Holy Week Art from Cameroon (Jesus Mafa)
I’m starting a new series of blog posts with scenes from Holy Week as portrayed by artists from Asia and Africa. This is the first post in the new series.
Holy Week in the Christian year is the week immediately before Easter. The earliest allusion to the custom of marking this week as a whole with special observances is to be found in the Apostolical Constitutions (v. 18, 19), dating from the latter half of the 3rd century and 4th century.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Holy_Week
Major events in the storyline include:
* Palm Sunday
* the anointing of Jesus’ feet at Bethany
* Jesus weeps over Jerusalem
* Jesus cleanses the temple
* Jesus washing the disciples’ feet
* the Last Supper
* praying in the Garden of Gethsemane
* betrayal by Judas
* denial by Peter
* multiple court trials of Christ
* carrying the cross (helped by Simon of Cyrene)
* crucifixion (with associated events like the crown of thorns, gambling for clothes, piercing the side, Temple curtain torn, etc)
* Deposition from the cross (lowering Christ’s body)
* Pieta (Mary cradling the body of her dad Son)
* wrapping the body in grave clothes
* laying Christ’s body in the tomb
Holy Week officially ends there, but for the purposes of these blog posts, I"m including some art of scenes of the Resurrection as well. As expected, each artist paints some scenes from this list but not all of them. And some artists will create multiple versions of a single scene.
In this series of blog posts, I’ll focus each post on the work of an individual artist, rather than a comparative post representing artists from a variety of countries, as I have usually done in the past. Thus, we’ll gain more exposure to the fuller oeuvre of a single artist at a time.
My hope is that these images from Asian and African artists, some well-known in the West and some very obscure, will help you prayerfully reflect on the Passion of Christ and his sacrificial love for all ethnic groups of the world.
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Holy Week Art from Cameroon (Jesus Mafa)
In the 1970s Mafa Christians in North Cameroon wanted to have pictures of the Gospel using their own cultural resonances. With the help of French missionaries they acted out the scenes, which were photographed, and sketches of the plays were worked up by French artists and given back to them – and to the world. More than 6 million copies have been distributed to date to 83 countries.
The 63 pictures are called ‘Jesus Mafa’ pictures and are available here:
http://diglib.library.vanderbilt.edu/diglib-displayindex.pl?SID=20161210880767822&pagenumber=1&code=act&
When I worked in rural Ghana for 7 years with Wycliffe Bible Translators, we used these culturally-contextualized pictures quite a lot and they received a lot of interest and good response from Christians and non-Christians.
Triumphal Entry on Palm Sunday
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Mary Anoints Jesus in Bethany
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Jesus Cleanses the Temple
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Jesus Washes the Feet of Peter
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The Last Supper
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Garden of Gethsemane
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Betrayal by Judas
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Peter Denies Jesus
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Jesus is Scourged
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Crucifixion
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An Angel Appears to Women at the Tomb (version 1)
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An Angel Appears to Women at the Tomb (version 2)
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Mary Sees Jesus in the Garden
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Emmaus
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Doubting Thomas
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I found this photo on the Jesus Mafa website. It’s apparently the Mafa people posing the scene of the Last Supper, and this photograph was given to the French artist to paint (Bénédite de la Roncière).
