A History of the World in 100 Objects - Dr Neil MacGregor [236]
The Great Wave, like the other images in the series, was printed in at least 5,000 impressions, possibly as many as 8,000, and we know that in 1842 the price of a single sheet was officially fixed at 16 mon, the equivalent of a double helping of noodles. This was cheap, popular art; but when printed in such quantities, to exquisite technical standards, it could be highly profitable.
After Commodore Perry’s forced opening of the Japanese ports in 1853 and 1854, Japan resumed sustained contact with the outside world. It had learnt that no nation would be allowed to opt out of the global economic system. Japanese prints were exported in large numbers to Europe, where they were quickly discovered and celebrated by artists like Whistler, Van Gogh and Monet; the Japanese artist who had been so influenced by European prints now influenced the Europeans in return. Japonisme became a craze and was absorbed into the artistic traditions of Europe and America, influencing the fine and applied arts well into the twentieth century. In time, Japan followed the industrial, commercial West and was transformed in the process into an imperial economic power. Yet just as Constable’s Haywain, painted at roughly the same time, became the iconic image of a rural, pre-industrial England, so Hokusai’s Great Wave became – and in the modern imagination has remained – the emblem of a timeless Japan, reproduced on everything from textiles to tea cups.
94
Sudanese Slit Drum
Drum, from Central Africa
AD 1850–1900
Horatio Herbert Kitchener, 1st Earl Kitchener, was one of the media stars of the First World War. The famous recruitment poster has him pointing straight at us in full uniform, finger in the foreground, handlebar moustache not far behind, with the words ‘Your country needs YOU’. By then Kitchener was already legendary as Kitchener of Khartoum, and this Central African wooden drum, which he captured and presented to Queen Victoria in 1898, just after his army had killed around 11,000 Sudanese soldiers in the Battle of Omdurman, is part of how he earned his title.
The biography of this slit drum, as it’s called, is a story of Sudan in the nineteenth century, when Ottoman Egypt, Britain and France all converged on this enormous Nile country which had long been divided between an African south, which practised traditional beliefs, and an Islamic north. It is another document of the enduring geopolitical fault-line around the Nile cataracts that we have encountered twice before: in the sphinx of Taharqo (Chapter 22) and the head of Augustus (Chapter 35). This drum is part of the history of indigenous African culture, of the East African slave trade centred on Khartoum, and of the European scramble for Africa at the end of the nineteenth century.
The slit drum began its life in Central Africa, in the region where Sudan and the Congo share a frontier, and it would have been part of the court orchestra of a powerful chief. It is in the shape of a short-horned buffalo or bush cow, about 270 centimetres (110 inches) long from nose to tail, and about 80 centimetres (30 inches) high, so about the size of a big calf with very short legs. The head is small, and the tail short – the bulk is concentrated entirely in the body, which has been hollowed out and has a narrow slit running across its back. The flanks of the drum have been carved to different thicknesses, so that a skilled drummer with a traditional drumstick can produce at least two tones and as many as four distinct pitches. It is made from a single piece of reddish African coralwood, a durable hardwood found in the forested areas of Central Africa and valued for making drums because it stands up well to repeated striking, maintains a constant tone and is resistant to termites.
The main function of the drum was music-making, marking community events such as births, deaths and feasts. Europeans