Modern Art in Africa: An Ongoing Project
Everlyn Nicodemus
In the year 1900, Aina Onabolu (1882-1963), a
young man in the British colonially ruled city of
Lagos in what is today Nigeria, began a career as
a self-taught portrait painter. Fascinated from
childhood by reproductions of European paintings
in foreign magazines, in school Onabolu became
notorious as the only black African to make
images like the whites. The European painting he
copied was academic realism, which, with its
exact
likenesses
of individuals,
objects,
and
landscapes, presented something starkly different
from the religiously functioning carved idols and
masks that constituted the main tradition of
Aina Onabolu, Portrait of a Lawyer, oil on
canvas, early 20th century, collection Nkiru
Nzegwu
African visual culture Onabolu had grown up with.
In
the
African
context,
the
young
artist’s
appropriation was a revolution: “modern” in that
it was a clear break with the past.1
Aina Onabolu’s choice of easel painting and academic realism was also deeply
political, an act of defiance against the bigotry that oppressed all Africans. This was
a period in the colonial history of African-European relations when so-called
scientific racism flourished in Europe, branding black Africans as sub-humans and
The biographical facts about Aina Onabolu are from Ola Oloidi, “Art and Nationalism in Colonial Nigeria” in
Colonial Nigeria, Nsukka Journal of History no 1, 1989, and from the obituary published by his son Dapo Onabolu
in Nigeria Magazine no 79, 1963.
1
1
hardening the colonizers’ attitudes against them. Indigenous Africans, according to
the “science” of Europe at this time, were not intellectually capable of producing
fine art in the Western sense; they were fit only for craft. Acknowledged as a gifted
professional,
finding
patrons
among
Lagos’
population
of
educated
black
immigrants, freed slaves returning from America and Europe, Onabolu managed to
have art lessons introduced in black schools and initiated the training of
professional artists in Nigeria by the 1920s.
The case of Onabolu is typical and exceptional. Exceptional by being that early;
typical because the difficulties he faced were those that have challenged all black
African artists at every step towards an African modernism here conceived as an
ongoing project.
* * *
As in most formerly colonized parts of the world, the time frame of modern art in
Africa differs considerably from that of modern art in Europe and the United States,
where modernism chronologically coincides with the era of colonialism. What is
considered
modernism’s
terminus
in
the
West
with
World
War
Two
and
decolonization corresponds to the establishment of modern art in Africa. To further
complicate periodization within the African continent, some countries like Nigeria
and South Africa came early to modern art while other countries are still in the
preliminary phase.
Yet however one negotiates the chronology of global modern
art and the link between colonialism and modernism, what is indisputable is that in
Africa modern art responds to colonial relations from the opposite side, the side of
the colonized. This gives it a politico-philosophical distinction ultimately linked to
the notion of the black African identity: a difference that is something more than
hybridization.
When talking about African history, there is another time aspect to keep in mind:
historiography itself.
On the rather flimsy ground that handing over knowledge
about the past has traditionally occurred in African societies through oral tradition
2
and rarely through written documents, the West has declared Africa a continent
without history. “The central myth,” stated Kwame Nkrumah (1909-1972), the first
president of independent Ghana, “is the denial that we are a historical people." 2
Western anthropologists and ethnological Africanists, who long functioned as the
dominant authorities on African cultures, preferred to treat African cultures as if
they existed in an unchangeable “present past,” preserving some mythical primeval
origin. The order of the day was the West’s passion for the “primitive.”
Africa as the “heart of darkness,” an isolated “dark continent,” is a Eurocentric
myth. Exchange and adopting new ways and ideas were always part of the pattern
of African life. Africa was never the changeless continent Western explorers and
colonizers depicted. On the eastern side of the African continent, for example, long
before the Portuguese in the 15th century discovered sailing routes around the Cape
of Good Hope, Africa was an active part of world trade networks with Asia, including
China and India.3 All the while, other routes of trade had been crossing into the
interior of the African continent. Traveling Arab historians collected a vast
knowledge of its cultures and history, of which Europe long remained mainly
uninformed.4
Providing the surrounding world with gold and ivory and at an early stage exporting
high quality iron to the East, the African continent had from ancient times been
crisscrossed by traders in the footsteps of whom new religions, mainly Islam, were
introduced. The trans-Saharan trade intensified when North Africa was arabianized
and big parts of Sub-Saharan Africa were integrated into the Muslim world. The
African slave trade, initiated by the Arabs some six hundred years before the
Europeans, was dramatically accelerated by the demand for labor in the New World.
The Euro-American trans-Atlantic slave trade (1601-1870) was to have a
paradoxical double impact, mainly brutalizing and draining many parts of the
2
In a speech at the Congress of Africanists in Accra, Ghana 1962.
About the world trade on the Indian Ocean, see the exemplary history of textile trade by the Japanese scholar Yuko
Tanaka, which goes back to medieval time and mentions the East African trade ports Kilwa and Malindi. Yuko
Tanaka, “A Comparative study of textile production and trading from the beginning of the 16 th century to the end of
the 19th century.” Hosei University Bulletin 1995.
4
For the history of Ibn Battuta, Leo Africanus, and other Muslim travelers to Africa see “Cambridge History of
Africa,” editor Roland Oliver, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1977.
3
3
continent of human resources, but also globalizing African culture. In the century
leading up to Europe’s rapacious scramble for Africa instigated at the Berlin
Conference of 1884-85, the modern technological revolution in the West enabled an
intensified Atlantic trade. Shipping increased economic and cultural exchange
between African regions and the West, between African and European individuals.
Nonetheless, the West’s deep and widespread belief in Africa as a primordial land
with no history grew in popularity. The blind and pervasive force of the myth of
primitive peoples can only be understood as a necessary illusion: the rationale for a
massive and otherwise morally inconceivable crime against humanity.
***
For a long time, the adventure of developing African modernism was carried
through by a few rather isolated individuals, daring and obsessed like Onabolu.
Some went to study in Europe; some art schools were established in African
countries; practicing modern art spread. But it was not until the years after World
War Two with the struggle for freedom from colonial rule, which for the majority of
African countries was acquired in the 1960s, that modern art production became a
regular part of African culture. Not until independence could deeply rooted
aspirations blossom out as the expression of the self-esteem of an Africa that had
shaken off the colonial yoke. The one thing that all the countries and all the peoples
in Africa with few exceptions have in common is the trauma of colonization and the
relief of acquiring independence. As Marshall Berman observed in 1982 about postcolonial modernisms, "When the lid is blown off, the modernist spirit is one of the
first things to come out: it is the return of the repressed.”5 Africa’s explosive postcolonial modernization was stressed by Marshall W. Mount in the preface to his
groundbreaking book on African modern art. “Africa,” Mount observed in 1973, “is
currently undergoing transformation at a speed unequaled in the history of
civilization."6 Independence era modernization is the universal context for the rise
Marshall Berman, “All That is Solid Melts into Air: The Experience of Modernity,” New York: Simon & Schuster,
1982, p. 125.
6
Marshall W. Mount, “African Art. The Years since 1920. With a New Introduction by the author,” Indiana: Da
Capo Press 1989, p XV.
5
4
of modern art in Africa.
Newly independent African countries realized the symbolic power of modern visual
art as a sign of progress and participation in the modern world.
Art academies
were established and artists were given official commissions. This occurred in the
cities. But the newly awakened spirit of public investment in modern art could not
conceal how formidable the changeover was and how alien to the approximately
eighty percent of the population who still lived in villages in rural Africa. In the
traditional system, which was gradually becoming defunct, ritual objects had been
integrated as tools in collective social practices. In the new system, artists were
supposed to produce works for an art market and an initiated audience.
But
building domestic art markets and developing supporting audiences was a very slow
process even in the cities.
African modern artists, those
who have not gone abroad,
have worked within limited and
weak cultural structures and
mostly been obliged to rely on
benevolent foreign expatriates
and
embassy
personnel
as
their patrons. The astounding
thing
is
the
swiftness
with
which modern art in Africa
developed
original
aesthetic
Erhabor Emokpae, Struggle between Life and Death, 1962, Oil on
board, 61 x 122 cm, Collection of Afolabi Kofo-Abayomi, Lagos,
Nigeria
solutions
and
a
vitality
of
its
own
despite
underdeveloped infrastructures for promotion, distribution and preservation of art.
In a parallel Latin American context, Nestor Garcia Canclini has pointed out that a
developed capitalistic economy and a sufficiently high level of general literacy are
prerequisites for a consistent modernism. 7 Most African countries have been left
lacking in both aspects.
Where a cultural infrastructure and an art market did
develop, as in Nigeria, the heterogeneity of the audience is often reflected in the
See Nestor Garcia Canclini, “Modernity after Postmodernity,” in Beyond the Fantastic. Contemporary Art
Criticism from Latin America, edited by Gerardo Mosquera, London: inlVA,1995
7
5
production of artists. The Nigerian modernist pioneer Erhabor Emokpae (19341984), for instance, alternated between painting huge figurative battle scenes in a
conservative academic style and modernist non-figurative compositions that
express the artist’s own philosophical reflections.
Despite the unity ascribed to Africa by the West and Africa’s relations with the
West, in the end it is questionable if one can talk at all about an "African" modern
art or even about “Africa” as a defined entity. The continent is five times the size of
the United States. It contains today more than fifty countries. Several of the
countries, the borders of which were drawn with a ruler by the colonizing powers,
count internally a great many different tribal languages and cultures, in some cases
hundreds of them. Nigeria has for instance more than two hundred and fifty ethnic
groups; my own native country, Tanzania, has one hundred and twenty. And before
being colonized, the continent contained multiple kingdoms and trade centers with
prominent trade languages and cultural institutions. What do we then specifically
refer when we mention "Africa"?
“Africa,” the histories of the continent as well as the history of African art and its
modern chapter, are stories containing within them multiple different stories, each
with its own temporal trajectory and unique relations and exchanges with the outer
world, predominantly with the West. If I here have chosen to speak about “Africa”
referring to what is mainly called Black Africa or Africa south of Sahara, it should
not be seen to diminish this paradox of a broadly generalized multiplicity, which
makes the continent a model for perceiving the many contradictions of local and
global transaction in other parts of the world.
Modern Art in Africa: Selected Readings
The essays in this section present African modern art from a particular point of
view. The selections reflect the fact that I am a black African woman, an artist and
independent scholar who participates in an African-diasporic intellectual culture that
is transnational. A critical choice was to focus mainly on Black Africa and much less
6
on the north of the continent, where the art could be discussed, with no less
relevancy, in a Middle East geopolitical context.
To give a comprehensive and
composite picture of African visual creativity within different arts during the
modernist era, I have as far as possible given priority to texts written by black
African, African American, and black diaspora authors dealing with black artists.
Some artists, art writers, and patrons within white minorities, mainly in South
Africa, can be said to have contributed beyond their own communities. But to me
the principal story to tell has been that of Black Africa finding its way to modernism.
The authors of the selected essays also assume various postures on defining
characteristics of African modernism. Chika Okeke in his essay “Modern African Art”
has surveyed modernism within the African continent as a whole, including the
Maghreb in the north. This approach enables him to broaden the picture of how
modernism first emerged on African soil.
From this larger perspective, Aina
Onabolu in Nigeria was not alone in his early demands for modern art education. In
1908 a member of the Egyptian National Party, Prince Yusef Kamal, established in
Cairo the first school of fine arts on the continent. Art schools followed in countries
like Ghana (1936), Uganda (1939), Sudan (1946) and Nigeria (1953 and 1955).
Some of them, like the School of Fine Arts at Makerere University College in
Kampala, Uganda, became sites for vital cultural and political pan-African
interaction. At one of the early Nigerian art academies, in Zaria, a group of
students, the so-called Zaria Rebels, took it upon themselves to formulate guiding
principles for a modern art in independent Nigeria.
See the document “Natural
Synthesis” by Uche Okeke, the leading theoretician among them. Similar rebellions
by black African art school students empowering themselves occurred at the
Makerere art school in Kampala, where students like the sculptor Gregory Maloba
and the painter Sam Ntiro took over as teachers, and in South Africa at the Polly
Street Art Center in Johannesburg with Sidney Kumalo and Ezrom Legae.
While Chika Okeke deals with the wide, continental perspectives of African
modernism, Steven Sack has written “From Country to City: The Development of an
Urban Art” from a closely informed view of the devastating conditions of the black
7
South African artists during apartheid. The history of black modern art in South
Africa calls for special attention. De-colonization, which in most of Africa
represented the moment that freed black creative power, did not occur in the same
way in South Africa. Independence from Britain was here an agreement between
whites, between Britain and British and Dutch minorities in South Africa, and it had
hardly any impact on the situation of the black majority. On the other side, the
existence of a white community of South African artists and liberal patrons
facilitated in some cases exchange and interracial initiatives. The most important
example is the Polly Street Art Center, mentioned above, and the case of the South
African woman artist Gladys Mgudlandlu (1925-1979) as told by Elza Miles in
“Nomfanekiso Who Paints at Night: The Art of Gladys Mgudlandlu.” Mgudlandlu is
exceptional because of the press exposure and success she experienced despite
increasing apartheid and because black professional modern women artists are
extremely rare.
In fact, a first question during my research was always, where are the black women
artists and where can I find texts written on them by black women authors? They
exist, but I have had to resign myself to the fact that two patriarchal systems, the
African one and that of the colonizing West, delayed black women’s contribution to
the production of modern art and the critical discourse surrounding it. This is
specifically valid for the modern period. Black African women artists were in some
countries accepted into professional art schools, but they were rarely encouraged
and supported. Still, there exists in many traditional African societies a practice of
painting that is a women’s prerogative, namely the making of ritual decorations of
the walls of houses and huts. In South Africa Gladys Mgudlandlu as well as Helen
Sebidi are among the rare examples of women painters who managed to proceed to
professional careers as fine artists from having grown up practicing within this
tradition.
Photography as a modern technological medium played an important role in
modernizing the pictorial tradition in Africa. As an art medium in the hands of black
Africans it had an early chapter mainly in West Africa and predominantly in the
8
form of studio portrait photography. Mama Casset in Senegal started to take such
photographs in the 1920s, and Seydou Keita in Mali opened his portrait studio in
1948. In general terms their portraits represent descriptions of individuals as much
as they are inscriptions of social identities, write Okwui Enwezor and Octavio Zaya
in “Negritude, Pan-Africanism, and Postcolonial African Identity: African Portrait
Photography.” In the period of transformation leading to independence the
photographs are instilled with euphoria and disappointment, pride and insecurity,
confidence and contradictions. The photographs are modern, the authors point out,
in the sense of implicitly diverging from a retrogressive side of Negritude that
internalized primitivism; instead they manifest a “reluctance to be confined to . . . a
natural-history or ethnographic setting.”
Portrait photography addressed the private sphere. On the contrary Drum Magazine
in South Africa introduced, as writes Okwui Enwezor in “A Critical Presence: Drum
Magazine in Context,” a vital form of socially and culturally investigative
photography beyond the documentary. The magazine had a Pan-African readership
outside South Africa through editions published in several parts of Africa.
It
contributed significantly to a developing modern African identity and self-esteem. In
my childhood, Drum could be found at the coffee table in many middle-class
families.
The Pan-Africanism evident in the international popularity of Drum
Magazine is a universal of African modernism. The roots of Pan-Africanism go back
to the Atlantic slave trade and to a shared African history of diaspora, the
transnational space within which, as describes Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic:
Modernity and Double Consciousness (1992), black artists had long traveled and
worked.8
Between the early sixteenth century and the second half of the nineteenth century
around fourteen million Africans arrived on the other side of the Atlantic, kidnapped
and shipped as slaves. They had been forced to leave their material culture behind
and were forbidden most of their cultural practices. But they carried inside them
8
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, Cambridge: Harvard University Press
1992.
9
creative patterns and interpretations of life.
The essay by Cuban Gerardo
Mosquera, “Africa in the Art of Latin America,” in the Latin American section of this
volume can be read in this context. In this section, Michael Harris begins his essay
“Art of the African Diaspora”9 by reminding us of the history of the Black Atlantic.
In the United States, the African heritage lived on mainly within popular arts, but in
the 20th century emancipated African American artists emerged with new selfconfidence. In what is known as the Harlem Renaissance, black American artists in
the 1920s drew inspiration from pre-colonial African prototypes to celebrate black
African identity. In this they followed the primitivist example of European Cubists
and Expressionists. For African-American artists, however, the African sculpture
that revolutionized Western art was their own ancestral heritage.
See the 1925
essay, “The Art of the Ancestors,” by Alain Locke.
The African diaspora played an important role in developing modern African art. In
the 1930s Paris became another diasporic centre of activity.
Some of the
pioneering black artists who emerged in Africa during Europe’s interwar period and
who laid the foundation for modern art in Africa contributed after the Second World
War to Pan-African activity centered around the Paris-based magazine, Presence
Africaine (African presence), which also organized international conferences on
black African literature and art. In Paris, black avant-garde writers, preeminently
Aime Cesaire and Leopold Senghor from Francophone Caribbean and continental
Africa, worked out Pan-African theories of black African aesthetics, particularly
Negritude, while the Caribbean psychiatrist and political thinker Frantz Fanon
established a critical analysis of colonial and post-colonial culture in Africa. See the
selections in this volume from Cesaire’s 1955 Discourse on Colonialism and from
Fanon’s seminal The Wretched of the Earth (1961).
In architect Hassan Fathy’s 1969 text, “Chorale: Man, Society, and Technology: An
Experiment in Rural Egypt,” we meet a committed and lively modernist voice from
the African continent. It stands here for a category of modern production,
While “African diaspora” generally refers to the movements of Africans and their descendants throughout the
world, Michael Harris has in his essay chosen to focus mainly on African American art.
9
10
indigenous African architecture, the success of which seems still in waiting in most
parts of Africa. While the Egyptian Fathy achieved world recognition, few black
African architects have so far managed to be awarded major domestic designs.
Although large-scale urban modernization projects have been achieved in postcolonial Africa, for instance the new capitals of Nigeria and Tanzania, the architects
chosen to design them have all been foreign.
Fathy was skeptical about International style modern architecture, at least when
applied outside big cities in Africa. When commissioned in the 1940s to build New
Gurna, a village close to the ancient site of the Valley of the Kings in Egypt, he
chose an approach fundamentally opposed to that of Western architectural
modernists. Instead of applying an abstract and anonymous International style, he
modernized traditional Muslim forms and ancient techniques that still existed in that
region of Egypt but were less and less held in esteem by the population.
We meet a similarly wide modernization of deep-rooted African traditions in
Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike’s chapter “Oral Traditions and the Aesthetics of Black
African Cinema.” Modern black African cinema shares a socio-cultural structure, a
system of ideas and images, he writes, of which oral performances, dance, music,
singing, artisan crafts, metaphors and proverbs are all integral parts. And this
structure, typical of the oral traditions in most parts of Africa, has given rise to a
new cinematographic language. The core of this system, the oral tradition, is a
specifically African vital tradition of communicating by telling stories and tales. In
the center of African film is the so-called griot, the traditional story tellers who
function as oral historians responsible for handing down from generation to
generation a collective memory.
Ukadike’s text tells us about a specifically African attitude among modern
professional producers towards living traditions of popular arts, traditions that are
characterized by powerful rhythms, colorful performances and intense bodily
expressions. It is an attitude of mind which comprises respect and identification and
which strongly differs from Western ethnographic interpretations of African folklore.
11
See the dialogue between a prominent French ethnographic film maker and a
pioneering modern African cineaste in this volume under the significant title “A
Historic Confrontation between Jean Rouch and Osmane Sembene in 1965: You
Look at Us as if We Were Insects.”
There can be no doubt that modern African art, produced in the inspiring vicinity of
a uniquely vital popular culture, has drawn deeply from the inexhaustible watering
hole of oral tradition. If one could speak here about an internally African search for
authenticity – but “authentic” is a Western notion burdened with preconceived ideas
regarding African arts – then this symbiosis of modern experimentation and popular
lore gives us yet another answer to how African modern art, diverse, local and
individual as it may be, manifests itself beyond Africa’s modern experience of
slavery, colonialism, independence and diaspora as a uniquely and universally
“African” modern art.
The essays and documents presented here are edited and shortened. They
have been selected from the following publications:
Okeke, Chika. “Modern African Art.” In The Short Century: Independence and
Liberation Movements in Africa 1945-1994, edited by Okwui Enwezor, 29-36.
Munich, London, New York: Prestel, 2001.
Sack, Steven. “From Country to City: The Development of an Urban Art,” in Ten
Years of Collecting, edited by Anitra Nettleton and David Hammond-Tooke, 54-57.
Johannesburg: University of Witwatersrand Art Galleries, 1989.
Miles, Elza. “Nomfanekiso Who Paints at Night: The Art of Gladys Mgudlandlu”.
Vlaeberg, South Africa: Fernwood Press, 2002.
Enwezor, Okwui and Octavio Zaya. “Negritude, Pan-Africanism, and Postcolonial
African Identity: African Portrait Photography.” In “Colonial Imaginary, Tropes of
Disruption: History, Culture, and Representation in the Works of African
Photographers.” In In/sight: African Photographers, 1940 to the Present, 17-47.
New York: Harry Abrams, 1996.
Enwezor, Okwui. “A Critical Presence: Drum Magazine in Context.” In In/sight:
African Photographers, 1940 to the Present, 179-191. New York: Harry Abrams,
1996.
12
Harris, Michael. “Art of the African Diaspora.” In A History of Art in Africa, 500-514.
New York: Harry N. Abrams, 2001.
Fathy, Hassan. “Chorale: Man, Society, and Technology: An Experiment in Rural
Egypt” (1969). In Architecture for the Poor: An Experiment in Rural Egypt, 24-26,
37-38, 43-45. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973.
Ukadike, Nwachukwu Frank, “Oral Tradition and the Aesthetics of Black African
Cinema.” In Nwachukwu Frank Ukadike, Black African Cinema, 70-72, 201-216.
Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994.
Okeke, Uche. “Natural Synthesis” (1960). In Seven Stories about Modern Art in
Africa, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, pp. 208-9. Paris, New York: Flammarion,
1995.
Fanon, Frantz. From the chapter “On National Culture” in The Wretched of the Earth
(in French 1961). Preface by Paul Sartre. Copyright Presence Africaine, 181. Great
Britain: Penguin Books 1967.
Cesaire, Aime. “Discourse on Colonialism” (in French 1955), 75-76. New York:
Monthly Review Press, 1972.
Rouch, Jean, and Ousmane Sembène. “A Historic Confrontation between Jean
Rouch and Ousmane Sembène in 1965: ‘You Look at Us as if We Were Insects.”
Transcribed by Albert Cervoni and translated by Muna El Fituri. In The Short
Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945-1994, edited by
Okwui Enwezor, p.440. Munich, London, New York: Prestel, 2001.
13