p ostco lo n i a l m o d e r n i sm

Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria

Chik a Okeke-Agulu
 P O S TCO LO N I A L
Art and MODERNISM
Decolonization in
Twentieth-­Century
Nigeria

CH I K A OKE KE-­A G U LU

Duke University Press

Durham and London  2015
© 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.
isbn 978-­0-­8223-­5732-­2 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn 978-­0-­8223-­5746-­9 (pbk : alk. paper)
1. Art, Nigerian—20th century. 2. Postcolonialism—Nigeria.
3. Decolonization—Nigeria. I. Title.
n7399. n 5O394 2014
709.669′09041—dc23
2014006962

isbn 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.
 In memory of my father

vincent chike okeke-­a gulu

(“Nwokafor Ayaghiliya”; 1929–1993)
 CONTENTS

ix List of Illustrations
xiii Acknowledgments

INTRODUCTION   Postcolonial Modernism

1

21
CHAPTER 1   Colonialism and the Educated Africans

39
CHAPTER 2   Indirect Rule and Colonial Modernism

71
CHAPTER 3   The Academy and the Avant-­Garde

131
CHAPTER 4   Transacting the Modern: Ulli Beier,
Black Orpheus, and the Mbari International

183
CHAPTER 5   After Zaria

227
CHAPTER 6   Contesting the Modern: Artists’ Societies
and Debates on Art

259
CHAPTER 7   Crisis in the Postcolony

291 Notes
313 Bibliography
327 Index
 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURE 2.1  Aina Onabolu, Sisi Nurse, 1922, 46

FIGURE 2.2  Akinola Lasekan, Ajaka of Owo, 1944, 48
FIGURE 2.3  Raja Ravi Varma, Young Woman with a Veena, 1901, 49
FIGURE 2. 4  Kenneth Murray, Kwami, 1936, 53
FIGURE 2.5  Kenneth Murray, Keta Girl, 1942, 53
FIGURE 2. 6  Ben Enwonwu, Coconut Palms, 1935, 58
FIGURE 2.7  C. C. (Christopher Chukwunenye) Ibeto, Ibo Dancers at Awka, 1937, 58
FIGURE 2.8  Uthman Ibrahim, Bamboos, ca. 1935, 67
FIGURE 3.1  Sculpture studio with students’ work, ca. 1958–1950, 74
FIGURE 3.2  Paul de Monchaux, Head, 1958, 74
FIGURE 3.3 Group photograph showing Paul de Monchaux (center) and art students
of the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology (NCAST), ca. 1960, 79
FIGURE 3. 4 Photograph of “Tsoede bronzes,” including the well-­known seated figure
(right) from Tada, 1959, 80
John Danford with plaster figure of Emotan, in his Chelsea studio,
FIGURE 3.5 
London, 1953, 81
FIGURE 3. 6  Papa Ibra Tall, Royal Couple, 1965, 97
FIGURE 3.7  Uche Okeke, Egbenuoba, 1961, 100
FIGURE 3.8  Uche Okeke, Monster, 1961, 100
FIGURE 3.9  Uche Okeke, Christ, 1961, 102
FIGURE 3.10  Uche Okeke, Jumaa, 1961, 103
FIGURE 3.11  Uche Okeke, Ana Mmuo (Land of the Dead), 1961, 104
FIGURE 3.12  Uche Okeke, Nza the Smart, 1958, 105
FIGURE 3.13  Demas Nwoko, Beggars in the Train, 1959, 107
List of Illustrations

x FIGURE 3.14  Demas Nwoko, Ogboni Chief, 1961, 108

FIGURE 3.15  Demas Nwoko, Nigeria in 1959, 1960, 109
FIGURE 3.16  Demas Nwoko, White Fraternity, ca. 1960, 110
FIGURE 3.17  Demas Nwoko, Bathing Women, 1961, 111
FIGURE 3.18  Bruce Onobrakpeya, Eketeke vbe Erevbuye (Two Laziest People), 1961, 113
FIGURE 3.19  Bruce Onobrakpeya, Landscape with Skull and Anthill, 1961, 114
FIGURE 3.20  Yusuf Grillo, Oloogun, 1960, 115
FIGURE 3.21  Yusuf Grillo, Sabada (Dance), 1964, 117
FIGURE 3.22  Yusuf Grillo, Harvest, early 1960s, 118
FIGURE 3.23  Akinola Lasekan, Portrait of J. D. Akeredolu, 1957, 119
FIGURE 3.24  Oseloka Osadebe, Lunch at the Park, 1961, 120
FIGURE 3.25  Okechukwu Odita, Sheep Grazing, 1961, 120
FIGURE 3.26  Clifford Frith, Fulani Portrait, ca. 1960, 121
FIGURE 3.27  Clifford Frith, Harmattan Landscape with Figures, 1960–1961, 122
FIGURE 3.28  Patrick George, Hausa Standing, 1959, 123
FIGURE 3.29  Okechukwu Odita, Female Model, 1962, 123
FIGURE 3.30  Oseloka Osadebe, Husband and Wife, 1964, 124
FIGURE 3.31  Jimo Akolo, Hausa Drummer, 1961, 125
FIGURE 4.1  Susanne Wenger, Iwin, ca. 1958, 135
FIGURE 4.2  Francis Newton Souza, Two Saints in a Landscape, 1961, 139
FIGURE 4.3  Francis Newton Souza, Crucifixion, 1959, 139
Okeke and Onobrakpeya working in Michael Crowder’s residence,
FIGURE 4. 4 
Lagos, summer 1960, 142
Bruce Onobrakpeya, sketch for a panel of his Covered Way mural (detail),
FIGURE 4.5 
1960, 144
Demas Nwoko, mural, Arts and Crafts pavilion, Nigeria Exhibition,
FIGURE 4. 6 
Lagos, 1960, 144
FIGURE 4.7  Ben Enwonwu, Head of Afi, 1959, 146
FIGURE 4.8  Yusuf Grillo, Two Yoruba Women, 1960, 148
Demas Nwoko and Uche Okeke at the opening of the Mbari Ibadan
FIGURE 4.9 
inaugural art exhibition, 1961, 152
FIGURE 4.10  Ibrahim El Salahi, Untitled, 1954–1957, 155
FIGURE 4.11  Ibrahim El Salahi, Prayer, 1960, 155
FIGURE 4.12  Ibrahim El Salahi, Untitled, 1961, 157
FIGURE 4.13  Vincent Kofi at Mbari-­Mbayo, Osogbo, 1962, 159
FIGURE 4.14  Jacob Lawrence with Vincent Kofi’s Drummer, 1962, 159
FIGURE 4.15  Malangatana Ngwenya, Untitled, 1961, 163
FIGURE 4.16  Malangatana Ngwenya, To the Clandestine Maternity Home, 1961, 164
FIGURE 4.17  Karl Schmidt-­Rottluff, Kneeling Woman, 1914, 167
 List of Illustrations

FIGURE 4.18  Karl Schmidt-­Rottluff, Girl before a Mirror (Mädchen vor dem Spiegel), xi
1914, 167
FIGURE 4.19  Jacob Lawrence, The Migration of the Negro, No. 22, 1940–1941, 170
FIGURE 4.20  Jacob Lawrence, War Series: The Letter, 1946, 170
FIGURE 4.21  Jacob Lawrence, Street to Mbari, 1964, 173
FIGURE 4.22  Jacob Lawrence, Four Sheep, 1964, 173
FIGURE 4.23  Ahmed Shibrain, Calligraphy, 1962, 174
FIGURE 4.24  Skunder Boghossian, Juju’s Wedding, 1964, 176
FIGURE 4.25  Skunder Boghossian, Night Flight of Dread and Delight, 1964, 178
FIGURE 4.26  Agnaldo dos Santos, Nun, ca. late 1950s, 179
FIGURE 4.27  Agnaldo dos Santos, Untitled, ca. late 1950s, 179
FIGURE 4.28  Naoko Matsubara, Ravi Shankar, 1961, 180
FIGURE 4.29  Naoko Matsubara, A Giant Tree, 1962, 180
FIGURE 5.1  Uche Okeke, mural in the courtyard, Mbari Ibadan, 1961, 185
FIGURE 5.2  Some Uli motifs, 187
FIGURE 5.3  Uli mural, 1994, 187
FIGURE 5. 4  Uli mural, Eke shrine, 1987, 188
FIGURE 5.5  Woman decorated with Uli, 1994, 188
FIGURE 5. 6  Uche Okeke, From the Forest, 1962, 190
FIGURE 5.7  Uche Okeke, Head of a Girl, 1962, 190
FIGURE 5.8  Uche Okeke, Owls, 1962, 191
FIGURE 5.9  Uche Okeke, Munich Girl, 1962, 193
FIGURE 5.10  Uche Okeke, Birds in Flight, 1963, 195
FIGURE 5.11  Demas Nwoko, The Gift of Talents, mural, 1962, 197
FIGURE 5.12  Igbo artist, male and female figures, 198
FIGURE 5.13  Demas Nwoko, Adam and Eve, 1963, 199
FIGURE 5.14  Demas Nwoko, Adam and Eve, 1962, 200
FIGURE 5.15  Demas Nwoko, Adam and Eve, 1962–1963, 202
FIGURE 5.16  Head, classical style, Nok culture, ca. 400 bce–200 ce, 203
FIGURE 5.17  Demas Nwoko, Titled Woman, 1965, 205
FIGURE 5.18  Demas Nwoko, Philosopher, 1965, 206
Bruce Onobrakpeya and Ru van Rossem at summer workshop,
FIGURE 5.19 
Mbari-­Mbayo, Osogbo, 1964, 209
FIGURE 5.20  Bruce Onobrakpeya, Man with Two Wives, 1965, 211
FIGURE 5.21  Bruce Onobrakpeya, Dancing Masquerader, 1965, 212
FIGURE 5.22  Bruce Onobrakpeya, Untitled, ca. 1966, 213
FIGURE 5.23  Bruce Onobrakpeya, Untitled, ca. 1966, 213
FIGURE 5.24  Bruce Onobrakpeya, Travellers, 1967, 214
FIGURE 5.25  Bruce Onobrakpeya, Bathers I, 1967, 215
List of Illustrations

xii FIGURE 5.26  Simon Okeke, Lady, 1965, 218

FIGURE 5.27  Simon Okeke, Off to Battle, 1963, 219
FIGURE 5.28  Jimo Akolo, Fulani Horsemen, 1962, 222
FIGURE 5.29  Jimo Akolo, Untitled, 1963, 223
FIGURE 5.30  Jimo Akolo, Man Hanging from a Tree, 1963, 224
FIGURE 5.31  Jimo Akolo, Northern Horsemen, 1965, 225
FIGURE 6.1  Ben Enwonwu, Sango, 1964, 230
FIGURE 6.2  Afi Ekong, Meeting, 1960, 232
FIGURE 6.3  Afi Ekong, Cowherd, early 1960s, 232
FIGURE 6. 4  Ben Enwonwu, Beauty and the Beast, 1961, 244
FIGURE 6.5  Erhabor Emokpae, My American Friend, ca. 1957, 246
FIGURE 6. 6  Erhabor Emokpae, Struggle between Life and Death, 1962, 247
FIGURE 6.7  Erhabor Emokpae, Dialogue, 1966, 249
FIGURE 6.8  Erhabor Emokpae, The Last Supper, 1963, 250
FIGURE 6.9  Colette Omogbai, Accident, ca. 1963, 254
FIGURE 6.10  Colette Omogbai, Anguish, ca. 1963, 255
FIGURE 7.1  Uche Okeke (seated right) and Lawrence Emeka (center), 262
Scene from the Eastern Nigeria Theatre Group production of Andre
FIGURE 7.2 
Obe’s Noah, showing set and costumes designed by Uche Okeke, 262
FIGURE 7.3 Visitors at the opening of exhibition of work by Oseloka Osadebe
(second from right) at Mbari Enugu, ca. 1964, 262
FIGURE 7. 4  Uche Okeke, Crucifixion, 1962, 266
FIGURE 7.5  Uche Okeke, Primeval Forest, 1965, 267
FIGURE 7. 6  Uche Okeke, Nativity, 1965, 268
FIGURE 7.7  Uche Okeke, Adam and Eve, 1965, 269
FIGURE 7.8  Uche Okeke, Oyoyo, 1965, 270
FIGURE 7.9  Uche Okeke, Conflict (After Achebe), 1965, 273
FIGURE 7.10  Uche Okeke, Aba Revolt (Women’s War), 1965, 275
FIGURE 7.11  Demas Nwoko, Crisis, 1967, 279
FIGURE 7.12  Demas Nwoko, Hunter in a War Scene, 1967, 280
FIGURE 7.13  Demas Nwoko, Combatant I, 1967, 281
FIGURE 7.14  Demas Nwoko, Combatant II, 1967, 282
FIGURE 7.15  Demas Nwoko, Soldier (Soja), 1968, 284
FIGURE 7.16  Demas Nwoko, Soldier (Soja), 1968, 285
FIGURE 7.17  Demas Nwoko, Enuani Dancers, 1968, 286
FIGURE 7.18  Demas Nwoko, Dancing Couple (Owambe), 1968, 287
 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

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 El
Anatsui 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 FSAH Collection at the University of Lagos library. I am grateful to the late
Segun 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 NCAST
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 Archives
at the National Museum, Lagos. I also thank Kavita Chellarams and Nana
Acknowledgments

xiv Sonoiki, of Art House Contemporary Ltd, Lagos; Vilma Eid, of Galeria Esta-
ção, São Paulo; and Ulf 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 Emmanuel
Arinze for giving me access to the collections of the National Gallery of Art
and the National Council for Arts and Culture, respectively. My appreciation
also goes to Afolabi Kofo-­Abayomi 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 John
Picton, 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-
 Acknowledgments

tional Museum of African Art Library, and Simon Ottenberg, Rebecca Dim- xv

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 to
African artistic modernism and specific aspects of this work over the years.
I have benefited also from working with Enwezor on several art exhibitions
that have helped me think through some of the important arguments pre-
sented in this study.
I thank James Meyer, Clark Poling, and Bruce Knauft, whose intellectual
generosity shaped my scholarly life at Emory University and beyond. I 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 Valerie
Smith 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 met
along the way and who supported me and my work. My deepest gratitude
goes to Obiora and Ada Udechukwu, with whom I shared so many 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
Acknowledgments

xvi Okeke-­Agulu (“Aruagbala”), my brothers, Okwudili, Ikechukwu, and Eji-

keme, and my sisters, Ogoegbunam and Onyinyechukwu, for supporting me
during all these years. My late sister, Uzoamaka, and brother, Uchechukwu,
saw the beginning of this work but not its completion in the form of this
book. I offer it to their memory. To Marcia, my dearest friend and wife: no
words can express enough my debt to you for sticking with me through the
rough yet exhilarating years that began at the House of Hunger and the art
studios in Nsukka and for being the mother of our most precious children,
Arinzechukwu and Ngozichukwu, who have made my life complete.
 Introduction

POSTCOLONIAL
MODERNISM

THIS BOOK EXAMINES the emergence of postcolonial modernism in Nigeria

during the first half of the twentieth 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

2 radically new formal modes. The results are works of art that show both a
deep connection with local artistic traditions and the stylistic sophistication
we have come to associate with twentieth-­century modernist practices. In
embarking on this crucial work, these artists were inspired by the 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 of both its formal ambition and the vigorous criti-
cal discourse it fostered. In mapping the emergence of this new work during
the period of national independence, this book demonstrates the specific
ways that aspiration to and experience of political sovereignty, in the hands
of young Nigerian artists, was translated into an artistic modernism closely
aligned to the experience and realities of Nigeria’s postcolonial modernity.
What is more, in the way it follows the antagonistic relationship between
the colonial regime and Lagos-­based intellectual elite, the debates among
colonial art educators, curricular strategies within the art department at
Nigeria’s first art school at Zaria, where the Art Society was formed, and the
art criticism and national cultural programs in the early 1960s, the book
argues that modernism and political ideology, in the context of decolonizing
nations, were not mutually exclusive discourses. In fact, the book’s point,
mooted already by Elizabeth Harney and Geeta Kapur but without the 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.1 This book thus crucially maps
the 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 European
artists, critics, and the cultural elite during the continent’s decade of inde-
pendence.
The reader will also notice that this book goes beyond art as such, occa-
sionally bringing into view my own reading of 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 signal
forums of mid-­twentieth century African and black artistic and literary mod-
 Introduction

ernism. Still, the book’s underlying premise is that it is impossible to de- 3

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 brought
modern art from the margins of cultural practice during the colonial period
to the very center of debates about African artistic subjectivity and cultural
identity in the years after the attainment of political sovereignty.
My hope, therefore, is that this book 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 of individual
artists or their intellectual motivations and ideas within a larger context of
similar or antagonistic positions advanced by other artists and stakeholders
of an evolving art world. In fact, it is this kind of study—which maps the 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 making
of these histories—that African art history scholarship urgently needs. To
be sure, dual attention to the big picture and close analysis in one book can
have its shortcomings, but I would argue 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 during
the independence period. In so doing, I strike a balance between narrating
through a selective compression of a sociopolitical history of Nigeria and a
critical examination of contemporary writings, as well as a formalist analysis
of specific artworks and technical protocols deployed by key artists. In the
process, I sidestep deep engagements with biographies of the individuals,
except in the rare instance where such information is relevant to the ideas
associated with such persons.
From the vantage point of researching and writing this book, I can already
Introduction

4 see the salience of its key arguments in the modern art of various African
countries, 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 Old
Khartoum school in the Sudan—where together with his colleagues, Ibrahim
El Salahi (born 1930), who figures in this study courtesy of the presenta-
tion of 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 so
on; 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 on
Nigeria. What we have, instead, are isolated views of these important mo-
ments, studies of individual artists or groups, and writings that have inserted
these artists and their work into disconnected, ahistoric thematic rubrics.2
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 announced
by 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 of his intellectual connections to
two Mbari artists, Uche Okeke and Vincent Kofi, and to Kwame Nkrumah’s
politics and the rhetoric of African personality? The answer to this 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-
 Introduction

ized natural synthesis, thus becoming the leader of the Nsukka school, which 5

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 of
its curricular ideology to his own artistic sensibilities, which were already
primed by his attraction to Nkrumah’s cultural politics.3 Knowledge of this
connection between Anatsui and Okeke and, by extension, between Anatsui
and 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 that
the 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 that
by the late 1960s, which marks one chronological bookend of this study,
these artists (and their colleagues in Lagos) had become the acknowledged
leading figures in modern Nigerian art, their influence grew exponentially
in the subsequent decades. Take, for instance, three key artists presented.
Along with Okeke and his work at the Nsukka school, Demas Nwoko (born
1935) established himself as a major architect who, perhaps more than any
other modern Nigerian architect, articulated through his designs the suc-
cessful synthesis of traditional Igbo, Japanese, and Western architectural de-
sign and principles.4 Bruce Onobrakpeya (born 1932), building on the print-
making techniques he discovered in the mid-­1960s (see chapter 5) but also
on 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.5
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
Introduction

6 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 had
retired in near seclusion to his historic cultural research center, the Asele
Institute, Nimo. In the course of planning that exhibition I was led to an
era, in many ways a distant one, a meaningful appreciation of whose scope
and core motivations, politics and legacies, a reading of the major texts—
Ulli Beier’s Contemporary Art in Africa (1968), Marshall Ward Mount’s Afri-
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.6 Access to Okeke’s personal
archives, including his stunningly meticulous diary entries from the mid-­
1950s through the 1960s, spurred my two-­decade-­long study, not just of his
work, but also of 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 2001.7 Needless to say, The Short Century,
because of 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
 Introduction

between British indirect rule ideology and its attendant cultural practices 7
and on the other from theories and ideas associated with African decolo-
nization in the first half of the twentieth century. In tracing the genealogy
and the political-­discursive conditions that catalyzed this new work, as I do
in the first two chapters, my task is to question routine assumptions about
the origins of modern art in Nigeria (and Africa) by resituating and refram-
ing its ideological relationship with colonialist thought. This is an important
art-­historical problem, no less because it had been normal for historians of
modern African art to see a seamless, unproblematic link between the estab-
lishment of art teaching in colonial schools or in workshops established by
European artist-­teachers and the rise of modern art in Africa. The usual ar-
gument is that since formal art teaching began under the watch of colonial
regimes and since easel painting and academic art was imported into colo-
nial Africa through these encounters, it follows that the art made by Africans
after this European type of art education is a product of colonialism and colo-
nialist visions. Against these notions, this book sets out to disentangle artis-
tic modernism from this supposed colonial imagination, returning it to the
long history of anticolonial, self-­affirmative theories, practices, and visions
that began at the turn of the twentieth century. For it is all too clear, as I de-
tail in the first chapter, that with the entrenchment of formal colonialism on
the continent, African and black intellectuals in fields as diverse as religion,
sociology, literature, art, and politics set for themselves the task of imagining
an African modern subjectivity defined primarily by their own need for self-­
assertion and their visions of political and cultural autonomy. Even when this
task was not vociferously anticolonial, it often staked a claim to an alternative
position at odds with the schemes and propositions of colonial regimes and
their apologists. This will to self-­definition—which characterized the Afri-
can anticolonial and decolonization movements—laid the grounds for the
work of that generation of artists in Nigeria and elsewhere who participated,
midcentury, in the making of what this book calls postcolonial modernism.
The assumption of a causal link between colonialist thought and mod-
ern African art has resulted in the long-­standing underestimation of or out-
right disregard for the artistic accomplishments represented by this work,
as well as doubts about the significance of its contribution to the expansion
of the horizons of modernisms of the twentieth century. It is in fact neces-
sary to return to this rather old problem, precisely because its damning effect
on the reception of African modernist work remains with us today. Let me
cite three examples of how a particular perspective on the colonial history of
Africa has undermined the reception and appreciation of modern African art
Introduction

8 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 its
merits is an extension of European art by a kind of involuntary cultural colo-
nialism.”8 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 of how commendable the effort might be basically.”9 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 “mimicry
under the tutelage of colonial paternalism.”10 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 of involuntary
mimicry of European art; and second, its apparent belatedness, that is to say,
its perpetual condition of being out of time, quintessentially anachronistic,
and completely evacuated of any radical potential.11
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.”12 In
other 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 of 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.
 Introduction

9
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.13 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 and
nationalists, 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).14 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 decades
as 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.15 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 of his
new, independent personhood. Even so, Nkrumah also wore Mao suits to
establish 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 both
instances, 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.
Introduction

10 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 of Western economic and political modernity—suggests
a more complex, even paradoxical, response to the metropolitan encounter.
Put differently, the pilgrimage might have produced what Anderson calls
Anglicized colonial subjects, but the pilgrim cultural nationalists returned
home with the confidence to regard Western and African cultures and 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.16
But how to make sense of this will to synthesis, this idea of modernity in
which combinatory nativisms and Westernisms yielded what could easily be
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 of becoming. I suggest that this attitude to
modernity is especially unproblematic among African peoples, given that
their cosmologies tend to run counter to the very metaphysical and ontologi-
cal absolutes at the basis of 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,” a
common Igbo adage, which affirms the belief that the self and the other are
not necessarily opposed but instead are signposts in a cyclical network of so-
cial, ritual, and cosmic relations.17 The ideas encapsulated in this Igbo prov-
erb also occur in a Xhosa proverb, “umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu” (a person is
a 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.”18 One might call this the principle
of complementarity at the basis of Igbo and African philosophies of being.
This, it seems to me, helps explain the disposition on the part of African
peoples to open up to and incorporate new religions, cultures, and ideas,
whether before, during, or after the colonial encounter. This sensibility is
further instantiated in an episode in Chinua Achebe’s novel Arrow of God,
in which the priest Ezeulu, an appointed protector of his community’s tradi-
tions against the onslaught of alien Christian-­colonial culture, admonished
 Introduction

his school-­bound son to thoroughly master the white man’s system of writing 11
upon which colonial governance is based, such that he could write with his
left hand—in other words, so he could do what he wished with this acquired
knowledge.19 Despite his antagonism for the colonial regime, Ezeulu saw in
the written word not just a gateway to the new world order but also a tool for
self-­enunciation and navigation through the maze of confounding moder-
nity. He was, like many an African cultural nationalist, fiercely protective
of his ancestral heritage and cognizant of the inexorable value of aspects of
Western modernity to the constitution of 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 postcolonial
modernity. 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.”20
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 itself 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 Urhobo
religions and folklore, as if to assert their equal sympathies for the doctrine
and legacies of 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 and
familiarity 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
Introduction

12 endogenously, not in exclusivist, racial-­chauvinist terms but all the same as

a distinctive presence in the world on its own terms.”21

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 of how this work by African (and Third World)
artists fits into the narrative template of modernism, which is traditionally
understood to be the aesthetic manifestation of 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 at
first, to consider the cultural implications of the sovereignties won by what
would be known as Third World countries in Africa, Asia, the Caribbean,
and elsewhere. Important work on the African diaspora and Latin America—­
exemplified by that of Paul Gilroy, Nestor Garcia Canclini, and David 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 of histories, cultures, and subjec-
tivities before and after colonialism.
The question that confronts us, then, is how to describe the foundational
concerns 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-­gardes
everywhere, all manifestations of artistic modernism ought to be qualified
in some way to reflect their origins, particularities, and horizons. Moreover,
it makes sense to name all modernisms, 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
 Introduction

study of the conjunction of art and the politics of decolonization in twentieth-­ 13

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 of bodies and ideas between colonial peripheries and Western
metropolises 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 of 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.22
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 of 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 artistic
discourses 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—but
also the realities of nations and peoples emerging into a new imperialistic
context of economic and sometimes political domination.”23
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
Introduction

14 the “wide-­ranging reassessment of the cultural politics of [modernism] in-

augurated in the late 1980s.”24 In this book, I recuperate and reanimate the
critical ambitions of literary postcolonial modernism as a way to give ana-
lytical rigor to the work of artistic modernisms in Nigeria and the African
continent. As I detail in this book, the literatures that have been subjected to
analyses as exemplary of postcolonial modernism were produced in the same
discursive spaces and contexts as the works of art with which I am concerned
here. Whether in the pages of the literary journal Black Orpheus, founded
at Ibadan, Nigeria, in 1957, or within the Mbari Club in the 1960s, Afri-
can writers (Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, Es’kia Mphahlele, Christopher
Okigbo, for instance) shared the same concerns with their artist-­colleagues
(Uche Okeke, Demas Nwoko, Bruce Onobrakpeya, Ibrahim El Salahi, among
others) about the implications and impact of political decolonization on the
thematic and stylistic directions of their work. Despite the fact that debates
on these questions were undoubtedly more developed and vociferous in the
field of literature, closer examination of contemporary art criticism, which I
offer in this book, convinces us that conversations of similar motivation and
substance occurred on the subject of art during the same period.
Given the above considerations, it is clear as day that the work of the Art
Society and their colleagues elsewhere on the continent in the independence
decade was decidedly postcolonial, in the sense that they initially imagined
their art as constituting a critical space in which the exhilarating drama of
cultural decolonization was enacted, and subsequently thought of it as a plat-
form for articulating the contradictions of political sovereignty and crises of
postindependence nationalism and subjectivity. These two sequences of the
postcolonial, as I describe them in chapters 5 and 7, respectively, are evident
first in Uche Okeke’s Oja Series, a suite of drawings inspired by Igbo Uli tra-
ditional drawing (and in Achebe’s Things Fall Apart);25 and second, in Okeke
and Demas Nwoko’s “crisis” paintings (as well as in Christopher Okigbo’s
poems Path of Thunder), from the late 1960s. In conjunction with its post-
colonial status, the work of these artists manifests the formal and discursive
sensibilities that have come to define artistic modernisms. First among these
is their belief in the significance of the artist’s role in fashioning a new art
and culture for the new nation and society, as a harbinger of the new. It is in
this sense that I describe Okeke, Nwoko, and their cohorts as constituting an
avant-­garde. Second is their attempt to articulate and reframe their relation-
ship with “tradition” and the past. Third is their focus on the invention of
formal styles unlike any developed before them. Fourth is the artists’ turn to
critical analyses and commentary on the postcolonial state as it was eclipsed
by political crises from the late 1960s onward.
 Introduction

Let me return to Appiah’s description of the postcolonial as a space-­ 15

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 wave
of decolonization that set off at full speed soon after the end of the World
War II, young, progressive artists and writers set about reimagining and re-
calibrating their relations with imperial Europe, its ideologies, cultures, and
knowledge bases. It is not so much that they rejected Europe or replaced
it with “native” cultures; rather, in marking both the locus and the 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 with
the monovalent pulls of blackness, Africa, the nation, or the ethnos. What
the artists presented in this book demonstrate through their work is the
constitution, during the years around political independence in Nigeria, of
compound—messy, fraught, and inevitably distinctive—postcolonial mod-
ern ­subjectivities.

BEFORE I SUMMARIZE this book’s chapters, let me explain the logic of its
architecture. From the onset I had to confront the option of compressing the
scope 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 the
latter. 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 sweeping
intellectual and social-­historical accounts to meticulous formalist and criti-
cal readings of particular artworks and texts. This is my way of insisting on
an 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
Introduction

16 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 colonial
apologists and anticolonial nationalists, noting how early notions of African
personality 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 constitutes
the 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 art
program at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology (1954–
1961) to highlight its participation in a national conversation about the role
of fine art in a decolonizing society and the tensions and anxieties within the
school about institutional credibility at a time when London’s control of colo-
 Introduction

nial education was confronted by growing discontent in the colony about the 17
reaches of 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-­century
Nigerian art. The second part of this chapter dwells on the Art Society and the
sources of 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
of 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, the
magazine that gave voice to a new generation of Anglophone African and
black diaspora writers and artists in the 1950s and 1960s—as well as of the
exhibitions and workshops at the Mbari Artists and Writers Club, Ibadan.
This chapter affords us a view into the process of internationalizing an incipi-
ent postcolonial modernism through the work of Ulli Beier and his network
of 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 (and
literary) modernism. This is important because it returns us to the claim,
Introduction

18 made in chapters 2 and 3, that the work of Art Society artists and many of
their Nigerian and African contemporaries followed the political and 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 figural
sculpture. 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 of 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 of
Lagos, especially after 1963, when that city effectively replaced Ibadan as
the center of postcolonial artistic production and debate. Four important
factors guaranteed Lagos’s new significance as the hub of modern art and
culture during this period. First was the radical transformation in 1962 of
Nigeria, a general-­interest journal during the colonial period, into a powerful
cultural 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
 Introduction

center of the American Society of African Culture, which hosted African 19

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 and
Humanities. 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 from
Zaria and their contemporaries in Lagos, particularly the irreverent painters
Erhabor Emokpae, Okpu Eze, and Colette Omogbai. This excursion reveals
crucial fissures between the so-­called 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, more
crucially, 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 following
year 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, the
most obvious instance being the formation of Mbari Enugu by artists and
writers from the eastern region, many of whom had previously associated
with Ibadan and Lagos. I argue in this chapter that the crisis in the 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 Okeke
and Demas Nwoko from 1965 exemplify this change. Into my reading of
their “crisis” paintings and sculptures of this period, I interpolate analysis of
the prophetic, contemporary poetry of their Mbari Club colleagues Christo-
pher Okigbo and Wole Soyinka, the point being to demonstrate that the most
compelling late-­1960s postcolonial Nigerian art and poetry, which had their
roots 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 in
Okeke 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.
 NOTES

Introduction
1. For similar arguments, see Kapur, When Was Modernism, and Harney, In Sen-
ghor’s Shadow.
2. See, e.g., Vogel, Africa Explores.
3. See Okeke, “The Quest,” 41–75, and Ottenberg, New Traditions and The Nsukka
Artists.
4. See Godwin and Hopwood, Architecture of Demas Nwoko; Okoye, “Nigerian Ar-
chitecture,” 29–42.
5. See Enwezor and Okeke-­Agulu, Contemporary African Art.
6. See Beier, Contemporary Art in Africa; Mount, African Art; and Kennedy, New
Currents.
7. See Enwezor, The Short Century.
8. See Fagg and Plass, African Sculpture, 6.
9. See Hassan, “The Modernist Experience in African Art,” 216.
10. Araeen, “Modernity, Modernism,” 278.
11. Shohat and Stam, “Narrativizing Visual Culture,” 28.
12. Bhabha, Location of Culture, 122.
13. Anderson, Imagined Communities, 114–116.
14. Nkrumah, Autobiography, 52–63.
15. Nkrumah defines consciencism as “the map in intellectual terms of the disposi-
tion of forces which will enable African society to digest the Western and the
Islamic and the Euro-­Christian element[s] of Africa, and develop them in such a
way that they fit the African personality. The African personality itself is defined
by the cluster of humanist principles which underlie the traditional African so-
ciety.” See Nkrumah, Consciencism, 79.
16. Taylor, “Two Theories of Modernity,” 183.
17. John S. Mbiti famously asserted the status of the individual in Africa with the
Notes to Chapter 1

292 dictum, “I am because we are; and since we are, therefore I am.” See Mbiti, Afri-
can Religions and Philosophy, 109. The tenability of this assertion has for years
been a matter of intense philosophical debate. But there is ample evidence from
popular sayings, proverbs, and aphorisms of diverse African peoples to suggest
that individual subjectivity is for the most part strongly linked to an awareness
of its dependence on a network of relations with other human and metaphysical
beings.
18. Shutte, Philosophy for Africa, 47.
19. See Achebe, Arrow of God, 234,
20. Drewal, “Memory and Agency,” 242–243.
21. Jeyifo, Perspectives on Wole Soyinka, 117.
22. See Appiah, “Postcolonial and the Postmodern,” 62.
23. Italics added. See Young, Postcolonialism, 57.
24. Moore-­Gilbert, “Postcolonial Modernism,” 551.
25. See my “Politics of Form, 67–86.

Chapter 1: Colonialism and the Educ ated Afric ans

1. Du Bois, Souls of Black Folk, 243–244.
2. Taiwo, How Colonialism Preempted Modernity.
3. Taiwo, How Colonialism Preempted Modernity, 11.
4. Carland, Colonial Office and Nigeria, 108.
5. Frenkel, “Edward Blyden,” 288.
6. Colonial government in southern Nigeria blamed the mission-­trained Afri-
cans for the massive consumption of alcohol responsible for the illicit liquor
trade. For her part, the nineteenth-­century ethnographic writer and explorer
Mary Kingsley thought that mission education made the African “the curse of
the Coast.” Several other commentators emphasized the threat these mission-­
trained Africans posed to the colonial system and its regime of racial and social
hierarchy. For more, see Lyons, “Evolutionary Ideas and Educational Policy,”
15–19.
7. Lyons, “The Educable African,” 17.
8. Lyons, “The Educable African,” 17.
9. Lyons, “The Educable African,” 17.
10. Lugard’s influential book, Dual Mandate in British Tropical Africa, in which he
laid out the principles and practice of indirect rule, became a manual of sorts for
colonial officers in colonial British Africa. See Lugard, Dual Mandate.
11. See Porter, Critics of Empire, 151.
12. Mary Kingsley once stated: “I regard not only the African, but all coloured races,
as inferior—inferior in kind not in degree—to the white races.” Quoted in
Porter, Critics of Empire, 151–152. Porter discusses Mary Kingsley’s influence on
the development of indirect rule colonialism.
13. “[W]e are certain that the publication of the Report will add the last nail to the
coffin of the Nigerian System, falsify the aspersions which have been cast upon
the educated Native by daubing him an agitator who is denationalized by virtue