M S I N R E D O M L A I N O L O C T S D ecolonization in Twentieth-Century Twentieth-Century Nigeria O Art and Decolonization P CHIK A OKEKE�AGULU
P O S T M C O O D L E O R N Art and N I Decolonization in I A Twentieth-Century TwentiethCentury S L Nigeria M CHIK A OKEKE�AGULU OKEKE� AGULU
Duke University Press Durham and London 2015
© 2015 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free acid- free paper ♾ Designed by Heather Hensley Typeset in Scala and Meta by Ts Tseng eng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Cataloging-inCataloging- in-Publication Publication Data Okeke-Agulu, OkekeAgulu, Chika. Postcoloniall modernism : art and decolonization in Postcolonia twentieth-century twentiethcentury Nigeria / Chika Okeke-Agulu. Okeke-Agulu. pages cm Includes bibliographical bibliographical references and index. ���� 978978-00-82238223-57325732-2 2 (cloth : alk. paper) ���� 978978-00-82238223-57465746-9 9 (pbk : alk. paper) 1. Art, Nigerian—20th century. century. 2. Postcolonialism—Nigeria. Postcolonialism—Nigeria. 3. Decolonization—Nigeria. Decolonization—Nigeria. I. Title. �7399. � 5�394 2014 709.669′09041—dc23 2014006962 ���� 978978-00-82238223-76307630-9 9 (e-book) Cover: Demas Nwoko, Nigeria in 1959 , oil on board, 1960. Artist’s collection. Photo, the author. © Demas Nwoko. Frontispiece: Erhabor Emokpae, The Last Supper , oil on board, 1963. Photo, Clementine Deliss. © Estate of Erhabor Emokpae. This publication is made possible in part from the Barr Ferree Foundation Fund for Publications, Princeton University.
In memory of my father
���� �� �� �� � �� �� � �� � �� - ����� (“Nwokafor Ayaghiliya”; 1929–1993)
CONTENTS
ix
List of Illustrations
xiii
Acknowledgments
1
INTRODUCTION
Postcolonial Modernism
21
CHAPTER �
Colonialism and the Educated Educated Africans Africans
39
CHAPTER �
Indirect Rule and Colonial Modernism
71
CHAPTER �
The Academy and the AvantAvant-Garde Garde
131
CHAPTER �
183
CHAPTER �
227
CHAPTER �
259
CHAPTER �
291
Notes
313
Bibliographyy Bibliograph
327
Index
Transacting the Modern: Ulli Beier, Black Orpheus, Orpheus, and the Mbari International After Zaria
Contesting the Modern: Artists’ Societies and Debates on Art Crisis in the Postcolony
LIST OF ILLUSTRA ILLUSTRATIONS TIONS
FIGURE �.�
Aina Onabolu, Sisi Nurse, 1922, 46
FIGURE �.�
Akinola Lasekan, Ajaka of Owo, 1944, 48
FIGURE �.�
Raja Ravi Varma, Young Woman with a Veena, 1901, 49
FIGURE �.�
Kenneth Murray Murray,, Kwami, 1936, 53
FIGURE �.�
Kenneth Murray Murray,, Keta Girl , 1942, 53
FIGURE �.�
Ben Enwonwu, Coconut Palms, 1935, 58
FIGURE �.�
C. C. (Christopher Chukwunenye) Ibeto, Ibo Dancers at Awka , 1937, 58
FIGURE �.�
Uthman Ibrahim, Bamboos, ca. 1935, 67
FIGURE �.�
Sculpture studio with students’ work, ca. 1958–1950, 74
FIGURE �.�
Paul de Monchaux, Head , 1958, 74
Group photograph showing Paul de Monchaux (center) and art students of the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology (�����), ca. 1960, 79
FIGURE �.�
Photograph of “T “ Tsoede bronzes,” including the well-known well- known seated figure (right) from Tada, 1959, 80
FIGURE �.�
John Danford with plaster figure of Emotan, in his Chelsea studio, London, 1953, 81
FIGURE �.�
FIGURE �.�
Papa Ibra Tall, Royal Couple, 1965, 97
FIGURE �.�
Uche Okeke, Egbenuoba, 1961, 100
FIGURE �.�
Uche Okeke, Monster , 1961, 100
FIGURE �.�
Uche Okeke, Christ , 1961, 102
FIGURE �.��
Uche Okeke, Jumaa, 1961, 103
FIGURE �.��
Land of the Dead ), Uche Okeke, Ana Mmuo (Land ), 1961, 104
FIGURE �.��
Uche Okeke, Nza the Smart , 1958, 105
FIGURE �.��
Demas Nwoko, Beggars in the Train, 1959, 107
���� �� ������������� — x
FIGURE �.��
Demas Nwoko, N woko, Ogboni Chief , 1961, 108
FIGURE �.��
Demas Nwoko, Nigeria in 1959 , 1960, 109
FIGURE �.��
Demas Nwoko, White Fraternity , ca. 1960, 110
FIGURE �.��
Demas Nwoko, Bathing Women, 1961, 111
FIGURE �.��
Bruce Onobrakpeya, Eketeke vbe Erevbuye (Two Two Laziest People), 1961, 113
FIGURE �.��
Bruce Onobrakpeya, Landscape with Skull and Anthill , 1961, 114
FIGURE �.��
Yusuf Grillo, Oloogun, 1960, 115
FIGURE �.��
Yusuf Grillo, Sabada (Dance), 1964, 117
FIGURE �.��
Yusuf Grillo, Harvest , early 1960s, 118
FIGURE �.��
Akinola Lasekan, Portrait of J. D. Akeredolu , 1957, 119
FIGURE �.��
Oseloka Osadebe, Lunch at the Park, 1961, 120
FIGURE �.��
Okechukwu Odita, Sheep Grazing , 1961, 120
FIGURE �.��
Clifford Frith, Fulani Portrait , ca. 1960, 121
FIGURE �.��
Clifford Frith, Harmattan Landscape with Figures, 1960–1961, 122
FIGURE �.��
Patrick George, Hausa Standing , 1959, 123
FIGURE �.��
Okechukwu Odita, Female Model , 1962, 123
FIGURE �.��
Oseloka Osadebe, Husband and Wife, 1964, 124
FIGURE �.��
Jimo Akolo, Hausa Drummer , 1961, 125
FIGURE �.�
Susanne Wenger, Iwin, ca. 1958, 135
FIGURE �.�
Francis Newton Souza, Two Saints in a Landscape , 1961, 139
FIGURE �.�
Francis Newton Souza, Crucifixion , 1959, 139
Okeke and Onobrakpeya working in Michael Crowder’s residence, Lagos, summer 1960, 142
FIGURE �.�
Bruce Onobrakpeya, sketch for a panel o� his Covered Way mural mural (detail), 1960, 144
FIGURE �.�
Demas Nwoko, mural, Arts and Crafts pavilion, Nigeria Exhibition, Lagos, 1960, 144
FIGURE �.�
FIGURE �.�
Ben Enwonwu, Head of Afi, 1959, 146
FIGURE �.�
Yusuf Grillo, Two Yoruba Women, 1960, 148
Demas Nwoko and Uche Okeke at the opening of the Mbari Ibadan inaugural art exhibition, 1961, 152
FIGURE �.�
FIGURE �.��
Ibrahim El Salahi, Untitled, 1954–1957, 155
FIGURE �.��
Ibrahim El Salahi, Prayer , 1960, 155
FIGURE �.��
Ibrahim El Salahi, Untitled, 1961, 157
FIGURE �.��
Vincent Kofi at Mbari-Mbayo, Mbari-Mbayo, Osogbo, 1962, 159
FIGURE �.��
Jacob Jaco b Lawrence with Vincent Kofi’s Drummer , 1962, 159
FIGURE �.��
Malangatana Ngwenya, Untitled, 1961, 163
FIGURE �.��
C landestine Maternity Home , 1961, 164 Malangatana Ngwenya, To the Clandestine
FIGURE �.��
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Schmidt-Rottluff, Kneeling Woman, 1914, 167
���� �� ������������� —
Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Schmidt-Rottluff, Girl before a Mirror ( Mädchen ( ädchen vor dem Spiegel ), ), M
FIGURE �.��
1914, 167 FIGURE �.��
Jacob Lawrence, The Migration of the Negro, No. 22, 1940–1941, 170
FIGURE �.��
Jacob Lawrence, War Series: The Letter , 1946, 170
FIGURE �.��
Jacob Jaco b Lawrence, Street to Mbari, 1964, 173
FIGURE �.��
Jacob Lawrence, Four Sheep, 1964, 173
FIGURE �.��
Ahmed Shibrain, Calligraphy , 1962, 174
FIGURE �.��
Wedding ing , 1964, 176 Skunder Boghossian, Juju’s Wedd
FIGURE �.��
Skunder Boghossian, Night Flight of Dread and Delight , 1964, 178
FIGURE �.��
Agnaldo dos Santos, Nun, ca. late 1950s, 179
FIGURE �.��
Agnaldo dos Santos, Untitled, ca. late 1950s, 1 79
FIGURE �.��
Naoko Matsubara, Ravi Shankar , 1961, 180
FIGURE �.��
Naoko Matsubara, A Giant Tree, 1962, 180
FIGURE �.�
Uche Okeke, mural in the courtyard, Mbari Ibadan, 1961, 185
FIGURE �.�
Some Uli motifs, 187
FIGURE �.�
Uli mural, 1994, 187
FIGURE �.�
Uli mural, Eke shrine, 1987, 188
FIGURE �.�
Woman decorated with Uli, 1994, 188
FIGURE �.�
Uche Okeke, From the Forest , 1962, 190
FIGURE �.�
Uche Okeke, Head of a Girl , 1962, 190
FIGURE �.�
Uche Okeke, Owls, 1962, 191
FIGURE �.�
Uche Okeke, Munich Girl , 1962, 193
FIGURE �.��
Uche Okeke, Birds in Flight , 1963, 195
FIGURE �.��
Demas Nwoko, The Gift of Talents , mural, 1962, 197
FIGURE �.��
Igbo artist, male and female figures, 198
FIGURE �.��
Demas Nwoko, Adam and Eve, 1963, 199
FIGURE �.��
Demas Nwoko, Adam and Eve, 1962, 200
FIGURE �.��
Demas Nwoko, Adam and Eve, 1962–1963, 202
FIGURE �.��
Head, classical style, Nok culture, ca. 400 ���–200 ��, 203
FIGURE �.��
Demas Nwoko, Titled Woman, 1965, 205
FIGURE �.��
Demas Nwoko, Philosopher , 1965, 206
Bruce Onobrakpeya and Ru van Rossem at summer workshop, Mbari-Mbayo, MbariMbayo, Osogbo, 1964, 209
FIGURE �.��
FIGURE �.��
Bruce Onobrakpeya, Man with Two Wives , 1965, 211
FIGURE �.��
Bruce Onobrakpeya, Dancing Masquerader , 1965, 212
FIGURE �.��
Bruce Onobrakpeya, Untitled, ca. 1966, 213
FIGURE �.��
Bruce Onobrakpeya, Untitled, ca. 1966, 213
FIGURE �.��
Bruce Onobrakpeya, Travellers, 1967, 214
FIGURE �.��
Bruce Onobrakpeya, Bathers I , 1967, 215
xi
���� �� ������������� — xi i
FIGURE �.��
Simon Okeke, Lady , 1965, 218
FIGURE �.��
Simon Okeke, Off to Battle, 1963, 219
FIGURE �.��
Jimo Akolo, Fulani Horsemen, 1962, 222
FIGURE �.��
Jimo Akolo, Untitled, 1963, 223
FIGURE �.��
Jimo Akolo, Man Hanging from a Tree, 1963, 224
FIGURE �.��
Jimo Akolo, Northern Horsemen, 1965, 225
FIGURE �.�
Ben Enwonwu, Sango, 1964, 230
FIGURE �.�
Afi Ekong, Meeting , 1960, 232
FIGURE �.�
Afi Ekong, Cowherd , early 1960s, 232
FIGURE �.�
Ben Enwonwu, Beauty and the Beast , 1961, 244
FIGURE �.�
Erhabor Emokpae, My American Friend , ca. 1957, 246
FIGURE �.�
Erhabor Emokpae, Struggle between Life and Death , 1962, 247
FIGURE �.�
Erhabor Emokpae, Dialogue, 1966, 249
FIGURE �.�
Erhabor Emokpae, The Last Supper , 1963, 250
FIGURE �.�
Colette Omogbai, Accident , ca. 1963, 254
FIGURE �.�� FIGURE �.�
Colette Omogbai, Anguish , ca. 1963, 255
Uche Okeke (seated right) and Lawrence Emeka (center), 262
Scene from the Eastern Nigeria Theatre Group production of Andre Obe’s Noah , showing set and costumes designed by Uche Okeke, 262
FIGURE �.�
Visitors at the opening of exhibition of work by Oseloka Osadebe (second from right) at Mbari Enugu, ca. 1964, 262
FIGURE �.�
FIGURE �.�
Uche Okeke, Crucifixion , 1962, 266
FIGURE �.�
Uche Okeke, Primeval Forest , 1965, 267
FIGURE �.�
Uche Okeke, Nativity , 1965, 268
FIGURE �.�
Uche Okeke, Adam and Eve, 1965, 269
FIGURE �.�
Uche Okeke, Oyoyo, 1965, 270
FIGURE �.�
After Achebe), 1965, 273 Uche Okeke, Conflict ( (After
FIGURE �.��
W Uche Okeke, Aba Revolt ( Women’s ( omen’s War ), ), 1965, 275
FIGURE �.��
Demas Nwoko, N woko, Crisis, 1967, 279
FIGURE �.��
Demas Nwoko, Hunter in a War Scene, 1967, 280
FIGURE �.��
Demas Nwoko, Combatant I , 1967, 281
FIGURE �.��
Demas Nwoko, Nw oko, Combatant II , 1967, 282
FIGURE �.��
Demas Nwoko, Soldier ( Soja ( oja), 1968, 284 S
FIGURE �.��
S Demas Nwoko, Soldier ( Soja ( oja), 1968, 285
FIGURE �.��
Demas Nwoko, Enuani Dancers, 1968, 286
FIGURE �.��
Demas Nwoko, Dancing Couple (Owambe), 1968, 287
AC A CKNOWLEDG MENTS
gathered in this book came to life two decades ago, when in 1993 I organized a major retrospective retrospe ctive of Uche Okeke in Lagos. Since then I have benefited immensely from many individuals and institutions, but I can mention only a few here. First, I thank Obiora Udechukwu, my teacher and friend, who, by convincing me to organize the Okeke retrospective, set me on a path that eventually took me from studio practice to art history and, ultimately, to this book. I cannot overstate the role he and El Anatsui played in shaping my intellectual intellec tual life in Nsukka. I thank Uche Okeke for granting me several interviews over the years, especially for giving me unhindered access to his meticulous Zaria-period Zaria-period diaries and to the Asele Institute library and art collection. collec tion. I thank also Bruce Onobrakpeya, Demas Nwoko, Jimo Akolo, Yusuf Grillo, Okechukwu Odita, Felix Ekeada, Paul de Monchaux, J. P. Clark, and Clifford Frith for sharing with me their archival materials, memories of Zaria, and information about their work. Yusuf Grillo was particularly helpful in facilitating my access to the ��� � Collection at the University University of Lagos Lagos library. I am grateful to the late Segun Olusola and to Frank Aig-Imoukhuede, Aig-Imoukhuede, who gave me invaluable information on art and culture in Nigeria during the early sixties; and to Nduka Otiono for connecting me with J. P. Clark. I thank Jerry Buhari, who made it possible for me to consult the ����� files in the Ahmadu Bello University art department storeroom; Dapo Adeniyi, for making my access to the Daily Times photo archives less of an ordeal; Mayo Adediran, for facilitating my access to the Kenneth Murray Archives at the National Museum, Lagos. I also thank Kavita Chellarams and Nana THE MATERIAL AND IDEAS
��������������� — xi v
Sonoiki, of Art House Contemporary Ltd, Lagos; Vilma Eid, of Galeria Estação, São Paulo; and Ul� Vierke and Sigrid Horsch-Albert, Horsch-Albert, of Iwalewa-Haus, Iwalewa-Haus, University of Bayreuth; they all helped me find many of the rare images published in this book. Many thanks to Chike Dike and the late Emmanuel Arinze for giving me access to the collections of the National Gallery of Art and the National Council for Arts and Culture, respectively. My appreciation also goes to Afolabi Kofo-Abayomi Kofo-Abayomi for giving me access to his private art ar t collection, and to Chinwe Uwatse, Ndidi Dike, Ego UcheUche-Okeke, Okeke, Peju Layiwola, John Ogene, Ngozi Akande, Teena Akan, Chuma Okadigwe, Kolade Oshinowo, Hilary Ogbechie, Oliver Enwonwu, Olasehinde Odimayo, and Chike Nwagbogu; and to my dear friends Uche Nwosu and Tony Nsofor, who assisted me in my research in Nigeria. In England, England, I benefited from the valued advice and assistance of John Picton, Doig Simmonds, John Murray, Christopher Atkinson, and Grant Waters. I thank Ibrahim El Salahi for granting me a three-day three- day interview at his residence in Oxford. My gratitude goes to Nnorom Azuonye and Eddie Chambers, who accommodated me and helped me find my way around London and Bristol while on research in the summer of 2003. I appreciate the assistance given to me by the following: Helen Masters, of the British Empire and Commonwealth Museum, Bristol; Malcolm Staig, the archivist at Goldsmiths’ college library, London; Lucy Dean, Simon Lane, and Dorothy Sheridan, at the University of Sussex; Catherine Russell, at the Otter Gallery of Art, Ar t, University of Chichester; Lucie Marchelot, of Bonhams, London; Jessica Iles, of Browse & Darby, London; London; and Martine Mart ine Rouleau, of the University College London Art Museum, London. Thanks, too, to Akin Adesokan, Koyo Kouoh, Alioune Badiane, Hamady Bocoum, and Joanna Grabski for their assistance with research on images.
I MUST MENTION THE most
rewarding time I spent with the late Ulli Beier and with Georgina Georg ina Beier in Sydney, Australia, in the summers of 2000, 2005, and 2009. The interviews interv iews and conversations that often continued until early in the morning remain most memorable. I thank them also for giving me access to the vast Ulli and Georgina Beier Archive and for the frequent discussions and exchange of mails on their incomparable experience of African art and culture. In a way, this book is in part a testament to Ulli’s unparalleled work in modern Nigerian art and literature. In the United States, several people have been of tremendous help in the course of my research for this book. These include Janet Stanley, of the Na-
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tional Museum of African Art Library, Librar y, and Simon Ottenberg, Rebecca Dimling Cochran, Peri Klemm, and Dianne Stewart. I thank Okwui Enwezor and Salah M. Hassan, my colleagues and coeditors at Nka: Journal of Contem porary African Afric an Art , with whom I have shared and debated issues relating to African artistic modernism and specific aspects of this work over the years. I have benefited also from working with Enwezor on several art exhibitions that have helped me think through some of the important arguments presented in this study. I thank James Meyer, Clark Poling, and Bruce Knauft, whose intellectual generosity shaped my scholarly life at Emory University and beyond. I remain ever grateful to Sidney Kasfir as my mentor and friend; she kept insisting that I finish work on this book before life happened to it. I must mention Kobena Mercer, Esther Da Costa-Meyer, Costa-Meyer, Simon Gikandi, Steven Nelson, Peter Erickson, Valerie Smith, Okwui Enwezor, Salah M. Hassan, Sidney Kasfir, Obiora Udechukwu, and Ada Udechukwu, all of whom read earlier versions of this book’s manuscript and provided invaluable comments on it. Through the process of writing this book, since its earliest iterations, I received invaluable research funding and fellowships from Emory University, the Pennsylvania State University, Williams College, the Sterling and Francine Clark Art Institute, the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Foundation, and most importantly, Princeton University. University. Thanks to Hal Foster and Thomas Leisten, at the Department of Art and Archaeology, and to Valerie Smith and Eddie Glaude, at the Center for African A frican American Studies, Princeton University, for allowing me generous research time and the resources I needed to complete this book and bring it to its present form. I am especially thankful to the Barr Ferree Fund, whose generous funding made the many color reproductions in this book possible. I also wish to thank Monica Rumsey, my copyeditor; Ken Wissoker, the editorial director at Duke University Press, for believing in this work long before it became a publishable manuscript; and Elizabeth Ault and Jessica Jessica Ryan for guiding me through the rigors of manuscript preparation. I will never forget Enee Abelman, Sarah, Sharon and Larry Adams, Olu Oguibe, Simon Ottenberg, Toyin Akinosho, Jahman Anikulapo, Chinwe Uwatse, Ndidi Dike, Janet Stanley, and Alhaji Abdulaziz Ude—friends I met along the way and who supported me and my work. My deepest gratitude goes to Obiora and Ada Udechukwu, with whom I shared so many experiences before and after the dark days at Nsukka; and to Okwui Enwezor and Salah M. Hassan, two most enduring friends. Finally,, I must mention here my deep gratitude to my mother, Joy Egoyibo Finally
xv
��������������� — xv i
Okeke-Agulu (“Aruagbala”), my brothers, Okwudili, Ikechukwu, and EjiOkeke-Agulu keme, and my sisters, Ogoegbunam and Onyinyechukwu, for supporting me during all these years. My late sister, Uzoamaka, and brother, Uchechukwu, saw the beginning of this work but not its completion in the form of this book. I offer it to their memory. To Marcia, my dearest friend and wife: no words can express enough my debt to you for sticking with me through the rough yet exhilarating years that began at the House of Hunger and the art studios in Nsukka and for being the mother of our most precious children, Arinzechukwu and Ngozichukwu, who have made my life complete.
Introduction
POSTCOLONIAL MODERNISM
THIS BOOK EXAMINES the emergence of postcolonial modernism in Nigeria
during the first half of the twentieth centur y and its elaboration in the decade of political independence, roughly between 1957 and 1967. It covers the dede cades of colonization yet focuses on the Art Society—a group of young artists whose careers began while students at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology, Technology, Zaria, and in whose work we find the first concerted concert ed articulation of artistic modernism in postindependence Nigeria. In revisiting the debates within the contemporary art world that emerged in Nigeria during this decade, this book argues that by proposing the idea of natural synthesis, which basically meant the selective use of artistic resources and forms from Nigerian/African and European traditions, these artists inaugurated postcolonial modernism in Nigeria. Consistent with the idea of natural synthesis is the acknowledgment and appropriation of technical procedures and sensibilities inherent in modernism, particularly the deployment of experimental rigor and zeal to develop
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2
radically new formal modes. The results are works of art that show both a deep connection with local artistic traditions and the stylistic sophistication we have come to associate with twentieth- century modernist practices. In embarking on this crucial work, these artists were inspired by the rhetoric and ideologies of decolonization and nationalism initiated by early black nationalists Edward Blyden (1832–1912) and Herbert Macaulay (1864–1946) (1864 –1946) and later by advocates of negritude and pan-Africanism, pan- Africanism, thus reminding us that it is impossible to imagine modernism in Nigeria (and Africa) outside a wider context of cultural nationalism. Notwithstanding that what I call the independence generation of artists built on the achievements of their modern predecessors in Nigeria, their work—as this book amply shows—was radically different in terms o� both its formal ambition and the vigorous critical discourse it fostered. fos tered. In mapping the emergence of this new work during the period of national independence, this book demonstrates the specific ways that aspiration to and experience of political sovereignty, in the hands of young Nigerian artists, was translated into an artistic modernism closely aligned to the experience and realities of Nigeria’s postcolonial modernity. What is more, in the way it follows the antagonistic relationship between the colonial regime r egime and Lagos-based intellectual elite, the debates among colonial art educators, curricular strategies within the art department at Nigeria’s first art school at Zaria, where the Art Society was formed, and the art criticism and national cultural programs in the early 1960s, the book argues that modernism and political ideolog y, in in the context of decolonizing nations, were not mutually exclusive discourses. In fact, the book’s point, mooted already by Elizabeth Harney and Geeta Kapur but without the directness attempted here, is that the conjunction of art and nationalist ideology is an important characteristic of postcolonial modernism as an international mid-twentiethmid-twentieth-century century phenomenon.� This book thus crucially maps the unprecedented, largely ill understood, yet fundamental artistic, intellectual, and critical networks in four Nigerian cities—Zaria, Ibadan, Lagos, and Enugu—connecting Nigerian, African, African diaspora, and European artists, critics, and the cultural elite during the continent’s decade o� independence. The reader will also notice that this book goes beyond art as such, occasionally bringing into view my own reading o� literature produced by Nigerian writers during this period. This approach is prescribed by the deep entanglements of modern art, literature, and drama as indexed in the journal Black Orpheus and Orpheus and the Mbari Artists and Writers Club, Ibadan—two signal forums of mid-twentieth mid-twentieth century African and black artistic and literary literar y mod-
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ernism. Still, the book’s underlying premise is that it is impossible to develop a historical perspective on modern and contemporary African art of the twentieth century and beyond without the sort of close examination of the political, discursive, and artistic transactions and translations that brought modern art from the margins of cultural practice during the colonial period to the very center of debates about African artistic subjectivity and cultural identity in the years after the attainment of political sovereignty. My hope, therefore, is that this book bo ok might serve as a model of the kind of much needed expansive history of modern African art. It lays bare the often ignored yet critical connections between political developments and transactions in the cultural-artistic cultural-artistic landscape, and it places the work o� individual artists or their intellectual motivations and ideas within a larger context of similar or antagonistic positions advanced by other artists and stakeholders of an evolving art world. In fact, it is this kind of study—which maps the primary political and cultural scene of modern art but also engages in a focused reading of the work of exemplary and leading artists involved in the making of these histories—that African art history scholarship urgently needs. To be sure, dual attention to the big picture and close analysis in one book can have its shortcomings, but I would argue arg ue that the gains of such an approach are inestimable for two reasons. First is that to date our understanding of the development of modernism in Nigeria and Africa remains at the very best fragmentary; a most pressing task of art history is reconstructing that history not so much to understand the art of yesterday as to appreciate how it shapes the more familiar landscape of contemporary art. Second, in order to show the very processes and contexts from which modernism emerged, as well as its ambitions, arguments, and visual rhetoric, we must perforce em bark on a meticulous reading of particular artists and their works and ideas, which are central to this history. These two considerations inform the architecture of this book in the sense that in it I begin with the making of anticolonial subjectivity and with colonial modernism as a way to situate intellectual and ideological origins of the work associated with the Art Society during the independence period. In so doing, I strike a balance between narrating through a selective compression of a sociopolitical history of Nigeria and a critical examination of contemporary writings, wr itings, as well as a formalist analysis of specific artworks and technical protocols deployed by key artists. In the process, I sidestep deep engagements with biographies of the individuals, except in the rare instance where such information is relevant to the ideas associated with such persons. From the vantage point of researching and writing this book, I can already
3
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see the salience o� its key arguments in the modern art of various African countries, where groups of artists during the mid-twentieth mid- twentieth century confronted similar colonial conditions and subsequently developed versions of what this book calls postcolonial calls postcolonial modernism . One need look only at the Old Khartoum school in the Sudan—where together with his colleagues, Ibrahim El Salahi (born 1930), who figures in this study courtesy of the presentation o� his work at Mbari, Ibadan, and in Black Orpheus, Orpheus, articulated a modernism built upon artistic resources from Islamic calligraphy, indigenous Sudanese craftwork, and modernist pictorial techniques—or at the work of the school’s contemporaries, who formed the school of Casablanca and for whom, in addition to everything else, Berber visual arts and ritual signs became primary sources for reimagining their work as modern artists. There are other, similar manifestations in Egypt, Ghana, Algeria, Ethiopia, and so on; what they have in common is that the impulse to rethink their work was often catalyzed by b y their identification with the rhetoric of decolonization and the attainment of national political independence. But these topics have yet to be subjected to the kind of rigorous examination this book attempts on Nigeria. What we have, instead, are isolated views of these important moments, studies o� individual artists or groups, and writings that have inserted these artists and their work into disconnected, ahistoric thematic rubrics.� It is important to stress two other crucial points of this book, besides illuminating what until now has been a mythic, modernist era in Nigeria. First, it is an attempt to plug a gaping hole in the art history of twentieth- century Nigeria and, by extension, Africa. With the significant entry of contemporary African artists into the international arena in the 1990s, and especially during the first decade of the twenty-first twenty-first century—a phenomenon announced by the 2004 ArtNews magazine cover “Contemporary African art: The newest avant-garde?”—understanding avantgarde?”—understanding the genealogy of this “new” art has become pressing. Is it really possible to fully understand, say, the magnificent metal and wood sculptures of El Anatsui, the world-renowned world-renowned Ghanaian-Nigerian Ghanaian-Nigerian artist (born 1944), without any knowledge o� his intellectual connections to two Mbari artists, Uche Okeke and Vincent Kofi, and to Kwame Nkrumah’s politics and the rhetoric of African personality? The answer to this question will depend on how much we know about the influences that the artists presented in this book exerted on later artists, such as Anatsui in Nigeria and elsewhere, and about the ideas that informed their work during the independence decade. Consider, for instance, that at the end of the Biafran War (1967–1970), Uche Okeke (born 1933) became head of the art school at Nsukka. He soon reorganized the art program and more or less institutional-
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ized natural synthesis, thus becoming the leader of the Nsukka school, which was famous for its exploration of Igbo I gbo Uli and other West West African traditional graphic forms. It was this “new” school of artists, with its growing international reputation, that Anatsui joined in 1975, convinced of the relevance of its curricular ideology to his own artistic sensibilities, which were already primed by his attraction to Nkrumah’s cultural politics.� Knowledge of this connection between Anatsui and Okeke and, by extension, between be tween Anatsui and postcolonial modernism facilitates a longer historical histori cal perspective of contemporary African art and troubles the trope of surprising newness that has tended to follow, f ollow, like a wondrous shadow, the work of even the most accomplished African artists today. The second reason the history narrated in this book is important has already been insinuated in the preceding paragraph: the profound impact that the work of the Art Society artists and similar groups in other countries had on late twentieth-century twentieth-century Nigerian and African art. Apart from the fact that by the late 1960s, which marks one chronological bookend of this study, these artists (and their colleagues in Lagos) had become the acknowledged leading figures in modern Nigerian art, their influence grew exponentially in the subsequent decades. Take, for instance, three key artists presented. Along with Okeke and his work at the Nsukka school, Demas Nwoko (born 1935) established himself as a major architect who, perhaps more than any other modern Nigerian architect, articulated through his designs the successful synthesis of traditional trad itional Igbo, Japanese, Japanese, and Western architectural dede sign and principles.� Bruce Onobrakpeya (born 1932), building on the printmaking techniques he discovered in the mid-1960s mid- 1960s (see chapter 5) but also on the massive network of artists associated with w ith his studio in Lagos, became one of Nigeria’s and Africa’s most influential artists. The stature and influence of their other colleagues—among them Yusuf Grillo, Erhabor Emokpae, and Jimo Akolo—is no less illustrious. In short, even within the irrefutably complex, multiple trajectories that constitute contemporary Nigerian art in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the idea of natural synsy nthesis articulated by Okeke and the Art Society remains strong. This book thus helps contextualize and historicize contemporary Nigerian and African artists’ relationship with the postcolony and to make sense of the expanded landscape of art since the last two decades of the twentieth century. centur y.�� The material presented here is the result of twenty years of sustained research, beginning with my very ver y first major effort at organizing an art exhibition in the early 1990s. Sometime in 1992, Obiora Udechukwu, my former teacher and colleague at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, suggested that I
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organize a retrospective exhibition of Uche Okeke to mark his sixtieth birthday in April 1993. I had not met Okeke, but I was fascinated by the opportunity to get to really know k now him and his work, given his reputation as the doyen of the Nsukka school and a mysterious national figure who at the time had retired in near seclusion to his historic cultural research center, the Asele Institute, Nimo. In the course of planning that exhibition I was led to an era, in many ways a distant one, a meaningful appreciation of whose scope and core motivations, politics and legacies, a reading of the major texts— Ulli Beier’s Contemporary Art in Africa (1968), Africa (1968), Marshall Ward Mount’s African Art: The Years since 1920 (1973), Jean Kennedy’s New Currents, Ancient Rivers (1992)—had not prepared me. Nor did those texts help me understand the relationship between the formal, discursive, and ideological dimensions of the work of Okeke or other leading figures.� Access to Okeke’s personal archives, including his stunningly meticulous diary entries from the mid1950s through the 1960s, spurred my two-decadetwo-decade-long long study, not just o� his work, but also o� his surviving former Zaria colleagues and their contemporaries. In fact, it was this interest in the work of the Art Society artists and their contemporaries that set me to writing this book; book ; it also helped me conceptualize the curatorial collaboration—with my friend and colleague Okwui Enwezor—that became the complex, traveling exhibition The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994 1945–19 94,, organized by the Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, in 2001.� Needless to say, The Short Century , because o� its continental scope, made me particularly aware of the similarities between modern art and the politics of decolonization in Nigeria and Africa. It made me consider the broader, more challenging questions that have dogged the perception of modern African art, all of which are connected to its relationship with colonialism and Western art traditions, its apparent inauthenticity and derivativeness, its supposed lack of comparative sophistication, its troubling intimacy with cultural nationalism, and its dubious connection with African modernity. Let me address some of these matters to better frame the critical challenges this book confronts.
Europe and Modern African Art
It is impossible to fully appreciate the stakes of artistic modernism in twentieth-century twentiethcentury Nigeria without close attention to the political and cultural implications of Africa’s encounter with Europe during the imperial age. As this book argues, this modernism is a consequence of complex factors arising on the one hand from the political and discursive confrontation
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between British indirect rule ideology and its attendant cultural practices and on the other from theories and ideas associated with African decolo nization in the first half of the twentieth century. In tracing the genealogy and the political-discursive political-discursive conditions that catalyzed this new work, as I do in the first two chapters, my task is to question routine assumptions about the origins of modern art in Nigeria (and Africa) by resituating and reframing its ideological relationship relat ionship with colonialist thought. This is an important impor tant art-historical arthistorical problem, no less because it had been normal for historians of modern African art to see a seamless, seamle ss, unproblematic link between the establishment of art teaching in colonial schools or in workshops established by European artist-teachers artist-teachers and the rise of modern art in Africa. The usual argument is that since formal art teaching began under the watch of colonial regimes and since easel painting and academic art was imported into colonial Africa through these encounters, it follows that the art made by Africans after this European type typ e of art education is a product of colonialism and colonialist visions. Against these notions, this book sets out to disentangle artistic modernism from this supposed colonial imagination, returning it to the long history of anticolonial, self-affirmative self-affirmative theories, practices, and visions that began at the turn of the twentieth century. For it is all too clear, as I detail in the first chapter, that with the entrenchment of formal colonialism on the continent, African and black intellectuals in fields as diverse as religion, sociology, literature, art, and politics set se t for themselves the task o� imagining an African modern subjectivity defined primarily by their own need for selfassertion and their visions visi ons of political and cultural autonomy. autonomy. Even when this task was not vociferously anticolonial, anticolonial, it often staked a claim cla im to an alternative position at odds with the schemes and propositions of colonial regimes and their apologists. This will to self-definition—which self- definition—which characterized the African anticolonial and decolonization movements—laid the grounds for the work of that generation of artists in Nigeria and elsewhere who par ticipated, midcentury, in the making of what this book calls cal ls postcolonial modernism. The assumption of a causal link between colonialist thought and modern African art has resulted in the long-standing long- standing underestimation of or outright disregard for the artistic accomplishments represented by this work, as well as doubts about the significance o� its contribution to the expansion of the horizons of modernisms of the twentieth century. It is in fact necessary to return to this rather old problem, precisely because its damning effect on the reception of African modernist work remains with us today. Let me cite three examples o� how a particular perspective on the colonial history of Africa has undermined the reception and appreciation of modern African art
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of the type covered in this study. In their classic 1964 book on African sculpture, two eminent ethnologists, the Briton William Fagg and the American Margaret Plass, summarily dismissed the work of African modernists thus: “we are not concerned here with ‘contemporary’ African art, which for all its merits is an extension exte nsion of European art by a kind o� involuntary cultural colonialism.”� More than three decades later, a European museum curator confidently justified the marginalization of contemporary African art in international art exhibitions by noting that “it seems se ems like third- rate artwork art work to us because the art presented here emulates the Western tradition—this is a criterion for selection—and because it is always lagging behind, regardless o� how commendable the effort might be basically.”� And finally, only a few years ago the British scholar Rasheed Araeen declared the naturalistic, colonial-era colonialera portrait paintings of Aina Onabolu to be a form of “mimicry under the tutelage of colonial paternalism.”�� Central to these three assessments of modern African art are two important, unflattering assumptions about this work: first, the idea that it is a weak copy, a product o� involuntary mimicry of European art; art ; and second, its apparent belatedness, belate dness, that is to say, its perpetual condition o� being out of time, quintessentially anachronistic, and completely evacuated of any radical potential.�� But these arguments about mimesis and modern African art miss a crucial aspect of mimicry, which, as Homi Bhabha has suggested, produces “the representation of difference that is itself a process of disavowal.”�� In other words, they ignore the radical potential of self-consciously self- consciously deployed mimesis. Moreover, they sidestep the rather complex strategies adopted by colonial subjects committed to asserting, even within the limited politicaldiscursive space available to them, their right to determine and articulate their own visions of modernity. Indeed, early-twentiethearly- twentieth-century century radical nationalists saw native beliefs and cultural practices as important elements of a modern subjectivity that was quite comfortable with negotiating, against all odds, its relationship with Europe. Thus my argument in this book is that this model of colonial-nationalist colonial-nationalist subjectivity informed the work of the independence generation of Nigerian artists who invented a modernist artistic identity from a rigorous and confident synthesis o� Western and indigenous techniques, design elements, and styles. st yles. In doing so, they asserted that modernist and progressive artists must be willing to acknowledge in their work the diverse contradictory local and foreign elements that constituted Nigerian and African modernity.
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9
Nationalism,, Modernity, and Compound Consciousness Nationalism
In his influential study on nationalism, Benedict Anderson introduced a useful concept, what he calls “coloni “colonial al pilgrimage,” which refers to the movemove ment of colonial subjects, initially to European metropolises and later to regional bureaucratic centers, to attend school. Often, he writes, they met fellow bilingual sojourners from other colonies, with whom they shared notions of nationalism drawn largely from Western models.�� Anderson’s point here is to draw a direct, uncomplicated line between Western education during the colonial period and the colonial subject’s mental conversion to everything European. Yet Yet it is clear that, although many of the African intelligentsia, with no viable options for higher education at home, embarked on the colonial pilgrimage to Europe (and later to the United United States), their rere sponses to the experience exper ience varied. For instance, in his autobiography Kwame Nkrumah describes his meetings in Europe with other African students and nationalists, including Jomo Kenyatta (1894–1978), Félix HouphouëtHouphouët-Boigny Boigny (1905–1993), and Léopold Sédar Senghor (1906–2001)—who, respectively, became the first presidents and prime ministers of Kenya, Ivory Coast, and Senegal—before and after the Fifth Pan-African Pan- African Congress in Manchester (1945).�� However, while Senghor and Houphouët-Boigny Houphouët- Boigny demonstrated their infatuation with la civilisation française and political commitment to “Françafrique,”” Kenyatta and Nkrumah’s view “Françafrique, v iew of and relationship with Western culture were very different. Senghor ruled Senegal with the support of French advisers, maintained strong ties with France, and after two decades as president, stunningly retired to a French village, vill age, where he died in 2001. In contrast, upon Nkrumah’s return from England, he revived the idea of African personality and his own concept of decolonization through consciencism as guiding principles for political pan-Africanism. pan-Africanism.�� �� He also colorfully placed Ghana’s cultural traditions at the fore of national politics, taking the honorific “Osagyefo,” in addition to adopting the kente cloth as an assertion o� his new, independent personhood. Even so, Nkrumah also wore Mao suits to establish his socialist credentials, cred entials, while his friend and colleague, the Kenyan nationalist Jomo Kenyatta, took the honorific “Mzee” and combined Savile Row suits with a leopard-skin leopard-skin hat, fly whisk, and Muslim sandals. In both instances, there is an unquestionably deft sartorial hybridization and manipulation of populist imagery for political capital. Yet it was in Nkrumah’s and Kenyatta’s Kenyatta’s recognition rather than rejection r ejection of the symbolic sy mbolic and tactical values of these unstable multicultural fusions that their sartorial sense parallels their nationalist political ideologies and their identity politics.
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This tendency to embrace native cultures and to publicly express one’s attachment to them after a a pilgrimage to the West—all West—all this while appropriating usable ciphers o� Western economic and political modernity—suggests a more complex, even paradoxical, response to the metropolitan encounter. Put differently, the pilgrimage might have produced what Anderson calls Anglicized colonial subjects, but the pilgrim cultural nationalists returned home with the confidence to regard Western and African cultures and resources as permutable and fungible elements for the construction of a new, hybrid postcolonial subjectivity. subjectivit y. These West Africans thus remind us of Chatterjee’s Indian nationalists, for whom the road to modernity had to begin with an assertion of cultural difference without which any claim to independence from Europe might not be completely justifiable or meaningful.�� meaningful.�� But how to make sense of this will to synthesis, this idea of modernity in which combinatory nativisms and Westernisms yielded what could easily be be mistaken for a crisis-prone, crisis-prone, unstable, and inauthentic postcolonial subjectivity? One thing is certain: theories of mimicry, W. E. B. Du Bois’s notion of “double consciousness,” or Ali Mazrui’s idea of triple heritage do not sufficiently explain how self-aware self-aware Africans synthesized autonomous and competing pressures of ethnic, religious, national, and racial identities as part of what I want to call strategies o� becoming. I suggest that this attitude to modernity is especially unproblematic among African peoples, given that their cosmologies tend to run counter to the very metaphysical me taphysical and ontological absolutes at the basis o� Western worldviews. This kind of subjectivity is refashioned through and constituted by constant negotiation with others— humans, deities, spirits. Also, it is the essence of “Ife “Ife kwulu ife akwuso ya,” ya,” a common Igbo adage, which affirms the belief that the self and the other are not necessarily opposed but instead are signposts in a cyclical network ne twork of sosocial, ritual, and cosmic relations.�� The ideas encapsulated in this Igbo proverb also occur in a Xhosa proverb, “umuntu “umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu ” (a person is a person through persons), which, according to the South African philosopher Augustine Shutte, means that the “self and world are united and intermingle in a web of reciprocal relations.”�� One might call this the principle of complementarity at the basis of Igbo and African philosophies o� being. This, it seems to me, helps explain the disposition on the part of African peoples to open up to and incorporate new religions, cultures, and ideas, whether before, during, or after the colonial encounter. This sensibility is further instantiated in an episode in Chinua Achebe’s novel Arrow of God , in which the priest Ezeulu, an appointed protector o� his community’s traditions against the onslaught of alien Christian-colonial Christian- colonial culture, admonished
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his school-bound school-bound son to thoroughly master the the white man’s system of writing upon which colonial governance is based, such that he could write with his left hand—in other words, so he could do what he wished with this acquired knowledge.�� Despite his antagonism for the colonial regime, reg ime, Ezeulu saw in the written word not just a gateway to the new world order but also a tool to ol for self-enunciation selfenunciation and navigation through the maze of confounding modernity. He was, like many an African cultural nationalist, fiercely protective o� his ancestral heritage and cognizant of the inexorable value of aspects of Western modernity to the constitution o� his son’s subjectivity in the new, colonial world. This same incorporative, compound consciousness of African subjectivity was what the proponents of negritude, African personality, and similar anticolonial ideologies sought to recoup when they argued for the inclusion of Africa and African traditions in the making of postcolonial modernity. In proposing this idea of compound consciousness, my intention is to place emphasis on the agency or choice-making choice-making facility of the individuals involved; in other words, they are simultaneously products and agents of history. In this sense I agree with the art ar t historian Henry J. Drewal, who has argued that what he calls “multiple consciousness” of Afro-Brazilians Afro-Brazilians is not to be mistaken for “syncretism,” which implies a “blending and homogenizing process.” process.” As he notes: “I would suggest we recognize the distinctiveness of each faith, the simultaneous interplay and juxtaposition of multiple beliefs and practices for persons whose histories demanded a refined, subtle, and effective facility for multiple consciousness.”�� consciousness.”�� The work of artists presented in this book, I reiterate, was motivated by the need to imagine the postcolonial self as a compound consciousness that constantly reconstituted itsel� by selective incorporation of diverse, opposiopposi tional, or complementary elements. This might help us come to terms, for instance, with what can seem an intriguing incidence of Christian themes in the work of many of these artists. The Christians C hristians among them—say, Uche Okeke and Bruce Onobrakpeya, who are practicing Catholics—depicted themes from the Old and New Testaments Testaments as well as from Igbo and Urhobo religions and folklore, as if to assert their equal sympathies for the doctrine and legacies o� both religions traditions. Similarly Yusuf Grillo, a devout Muslim, executed many major commissions for Lagos churches, to the extent that we must imagine his having a considerable understanding of and familiarity with Christian iconography and ritual aesthetics. What we take from this is that the modernism of these artists—to cite Biodun Bio dun Jeyifo’s Jeyifo’s argument about parallel developments in modern African literature—is a product of “a replete African world which derives its deepest truths and resources
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endogenously, not in exclusivist, racial-chauvinist racial-chauvinist terms but all the same as a distinctive presence in the world on its own terms.”��
Postcolonial Modernism
Why do I insist on calling the work of these Nigerian and African artists “postcolonial modernism”? This question is especially pertinent since, for nearly two decades now, art history and visual culture scholarship has seriously engaged the question o� how this work by African (and Third World) artists fits into the narrative template of modernism, which is traditionally understood to be the aesthetic manifestation o� Western modernity. What we can see clearly is that, years after the final waves of decolonization blew over the world in the mid-twentieth mid-twentieth century, centur y, the scholarship began, slowly at first, to consider the cultural implications of the sovereignties won by what would be known as Third World countries in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean, and elsewhere. Important work on the African diaspora and Latin America— exemplified by that of Paul Gilroy, Nestor Garcia Canclini, and David Craven—sought to name, describe, and analyze the art, literature, and other forms of expression produced within a context of colonial and postcolonial modernity. Quite pertinently, there is a general consensus that in these parts of the world, the tapestry of modernity and modernism was not just woven from diverse multicultural threads but was forged during the colonial encounter, as well as from the intermixture o� histories, cultures, and subjectivities before and after colonialism. The question that confronts us, then, is how to describe describ e the foundational concerns of artists whose work was catalyzed by ideas of cultural and social modernity and informed by visions of progress within the context of a sovereign nation. I am convinced of the appropriateness of calling this work “postcolonial modernism” for two reasons. For one, it reflects my belief that, given what we know today about the specific political, cultural, inte llectual, and discursive contexts of the work of twentieth-century twentieth- century avant-gardes avant-gardes everywhere, all manifestations of artistic modernism ought to be qualified in some way to reflect their origins, particularities, and horizons. Moreover, it makes sense to name all modernisms, modernisms, so long as—this is important—such acts do not tempt us to view them in hierarchical order. This is so simply because nothing I have seen in the histories of modernisms around the world makes any particular one, whether it manifested earlier or later in the century, any more or less profound. In proposing postcolonial modernism as an analytical concept for this
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study of the conjunction of art and the politics politi cs of decolonization in twentiethcentury Nigeria, I am inspired by Kobena Mercer’s idea of “cosmopolitan modernisms.” For For him, this term describes two related experiences: experi ences: first, the two-way twoway traffic o� bodies and ideas between colonial peripheries peri pheries and Western Western metropolises and the relocation of modernism from European cities to New York; second, the threefold interaction among non-Western non-Western artists, minority artists in the West, and Western art movements that have engaged different cultures. However, However, if Mercer’s Mercer ’s cosmopolitan modernisms—drawing on postcolonial theory’s onslaught against the hegemonic and universal ambitions of what now looks like an insular strain o� Western modernism—ser ves as a conceptual tool for articulating a broad-based, broad-based, global theory of modernism, then postcolonial modernism as used in this book describes describ es an aspect of “the cosmopolitan” specific to Nigeria and other (African) locales with similar cultural histories and modernist work that is deeply inflected by the experience and rhetoric of decolonization. de colonization. But what is the status of the “postcolonial”? What do I mean by this term? In thinking about the postcolonial, I recall Kwame Anthony Appiah’s Appiah’s descripdescrip tion of postcoloniality as the condition of the elite, college -trained writers and intellectuals who, because of their dual access to Western Western and African Afr ican knowledge systems, act as mediators between the two supposedly distinct worlds.�� Unlike their less-educated less-educated compatriots, who in fact constitute the majority and who are more or less unconcerned with transcending the colonial condition, Appiah argues, the elites embrace postcoloniality as a means of clearing the space previously occupied by colonial, cultural modernity. While I agree with Appiah’s association of postcoloniality with the African intellectual elite, I also see the postcolonial as describing sets of critical practices— by elite writers, artists, political theorists, philosophers—simultaneously directed at dismantling the ideological foundations of colonialism and anticipating the consequences o� its end. In this sense, the postcolonial does not necessarily depend on the hard temporal markers of colonialism’s end; in other words, it is not restricted, in Nigeria for instance, to literar y and artistic discourses and practices that came after 1960. 1960. Rather, I use it as Robert J. C. Young has described it: “a dialectical concept that marks the broad historical facts of decolonization decolonization and and the determined achievement of sovereignty—but also the realities of nations and peoples emerging into a new imperialistic context of economic and sometimes political domination.”�� To be sure, the concept of postcolonial modernism made its first appearance in literary criticism, specifically to address, as Bart Moore-Gilbert Moore- Gilbert has put it, both the critical conjunction of postcolonialism and modernism and
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the “wide-ranging “wide-ranging reassessment of the cultural politics of [modernism] inaugurated in the late 1980s.”�� In this book, I recuperate and reanimate the critical ambitions o� literary postcolonial modernism as a way to give analytical rigor to the work of artistic modernisms in Nigeria and the African continent. As I detail in this book, book , the literatures that have been subjected to analyses as exemplary of postcolonial modernism were produced in the same discursive spaces and contexts as the works of art with which I am concerned here. Whether in the pages of the literary journal Black Orpheus, founded at Ibadan, Nigeria, in 1957, or within the Mbari Club in the 1960s, African writers (Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Es’kia Mphahlele, Christopher Okigbo, for instance) shared the same concerns with their artist-colleagues artist- colleagues (Uche Okeke, Demas Nwoko, Bruce Onobrakpeya, Ibrahim I brahim El Salahi, among others) about the implications and impact of political decolonization on the thematic and stylistic directions of their work. Despite the fact that debates on these questions were undoubtedly more developed and vociferous in the field o� literature, closer examination of contemporary art criticism, which I offer in this book, bo ok, convinces us that conversations of similar motivation and substance occurred on the subject of art during the same period. Given the above considerations, it is clear as day that the work of the Art Society and their colleagues elsewhere el sewhere on the continent in the independence decade was decidedly postcolonial, in the sense that they initially imagined their art as constituting a critical space in which the exhilarating drama of cultural decolonization was enacted, and subsequently thought o� it as a platform for articulating the contradictions of political sovereignty and crises of postindependence nationalism and subjectivity. These two sequences of the postcolonial, as I describe them in chapters 5 and 7, respectively, are evident first in Uche Okeke’s Oja Series, traSeries, a suite of drawings inspired by Igbo Uli traditional drawing (and in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart );�� );�� and second, in Okeke and Demas Nwoko’s “crisis” paintings (as well as in Christopher Okigbo’s poems Path of Thunder ), ), from the late 1960s. In conjunction with its postcolonial status, the work of these artists manifests the formal and discursive sensibilities that have come to define artistic artisti c modernisms. First among these is their belie� in the significance of the artist’s role in fashioning a new art and culture for the new nation and society, as a harbinger of the new. It is in this sense that I describe Okeke, Okeke , Nwoko, and their cohorts as constituting an avant-garde. avantgarde. Second is their attempt to articulate and reframe their relationship with “tradition” and the past. Third is their focus on the invention of formal styles unlike any developed before be fore them. Fourth is the artists’ turn to critical analyses and commentary on the postcolonial state as it was eclipsed by political crises from the late 1960s onward.
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Let me return to Appiah’s description of the postcolonial as a spaceclearing gesture simply to retrieve an earlier point about my view of the relationship of the Nigerian modernists of the independence decade and coloniality. It is quite evident that once inspired by the thrilling, powerful wave of decolonization that set off at full speed soon after the end of the World War II, young, progressive artists and writers set about reimagining and recalibrating their relations with imperial Europe, its ideologies, cultures, and knowledge bases. It is not so much that they rejected Europe or replaced it with “native” cultures; rather, in marking both the locus and the horizons of their artistic imagination, they outlined a new, multidimensional space in which the complex drama of their postcolonial subjectivities played out. It was no longer about whether they spoke the artistic language of Europe or that of their ancestors or whether they aligned themselves with the monovalent pulls o� blackness, Africa, the nation, or the ethnos. What the artists presented in this book demonstrate through their work is the constitution, during the years around political independence in Nigeria, of compound—messy, fraught, and inevitably distinctive—postcolonial modern subjectivities.
BEFORE I SUMMARIZE this
book’s chapters, let me explain the logic o� its architecture. From the onset I had to confront the option of compressing the scope by zooming closely into the independence decade, paying only passing attention to the context of modern art of the previous decades. There is no doubt some sense in this approach. But the alternative route, taken here, allows me to examine the longer historical, ideological, and intellectual context of the work that emerged in the late 1950s; otherwise we might miss or fail to fully appreciate, as has been the case in the literature, the stakes of the latter. Besides keeping the modern art of the independence decade in dynamic alignment with the preceding six decades decade s of Nigerian art and political history, the narrative arc of this book frequently swings between sweeping intellectual and social-historical social-historical accounts to meticulous formalist and critical readings of particular artworks and texts. This is my way o� insisting on an approach to writing modern and contemporary African art history that depends on the scholarly virtues of research-based research-based critical storytelling and close reading of works of art in order to reveal not just their visual intelligence but also how they relate to the world of the artist and his society. This study is divided into seven chapters, the first of which sets the colonial context from which the postcolonial modernism of the midcentury emerged. It argues, following the work of the historian Taiwo Olufemi, that
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even in colonialism’s most altruistic guise, the oppressive infrastructure of British imperial enterprise forced upon the political and cultural guardians of empire a denial and suppression of an emergent sovereign African modernity. This book also sketches the ideological antagonisms between colonial apologists and anticolonial nationalists, noting how early notions of African personality contributed to the cultural nationalism and pan-Africanism pan- Africanism of W. E. B. Du Bois, Marcus Garvey, and Nnamdi Azikiwe. These same ideas ultimately set the philosophical and ideological grounds for the emergence of the postcolonial modernism of the Art Society and its Nigerian and African contemporaries during the independence decade. This chapter is thus both an attempt to outline the intellectual origins of the ar t that defined modernmoder nism in Nigeria in the 1950s and 1960s and a gesture toward the production of a more meaningful account of modern art of twentieth-century twentieth- century Nigeria. Building on the first chapter, the second situates the work of pioneer Nigerian modernist painter Aina Onabolu (1882–1963) and and the British art ar t teacher Kenneth Murray (1903–1972) within the oppositional imperialist and anticolonialist views not just of modernity and subjectivity but also of the role of art in their articulation. Where Onabolu called for a complete break with the traditional arts of Nigeria and the production of a modern subject through the new medium of academic easel painting, Murray argued for a return to the glories of traditional art against the onslaught of modernity and artistic modernism. My task in this chapter is to show precisely that what constitutes the political in modern Nigerian art is not so much the depiction of political themes as the engagement by artists ar tists with the question of subjectivity, of who has the right to articulate it and in what language. Although this matter becomes much magnified in the art and politics of the independence decade, chapter 2 shows that it was already there at the very onset of modern art, as the competing ideas and pedagogies of Onabolu and Murray reveal. Moreover, the chapter maps the earliest attempts to articulate art iculate the meaning, scope, and directions of modern art in Nigeria during the 1940s and early 1950s, as the students of Onabolu on the one hand and the British teachers sympas ympathetic to Murray’s visions on the other jostled for visibility and leadership in an emerging art world that was soon ruptured by the art and theory of the Art Society and the criticism of Ulli Beier. Chapter 3 reconstructs the history of the country’s first tertiary-level tertiary-level art program at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology (1954– 1961) to highlight its participation in a national conversation about the role of fine art in a decolonizing society and the tensions and anxieties anxie ties within the school about institutional credibility at a time when London’s London’s control of colo-
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nial education was confronted by growing grow ing discontent in the colony about the reaches o� imperial power. I also examine how questions about relevance of local content in the design of the art school’s curriculum provided the critical context for the radical work of the Art Society. It is impossible to overstate the historiographic significance of engaging this history of Zaria, much of which has been occluded from art history’s view of a period that I insist is most fundamental to our understanding of the stakes of twentieth-century twentieth- century Nigerian art. The second part of this chapter dwells on the Art Society and the sources o� its ideas, particularly the theory of “natural synthesis” sy nthesis” proposed by its leader, Uche Okeke, as the organizing principle of the group’s future work. The chapter concludes by resituating the work of the Art Society within the history of Nigerian art, arguing that it represents an advancement of Onabolu’s brand of colonial modernism (and a critique of Kenneth Murray’s). This context is important, for it goes against what the scholarship tells us, which is that Murray, not Onabolu, must be credited with initiating the sets o� ideas championed by the Art Society artists. The fourth chapter examines the emergence of Nigerian/African modernist and postcolonial art practice and discourse through detailed analysis of the art criticism, reviews, and portfolios published in Black Orpheus, Orpheus, the magazine that gave voice to a new generation of Anglophone African and black diaspora writers and artists in the 1950s and 1960s—as well as of the exhibitions and workshops at the Mbari Artists and Writers Club, Ibadan. This chapter affords us a view into i nto the process o� internationalizing an incipient postcolonial modernism through the work of Ulli Beier Be ier and his network o� international writers, critics, and artists. Chapter 4 specifically s hows how the journal, the club, and Beier’s work fostered a community of emerging contemporary artists and writers, now more aware of their collective cultural and artistic experiences and objectives. It also discusses how this loose network to which the Art Society artists belonged be longed fit into and participated in the politics of modern Nigerian art and culture around 1960. It is inevitable that Beier, a controversial, incomparably important art and literar y critic and impresario, looms large in this chapter. But the narrative is less about him than about his participation in the making of an increasingly complex, sophisticated art world that in just a few years saw a new generation of Nigerian artists and writers at its helm. A key premise of chapter 4 is that the cultural and literary arguments of negritude and pan-Africanism, pan-Africanism, disseminated through Beier, Black Orpheus, Orpheus, and the Mbari Club, became major influences on postcolonial artistic (and literary) modernism. This is important because it returns us to the claim,
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made in chapters 2 and 3, that the work of Art Society artists and many of their Nigerian and African contemporaries followed the political and cultural ideologies associated with pan-Africanism pan-Africanism and negritude rather than the adaptationist ideas of British indirect rule educational policies. In chapter 5 I engage in some detail d etail the key individual work of some of the Art Society members in the years following their graduation from Zaria. In 1962, during his short stay in Lagos and throughout his one-year one-year residency in Munich, Uche Okeke began a series of experimental drawings inspired by traditional Igbo Uli art, thus realizing the full formal and conceptual implications of natural synthesis. Similarly, Bruce Onobrakpeya developed a formal style that depended on the manipulation of designs and motifs of his native Urhobo arts (Yoruba arts, too) even as he was experimenting with printmaking techniques following his participation in summer art workshops organized by Beier at the Mbari Clubs in Ibadan and Osogbo. For his part, Demas Nwoko developed a figural style—manifest in his wood sculptures and in a suite of paintings on the theme of Adam and Eve while on a one-year one-year visit to Paris in 1962/63—influenced by traditional Igbo figural sculpture. On the other hand, their Art Society Societ y colleague Simon Okeke relied on techniques and styles borrowed from early modern Western art to create enigmatic, monochromatic watercolors, while in his canvases Yusuf Grillo explored postcubist figuration and palette. Finally, Jimo Akolo, who was all but an official member of the Art Society, continued to experiment with diverse Western modernist painting styles, particularly in the suite of paintings he produced in London in 1963. Chapter 5 reveals the society members’ different attitudes toward the theory of natural synthesis and the role o� indigenous art forms in their own evolving styles and suggests that the value of the theory is not so much in its potential to authorize a unified “national“national ist” art as in its enabling an unprecedented, diverse, and ambitious art that defined the landscape of Nigeria’s postcolonial modernism. Chapter 6 shifts the focus from the specificity of the Art Society artists and their work to the intellectual and cultural firmament and art world of Lagos, especially after 1963, when that city effectively replaced Ibadan as the center of postcolonial artistic production and debate. Four important factors guaranteed Lagos’s new significance as the hub of modern art and culture during this period. First was the radical transformation in 1962 of general-interest journal during the colonial period, into a powerful Nigeria,, a general-interest Nigeria cultural magazine with ample coverage of contemporary art and literature. This shift took place under its first Nigerian editor, editor, the novelist and amateur anthropologist Onuora Nzekwu. Second was the establishment of the Lagos
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center of the American Society of African Culture, which hosted African American artists and writers in the city and facilitated their participation in Mbari Club events and exhibitions. ex hibitions. Third was the work of the Lagos branches of the revamped Nigerian Art Council and the Federal Society of Arts and Humanities. And finally, the establishment in 1964 of the Society of Nigerian Artists, in fulfillment of the Art Society’s dream of translating the modest college-era college-era group into a national organization. Chapter 6 also examines the debates, in Nigeria Nigeria and and elsewhere, around the work of young artists ar tists from Zaria and their contemporaries in Lagos, particularly the irreverent painters Erhabor Emokpae, Okpu Eze, and Colette Omogbai. This excursion reveals crucial fissures between the so-called so-called young Turks and the older generation of artists—represented artists—represented by Ben Enwonwu, Akinola Lasekan, and the novelist/critic Cyprian Cypr ian Ekwensi—about what constituted ambitious art and, more crucially, about the direction of postindependence Nigerian art. Chapter 7, concluding this book, argues that postindependence political crises, the military intervention in 1966, and the civil war the following year all adversely affected the sense of cultural nationalism that earlier inspired the Art Society and other artists in Lagos. In other words, the resurgence of regionalism in the postindependence era, which reached a climax by the middle of the decade, left its mark on the art and culture sector, the most obvious instance being the formation of Mbari Enugu by artists and writers from the eastern region, many of whom had previously associated with Ibadan and Lagos. I argue in this chapter that the crisis in the postcolony underwrote the dramatic shift in the style and themes of politically conscious artists (and writers) who themselves had become be come increasingly disillusioned about the prospects of the new nation. The works of Uche Okeke and Demas Nwoko from 1965 exemplify this change. Into my reading of their “crisis” paintings and sculptures of this period, I interpolate analysis of the prophetic, contemporary poetry of their Mbari Club colleagues Christopher Okigbo and Wole Soyinka, the point being to demonstrate that the most compelling late-1960s late-1960s postcolonial Nigerian art and poetry, which had their roots in the Mbari and Black Orpheus world, Orpheus world, index the unraveling of the euphoria of political independence and anticipate the postcolonial crisis that led to civil war (1967–1970). Apart from the fact that these works, in terms of their formal ambition and conceptual complexity, marked a watershed in Okeke and Nwoko’s oeuvre as artists, they moreover exemplify the fundamental changes in the stylistic and thematic preoccupations of postcolonial modernism in the course of that thrilling, heady, phenomenal phenomenal decade.
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1. For similar argument arguments, s, see Kapur, When Was Modernism , and Harney, In Sen ghor’s Shadow Shadow . 2. See, e.g., Vogel, Africa Explores. 3. See Okeke, “The Quest,” Quest,” 41–75, and Ottenberg, New Traditions and The Nsukka Artists. 4. See Godwin and Hopwood, Architecture of Demas Nwoko; Okoye, “Nigerian Architecture,” 29–42. 5. See Enwezor and OkekeOkeke-Agulu, Agulu, Contempor Contemporary ary African Afr ican Art . 6. See Beier, Contemporary Art in Africa; Africa; Mount, African Art ; and Kennedy, New Currents. 7. See Enwezor, The Short Century . 8. See Fagg and Plass, African Sculpture, 6. 9. See Hassan, “The Modernist Experience in African Art,” Art,” 216. 216. 10. Araeen, “Modernity, “Modernity, Modernism,” 278. 11. Shohat Shohat and Stam, “Narrativizing “Narrativizing Visual Culture,” Culture,” 28. 12. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 122. 13. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 114–116. 14. Nkrumah, Autobiography , 52–63. 15. Nkrumah defines consciencism as as “the map in intellectual terms of the disposidisposition of forces which will enable African society to digest the Western and the Islamic and the Euro-Christian Euro- Christian element[s] of Africa, and develop them in such a way that they fit the African personality. The African personality itsel� is defined by the cluster o� humanist principles which underlie the traditional African society.” See Nkrumah, Consciencism , 79. 16. Taylor, Taylor, “Two Theor Theories ies of Modernit Modernity, y,”” 183. 17. John S. Mbiti famously famously asserted the status of the individual in Africa Africa with the
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dictum, “I am because we are; and since we are, therefore I am.” See Mbiti, African Religions and Philosophy , 109. The tenability of this assertion has for years been a matter o� intense philosophical debate. But there is ample evidence from popular sayings, proverbs, and aphorisms of diverse African peoples to suggest that individual subjectivity is for the most part strongly linked to an awareness o� its dependence on a network of relations with other human and metaphysical beings. 18. Shutte, Philosop Philosophy hy for Africa Afr ica, 47. 19. See Achebe, Arrow of God , 234, 20. Drewal, “Memory and Agency, Agency,”” 242–243. 21. Jeyifo, Perspectives on Wole Soyinka, 117. 22. See Appiah, “Postcolonial “Postcolonial and the the Postmodern,” Postmodern,” 62. 23. Italics Italics added. See Young, Young, Postcolonialism , 57. 24. Moore-Gilbert, Moore-Gilbert, “Postcolo “Postcolonial nial Modernism,” 551. 25. See my “Politics of Form, Form, 67–86. ������� 1: ����������� ��� ��� �������� ��������
1. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 243–244. 2. Taiwo, How Colonialism Preempted Modernity . 3. Taiwo, How Colonialism Preempted Modernity , 11. 4. Carland, Colonial Office and Nigeria, 108. 5. Frenkel, “Edward Blyden,” 288. 6. Colonial government in southern Nigeria Nigeria blamed the missionmission-trained trained Africans for the massive consumption of alcohol responsible for the illicit liquor trade. For her part, the nineteenth-century nineteenth- century ethnographic writer and explorer Mary Kingsley thought that mission education made the African “the curse of the Coast.” Several other commentators emphasized the threat these missiontrained Africans posed to the colonial system and its regime of racial and social hierarchy. For more, see Lyons, “Evolutionary Ideas and Educational Policy,” 15–19. 7. Lyons, “The Educable African,” 17. 8. Lyons, “The Educable Educable African,” 17. 9. Lyons, “The Educable Educable African,” 17. 10. Lugard’ Lugard’ss influential book, Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa , in which he laid out the principles and practice o� indirect rule, became a manual of sorts for colonial officers in colonial British Africa. See Lugard, Dual Mandate. 11. See Porter, Critics of Empire, 151. 12. Mary Kingsley once stated: “I regard not only the the African, but all coloured races, as inferior—inferior in kind not in degree—to the white races.” Quoted in Porter, Critics of Empire, 151–152. Porter discusses Mary Kingsley’s influence on the development o� indirect rule colonialism. 13. “[W]e are certain that the publication of the Report Report will add the last last nail to the coffin of the Nigerian System, falsify the aspersions which have been cast upon the educated Native by daubing him an agitator who is denationalized by virtue
