"Heroes": Principles of African Greatness Part 1—That Liberty & Equality Might Reign

The universal struggle for Liberty and Equality animates the opening series of works in Heroes. For all of the remote and abstract ways in which ideas of liberty and equality are all-too-often casually invoked, particularly in the contemporary Western world...

...they have deeply personal consequences for those denied the luxury of enjoying them on an everyday basis. The artists and heroes in history depicted in this foundational section all share a clear and defiant understanding of their fundamental rights to the realization of these principles.

Paa Joe documents a building that beheld a depraved and dreadful history.

Paa Joe is one of the best-known innovators of an art form that has developed outside Accra—"fantasy coffins” (abebu adekai) sculpted in forms that memorialize their future residents’ key accomplishments in life. 

Abebu adekai not only carry their occupants into the next life in style, but leave a searing, visual memory of an image to embody the deceased’s memory long after their physical bodies have been returned to the earth. 


In this style, Paa Joe created a series of architectural models of Ghana’s coastal forts—global sites of memory, conscience, and loss. 

 In the 17th and 18th centuries these buildings became repositories for bodies themselves—the bodies of African men, women, and children who were captured and converted into commodities in the dehumanizing international trade in enslaved labor.

I am sorry to observe that the practice of your country (which as a resident I love) . . . has been uniformly wicked in the East and West-Indies—and even on the coast of Guinea. The grand object of English navigators—indeed of all Christian navigators—is money—money—money . . . 

. . . In Africa . . . the Christians’ abominable traffic for slaves and the horrid cruelty and treachery of the petty Kings [are] encouraged by their Christian customers who carry them strong liquors to enflame their national madness—and powder—and bad fire-arms—to furnish them with the hellish means of killing and kidnapping.
—Ignatius Sancho, letter to Mr. Jack Wingrave, 1778

I am Sir an Affrican—with two ffs—if you please—& proud am I to be of a country that knows no politicians—nor lawyers—no—nor Thieves.—Ignatius Sancho, letter, c. 1776–80

·  Brought to England in childhood, Sancho learned to read; he devoured books.

·  Sancho and his wife set up a shop in Westminster, giving him the right to vote in parliamentary elections. He was the first Black man to vote in Britain.

·  His letters, published posthumously, were one of the earliest accounts of slavery in English. They became a rallying point in the growing abolitionist movement.

This work rises in the center of Heroes as the museum’s own Statue of Liberty.

The Senegalese sculptor Ousmane Sow created this work as part of a series of sculptures commemorating the bicentennial of the French Revolution.

Unlike those sculptures, however, Sow’s Toussaint Louverture depicts a figure who actually struggled directly against the French state, taking on the mantle of the original revolutionary principles (egalité, fraternité, and, above all, liberté) surrendered at the dawn of the 19th century in Paris to the authoritarian rule of Napoleon.

Brothers and friends, I am Toussaint Louverture; perhaps my name has made itself known to you. I have undertaken vengeance. I want Liberty and Equality to reign in St. Domingue. I am working to make that happen. Unite yourselves to us, brothers, and fight with us for the same cause.
—Toussaint Louverture, at Camp Turel, Aug. 29, 1793

·  From a plantation birth to an early life as a wealthy free man, he was well educated. He took the surname Louverture, from the French term for “opening.”

·  Louverture led a slave rebellion, beginning in 1791, in a series of campaigns that ultimately defeated the armies of three world powers: Spain, the United Kingdom, and France.

·  Ruling a St. Dominigue freed from French rule, Louverture codified the abolition of slavery in the new nation, soon to be renamed Haiti.

They are made to be looked up to.

These sentries stand as virtuous, upright, and beautiful representations of key Hemba leaders, since passed. Each figure was commissioned by a Hemba community as a portrait of a remembered and venerated male predecessor. 

Instead of portraying these men directly, however, these sculptures may instead be considered “moral portraits”—dignified, serene, strong, and contained. 

They embody the physical and ethical ideals of leadership for a typical late 19th-century Hemba community. 

Images like this once inspired defiance to French rule in Senegal.

Sheikh Amadou Bamba stands in the center, in a white robe and turban. A Sufi saint, poet, and teacher, he led a pacifist resistance against the French colonial administration. 

As a founder of the influential Mouride movement, one of four mystical Sufi groups within Islam, Bamba’s image was considered so potent...

...by both his followers, who believe it conveys blessings, and by the French, who feared it as a rallying point of resistance...

...that it was once banned in the colony.

O you the Just, the Good by excellence, the Preserver! O You who heal and who hold man’s destiny in Your hands! Let Your blessings descend where harm exists And let there be good where evil prevails. And let there be generosity where avarice prevails. Let wealth be showered in poor places and let there be gratitude where ingratitude prevails . . .
—Sheikh Amadou Bamba, “The Quest for Healing”

·  Sheikh Bamba founded the Mouride brotherhood in Touba, Senegal, in 1883. He emphasized pacifism, hard work, and self-improvement.

·  When French colonial leaders were promoting Christianization and assimilation, Sheikh Bamba asserted his submission to God alone. Fearing his example, the French authorities exiled him for 12 years.

·  Today, the Mouride order consists of at least five million members globally.

A monument to women who dared to claim their own power.

The Blue Bra Girls commemorates women who gathered in Tahrir Square, in central Cairo, in December 2011 to demonstrate for political openness and to protest the military administration that replaced president Hosni Mubarak, overthrown that February after 30 years in power.  It recalls a moment of tremendous possibility in Egypt—and of hopes soon thwarted by misogyny, violence, and repression.

The Blue Bra Girls references a widely circulated photograph from that late 2011 uprising in Tahrir Square—of an anonymous woman so violently beaten and dragged by the police that her black abaya was lifted, leaving her torso bare, except for her blue bra.

As the image circulated globally that December, Cairo witnessed the largest political gathering of women in the country—the largest, that is, since the anticolonial demonstrations organized by feminist leader Huda Sha’arawi in 1919.