, we want to present you with the extremely coveted Iowa City Foreign Relations Council mug - [Christopher Roy] Oh my, oh my goodness. Oh that's fantastic. - [Dave Martin] Which you can use for coffee, tea or any other beverage of your choice. - [Christopher Roy] Bourbon? - [Dave Martin] Hey, it's your choice. Danielle wants me to mention that we might alternative suggest using it as a a pencil holder, you might. 'Cause the extra time in your desk is free advertising for us. And speaking of advertising if you have any questions about joining ICFRC please call the office 335-0351. If you enjoy listening to this program on the radio or via cable TV and wish to send a tax deductible contribution, you can either call that number, 335-0351 or send donations and inquiries to the Iowa City Foreign Relations Council 1111 University Capitol Center, Iowa City, 52242. Please join me again in thanking Chris for speaking.