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Trove of art objects donated to African Studies Center

By Hope Green

While Nigeria was recovering from the horrors of the Biafran war in 1970, Mark Rapoport was volunteering at a hospital there seven days a week. He was also developing an interest in African art.

	Bracelets from various regions of West Africa. These and other metal objects in the collection, made of iron, copper, and bronze, have been used by tribespeople as currency. Photo by Michael DiBlasi

During his few off-hours on Sundays, he started buying odds and ends in a local market. When he returned to the United States to start his medical internship, says Rapoport (MED'70), "I started to figure out what I had bought and what it meant to the people who made it."

In the ensuing 30 years he lived and practiced medicine in New York City and amassed a huge assortment of ethnographic objects, so many that his living room overflowed with them. He recently donated more than 150 of these items to Boston University's African Studies Center (ASC).

Rapoport's gift consists of a wide range of utilitarian and ceremonial pieces from the 20th century, including carved wooden tent posts, beaded aprons, masks, iron spearheads, slingshots, and door latches. All are examples of ancient art forms that may dwindle in modern Africa as apprentices to aging master craftsmen become scarce.

"When I first heard about this, I thought Dr. Rapoport was just going to give us a few things to put on the walls," says Michael DiBlasi, an archaeology research fellow and acting assistant director at ASC. "Then I found out it's a much bigger, more interesting honor than that. Art historians who have come in and looked at the collection have been very excited about its potential for educational use."

At Rapoport's request, the items will be available for students and experts to examine closely.

Beaded aprons from West Africa. Photo by Michael DiBlasi

"We want people to be able to have a hands-on experience with the artifacts and the artwork," says DiBlasi, who is in charge of organizing the collection. "These aren't things that are going to be kept behind glass in a display case."

Functional beauty

Wooden slingshots carved with images of protective spirits are among the larger categories of donated items. These are not merely mass-produced curios for tourists, Rapoport says. African boys use the ornately decorated tools to hunt birds and bats in the forest as a protein source.

Likewise, a coconut grating stool, a hinged wooden seat with a serrated metal attachment, looks more like a sculpture than a kitchen appliance.

"My interest is in functional objects," explains Rapoport, a former New York City deputy commissioner of health who is now conducting public health research in Vietnam. "I'm much less interested in masks and statues that are usually the defining elements of African art. I'm more interested in things people use every day, that mean something to them and have a role in their lives, and that in many cases they work very hard to make beautiful, either by form or by decoration or by the material they use.

	Tuareg tent post of carved wood, from Niger. Photo by Michael DiBlasi

"It's a tribute to the human spirit," he says, "because in much of Africa, especially in desert areas, life's a struggle. It's tough getting out food for the family every day. Yet you find people with objects that are extraordinarily ornate and lovely and carefully made. And they are also expensive to people in these cultures, whether in the amount of time their owners spend to make the objects themselves or what they pay professional craftsmen to make them."

Show and tell

The collection Rapoport has donated to ASC will be available for use in college classrooms in such fields as history, art history, archaeology, and anthropology. DiBlasi also hopes to lend out some of the artifacts to public schools. But first the items will need to be photographed, and they will be catalogued according to how they are used and their culture of origin. African art specialists from the Smithsonian Institution and other scholars will visit the center to help, as DiBlasi puts it, "fill in the wide gaps in our understanding of just what we have." Dozens of other pieces that have accumulated at the center over the past 50 years will be identified and photographed as well.

Ultimately DiBlasi envisions that a digital catalog of everything the center owns will be available for viewing on the ASC Web site. The cataloging and evaluation project is funded in part by a grant from the Boston University Humanities Foundation.

Learning from merchants

Rapoport has always been a collector by nature, starting as a boy with baseball cards. As an adult, he traveled extensively and bought indigenous artifacts wherever he went. Later he made his purchases from West African salesmen known as runners. These merchants spend several months a year in Africa, usually in their home countries, gathering whatever they predict would appeal to American collectors and dealers. For the rest of the year they live in inexpensive hotels on the west side of Manhattan or in Harlem, where Rapoport has done all of his clinical work.

Carved wooden slingshots from West Africa. Photo by Michael DiBlasi

"I've given them medical care for nothing, and I have helped them once in a while with legal problems and a host of other things, so it's really quite a close relationship," Rapoport says. "When there are objects I'm particularly interested in, they will go looking for them, often working with their family members back in Africa.

"They aren't trained anthropologists," adds Rapoport, who took one anthropology and one art course at BU, "but many were farmers earlier in their lives. They have taught me a great deal about the objects at a practical level."

23 April 2001
Boston University
Office of University Relations