Category Archives: Africa

Made by Children: An Album of Prints and Drawings by Boys at Chirodzo School, Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia

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Front cover of the album made by pupils at the Chirodzo SchoolAnother case of going to look for one thing and being surprised by something else on the shelf…   What caught my eye was the inscription on the front cover identifying this album of children’s art as the creations of African schoolboys: most of this kind of material in Cotsen comes from Western Europe or North America.

Note about the album by Chirodzo School pupils on the inside coverThe inside of the front wrapper is filled with a note in block letters explaining that primary school students between the ages of nine and thirteen cut linoleum blocks or made watercolor drawings from their imaginations.  The group was a mix of boys who had lived for two or more generations in the city of Salisbury, Southern Rhodesia (now Harari, the  capital of Zimbabwe) and the bush, living with relatives in order to take advantage of the educational opportunities. Laid in the album is a card: all the names of the boys who contributed to the album are written in pencil on the back.Card with list of names of students who contributed prints or drawings to the albumHere are some examples of the artwork in the album. The first linocut is unsigned and seems to be a fanciful design based on plants.  The second has two boys in the foreground and floating overhead two boys riding bicycles down a road.  “Tongai 1950”  appears in the line of triangles along the bottom.  “Tongai” is a boy’s name in Shona, a language spoken in Zimbabwe.Linocut print of vegetation made by a student at Chirodzo SchoolLinocut of boys and bicycles made by pupil at Chirodzo SchoolAccording to the author of the note, the girl pupils at Chirodzo School were excluded from art instruction: they took domestic arts where they learned to make puddings and sweets. the boys would have rather traded places with them instead of participating in the school’s world-famous art program under the direction of the Canon Edward Paterson (1895-1974).

These watercolors suggest otherwise.  Kenneth Kudenga boldly signed his name on a colorful landscape with animals. The caption written for the second watercolor explains: “They love setting themselves problems–here the problem of showing a beast drinking from the front.”   The next one according to the caption shows “the terrors of the bush–crocodile, snakes, lion, leopard appear often in the work of city children, afraid of the bush.”Drawing by Kenneth Kudenzh pupil at Chirodzo SchoolDrawing of a boy and cows by a pupil at Chirodzo SchoolScene of a river with crocodiles and fish by student Chirodzo SchoolA Scot who emigrated with his family to South Africa in 1901.  After military service in Namibia and East Africa, he accepted a scholarship to study at London’s School of Arts and Crafts, then returned to South Africa to train for the Anglican priesthood.  After ordination in 1928, he served in several Transvaal congregations, where his artistic interests surfaced in the launching of projects to teach pupils skills like bas relief carving or painting murals in churches.

Paterson enjoyed the reputation as the leading art educator in Africa. Between 1939 and 1953, he taught at Cyrene School, where he developed an unusual curriculum for art education.  Under his tuition, his students so distinguished themselves that their work was displayed in a series of travelling exhibitions between 1949 and 1953 in South Africa, England, and America.  White Rhodesians began buying the young men’s artwork, which helped to underwrite the cost of classes at Cyrene. When he moved to the Chirodzo School in Salisbury, his students’ work continued to attract international attention.  Grace McCann Morley, the forward-thinking director of the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, organized an exhibition of 900 pieces of African student art which was view there in 1958. The archive remained at SFMoA, where a curator recently highlighted it in a video presentation.Drawing of hunting in the bush by pupil at Chirodzo SchoolThis recognition may have encouraged Paterson to think that the director Frank McEwen of the new National Gallery in Salisbury established 1957 would welcome him and his students.  When opportunities did not materialize, the two men quarrelled openly with change in the situation.  Eventually McEwen’s work on Zimbabwean art overshadowed that of Paterson, whose influence has been questioned by scholars more recently.  His own limitations as an artist, it has been argued, may have prevented students to move beyond copying his style and to develop more comprehensive technical skills.  His harshest critics claim most of his students ended up in the tourist trade and few established vibrant artistic practices.Photo of Canon Edward Paterson and pupilNo one disputes, however, that some of Zimbabwe’s first artists got their start in Paterson’s classes. It would be interesting to see how many of the boys whose work appears in this album continued to make art after they left Chirodzo School.

Collect Them All, Kids: Colonialism and Promotional Giveaways about Africa

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Funny Jungleland Moving Pictures. Battle Creek, Mich.: W. K. Kellogg, c1909. (Cotsen 4419)

Once upon a time, cereal shopping was an adventure. While mother made the circuit of the aisles, her child disappeared to the cereal section to decide which one had the best giveaway.  The cereal manufacturers were hoped to make the child pine for all their promised prizes so he or she would ask to buy more boxes of their products, supposedly creating brand loyalty. When mother arrived, negotiations began about what brand her darling wanted versus what she was willing to buy, having given in before and seen boxes of untouched cereal stripped of the prizes going stale on the shelf.  We can give thanks to the Kellogg Company of Battle Creek, Michigan for putting the first promotional giveaway for children, Funny Jungleland Moving Pictures (1909), in boxes of cornflakes.

European corporations also have used this diabolical advertising strategy in the promotion of food products to children.  Several ambitious examples of collectible premiums about Africa were added to Cotsen’s collection of advertising ephemera because they looked like an underused source for studying how corporations doing business in particular countries presented to children those cultures formerly under European control.

Africorama was a promotional giveaway ca. 1967 for Petit-Exquis cookies by the L’Alsacienne brand, which had been baking the buttery treats since the 1920s.  The cookie box contained a color enamel metal flag of an African nation. There were two sets, 20 representing the Muslim countries of Africa, and 28 for the “pays noirs” or Black countries. The set in Cotsen has all of the flags except for the Rhodesian one.  Most of the copies coming on the market are seriously defective, so it is unusual to have one so complete.  On the picture of the cookie box to the left, the metal tabs of the flags can be seen. The metal flags were supposed to be displayed on a  folded, perforated cardboard sheet illustrated by Wilquin.  The flags came with the cookies, but the child-collector had to write away for the sheets if they were to be displayed.  The set for the Muslim countries features a full-length portrait of a Berber Tuareg warrior, a Bantu warrior on the Black one. The back of the cardboard display has a big illustrated advertisement for Petit-Exquis cookies, but no clues why L’Alsacienne was issuing such an elaborate giveaway.

The second example of a French promotional giveaway, La collection La Vache qui Rit, also dates from the 1960s.  The semi-soft cheese had been sold in Africa since the 1930s and the continent remains a big market for the product.  Tucked into the little circular cardboard packages containing the cheese were illustrated cards the same size and shape. The child determined to acquire a complete set had to convince his mother to purchase over 200 boxes of cheese. I suspect many mothers were of two minds about that unless her family consumed a great deal of La Vache qui Rit anyway.  Similar to Africorama, single cards and one or the other of the display sheets are not hard to come by, a set as large as this takes persistence and time to accumulate.

The cards, none of which are signed by the artist, are in French and Dutch.  They illustrate in rather attractive detail African animals, arts and crafts, indigenous costumes, and relations between the European colonizers and native Africans in the Belgian Congo. The cards could be stood up for display if cut along the indicated lines on the front and folded as directed. The pictures are captioned, but there is no explanatory text on the back: they are blank. The subjects are quite intriguing; surely many children would have been curious to learn more about what they saw. To look at these cards, no one would have any idea that the Congo had been roiled by political turmoil since it was granted independence by Belgium in 1960.To understand why these two French corporations produced such attractive, elaborate promotional giveaways, one needs to know something about the history of European corporate investment in Africa during the twentieth century.   Have economists studied this phenomenon to learn more about how corporate strategies for increasing market share at home and possibly abroad devised these sets?  Who came up with the ideas?  Who was responsible for the projects, which could not have executed quickly or cheaply.   Was there a motive other than an economic one for making these giveaways?

How might the presentation of Africa in these promotions might have affected French children and African children living in France or abroad?  When were French children taught about the history of their country’s colonization of Africa?   Would they have been exposed to news about Africa in the press, radio, and television? What attitudes towards non-European people were reflected in the illustrations? How would they have compared with those in school books, leisure reading, or the media?  Would children have heard similar or different views expressed by the adults in their families?   And do reminiscences of collecting promotional giveaways as children survive?  Is collecting this kind of ephemera bound up with nostalgia in the same way as it is in America?