Postcards Still Send A Message

Did you know that there are 16,000 postcards in the permanent collection of the National Museum of African Art?

They're something of a secret. They're not up on the walls but in plastic sleeves in binders in the archives, which are deep in the museum. Anyone can look at them, but first you have to call and set up an appointment, and then you get to see too many pictures to absorb.

Dozens of old postcards, then scores of them, then hundreds, small photographs of Africa, black-and-white, or sepia, many stuck with stamps, addressed and mailed from the colonies. Looked at in big bunches, one after another, they leave memories that sting.

They aren't the sort of pictures one generally expects to find in art museums on the Mall. They aren't rare or handmade or transcendent or anything like that; they're middle-brow, faddish and cheap. I'm glad they're there.

They aren't worth much. In antiques malls, where they're sold from shoeboxes, early cards like these cost a few dollars apiece. There are lots of them around. They're not great art; they're products of the international postcard craze.

The craze began in the 1890s, when stiff cards without envelopes could first be mailed for less cost than letters, then really took off in 1902, when divided backs (half for the message, half for the address) were first permitted in the mail, and then fizzled before World War II, which means it largely coincided with African colonialism's turbulent finale.

The cards in the museum show a bygone time, and a bygone way of thinking about Africa. They're drenched in the colonial, and their innocence is brutal.

Some are merely souvenirs of this river port or that one. Others grab attention in more aggressive ways: They remind you of your duty, or cry out for your pity, or feed your curiosity, or manipulate your lust.

If you telephone the Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives -- 202-633-4690 -- and get your appointment, and spend a day with postcards, this is what you'll see:

Africa. The people of the continent, their necklaces and beads, their hairdos and their scars, headdresses and masks, fetishes and shrines. Waterfalls and termite mounds. The tusks of many elephants. White hunters with dead leopards. Bare breasts, grass huts, drums.

In the boom days of the postcard vogue, palm-size photographs like these were sold all over Europe, to women in particular, who collected them assiduously, inserted them in albums and showed them to their friends.

A postage stamp from far away, from French Equatorial Africa or the Belgian Congo, stuck right there on the photograph instead of on the back, made your postcard more exotic.