Guide
A short history of African art
African art is not one tradition but thousands, made across fifty-four countries over more than 70,000 years — the oldest known drawing, the rock paintings of the Sahara and the Drakensberg, the sculpture of Nok, Ife and Benin, the Christian art of Ethiopia and the Islamic architecture of North Africa and the Swahili coast, masks, textiles and beadwork, the modernist schools of the independence era, and the contemporary artists who now show in every major museum. This guide follows that history in order and links to the articles that tell each part of it.
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The oldest art in the world
The story begins in Africa because the human story does. At Blombos Cave in South Africa, people engraved pieces of ochre with cross-hatched lines, wore shell beads and, about 73,000 years ago, drew a cross-hatched pattern on a stone flake — the oldest known drawing. Painted slabs from Apollo 11 Cave in Namibia are about 25,000 to 30,000 years old. Over the following millennia hunters, herders and farmers covered rock shelters from the Sahara to the Cape with paintings and engravings. See African rock art.
The Nile valley
Ancient Egypt, from around 3000 BCE, created one of the most influential art traditions in history — monumental architecture, sculpture, painting and the hieroglyphic script. To its south, the Nubian kingdoms of Kerma and Kush produced fine pottery, temples and pyramids; in the eighth century BCE Kushite kings conquered Egypt and ruled it as its Twenty-fifth Dynasty. Egypt and Nubia are part of African art history, not a separate chapter. See North African art.
West African sculpture
From the first millennium BCE, the Nok culture of central Nigeria made terracotta figures. Igbo-Ukwu produced intricate bronzes in the ninth and tenth centuries; Ife, between the twelfth and fifteenth, naturalistic heads in copper alloy and terracotta; the Kingdom of Benin, for centuries, the brass heads and plaques of its royal court. In the Inland Niger Delta of Mali, Djenné-Djenno produced terracotta figures, and the Sahel developed a monumental architecture of earth, of which the Great Mosque of Djenné is the most famous example. See African sculpture and the Benin Bronzes.
Christian Ethiopia, Islamic Africa and the Swahili coast
Aksum, in the Ethiopian highlands, raised giant stelae and adopted Christianity in the fourth century; Ethiopia's manuscripts, icons and rock-hewn churches followed (Ethiopian art). From the seventh century, Islam brought new arts to North Africa and, later, to the Sahel and the East African coast: mosques such as Kairouan's in Tunisia, the tilework and calligraphy of Morocco, the manuscript libraries of Timbuktu, and the coral-stone towns and carved wooden doors of the Swahili coast, from Lamu to Zanzibar and Kilwa. See East African art.
Southern Africa's kingdoms
At Mapungubwe, in today's South Africa, a thirteenth-century kingdom buried its rulers with gold, including a small gold rhinoceros. Great Zimbabwe, which flourished from about the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, built vast dry-stone walls and carved the soapstone birds that are now Zimbabwe's national emblem. See Southern African art.
Masks, figures, cloth and beads
Most of what museums call "traditional African art" was made in the last two or three centuries, in wood, fibre, cloth, clay and beads that rarely survive longer. It was made for use: masks danced at initiations and funerals, figures for shrines and ancestors, stools and staffs for rulers, pottery for water and beer, textiles such as kente, adinkra and mudcloth, and beadwork that marked status and age. These are the arts that West and Central African peoples are best known for.
Colonial collecting and the European "discovery"
In the late nineteenth century, colonial conquest moved huge numbers of objects into European museums — in 1897 British troops looted Benin City. In Paris around 1906–07, Picasso and his circle discovered African sculpture and used it to remake European art. African objects were celebrated as "primitive art" while their makers were often reduced to anonymous "tribes". Since the 2010s, restitution of looted objects has become one of the defining debates of museums worldwide.
African modernism
Around independence, artists across the continent asked what a modern African art should be. Art schools and workshops gave different answers: Makerere in Uganda, where Margaret Trowell began teaching art in 1937; the Zaria Art Society and the Oshogbo school in Nigeria; the Khartoum School in Sudan; the École de Dakar; the Casablanca School; the Addis Ababa School of Fine Arts; Zimbabwe's stone sculptors; Tanzania's Tingatinga painters; and Kinshasa's popular painters. Artists such as Ben Enwonwu, Ibrahim El-Salahi and Malangatana became national figures.
Contemporary African art
Since the 1990s, artists from Africa and its diaspora have moved to the centre of the international art world, through biennales in Dakar, Bamako and Johannesburg, landmark exhibitions, new museums such as Zeitz MOCAA, and artists such as El Anatsui, Wangechi Mutu and the photographers of African photography. See contemporary African art.
A note on the label
"African art" is a convenient name for something too large for any one name: fifty-four countries, thousands of languages and peoples, and more than 70,000 years. Older books often left out North Africa and Ethiopia, or stopped in 1900. This guide treats the continent as a whole and its art as a living history. To explore it region by region, start with West, Central, East, Southern or North Africa.