Name/Title
Remembering The PresentDescription
Ethnography and painting are joined in _ this book to present a fascinating new vision of African history. In the 1970s, Johannes Fabian encouraged Tshibumba Kanda Matulu, a self-taught artist, to paint the history of Zaire. The artist delivered the work in batches, together with an oral narrative of the events. Fabian recorded these statements along with his own ques-tion-and-answer sessions with the painter.
The first part of the book displays the complete series of one hundred paintings, with excerpts from the artist's narrative and the artist-anthropologist dialogues. Part II consists of Fabian's essays discussing local history, its complex relationship to forms of self-expression and self-understanding, and the aesthetics of contemporary urban African and third world societies. As a collaboration between ethnographer and painter, Remembering the Present is an imaginative exploration of memory and experience in postcolonial Africa.