LOST AFRICA

By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK

Different disciplines of science measure Africa in different ways. Geographers point to a climate that ranges from the burning Sahara to the steamy rain forests of Zaire to the dry savannas of Kenya. Biologists note the astonishing abundance and variety of the continent's wildlife. Epidemiologists speak with horror and fascination of deadly viruses like HIV and Ebola that have come out of the jungle, and of countless undiscovered microbes waiting to emerge.

For anthropologists, however, Africa's most impressive statistics are the ones that measure the enormous diversity of its people. Some 1,300 languages are spoken on the continent, about a third of the world's total. Each represents a distinct ethnic group with its own beliefs and its own rituals and ceremonies--some of which have been performed for hundreds of years.

Yet within a few decades many of these traditions will vanish, or at least change beyond recognition. In many African nations, minority tribes are being culturally assimilated--if not physically wiped out--by the ruling majority; in others, rural villagers are migrating to the melting pots of the cities. Even those who stay behind are finding the lure of Western music, culture and clothing irresistible. Nobody believes the trend can be stopped, or that it is necessarily a bad thing--for example, in the case of female circumcision. But scientists do want to document Africa's existing cultures before it's too late.

That's where photographers Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher come in. For 25 years, working separately and then together, the two women have crisscrossed the continent from Senegal to Ethiopia, from Morocco to South Africa, observing and documenting traditional native ceremonies. Although not working scientists (Fisher was trained as a sociologist before she switched to photography; Beckwith came to the field from a background in art), they have studied their subjects with the thoroughness of professional researchers, visiting all but seven of Africa's 53 nations and capturing on film most of the rituals that are still practiced on the continent. In some cases, Beckwith and Fisher are the first Westerners the tribes have ever seen.

The result is an unparalleled collection of tens of thousands of photographs, many of them strikingly beautiful, that has been distilled into four books (a fifth will be published in 1998, along with a CD-ROM and a documentary film) and several major articles in National Geographic (another will appear in the October issue). Most important to scholars, though, is the fact that Beckwith and Fisher are making the collection available to researchers--a priceless ethnographic archive that will endure no matter what happens to the tribes. Beckwith and Fisher, says art historian Christine Mullen Kreamer of the National Museum of Natural History in Washington, "are making valuable contributions to the visual anthropology of Africa."

The photographers found Africa before they found each other. Beckwith had already photographed the Maasai when she and Fisher met in 1979. Fisher, a jewelry collector and designer, had mastered photography in order to document the body adornment of African tribespeople. Recalls Beckwith: "It only took us a week to decide to collaborate." They started with a Maasai warrior-graduation ceremony in Kenya and Wodaabe courtship rituals in Niger. Then, beginning in 1985, they spent five years photographing the everyday life of tribal peoples in the Horn of Africa, particularly Ethiopia, a project that resulted in an award-winning book called African Ark (Abrams; 1990).

For the past five years, Beckwith and Fisher have been concentrating on sacred rites of passage that mark major life changes: birth, puberty, courtship, healing and death. This fieldwork will continue for one more year; the photographers are currently in the field filming the Swazi reed dance in Swaziland, Ndebele marriages in South Africa and Tuareg seasonal ceremonies in the Sahara. Says Beckwith: "These ceremonies are some of the most powerful events in these tribes. They promote healing and provide a powerful new sense of identity. Some of the rituals we've photographed no longer exist. And many of those that do have been altered by Western influences. We're trying to document as many as we can."

To do so, the pair often spend months at a time traveling through remote regions by car, mule or camel, with no means of communication with the outside world. In order to gain the trust of wary tribes, Beckwith and Fisher may live with the locals for weeks or even months, befriending the chief and integrating themselves as much as possible into daily life. The women usually work through a translator--sometimes two, in the case of especially rare dialects. Being female has made it easier to gain access to rites that outsiders rarely witness. Notes Fisher: "We're less threatening to the women, and we're able to see female rites that men would be forbidden to see." They're less threatening to men as well, and as a result have gained access to such rites as Maasai circumcisions and the male passage to adulthood in Benin.

It took Beckwith and Fisher 19 years to win permission to photograph the six-week-long Dogon Dama funeral ceremony in Mali, in which bodies are wrapped in cloths and hauled 300 ft. up a sheer cliff face to burial caves that have been in use since the 15th century. To get a shot of the interior of one of those caves, the duo had to be lowered from the top of the cliff by means of ropes and handmade ladders.

Even when permission is granted, the rituals don't always take place on schedule. Indeed, when the women showed up to film the Dogon funeral ceremony--which occurs only once every 12 years--they discovered that it wouldn't begin for six more weeks. "We often end up sitting and waiting for events to happen," says Fisher. Despite these obstacles, the pair have photographed scores of ceremonies, including initiation rites, male and female circumcisions, bridal fairs and weddings, funerals and even exorcisms.

No one denies the beauty and power of Fisher and Beckwith's work or downplays the effort involved, but some have suggested that in pursuing pretty pictures they've taken advantage of their subjects. "The criticism," says Monni Adams, an art historian and archaeologist at Harvard's Peabody Museum, "is that they are exploiting these people by showing their nudity and other unusual characteristics." Adams quickly adds that she doesn't believe the criticism is fair. "Their pictures go far beyond the phenomenon of bare-breasted women," she says. "There's a sense of people's activities, their quality of life."

Beyond that, the photographers have gone out of their way to repay indigenous Africans for the access they've been granted. They have, for example, established a Maasai primary school, helped Africans get educated in the West, purchased medicine and even helped dig wells. But it isn't always easy, says Fisher, to decide where helping ends and meddling begins. "It's a real conflict for us," she says. "Should we be exposing these groups to the outside world or should we leave them alone?"

The truth, say scholars, is that it won't make much difference in the end. The pressures on traditional African ceremonies are inexorable. Many ethnologists believe these changes are, in fact, part of the natural life cycle of such rituals. "African traditions are not vanishing," says Mullen Kreamer of the National Museum of Natural History. "They are changing. Even ceremonies that have been performed for hundreds of years have changed throughout the centuries as people adapt to new stimuli and new ideas." Still, there is a poignancy in Beckwith and Fisher's images, a sense that we are seeing some of the last things on earth that have not been subsumed by 20th century Western culture. Jason Clay, co-founder of Cultural Survival Quarterly, uses the phrase salvage ethnography to describe the race to capture these traditions. "It would be tragic," he says, "if work like that of Carol Beckwith and Angela Fisher turned out to be their final documentation."

--Reported by Andrea Dorfman/New York

With reporting by Andrea Dorfman/New York