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African Art and The Struggle for Independence
The Smithsonian Associates Interview Series
Our interview today is with Harvard’s Kevin Tervala. Kevin Tervala studies creativity in sub-Saharan Africa. Trained as an art and architectural historian, he is broadly interested in how environmental conditions shape creativity and artistic form.
In the mid-20th century, revolution was sweeping across the world’s second largest continent. From Morocco to Mozambique, Africans of all identities and experiences had begun to stand up and demand their right to self-determination in greater and greater numbers. Since the Berlin Conference of 1884, European colonial powers had brutalized and exploited the continent and its hundreds of millions of residents. And now, speaking almost as one, they had decided enough was enough. In the span of just a few decades, independence movements formed in nearly every colony on the continent. Some were…
