www.success-and-culture.net The purpose of this site is to try and get the world to start dealing with the interaction between culture and success in a mature and intelligent manner. Poll: Do you believe culture influences success? Yes 67.5% No 17.3% Uncertain 15.1% - Newest Articles - Per Capita Income Around the World Per capita income figures for the countries and regions of the world. Hind Swaraj, by M.K. Gandhi While rarely read this is Gandhi's most important written work. Civilization and Success The traditional explanation for the noticeable differences in income across cultures was to say that they differed in their level of civilization. - Categories - Civilization and Success Culture is to the group what personality is to the individual. Civilization is to the group what enlightenment is to the individual. By the Numbers A careful examination of the numbers is necessary to understand the relationship between success and culture. Third World and the Underclass The Third World is where the relationship between success and culture is revealed in the most brutal manner. Politics and Success The central political issue of our time is whether or not culture influences success. - All Articles - Per Capita Income Around the World Per capita income figures for the countries and regions of the world. Hind Swaraj, by M.K. Gandhi While rarely read this is Gandhi's most important written work. Civilization and Success The traditional explanation for the noticeable differences in income across cultures was to say that they differed in their level of civilization. Fundamentals of Prosperity This 1920 work by Roger Babson is a classic with in its genre. It promotes the traditional, pre-1960s explanation for the connection between success and culture. Zimbabwe: the World's Largest Test Tube Current events in Zimbabwe are giving us an unprecedented opportunity to measure and judge the effect of white settlement and colonization in Africa. US Incomes by Race, Ethnicity and Religion Average US Incomes by Race, Ethnicity and Religion. Are Calvinists Predestined to Succeed? Max Weber's claim that Protestantism is more conducive to success than Catholicism and that Calvinism is in particular more successful is widely repeated and rarely examined. Wealth and the Recogniton of Culture We need to recognize that culture is the personality of a group or race and we must see culture and having seen it, make it a work of art. The Recipient Class The moral justification for welfare is supposed to be that we are temporarily helping out our fellow man through a rough stretch of road or helping the disabled permanently. If it is to become a system for continually transferring wealth from one group to another the people behind this change owe us an explanation. Culturalism The great taboo of our age is not speaking about race, but speaking about culture. Bourgeois Bourgeoisie is more than just a term of abuse used by the Left, it refers to a real people who led real lives. Selections from the Federal Outlook Selections from a 1960's Rhodesian newspaper. How Africa Underdeveloped Africa Africa is the poorest place in the world. Why? Will Famine Come to Zimbabwe? The end of commercial farming in Zimbabwe could plunge the country into famine. The Tragedy of the Zimbabwe Commons Communally owned property always has and always will suffer from the 'tragedy of the commons' problem. Band Aid Africa recieves $15 billion a year in aid. Is it helping?

The Nature of Bantu Art and Some Suggestions for its Encouragement

THE REV. EDWARD PATERSON, Principal of Cyrene.

Most of us are guilty of using the term "African Art" and meaning by it that there is an art peculiar to the African and differing from the art of the peoples of other continents. The moment we think, however, about the art of this continent, we find that this imagined unity within Africa breaks up into several well types of art which have no more of a common denominator between them than that which connects them with the art of the rest. of the world. Leaving out the art of the Northern Coast of Africa and the art of Egypt as being develop duo to circumstances and influences absent from the rest of Africa, we have still the art of Abyssinia and Nubia, Negro art, Bantu art and Bushman art. For the purpose of this article it is necessary to consider only Negro and Bantu art and to decide whether there is between them any essential difference.

Negro Art, which has been much publicised, has, owing to its more spectacular nature, fixed itself in the public mind as being the highwater mark of the art of the black man, with Bantu art considered to be a debased or at least an undeveloped form of the same art. About the year 1920, when the mind of Europe was floundering in the mental aftermath of war and feeling after new formulae for the expression of personality in art and poetry and music, Negro art was introduced to the European in a series of exhibitions to be immediately seized upon by the art world as being or that type of restatement of old truths for which it had been seeking This strange "new" art was seen to have a dynamic vitality; Its simple rendition of form and flawless finish giving it a potency, even though a brutal potency, which had long disappeared from the cold classicism of the derivative art of Europe, and, fresh from the battlefields of Europe, men felt in their dissatisfaction with the then world, the need of restating brutally and crudely the lessons of destruction learnt. It was for this reason that the arts if Europe preferred as a postwar influence the crudities of primitive titan before the flawless technical perfection of decadent antique art. Negro art was not alone in its advent to those turbulent times; the dIscoveries of archaeological excavators and Maya and Aztec art, the art of the jungles of India, the ponderous crudities of Easter Island soul a welter of the arts of primitive man took Europe by storm; expressions such as barbaric colour, vitality, significant form, pregnant space, were bandied about, and after a long feast of seeing and discussing, European man settled clown to the translation into his art terms the lessons learnt from these new Influences. The results were in every case strangely disappointing; the same forms used by the man of Africa when used by the man of Europe had only a spurious vitality-emasculatel-ike temples from which the cultus had flown, and it is well to consider this was so.

Man inevitably ties his finest craftsmanship to his hopes from life: the philosophy of his religion, and not to his understanding of life. There is in all great art the quality of its having been lifted up and consecrated, not only to enshrine the craft of the artist but also to connect with the concept of the permanent and to honour the God. This quality of consecration disappears from art and is superseded by mere technical dexterity when craftsmanship is lifted tip merely to the pleasure of a king, a town council, a courtesan, as we see, for example, in the intolerable trickery of much of the art of later Egypt, of Chien Lung, Venice, the 1851 Exhibition and presentday Bond Street. It is not essential that art should be objectively religious in order to capture this quality of consecration, and indeed the objective form of art does not here enter the sub for it is the mind of the artist, released from the bondage to wealth and bound to his philosophy of life, which finds itself able to enshrine within craftsmanship as though by accident this num quality, and it is this alone which is the common denominator in the art of all races, whether the God be a God of Cruelty or a God of Love.

When the reasons for the difference in the outward form of art is sought for, we have to deal with a very different set of circumstances, but human and understandable circumstances such as ritual observances, the conventions of tradition, the economic factor, and so forth, as not, as might be supposed, with factors such as race or pigmentation of skin.

Thus, if one takes a map of the world which shows the rain areas and refers to the religion and art of these areas, one finds between them a strange similarity. In all these areas religion Is cruel because nature is cruel, and consequently art becomes cruel Ito Its outward form: God of the rainforests places no value upon human life, for cheapness of human life is part of the prolificity r 11w soil, or, in other words, religion is here a religion of blood; red from human beings and green from the trees. If we alter the conception of the nature of God in the minds of these people we inevitably take from their art is spontaneity and vitality, perhaps row ever or perhaps only for a time; a question which depends upon how much of their own religious ideas they can smuggle in with them into their new faith.

It Is this question of the productiveness of the soil; the ease or difficulty with which man can obtain his food which governs his conception of the character of God and his demands from man. This will explain why it is that the Bantu conception of God, with the art dependent therefrom, rising as it does from an entirely different, set of economic factors, is so different from that of the Negro.

To the Negro, God, terribly near at hand and whimsical in his judgements, seemed to invite the proitiatory representation of his person and character and to express delight in blood and cruelty and fear considered as ends in themselves. God, to the Bantu, had no delight in cruelty; He was far away and his people were connected to him only through the mediation of prophets and seers; he demanded from them no representation in art, but instead only gifts of thanksgiving or propitiation won from the soil or from their herds.

It is in some such way that we must account for the fact that there exists no considerable work of art which can be ascribed to the Bantu, apart from Zimbabwe, and Zimbabwe is probably nothing more than the sudden flowering of a new religious idea, similar to the meteoric rise of Solomon in Hebrew history and the heretical renaissance of Tutankhamen in Egypt and which as suddenly died away in an inclement soil.

There are, however, many objective relationships between Negro and Bantu art which must be remembered, as it is these fortuitous accidents which to a great degree are the cause of their having been considered parts of a related art; both peoples have been cut off from new influences in art; both are threedimensional in outlook because both start with a log of wood or a dollop of clay, both use rushes and grasses and skins and a handful of beads; both have the same type of primitive tools; both live in simple houses and share the same sort of tribal life, and both share the same unending indolence, but here the likeness ends.

In considering Bantu art, we must first decide whether it is an art sui generis" or whether it has affinities with the arts of other peoples. My own experience leads me to dogmatise that all peoples start level in first expressing themselves aesthetically and that consequently, when the purely literary side of a drawing is disregarded, it is impossible to distinguish the art of a Bantu child from the art of any other children. To all little children the significant points of the human figure are the head, with its eyes and mouth, the arms and legs with its fingers and toes, and not the body, which is rendered arbitrarily by a line or a circle or a box: a subjective and mental approach, and not visual. It would seem, though I will not dogmatise about this, that the significance of the body proper, and the articulation of the limbs is felt only with the approach to puberty.

A Bantu child will produce from its subliminal self patterns and shapes which have been used by man ever since he walked the earth, and will, with little development, continue to use them in mature life. When one searches through the history of art for the origin of these patterns and shapes, one discovers that the Bantu affinity is with people whose way of life most closely approximates his own, that is, with the simple pastoral and agricultural peoples of the world of history; people, the monotony of whose lives is varied by tribal wars, harvest festivals, weddings and funeral feasts. This type of life has been common since Neolithic times: it was the life of the Hebrews, and it exists today in many parts of Eastern Europe and Asia. Among all such people there is an essential similarity of religion and art: a peasant art which is common to every man and which hugs the soil; an art concerned more with the beautifying of the things of everyday use than with the production of objects of vertu. It is when people living such lives become prosperous and Powerful (e.g., Solomon) and add to their system kings and courts and a developed cultus that art moves away from the soil and becomes expressive, at least in part, of such new elements in their lives. In such a development the artist is no longer everyman, but a specialist member of a caste which denies to the people the validity of their old art forms.

We have then in Bantu art the art of a simple pastoral and agricultural people which has not moved far from the soil or from the simple decoration of utilitarian things; the art of a people who ask little of life but the satisfaction of the needs of the moment. The industrialisation of the Bantu and his herding together in locations will thus be seen to introduce an entirely ditl'ern'nt set of circumstances and perforce a new conception of God, and it is to be expected, as has already happened in the Union, that his art will be affected and controlled by those same factors which control European art, or rather the art of people who are ignorant of the soil and who buy their food in shops.

In teaching art to children of whatever background, one should get rid of the word "teaching" and substitute "encouragement," for no teacher would willingly impose upon a class a set form of art if he were to know that with such a method the great majority of the class will drop art as soon as the "teaching" ceases; "having no root in themselves." This point is important in all craft work, for how often does one meet onetime art pupils who have for show some laboured drawing done at school twenty years before and with nothing done since. An unreasoned fear of the inspector or the governing body will sometimes make a teacher force a set form of art upon a class for the sake of making a show, and this is very wrong, for it sacrifices the ultimate pleasure of his pupils in art to the immediate and sterile pleasure of the teacher.

This article is intended to reach teachers and officials who find themselves suddenly confronted by some manifestation of art and who, while wishing to encourage it, feel incompetent, because of lack of training and knowledge, to deal with it, and to assure them that simple encouragement has always been a more fruitful source of stimulus towards development than even wise and informed advice. It is a wise teacher or parent who can teach by eliminating himself and giving his pupils the feeling of having found their own feet. We must learn not to obtrude ourselves too much into their lives and to worry more about their background than about their expression of their background. I know of one wellmeaning storekeeper in a reserve who ruined the delightful pottery of his district by showing them models of prehistoric animals and of European pottery and getting them to copy them, and thereafter supplying cheaply little tins of brightlycoloured enamels to colour them with. We should not impose our weary and confused ideas of beauty on a child, but encourage him to show us his own idea of beauty.

The articles commonly used by the Bantu as fields for decoration are rapidly disappearing from his life. In a hundred homes one may find, apart from native adzes and grass mats, no single article of native workmanship. The trader had made the native "deaf and numb in both hands," in so far as art expression is coneeu'umt'd; just as the rhythms of hymns and jazz have curbed his ininisic. Today many of us feel, without being able to reason the matter out, that a people should have at its command every means or aesthetic expression which we ourselves have found necessary. We should not be concerned with the direction taken by the Bantu in expressing himself in art. Provided we do not expect immediate results, he will find the field for art almost unlimited. A very great deal has been done by the Bantu in the Union in the fields of art, literature and music; a first flowering from seed sown haphazardly many years ago, some of it in reserves and some In the 'ferment of large towns and slums. Of this flowering I can speak with authority and say that it was watered by encouragement rather than by teaching, and say further that in the future the development of art will be due not to a settled policy or syllabus, but rather to our encouraged secret growth flowering unexpectedly. By "unexpectedly" I mean that a child who shows talent in the drawing class may later rise like a rocket in some other of the arts. The practice of any one of the arts seems to provide pupils with a keya mental awaredness of deeper things, and provides a bridge which later may be discarded as the pupil finds his feet in his personal predilection. On these lines must the answer be given to those who question the value of arts and crafts in schools. They are instruments for coordinating hand and brain and soul, and when this result is achieved, the means used for coordination may be discarded: "the raison d'etre of the rabbit snare is the rabbitwhen the rabbit is caught Me snare may be dispensed with." As an illustration of this point, there is printed at the end of this paper a poem written in English by a 14 year old Bantu boy. He was a pupil in a woodcarving class, but, his genius flowered in this unexpected way. It is an unstudied effort, written without faltering or correction, and discovered quite by accident in his personal note book.

Personally, therefore, I am against a settled syllabus in art, but at the same time very conscious of the value of a school as a seedbed of culture. By way of relief from a spate of words, I have included three pages of illustrations of the sort of work one may expect in the first year of encouraging art in a native school. The materials used are paper, pencil, ink and crayons, but neither ruler's nor rubbers are allowed. In this year a few developed sufficiently to be able to make designs for carving on chairs and tables and for fresco on walls. To achieve such results a school should be made "artconscious" and taught to regard the artist as being normal and not as being abnormal as is the case in European schools.

A set period is devoted to art, and the pupils given a set subject for illustration until such time as they are able to think of their own subjects. The subject should be one in which a child might reasonably be expected to be interested in, such as Getting Honey, My Wedding Day, The Troublesome Ox, The Veld Fire, The End of Term, An Incident in School Life, A Native Fable. The teacher leaves the publils to themselves, retorting "Nonsense" to qa pupil who says "I can't draw and ox." After perhaps twenty minutes the teacher selects a drawing which shows some little understanding of the drawing of a particular thing and shows it round the class, saying, "Look what Abednego has done!" A spirit of emulation is very easily awakened, early crudities will disappear and drawings produced which can be shown to visitors. The teacher should not attempt to draw on the board or in any way to dictate the design or grouping of a picture, neither should he exhibit any illustration or model which can be copied. Design just "happens" by itself, but it can be encouraged by making pupils first draw a border to their work and even patterning it and thereafter drawing within it; the drawing of this border has fixed in the pupil's mind the area over which he has command and forces him sooner or later to fill the space with interesting forms. Theories of design need not worry the teacher, for children have some natural idea of design, but it is perhaps well to know that in general the details of a picture should be so arranged as to keep the eye satisfied within the border and with no lines or forms which by their trend tend to lead the eye off the picture.

The pupil's ideas about drawing and colour should not be interfered with, and it has been found well to leave the drawing with his for completion in his spare time.

After a few months the teacher will examine his harvest and paste in rough scrapbooks those drawings or portions of drawings which commend themselves to him, but not as compared with our drawing or even with the object represented, but outstanding because of vitality or symbolism or economy of life or sense of humour. This is the difficult part of the work and the part most likely to terrify the teacher, as so much depends upon his ability to recognise art in strange guise, but when it is remembered that children see with mental vision and not with visual vision, the teacher may learn to forget his presuppositions and see with a fresh eye. These scrapbooks should then be pondered over and the apparent bent of each child considered and new material such as compasses, watercolour, large paper and poster colours introduced. Where possible, scrapbooks should be exchanged between schools for mutual encouragement.

In this way drawing will become a school hobby and all over the school will be seen students busy at some sort of drawing. When this happens, the art period may be used for more concentrated Individual work: reviewing past efforts and rather pointing out good points than finding fault.

The official who works with natives and who is faced by art must do what he can by encouragement: a word of praise to a woman who has decorated her house or made a good bit of grasswork or a clay pot; an unfeigned interest in the work of any craftsman; a pretended serious examination of the sandtray houses of stones and rubbish which children are for ever busy at, or a little help with pencils and paper to a boy struggling to express himself In line. I know of one distridct where one might have imagind the people to be of a different tribe from those in the next district, so gaily were the houses decorated and so much did the women vie with each other in the care of their homes, and yet this difference was due simply to the fact that a European who visited frequently in this district had habitually noticed such things and discussed them with the people and joked about them.

Of all this encouragement we cannot see the outcome; there is in certain individuals the urge to express themselves in one of the forms of art and they themselves, if they need more than the satisfaction of their own urge, must create and maintain their own market. To us it is given to sympathise and encourage and then to stand aside, prepared even in our own lifetime, to see some flowering of their genius.

NOTE ON THE PLATES.

It will be appreciated that the illustrations for an article such as this must be chosen to encourage and also to illustrate points made in the article. In the last three months we have been using colour and thus we are not able to illustrate them. I can only say of this later work that it is surprisingly good. All the illustrations are from drawings by pupils at Cyrene. The letters P.A. refer to a Pelican Sixpenny, 'Primitive Art," by L. Adam, an illustrated book which makes interesting reading.

Plate I shows the sort of thing one starts with when pupils have never before drawn. The drawings above the line are by children below puberty, the one at F2 by an European child aged three for comparison, and the one with roads by a child on the edge of puberty. Fl is interesting as being the representation of a hut as a femalean enfolding refuge. B4 shows an 'Xray" hut, an idea which has affinities with primitive art in many lands and which is perhaps seen again in A5. Of the postpuberty period under the line, F4, B9, AlO and E9 all go back to Neolithic times. F8 is related to one of the techniques used in the South African petroglyphs (P.A. 73), and A7 to yet another technique there used (P.A. 89). D5 and E6 are beautifully and surely drawn and are in part symbols on the way to becoming pictographs. AG is Celtic in type. D8 is related to Fl in idea.

Plate 11.These are examples of change after three months. It will be seen that the pupils have not been given a formula for the drawing of the body, but that instead each pupil, arid this is true of the whole school, has his own idea about things.