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8/17/2019 Postcolonial Modernism Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria
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POSTCOLONIALMODERNISM
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Art and
Decolonization inTwentieth-Century
Nigeria
P O S T C
O L O N
I A L
M
O D E R
N I S M
CHI KA OKEKEAGULU
Duke University Press
Durham and London 2015
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© 2015 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ♾Designed by Heather Hensley
Typeset in Scala and Meta by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Okeke-Agulu, Chika.Postcolonial modernism : art and decolonization in
twentieth-century Nigeria / Chika Okeke-Agulu.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
978-0-8223-5732-2 (cloth : alk. paper)
978-0-8223-5746-9 (pbk : alk. paper)
1. Art, Nigerian—20th century. 2. Postcolonialism—Nigeria.
3. Decolonization—Nigeria. I. Title.
7399. 5394 2014
709.669′09041—dc23
2014006962
978-0-8223-7630-9 (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.
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In memory of my father
-
(“Nwokafor Ayaghiliya”; 1929–1993)
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ix List of Illustrations
xiii Acknowledgments
1 INTRODUCTION Postcolonial Modernism
21 CHAPTER Colonialism and the Educated Africans
39 CHAPTER Indirect Rule and Colonial Modernism
71 CHAPTER The Academy and the Avant- Garde
131 CHAPTER Transacting the Modern: Ulli Beier,
Black Orpheus, and the Mbari International
183 CHAPTER After Zaria
227 CHAPTER Contesting the Modern: Artists’ Societies
and Debates on Art
259 CHAPTER Crisis in the Postcolony
291 Notes
313 Bibliography
327 Index
CONTENTS
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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, Kwami, 1936, 53
FIGURE . Kenneth Murray, Keta Girl , 1942, 53
FIGURE . Ben Enwonwu, Coconut Palms, 1935, 58
FIGURE . C. C. (Christopher Chukwunenye) Ibeto, Ibo Dancers at Awka, 1937, 58FIGURE . Uthman Ibrahim, Bamboos, ca. 1935, 67
FIGURE . Sculpture studio with students’ work, ca. 1958–1950, 74
FIGURE . Paul de Monchaux, Head , 1958, 74
FIGURE . Group photograph showing Paul de Monchaux (center) and art studentsof the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology (), ca. 1960, 79
FIGURE . Photograph of “Tsoede bronzes,” including the 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 . 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 . Uche Okeke, Ana Mmuo (Land of the Dead ), 1961, 104
FIGURE . Uche Okeke, Nza the Smart , 1958, 105
FIGURE . Demas Nwoko, Beggars in the Train, 1959, 107
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
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FIGURE . Demas Nwoko, 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, 111FIGURE . Bruce Onobrakpeya, Eketeke vbe Erevbuye (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, 121FIGURE . 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
FIGURE . 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 (detail),1960, 144
FIGURE . Demas Nwoko, mural, Arts and Crafts pavilion, Nigeria Exhibition,Lagos, 1960, 144
FIGURE . Ben Enwonwu, Head of Afi, 1959, 146
FIGURE . Yusuf Grillo, Two Yoruba Women, 1960, 148
FIGURE . Demas Nwoko and Uche Okeke at the opening of the Mbari Ibadan
inaugural art exhibition, 1961, 152FIGURE . 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, Osogbo, 1962, 159
FIGURE . Jacob Lawrence with Vincent Kofi’s Drummer , 1962, 159
FIGURE . Malangatana Ngwenya, Untitled, 1961, 163
FIGURE . Malangatana Ngwenya, To the Clandestine Maternity Home, 1961, 164
FIGURE . Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, Kneeling Woman, 1914, 167
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FIGURE . Karl Schmidt- Rottluff, Girl before a Mirror (Mädchen vor dem Spiegel ),1914, 167
FIGURE . Jacob Lawrence, The Migration of the Negro, No. 22, 1940–1941, 170
FIGURE . Jacob Lawrence, War Series: The Letter , 1946, 170FIGURE . Jacob Lawrence, Street to Mbari, 1964, 173
FIGURE . Jacob Lawrence, Four Sheep, 1964, 173
FIGURE . Ahmed Shibrain, Calligraphy , 1962, 174
FIGURE . Skunder Boghossian, Juju’s Wedding , 1964, 176
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, 179
FIGURE . Naoko Matsubara, Ravi Shankar , 1961, 180
FIGURE . Naoko Matsubara, A Giant Tree, 1962, 180FIGURE . 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, 193FIGURE . 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
FIGURE . Bruce Onobrakpeya and Ru van Rossem at summer workshop,Mbari-Mbayo, Osogbo, 1964, 209
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
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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, 223FIGURE . 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, 249FIGURE . Erhabor Emokpae, The Last Supper , 1963, 250
FIGURE . Colette Omogbai, Accident , ca. 1963, 254
FIGURE . Colette Omogbai, Anguish , ca. 1963, 255
FIGURE . Uche Okeke (seated right) and Lawrence Emeka (center), 262
FIGURE . Scene from the Eastern Nigeria Theatre Group production of AndreObe’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 . Uche Okeke, Crucifixion, 1962, 266FIGURE . 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 . Uche Okeke, Conflict (After Achebe), 1965, 273
FIGURE . Uche Okeke, Aba Revolt (Women’s War ), 1965, 275
FIGURE . Demas Nwoko, Crisis, 1967, 279
FIGURE . Demas Nwoko, Hunter in a War Scene, 1967, 280
FIGURE . Demas Nwoko, Combatant I , 1967, 281FIGURE . Demas Nwoko, Combatant II , 1967, 282
FIGURE . Demas Nwoko, Soldier (Soja), 1968, 284
FIGURE . Demas Nwoko, Soldier (Soja), 1968, 285
FIGURE . Demas Nwoko, Enuani Dancers, 1968, 286
FIGURE . Demas Nwoko, Dancing Couple (Owambe), 1968, 287
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THE MATERIAL AND IDEAS gathered in this book came to life two decades
ago, when in 1993 I organized a major retrospective of Uche Okeke in Lagos.
Since then I have benefited immensely from many individuals and institu-
tions, 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 retro-
spective, 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 ElAnatsui played in shaping my intellectual 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
diaries and to the Asele Institute library and art collection. 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 of Lagos library. I am grateful to the lateSegun Olusola and to Frank Aig-Imoukhuede, who gave me invaluable infor-
mation 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 Ade-
niyi, for making my access to the Daily Times photo archives less of an ordeal;Mayo Adediran, for facilitating my access to the Kenneth Murray Archivesat the National Museum, Lagos. I also thank Kavita Chellarams and Nana
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
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Sonoiki, of Art House Contemporary Ltd, Lagos; Vilma Eid, of Galeria Esta-
ção, São Paulo; and Ul Vierke and Sigrid Horsch-Albert, of 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 EmmanuelArinze 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 for giving me access to his private art col-
lection, and to Chinwe Uwatse, Ndidi Dike, Ego Uche-Okeke, Peju Layiwola,John Ogene, Ngozi Akande, Teena Akan, Chuma Okadigwe, Kolade Oshi-
nowo, Hilary Ogbechie, Oliver Enwonwu, Olasehinde Odimayo, and Chike
Nwagbogu; and to my dear friends Uche Nwosu and Tony Nsofor, who as-
sisted me in my research in Nigeria.
In England, I benefited from the valued advice and assistance of JohnPicton, Doig Simmonds, John Murray, Christopher Atkinson, and Grant
Waters. I thank Ibrahim El Salahi for granting me a 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 Lon-
don 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 Em-
pire 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 Gal-lery of Art, University of Chichester; Lucie Marchelot, of Bonhams, London;
Jessica Iles, of Browse & Darby, London; and Martine Rouleau, of the Univer-
sity 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 Beier in Sydney, Australia, in the summers of 2000, 2005,and 2009. The interviews and conversations that often continued until early
in the morning remain most memorable. I thank them also for giving me ac-
cess to the vast Ulli and Georgina Beier Archive and for the frequent discus-
sions 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, and Simon Ottenberg, Rebecca Dim-ling 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 Art , with whom I have shared and debated issues relating toAfrican 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 pre-
sented in this study.
I thank James Meyer, Clark Poling, and Bruce Knauft, whose intellectualgenerosity shaped my scholarly life at Emory University and beyond. I re-
main ever grateful to Sidney Kasfir as my mentor and friend; she kept insist-
ing that I finish work on this book before life happened to it. I must men-
tion Kobena Mercer, Esther Da 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 Univer-
sity, the Pennsylvania State University, Williams College, the Sterling and
Francine Clark Art Institute, the Woodrow Wilson Fellowship Founda-
tion, and most importantly, Princeton University. Thanks to Hal Foster and
Thomas Leisten, at the Department of Art and Archaeology, and to ValerieSmith and Eddie Glaude, at the Center for African American Studies, Prince-
ton 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 Rum-
sey, my copyeditor; Ken Wissoker, the editorial director at Duke University
Press, for believing in this work long before it became a publishable manu-script; and Elizabeth Ault and 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 metalong the way and who supported me and my work. My deepest gratitude
goes to Obiora and Ada Udechukwu, with whom I shared so many experi-
ences 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
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THIS BOOK EXAMINES the emergence of postcolonial modernism in Nigeria
during the first half of the twentieth century and its elaboration in the decade
of political independence, roughly between 1957 and 1967. It covers the de-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, Zaria, and in whose work we find the first concerted articu-
lation 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 post-
colonial modernism in Nigeria.
Consistent with the idea of natural synthesis is the acknowledgment and
appropriation of technical procedures and sensibilities inherent in modern-
ism, particularly the deployment of experimental rigor and zeal to develop
Introduction
POSTCOLONIALMODERNISM
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radically new formal modes. The results are works of art that show both a
deep connection with local artistic traditions and the stylistic sophisticationwe have come to associate with twentieth-century modernist practices. In
embarking on this crucial work, these artists were inspired by the rheto-ric and ideologies of decolonization and nationalism initiated by early black
nationalists Edward Blyden (1832–1912) and Herbert Macaulay (1864–1946)
and later by advocates of negritude and 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 mod-ern predecessors in Nigeria, their work—as this book amply shows—was
radically different in terms o both its formal ambition and the vigorous criti-
cal discourse it fostered. In mapping the emergence of this new work duringthe 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 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 bookargues that modernism and political ideology, in the context of decolonizingnations, were not mutually exclusive discourses. In fact, the book’s point,
mooted already by Elizabeth Harney and Geeta Kapur but without the di-
rectness attempted here, is that the conjunction of art and nationalist ideol-
ogy is an important characteristic of postcolonial modernism as an interna-
tional mid-twentieth-century phenomenon. This book thus crucially mapsthe unprecedented, largely ill understood, yet fundamental artistic, intel-
lectual, and critical networks in four Nigerian cities—Zaria, Ibadan, Lagos,
and Enugu—connecting Nigerian, African, African diaspora, and Europeanartists, critics, and the cultural elite during the continent’s decade o inde-
pendence.
The reader will also notice that this book goes beyond art as such, occa-
sionally bringing into view my own reading o literature produced by Nige-
rian writers during this period. This approach is prescribed by the deep en-
tanglements of modern art, literature, and drama as indexed in the journal
Black Orpheus and the Mbari Artists and Writers Club, Ibadan—two signalforums of mid-twentieth century African and black artistic and literary mod-
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ernism. Still, the book’s underlying premise is that it is impossible to de-
velop 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 broughtmodern 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 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 trans-
actions in the 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 stakeholdersof an evolving art world. In fact, it is this kind of study—which maps the pri-
mary 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 makingof 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 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 his-tory 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 archi-tecture of this book in the sense that in it I begin with the making of anticolo-
nial subjectivity and with colonial modernism as a way to situate intellectual
and ideological origins of the work associated with the Art Society duringthe 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, as well as a formalist analysis
of specific artworks and technical protocols deployed by key artists. In theprocess, 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
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see the salience o its key arguments in the modern art of various Africancountries, where groups of artists during the mid- twentieth century con-
fronted similar colonial conditions and subsequently developed versions of
what this book calls postcolonial modernism . One need look only at the OldKhartoum school in the Sudan—where together with his colleagues, Ibrahim
El Salahi (born 1930), who figures in this study courtesy of the presenta-
tion o his work at Mbari, Ibadan, and in Black Orpheus, articulated a mod-ernism 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 be-
came primary sources for reimagining their work as modern artists. There
are other, similar manifestations in Egypt, Ghana, Algeria, Ethiopia, and soon; what they have in common is that the impulse to rethink their work was
often catalyzed by 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 onNigeria. What we have, instead, are isolated views of these important mo-
ments, 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 illu-
minating 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 dur-
ing the first decade of the twenty-first century—a phenomenon announcedby the 2004 ArtNews magazine cover “Contemporary African art: The newest
avant-garde?”—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 Ghanaian-Nigerian
artist (born 1944), without any knowledge o his intellectual connections totwo Mbari artists, Uche Okeke and Vincent Kofi, and to Kwame Nkrumah’spolitics and the rhetoric of African personality? The answer to this ques-
tion will depend on how much we know about the influences that the art-
ists presented in this book exerted on later artists, such as Anatsui in Nige-
ria 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 Uli and other West African traditional
graphic forms. It was this “new” school of artists, with its growing interna-
tional reputation, that Anatsui joined in 1975, convinced of the relevance ofits 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 Anatsuiand postcolonial modernism facilitates a longer historical perspective of con-
temporary African art and troubles the trope of surprising newness that has
tended to follow, like a wondrous shadow, the work of even the most accom-
plished African artists today.
The second reason the history narrated in this book is important has al-
ready been insinuated in the preceding paragraph: the profound impact thatthe work of the Art Society artists and similar groups in other countries had
on late twentieth-century Nigerian and African art. Apart from the fact thatby 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 suc-cessful synthesis of traditional Igbo, Japanese, and Western architectural de-
sign and principles. Bruce Onobrakpeya (born 1932), building on the print-
making techniques he discovered in the mid-1960s (see chapter 5) but alsoon the massive network of artists associated with his studio in Lagos, became
one of Nigeria’s and Africa’s most influential artists. The stature and influ-ence 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 syn-thesis 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.
The material presented here is the result of twenty years of sustained re-
search, beginning with my very first major effort at organizing an art exhibi-
tion 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 birth-
day in April 1993. I had not met Okeke, but I was fascinated by the opportu-
nity to get to really know him and his work, given his reputation as the doyen
of the Nsukka school and a mysterious national figure who at the time hadretired 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 scopeand core motivations, politics and legacies, a reading of the major texts—
Ulli Beier’s Contemporary Art in Africa (1968), Marshall Ward Mount’sAfri-can 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 personalarchives, including his stunningly meticulous diary entries from the mid-
1950s through the 1960s, spurred my two-decade-long study, not just o his
work, but also o his surviving former Zaria colleagues and their contempo-
raries. In fact, it was this interest in the work of the Art Society artists and
their contemporaries that set me to writing this book; it also helped me con-ceptualize the curatorial collaboration—with my friend and colleague Okwui
Enwezor—that became the complex, traveling exhibition The Short Century:Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945–1994 , 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 similari-ties 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 sophis-tication, 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 Nigeria without close attention to the political and cul-
tural implications of Africa’s encounter with Europe during the imperial
age. As this book argues, this modernism is a consequence of complex fac-
tors arising on the one hand from the political and discursive confrontation
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of the type covered in this study. In their classic 1964 book on African sculp-
ture, 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 itsmerits is an extension of European art by a kind o involuntary cultural colo-
nialism.” More than three decades later, a European museum curator con-
fidently justified the marginalization of contemporary African art in inter-national art exhibitions by noting that “it seems like third- rate artwork to
us because the art presented here emulates the Western tradition—this is
a criterion for selection—and because it is always lagging behind, regard-
less 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 portrait paintings of Aina Onabolu to be a form of “mimicryunder the tutelage of colonial paternalism.” Central to these three assess-
ments 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; and second, its apparent belatedness, 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 cru-cial aspect of mimicry, which, as Homi Bhabha has suggested, produces
“the representation of difference that is itself a process of disavowal.” Inother words, they ignore the radical potential of self-consciously deployed
mimesis. Moreover, they sidestep the rather complex strategies adopted by
colonial subjects committed to asserting, even within the limited political-discursive space available to them, their right to determine and articulate
their own visions of modernity. Indeed, early-twentieth-century radical na-
tionalists 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 subjectivity informed the work of the inde-pendence 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. In doing so, they asserted that mod-
ernist and progressive artists must be willing to acknowledge in their work
the diverse contradictory local and foreign elements that constituted Nige-
rian and African modernity.
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Nationalism, Modernity, and Compound Consciousness
In his influential study on nationalism, Benedict Anderson introduced a
useful concept, what he calls “colonial pilgrimage,” which refers to the move-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 educa-
tion during the colonial period and the colonial subject’s mental conversion
to everything European. Yet it is clear that, although many of the African in-
telligentsia, with no viable options for higher education at home, embarked
on the colonial pilgrimage to Europe (and later to the United States), their re-sponses to the experience varied. For instance, in his autobiography Kwame
Nkrumah describes his meetings in Europe with other African students andnationalists, including Jomo Kenyatta (1894–1978), Félix Houphouët-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 Congress in Manchester
(1945). However, while Senghor and Houphouët-Boigny demonstrated
their infatuation with la civilisation française and political commitment to
“Françafrique,” Kenyatta and Nkrumah’s view of and relationship with West-ern culture were very different. Senghor ruled Senegal with the support of
French advisers, maintained strong ties with France, and after two decadesas president, stunningly retired to a French village, where he died in 2001. In
contrast, upon Nkrumah’s return from England, he revived the idea of Afri-can personality and his own concept of decolonization through consciencism
as guiding principles for political pan-Africanism. He also colorfully placed
Ghana’s cultural traditions at the fore of national politics, taking the honor-
ific “Osagyefo,” in addition to adopting the kente cloth as an assertion o his
new, independent personhood. Even so, Nkrumah also wore Mao suits toestablish his socialist credentials, while his friend and colleague, the Kenyan
nationalist Jomo Kenyatta, took the honorific “Mzee” and combined Savile
Row suits with a leopard-skin hat, fly whisk, and Muslim sandals. In bothinstances, there is an unquestionably deft sartorial hybridization and ma-
nipulation of populist imagery for political capital. Yet it was in Nkrumah’s
and Kenyatta’s recognition rather than rejection of the symbolic and tactical
values of these unstable multicultural fusions that their sartorial sense paral-
lels 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 pilgrimage to the West—all this while appropriat-ing 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 returnedhome with the confidence to regard Western and African cultures and re-
sources as permutable and fungible elements for the construction of a new,hybrid postcolonial subjectivity. These West Africans thus remind us of Chat-
terjee’s Indian nationalists, for whom the road to modernity had to begin
with an assertion of cultural difference without which any claim to indepen-
dence from Europe might not be completely justifiable or meaningful.
But how to make sense of this will to synthesis, this idea of modernity inwhich combinatory nativisms and Westernisms yielded what could easily be
mistaken for a crisis-prone, unstable, and inauthentic postcolonial subjec-
tivity? 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 suf-
ficiently explain how self- aware Africans synthesized autonomous and com-
peting pressures of ethnic, religious, national, and racial identities as part
of what I want to call strategies o becoming. I suggest that this attitude tomodernity is especially unproblematic among African peoples, given that
their cosmologies tend to run counter to the very metaphysical and ontologi-cal 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 kwulu ife akwuso ya,” acommon Igbo adage, which affirms the belief that the self and the other are
not necessarily opposed but instead are signposts in a cyclical network of so-
cial, ritual, and cosmic relations. The ideas encapsulated in this Igbo prov-
erb also occur in a Xhosa proverb, “umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu ” (a person isa person through persons), which, according to the South African philoso-
pher Augustine Shutte, means that the “self and world are united and inter-mingle 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 Africanpeoples 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 tradi-
tions against the onslaught of alien Christian-colonial culture, admonished
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his school-bound son to thoroughly master the white man’s system of writingupon 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, Ezeulu saw inthe written word not just a gateway to the new world order but also a tool forself-enunciation and navigation through the maze of confounding moder-
nity. 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 Afri-
can 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 postcolonialmodernity. In proposing this idea of compound consciousness, my intention
is to place emphasis on the agency or choice-making facility of the individu-
als involved; in other words, they are simultaneously products and agents of
history. In this sense I agree with the art historian Henry J. Drewal, who has
argued that what he calls “multiple consciousness” of Afro-Brazilians is not
to be mistaken for “syncretism,” which implies a “blending and homogeniz-
ing process.” As he notes: “I would suggest we recognize the distinctiveness
of each faith, the simultaneous interplay and juxtaposition of multiple be-
liefs and practices for persons whose histories demanded a refined, subtle,and effective facility for multiple 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, opposi-
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 among them—say, Uche
Okeke and Bruce Onobrakpeya, who are practicing Catholics—depicted
themes from the Old and New Testaments as well as from Igbo and Urhoboreligions and folklore, as if to assert their equal sympathies for the doctrineand legacies o both religions traditions. Similarly Yusuf Grillo, a devout
Muslim, executed many major commissions for Lagos churches, to the ex-
tent that we must imagine his having a considerable understanding of andfamiliarity with Christian iconography and ritual aesthetics. What we take
from this is that the modernism of these artists—to cite Biodun Jeyifo’s argu-
ment about parallel developments in modern African literature—is a prod-
uct of “a replete African world which derives its deepest truths and resources
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endogenously, not in exclusivist, 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 seri-
ously engaged the question o how this work by African (and Third World)
artists fits into the narrative template of modernism, which is traditionallyunderstood 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 century, the scholarship began, slowly atfirst, to consider the cultural implications of the sovereignties won by whatwould 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 Cra-ven—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 en-counter, as well as from the intermixture o histories, cultures, and subjec-
tivities before and after colonialism.
The question that confronts us, then, is how to describe the foundationalconcerns of artists whose work was catalyzed by ideas of cultural and so-
cial 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, intellec-
tual, and discursive contexts of the work of twentieth-century avant-gardeseverywhere, 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, so long as—this is important—such
acts do not tempt us to view them in hierarchical order. This is so simply be-
cause nothing I have seen in the histories of modernisms around the world
makes any particular one, whether it manifested earlier or later in the cen-
tury, 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 of decolonization in twentieth-
century Nigeria, I am inspired by Kobena Mercer’s idea of “cosmopolitan
modernisms.” For him, this term describes two related experiences: first, the
two-way traffic o bodies and ideas between colonial peripheries and Westernmetropolises and the relocation of modernism from European cities to New
York; second, the threefold interaction among non-Western artists, minority
artists in the West, and Western art movements that have engaged different
cultures. However, if Mercer’s cosmopolitan modernisms—drawing on post-
colonial theory’s onslaught against the hegemonic and universal ambitions
of what now looks like an insular strain o Western modernism—serves as a
conceptual tool for articulating a broad-based, global theory of modernism,then postcolonial modernism as used in this book describes an aspect of “the
cosmopolitan” specific to Nigeria and other (African) locales with similar cul-tural histories and modernist work that is deeply inflected by the experience
and rhetoric of decolonization.
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 descrip-
tion of postcoloniality as the condition of the elite, college-trained writers and
intellectuals who, because of their dual access to Western and African knowl-edge systems, act as mediators between the two supposedly distinct worlds.
Unlike their less-educated compatriots, who in fact constitute the majority
and who are more or less unconcerned with transcending the colonial con-dition, Appiah argues, the elites embrace postcoloniality as a means of clear-ing the space previously occupied by colonial, cultural modernity. While I
agree with Appiah’s association of postcoloniality with the African intellec-
tual 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 an-
ticipating 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 literary and artisticdiscourses and practices that came after 1960. Rather, I use it as Robert J. C.Young has described it: “a dialectical concept that marks the broad historical
facts of decolonization and the determined achievement of sovereignty—butalso 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 appear-
ance in literary criticism, specifically to address, as Bart Moore-Gilbert has
put it, both the critical conjunction of postcolonialism and modernism and
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Let me return to Appiah’s description of the postcolonial as a space-
clearing gesture simply to retrieve an earlier point about my view of the re-
lationship of the Nigerian modernists of the independence decade and colo-
niality. It is quite evident that once inspired by the thrilling, powerful waveof 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 re-
calibrating their relations with imperial Europe, its ideologies, cultures, andknowledge bases. It is not so much that they rejected Europe or replaced
it with “native” cultures; rather, in marking both the locus and the hori-
zons 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 withthe 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, ofcompound—messy, fraught, and inevitably distinctive—postcolonial mod-
ern 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 thescope by zooming closely into the independence decade, paying only pass-
ing 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 con-
text 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 thelatter. Besides keeping the modern art of the independence decade in dy-
namic alignment with the preceding six decades of Nigerian art and political
history, the narrative arc of this book frequently swings between sweepingintellectual and social-historical accounts to meticulous formalist and criti-
cal readings of particular artworks and texts. This is my way o insisting onan approach to writing modern and contemporary African art history that
depends on the scholarly virtues of research-based critical storytelling and
close reading of works of art in order to reveal not just their visual intelli-
gence 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 colo-nial 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 moder-
nity. This book also sketches the ideological antagonisms between colonialapologists and anticolonial nationalists, noting how early notions of Africanpersonality contributed to the cultural nationalism and 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 art that defined modern-
ism in Nigeria in the 1950s and 1960s and a gesture toward the production
of a more meaningful account of modern art of twentieth-century Nigeria.Building on the first chapter, the second situates the work of pioneer Nige-
rian modernist painter Aina Onabolu (1882–1963) and the British art teacher
Kenneth Murray (1903–1972) within the oppositional imperialist and anti-
colonialist 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 constitutesthe political in modern Nigerian art is not so much the depiction of political
themes as the engagement by artists with the question of subjectivity, of who
has the right to articulate it and in what language. Although this matter be-
comes 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. More-
over, the chapter maps the earliest attempts to articulate 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 sympa-thetic 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 artprogram 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 within theschool about institutional credibility at a time when London’s control of colo-
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nial education was confronted by growing 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 criti-
cal context for the radical work of the Art Society. It is impossible to over-state 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-centuryNigerian art. The second part of this chapter dwells on the Art Society and the
sources o its ideas, particularly the theory of “natural synthesis” 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 Ona-
bolu’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 mod-
ernist and postcolonial art practice and discourse through detailed analysis
of the art criticism, reviews, and portfolios published in Black Orpheus, themagazine 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 the process o internationalizing an incipi-
ent postcolonial modernism through the work of Ulli Beier and his network
o international writers, critics, and artists. Chapter 4 specifically shows 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 net-
work to which the Art Society artists belonged 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 literary critic and im-presario, looms large in this chapter. But the narrative is less about him than
about his participation in the making of an increasingly complex, sophisti-
cated art world that in just a few years saw a new generation of Nigerian art-
ists and writers at its helm.
A key premise of chapter 4 is that the cultural and literary arguments of
negritude and pan-Africanism, disseminated through Beier, Black Orpheus,and the Mbari Club, became major influences on postcolonial artistic (andliterary) 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 oftheir Nigerian and African contemporaries followed the political and cul-
tural ideologies associated with pan-Africanism and negritude rather than
the adaptationist ideas of British indirect rule educational policies.In chapter 5 I engage in some detail 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 residency
in Munich, Uche Okeke began a series of experimental drawings inspired
by traditional Igbo Uli art, thus realizing the full formal and conceptual im-plications 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 work-shops organized by Beier at the Mbari Clubs in Ibadan and Osogbo. For his
part, Demas Nwoko developed a figural style—manifest in his wood sculp-tures and in a suite of paintings on the theme of Adam and Eve while on
a one-year visit to Paris in 1962/63—influenced by traditional Igbo figuralsculpture. On the other hand, their Art Society 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 di-verse Western modernist painting styles, particularly in the suite of paint-
ings he produced in London in 1963. Chapter 5 reveals the society members’
different attitudes toward the theory of natural synthesis and the role o in-
digenous 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-
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 ofLagos, 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
Nigeria, a general- interest journal during the colonial period, into a powerfulcultural magazine with ample coverage of contemporary art and literature.
This shift took place under its first Nigerian 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. Third was the work of the Lagos branches
of the revamped Nigerian Art Council and the Federal Society of Arts andHumanities. And finally, the establishment in 1964 of the Society of Nige-
rian Artists, in fulfillment of the Art Society’s dream of translating the mod-
est college-era group into a national organization. Chapter 6 also examines
the debates, in Nigeria and elsewhere, around the work of young artists fromZaria 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 young Turks and the older generation
of artists—represented by Ben Enwonwu, Akinola Lasekan, and the novel-
ist/critic Cyprian Ekwensi—about what constituted ambitious art and, morecrucially, about the direction of postindependence Nigerian art.
Chapter 7, concluding this book, argues that postindependence politi-
cal crises, the military intervention in 1966, and the civil war the followingyear all adversely affected the sense of cultural nationalism that earlier in-
spired the Art Society and other artists in Lagos. In other words, the resur-
gence 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, themost obvious instance being the formation of Mbari Enugu by artists and
writers from the eastern region, many of whom had previously associatedwith Ibadan and Lagos. I argue in this chapter that the crisis in the post-
colony underwrote the dramatic shift in the style and themes of politically
conscious artists (and writers) who themselves had become increasingly dis-
illusioned about the prospects of the new nation. The works of Uche Okekeand 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 Christo-
pher Okigbo and Wole Soyinka, the point being to demonstrate that the most
compelling late- 1960s postcolonial Nigerian art and poetry, which had theirroots in the Mbari and Black Orpheus world, index the unraveling of the eu-phoria 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 inOkeke and Nwoko’s oeuvre as artists, they moreover exemplify the funda-
mental changes in the stylistic and thematic preoccupations of postcolonial
modernism in the course of that thrilling, heady, phenomenal decade.
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lution of modern Nigerian art on a parallel track with developments in thenational political sphere. The objective is to make the reader constantly aware
of the ineluctable if fraught and asymmetric relationship of politics, culture,
and art.It is eminently clear from contemporary texts that early twentieth-century
British colonial administration was particularly suspicious of what was then
called literary education—social science and humanities courses (includingfine art)—because such education was believed to breed, in the colonized
subjects, critical thinkers and “troublemakers” who constituted a formidable,
even mortal threat to the entire colonial system. One cannot help noting the
striking similarity between this view of the educated native in the context of
colonial Nigeria and in post-Reconstruction United States (the period of the
1895 Atlanta Compromise). Consider, for instance, that moment in W. E. B.Du Bois’s short story “The Coming of John” when the white southern judge
confronts John, the black son of former slaves:
In their place, your people can be honest and respectful; and God knows,
I’ll do what I can to help them. But when they want to reverse nature, and
rule white men, and marry white women, and sit in my parlor, then by
God! we’ll hold them under if we have to lynch every nigger in the land.Now, John, the question is, are you, with your education and Northern
notions, going to accept the situation and teach the darkies to be faithful
servants and laborers as your fathers were—I knew your father, John, he
belonged to my brother, and he was a good Nigger. Well—well, are you
going to be like him, or are you going to try to put fool ideas of rising
and equality into these folks’ heads, and make them discontented and
unhappy?
What is certain is that the fear of the revolutionary potential of the edu-
cated native in post-Reconstruction America, as in colonial Nigeria, was at
the basis of the official antagonism toward him. With hindsight, the apolo-
gists o indirect rule were, in fact, right on the mark in their distrust o liter-ary education. This is so because, to the early nationalists, education not onlyprovided the intellectual weapons with which to confront the colonial system
and its political institutions; it was in itself a battleground for the long- term
struggle to define the terms of modern African subjectivity.The focus in this chapter on the politics of colonial education helps us
appreciate the fundamental argument of this book: that the development
o independence movements and ideologies of decolonization premised onthe invention of a modern African cultural identity provided the basis for
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the crucial emergence of postcolonial modernism in Nigeria in the 1950s
and 1960s.
This chapter prepares us to better appreciate my claim that colonialism
resisted rather than chaperoned the emergence of modern art in Nigeria. Iconcede that this must surely sound heretical to many; after all, we know
that Western-style art schools were established during the colonial period inmany parts of Africa. I am heartened by recent compelling studies, especially
the groundbreaking work by Olufemi Taiwo, who argues that colonialism
resisted and ultimately derailed the emergence of modernity and its institu-tions—in fact, the very idea of modern subjectivity in Africa. His proposition
is that if modernity is marked by the triumph of an industrial economy, therule o law, and a democratic system, then indirect rule colonialism, given its
economic and political priorities, was antithetical to these benchmarks anddid not demonstrate the will to midwife African modernity. When he pro-
poses that British colonialism used what he has called sociocryonics—which
he defines as “the ignoble science of cryopreserving social forms, arresting
them and denying them and those whose social forms they are the opportu-
nity of deciding what, how, and when to keep any of their social forms”—
to stanch the already substantial march toward modernity initiated by Afri-
can and black missionaries in the late nineteenth century, I could not agree
more with him. In fact, my task in this chapter complements this new way
of thinking about the battle for African modernist subjectivity between theapologists and forces o indirect rule and their native antagonists, for whom
the question of their autonomous agency was an inalienable right.
Indirect Rule and Colonial Education
In 1908, the maverick governor of the Southern Nigeria Protectorate, Sir
Walter Egerton, listed his government’s six administrative priorities, all of
which were political (“to pacify the country” and “to establish settled gov-
ernment in the newly won districts”) or economic (to expand land, water,and railroad networks). The goal of the colonial government, he asserted,
was developing the colonies for profit; it did not matter that apologists of
colonialism claimed, ad nauseam, that its object was to open up “primitive”
and “pagan” peoples to European Christian civilization and progress. Afri-
can colonization, as a popular refrain had it, was the “white man’s burden.”
In any case, the government’s economic motive and the moral imperatives
of the Christian missionaries (already operating in the West African coastal
regions before the onset of formal colonization of the continent in the years
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after the Berlin-Congo Conference of 1884/85) more or less meshed. How-ever, this alliance was often riddled with conflict arising from misaligned
visions, attitudes, and convictions of the apostles o imperialism and Chris-
tian missionaries. The colonial government’s primary goal, as outlined byEgerton, was political conquest, euphemistically called “pacification,” and ex-
ploitation of the economic and natural resources of the colonies. The Chris-
tian missions, by contrast, convinced of their duty to bring the Gospel andsalvation to pagan peoples, combined evangelization through the church
with Western-style education through mission schools.
By the turn of the twentieth century, with colonialism firmly established,
the stage was set in the colonies for a clash, ultimately for resolution of the
rift, between the gospel and government, between the Bible and the gun. The
trouble, as Martin Kisch, a colonial government official in northern Nigeriaput it, was that mission education turned the African from the admired, lov-
able “native” to the despised, disreputable “nigger.” The end of this crisis,however, raised the stakes of mutual antagonism between the educated elites
from the colonies and the colonial regime—a high-intensity drama that, in
turn, laid the grounds for the independence and decolonization movements
of the post–World War II era.A century earlier, it was already clear, given the prevalent imperial as-
sumptions in Europe, that the protocolonial administration favored educa-
tion but only insofar as it was aimed at giving Africans basic technical train-ing. The 1846/47 report of the commission set up by Earl Grey, Secretary for
the Colonies, recommended that colonial education should give the Africans
enough training to liberate themselves from “habits o listless contentment”
resulting from their inhabiting a bounteous tropical climate. It also envis-
aged that such education should prepare them for serving in “the humbler
machinery o local affairs.” Although the report was specifically in response
to the question of native education in the West Indies, it was also circulated
among governors in the British West African colonies. Little surprise then
that, a few years later, B. C. C. Pine, the acting governor of Sierra Leone, pos-sibly influenced by this report, attacked the mission schools for providing
the natives literary education, given their lack of a culture suitable for intel-
lectual pursuits.
The Christian missionaries, for their part, saw literary education as a cru-cial tool of evangelization, for it speeded up the spread of the Gospel and
European cultural enlightenment among the natives. Yet by 1865, at the verybeginning of British imperialism in Africa, missionary education was already
under enormous pressure. Answering questions from the Select Committee
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on West Africa, Reverend Elias Shrenk of the Basel Mission argued that the
natives needed to learn Latin and Greek to enable them to read newspapers;
the gift of such education, he suggested, ought to be seen as a reparatory ges-
ture on the part of Britain in atonement o its sordid slavery past. The colonialgovernment, unconvinced of the merits of Shrenk’s apologia for missionary
education, set its eyes on a different model of education for colonized Afri-
cans. Helped in large measure by the work of American missionaries influ-
enced by the work of the African American educator Booker T. Washington,West African mission schools increasingly opted for industrial education,
which resulted in the simultaneous retrenchment from literary and human-istic studies and instead supported, willy-nilly, the colonial governments’
emphasis on technical and low-grade education in the era o indirect rule.
Indirect rule has a complex history. The best- known and the most influ-ential model of British colonial governance in Africa, it is usually associatedwith Lord Frederick Lugard—under whose regime Nigeria was formed in
1914—and derived in part from the earlier ideas of the French ethnologist
Gustav d’Eichthal, who advised the precolonial British Niger Mission against
disrupting the Islamic society of the Fulani Empire in today’s northern Nige-
ria. The mission, he reasoned, would do better to leave the Muslim Africans
to develop in their own way, separate from the Europeans. D’Eichthal’s ideas,well received in Britain, helped the colonial administration formulate the
terms o its later political engagement with Islamic societies in the region.Apart from d’Eichthal, other important voices, such as the anthropologist
and self-proclaimed imperialist Mary Kingsley, argued that African coloni-
zation must be based on the recognition of the role of African cultural insti-
tutions as well as the difference of the African. In fact Kingsley’s sympatheticracism, built as it was on her brand of social anthropology, exerted tremen-
dous influence on the development of the theory o indirect rule operational-
ized in Nigeria by Lord Lugard.
The problem with indirect rule’s claim to preserving Islamic/African cul-
tures and political structures lies in the colonialists’ underestimation of theimpact of their presence as political agents with ultimate coercive and judi-cial powers in the colonies. Moreover, Lugard’s rule in northern Nigeria,
legendary for its authoritarian excesses, did not reflect his supposed respectfor Islamic culture. In its editorial in response to a famous 1920 speech
by Lord Montagu, secretary of state for India at the British House of Par-
liament, in which he condemned the massacre of Indians at Amritsar, the
Lagos Weekly Record drew parallels between official terrorism in India and inLugard’s Nigeria. The journal noted that Montagu’s statement
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could be made to apply to Nigeria particularly during the terrible admin-
istration of Sir Frederick Lugard, to wit: “when you pass an order that inthe Northern Provinces all Nigerians must Zaki before any white man,
when you pass an order to say that all Nigerians must compulsorily saluteany officer of His Majesty the King, you are indulging in frightfulness and
there is no adequate word to describe it.”
Evidently, the argument for the preservation of Islamic cultures by in-
direct rule’s apologists conveniently justified the systematic alienation of allbut a few northern princes from Western education, thereby limiting the
scale of popular access to political power within the context of the modern
state. From their experience in Lagos and southern Nigeria, the British knew
that uncontrolled Western education for the colonized, especially at the sec-
ondary and tertiary level, inexorably led to disenchantment with the colo-
nial status quo and to the struggle for independence. Given its success in
stanching direct access to institutions of modernity by northern Nigerians,
indirect rule seemed the most attractive bulwark against the upsurge of anti-
colonialism, as articulated by the southern educated elite clustered aroundLagos in the interwar period. In the hands of Lugard, this system of gov-
ernment avoided meaningful education of the natives, and his critics in the
Lagos press—his eternal enemies—never forgave him for that. To his crit-ics, indirect rule colonialism, as Achille Mbembe has persuasively argued,
was not just about control of the bodies of the colonized through spectacu-
lar violence; its less obvious yet more pernicious objective was disciplining
the intellect of the colonized. If colonialism depended on systematically
stage-managing the colonized people’s access to the liberatory potential of
education, the only effective bulwark against it would be sustained counter-
offensive and contestation of the assumptions of colonial education policies.
The Educated African as Troublemaker
From the onset of British imperialism, the colonial government distrusted
the educated native in unmistakable terms and was patently equivocal in its
disposition toward the business of colonial education. More precisely, it pre-ferred industrial education, which, apart from providing low-level manpower
required to support the colonial bureaucracy, was less risky than literary edu-
cation, which eventually led to the emergence of troublesome lawyers, his-
torians, and social scientists who, soon enough, announced their disdain forthe colonial system. While some outspoken members of the African elite
in colonial Lagos condemned literary education because o its supposed ir-
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relevance—because job prospects for those so trained were slim—others
realized its importance in the establishment of a viable literate, progressive,
modern society competent enough to assume political power from the colo-
nialists. Lord Lugard, for instance, seemed to have confirmed his preferencefor agricultural and technical education over “book learning” in response to
gratuitous anti–native education statements by two prominent beneficiarieso literary education: Lagosian lawyers Henry Carr and Sapara Williams.
Moreover, as Benedict Anderson has shown regarding the connection be-
tween the rise of print capitalism and national consciousness, it is far from
surprising that the emergence of a vibrant press in Lagos, signifying a con-
siderable literate population, marked the beginnings of political and cultural
nationalism in the colony by the late nineteenth century. It was an open
secret, shared by colonizer and colonized, that support for and encourage-ment o literary and higher education invariably implanted the seeds of po-
litical opposition amongst the African population and was therefore inimical
to the survival of the colonial system. Remarkably, this question