The Red Fez: Art and Spirit Possession in Africa

While European explorers saw Africans as savages, so Africans viewed the Europeans as barbarians and incorporated details from the invaders, especially those objects like the fez that emphasized their otherness, into ``curious cultic systems.'' Surveying a range of art and tribal cultures from Sudan to South Africa, Kramer, a German professor of art theory, has constructed an erudite but dense study of African representation of colonial Europeans. Within the catalog are some intriguing tales: the hauka cult of the Gold Coast (now Ghana) used tattered cloth called ``Union Jack'' and sought to rise ``above the `normal' human state by breaking a serious European taboo''--that of eating dogs. In the modern day, according to Kramer, the ``flattened reality'' of photography provides images for the surviving spirit possession cults. Photos. (Oct.)