This article was downloaded by: [Bibliothèques de l'Université de Montréal]On: 03 December 2014, At: 13:12Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK

Third TextPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ctte20

Appropriation as Nationalism inModern African ArtOlu OguibePublished online: 25 Aug 2010.

To cite this article: Olu Oguibe (2002) Appropriation as Nationalism in Modern African Art, ThirdText, 16:3, 243-259, DOI: 10.1080/09528820110120704

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09528820110120704

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoeveror howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to orarising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms& Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

2

1. A D Galloway,‘Missionary Impact onNigeria’, NigeriaMagazine, Special issue,October 1960, p 63.

2. Uche Okeke, ‘History ofModern Nigerian Art’,Nigeria Magazine,128–129, 1979, p 103.

Appropriation as Nationalism inModern African Art

Olu Oguibe

One interesting theatre of nationalist struggle in Africa at the beginningof the 20th century was the changing space of the visual arts. Moreinteresting still was the nature of this struggle that resided not in adirect confrontation with the structures of colonialism, nor in thetropes of imaging and representation, but was written through astrategy of appropriation of the forms of imperial culture.

In the second half of the 19th century, Christian missions began toestablish schools in Africa. The missions needed interpreters and juniorteachers, while growing colonial business concerns required cheap,semi-skilled labour and law enforcement cadres. This specific necessitydetermined the scope of the school curriculum. As A D Galloway haswritten, the ‘early mission schools … [were] somewhat uninspired intheir conception and excessively utilitarian in their concentration uponReading, Writing and Arithmetic (the Catechism being printedalongside the multiplication tables in their text books)’.1 In Nigeria, theRevd Birch Freeman’s school timetable of 1848 departed slightly fromthis narrow scheme and included Geography. Art education, however,was not considered necessary or indeed useful. In his history of arteducation in Nigeria, Uche Okeke concludes that with the colonialChristian mission, ‘cultural and creative education was not consideredimportant for the converts’.2

Beyond the logic of the functionalist argument, though, lay a morefundamental principle at the heart of colonial discourse, namely theperpetuation of the fictions of difference upon which the colonialproject was constructed. A crucial device of colonial authority was toinsert and institutionalise a corridor of slippage that granted thecolonised only partial access to the possibility of transition andtransformation to a modern identity. This boundary of possibility,identified by Sir Edward Cust as the cornerstone of colonial policy,allowed the colonised only a ‘mimic representation’ of imperial culture,such that the colonised was transformed from the extremities ofbackwardness which colonial discourse ascribed to her, into a partial

Third Text, Vol. 16, Issue 3, 2002, 243-259

Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online © 2002 Kala Press/Black Umbrellahttp://www.tandf.co.uk/journals

DOI: 10.1080/09528820110120704

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Bib

lioth

èque

s de

l'U

nive

rsité

de

Mon

tréa

l] a

t 13:

12 0

3 D

ecem

ber

2014

presence, one that supposedly existed at the crossroads of barbary andcivilisation.3 Behind this device, remarked Cust, lay a ‘fundamentalprinciple … in our system of colonial policy, that of colonialdependence’. For as long as the colonised was precluded fromacquiring full mastery of colonial ways, for as long as difference wasmaintained, colonial dependence could be guaranteed.

Early colonial education was conceived, therefore, to ensure thisdependence by restricting itself to the encouragement of specific skillsfor the service of empire, and certainly not those which ascribed fullhumanity to the colonised by acknowledging full creative abilities inher. Within colonial discourse art and the aesthetic sensibility werecrucial signifiers of the civilised station, and constituted theunbridgeable distance between savagery and culture. Like speech, artwas seen as either a signifier or lack, the absence of which relegated thecolonised in the hierarchy of the colonial text. It was into this territoryof performance that the supposed primitivism, and thus inferiority, ofthe colonised was written. Writing in the Blackwood Advertiser ofJanuary 1918, for instance, the colonial Governor of the Gold CoastSir Hugh Clifford deposited:

The West African Negro has often been reproached with his failureto develop any high form of civilisation. It has been pointed out adnauseam that he has never sculptured a statue, painted a picture,produced a literature, or even invented a mechanical contrivanceworthy of the name, all of which are perfectly true.4

This under-privileging fiction translated into a pedagogical principlethat questioned the introduction of art into the colonial curriculum. Asa certain George Fowler noted in the visitors’ book of a Lagos artist in1938, ‘teaching an African the art of a white man is not only a wasteof time but also a misplaced value…’.5 It was further argued that‘rather than impose on them [Africans] what will end up being atorturing load, [i.e. art], they can be taught some aspects of Europeancrafts which will be useful to various missions in the colony’.6

The substitution of crafts for art on the curriculum was projected asan act of philanthropy when in truth it was part of a complex colonialstrategy of iterative exercise of hegemony, to assimilate the colonisedinto regulatory administration of colonial power. However, at ameeting of the staff of Achimota College, Gold Coast, in March 1928,G A Stevens, a colonial functionary, strongly deplored this policy andargued for the recognition of the equal creative and mental capabilitiesof Africans, and the acknowledgement of their rich creative heritage,by introducing meaningful and non-discriminatory art courses inschools in the colonies.7 But in the general scheme of early colonialrelations such arguments could only be dismissed as dangerous and notat all mindful of what Edward Cust further described as ‘the folly ofconferring such privileges on a condition of society that has no earthlyclaim to so exalted a position’.8 It is against this background thatAfricans began to enter and appropriate cultural forms of modernity atthe turn of the 19th century.

While the colonial curriculum ignored art education anddiscouraged the teaching of art to the colonised, the Christian missionsengaged in the deprecation and destruction of existing artistic

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

2

3. Sir Edward Cust,Reflections on WestAfrican Affairs addressedto the Colonial Office,Hatchard, London, 1839.

4. Quoted in Dapo Onabolu,‘Aina Onabolu’, NigeriaMagazine, 79, December1963, p 295.

5. George Fowler, in AinaOnabolu’s visitor’s book,Lagos, August 13, 1938.

6. Akinola Lasekan,‘Western Art on AfricanShores’, unpublishedmanuscript, University ofNigeria, Nsukka, 1966.

7. G A Stevens, ‘The Futureof African Art: WithSpecial Reference toProblems Arising in GoldCoast Colony’, Africa:Journal of theInternational Institute ofAfrican Languages andCultures, III, 1930,pp 150–160.

8. Sir Edward Cust, op cit.

244

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Bib

lioth

èque

s de

l'U

nive

rsité

de

Mon

tréa

l] a

t 13:

12 0

3 D

ecem

ber

2014

traditions. Artistic practice in traditional idioms was condemned asidolatry and was therefore violently combated, with tons of art objectsseized and destroyed in bonfires. Converts were warned in damninglanguage of the harsh and irrevocable consequences of either creatingor keeping indigenous art forms.

One easily finds the frustrating potentials of this strategy in thesermon of the Catholic apostate who cited African sculpture as thestumbling block to his mission in the colonies, describing them as ‘thewretched, irritating and grotesque woods … this annoying block …the shade that dims the light of faith that is already burning in thehearts of so many natives’.9 The ‘shade’, however, was much morethan the wood. It was the split in the colonising mission that thepersistence of these images inscribed, the germ of fragmentation anddissolution in the body of the colonial project their perpetuationsymbolised. It signified the writing of colonialism as trespass, andrepresented the earliest instances of its rejection. The artist’spersistence with tradition, or that of his/her clientele and society,became not merely an aesthetic or temporal act, but a contest ofidentities which signaled the beginnings of a new discourse ofnationalism.

The scheme to obliterate colonial claims to culture was carriedout through the combined devices of textual erasure, materialvandalism and cultural protectionism that were carried out inAfrica. The deracination of material cultures among the colonisedon the one hand, and the prohibition of access to Western/school arton the other, provided perfect conditions for the manufacture of themimic man, the utilitarian craftsman with no traditions of great artand no access to Imperial Enlightenment. At the same time, itcreated only two possibilities of resistance, two possibilities for itsown negation. One was to persist with the indigenous forms whichcolonialism condemned and sought to obliterate. The other was tohack, to use a most appropriate colloquialism, into the exclusivespace of the antipode, in other words to possess the contestedterritory by mastering the forms and techniques of Western artisticexpression in order to cross out the ideological principles resident inits exclusivity.

NATIONALISM AND MODERNITY

The advent in parts of Africa of a new artistic idiom akin to that ofEurope in the late 19th century was not intended simply to prove theequal competence of the colonised as an end, but in so doing also toundermine the ideological foundations of the colonial project andoverwrite, as it were, the colonial text. In West Africa the artistgenerally accepted as the earliest to draw and paint in a modern idiombegan this practice without formal training.10 It is known that AinaOnabolu (1882–1963) was not the first West African to practicepainting and the graphic arts in the tradition of Renaissance Europe.11

But he is the earliest recorded in colonial West Africa to defy therestriction of the colonised to crafts and begin an art practice byteaching himself. Onabolu began to draw as a schoolboy in Ijebu Ode,

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

2

9. Revd Glover, Record ofSunday Service, RomanCatholic Mission, EsaOke, Western Nigeria, 8September 1935.

10. Much of the credit forthis must go to thedetailed but mostlyunpublished and largelyunacknowledged work ofNigerian art historian OlaOloidi, which neverthelesshas provided thedocumentary basis for thegenealogy of modernNigerian art. See KojoFosu 1986, Susan Vogel1992, Jean Kennedy1993.

11. In his Gallery of GoldCoast Celebrities, Dr I SEphson writes aboutAttabora Kweku Enu[1742–98], an ex-slavewho became a painter inBritain and worked ‘in1788 … in the service ofCosway, the first painterto the Prince of Wales’ [p31]. Unfortunately, I havebeen unable to trace Enu’sslave narrative,Reflections on the SlaveTrade and the Slavery ofNegroes, reportedlypublished in English andFrench, to which Ephsonrefers.

245

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Bib

lioth

èque

s de

l'U

nive

rsité

de

Mon

tréa

l] a

t 13:

12 0

3 D

ecem

ber

2014

Western Nigeria, in the 1890s, copying outillustrations from European religious and businessliterature.12 Though formally educated in amission school, Onabolu received no artinstruction in school because the curriculumoffered only training in craftsmaking. Nor was heencouraged in his artistic interests by histeachers.13 Between 1900 and 1906 when hefinished school and took up a job with thecolonial marine department in Lagos, Onaboluworked on his own, improving his skills indraughtsmanship and the use of watercolours.Using connections provided by his job, hechannelled his earnings into obtaining materialsfrom England, and applied his resources not onlyto art practice but also to the teaching of hischosen idiom.14 At the time, it appears, he wasalone in the region in his peculiar fascination.

Onabolu described realism as the ‘true art’. Forhim the canons and devices of realism, like thescience of perspective for which he became widelyknown all over Lagos as ‘Mr Perspective’, werenot only European inventions or ciphers ofWestern civilisation but part of a universal artisticidiom. It is important to note here that realismwas also part of Onabolu’s own artistic heritage,in the form of the traditions of classical Ife courtart. In choosing realism over abstraction,

therefore, Onabolu was not merely mimicking Europe. He was alsobeginning to define his idiom as a vehicle for translating and reinstatinghis own heritage into new forms in the context of changing reality ofAfrica.

Although he did his best to draw public attention to his work,Onabolu was actively discouraged and on occasion subtly threatenedby Europeans. Ola Oloidi observes that the colonial authorities failedto distinguish between the classical African forms which theycondemned as heathen, and Onabolu’s work.15 He further notes thatthis ‘can be considered a deliberate action, for the Missionaries,especially, who did not want any artistic mode that could remind theAfricans of the age-old traditional art which these missionariesrejected’. The problem with this explanation, of course, is that it failsto equally observe that contempt for Onabolu’s realism was notextended to the very examples of European art which he used asmodels in his self-tuition. In other words, it does not account for theevident contradiction in European attitudes to like forms in the colonyvis-à-vis their distaste for appropriation of European techniques, acontradiction that is predicated on a discourse of authorial identities, acontest over author-ity. Clearly Onabolu’s work, though produced inthe same idiom of verisimilitude as most European art in the coloniesat the time, was unacceptable for the simple but significant reason thatit bore the authorial sign of a colonial. Rather than ‘remind theAfricans of the age-old traditional art which these missionaries

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

2

12. Ola Oloidi, ‘Constraintson the Growth andDevelopment of ModernNigerian Art in theColonial Period’, ArtsFaculty Seminar,University of Nigeria,Nsukka, 1986,unpublished, p 24.

13. Aina Onabolu, ‘TheLonely Beginning’, Artist’snotes, unpublished, 1922.

14. Aina Onabolu, ‘MyPioneering Efforts’,Artist’s private document,27 August 1937.

15. Oloidi, op cit, p 29.

246

Aina Onabolu, Portrait of a Lawyer, oil on canvas,size and date unavailable.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Bib

lioth

èque

s de

l'U

nive

rsité

de

Mon

tréa

l] a

t 13:

12 0

3 D

ecem

ber

2014

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

2

247

rejected’, they reminded the Europeans of the fallacy of theirconstruction of the colonised as an incompetent savage. Within theframes of that construct, the ability to draw like the European, whichOnabolu had acquired by the end of the century, signified civilitybeyond disputation. And the possibility of this acquisition outside theregulatory powers of colonial authority represented a crack in thescheme of empire. It signified the possibility of independence andforegrounded the dangers which Cust identified when he warned thata colony ‘would not be a colony for a single hour if she could maintainan independent station’.16 Thus the veiled threat in this letter from aBritish acquaintance of Onabolu’s, a J Holloway of the NigerianRailway, Lagos, to the artist in October 1910.

I am happy you yourself realise the danger of going your forefather’sway … by creating the type of art that our church can quarrelwith…. I came back from Abeokuta a few days ago, and I must herebring to your knowledge what the Rev. in our church said. This Rev.gentleman strongly rebuked the congregation for their stubborndevotion to their idols which he regarded as heathen objects. Theywere considered ungrateful people who could not appreciate whatGod had done in their lives…. Though you once said that your ownart is special … I am not trying to discourage your type of art forthe colony, but knowing your potential very well, you may have tothink well about its acceptance in the colony.17

Though the relationship between Onabolu’s ‘type of art for thecolony’ and the ‘heathen forms’ condemned and vehemently combatedby the Christian missions was not apparent, it is obvious neverthelessthat the anxiety was not over the production of a particular kind ofcreative endeavor. It would not be over-stretching the point to infer aconnection between the pseudo-ecclesiastical anxiety of the Church,and overall colonialist desperation to deny the creativity of the native.18

Protests such as Mr Holloway’s made Onabolu even more determinedto prove that the arts of drawing and painting were not culture-specificand could not, by their very nature, manifest the superiority of oneculture or people over another. He saw the practice and propagation ofthe new artistic tendency not only as an opportunity to emphasise itsuniversality; he equally saw it as a chance to affirm the capabilities ofhis people, and in so doing restate his equality with the European.19 Hisintentions were not to achieve validation in the eyes of the white man,but to invalidate European assumptions upon which the civilisingmission in the colonies was founded. If the African could performequally well in what Europe claims its exclusive domain, then theformer cancels out the tropes of ascendancy and puts Europe in itsproper place.

Between 1900 and 1920 Onabolu made consistent and relentlessefforts to persuade the colonial education department in Nigeria tointroduce art in schools, but these met with little or no enthusiasm, aswas clear from correspondence between him and the deputy director ofthe department in Lagos in 1919. However, on the advice of a fewmission school head teachers, Onabolu wrote to the department askingpermission to teach art in a number of schools in the Lagos area. In hisletter, he pointed out the great advantages of introducing what he

16. Sir Edward Cust, op cit.

17. J Holloway, ‘Dear Aina’,Letter dated 4 October1910, archives of theOnabolu family.

18. In a note in Onabolu’svisitors’ book of 21February 1939, a certainF Miller remarks on thesignificance of Onabolu’swork in a time whenEuropeans still ‘could notsee how an African couldexcel’ in an art that wasconsidered Western.

19. Writing about Onabolu inNigeria Magazine, no 79,December 1963, p 295,his son Dapo Onaboludescribes Onabolu as ‘aman who believed in theintrinsic quality of hispeople as men who haveidentical artisticinclinations and potentialwith men of other races’.Elsewhere in the samearticle, he notes thatOnabolu saw all art,whether Western orotherwise, as ‘a humanquantity which was ahuman legacy, and whichlike the motor car, thesteamship, and the legacyof law, though originatingin its various aspects fromdifferent but preciselocalities of the world,was nevertheless part of ageneral harvest of humanthought and endeavour’.Cf. Negritude poet SedarSenghor’s position, whichdichotomised between aEurope of science andmechanics, and an Africaof poetry and rhythm.(Dapo Onabolu, ‘AinaOnabolu’, NigeriaMagazine, no 79,December 1963, p 298.)

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Bib

lioth

èque

s de

l'U

nive

rsité

de

Mon

tréa

l] a

t 13:

12 0

3 D

ecem

ber

2014

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

2

248

described as ‘the prestigious art of drawing and painting’, and referredto his already proven ability as a practitioner, enclosingcommendations from highly placed figures in the colony. He alsoattached his curriculum vitae as well as the names of three referees.However, in his reply of 3 April 1919, the acting deputy director ofeducation in the colony, Mr L Richards, regretted that he was notdisposed to grant the permission sought, referring Onabolu back to thehead teachers. He pointed out, however, with not a little touch ofsarcasm, that it was doubtful that the head teachers would needOnabolu’s services.20

Onabolu did not despair. Instead he collected willing enthusiastsand began to give them private tuition. Eventually some of the headteachers, contrary to the deputy director’s pronouncement, finallyengaged him, and at some point he was teaching four schools aroundLagos.

Over several years of distinguished practice Onabolu producednumerous drawings and portraits of Lagos elite including colonialofficials.21 Among his portraits from this period is the 1906watercolour, Portrait of Mrs Spencer Savage, considered by scholars tobe a masterpiece of realism of early modern African art. In 1920Onabolu went to England to study art at St John’s Wood College,London. According to his son, Dapo Onabolu, his mission in Englandwas to acquire ‘whatever he could of the sciences of painting,perspective, anatomy and the other specialisations and ancillarydisciplines which characterise European art education’.22 Since he hadalready proved himself quite competent in these skills before he wentto England, a more logical reason for Onabolu’s sojourn there was toobtain a teaching diploma with which he stood a better chance ofgaining entry into the colonial education system. It was his calculationthat a teacher’s qualification would more easily gain him the officialapproval he needed to introduce art into schools.

Onabolu’s example represents a phase in cultural nationalism inAfrica when the regulated space of colonial education became a theatrefor the colonised to unravel the mystique of colonialism preparatory toits dislodgement. In his early novels Chinua Achebe details a narrativeof differing strategies among the colonised, which coalesce in the logicof confronting Europe on its own grounds by mastering it.23 This hasbeen qualified as anthropophagia or the digestion of the West.24

However, the mastery of Europe speaks to a tactic of overdub ratherthan one of cannibalism. The appropriation of the European realisttradition in painting and the graphic arts which Onabolu introducedwas a significant part of a process of crossing out Europe’s texts ofexclusivity, rather than merely imbibing forms and surfaces.

AFRICAN QUEST FOR MODERNISM VS COLONIALCONSTRUCTION OF THE AUTHENTIC NATIVE

After his return from Europe in 1922, Onabolu eventually receivedofficial approval from the colonial administration to teach art inschools within Lagos and its environs. By 1926 the teaching load wasunderstandably too heavy for one teacher, and Onabolu requested of

20. L Richards, April 3, 1919,letter in the collection ofAkinola Lasekan Estate.

21. Ibid.

22. Dapo Onabolu, opcit, p295.

23. In Chinua Achebe’s novel,Arrow of God, the chiefprotagonist, Ezeulu,explains sending his sonto join the white manthus: ‘When we want tomake a charm we look forthe animal whose bloodcan match its power….And our fathers have toldus that it may happen toan unfortunate generationthat they are pushedbeyond the end of things,and their back is brokenand hung over a fire.When this happens theymay sacrifice their ownblood’. The AfricanTrilogy, Pan Books,London, 1988, p 456. It isthe same conviction thatmade Elesin Oba,charioteer andcommander of the cavalryfor his King, send his sonOlunde to study overseas,in Soyinka’s Death andthe King’s Horseman. Inthe drama, as well as thereal-life story on which itis based, when thecolonial authoritiesinterfered in 1946 andstopped the commanderfrom fulfilling his stateobligation of ritual suicideupon the King’s death itwas his son who defiedthem and took his ownlife as an act of honour inhis father’s stead.

24. See Susan Vogel, AfricaExplores, Museum ofAfrican Art, New York,1992.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Bib

lioth

èque

s de

l'U

nive

rsité

de

Mon

tréa

l] a

t 13:

12 0

3 D

ecem

ber

2014

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

2

249

the education department that another art teacher be appointed. Nothaving candidates in the colony, the administration brought in KennethC Murray from England.25 The young Murray had little art educationand no experience in studio practice. But the colonial administration,still ambivalent over the challenge that Onabolu represented, felt morecomfortable with the new British art teacher. As Oloidi has observed,Murray was accorded ‘an almost exclusive recognition [and given]many powerful responsibilities [as] art teacher, travelling teacher, artsupervisor, education officer, and, though unofficially, preserver ofNigerian antiquities, all duties performed almost at the same time’.26

Murray’s appearance signalled a new contest over modernity, acontest that was replicated eventually in other parts of Africa in anincreasingly addled rhetoric of iteration. Murray admonished hisstudents to ignore the formal concerns that Onabolu emphasised, andto occupy themselves only with portraying scenes from their rural livesas a means of preserving and perpetuating their own identity. Heconsidered Onabolu’s themes and methods as too steeped in theEuropean tradition, and taught his students to eschew what heconsidered alien to their natural sensibilities. Instead of life studies andkeen understanding of anatomy, chiaroscuro, and the science of depthand perspective that Onabolu enjoined his students to acquire, Murrayencouraged his own students to concentrate not on the acquisition oftechnical skills but on the subject matter of their daily life andenvironment. He encouraged them to produce romantic images ofvillage life: fetching firewood, women going to the stream, childrensweeping the yard or climbing trees. Such images, he contended,though naive and lacking in technical finesse, were more authentic asthey represented the natives’ world more accurately than whatOnabolu propagated through his portraits, life drawings and exercisesin perspectival representation.

Murray’s understanding of what should constitute appropriateresponse to Europe by the colonised thus differed markedly fromOnabolu’s. It also represented a shift in the colonialist stance, one thatwas both political and generational. The European was moving fromcomplete denial of colonial creativity to constructing, and preserving,the authentic native. Recognising a certain futility in its originalregulatory strategy, the colonial project seemed to have progressedfrom trying to efface or even erase the colonised or their claim toculture. Its new strategy, manifest in Murray’s different understandingof and approach to the creative abilities of the natives, seemed toengage instead in the production of what Fanon describes as the‘palatable’ Negro, the admired, authentic colonial.

Murray was dedicated to the preservation of his ideal of the culturesthat he met. He failed to understand their predilection for change, andseemed to loathe their strategy of selective appropriation. This wasmanifested in undue zealotry and colonialist fervour on his part –Murray was reputed to possess the energy and restlessness of five men27

– and a pontifical conservationism. By opposing the acquisition of theskills of observation and representation that Onabolu insisted on,Murray produced a strange, new form of naive art which had little todo with the classical traditions of his pupils’ backgrounds, or with themodern tendencies that were beginning to emerge as a result of the

25. See letter to the EducationDepartment, Lagos, by KC Murray, 4 November1937, soliciting that ‘Mr.Onabolu on whoserequest I have beenbrought be given everypossible cooperationwhich will encourage himto train more boys inLagos’. Papers of K CMurray, Archives of theNational Museum, Lagos.

26. Oloidi, ‘Growth andDevelopment’, p 29.

27. Oloidi, ‘Growth andDevelopment’, p 114.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Bib

lioth

èque

s de

l'U

nive

rsité

de

Mon

tréa

l] a

t 13:

12 0

3 D

ecem

ber

2014

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

2

250

appropriation and domestication of European principles. For the nextthree decades Onabolu’s work was thus actively undermined.

During the same period, the discourse of authenticity that Murray’smethods introduced was played out in other parts of Africa, especiallyin South Africa. In his study of South African Art, Steven Sack notes inThe Neglected Tradition that a ‘kind of prescriptiveness, and a desireto keep the artist “tribal” and untainted by outside influence isreiterated time and time again’.28 Quoting Tim Couzens, Sack recallsthe experience of John Mohl, one of the earliest black South Africanlandscape painters:

Mohl was once approached by a white admirer and advised not toconcentrate on landscape painting: but to paint figures of his peoplein poverty and misery. Landscape, he was advised, had become afield where Europeans had advanced very far in perfecting itspainting.29

In response Mohl brought the subtext of contested identitiesrunning through the above to the fore. He challenged the rhetoric offixity and hierarchisation, and the construction of the colonised as alack by advancing a teleological argument which significantlyprefigured postcolonial articulation of difference. ‘But I am anAfrican’, Mohl replied, ‘and when God made Africa, He also createdbeautiful landscapes for Africans to admire and paint’. Mohlrecognised the attempt to place him within the frames of palatability,whereby the hegemonic position of the European is acknowledged andupheld. To defy such stipulative borders, therefore, was to break freeof this hegemony, and in Mohl’s case landscape painting, remarkably,was the contested territory which he must possess to achieve this. Mohlverbalised his objectives in terms almost identical to Onabolu’s:

28. Steven Sack, TheNeglected Tradition:Towards a New Historyof South African Art(1930–1988),Johannesburg Art Gallery,1988, p 10.

29. Ibid, p 10.

John K Mohl, Sophia Town: Corner Rey and Edward Streets, oil on canvas marouflagedon plywood, 45.1 x 64.5 cm, undated, collection: M Cooke

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Bib

lioth

èque

s de

l'U

nive

rsité

de

Mon

tréa

l] a

t 13:

12 0

3 D

ecem

ber

2014

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

2

251

I wanted the world to realize that black people are human beingsand that among them good workers can be found, good artists andin addition to that I wanted to lecture indirectly or directly to mypeople of the importance of this type of thing [modern art], whichto them is just a thing.30

Though Mohl’s rural and urban landscapes were in themselveshardly distinguished, they nevertheless spoke to a clear discourse ofcultural defiance. By painting landscapes Mohl thus transgressedbeyond the frame of imperial fiction and expectation of the native.

Gerard Bhengu, a contemporary of Mohl’s and a particularlytalented naturalist painter, could not match his evident talent with theskill that would be expected of a white artist of his endowment andcreative dedication. Bhengu, according to Sack, ‘was denied the chanceto acquire formal training’.31 Bhengu’s story parallels those of manyearly artists in the post-traditional manner in different parts of Africa.Though his work benefited considerably from the patronage ofEuropean benefactors, Bhengu was nevertheless considered unfit topossess the same skills as a European. A recommendation that he beallowed access to formal training was rejected by the University of

30. T Cousens, The NewAfrican: A Study of theLife and Work of H. I. E.Dhlomo, Ravan Press,Johannesburg, 1985, p253.

31. Sack, op cit, p 11.

Gerard Bhengu, Country scene with misty mountains in background, watercolour, 26 x 36.1 cm, undated, collection: theCampbell Collections of the University of Natal

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Bib

lioth

èque

s de

l'U

nive

rsité

de

Mon

tréa

l] a

t 13:

12 0

3 D

ecem

ber

2014

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

2

252

Natal on the grounds that he should ‘work in his own way and develophis own technique’.32 Unlike Mohl, however, Bhengu was unable tomove his practice beyond pastoral illustrations within colonialacceptability.

Gerard Sekoto, on the other hand, left South Africa for France in1947 in pursuit of his modernist aspirations. Whereas Onaboluidentified European academicism as the visual signifier of colonialidentity, Sekoto considered modern expressionism the proper space ofcontest for modernity in the 1940s. In his determination to occupy aspace in modernity, he drew on post-Impressionism and Fauvism for hisurban landscapes and figure paintings, despite the disregard by whiteauthorities and lack of patronage. In some of his early work Sekotoreferenced Van Gogh, and his undated Girl with Orange, probably from

32. P Savory, Gerard Bhengu:Zulu Artist, HowardTimmins, Cape Town,1965, p 10.

Gerard Sekoto, Self Portrait, pencil on paper, 31.5 x 25.2 cm, 1943, collection: Universityof South Africa

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Bib

lioth

èque

s de

l'U

nive

rsité

de

Mon

tréa

l] a

t 13:

12 0

3 D

ecem

ber

2014

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

2

253

the same period, directly quotes Gauguin. Although the extent ofSekoto’s influence on art in South Africa is rather uncertain,33 as he hadchosen to spend the rest of his life in France in his private pursuit ofmodernist subjectivity, he is considered to be an important figure in thedevelopment of modernism in Africa. His Self-Portrait of 1943 standsas one of the remarkable examples of early modern art in Africa.

Sekoto belonged to a generation of black South African artists thatwould choose expatriation and relocation to the European centres ofmodernist practice as a way not only to escape the machinery ofEuropean supremacy at home but to challenge and defy it, also. For ahandful of artists of that generation, proving themselves in Europewhere opportunities supposedly exceeded those in a white-dominatedSouth Africa was more effective a response to that dominance asremaining within its reaches to combat it.

33. Although Sack contendsthat of the early artistsonly Mohl had anyinfluence on SouthAfrican art (see Sack p15), there is an obviouspresence of Sekoto in thework of EphraimNgatane, one of the mostengaging artists of the late1950s and early 1960swho, though he studiedunder Sihlali and Skotnesof the Polly Street Centre,pursued a muscular stylequite distinct from that ofPolly Street. Ngatane diedtragically young in 1971.

Gerard Sekoto, Children Playing, 1942–45

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Bib

lioth

èque

s de

l'U

nive

rsité

de

Mon

tréa

l] a

t 13:

12 0

3 D

ecem

ber

2014

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

2

34. F McEwen, ‘PersonalReflections’, inContemporary StoneCarvings from Zimbabwe,Yorkshire Sculpture Park,1990, p 27.

35. Ibid, p 30.

36. M Shepherd,Contemporary StoneCarving from Zimbabwe,p 18.

37. Ibid, p 19. Emphasisadded.

38. F McEwen, ‘Return toOrigins’, African Arts,1:2, Winter 1968.

39. Ibid, p 26.

254

Whereas African artists were considered only good enough forwoodcrafts and other media such as clay, Sekoto and Mohl deliberatelydefied this limitation. They equally defied the subsequent extension ofthese limits when watercolours, the medium in which Bhengu did muchof his work, were implicitly added to the list of mediums in which theartists were expected to work. Murray’s students in Nigeria workedexclusively in craft or cheap watercolours and drawing materials, thesame mediums that the authorities encouraged in art courses in SouthAfrica. Mohl and Sekoto, however, both proceeded to work in oils aswell, as Onabolu had done earlier.

The significance of artists such as Onabolu, Mohl and Sekoto in theconstruction of modernity in Africa is to be understood when it iscompared with what was produced by the several ‘workshops’ and artcentres that would later sprout all over the continent under thedirection of European art teachers. In all cases, the art was predictablynaive and unaccomplished, which for the colonialists represented thelimits of African ability to represent what they saw as African reality.Only artists who understood the ideological underpinnings of such artactively contested these underpinnings and produced work of anaccomplished quality as part of Africa’s aspirations for change throughmodernity.

It was the discourse of colonial authentication of the native,identified by David Koloane as ‘the aesthetic barrier imposed betweenblack and white artists’ in South Africa, which was also carried on inRhodesia under Frank McEwen, a Fine Arts Representative of theBritish Council in Paris in the 1970s. McEwen was acquainted with theCubist school in Paris, before he went to Rhodesia in 1954 on theadvice of Herbert Read.34 Having helped found the National Gallery ofRhodesia, McEwen became its director in 1955, and the next yearinstituted an ‘informal gallery workshop’ for museum staff andvisitors.35 The products of this ‘informal’ workshop he then began topush vigorously through powerful, highly placed friends in the artworld. Soon an international clientele developed under McEwen’sfostering, and he was able to move the workshop outside the gallery.This was the beginning of contemporary ‘Shona’ stone sculpture.

A recent narrative of this very significant episode is quite revealing.By Michael Shepherd’s testimony, it was after McEwen had listened tofolk-tales by Shona labourers at the site of the Gallery in Salisbury thathe ‘infiltrated potential artists into the security and curatorial staff, …[and gave] them crayons and paint…’.36 Shepherd then maintains that,after this, ‘the urge to carve and sculpt – long forgotten in Zimbabweand virtually without surviving traces – emerged again spontaneously ,without his [McEwen’s] planning it’.37 This narrative of colonial‘spontaneity’ nevertheless fails to explain how McEwen’s roguecurators and security men came to entirely occupy their new sculpturaltradition with the same folk-tales they related to McEwen, all withoutthe latter’s intervention. McEwen was more revealing when he declaredin 1968: ‘Once again in the history of art, an umbrella of protectionhas allowed dormant genius to revive’.38 But of greater importance tous is McEwen’s obsession with ‘purity and authenticity’ in the traditionthat he fostered, and his exaltation of ‘untutored craftsmanship’ in ‘anunspoilt people’.39 McEwen’s mission in Rhodesia was to produce a

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Bib

lioth

èque

s de

l'U

nive

rsité

de

Mon

tréa

l] a

t 13:

12 0

3 D

ecem

ber

2014

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

2

40. Ibid, p 26.

41. Ibid, p 27.

255

new noble savage, a reconstruction of the innocent colonised, thesavage saviour of the world. The product of this reconstruction is afetish, an object of European fantasy and containment of the Other, inwhich the anxiety of the loss of innocence is displaced but remains anobject of hegemonic regulation in the form of the alterity of the other.Before he left Paris McEwen was already convinced that ‘a new waveof ‘Trivialism’ was overtaking the world centre of creative art’.40 Hehad come to the conclusion that if ‘some vital new art exists or is aboutto exist … it may occur elsewhere, in a different walk of life with adifferent raison d’être: prompted by a new environment’.41 It was thisenvironment, and this new art, that he reified in Rhodesia. Havingconstructed his ‘unspoilt’ colonial, McEwen proceeded to fetishise it,and would spend the rest of his life defending its ‘authenticity’ andstruggling to provide it with an ‘umbrella of protection’.

In the 1960s, McEwen’s experiment was repeated by the youngBritish artist Georgina Betts in Oshogbo, Nigeria, where, beginning in1964, she and her German partner Ulli Beier ran four-week workshopsthat drew participants from a travelling theatre in the little Yoruba

Jacob Afolabi (one of the Oshogbo artists), Abraham’s Sacrifice, linocut, 1963, size unavailable

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Bib

lioth

èque

s de

l'U

nive

rsité

de

Mon

tréa

l] a

t 13:

12 0

3 D

ecem

ber

2014

town. As the claim goes, the previously untrained participants wereinstantly transformed into competent, professional artists by theworkshops.42 Writing about the experiments, Beier noted that the mostsignificant thing about the ‘short cut’ artists from the workshops wasthat they ‘worked in a kind of euphoria. They did not have anyconception of what an ‘artist’ was and they did not agonise about themeaning of ‘art’.43 Though Beier maintains that the relationshipbetween Betts and her students was one of ‘mutual trust [and] notauthority’, he nevertheless admits that she exercised discretion in‘spotting and pinpointing each artist’s very own personal vision’.44 Wefind the same processes of hegemonic replication as were evident inMcEwen’s workshop played out here in both the conceptualisation ofthe Oshogbo experiment and the language and formula of its affirmingnarrative.

The McEwen workshop echoed Murray’s methods in imaging the‘untutored’ as the ‘authentic’. The reiteration of this fiction of colonialdiscourse provided a matrix of relevance for its fragmentation, for thecontinual disruption of colonialism’s constructed identities. In severalparts of Africa similar workshops and centres sprang up whereEuropeans fostered their ideals of the ‘authentic’, and vigorouslymarketed whatever art this creation produced. In many such centres ortheir fringes, tendencies emerged which represented an adoption of amercantilist strategy that split the fiction of identities andauthenticities. This had little nationalist pretension. It was within thecontext of crossing out the manufactured identities mentioned abovethat a nationalist discourse sited itself, and it was there that the worksof Onabolu, Mohl and Sekoto assumed their nationalist significance.

A NEW NATIONALISM

Of the pioneer South African modernists, one deserves mention forrepresenting a different strategy from those of Onabolu, Mohl andSekoto. The new strategy, evident in the work of Ernest Mancoba fromthe mid-1930s, involved a redefinition of African modernism byelecting classical African art as its model. It displaced the iconographyof the European Enlightenment and chose African sculpture and formsas the source of inspiration, the point of departure and yet the frameof reference. Its intent was a new aesthetic. Conceptually, this newaesthetic also effectively proposed a confluence of European andAfrican modernisms by writing African art as the common frame andsubtext of all modernisms. Rather than quote pre-modernist Westernform, as did Onabolu and Mohl, or Western modernism as did Sekoto,Mancoba referenced African sculpture on the specifically modernistprinciple of formalist articulation.

Ernest Mancoba received early instruction in wood sculpture, andalthough he eventually studied at the University of Fort Hare and theUniversity of South Africa in the 1930s, he received no further formalart training beyond this early introduction. Eventually he left SouthAfrica and was later associated with the Cobra group in Europe.Mancoba, like most African artists in South Africa of the period, beganby producing ecclesiastical pieces in wood, commissioned by the

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

2

42. Ulli Beier, Thirty Years ofOshogbo Art, Iwalewa,Bayreuth, 1991, p 6.

43. Ibid, p 6.

44. Ibid, p 6.

256

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Bib

lioth

èque

s de

l'U

nive

rsité

de

Mon

tréa

l] a

t 13:

12 0

3 D

ecem

ber

2014

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

2

45. S Sack, The NeglectedTradition, p 12.

46. The Natal Advertiser, 9June 1936, quoted inSack, ibid, p 12.

257

Christian missions. About 1936, however, a noticeable changeappeared in his sculpture. According to Steven Sack, Mancoba ‘turnedaway from ecclesiastical and European sources in exchange for akeener interest in the sculptural tradition of Africa’.45 Sack quotes acontemporary newspaper report on Mancoba’s development:

Recently he came upon a book of primitive African sculpture. Hewas deeply stirred…. He was fascinated by the ‘pattern within thepattern’, and the way in which the carvings nonetheless remainedwholes.46

Mancoba’s Musician of 1936 abandoned the pseudo-realist finish ofhis earlier pieces, and of Makoanye, Bhengu and the others, for theplanar surface of sculpture from the Congo basin. In Musician

Ernest Mancoba, COBRA Family Photograph, Copenhagen Zoological Gardens, 1948.Front: Asger John, Sonia and Wonga Mancoba, Ernest Mancoba in black beret. Courtesy:Miles, Elza, Lifeline Out of Africa: The Art of Ernest Mancoba, Human & Rosseau, CapeTown and Johannesburg 1994, p 44

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Bib

lioth

èque

s de

l'U

nive

rsité

de

Mon

tréa

l] a

t 13:

12 0

3 D

ecem

ber

2014

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

2

258

Mancoba sought the peculiar dialect of the adze, phrasing his form ina staccato of cuts and geometric elements, a syncopation of surfaces. Inplace of academicist anatomy he chose stylisation, and thus was ableto achieve the strength and affective presence similar to that whichEuropean modernism sought in African art.

Yet Mancoba was not a traditionalist. His approach to Africansculpture was not one of iteration or even direct quotation. Instead heemployed the rhetoric of allusion. And other than the tactic of reaction,which the colonial regulation of the contest for modernity dictated andwhich Mohl and Sekoto adopted, Mancoba identified a different site ofpractice outside the boundaries of colonialist intervention.Conceptually, if not formally, his new aesthetic seemed to parallel theNegritude aesthetic, then in its formative stages among African

Ernest Mancoba, Drawing, ink and watercolour on paper, 26.8 x 20.6 cm, 1939,collection: Silkeborg Kunstmuseum

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Bib

lioth

èque

s de

l'U

nive

rsité

de

Mon

tréa

l] a

t 13:

12 0

3 D

ecem

ber

2014

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

23

45

67

89

01

2

259

intellectuals and artists in France. At the centre of both was therelocation of colonial desire from the exclusivist and supremacist sitesof Enlightenment aesthetics to the territory of African forms andparadigms. Negritude of course ultimately failed to extricate itselfentirely from the enclosures of European contemporary thought andform. But the new aesthetic that Mancoba introduced existed outsidethose boundaries.

Mancoba’s rejection of stipulated as well as preferred frames begana process of redefinition that would take nearly three decades to fullyrealise. It prefigured an important turn in nationalist response tocolonial regulation in Nigeria in the late 1950s. By this period a groupof young Nigerian artists began to question the praxis of reverseappropriation outlined by Onabolu, and to reassess strategies ofresponse to colonialist hegemony. The artists felt it was no longer ofparamount importance to disprove colonialist superiority, otherhistorical events having offered the colonised opportunities to do sosufficiently and effectively. The period of rigorous contestations overmodernity was gone, and the imperative of nationalism, whetherpolitical or cultural, no longer was to engage in a contest of sites withcolonialism, but to dislodge it.

Where Onabolu and his contemporaries pursued a discourse ofhumanist universalism, the younger artists initiated what one mightcall a discourse of mapped difference, and set about defining andinscribing that difference. The formation in 1958 of the Zaria ArtSociety by a small group of students at the College of Arts, Science andTechnology, Zaria, was precisely for this purpose, namely to rethinkand reformulate attitudes to European forms, and to devise a newaesthetic akin to Mancoba’s. This aesthetic would locate the nationalistimperative not in the reverse appropriation of Europe, but in thetranslation and foregrounding of colonised forms, and through this thefabrication of new national cultures, and a new modernism.

Dow

nloa

ded

by [

Bib

lioth

èque

s de

l'U

nive

rsité

de

Mon

tréa

l] a

t 13:

12 0

3 D

ecem

ber

2014