Preserving Panafrica: Ephemera in Art and Culture – LIBRARIES

Wooden bust of an African man with an elongated face and hair in a top braid

Wooden bust of a man, Kanike, by Feliz Idubor, 1955

By Susan Russick

Magazines. Brochures. Books. You expect to see these materials in a library setting, but not on exhibit in an art museum—and yet, the Art Institute of Chicago has borrowed 32 objects (plus digitized versions of others) from Northwestern University Libraries for their exhibition Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica. The project, which is open from December 15, 2024 – March 30, 2025, is part of the Panafrica Across Chicago celebration, which includes events at the Art Institute, Stony Island Arts Bank, the Museum of Contemporary Photography and the Green Line Performing Arts Center. Northwestern University’s Black Arts Consortium is involved in the concluding Panafrica Days March 5-8, 2025.

Northwestern’s contribution involves collections from the Melville J. Herskovits Library of African Studies and the Charles Deering McCormick Library of Special Collections and University Archives. Some of these materials, although commonplace during the mid-20^th century, have already become rare.

Magazine cover of a black and white photo of a Black man with a rifle crouched next to a seated Black woman reading papers in her lap.

The Herskovits Library is especially rich in ephemeral publications such as this FRELIMO 1972 communique pamphlet.

light pink and white book covers with photos

The Afro-Asian Woman, August 1963 was printed in English from one cover and Arabic on the opposite cover.

Blue, black, and white angular design for the cover of Black Orpheus 18

The Nigerian literary journal, Black Orpheus, included beautiful silkscreened covers. Shown here is v. 1 No. 18 1965.

Several of the loaned materials are magazines. When newly acquired by the Herskovits Library, glossy pictorial magazines Bingo from Senegal and Drum from South Africa were like the Life Magazine of French and English-speaking African countries. Both began publication in the 1950s and featured a variety of fashion, culture, and news stories that featured urban black culture.

Drum magazine cover with a Black woman shown from the bust up, posed with her head turned but looking at the camera.

Cover of Bingo magazine of a Black woman in flight attendant uniform outside with part of a plane behind her.

Light blue cover of a Bingo magazine with floating heard of women

Images:
Drum Magazine, November 1958
Bingo: L’illustre africain: Revue mensuelle de l’activite noire, No. 85, February 1960
Bingo: L’illustre africain: Revue mensuelle de l’activite noire, No. 122, March 1963

The magazines were commonly available and like other magazine subscriptions, once Northwestern collected the full year, the 12 issues were bound together in a single volume. Those bindings worked well when they were newer and more flexible, but like newspapers, these magazines were engineered for immediate use and were not made to last. Worldwide, most copies of these well-loved publications have disappeared, and the Herskovits Library now owns one of the most complete sets of these titles.

Bindings that once functioned to securely keep a year of issues together currently cause damage to the now-brittle magazines. The bindings need to be removed to use the magazines without tearing the paper further. It is quite a project to dis-bind these volumes. Different binding styles were used over the years. Some magazines separated relatively easily and suffered little damage. Others had been trimmed on all edges, oversewn, and then slathered with glue – those needed extra care.

Red book sitting on a light wood surface

Close up of 2 hands peeling off some of the spine paper on a bound group of magazins

The cover peeled off of bound magazines, exposing the glue and paper tears

Images:
A year of magazine issues bound together in plain buckram cover
Removing the binding is a messy process
Spine linings and binding have been separated from the magazines, revealing sewing and adhesive layers
Brittle paper on individual issues is often torn by flexing next to stiffeners (the white strip) in the binding.

An open newsprint magazine spread that is ripped and damaged.

Photodocumentation of Drum after disbinding, before mending

While the cover usually depicted glamorous women, the articles inside included more complicated stories, including this one featuring Nelson Mandela. This issue is shown after disbinding, before mending.

After returning the bound magazines to their original individual issue format, we mended torn pages and they are now comfortably housed in folders, sharing a box with their year-mates. Their paper will never be flexible again, but now they can be read and appreciated for the rich stories they tell, and even admired as art.

Additional information

Bingo Magazine in the Age of Pan-African Festivals: A Feminist Archive of Global Black Consciousness? Tsitsi Jaji. Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, Number 42-43, November 2018, pp. 110-123 (Article). Published by Duke University Press. https://muse.jhu.edu/pub/4/article/712768/pdf, accessed 11/11/2024.

Drum Magazine. South Africa History Online: Towards a people’s history. https://www.sahistory.org.za/article/drum-magazine, accessed 11/11/2024.