African Carvers and the Reinvention of Everyday Objects in Colonial South Africa

As early as the mid-nineteenth century, black carvers in colonial South Africa were creating wooden works for sale to European buyers. Many such carvings ostensibly take the forms of utilitarian personal objects, such as containers, headrests, or staffs – to name just a few. However, in the context of the colonial curio market, African artists reimagined these conventionally tactile things as spectacular objects that were primarily for visual consumption. Works of this kind thus combined implicit references to the human body with conspicuous demonstrations of their carvers’ embodied skill. Though canonized by Western collectors as timeless “traditional” carvings, such works were in fact products of their specific historical and colonial circumstances. This paper analyzes how these works constitute an aesthetic and economic response to the historical forces of colonialism and the rise of a cash economy in South Africa, which subjected people’s bodies – and specifically Africans’ bodies – to commodification in unprecedented ways. As such, these works reveal their makers’ keen awareness of the dynamics and tastes of colonial collecting, and their active participation in the colonial art market, as both economic actors and cultural producers.