Juju

In the late 15th century, Portuguese travellers set sail for an area of west Africa known to them as Guinea, in search of gold. Medieval Portugal was a feudal society, ruled by a monarchy and dominated by the Catholic church. Witchcraft was condemned, and any perceived use of magic was illegal, like divination, fortune-telling, incantations, summoning devils, casting spells, as well as the use of feitiços: material objects with magical influence like precious stones, preserved animal parts, and charms constructed from various items of significance.

Establishing an enclave on what become known as the Gold Coast (present day Ghana), these travellers set about developing a trade in gold, ivory and spices. The local culture was incomprehensible to them, but seeing the way west African people centred physical objects in their social and spiritual customs and habits, the Portuguese interpreted this as something similar to the witchcraft back home and used feitiços to refer to the items the local people seemed to value but which the Portuguese didn’t, ascribing this to some sort of superstition. This mutual incomprehension lent itself to exchange however, where a worthless object to one was valued by the other, and as trade was established and people from a wide range of cultures were drawn to the area, it became a category in an informal language of commerce where feitiço gave rise to the pidgin term fetisso. A word specific to this trade between African and European merchants, rather than belonging to any individual group.

In western Europe this was the beginning of the period known as the ‘Age of Discovery,’ where European countries competed with each other to find new sources of wealth and influence through international trade, then increasingly through military dominance and colonization. So, over the 16th and 17th centuries more and more Europeans established themselves across the coast of west Africa. Areas to the west of the Gold Coast became known as the Ivory Coast and the Pepper Coast and, as European expansion involved vast plantation colonies in the Americas dependent on enslaved labour, the area to the east became known as the Slave Coast. The enslavement of Africans initially being justified by the concept of ‘blood purity’ in Portuguese law, and the belief that non-Christians were ‘enemies of Christ.’

By the mid 17th century, though, the Portuguese had been ousted from the Gold Coast by the Dutch West India Company. The Protestant Dutch were interested in commodities, where value was defined outside of any religious significance, and were dismissive of both Catholic and local African beliefs in any kind of sacramental value. But, like the Portuguese and other Europeans, they were also keen to project an idea of moral and intellectual inferiority onto the people who were being enslaved, in order to preserve their own positive moral sense of themselves. The mercantile fetisso became a wider category applied to any object of perceived value to sub-Saharan Africans, now referred to as fétiche or ‘fetish,’ and considered evidence of a ‘primitive’ belief in superstition and magic.

The actual customs and languages of the people of west Africa, like much of sub-Saharan Africa, varied from community to community, which themselves varied in constitution, population and area size. There was no single homogenous set of beliefs or practices, although there were many commonalities and the boundaries between them could be porous. The types of objects and items that were referred to as ‘fetishes’ served different purposes and would sometimes be identified by names specific to their use, in the language of those that used them. They varied from found or preserved items like plants, feathers or animal skulls, to carefully made sculptures of leaders or deities, to jewellery and ornaments, to practical tools and items of dress. What they largely had in common was that they would be made of physical materials, so to embody the history of that material or an idea associated with it, they would have a social context, and they would have a direct relationship to the physical body of a living person or persons. These were central to rituals, ceremonies and faith-based beliefs, but their purpose was just as often social or practical in nature, and while the belief in their power could be literal, it could just as easily be symbolic or representative.

In Europe, by the end of the 18th century the term ‘fetishism’ was firmly established in philosophical discussions around the origins and history of religion, where fetishism was considered an early or ‘primitive’ stage in the development of humanity and belief systems. It then fed into the social sciences more broadly, where it was also applied to the development of humans as individuals, from childhood to adulthood, and to the relationship between the mind and things, between words and concepts, and between fantasy and reality. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, fetishism became an important concept in psychoanalysis, relating to the projection of feelings, ideas, memories, onto physical objects or symbols, particularly in relation to sexuality, where ultimately Freud would bluntly specify that “the fetish is a substitute for the penis.”

In the 19th century, as ‘fetish’ came to be used in academic and other contexts, particularly among English speakers, another term became more commonly applied to African customs, juju. A word with no obvious origin, sometimes claimed, without evidence, to be from an African language like Hausa, Yoruba or Igbo, but more commonly as deriving from the French joujou, meaning ‘plaything,’ which is appropriate to the dismissive way it was used by Europeans. Also, there emerged in Lagos in the early 20th century a style of popular music called jùjú, after the name given to the tambourine drum introduced by the Salvation Army, which suggests that Nigerians associated the word with the British. It’s just as likely though, that two people speaking different languages misheard each other and settled on a word, each believing it to belong to the other.

The word wasn’t as specific to physical objects as ‘fetish.’ When Africans were asked by Europeans to explain their societies, juju could be used as a catch-all term to refer to social and spiritual concepts where there wasn’t an obvious word in English. This would often also involve an element of storytelling and exaggeration, which travellers would later expand upon themselves, to tell their own tales of wonder and adventure when they returned home.

Today, as Christianity has emerged as the dominant religion in west and central Africa, juju has become an increasingly loaded term. While sometimes used in good faith to refer to traditional religious and social practices, its meaning is often clouded by those European ideas of ‘enemies of Christ’ and the ‘primitive,’ as well as sensationalized news reports, conspiracy theories and social prejudices, both local and international.

As European powers had established territories for the extraction of resources over much of the continent of Africa, one of the last areas to see European incursion was the vast Congo Basin, mostly covered by dense rainforest. It was populated by diverse communities of people, including several kingdoms of varying sizes, but from a European perspective it would be a rich source of rubber, ivory and minerals. As various western European rivals competed for dominance elsewhere on the continent, Leopold II of Belgium used the opportunity to play them off against each other, as well as employing western explorers to make deals for territory on the ground, and ultimately established the Congo Free State in 1885, with himself as absolute monarch. His reign was notoriously brutal, Congolese people were put to work in inhuman conditions, through which, and resultant famine and disease, as many as 8 to 10 million people lost their lives over the period of a couple of decades. Eventually international outrage led to the Belgian government reluctantly taking control of what would then be known as the Belgian Congo, in 1908.

Emil Torday was a Hungarian bank clerk, who developed an interest in central Africa while living in Belgium at the end of the 19th century and made his way to Leopold’s Congo Free State in 1900. He used his official administrative position there as a way to interact with local people, learning their languages, and came to be seen back in Europe as an expert on the area. On a brief return to Europe, he made contacts at the British Museum in London and later, after resigning his position and leaving the Congo Free State in frustration at the treatment of the local population by Leopold’s regime, he was persuaded to return at the end of 1907 to lead an independent ethnographic study of an area of the Kasai river basin in the south west of the country. As part of this undertaking, he was also instructed to trade with the people he encountered and collect items on behalf of the British Museum, to be shipped back and added to their collection.

The area that made the greatest impression on Torday was that of the Bushongo, or the Kuba kingdom, he was impressed by the king, Kwete Peshanga Kena (also known as Kot áPe), as well as the artistry of the Kuba people, and artifacts from this area formed the backbone of the collection he sent back to London.

One such item, collected at Misumba in the kingdom’s Bangongo province, was identified as a ‘hunting fetish’ and closely resembles an object mentioned by Torday’s travelling companion Melville Hilton-Simpson, in his account of the trip. According to Hilton-Simpson, this was often used by the people of Misumba before a hunt or whenever a hunt claimed a large animal. It was somewhat crude in style compared to the highly finished craft work of the village and stained with soot rather than the usual bright red pigment, tukula. He describes an occasion when, after local hunters captured an elephant, the figure was placed in the street where a ceremony involving dancing and drumming was performed in front of a large crowd, culminating in the sacrifice of a chicken. The item in his accompanying photograph looks extremely similar to the one which is now in the collection of the British Museum but not quite identical, so it’s possibly a duplicate or replica, perhaps even made specifically for them, Kot áPe was apparently persuaded of the museum’s importance and prestige as a public treasury of the world’s cultures. The item, which is given the name ‘Tembo’ or ‘Tambo’ in some illustrations, is a human figure made of a wood base, its facial features are decorated with copper or brass details and on top of its head are animal horns. Its body is small relative to the size of its head but is covered with cloth and what looks like a net of vine creeper, so it appears to be trapped inside of it or, like the version in Hilton-Simpson’s photograph which is more covered with leaves and grasses, emerging from the ground.

Elizabeth Wotherspoon sailed to the Belgian Congo in 1946 to work as a secretary, there she met and married Marc Ballion, who was doing medical research. The Belgians had set up bacteriological institutes across the country, to combat the tropical diseases they encountered there, and Ballion seems to have been based at the one in Elisabethville (present day Lubumbashi) where he coauthored a couple of papers on salmonella, one type occurring in snakes and the other in humans. Their daughter Ann was born in 1947, and Elizabeth briefly returned to the UK to give birth to a son, Michael, in 1949. Elizabeth was from London and Marc was from Ostend but had lived in Gravesend, just outside London, for a time as a child, and they eventually moved back to London permanently in 1956, where the following year their second daughter, Susan, was born.

Steven Bailey met Susan Ballion on Friday 17 October 1975, at the first of Roxy Music’s two nights at the Empire Pool, next to Wembley Stadium in the north west of London. They quickly hit it off, bonding over a shared taste in music and clothes, and discovered they lived near each other in South London and had mutual friends. A few months later Bailey saw the Sex Pistols for the first time and soon the pair and most of their friends were converts, ultimately helping to establish the image and style of the emerging punk scene. They also adopted new names to go along with the identities they were creating for themselves and, after a few different attempts, Bailey eventually decided on Steven Severin and Ballion became Siouxsie Sioux. Inspired to try making music themselves, there were a few false starts with the band they started before they eventually settled on a line-up that would record two albums, The Scream and Join Hands, but then acrimoniously split up in 1979 when guitarist John McKay and drummer Kenny Morris abruptly left the band a few hours before they were due to take to the stage in Aberdeen, halfway through a tour. Siouxsie and Severin ascribed this behaviour to them being ‘art students.’

Siouxsie and the Banshees persevered without them however, with some help from Robert Smith of the Cure, and for their next album, Kaleidoscope, they brought in two new art students. Peter Clarke, known to everyone as Budgie, from St Helens near Liverpool, who had recently been playing drums for the Slits, and John McGeoch from Greenock, a founding member of Manchester band Magazine, who had also joined Visage after moving to London. After bonding creatively in the studio, then gelling as a musical unit on the subsequent tour, the two became official members and by the early months of 1981 they had honed enough new material to begin making a new album.

The Horniman Museum in Forest Hill is something of a beloved institution for many South Londoners, no doubt very familiar to both Siouxsie and Severin, and an item, or items, in its collection seems to have been the initial inspiration for the loose theme of the new album, Juju. A fascination with human psychology recurs throughout the Banshees catalogue, particularly around ideas of power, control and agency and their relationship to belief and devotion, and this new material would consider some of its darker aspects. Much of what is sinister in Juju arises from misplaced faith and a fear of the unknown, what is terrifying is the absence of agency, being controlled, or someone else losing control. A person becomes a rag doll, a ‘voodoo dolly,’ a severed head, and what’s worse is that “you have no choice.” Inanimate objects come to life, characters hear voices and are compelled to action. And while there are references to magic and the spirit world, this was not intended to be taken literally, the worst horror exists in the human mind, often in its ignorance, akin to Francisco Goya’s admonition that ‘the sleep of reason produces monsters.’ The Banshees give this sleep of reason a name, Juju. A concept which itself arises from cultural misunderstanding, from a desire to simplify but also render mysterious, a frisson of danger at a safe remove, the exoticizing of the Other. A phenomenon presents itself as one thing, but is in fact something else, Juju here is a metaphor for a willingness to be misled, or the inability to tell the difference.

 We need to interpret what we experience in order to make sense of it. If something is inexplicable, we will use our imagination, but often our imagination is influenced by stories and myths, and the behaviour of those around us. An idea of ‘Africa’ sometimes appears in Banshees songs, but in a jumble of references where Congolese are conflated with Kenyans and Rwandans at a time when the former Belgian Congo was now the Republic of Zaire. An idea of ‘Africa’ from the kind of tales of wonder and adventure that travellers brought home from the colonies, where Juju is the word for concepts that are untranslatable. Perhaps it could help Siouxsie understand something about her parents, and what made her father the person she knew him to be, a difficult, resentful alcoholic who died when she was fourteen.

Severin considers a childhood memory of his own on ‘Halloween,’ a loss of innocence occurs when a spell is broken, when simply becoming aware of mundane reality renders the fantasy no longer possible. But Severin accepts this as a necessary stage in his life, there is danger in delusion, if Juju has a moral to teach us it might be: be careful what you wish for.

In psychoanalysis, fetishism involves the projection of a fantasy onto something physical and external, but often the physical reality of the fetish item is taken as proof that the fantasy is therefore objectively real itself. In an Alfred Hitchcock film, this item might be considered to be a MacGuffin, an item that drives the plot and is important to the characters but doesn’t actually mean anything to the audience. For Hitchcock, like Freud, fetishism is about sexual fantasy, and the results are usually disturbing.

Siouxsie and the Banshees, like Hitchcock, are masters of suspense, their songs often have a cinematic or novelistic quality where some of the action takes place offscreen, and is left to your imagination. So, although many lyrics reference real events or existing ideas, they should be received in that spirit, rather than as straightforwardly ‘about’ the things that inspire them. ‘Night Shift,’ for example, is often said to be about Peter Sutcliffe, who the tabloids called the ‘Yorkshire Ripper.’ The reality seems to be that Siouxsie was told by a journalist some details about Sutcliffe when he had been arrested and charged but not yet tried. At the time the only information in the public domain was that he was a truck driver, journalists knew more but were not permitted to report it until the information was made public at trial, which was after the album had been recorded. Siouxsie took the information that she was told informally, that he worked nights and had been a gravedigger, that many of his victims were sex workers, and created a character that owes more to a psychological profile of a serial killer like Ed Gein, an inspiration for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho among other things.

Maybe we shouldn’t take the album cover too literally either. The Horniman Museum is not where the figure on the sleeve came from, contrary to what is often reported. The museum does have some items from the Congo area which have visual similarities, as well as some items collected by Emil Torday, but the most likely scenario is that a visit to the Horniman inspired the title and the concept. Then afterwards the band described something they saw there as a starting point for the design. Perhaps what they had in mind was a MacGuffin.

In 1915 Emmy Hennings and Hugo Ball arrived in Zurich, Switzerland, having fled to a neutral country from Germany, horrified by the first World War and what Ball had experienced at the front. Finding themselves almost destitute, Ball found work as the pianist for a theatre troupe and Hennings as a cabaret singer, but after several months they got permission to use the back room of a bar called the Holländische Meierei, where they established their own club which they named Cabaret Voltaire. Like the 18th century writer it took its name from, the cabaret sought to puncture the optimism of bourgeois society, reject its conventions, and create something new. They were joined by likeminded artists and the scene around them quickly became a movement with a manifesto and a name, Dada.

Applying what Hennings and Ball had learned in vaudeville theatre, the cabaret incorporated performance, poetry, music and dance, sometimes simultaneously and often descending into chaos. Through this chaos they wanted to ‘destroy’ art and create new forms of expression, new languages, new rhythms. They embraced cacophony, the nonsensical and the absurd and sought inspiration from cultures that were as distant as possible from that which they rejected.

From the late 19th century, European modern artists had looked outside of the western classical tradition for inspiration, from the stylised elegance of Japonisme, to the non-representational patterns and arabesques of Islam, which they viewed with at least some knowledge and respect for the cultures that produced them. In the early 20th century, artists began to take inspiration from the African artifacts in the Musée d'Ethnographie du Trocadéro in Paris, but these works they didn’t perceive as having a history or tradition, instead artists like Picasso believed they were drawing on something more essential, something primal or ‘primitive.’

The western European concept of the ‘primitive’ is intertwined with the history of the fetish. While psychoanalysis was applying some of this thinking to human development from infancy to adulthood, in the arts the idea was being applied to cultural expression, where what was considered to be less refined, like children’s drawings and ‘outsider’ art, was tapping into something basic and essential, and therefore more authentic. And it was authenticity that modern artists hoped to find at the Trocadéro.

It was something like authenticity that the Dada artists were looking for too, but they embraced African influence in contradictory ways. They championed it as an alternative belief system, the inverse of the western civilization that had resulted in the brutality of the Great War, but what they celebrated was a reductive, exoticized Other, of their own imagining. They held ‘African Nights’ where they wore masks, pounded drums and recited poems of invented words and meaningless sounds meant to evoke African languages.

Language, and its negation, was a primary concern for many Dada artists. Tristan Tzara, who had written that first manifesto in 1916, developed a way of working with what he called "cut-ups," where he would cut words out of a newspaper, mix them up and reassemble them in whatever order they fell to create a poem. He would do the same with images, sometimes producing a page for a publication where illustrations and text were collaged together seemingly at random, or resulting in a striking collision of typographies. “Every page should explode” he said in a subsequent manifesto.

When Dada relocated to Berlin at the end of the war, Kurt Schwitters, in an attempt to rid himself of traditional art practices, created a collage technique he called Merz, incorporating fragments of images and text and found objects in a manner that often made a witty statement about current events or represented something specific to his own life. Also in Berlin, Hannah Höch created a series of collages, or photomontages, described as ‘From an Ethnographic Museum,’ where she would combine images of African masks and statues with magazine photographs of the Weimar Republic era ‘New Woman.’ Intended to comment on the rising right wing discourse of the time that derided both as degenerate and irrational, Höch juxtaposed them, perhaps in a way to assert solidarity between the two, or as a rejection of the European tendency to fetishise both.

In 1981 Rob O'Connor left his job in the art department of Polydor Records to found his own design agency, Stylorouge. Things had moved quickly for O’Connor. Inspired by the immediacy and hands-on DIY ethic of punk, he’d gone from working at a small design agency in Brighton to a major record label within six months of graduating from art college. Now, after just two years, he’d outgrown it, the purpose of the new agency was a greater level of creative expression and more ambitious projects. This momentum would continue, O’Connor began working alone in a small room above a restaurant but very soon Stylorouge was taking on extra staff, working in a spirit of collaboration that would expand and extend into the 21st Century.

One of the first design commissions the newly founded Stylorouge received in 1981 was for the artwork for the new Siouxsie and the Banshees album, recorded in March and April with Nigel Gray, to be released that June. O’Connor had already worked with the Banshees, as they were on Polydor, and he knew they would be particular about what they wanted, having insisted on control over their image when they had signed. They requested that the artwork reflect the theme of the album and had two main directives for the sleeve design: it should contain an image of an African fetish, and it should have a Dada approach.

O’Connor then worked with photo-illustrator Thomi Wroblewski to find an appropriate image, researching in books, libraries and museums, until eventually they thought they had found what they were looking for in the Museum of Mankind, at the time home to the British Museum’s Department of Ethnography, but since reabsorbed back into the main museum itself. Wroblewski was given permission to photograph a selection of items, and from those they ultimately decided on the wooden figure surrounded by cloth and vines made by the people of Misumba, that Emil Torday had shipped back to England in 1908.

O’Connor and Wroblewski then experimented with the photograph in the darkroom, manually manipulating it to get the kind of look that would fit the theme of the brief, and arrived at a version in negative that made the figure appear more gold in colour. For the background, to create a Dada aesthetic, they put together a collage using sheet music, also in negative to compliment the gold of the figure and splashed with colour in a style reminiscent of Kurt Schwitters or Hannah Höch. The pages of sheet music are not connected to the album but chosen for their visual effect. Probably just something easily to hand, but perhaps deliberately selected to not be recognisable as a specific piece of music, it looks like they are from Manual of Scales, Arpeggios and Broken Chords for Pianoforte, a book of exercises originally compiled by Oscar Beringer and Thomas Dunhill for the Royal Schools of Music around the same time Torday was in the Belgian Congo. The text of the album title and artist on the front, and the song titles on the rear, are in gold on a black background so they sit back into the design rather than jumping out ahead of the image. For the inner sleeve, one side features portraits, by Joe Lyons, of the four band members on a white background which is clearly meant to evoke the inside gatefold of the eponymous Beatles LP known as the White Album, something of a touchstone for the Banshees. The other side contains the all-important song lyrics.

Today the country visited by Emil Torday, and by Siouxsie’s parents, is officially the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But from the assassination of its first democratically elected prime minister, Patrice Lumumba in 1961, to the ‘blood minerals’ of the present day, it has been riven by conflict and instability fuelled by outside influences. Home to the world’s largest reserves of cobalt and coltan, both essential for modern technology, as well as copper, tungsten, diamonds and more, the exploitation and hazardous working conditions involved in their extraction have led to human rights abuses and health issues, as well as mass displacement as people flee the armed conflicts that arise from the desire to profit from them.