Tribal Art

The Koranic plates called allo kafi gida, preserved by the ethnic group of the Hausa who populate northern Nigeria, are marked with the seal of secrecy. The Hausa are afraid to reveal to strangers the auspicious formulas that adorn these objects. And they also refuse to take the risk of exhibiting representations of human beings and animals in an iconoclastic Islamic context. Even today, radical Islam still severely punishes the possession of allo kafi gida with sanctions that can go as far as capital punishment. Had they not been saved over time, all the tablets in this book would have been doomed to destruction by Muslim fundamentalists. The authors of the decorations that adorn the Quranic boards are not mere illustrators, they are true storytellers: they painted on these wooden boards the stories that reflect the cosmic vision of their society. Through artistic creation, they incorporated foreign and distant ideas into the Hausa system of thought, making these allo kafi gida true cosmological capsules on wood.
In this difficult context, the owners of these works of art can be described as "curators" because these secret tablets, although linked to the Muslim religion, bear witness to Hausa cosmology. The objects whose photographs illustrate this work, unique in the field of non-European art, belong to a private collection resulting from more than twenty years of research.
If you wish to acquire a Koranic board Allo kafi gida Hausa, we propose some in our gallery .

Author: Antoine Lema
Editions: Five Continents
Status: NEW
Language: English
Number of pages: 224
Dimensions: 245 x 340 mm
Linked
ISBN : 978-8874398744