Book Launch

Please excuse the delay in posting these photos taken at the launch of “The Great African Bangle Culture” by our dear friend Alan Kerr.  It was a wonderfully happy evening with friends, family and supporters celebrating the publication of my dad’s book.

There were many people to thank for their help throughout the research and production of the book which Jimmy in his speech.  Prof Malcolm McLeod then spoke of the importance of this new work (his notes are included below) and Jim Mellon (Jimmy’s son) encouraged everyone present to raise a toast to Jimmy and Philippa and buy at least one book!

Notes for a speech by Prof Malcolm, McLeod formerly Keeper of Ethnography British Museum.

Sir James has asked me to say a few words about his book.

I think the invitation came because in a small way I’ve had the pleasure of being involved from near the start of his extensive researches and have seen the book develop to the stage that, after four years or so, we now have the book. It is a great pleasure for me to see it published and I am sure you, like me, will enjoy it and find much in it that you did not know.

In a way this book is the story of an outsider noticing something that insiders were unable to see. It is a striking example of how easy it is to overlook what is there in plain sight, to ignore things that are — literally — blindingly obvious.  

Let me explain: in his work on African bangles Sir James has spotted what has gone almost completely unnoticed by professional museum curators and social anthropologists and art historians. As he shows, bangles are ubiquitous in sub-Saharan Africa. When one looks at very early drawings of Africans, or photographs and films of them, one almost always sees  bangles, bangles of different shapes and sizes and made of different materials — though predominantly copper or bronze – in short, bangles are everywhere.

And just because there were so many of them, that whenever one sees a picture of a person living in a traditional African society, they are adorned with one or more bangles, all this has meant bangles have become part of the scenery, they were just there. Since most Africans wore bangles they became almost unnoticeable.

And again, when one examines museum or private collections of African material, there too one finds bangles. In fact, as Sir James points out, museum collections around the world hold tens of thousands of bangles. Even so, as the book hints, these are often overlooked, left unstudied and sadly, in most cases they are inadequately documented. Bangles are everywhere yet, until Sir James noted the fact and began his researches, nobody thought to give this important fact the attention it deserves.

It took an outsider, someone not professionally involved in the study of African material culture, to step back, look at the wider picture and say: the bangle is an essential element in African culture. That was his first important contribution and it is well documented in his book.

His next contribution has been to do extensive research – just look at the number of museums around the world that he and Philippa have visited — ranging from Denmark to Vienna, from Seattle to New York and in this country the BM, Pitt Rivers, Liverpool –how I envy them the way they have been able to delve in so many reserve collections — and then on the basis of what he found, he has formulated testable theories, theories about how these essential pieces of African culture have developed, ideas about the importance of copper and bronze, theories about how, as the practice spread across Africa, large solid  castings were replaced by ones constructed of wire, theories about the roles they play in each society and how they may be linked to the dispersal of Bantu languages – and a lot more. It took a very sharp-eyed and persistent outsider to do that.

At the same time he has located and incorporated copious illustrations, bringing together material that was scattered in a very large number of different places. In short, he has produced a rich work and one which will be of use for years to come.

This is an important book because it provides a base from which others can now start to work forward. His ideas can be developed, refined and, perhaps, modified as more evidence becomes available. I recommend it to you most heartily: it tells us things we ought to have known, we should have known – well, now we have no excuse for not knowing.