Malcolm Woods headstones at African Antiques

African Art David Norden |Mail|map Sint Katelijnevest 27. B2000 ANTWERPEN-Belgium. Tel +32 3 227 35 40
Discover the African Art books I like

African link to cemetery USA studied

HARRISONBURG - History professor Rachel Malcolm-Woods knows well the academic debate over whether any African cultural traditions survived the slave trade to the United States intact.
Nothing in the historical record suggested that it had.
That's why when Malcolm-Woods in October inspected old cemetery slabs in the George Washing- ton and Jefferson National Forests, she lost sleep for nearly a week, she said.

JMU professor cites headstones in national forest in examining whether traditions survived intact

BY CALVIN R.TRICE found at TIMES-DISPATCH on Mar 21, 2004

Malcolm-Woods

The headstones bore markings that traced directly back to ideograms in West Africa - symbolic engravings that even some current Africans can recognize at first glance, Malcolm-Woods said.
"We're a little further along on the frontier of proving that there were African traditions practiced in the United States," she said last week at James Madison University, where she's a visiting professor. "This gives us the hard copy [of evidence]."
The engravings are from the Nsibidi sign system of Igbo cultures in Nigeria and northern Cameroon, she said.
African symbols and cultural elements survive in many aspects of black American culture. But what remains are adaptations to Western or Christian traditions, or amalgams of different African traditions that blended in the states, Malcolm-Woods said.
Slave owners suppressed black expressions of their cultural origins, so other known engravings or practices were stylized to evade detection, she said.
The national-forest markings are the only examples of an unadulterated cultural link to Africa, she said.

"This is a very big thing for people who work in diaspora studies and to the argument over whether there were any African traditions in North America," Malcolm-Woods said. "To actually see real African ideograms in the [United States] is proof that there were."
The national forest has 13 stones that date to around 1830. They include etchings for individuals buried until the end of the 19th century. The ideograms include references to the journey of life and to ancestral reverence, she said.
The cemetery in Amherst County contains 20 graves. The last interment appears to have been for a woman who died in 1897. Malcolm-Woods suspects all the engravings were performed by one person and made for a specific family.
The Igbo link at the cemetery site is important. Virginia was unique among slaveholding states in that a majority of African slaves brought in during the slave trade were skilled people from Igbo cultures who worked on plantation industry. Many would have been blacksmith engravers versed in the Nsibidi sign system, she said.

Malcolm-Woods, 54, is a history and art history doctoral candidate at the University of Missouri-Kansas City. She teaches art history at JMU while working on her doctoral thesis.

An oil painter with six grown children, she first began studying African art and engravings while working on her master's in art history in 1997.
Teaching during her first full school year at JMU last spring, she was at first skeptical when a forest-service worker showed her rubbings of the strange symbols found at the cemetery more than a decade earlier.
When she finally went to see the stones, gray slates carved from a nearby quarry, she recognized the engravings immediately, she said.
A national-forest expert had researched the markings to no avail before making the rubbings. In the mid-1990s, forest workers found some of the stones in a ditch near the site and moved them to a secure storage building, said George Tolley, an archeologist with the national forest.
Archeologists didn't look further into the stones' significance because their small staff is always committed to researching sites targeted for development, said George Tolley, an archeologist with the national forest.
"That cemetery, while very interesting, was not going to be disturbed because it was a cemetery," Tolley said.

Malcolm-Woods received a seed grant from the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities to plan a study and restoration of the site. She wants to learn about the family buried there and eventually write about the last woman interred, she said.

Since the time of the site's discovery, some of the headstones have apparently been stolen. Both Malcolm-Woods and Tolley are wary of the cemetery being disturbed further. Tolley warned that cemetery theft or destruction is a criminal offense.
Malcolm-Woods would just like the missing pieces back, and would be willing to take back portions of the rare historical find without asking questions, she said.

"We have to save these for future generations," she said. "They're very, very precious."

Virginia Museum of Fine Arts acquires significant African art

Contact Calvin R. Trice at (540) 574-9977 or ctrice*timesdispatch.com

Dear African Art Collectors,

Discover the African Art books I like

African Antiques is the archive and not growing much anymore but still updated.

Visit African Art for recent African Art News.

For extended news about Malcolm Woods headstones join our African Art Club and become an insider, to enter you'll need to pay a small monthly fee .

And if you are a collector of African Art, have a look at our exclusive African Art Collection .

David Norden