'Black Is King' and The Void Of Documentation for African Arts and History
When you’re as big as Queen Bey, It’s almost expected that every public move or project will be met with some kind of divisive push back. The reception for her new visual album, Black Is King hasn’t been all the way polarised, but the acceptance hasn’t been universal either.
Back in June, the trailer for Black is King surfaced online, followed by criticism for what many deemed a stereotypical depiction of Africans in huts, with tribal markings, animal skin, and lions. In a series of radically-tilting online reactions, words like ‘homogenisation’, ‘cultural appropriation’, ‘cultural syncretism’, and—my favourite—“Wakandafication” were floated around.
In the same vein, African creatives in fashion and Afro-urban culture, whose works were credited in the film, were quick to present an alternate stance, arguing for Beyoncé’s exultation and elevation of African art and consciousness. Both positions are somewhat valid, but their conclusions only raise new conversations around the contextualisation of black identity.
In the last two years, notably, since the release of Marvel’s 2018, superhero film, Black Panther, the re-imagination of Africa in audiovisual literature has largely been inspired by romanticising Afrofuturism. Philosophically, Afrofuturism proselytizes the future of black people, by drawing inspirations from what’s accessible of black history. Often, the emphasised themes are black utopia, divine ancestry and technoculture.
Black Is King, is overtly laced with all these motifs and more. Flamboyant magenta colours you see when “WATER” is sung, are similar to flared ceremonial attires of the ancient Dogon people of Mali. The running symbolism of water is a nod to Yoruba mythological river goddess Oshun, who Beyoncé already channelled on her last visual project Lemonade. Resplendent scenes soaked in luxury and wide-pan shots with feels of an epic, restate presumed ties between royalty and black heritage. White-washed backdrops with abstract patterns, ankara prints, gold adornments, and bejeweled clothes are traceable to the meta-ethnicity of Akan people, sprawled between modern-day Ghana and Ivory Coast.
For a film based on an accompanying (alternate) soundtrack to Disney’s cringe CGI Lion King remake, these cultural references reflect depth rarely seen in pop music. But Beyoncé has always thrived outside the confines of popular culture. And that’s perhaps ironically why the arguments of her critics hold up.
When The Lion King: The Gift dropped last year, the main backlash for the project was that it sold the idea of pan-Africanism that didn’t actually reflect in the final output. The Lion King: The Gift has a heavy sonic focus on West African Afropop while largely ignoring North African music and East Africa, where the Lion King remake drew much of its geographical inspirations. A valid counterpoint to that criticism would’ve been that pop music as a vehicle for social engineering is designed to fixate on the most market-ready stories. This would imply, demanding accurate ‘representation’ is outside the realms of what is currently possible within pop music. Hence why the album was chock-full of Nigerian artists who were enjoying a global cross-over moment. But perhaps, the criticism wouldn’t have made sense in the first place, if Queen Bey herself hadn’t ambitiously tagged the project as a ‘Love Letter To Africa’.
In a sense, Black Is King suffers from the same marketing pitfall as its parent project. In the announcement Instagram post for the trailer, Beyoncé wrote: “I believe that when Black people tell our own stories, we can shift the axis of the world and tell our REAL history of generational wealth and richness of soul that are not told in our history books. With this visual album, I wanted to present elements of Black history and African tradition, with a modern twist and a universal message, and what it truly means to find your self-identity and build a legacy”. Unwittingly, she doesn’t only raise expectations for Black Is King to the moon, her caption also suggests audiences can expect an authentic depiction of blackness within the exposition of African origins.
Now, don’t get me wrong, Black Is King is a stunning piece of art. But its attempt to displace the Western gaze of Africa’s colonial history through Afrofuturist inspirations also entrap Beyoncé’s lofty aspirations in cliches. Tropes of royal African heritage that formed the basis for movies like Coming to America (1988), are as popular as fantastical depictions of Africa as a land of boundless wealth and riches. Neither of which are true, or even sensible.
Yes, the real Africa is indeed witnessing a wave of progressiveness, but that revolution is happening side by side continent-wide poverty, constitutional disregard, human rights abuses, regional conflicts and infrastructural problems amongst other issues. Black Is King if anything is representative of how pop-provocateurs like Kanye West have pushed the boundaries of the music video format, meets the brand of black excellence we see in Instagrammed pictures of Roc Nation’s annual brunches.
Because the central purpose of the work of art in discourse is entertainment, it’s only natural we return to the question of how much accuracy and authenticity, audiences can demand from Beyoncé. Which would also raise the question of how much of that responsibility is unduly foisted on an artist whose primary job is to keep fans within her musical universe using as many accessible narratives as possible? Where things get tricky, however, is Beyoncé’s choice of subject matter: African arts and history.
It’s not often said, but a bulk of what is known of African history today, is relatively new public knowledge. Less than 70 years ago, late British historian Hugh Trevor-Roper infamously declared the continent as “unhistoric”. During those colonial years, Emeritus Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pittsburgh, Joseph K. Adjaye, says Africans were deliberately denied the opportunity to study their own past. Adjaye who was high schooling in Ghana during the waning years of colonialism, says it took years for the former British colony to adopt an indigenised curriculum, even after gaining independence in 1957.
“In literature, the curriculum was centred on English literature—Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, the Romantics, etc. Again, African literature was nowhere. Similarly, our history syllabus was centred on European and English history. The Tudors, Stuarts, Charlemagne, Peter the Great, etc., still stick out in my mind.” Adjaye says. The way he tells it, colonial education “was grounded on the racist assumption that there was nothing worthy of academic or intellectual study in Africa”. According to him, the gathering of research and study of African history didn’t truly begin until the end of colonial occupation of Africa.
The end of colonisation, however, didn’t mean Africans immediately began to revert to their own history. Lagos-based storyteller, Fu’ad Lawal, posits two main factors contributed to this phenomenon; the limitations of oral traditions and the spread of Abrahamic religions (Islam and Christianity).
Lawal, who is also Editor-In-Chief of Zikoko, a Nigerian pop-culture platform, says oral traditions in documenting history often meant that when narrators die, their stories die with them. As a result, many parts of sub-Saharan Africa today lack documented history beyond 400-500 years ago, outside of foreign accounts. “Another factor is religion”, he says. “Somehow, when we took up Abrahamic religions, we adopted a culture that said it had to be those faiths or nothing else. So anything that was remotely related to our culture, we demonised it like a bastard child” he added.
In addition to how these factors only widened the narrative gaps already created by the effects of colonisation. Africa’s lack of strong academic and research institutions and low funding for history departments, means even the little documentation we have covered in print over the last 60 years or so, hasn’t been preserved enough to be accessible by a general public increasingly going digital. “The knowledge and stories are dying off in libraries because they’re inaccessible. And because they’re hard to access, we’re just going to continue approaching [African] life without context” Lawal says.
Pop-music aside, the volatility of documentation in the domains of African history is the chief reason projects like Black Is King, with the potential to reach a wider audience, are often piled with trans-generational expectations. A keen observation Lawal makes is that much of the excitement for Beyoncé’s new film is due to a novelty engendered by the lack of strong contextual knowledge about African history.
It’s hard to disagree. Perhaps, if there had been an HBO original series about the medieval seven kingdoms of Yorubaland, or big-budget epics based on the journeys of Mali’s Mansa Musa, or the historical wonders of Zimbabwe’s Monomatapa—rumoured home to King Solomon’s infamous gold mines, Beyoncé wouldn’t be encumbered with providing an accurate audiovisual account of our collective origins.
The navel-gazey tilt of Beyoncé foray into African arts only becomes more obvious when you take an even closer look at Black Parade, the companion project to the Black Is King. By its description, Black Parade is Beyoncé’s attempt to improve the visibility of black fashion brands on the continent during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“On the surface, it’s a great gesture,” says Edwin Okolo, owner of Studio Imo, one of the labels featured on Black Parade. “But when you look deeper, you find that there wasn’t really a lot of thought that was put into it. Essentially our brands were info-dumped on Beyoncé’s website. We had to do the promotions for ourselves with the Black Parade project, which is an inversion of what should have actually happened, which should have been Beyoncé saying: ‘These are the brands that I am featuring on my Black Parade project’” he added.
Beyoncé’s Black Parade side project is a microcosm of the Black Is King project itself. Black is King makes a lot of big promises about what it’s going to do for African representation in global media and representation of traditional African cultures. What happens, in reality, is that there isn’t enough consideration to ensure the projected output is accurate, easily digestible or doesn’t misinform audiences.
Most of the collaborators who worked on the project have come out en masse to defend hard criticisms of Black Is King, which is understandable for anyone who is being affiliated with a brand as powerful as Beyoncé. But even those collaborators haven’t fully benefited from the full strength of working with such a mega pop star, because none of their pre-Black Is King works have been highlighted or promoted by Queen Bey or Disney.
This means most people who will engage with creators who worked on Black Is King, will be completely ignorant of their previous works. Subtly or overtly, Black Is King may become the defining narrative for the careers of creators who have been telling stories before they got that email from Beyoncé’s team.
Bey has been tapping African inspirations since her self-titled 2013 album, where additional vocals from Chimamanda Adichie's "We Should All Be Feminists" TED Talk surfaced on "Flawless". LEMONADE happened three years later with Oshun references, and in 2018, she embodied Egypt's revolutionary Queen Nefertiti for her era-defining Homecoming headline at Coachella. She later solidified the arch in wax with ”Everything Is Love” video, alongside Jay-Z, where black royalty meets, art and love. Later that year, she performed at South Africa's 90,000-seat FNB stadium for the Global Citizen Festival featuring some of the biggest music acts within Africa.
If this same person, with such seemingly expansive ties with Africa, wants to make a film, documentary or album with African creatives, the least she can do is ensure those she works with, are more than pawns in the attempts of a big corporation like Disney to profit off the renewed interest in African popular culture. Because if that’s what representation means in 2020, we already have unapologetic white cultural appropriators for that. History says, we’ve been here before.
