There’s a busker
in Manchester who plays the kora, sprinkling sweet notes across Piccadilly
Gardens, while people bustle past and trams rattle and squeal within inches of
his pitch. I like what he plays but have never thrown any coins into his hat
because I am inclined to disapprove of his use of powered amplification and
find it hard to accept that the instrument, hand-crafted in the ancient
tradition from calabash, cowhide and seasoned, native wood, should have its
natural voice distorted by the intervention of modern technologies. I listen,
by comparison, to a blackbird, perched for much of the day just outside my
window, performing unplugged. The natural acoustic of its song rises over the
city, mocking the clamour of industry, business and technology.
Nevertheless,
despite his amplifier, the busker, a small, grizzled West African, is talented
– and intrepid for he plays his foreign tunes, uninvited, in the heart of a city
renowned for its own, very different, musical heritage. Yesterday I passed him
on my way to a nearby exhibition of West African art and speculated whether he
might take his lunch-break at the gallery to sit and reflect nostalgically amongst
the cultural artefacts of his homeland, the masks and figures carved from ivory
and mahogany which I was on my way to see.
I ought not
skim-read things: by doing so I had missed the last word in the exhibition’s
title West African Art Today; there
were no ivory statuettes. In fact the first thing I encountered was an
amplified soundscape recorded on the streets of central Lagos and sounding
rather like any other city. Africa has, of course, moved on from where I
imagined it to be.
The largest
piece on display is a spectacular, multi-coloured, glistening tapestry – not of
woven thread but of stitched-together bottle-tops and various other small
pieces of coloured metal. It startled me into remembering that my brother and
I, as children, curated our own collection of bottle-tops which we treasured for
their shiny colours and valued according to their provenance. We kept them in boxes
and brought them out to admire, compare and categorise by pattern, condition
and rarity. Then we would arrange them in shapes on the floor, often pretending
they were tanks or artillery pieces.
In this
remembered context El Anatsui’s tapestry is the ultimate display of bottle tops,
the ne plus ultra of collections of
salvaged materials. In its modern context, however, this work reflects upon a
very African state of affairs in which the commercial products of the West have
infiltrated a society which is only partly able to assimilate them. Machine
made goods have been available since colonists first invaded yet masses of
people still cannot afford to buy them and only have access to what is
discarded or surplus. Is it surprising that they set a value upon the broken-down
appliances, the packaging and other detritus? Maybe they approach these objects,
not as we children did, enthralled by the colours, but as adults questioning
the wastefulness and looking for ways to redress it. The tapestry is both a
curious thing of beauty and an ironic comment on colonialism.
I walked
back past the busker who was taking a break, rolling a cigarette from a pack of
Old Holborn tobacco. I asked him about his music and where he was from. He told
me he came from Gambia and lives here now because he married a Mancunian.
“Do you know about the exhibition down the road?” I asked.
“Oh yes, I am playing some gigs there”.
He pulled
out a crumpled sheet of paper and showed me his list of engagement dates. I put
some money in his hat and he bowed politely – or was it ironically?
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