Eye Magazine

Leaving through this compendium of 900 posters, many produced in Africa but some in Europe, I paused at length on one poster. It was the urgency of the poster’s message that struck me, despite its obvious vintage. Set against a red backdrop, a black man directly engages the viewer with a piercing gaze, his mouth gagged. Below the illustration, set against the right margin, is a terse bit of German copy which reads: ‘Freiheit für Zimbabwe’, or ‘Freedom for Zimbabwe’. Despite the fact that the poster was produced in the late 1970s and was fashioned after a sticker made in Britain in 1976, the words still resonate.

Not all the posters collected in African Posters engage the viewer quite so forcefully. Many of the posters from the Basler Afrika Library, based in the Swiss city of Basel, tend to be from particular historical moments. The archive’s collection of Namibian and South African election posters, for instance, have a recent post-colonial provenance and are boldly functional. Older, colonial-era, posters, some dating back to 1922, showcase Africa as an exotic wonder-land. Viewed alongside each other, these opposing sets of posters function well to describe visually Africa’s momentous passage from a place of foreign occupation to a continent negotiating self-determination.

Although largely visual, this thematically sectioned book is the work of historians. ‘Until now, the role played by posters in analyses of the visual history of Africa has been a minor one,’ write Miescher and Henrichsen in the introduction. ‘Unlike photographs, which in the past few decades have been “discovered” as historical sources in their own right, interest in posters is still in its infancy.’

This fledgling status of posters may explain the erratic quality of the book’s contents. The foundation of the Basler collection was a number of posters from pre-independence Namibia. This was then enhanced by posters from disbanding Swiss and German solidarity and anti-apartheid committees. As such, the title of the book can be deceptive, for the bulk of the content is focused on southern African posters, particularly Namibia.

Despite its lack of breadth, though, the book allows useful comparative insights. For instance, the frenzied pictorial montages favoured by Nigerian poster designers differ vastly from the equally frantic exercises in type layout preferred by poster makers for South Africa’s trade unions. Of the commercial examples, the collection’s beer posters are poor. The high point is the diverse collection of revolutionary graphics, where the influence of militant Cuban and Chinese traditions is clear.

Sean O’Toole, writer, editor, Johannesburg

First published in Eye no. 55 vol. 14 2005