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The most sensitive question is how to portray Jesus Christ. Some tribes show him with a huge head to symbolize great wisdom or a massive chest to convey strength. But should he be depicted as an African? Urban Christians are more open to this than believers in the bush. Commissioned by the Catholic Cathedral in Kananga, Zaire, Enkobo Mpane created his first Bantu Christ from ebony in 1969. Parishioners rejected the work, so it hangs in a nearby convent. "Our parishioners still think of Christ as a Jew and not an African," reports Arley Brown, a U.S. Baptist teaching in Kinshasa. But Nigerian Anglican architect Fola Alade insists, "If Jesus is the Son of God, how can he be just a Jew?"
For many African artists, the act of creation itself is a religious experience. Zaire's Mwabila Pemba, a specialist in beaten copper, rises daily at 5 a.m. to pray and believes that as he works "I'm in the hands of a divine force." He is among multitudes who speak of creating through prayers, dreams and inspiration from the Bible. Africans know that this makes them oddities among the world's modern-day artists. Ben Nhlanhla Nsusha, who recently returned to Johannesburg after five years of study in London, says the young artists in England "can't understand the way I think. They never do religious subjects."
Africans are anything but embarrassed about this cultural distinctiveness. Cecil Skotnes, one of the handful of creative white religious artists in South Africa, insists, "Urgency is the basis of all great art. This urgency is no longer apparent in European or U.S. art." That judgment may be too sweeping. Yet there is no question that African Christian art, serene and savage, florid and austere, stands virtually alone in the vigor and authenticity with which its practitioners seek to express the inexpressible.