The avatars. A unique iconographic corpus

The game of abia as an institution has been definitively relegated to these peoples' past. On being banned by the colonial authorities, it went from being a game played in the open to being a clandestine activity and gradually lost all its social dimension.

Nevertheless, these counters have over the years become not just museum pieces, personal ornaments, a source of inspiration for African and Western graphic designers, but also one of the symbols of traditional African culture. This is all very interesting as it raises the problem of the place certain objects from these cultures occupy today and the consideration they are given outside their context, now they have lost their original effect, meaning and function and been given new ones. This is the case of those everyday objects which, in keeping with the canons of a new aesthetic, have been transformed into "art objects" and perhaps quite rightly, because that is in fact what they were, although they were made according to the principles of a different aesthetic, and very often became a source of inspiration for Western artists as well as local ones. We all know how the discovery of African art in the early decades of the twentieth century influenced the post-impressionists and cubists. And in a world like our own, in which art has a price, we all know that these works have finally become "precious objects" in the hands of collectors, art dealers or ordinary citizens.

Leaving aside the trials the elements of this game have suffered, though without forgetting the part played by colonisation in the process, the fact is that today we have an exceptional corpus of these items available for contemplation and examination in various African and European museums. This, in spite of everything, is important, at least from the point of view of research, as they can be studied and documented for readers and somehow made available to the descendants of those Cameroonian artists so that people can see the aesthetic skills of these African peoples.

The large quantity of pieces forming, as I say, this homogeneous corpus from the same geographical and cultural background, lets us analyse and compare a sufficient number and variety of carvings to understand the different concepts involved in the style. The variations on a single theme also reveal the wide range of approaches taken by these Cameroonian artists in the way they conceived this type of graphic art. It is important to realise that the game of abia did not work like our card games, for example, in which each card has a value and the number of these cards is limited. The subject of the carving in these items (a fish, a snake, a buffalo, a musical instrument, etc.) did not bring either victory or defeat in the game. The carving was therefore completely gratuitous, in the sense that it had no objective function in deciding who won and who lost. This fact is important in realising the non-functionality of an art form, even in a game, and on the other hand of understanding its function or utility on a symbolic level, as each of these carvings is felt to be the graphic expression of the passage of the creatures of the universe from an undifferentiated state to one of individual existence. As such, we can consider the abia carvings the expression of a creation myth transmitted in the form of a game. A myth that could have its origins in the fact that it is represented in art in the form of an egg, as though the beings and bodies represented were still in the original womb before chance set the stage for their passage to an individual existence.

Thanks to this creative freedom, then, these items have left us with a small "encyclopaedia" of pictures, as they were able to carve anything they wanted, without any limitations of subject or form other of course than those imposed by the material itself and the artistic conventions of a community of artists who left the imprint of their unique style on these small woodblocks. We might also say that these items offer a minor guide to art: if we examine it closely we can understand how this Bantu people of central Africa conceived and applied notions of, for example, space, perspective, symmetry, proportion and distortion, simplification and stylisation, creating figurative forms as well as abstract, decorative, staged, allegorical forms, and materialised many of the principles that were later adopted by cubism, all in the framework of small woodcuts that can be seen as true miniatures.

Other topics:

> Mottoes as a form of audiovisual literature

> Are the "abia" carvings a form of proto-writing?