Art Histories
2013/ 2014

Mathias Fubah Alubafi

Africa on the Move: Drinking Horns in the Cameroon Grassfields and Beyond

Mathias Fubah Alubafi studied History, Archaeology, and Heritage Studies at the Universities of Buea and the Witwatersrand. He received a PhD in History of Art from the University of Reading in 2009. He is specialized in the traditional and contemporary art of the Cameroon Grassfields and has been conducting fieldwork in the region since 2005. He is the founder of the Grassfields Cultural Heritage Foundation and a founding member of the Bambui UK Development Association, BUKDA (www.bukda.org). In 2007, he worked as a volunteer on the African collections at the Horniman Museum, London. From 2010 to 2011, he was a visiting researcher at the University of the Witwatersrand and, in 2012-2013, a research fellow at the Centre of African Studies and a Visiting Scholar at Wolfson College, University of Cambridge. During his PhD and postdoctoral research, he taught an introductory course in African art at the Department of Continuing Education, Oxford University and also held tutorials and co-supervised undergraduate and postgraduate students at the Universities of Reading and the Witwatersrand. He is currently completing a monograph on the Art of the Bambui fondom (www.bambuifondom.org).

 

Africa on the Move: Drinking Horns in the Cameroon Grassfields and Beyond

As a Fellow of the Art Histories and Aesthetic Practices Program, his project will draw attention to three important throne objects: two buffalo horns and one cow horn at the Ethnological Museum, Berlin. In particular, the project will explore three major issues associated with the “social life” (Appadurai 1986) of the drinking horn in the museum. In the first part, he will present a brief historical sketch of the drinking horn as it is understood and used in the Grassfields. The second part will explore the iconography and iconology of the drinking horn as understood in the Grassfields and beyond. The third part will consider the type of visitors, interpretations, expectations and misunderstandings generated by the display of Grassfields throne objects in global institutions of cultures. Considering that most Africans still see museums as a mirror image of something that belongs to the West and seems “inauthentic, uncanny, and out of place in the African context” (Rowlands 2008), it would be interesting to understand the differences and similarities between the drinking horns displayed in the museum and those that are still in their cultural context, particularly in the Grassfields.