ARTS-CONGO: Women Tell it All on Canvas

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Nana Rosine Ngangoue

BRAZZAVILLE, Jan 30 1996 (IPS) - For now they’re only a handful, but Congo’s women painters have been slowly changing the face of an art which, in this Central African nation, has long been an all- male preserve.

The women have taken the paintbrush and used it as a means of gaining the freedom of expression their society has long denied them. But worried that the circle of art lovers here is too small, they yearn for the day when their works will come to the notice of an international public.

There are only about 10 known female painters here. Manstsenama Beatrice is one of them. When IPS visited her Brazzaville home in mid-January, she was busy putting the finishing touches on her latest work: a woman in a trance.

Squatting on her heels, she made delicate dabs with her paintbrush on the canvas before her. “The steps and the hands you are seeing represent the movements that someone who is in a trance makes,” she explained. “Painting is how I express what I feel, what I think of the world, of people, of the abstract.

It serves much the same purpose for Alouna Bernadine, a painter for nearly 11 years now.

“You know that here in our country women were not allowed to express themselves freely, to give their opinions on hot political issues, for example,” she tells IPS. “We didn’t even have the right to decide what to do with our bodies. Our parents made the decisions for us, often against our will.”

“Thanks to painting I can lash out at all the evil men do to women,” she adds.”I can idealise love, advocate unity and even call for peace between peoples and nations.”

Modern Congolese art dates back to the 1940s when a few European artists along with a Cameroonian colleague began painting here, prompting locals to emulate them.

In 1951, Frenchman Pierre Lods set up the Potopoto School of Art in Brazzaville, but it took three decades for Congo to get its first known female painter — Laurentine Gampika, who became an artist in 1981. Only a few other have followed her lead.

For some of the women, painting is a calling. Others have gone into it simply because they want to create something original. Alouna says that, as a child, she used to be fascinated by posters. That’s how she started painting. Curiosity led Mantsenama to accept the offer by a friend of hers, a French woman, to initiate her in the art.

Others, like Gampika, who now lives in Europe, followed a more formal route. She went through her paces at the Poto Poto School of Art. (MORE)

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