Fragments. (first word).

When the editors of African Arts asked me in the fall to write this column, suggesting that I might have "interesting" things to say about being both a scholar and a dealer, or gallery owner, what sprang to mind first had nothing to do with Africa. Rather I recalled the Chinese curse that one might live in "interesting" times. Since I try to bear the burden of an "interesting" life with a Zen smile--and preserve it even when drudgery eases the cursed portions--I thought I might as well venture into this ethical minefield, where so many friends and familiar figures stand sentry. Competitors and detractors are also there. In fact they, we, are all wired together, and only the driven snow may be pure.

Humans have gods because we unite under ethical banners. The "Death of God" might have arrived on the wings of relativism, which glided in on the slipstream of Western rationalism. Nonetheless, even our ardent atheists remain prone to adopt ethical stances, insisting on hierarchies of rights and wrongs. Though we are ethical beings and it is our ethics that separates us from animals (lions in a pride sometimes eat cubs), we squabble like vultures over meat. I think most readers would agree that a remarkable amount of backbiting and strident squawking rends the field of African art. The scrapping exists both between interest groups--including scholars, dealers, curators, collectors--and within them. (And this is for those of you among us who claim that you are not interested in the ethical quibbling, only in the Beauty in African Art, and that your only Truth is to the gorgeous object: when Wittgenstein observed that aesthetics and ethics are one and the same, he landed you and all your beautiful handmaidens squarely in the ethical quagmire along with the rest of us.)

One danger of this assignment, as I perceived it from afar, is that what I say could be read as a justification of my own positions. So before I carry on, I must venture that I'm just another wheeling vulture on the stoop. Let's get down to the carrion, where vultures, to be fed, must rush in where others fear to tread.

   Nok, Nok.

   Who's there?

   Terra.

   Terror who?

   Tear or cut a hole in a lily-white sheet; here's to begin: Have you ever
   bought or sold (or would you ever buy or sell) an archaeological
   terracotta? Suppose also, for present purposes, that money's no object and
   you're a free agent.

Never, you say. In that case, may I ask if you have written about such terracottas or published pictures of them? Yes, you say, but that was in the service of producing knowledge. A laudable aim, surely, say I, but I wonder if knowledge isn't itself a product, and furthermore one that produces desire--a desire in even one among your audience to have and to hold such a thing. And didn't that catalogue blurb that you wrote for Mr. and Mrs. Rich's terracotta praise it to the heavens; wasn't it just after that they sold it at auction and the price went through the ceiling? I fear you are as complicit as everyone else in the chain of transactions.

Never, you say, but the director of my museum' wants my African gallery to have at least one knockout specimen of each of the usual suspects: Dogon, Senufo, Bamana, Fang, Kota--you know the roll call. When this runner arrived with a wonderful Nok, I knew we had to have it. But it would have been too problematic for us to buy it directly. It's against our museum's collection policy. So instead I got our dear patrons Mr. and Mrs. Rich to buy it and donate it to us--after a visit to our favorite appraiser. See their name on the plaque and look at my director's pure-white teeth as he smiles down at me.

Never, you say, because you have no desire to possess, to own, to show or to tell. Congratulations, I salute you! You are free, but I wouldn't want to be marooned on a desert island with nondesiring you. On the other hand, though, maybe I would, because I'd get all the food. You'd starve to death, and I'd be even lonelier. Pity the pure; let's rather make children and eat them.

Of course, you say, buying and selling African art is what I do. The world consists of willing buyers and willing sellers. I got my best client a killer piece, top-top, undoubtedly by the Master of the Mali Mud Mallet, last one in private hands. It's been published everywhere--this scholarly article, that gilt-edged coffee-table book. I'm one hell of a tough guy, I tell you, look at my barrel chest--I go there myself, right to source. Via Liberia, usually. By the way, do you like diamonds? And tell me, do you collect Nok? Nok?

Yes, you say, we bought a major terracotta, but then the government of the African country whence it came wanted it back. But our president had a chat with their president, and we all agreed to call it their gift to our nation, and now it sits in the creme de la creme of our national galleries. No, you say, you don't know about the exchange economy of gifts, the quid pro quo, or whether the African president has a private account in a Swiss bank. But you do know he doesn't come from the most corrupt country in the world: the latest United Nations report says that's Cameroon.

Oh please, you say, get out of my face with your high horse. What else are we going to do: send the things back to the African museums so they can sell them again to someone else or let them crumble to dust in the humidity? Don't make me laugh. And if I don't buy it, some other dealer or collector will. The diggers want to eat, and they have children to feed--just like you and me. And anyway, if you think you're so clever, so academic, so fair, isn't it true what all the theoreticians say, that only in the West do we collect like this, that the museum itself is a Western invention? Here, then, in the West, is the only place for the things to be.

I'm flying over the dark Atlantic that has borne such volumes of African cargo on waves of venality. I'm on South African Airways headed for Cape Town, where the curator for African art at the South African National Gallery, Carol Kaufmann, has asked me to speak on a panel entitled "A Legacy of Looting: Can Africa's Heritage Be Saved?" The panel coincides with the closing of the exhibition "Soul of Africa," a selection from the Han Coray Collection from the Volkerkunde Museum at the University of Zurich, which will travel next to the Durban Art Gallery, opening September 2, during the U.N. World Conference Against Racism. My brother, Roger, is the exhibition designer for both venues, and I will visit Durban while he is there.

At the "Soul of Africa" opening in Cape Town, a visiting Nigerian drama professor, Kole Omotoso--a household face in South Africa because he acts in a TV commercial--had remarked that these precious objects were all "looted" from Africa and should be repatriated to their original homes. This followed the recent cover article on "looted" treasures in Time magazine, which is widely distributed in South Africa, and a New York Times article criticizing Sotheby's for selling Pre-Columbian material, which appeared immediately before their major spring sale of "Primitive Art." Every reader of African Arts, I am sure, would have something to say on these topics, because they touch us all.

I have a lot of other things to do in South Africa. I will visit contemporary artists and photographers whom I and Lisa Brittan, my wife and partner, represent through Axis Gallery. I will travel to Venda and Zululand to research the extraordinary pottery traditions there, for which we are trying to develop American markets and have committed ourselves to channeling profits back to organizations that are dedicated to "community upliftment." I'm scheduled to talk on these ceramics at the upcoming ASA meeting in Texas, but I'm so busy I think I'm going to have to cancel that--it's difficult doing scholarship without institutional backing and with a hungry business to feed. On my visits to South Africa, I also spend much time with colleagues in the museum community, in academia, and in government, all of whom are engaged in transforming South Africa's institutions. I'm friendly with some dealers in African art, and I reconnect with my friends and family, who still live there. Though I have become a New Yorker, the fiber of my being remains knitted into the fabric of South Africa. My interactions with these diverse interest groups form a seamless whole, and the dichotomy of Scholar vs. Dealer dissolves. Much more important issues are at stake in South Africa than these particular ethical dilemmas: the entire realm of visual culture is much beleaguered.

I don't know yet what I will say on the repatriation panel--I won't have time to prepare a formal statement. These words for African Arts will have to unfold in spare moments as I travel. Simultaneously, I must write an article for the upcoming exhibition "Un Autre Afrique: Arts et cultures d'Afrique du Sud" at the Musee des Arts d'Afrique et d'Oceanie (MAAO) in Paris (February 19-June 17, 2002), which will include many pieces purchased from Axis Gallery. (The last time I wrote for MAAO was as an artist, for a 1996 exhibition of my photographs of Basotho dwellings and ceremonies, which connect art and rain through red ocher and the blood of sacrifice. I concluded with a paean to Saartje Bartman, the "Hottentot Venus," whose genitalia and buttocks are bottled in the basement of the Musee de l'Homme. "May she rest in peace, plenty, and may it rain," I said, offering her the three-part Basotho benediction.) Both of these writing deadlines fall soon after my return to New York. All this weighs on my mind, part of that interesting curse I cannot shrug off. Smile. For the moment, what seems to provide a nexus is "Nok."

I've never bought or sold a Nok or Malian terracotta--Axis specializes in southern Africa--so perhaps this is a convenient hinge concept for me to have picked. If I were to inherit a Nok terracotta, though, I'd probably keep it. The ethical issues might be, for me, far enough blurred by decisions made in the past, written by history, not performed by me. Time heals wounds and broken hearts. Comes a time you get on with life, but that doesn't justify making the same mistakes again, now or tomorrow. No more holocausts. If, though, my father had ravished a treasure and bequeathed me the trove, I might smell his sin visited upon me and want to shed the weight of his history. I wonder.

South Africa does have Iron Age terracotta traditions. By now you have probably heard of the Lydenburg Heads, a half-dozen helmet-mask-like heads, dated A.D. 500-700. There was a time, not so long ago, when they were virtually unknown, even in South Africa, where their existence contradicted the apartheid myth that black peoples there had arrived only shortly before the whites. We have all come a way since then. Now, if someone were to offer me another such Lydenburg head, freshly dug up, I would report it to the South African National Heritage Resources Council, which can sue for the repatriation of heritage items under newly promulgated legislation. (I'm told that similar controls in Nigeria have so broken down that reporting a Nok being offered for sale today would be virtually pointless.)

I had never written a letter to an editor until I read online the recent number of Archaeology magazine (January/February 2001) about the terracotta export trade from west Africa. The article exposed aspects of the looting of archaeological sites, the faking of pieces by adding new components to genuine fragments, the problem of dating this material (since clay ground from ancient fragments yields ancient dates), and other issues. In the e-mail message-box provided, I popped off a comment, which Archaeology subsequently published as a "letter to the editor." I observed that what was stolen by this illicit trade was not solely art pieces but knowledge itself, because we lose the possibility of learning more about these civilizations through methodical excavation. That was the art historian speaking, who doesn't take the Nok issue as lightly as the "Knock! Knock!" fragments above might suggest. I also enjoyed the irony that collectors of African art who profess no interest in contemporary art were in fact buying "ancient" terracottas that were largely new! That was the gallerist who represents contemporary artists smiling. Who must now sleep. By morning we will be overflying Africa.

Nok, Nok. Terra firma below me: the African coast at the mouth of the Kunene River between Namibia and Angola. There doesn't seem to be anyone there, down below on the red earth of Angola, dry and wintry, where the decades of war continue still, where diamonds, oil, and arms swell the world's burgeoning ranks of crooked millionaires and fuel the civil discontent. Some African-art dealers have grown rich here, too, and not just from art. I have heard tales of one in South Africa who is reputed to boast of smashing Angolans' kneecaps to get what he wants, whatever that might be--that register of desire is beyond me. He is also suspected of commissioning fake pieces--South African and Angolan--and even offering them on the Internet auction site eBay: caveat emptor. We have never met, and I hope never will.

This red earth, here in the south, is often called "blood of the earth." That conveys its ritual charge: cycles of sacrifice and menstruation that ensure fertility. The red ocher is used to pray for rain; rain, too, is the blood of the earth, filling the rivers that are its veins. And this thirsty earth's history is written in blood. Now we are overflying Namibia, where the German commander Von Trotha ordered the extermination of the Herero people. Soon we will be over South Africa. Blood, what blood on my hands, on yours? A dealer I know in America--call him Dealer John Doe--once remarked that you are sullied if you shake someone's hand that has had blood on it. From arms trading, for example. Lady Macbeth, beware Mr. Rich. Heed Faulkner: never trust a man in a red tie.

I should also tell you that Dealer Doe and I found ourselves linked by an art crime. Though you starch your linen you may awake to find you have soiled your bed. This is what happened. I bought an important South African piece from Dealer Ray-Mee. After some time, I offered it at Sotheby's because similar pieces had recently achieved strong prices (which someone in South Africa later alleges were shills by a dealer there driving up prices). Two days before the sale, Sotheby's contacted me to say they had been notified that the object had been stolen from a gallery in 1985, and at the time the owner had lodged a police report with photographs. I was immediately suspicious, because I have learned how dirty the African-art world is. Perhaps a jealous third party, who previously had owned and photographed this object, was laying claim to it now that it carried a high estimate in the catalogue. I called my lawyers immediately. Sotheby's had never experienced such a claim in relation to an African piece--I had the dubious distinction of setting this precedent--but their legal department is experienced in such situations. They advised putting the claimant and me in touch to negotiate an arrangement under which the sale could proceed, since it is bad for a piece to withdraw it. The claimant turned out to be Dealer John Doe, whose first remark when I called him was "Thank God it's you. I couldn't sleep worrying about who I might have to deal with." (Dealer Doe was once assaulted to within an inch of his life over an art deal gone wrong.) We worked it out in a couple of minutes. So far so good. Then we started tracing the chain of ownership from Ray-Mee back to Doe. Presumably the police are singing the same song ...

We handle dirty pennies every day and know they should be kept out of the mouths of babes. If we knew a murderer had touched a penny in our pocket, few among us would want to keep it--but even if one did, surely that act, though fetishistic, would be blameless. Nonetheless, I will never view my once-stolen object in the same light. Part of its patina is a stain, and I feel tarnished personally. Its aesthetics and mine have been colored by ethics.

I learned something important from this stolen object though: in the United States the rights of the bona fide possessor of an art object are weak in the face of a claim of theft; the claimant's position is strong. The buyer of art bears a heavy onus of due diligence to ascertain that the seller has full title to the object. Terracotta buyers beware: how secure is the title of your seller? This legal position was a surprise to me, since I was trained first as a lawyer in South Africa, and in Roman Dutch law the position is substantially reversed.

This legal difference points to larger and more important ones in the conflict of international laws. Any country's laws for protecting heritage objects are difficult to enforce internationally unless destination countries, such as the United States and Europe, agree to bind themselves to international treaties that protect art heritage. These treaties cannot be too toothy lest they threaten repositories of foreign treasures, particularly in the museums of the former colonial powers. Though the United States is a signatory of the 1970 UNESCO convention protecting cultural property, individual countries must make a formal request to the U.S. to protect specific material--which only Mali among the nineteen African signatories has done. Though museums that have acquired Nok material recently might not have done anything technically illegal, their moral rectitude remains open to question.

All of this is delicate and complex. The ethical issues relating to art stolen from Jews during World War II have helped focus some of these issues, and leading museums in the United States have formulated collection policies that go further than the parameters of existing statutes. Still, there is a long way to go before the equities--the ethics--of the international trade in art objects can be agreed upon within institutions, within countries, and internationally. And even if that is achieved, these laws have been, and remain, easy to circumvent and difficult to enforce, both within and between countries. With insufficient will, there is no way that the trade will be stopped. We remain in terra incognita.

One can understand, for example, that the British Museum might be reluctant to return the Elgin Marbles to Athens, and that they would want to keep many of their 200,000-odd African objects. But it is hard to imagine why Britain won't surrender to South Africa the skull of the Xhosa chief Hintsa, whom the British murdered and mutilated in a disgraceful incident that caused international outrage in the 1830s. But there is some hope: this month the museum at the University of Manchester agreed to return four Aboriginal skulls, and forty British institutions are believed to be preparing to return part or all of their ethnographic collections.

Now, beneath our wings, the Kalahari awaits its baptismal blood. I think of the Khoisan, and I wonder if Saartje Bartman, who sprang from that blood, ever walked here. Her remains remain in France in formalin because the museum "can't trace her direct descendants," and her parts are part of the "inalienable patrimony" of France. Her fragmented buttocks and pudenda, they remind me, testify to the intersection between science and the myths about racial difference within the history of knowledge in France, and serve as a "pudic" symbol. "Pudic," from the Latin pudere, "to be ashamed," does not translate; in English the closest derivative is "pudency," meaning "modesty." Soon we will be landing. Let it rain, sap rise, spring come.

We have held the panel in the South African Museum, where the Lydenburg Heads reside and the San ("Bushman") diorama was removed only recently on personal command of President Mbeki. We only scratched the surface of the debate, touching on issues in the "Knock! Knock!" fragments I set down for you above while I flew. I was the only dealer among eight speakers: others declined. I suggested that just as I saw my roles--dealer and scholar--as connected, so are all the various actors in the world of African arts linked. Prof. Sandra Klopper, in whose classes my interest in African art was first kindled, reinforced this view.

I explained that I became a dealer by default. In the late 1980s, while a Ph.D. student at Columbia University, I attempted to form a trust in South Africa to purchase overseas and repatriate to South Africa historical examples of local African art. These were not then visible there, but they were available, relatively cheaply, on the international market. I failed to find support in the local business community, and ended up working with a dealer in the United States to buy objects for a South African Heritage Collection. After the 1994 elections, which introduced democracy in South Africa, the German government purchased some of this collection and donated it to the nation as a celebratory gift. The objects selected became a cornerstone of the Heritage Collection now at the South African National Gallery. This experience had shown me the power of private and commercial initiatives to achieve cultural goals while policymakers and corporates buried their heads in the sand and their hands in their pockets.

The most expensive piece in the Heritage Collection was a "Zulu maternity staff." I mentioned that I had recently bid several times more for a similar example--a newspaper article on the Hubert Goldet auction in Paris was among the handouts given to the audience--but had not won the item. Such escalation of value, I suggested, remained an important incentive for South Africa to invest in its art heritage. Furthermore, it ought to be realized that tourism is now the world's biggest industry, and that Cape Town's attraction as a destination and as the site of the country's oldest and best-stocked museums presented a unique local opportunity. I envisioned a greatly enlarged national gallery that would showcase all of South Africa's cultures. I did not tell the audience that while discussing this idea last year with a senior figure in government, I was told: in South Africa we are inventing a society from the grassroots up; we must question whether a national gallery is desirable at all; a national gallery is a Western idea. Like democracy, I retorted. That discussion got down to fundamentals and grew heated ...

... unlike our panel on "looting," except when Prof. Omotoso opined that cultural objects should stay at home, in the context where they are fully understood, and took objection when I disagreed. Context is relative; it begs other questions. I am as removed from the "context" of a medieval European reliquary as a Fang one. An encounter with Spirit is personal, lonely as death. I don't believe that all Christian icons and reliquaries must stay in Europe, nor all Picassos in France--or should Picassos stay in Spain, his country of birth, or more specifically only in Catalan regions close to his birthplace? Nor would I ban Mercedes Benz and Hugo Boss in Africa, and everywhere besides Germany--that would eliminate the entire class of WaBenzi in one fell swoop. Today we are interpolated into global flows--of people, capital, art, images, information, knowledge. This is not new. I think of an item that will be in the MAAO exhibition in Paris. It is a Xhosa garment made of British cloth, perhaps woven with cotton from the Carolinas, and trimmed in cashmere from Kashmir or perhaps Afghanistan, home of dynamited icons. It is studded with mother-of-pearl buttons that Xhosa raiders once snatched from the shirts of English herdboys newly settled in the Eastern Cape, and smeared with red ocher dug from the African earth. In the face of the much broader reach of the new globalism, if we think "We" instead of "Us & Them," then borders dissolve and we all are more "One." This is precisely the challenge of transformation that the nonracist New South Africa faces. Otherwise we're in Palestine, or Yugoslavia; we fragment. Maybe we could have pursued such discussion on the panel, but time was short and the audience was small because a rugby game was on TV.

Bigger question: Can South Africa's Department of Culture ever get a fair hearing if it is a department shared with sport, as it was in the past, or shared with Science and Technology, as it is now? How effectively can Culture be represented by a minister without formal education in at least one aspect of the arts? We could create another job right there, and many smaller ones.

Knock, knock, on the seven-foot wooden gates that barricade the Johannesburg garden where I am writing now. One doesn't just open up these days; one uses the intercom. Who's there? Hello, sir. I'm looking for a gardening job, sir. I'm sorry we can't help you. Just the same as the pre-democracy days. Scent of jasmine, bright, familiar birds flitting among the dry trees, except that sacred ibises and gray louries have immigrated from the Bushveld since I left. You feel Africa in Jo'burg, and many have fled that for Cape Town, dubbed Escape Town. In Cape Town it's difficult to get the press to cover African art exhibitions, and for dealers in African art (as opposed to curios) to make a living. And I'll never forget that in Cape Town a staff member at the National Gallery once told me--and he wasn't half joking--that African art isn't art. With this much at stake, when a world-class exhibition of African art comes visiting, surely one misses the woods for the trees by crying "looter." A luta continua.

"Looted" art is too often recognized as heritage only after it is stolen away, like a love that looms larger in loss. African countries must prioritize heritage for it to remain at home. In apartheid South Africa, neither the white nor the black populations were educated about artistic heritage. The fact that South African museums now do not have budgets to continually build collections signals lack of interest. Yes, jobs and houses may be higher priorities than, say, buying another "Zulu maternity staff" for the Durban Art Gallery in KwaZulu-Natal, where it can be seen by locals who will never travel the 1,000 miles to the National Gallery in Cape Town.

But that is not the point: it's not a case of jobs vs. heritage. The challenge must be seen not as "either/or" but as "and/and." Political willpower must be directed simultaneously at both objectives, along with many others. While in Cape Town I attended a debate in Parliament about government plans to spend billions of dollars on arms. The public spoke out, saying we don't need arms; we are not at war, and we are unlikely ever to be. And there was a lot of concern about corruption--an endemic factor in the transformation of wealth in the New South Africa, which could very easily extend to pillaging of the country's African art treasures (already at least one arrest has been made for such a crime, the thief turned in by a rival art dealer). If we must play "either/or," I say if those billions rather were spent on culture and on education about culture, then perhaps South Africans would learn to appreciate artistic heritage, learn to invest in it, buy it back, and see that it is a potent ingredient in global tourism.

Today's art is also tomorrow's heritage. South African museums without budgets cannot buy contemporary artists' work, which is being created underfoot and sold overseas by gallerists like myself. Artists must eat too. Creating is their job; their work is undervalued and they are constantly being asked to donate it for free. As Carol Brown, director of the Durban Art Gallery, pointed out during my visit with her, nobody in the future will be able to say that this contemporary art was looted, but it is leaving Africa as surely as the antiques did in their day, and still do.

Nok. Nok is not the problem; rather it is a doorway that opens onto a network of connected questions, about ethics, and more broadly about society. We are all in the net, arrayed across a field. Who is to point the first finger and cast the first stone? If you live in a glass house, remember to dress in the basement.

It's another night, a different host. Thunder jars the windows. We go and stand outside in the first tears of rain. The frightened dogs are allowed inside. If they sleep indoors, my gentle friend sleeps with a gun on his bedside table, instead of just the knife. In Zululand a month earlier, I had discovered when we entered a risky contretemps that my other friend, who was driving, had stashed a gun in the rucksack resting between my legs. Knock on wood, let it rain. Et qu'il pleuve.

Today I accompanied two Axis artists to a happening in a squalid squatter camp in downtown Johannesburg. Steven Cohen is dressed in a luxury chandelier--which symbolizes the European civilization and enlightenment that brought us colonialism and is lit by photon microlights developed by NASA--a codpiece, and full-body makeup, including a star of Zion on his forehead. This is no trivial stunt, but a continuation of Cohen's interrogation of the edge in South Africa, placing us here in the type of community that constitutes one of the country's most pressing human problems--and is a source of fear ("Darkest Africa") and crime. Brent Stirton is photographing Steven's interactions in this community, and a videographer is also recording. Three armed guards protect the cameras, cars, and us. As fate would have it, a dreaded municipal demolition crew arrives, dressed in red overalls--they're called Red Ants in the townships. Their job is to remove unauthorized settlements. As Steven totters on towering, agonizing shoes among the garbage and a welter of responses--many sexual and aggressive, but many supportive, especially from now homeless women--the settlement is torn to shreds, personal belongings flung outdoors, sheets of galvanized metal clanging to the ground. Interesting times in contemporary African art, and tragic, South African style. Knock, knock. Terribly sorry to disturb you. No doors left, no roofs. Those people are squatting in this rain tonight.

I'm back in Manhattan now, in the gallery putting the finishing touches to this article and to Bemi Searle's New York solo debut, which Lisa was preparing while I was in South Africa. I'm wearing a Levi's T-shirt that South African artist Christian Nerf blasted with a shotgun while it was still folded in its wrapper. There's a hole in my heart, and a couple of other places. The biggest conflict I feel right now--scholar/ dealer/gallerist/artist, just a person in the world--is being physically here vs. being there. Though Nok seems neither here nor there to me at this moment, the problems I have used it to posit remain both here and there. Whenever I land at JFK and drive into Manhattan on the Van Wyck Expressway I remind myself to change my African name. In America it's pronounced "van wick," or more correctly "van wike," rather than the South African "fun vake." I've given up fighting the freeway. When I'm here and there, I switch pronunciation appropriately. Like the mission of the gallery, which is to provide an "axis" between South Africa and America, identity is simultaneously here, there, and everywhere in between, multiple and fragmentary rather than binary. Knock, knock. Who's there? Where? Artist, scholar, dealer--does it matter?

Like many of us in this field of African art, I see myself as an advocate for African culture (and more specifically South African art). I can be many things, wear many hats, in service of this role, which is also a type of reparation for all the negativity visited upon the continent and still attributed to it. In that spirit, I am happy to reach out to kindred Africanist spirits rather than emphasize our petty divisions. It was divisiveness writ large--the undeclared civil war of apartheid--that first drove me from my country. That determined much of my life subsequently; that turned me into an African/American, white though I am, part of the world's endless migrations; that explains my physical presence in America at this moment. Also, perhaps the lingering memories of the struggle against the fascism and racism of the apartheid regime made me choose to stay in America. Especially understanding the scary possibility that if someone had put a lit fuse in my hand during that war, I might have killed people--and maybe even a few innocents as incidental casualties--in the name of justice, democracy, freedom, equality, and human dignity. But perhaps it is merely a desire for a bigger pond with more space between the snapping terrapins. Peace.

Knock, knock. How best does one fuse with what one loves?

Postscript: Manhattan, 9/11. Today the world changed, I think. To the article I finished yesterday I feel I must add this. This morning I witnessed thousands of innocent people die ten blocks in front of my eyes.

Today it is the very values that I held--and still hold--dear that have been assaulted, not only in America but also wherever they are the foundations of civil society. New York has taken a slap in the face that knocked out its two front teeth, the Pentagon is penetrated; but the values themselves stand, and now we will have to guard them in new ways. Peacefully may not be enough. Passive resistance is easily steamrollered--I saw that in South Africa, where even the paintings and murals I created fell under apartheid's draconian Terrorism Act; and it wouldn't have worked in World War II either. We might have to strike back at some heads on this terrorist hydra, try not to slaughter innocents, and swallow the collateral damage. But we--everyone in the world who is shocked by this--would do well to consider that globalization means we are all connected. The suffering of faraway others and the festering conflicts on the globe are not local. Similarly, if economic globalization enriches the wealthy at the expense of the one-third of the world that is malnourished, this is everyone's problem. We don't need a vial of anthrax or a nuke in a briefcase to underscore the point that "there" is "here."

These deep ethical issues for our planet eclipse the art questions I have essayed. Yet ethics is a body of philosophy in which all the components are connected, limb to limb, cell to cell. One ethical error can threaten the whole system, because if one is willing to overlook one small wrong, that can allow another, until the whole chain uncouples. This view of ethics as a unitary organism is why we have such organized religions as Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, which define the whole body of ethical prescriptions and proscriptions in fundamentally similar ways. Just as we have conflicts of laws, so too are these ethical systems often at odds, thanks to zealous fundamentalists--fanatics rather, since they eschew what is fundamental. Thus, while here thousands cry out and pray for the dead, there a few distribute candy and dance in the streets to thank the same deity--and the Rev. Jerry Falwell likens America to a chastised Gomorrah. I find no solace in his vengeful guard. We are left with each other, and our values, our ethics.

And thought, which crowns the great chain of being and places us at the pinnacle of evolution (whence it is easiest to fall). How architectural are the metaphors by which we construe thought. We think it as an edifice erected constructively on secure foundations, like a skyscraper. We defend thoughts like forts. We make stands for thoughts and ideas--the timid in ivory towers, the braver after knocking on Babel's door. But perhaps we have not built enough forums for debate and bridges for exchange to recognize similarities and truly understand differences.

To transcribe ethics into this architectural metaphor, if we crumple on any single ethical value, the whole tower could topple, and we could be left eating dust. Similarly, our connectedness, our human compact, is sandwiched together like the floors in a house of cards that is easier to knock down than we might think. Myriad doorways consumed by collapse, with nothing left to knock on but fragments. Yet, new unities arise already from the fragmentation here; humanity in the face of inhumanity. While Washington whoops Wild West war cries, on the streets of global Gotham are balancing posters for peace, "Whoa not War," and calls for consensus building. And careful thought.

Smoke on the water. The New York Times says that the concrete from the fallen towers is sufficient to build a pathway five feet wide from Manhattan to Washington, D.C.

GARY VAN WYK directs exhibitions at Axis Gallery, New York. Exhibitions presented in 2001 include Jurgen Schadeberg's "Drum Beat: South Africa 1950-1994"; "Zulu"; Berni Searle's U.S. solo debut entitled "Still"; "Saints, Spirits, and Strangers: Masks from Malawi"; and "Dance in Light: Xhosa Textiles and Beadwork." Reviews, images, and exhibition notes are viewable at www.AxisGallery.com.