When Douglas Curran was yanked 15 years ago into a sandy makeshift room in a small township outside Harare to witness his first Gule Wamkulu (the great dance) he was launched, or rather blindfolded and plopped, on a path of vertiginous cultural appropriation — not to mention billows and billows of dust. Since that encounter Curran, a well-known Canadian filmmaker and photographer, has spent the better part of the past decade participating in and documenting the Nyau spiritual culture of the Chewa people in Malawi. The fruits of this project comprise his current solo exhibition at the Origins Centre, The Elephant Has Four Hearts.
It’s a tricky business to describe the ritual practices of a minority ethnic group in Africa without sounding like one is showing off a curiosity cabinet. I was at first wary of the exhibition for this very reason. The publicity makes it look a lot like standard anthropological fodder. But happily The Elephant Has Four Hearts is almost nothing like this.
Yes, Curran has spent significant periods of time living among the Chewa and he was initiated as a Nyau member. But thankfully he is a photographer, not an anthropologist, and it shows.
The word Nyau means mask in Chichewa and the donning of masks for the performance of spiritual dance is an essential part of Nyau religious practice. Gule Wamkulu (used interchangeably with Phempero Lalikulu, or the great prayer) is the term for this type of performance and is a public event in which masked Nyau members perform what Curran calls ‘a psychodrama of danceâ€, spurred on by a large singing audience.
The clouds of dust kicked up in these performances is staggering. At various points a performer will rush at the audience and send them fleeing, or alternatively unmasked community members will intervene in the performance and relate to the dancer as his persona.
The rather skittish crowd at the opening on October 18 became privy to the spectacle when they were charged by a four-man ‘elephant†(the namesake of the show) by the light of the not-so-full moon. The full lexicon of symbolism in these prayer-dances, however, is absolutely hands-off to outsiders — Nyau ritual is preserved with a fence of secrecy, which members are more than loath to dishonour.
Although he has displayed the most extensive documentation of Nyau masks to date, Curran is uncompromisingly mum about the inner workings of this secret society.
The question that no one and everÂyone is wont to ask is: Why should we take seriously a Western white man coming to ‘discover Africa†and show it to ‘the worldâ€?
Curran’s aesthetically conscious photographs of the Nyau mitigate this question. Unlike conventional anthropological documentary, which, by its claim to objectivity, bears the black dots of every politics-of- representation debate in history, Curran’s images are candidly constructed.
Rather than snapshots of dances in progress, which would privilege the photographer as voyeur, Curran has photographed costumed Nyau members posing frontally and explicitly performing their adopted personas for the camera. The self-conscious artifice of these photographic images is analogous to the contract of belief entered into for the Nyau to participate in the performance of the mask.
When asked how much his initiation into the group had to do with his entitlement to document the Nyau, Curran responded that it was entirely because of his assimilation into the culture — with the support of friend and travel companion Chief Chituli — that this project was realised. Although the issue of entitled representation is murky and one that is often poised to pounce on the representor, it would be difficult to say what else might justifiably be expected of Curran in this circumstance. Particularly considering Chief Chituli’s somewhat hyperbolic word of blessing: when Curran asked the chief for permission to display the photographs internationally, he responded: ‘You honour my culture more than my people will.â€
With dramatic cultural shifts in Malawi since recent political change, the advent of TV (it arrived in 2000) and the spread of HIV/Aids, Curran predicts that Nyau culture doesn’t have long to survive. In some respect then, his work is a crucial historical archive. Yet, it is positioned as something more than this and treads an unsteady route of representation that constantly, by its own self-consciousness, attests to the difficulty of placing a historical origin. I believe that this awkward critical space is the right one for camera- wielders bold enough to take on the genre of photo-documentary.
The Elephant Has Four Hearts runs at the Wits Origins Centre, corner of Jorissen and Station streets, Braamfontein, until the end of April next year.