Art: Wonderstone Wonders

Samuel Songo, a Mashona tribesman of Southern Rhodesia, has a left arm that is like a magnificent piece of ebony sculpture. But the rest of his body is stunted and crippled; his reedy heron’s legs are too frail to carry him, and he can use only two fingers at the end of his wizened right arm. When Africa was darkest, such human culls as Sam Songo were staked out for the leopards to rid them from the tribe. But Sam was allowed to live and to learn to carve living figures in stone with those two fingers and his good left arm.

Last week a collection of Songo’s sculptures in polished, grey-blue wonderstone (an African soapstone) was on tour in England with a show of African primitives by young students of the Anglican Church’s Cyrene school, near Bulawayo in Southern Rhodesia. Among pictures of Biblical scenes, painted in colors as vivid as parrot feathers, and chiseled Christs with kinky hair, the hit of the show was Songo’s Prodigal Son. The moving, 15-inch figures of the rich father and dissolute son, like all the Negro artist’s carvings, seemed to have in miniature the massive power of a primitive Epstein.

Natural Harmony. Even in the rural Midlands, where dowagers were somewhat affronted that the black artist should imagine Jesus as an African, discerning art-lovers were charmed by Sorgo’s figures. One London critic thought that Songo might be leading a triumphant invasion of the Africans. And artists envied the harmony of spirit in his work. Said one: “If European artists manage to pull off this harmony, they reckon they’re lucky. But with these boys it’s natural.”

Songo, now 25, developed his creative ability in the eight years that he has been at Cyrene, the church school for 320 Negro boys. A government school inspector brought him from his farming village to grizzled Canon Edward Paterson, an artist-priest who founded Cyrene in 1940. He was a half-starved boy in grey rags, and so helpless that he had to be wheeled to classes in an old baby carriage. But Sam, who showed surprising aptitude for drawing, soon told the canon: “I can carve.” Paterson wisely refrained from giving the crippled young Negro any formal art training. “What I tried to do,” said Paterson, “was let him express what was in his eyes and mind.”

Priceless Reward. Songo’s carvings and paintings, sold to tourists who came to visit the school, eventually earned $100 —enough. Sam thought, to buy a wheelchair. Paterson did not have the heart to tell him that the chair, delivered in Africa, would cost more than $200; instead, he appealed to national-sweepstakes officials for the rest of the money. Now Sam cheerfully rolls himself around his work as he carves.

That his sculptures were being admired in far-off England did not impress him as much as the prestige they brought him at home. For primitive man needs praise as much as the urban intellectual. Sam’s priceless reward was seeing the revulsion in a native woman’s face at sight of him change to admiration when she saw his carvings. To Bachelor Sam she whispered: “Ah, but you are clever!”