My Journey Through African Heritage.

My Journey Through African Heritage

Alan Donovan Nairobi: Kenway Publications (East African Educational Publishers), 2005. Distributed in North America by Michigan State University Press and in the UK by African Books Collective (Oxford). 400 pp., 300+ color illustrations. $110 hardcover.

This barkcloth-wrapped, 400-page memoir-cum-coffee-table-book sat on my Lamu chest for five months because I had no idea how to review it. As a firsthand account of the hugely successful commodification of things African, from all the well-known textile traditions to Kenyan nomadic jewelry, decorated gourds, and West African sculpture and their spectacular rebirth as (sometimes high, sometimes goofy) fashion, this book has no peer, With its compilation of hundreds of full-color, glossy images, it is an inestimable teaching resource and therefore worth far more than its hundred dollar-plus list price. Alan Donovan is in important ways a somewhat younger, American Ulli Beier and Frank McEwen rolled into one. He is a well-known personage in Kenya, but for readers who are still stuck in West or southern Africa for their cultural moorings, his leanings could be summed up as one part Afrophile and Turkana scholar-collector, one part socialite do-gooder, and one part designer and impresario. African Heritage, his Nairobi-based business and obsession for the past thirty-odd years, was the "largest, most organized craft retail and wholesale operation in Africa" according to a World Bank report of 1995 cited prominently in the book.

To academic purists (and we are a snobby lot), everything Alan Donovan stands for is anathema: runway models wearing men's agbada, sexy "Jungle Safari" outfits assembled from clever combinations of trade beads and Lurex, and occasional bad art from Mali, Guinea, Cote d'Ivoire, and Nigeria: Christopher Steiner's Abidjan traders would shrug and call them "copies." But until the business was liquidated in 2004 due to the terrorism-induced tourism slump, the visitors who bought it all and the government ministers, ambassadors, and aid experts who were frequently photographed looking at it were not academic specialists and happily embraced the flashiness and hybridity.

To a postmodernist sensibility, on the other hand, Donovan's extravaganzas of tradition-gone-haywire and geographic- and gender-impossible reconfigured styles worn by fabulous-looking models can only excite admiration and approval. An example or two: on p. 363, at the Miss Nairobi Centennial, the winner, Emma Too, wears a black suede outfit loosely based on a Turkana leather dress but with a hand-hammered floor-length brass necklace (this a takeoff on a less jaw-dropping Turkana bead version) with a Masai face chain and hammered brass Hollywood-esque "slave" arm band; contest runner-up Gladys Sakaja is in a blue and yellow Malagasy embroidered cape tailored as a low-cut dress, with a "Cleopatra" necklace and shaved head. Or on p. 80, in the "Ghana Gold" segment of an African Heritage Festival designed and staged by Donovan, flawlessly toned male (presumably Kenyan) models wearing kente in traditional toga-fashion provide the backdrop for two elegant women seated in "Kente evening coats over silk gowns, ancient jasper beads, amber, and Fulani gold earrings." It's all about sensuality and luxe and for a certain type of taste this is over-the-top Paradise (a term Donovan likes to use).

Inevitably there are lots of ensembles using bogolan, Okene cloth, and kente in sophisticated ways. But what distinguishes Donovan's creations from the competition is the jewelry, which, like the clothes, runs from subtle reinterpretations of actual ethnic designs, often pastoralist Kenyan or Ethiopian, to fantasy pieces. He learned the fabrication techniques originally in 1971-72 at the Bombolulu craft workshops, an occupational training center for disabled Kenyans (p. 156). Beginning with the coiled brass surutia worn by married Samburu and Masai women and aparaparat, the leaf-shaped brass earrings and lip ornaments worn by Turkana women, he designed a collection of necklaces which were first worn in his Nigerian Festival (more about that later) and later sold under the trade name NALA.

As a general rule, designs which come out of Kenyan workshops are widely copied and marketed by competitors, a situation that has led Donovan to bring lawsuits against his imitators. This is one area in which African artisanal practice clashes with the handcraft production system initiated at African Heritage. In traditional workshops, copying was the main learning technique and imitation was not only tolerated but encouraged, in most places in Africa, the organization of informal sector artisanship has changed along with patronage demands, but artisans typically do not claim to own designs in any formal copyright sense. As a result, Donovan has found himself in the position of training jewelry makers who eventually leave and start businesses of their own using his designs (though not with his financial resources, to be sure), a practice which is culturally sanctioned but violates modern copyright law. He has also found himself buying back his own designs from other shop owners a few blocks from African Heritage who brazenly paid his staff to steal them.

Another interesting question is who these hybrid jewelry designs are for. They include materials culled from all over the continent: silver, gold, brass, agate and jasper, old glass beads, amber, ostrich egg shells, seashells, giraffe tails, porcupine quills, crocodile teeth, beetle wings and even colonial soldiers' bullet cartridges (p. 157). Ethnic jewelry as a modern taste category appeals to cultural outsiders, since its exoticism quotient depends on considerable cultural distance: In my own experience, the rich African women who could afford such things probably would not want them, preferring the international standard of 24 carat gold.

Masai and Kamba beadwork can be bought cheaply at Nairobi street markets, but for years tour guides brought their charges to African Heritage instead, with its reassuring fixed prices and upscale, Out-of-Africa ambience. The same Masai women who sold to Donovan also sold to street traders, but Donovan's staff paid more for their best pieces and this extra cost was passed along, with the high overheads, to the foreign buyer. The problem is that the stacks of beadwork that look so good framing the neat, shaven head of a Masai woman look incongruous with masses of hair and Western clothes. Enter the hybrid design, which manages to look both ethnic and urbane at the same time. Angela Fisher, who on her photographic safaris around the continent was in a unique position to acquire raw materials, created a line of exquisite necklaces sold under her name at African Heritage, with correspondingly high prices.

Donovan's talents as an impresario, embodied in the African Heritage Nights held for more than two decades in the grand ballroom of the Hotel Intercontinental in Nairobi, allowed him to be philanthropist and entrepreneur at the same time. These extravaganzas usually began with a charity fashion show and moved through a series of events that included costumed performances by acrobats and dancers. The book not only documents the festivals in all their technicolor-costumed splendor but also offers up vignettes of the most beautiful and influential among his design collaborators and models. To several his establishment obviously shouted "Career Opportunity," whether one was a model or a designer, and these opportunities were sometimes mutual: his collaboration with Maryesta Carr connected him with the New York fashion industry and internationally known celebrity designers (p. 336). The spectacular Somali model Iman, "the most beautiful girl in the world," who began her career with him in 1975, went on to international fame and fortune (p. 249-52). In fact, the operating mantra of African Heritage would seem to have been three C's: commodification, connectivity, and celebrity.

But Alan Donovan has sides other than impresario and fashion maven, and in revisiting the beginnings of his career in Africa, a different person emerges. Like many students who came of age in the 1960s, he opposed the US war in Vietnam and was disillusioned by the assassination of President Kennedy. Yet traveling to Africa turned out not to be the idealistic adventure he had envisioned as a graduate student at UCLA. In 1967 he was sent to Nigeria on assignment as a USAID staffer. This was the beginning of the Biafran War and a chilling, far-from-glamorous time to be there. During the pogroms in the North, Igbos were slaughtered and hunted down; the atrocities committed against them were virtually identical to those committed by Idi Amin's troops in Uganda only five years later. As an expatriate, Donovan found himself protecting Igbo in Lagos by hiding them in his Ikoyi compound's garden and sharing food with them (p. 46).

But despite the war, art was flourishing, especially in Oshogbo. It was only a few years after Ulli Beier's Mbari Mbayo workshops and Donovan was attracted to the high-spirited ambience they created. His photographs and commentary about the artists, such as Asiru Olatunde and Twins Seven Seven, are valuable first-person accounts quite distinct from those published by Ulli Beier himself or Jean Kennedy. An amazing double-page photograph by Donovan shows the Oshogbo king speaking into a mike and surrounded by pomp at the annual Osun festival (pp. 57-8). For anyone who loves cloth, as Donovan does, Nigeria's handwoven and pattern-dyed textiles are revelatory. It was this infatuation, brought on by invitations to Yoruba weddings, that inspired one of Donovan's earliest extravaganzas, the Nigerian Festival in faraway Nairobi in 1972.

There is also Donovan the connoisseur of Turkana jewelry and crafts, and one chapter is devoted to his collecting fieldtrips there beginning in 1970. After leaving Nigeria and traveling overland through the Congo (then Zaire) and Uganda to Kenya, he decided to see "somewhere in Africa that remained on its own, untouched" (p. 92). At that time the Northern Frontier District (NFD)--home of Turkana, Pokot, Samburu, and other cattle and camel pastoralists--was not fully under Kenyan political control and was closed to travel. After receiving a permit to travel to Lake Turkana, he and his companions hitched a ride on a fish lorry and eventually made their way to the lake. On successive trips Donovan collected whatever artifacts people were willing to sell and documented their artisanal practices. He "was captivated by Turkana designs, a study in artistic economy, simple but elegant" (p. 100). Among the many superb photographs of Turkana ornaments is an ivory lip plug he collected that turned out, on closer inspection, to be a plastic VW gearshift knob. As the collection grew, Donovan, still footloose and seminomadic, thought of exhibiting it somewhere.

Sherri Hunt, the owner of Studio Arts 68 in Nairobi, was interested and hired him to mount an exhibit of his collection. The Turkana show introduced him to the Nairobi gallery-going public and placed him on a career path which was to morph in the next few years from collector and curator to gallery owner and impresario. At the end of 1970, Alan Donovan flew to Madagascar to organize and collect textiles and crafts for his first Pan African Festival, "Marche du Madagascar," to be held in Nairobi in early 1971. This was followed by the Nigerian Festival, to coincide with the first All-African Trade Fair in 1972. By 1973 he had left Studio Arts 68 to start his own gallery, African Heritage. More festivals followed, interspersed with marketing trips to the United States. These also involved fashion shows, which were as tied to then-current American self-representations as they were to anything African. At their first opening night in New York, in 1971, "muscular African American men stood at the door dressed in towering feathered headdresses worn by Masai warriors for lion hunts" (p. 143). On the same trip, the models at Black Expo in Chicago are seen wearing West African textiles and huge Afros. (Shortly after this, Tanzania was to ban the wearing of Afros as a badge of Western imperialism.)

It would be possible, if space permitted, to follow many other strands of fashion history through the thirty-year period covered by this memoir. There is material here to match not only the current wave of Nigerian FESTAC and Osun Festival studies in terms of the complex cultural politics of heritage, but also any coffee table book for sheer visual extravagance. Nowhere is Alan Donovan's personal style more purely distilled than in the opening chapter on his own house, overlooking the Athi Plains outside Nairobi and inspired by his trips to Djenne, Lamu, Ghana, Marrakesh, and Bali. The exterior, a cross between an ocean liner in full sail and a Malian Friday mosque, contains within its myriad rooms furnishings of Kuba cloth, bogolan, handwoven cloth from Bida, doors and frames from Lamu, a Chokwe chair, beaded items from a Shango shrine in Nigeria, antique marionettes from Bamako, and a large sculpture by Francis Nnaggenda. Maybe "less is more" for the Turkana, but for Donovan himself, the style is pure Architectural Digest multicultural.

reviewed by Sidney Littlefield Kasfir