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Elaborately carved ivory tusks, such as that donated by Susan and Wolfgang Hamburger to the Spencer Art Museum [Hamburger tusk], are vivid documents of the cosmopolitan social and economic character of the Loango Coast, Congo during the peak of the Atlantic Trade [Map showing Loango Coast]. Crafted during the mid 19th century to the first decade or so of the 20th century, these relief carvings typically depict a multitude of scenes spiraling up a single tusk. Subjects range from pastoral and "Westernized" Africans, to European merchants and monarchs, to caravans of porters and enslaved Africans, to illustrations of the Roman pantheon [details showing such examples from several tusks]. Kongo-Vili artists carved each unique tusk to serve, mostly, as souvenirs for Westerners who were engaged in commerce along the Loango Coast.

At the time of the tusks' production, the Loango Coast was an archetypal "contact zone (Pratt 1992)," a setting where Africans and Europeans, each of many origins, encountered each other. History of the Loango Coast is well documented. Loango was one of nine provinces of the Kingdom of Kongo with whom the Portuguese established contact in 1483. In 1593, the Dutch established trade operations on the Loango Coast. After the demise of the Kingdom of Kongo in the 17th century, Loango rose to power. Thereafter, the region became a major hub for the Atlantic Trade with British, French, Americans, Dutch, and Portuguese competing there for the market in enslaved Africans and other commodities (Martin 1972). The African populations living there were also cosmopolitan. The Loango tusks' artists were Vili, a class of Kongo traders and middlemen who dominated the region through wealth and status, absorbing local indigenous populations as well as ethnic groups who were brought there via slave caravans (Vansina 1990). The Vilis' long history of interaction with Westerners likely facilitated carvers' ability to render imagery befitting souvenirs for Europeans. However, there is very little known concerning the details of the tusks' production and the nature of negotiations between Vili artists and Western patrons. Through further examinations of tusks and archives, I hope to eventually draw conclusions regarding artists' hands, workshops, and reconstructing more concerning negotiations between carvers and consumers by tracking down accounts from specific collectors of tusks.

This presentation concerns my investigation in analyzing the ways in which the imagery on Loango tusks appealed to their European consumers while simultaneously being indigenous expressions of their Kongo carvers.

[The Hamburger Tusk] The Hamburger tusk portrays a procession of generalized figures dressed in tunics and wrappers leading clockwise from the tusk's base to point in a spiral organization that is common to most Loango tusk carvings. The composition rhythmically balances the leftward direction for reading the tusk with a few figures who face right instead of left and yet are posed in a manner that perpetuates the procession's continuity [Hamburger details: kneeling fig. / suckling fig. / couple].

The Hamburger tusk is but one example of countless others that were produced during the nineteenth century for Westerners who engaged in trade on the Loango coast. Loango tusks belong within the canon of historical ivory carvings produced in a hybridized European and African aesthetic by Africans and which were exported to the West. After hundreds of years of elephant poaching, African ivory was scarce and expensive by the nineteenth century. A single raw tusk could cost two or three times the price of a slave (Ross 1992, 39). The earliest "Afro-European" ivories began production during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries for newly arrived Portuguese explorers and merchants in three centers along Africa's west coast - [Map showing three centers] Sapi peoples, the Kingdom of Benin, and the Kingdom of Kongo. Perhaps the most famous of the "Afro-Portuguese" ivories are those from the area of present-day Sierra-Leone, carved by Sapi artists. [Salt-cellar] The salt-cellar, this one dated circa 1500 (1490-1530) is one example of a non-indigenous form which integrates European and African design in innovative ways (Bassani and Fagg 1988). This saltcellar combines a European covered-chalice form with Sapi design patterns. Like many Loango tusks, the saltcellar also combines human and animal imagery. The Loango tusks and the much earlier Afro-European ivories are similar in respect to their stylistic hybridity. In style and subject matter the Loango tusks appeal to European tastes. The images are naturalistically rendered, convey narratives, and appeal to European mythical ideas about Africa.

As I examine more and more tusks in various collections, one preoccupation of my research concerns the development and classification of what I refer to as the "souvenir standards" evident in carved Loango tusks. [Hamburger/Full view of a UCLA tusk] What about the imagery of carved Loango tusks makes them effective souvenirs, or "memory objects (Kasfir 1999)," for their European owners? I believe the tusks' imagery demonstrates a number of standards that achieve this. Paula Ben-Amos has identified several "Parameters of Change" that contemporary African carvers in Benin employ when carving for tourists. She explains that carvers typically depart from indigenous tendencies, such as abstraction, to create objects that serve as a type of communication meant to bridge the aesthetic and symbolic gaps of understanding between makers and buyers. Among the changes that she describes, the three most applicable to Loango carved tusks are: 1) the Expansion of Motifs, 2) Standardization, and 3) the Reduction in Semantic Level of Traditional Forms (Ben-Amos 1977).

The expansion of motifs to include scenes of everyday life appeals to the preconceived images that travelers bring with them to Africa. Recognizable as African, scenes represented on a Loango tusk may be a combination of events that its owner witnessed or hoped to witness. Unlike tourist postcards where both the makers and intended audience are typically non-Africans, in the case of Loango tusks, African carvers appropriated the Westerner's gaze for profit. Beyond the personal significance of a souvenir to its owner, a souvenir also corresponds to the ideologies of the society from which the traveler comes. As Sidney Kasfir explains, "there is […] a social meaning to the souvenir - something that affirms and legitimates the memory for other viewers as well as for its collector (Kasfir 1999, 68)."

Although styles and amount of detail vary, the UCLA and other Loango tusks share many similar vignettes and subjects. In this sense "standardization" occurs through repetitive themes rather than copied, mass-produced objects as other studies of present-day African tourist art illustrate. I suggest that standardized themes exhibited on Loango tusks reinforced European notions of difference from and superiority to Africans. To date, I have classified recurrent subjects into three themes: "Menagerie," "Europeans," and "Savage Sensationalism" - and I intend develop others as my research dictates.

Loango tusk carvings convey the effect of menagerie. [UCLA full//Noah's Ark] The tusks' imagery correlates with the popular appeal of complete collections of Noah's Ark figurines during the Victorian era, and also appeals to the taste for curiosities. On the right, you see a German-made Noah's Ark set dated 1850-1900. The humans and animals depicted on the tusk, in addition to the tusk itself, are exotic and peculiar, rendered equal in size as "types" on parade up and around the spiral. The Africans are represented as so pastoral that they are on equal terms with the animals around them. [Details showing monkeys from three tusks] There is little separation between their worlds, as illustrated on the left by a monkey who reaches his right hand toward a figure. Although an animal might appear on a lower plane than the human because of the diagonal frame, they are often comparable in scale. This subject repeats on the NMAfA tusk (on the right), which portrays a monkey who is lifting the edge of a woman's wrapper. This is also depicted on a tusk from the University Museum at Penn.

Many Loango tusks depict Europeans. Many tusks depict processions of porters and slave caravans leading directly to a European [Walters detail]. Although all Loango tusks may not necessarily show Europeans in the body of the composition, their presence and influence on life, work, and the economy are implicit through the illustration of European material goods and processions of commercial porters. [Assorted details//Hamburger detail fig. w/hat] A man dressed in partial European clothing, women carrying parasols, and the elephant hunter's gun demonstrate increasing African dependency foreign goods during this time. [Malcolm detail, tusk porter] The transport of a single elephant tusk by a porter is poignantly depicted on a tusk from a private collection. The slave trade and trade in commodity goods, ivory among others, were codependent ventures whereby enslaved Africans - commodities themselves - also served as beasts of burden carrying trade goods and supplies for transport to and from the coast. [NMAfA detail showing slave caravan]

African artists may appeal to the predilections of tourists by implementing a "trend toward the grotesque (Bascom 1976, 314)." Although William Bascom refers to African carvers' attempt to "reflect […] European preconceptions about the savagery or strength of African sculpture" in their stylistic rendering, I suggest that Loango Coast carvers depicted sensational subject matter in order to appeal to European notions about the savagery and danger believed to be inherent to Africa and its people. The most commonly portrayed theme embodying "savage sensationalism" depicts humans being attacked by animals. [Leopard] On the top segment of a tusk from UCLA, a man attempts to rescue the leopard-attack victim by stabbing the leopard from behind. A NMAfA tusk depicts two such scenes. [Crocodile//Elephant] In one scene (on the left), a man is being attacked by a crocodile biting his leg while another man holds the victim's hands and yet another hoists a sword above the crocodile. In the other scene an elephant attacks a hunter who has dropped his gun while another man, presumably of his hunting party, prepares to fire his gun at the elephant. Such vignettes also evoke the effects mentioned previously about "menagerie." The scenes convey supposed affinities between African animals and people as in need of civilizing.

[UCLA full] Literally the "stuff" of Africa, the Loango tusks signify associations with the imagined Africa. A tusk communicates such notions as the grandeur of the African elephant, the adventure and danger of the elephant hunt, and the violence required to fell an elephant. That a Victorian could literally own a piece of Africa in these tusks for display in his parlor further reinforces the notion of European possession of Africa.

Nonetheless, for all of the ways in which our souvenir standards may cater to European-held stereotypes of Africa, Loango tusks remain very much Kongo objects. Created in the "contact zone (Pratt)," where Africans and Europeans - each of many origins - encountered each other, carved Loango tusks are quintessential "colonial hybrids (Bhabha 1994)," which may embody qualities of the colonizer while simultaneously conveying indigenous agency. In this way, a Loango tusk maintains indigenous potency and, while set on its mount in a Victorian parlor, may even jab back at or subvert the gaze of the Europeans who view it.

This brings us to Ben-Amos's third criteria for tourist art -- reduced semantic load. Loango tusks do not merely reflect the tastes of their consumers. Although the subject matter may reinforce European stereotypes about a mythical Africa, Loango tusk carvings do reveal indigenous, Kongo, aesthetic traditions. [Hamburger] The Loango tusks' spiral format resembles much earlier Kongo oliphants [Hamburger/Oliphant], which are carved ivory tusks that functioned as side-blown horns used for court celebrations and hunts. [Loango "faux-oliphant"] Although not likely to have been used as a horn, a carved Loango tusk in the collection of the Museum for Mankind, Rotterdam exhibits this legacy through two side holes imitating those of oliphants. [Oliphant] Oliphants made for the royal court were frequently carved with spiral-oriented designs that resemble Kongo textiles. Similar oliphants were given to early European explorers during the fifteenth century as gifts. This spiral pattern may signify spiritual return or the Kongo concept of the life cycle, luzîngu, in Kikongo literally "the coil of life (Fu-kiau, personal communication 2004)." [Oliphant//Hamburger]

The naturalistic style and figural narrative carving on Loango tusks are also grounded in two other ancestor-related Kongo aesthetic traditions. [ntadi] Kongo stone sculptures, such as this one from the 19th century, that mark(ed) the graves of high-status individuals illustrate that naturalism is not foreign to Kongo art. Like this stone image depicting a ruler, seated and smoking a pipe, figures carved on a Loango tusk share many of its naturalistic qualities. They display lifelike poses and gestures with assorted attributes. The naturalism employed on the grave marker functions as a visual metaphor for a number of associated indigenous meanings concerning the qualities of an effective and respected leader. Can the same be said about the naturalism on Loango tusks? Does Loango tusk naturalism simply depict or does it also signify?

Diminished metaphorical meaning corresponds to a final "parameter of change" that Ben-Amos identifies in tourist art - a "reduction in [the] semantic level of traditional forms." The "subordination of meaning to 'direct visual effect' (Ben-Amos 1977, 131)" is further evident in the contrasting use of narrative between Loango tusks and Kongo so-called "scepter-slates." [Scepter-slate] Part walking stick and part slate, these long, flat wooden forms, pointed at one end, are carved in low-relief with figural forms whose poses combined with abstract signs function ideographically to convey Kongo cosmological concepts about spiritual return and power, among others. Robert Farris Thompson explains, "an elder would take this staff and read back, from its signs, the wisdom and the major happenings of the past to the members of the present world (Thompson 1981, 42-52)." Serving to recount social history, this visual tradition presents an ironic parallel with the souvenir function of Loango tusks. [Hamburger] The returned European traveler would read the tusk's images and relate to his family and friends all the happenings of life in Africa. Yet unlike the scepter-slate, the Loango tusk does not narrate to its Western audience through abstract signs and does not convey to them cosmological wisdoms.

Although the artists may have reduced semantic meaning in order to accommodate Western viewers, I am curious as to whether the artists may have also maintained ideological integrity in addition to their integrity to indigenous aesthetics. Amidst imagery that seemingly defers to Westerners' preconceived notions of Africa, might the artists have incorporated their own brand of semantic meaning? In considering the possibility of carvers' agency through coded criticism, I have been influenced by my reading of Henry Louis Gates Jr.'s literary theory about "signifyin(g)" - that is "signifying" with or without the "G"-ending. According to Gates, "signifyin(g)" is black double-voicedness. It is rhetorical play in which black people subvert white or dominant culture's signifiers to communicate among themselves. A frequent manifestation of this would occur in tales featuring the trickster figure, the Signifying Monkey. Enslaved Africans in the Americas, and their descendants, "colonized" words of their masters; they appropriated them for their own use and simultaneously kept their original meaning. Words such as down, baby, cool, and bad are but a few examples of "signifyin(g)" words conveying "signifyin(g)" messages that may be variously critical, witty, persuasive, implicative, scathing, humorous, improvisational and yet indirect and indeterminate - all at once (Gates 1988).

This tendency of "signifyin(g)" to reverse power relationships is evident in Loango tusk imagery. Did Loango tusk carvers incorporate their own attitudes about their Western patrons and foreign encroachment in a visual code akin to "signfyin(g)?" In this light, let us now reconsider the mischievous monkey seen on our tusks. [UCLA Monkey // NMAfA Monkey] This primate, who boldly occupies humans' space, certainly exhibits unusual power relationships. Could these Loango tusk primates be among the earliest Signifying Monkeys to cross the Atlantic in visual form?

[Lemba figures?]. This figure, wearing a hat adorned with what appears to be the Lemba society rosette symbol, appears on many Loango tusks. If both this figure and frequent depiction of couples are indeed Lemba references, does their depiction assert the retention of indigenous power structures in spite of Western encroachment? [Hamburger couple / Couples]. [Caravans// Enslaved figures] Further, did the frequent illustration of captive Africans draw attention to the continuing illegitimate trade in slaves on the Loango Coast along side the "legitimate" trade there. [detail showing theriomorph] What could be the significations of this theriomorph?

In the true spirit of "signifyin(g)," answers to such questions must remain manifold and indeterminate at best. Like "colonized" words, Loango tusk carvers appropriated the Western idioms of naturalism, narrative, and stereotyped misconceptions about Africa. Yet, they also instilled their own indigenous significations, all the while maintaining the images' original, souvenir meanings.

Works Cited

Bascom, William. "Changing African Art." In Ethnic and Tourist Arts: Cultural Expressions from the Fourth World, edited by Nelson H. H. Graburn, 303-19. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976.

Bassani, Ezio and William B. Fagg. Africa and the Renaissance: Art in Ivory. New York: Center for African Art, 1988.

Ben-Amos, Paula. "Pidgin Languages and Tourist Arts." Studies in the Anthropology of Visual Communication 4, no. 2 (winter 1977): 128-39.

Bhabha, Homi. The Location of Culture. London and New York: Routledge, 1994.

Gates Jr., Henry Louis. The Signifying Monkey. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 1988.

Kasfir, Sidney. "Samburu Souvenirs: Representations of a Land in Amber." In Unpacking Culture: Art and Commodity in Colonial and Post-Colonial Worlds, edited by Ruth B. Phillips and Christopher B. Steiner, 3-19. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1999.

Martin, Phyllis. The External Trade of the Loango Coast 1576-1870. London: Oxford University Press, 1972

Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes. New York: Routledge 1992.

Ross, Doran H., ed., Elephant: The Animal and Its Ivory in African Culture. Los Angeles: UCLA Fowler Museum of Cultural History, 1992.

Thompson, Robert Farris and Joseph Cornet. The Four Moments of the Sun: Kongo Art in Two Worlds. Washington, D.C.: National Gallery of Art, 1981.

Vansina, Jan. Paths in the Rainforest. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1990.