The De-Africanization of African Art

Towards Post-African Aesthetics

Denis Ekpo, Pfunzo Sidogi, Denis Ekpo, Pfunzo Sidogi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000427240
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: African Art

This book argues for a radical new approach to thinking about art and creativity in Africa, challenging outdated normative discourses about Africa's creative heritage.

Africanism, which is driven by a traumatic response to colonialism in Africa, has an almost unshakable stranglehold on the content, stylistics, and meaning of art in Africa. Post-African aesthetics insists on the need to move beyond this counter-colonial self-consciousness and considerably change, re-work and enlarge the ground, principles and mission of artistic imagination and creativity in Africa. This book critiques and dismantles the tropes of Africanism and Afrocentrism, providing the criteria and methodology for a Post-African art theory or Post-African aesthetics. Grounded initially in essays by Denis Ekpo, the father of Post-Africanism, the book then explores a range of applications and interpretations of Post-African theory to the art forms and creative practices in Africa.

With particular reference to South Africa, this book will be of interest to researchers across the disciplines of Art, Literature, Media Studies, Cultural Anthropology, and African Studies.

1 Africa Mis-traveling to Modernity

From Modern African Art to African Modernism

Denis Ekpo

What prompted these reflections on the fate of African art was an experience I had in 2012 during an international workshop organized by German Scholars Kerstin Pinther and Larissa Forster in Bamako, Mali.¹ In the afternoon of the second day the group had visited the Musée National du Mali. In front of the main building was this untitled sculptural installation by the Benin artist Dominique Zinkpè: a ramshackle old mini-bus with sculpted passengers inside, its body painted in many colors (see Figure 1.1). The top of it is overladen with a huge assortment of goods. Both the driver and the passengers appear dazed and in a state of stupor. The wheels of the old vehicle are punctured and stuck in the mud. Immobilized, the wrecked old bus appears to be going nowhere, weighed down as it were by the sheer weight of its incongruous loads and probably by the nonfunctioning state of its engine. Everybody in the group was struck by the baroque beauty of this monstrous contraption. The director of the museum confirmed that though Malians generally do not appreciate what he calls contemporary art that much, this one was an exception. Every visitor wants to pose for a photograph beside it. Most of our group including me took photographs of it. However, what made this work particularly intriguing and revealing to me was the surprising coincidence of its relevance to the paper I had presented earlier that day titled “Art and the defeat of modernity in Africa.” The kernel of that paper was to show how modern African art, powered mostly by the anti-colonial ideologies of cultural nationalism and Afrocentrism, has been largely complicit in the subversion of the modernity project in Africa. Standing in front of this imposing hybridized piece of African contemporary art, my mind quickly raced to my hobbyhorse, namely, the ill-fated state of Africa in modernity and I half-jokingly told a colleague beside me, “Ah! This is Africa travelling to modernity!” We both laughed at the odd connection but within me I was serious. What I saw before me was nothing less than an allegory of Africa’s heavily troubled, if not totally aborted, journey from its old tribal self to modernity. Every aspect of that baroque iron carcass stuck in the mud and going no way despite its endless motions evoked the many layers of Africa’s shackled journey to a higher state of being. The heavy load of ill-assorted goods that weighed down the vehicle and stalled its movement recalled the state of the hybridized postcolonial mind and of African lifeworld overburdened with incongruous worldviews, incompatible stages of consciousness, and conflicting values running riot as they ceaselessly bump into each other, contaminating each other and stalling every effort at working out an orderly evolutionary rationality toward the modern form of life. Thus the immobilized vehicle spoke to the sick, disorderly and chaotic stasis of Africa’s postcolonial culture. Every step forward in the journey to development and peace sees Africa crashing down into violence and conflicts under the sheer weight and incongruity of multi-tribal/cross-cultural loads. Africa, like that iron scrap of a bus, mostly always looks stranded in the middle of nowhere regardless of all energies expended. She is like a whale, driven out from the waters, lying in the sandy shores of modernity, as incapable of swimming into the mainstream of global economic prosperity as she is of returning fully to her prior native swamps. This sickly hybridized beast, immobilized between tradition and modernity and bungling every step it takes, is what Zinkpè’s art work allegorized in my mind.

Figure 1.1 Dominique Zinkpè, Untitled, undated. Sculptural installation. Collection of the National Museum of Mali. © Dominique Zinkpè. Photograph: Denis Ekpo.
Reproduced with permission.

In my effort to understand how Africa came to this pass, I realized that art had not only a foundational meta-cultural role to play but that it is still generally playing that role. The dazed and stupefied passengers of Zinkpè’s bus in that ill-fated non-journey are most likely stuck in the mud of a new and reinforced sense of their Africanness. Art played a crucial role in birthing and normalizing this invented sense of a changeless Africanness. Remembering my previous as well as ongoing work on the imperative of questioning the value of our near-sacred Africanity myth, it occurred to me that perhaps the best place to start a Post-African cultural revolution was African art. Given that Post-Africanism is mostly about revaluating the highest values of the African ideology and that art is closely tied to the earliest construction of Africanism, I thought of a Post-African manifesto around the art, culture and aesthetic practices of Africa. The following are my reflections on the possibility of a Post-African art and aesthetic theory. But to build up the case for a post-African art, I will begin by reconstructing what I call the Afrophiliac discourse and ground of Africa’s aesthetic-ideological consciousness and practice.

Art and the Birth of Afrophilia

It is not an exaggeration to describe the first stirrings of Africa’s modernity consciousness – Africa’s rude awakening via the colonial canon shot to what G.W.F. Hegel termed ‘world history’ – as an essentially aesthetic phenomenon. The reason is that the vocabulary, the mood and foundational codes of our moral and political responses to colonialism were imagined and created mostly by the pioneer artists. We recall that on the morrow of the first canon shot that had aroused the tribes from their prolonged ethnological slumber, the elders had headed for the oracles to demand to know what had befallen them. The oracles were of little use before so mighty and uncanny a force from nowhere. Then appeared the first colonially acculturated poets and storytellers who claimed they knew what exactly had happened. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart suggested that it was a civilizational apocalypse signaling the annulment of Africa’s ancient tribal civilizations; another, David Diop’s “Africa My Africa,” depicted it as totally unjust invasion by alien vultures and immediately intoned a hymn of heroic resistance. Before them an intrepid neo-griot named Léopold Sédar Senghor, standing amidst the ruins of the fallen tribal kingdoms and flattened sacred forests, saw nothing but an essentially beautiful, soulful, and eternal Africa lying beyond the reach of the enemy’s racist tongue and Maxim’s gun. He symbolized this eternally beautiful, strong, and indestructible essence of Mother Africa in a poem titled “African Woman.” With these foundational and pace-setting imageries, searing formulas, soul-stirring narratives and daring novelties of voice, the artist – at first essentially the poet and the novelist – was the first to be able to drastically temper the brutality and uncanniness of colonial conquest and to tame its perplexing strangeness by putting some meanings around its many bewildering doings and sayings. Then drawing emotional and aesthetic inspiration from the poet’s trailblazing stories and images, the first visual artists emerged to materialize the poet’s counter-colonial nativist exuberance in more visually sensuous forms. Such pioneers as Ernest Mancoba (1904–2002) in South Africa, Aina Onabolu (1882–1963) and Ben Enwonwu (1917–1994) from Nigeria, and a host of others followed closely on the poets’ trail to counter in paint, sculpture, and drama the all-negative colonial single story of Africa. Thus impelled by the anti-colonialist/cultural-nationalist fire first lit by the poets, many of the acculturated artists went back with a vengeance to rediscover and reconstruct in wood, stone, or on canvas, Africa’s colonially disqualified ancient pagan shrines, archaic ancestral groves and other iconic visual memorials to an eternal Africa that continues to defy the colonially driven falling apart of things. Thus Ben Enwonwu’s iconic sculpture and attendant painting appropriately titled Negritude (1957), a visual materialization and confirmation of Senghor’s Afrophiliac poem “African Woman” became paradigmatic of the integrated anti-colonialist and cultural-nationalist mission and vision of all the art forms that emerged at the epochal threshold of Africa’s awakening to world history.

Most notable here is that as Africa suddenly found itself at the colonial gate to world history, it was art that first came to Africa’s rescue. With poems, stories, sculpture, painting, performance, drama, and music, Africa was not only able to pull itself back from frightful bewilderment occasioned by the colonial apparition but to pick its way back through the forest of strange happenings and situations, to some measure of emotional self-reassurance as well as cognitive control. By providing Africa the first images, symbols, and motives for its post-conquest self-reassurance, art furnished the basic orientation and shape of Africa’s modern self-consciousness, the basic orientation of Africa’s cultural and political sense of modernity. In other words, art or the aesthetic-affective attitude was called upon to play a fateful meta-cultural role in pioneering how Africa was to feel, what she was to do and how she was going to handle the colonial intrusion of modernity into Africa. However, in some narratives it is often said that art entered the scene as a handmaid to the nascent anti-colonial movement of cultural and political nationalism. But from a certain genealogical viewpoint, it is plausible to say that it was art that made cultural nationalism possible and effective; it was the condition of possibility of the ideological and cultural resistance movements that came to coagulate under the umbrella term of Africanism. Art shaped the imagination of the acculturated elite by supplying the trigger images that gave the theories of negritude or African personality emotional foundation and political efficacy.

It was the exuberantly affirmative Afrophilia of Senghor’s “African Woman,” the acutely wounded nostalgia of Diop’s “Africa My Africa”, and the wailing Weltschmerz of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, not forgetting the negritudian sculptures and paintings of the first visual artists, that fired the imagination of the cultural nationalists and armed their anti-colonialist hands. The gory picture of Okonkwo’s dead body dangling from a tree, after he had killed the colonial messenger without any backup from the community, was a more potent trigger of anti-colonialist anger and cultural nationalist resistance than Fanon’s anti-colonial theories or Senghor’s ontology of Africanness. My point is that African ideology did not create African art; rather it fed on art’s powerful motifs and imageries in order to constitute itself. It is in this sense that one can easily talk of the primacy of art over ideology in shaping for good and bad, the structure and orientation of our current Afrocentric and essentially anti-colonialist consciousness of modernity. It is also necessary to note here that at the inception of this African modernity consciousness, there was virtually no significant distinction in the agenda-setting role between the visual and literary arts, apart from the fact that the poets in some places preceded the sculptor or painter by creating the primal aesthetic images that awakened and fired the latter’s visual imagination and hands. Both, in reality, drank from the same pool of trigger images in their determination to give form and potency to Africa’s aesthetic-cultural awakening to modernity. In other words, far from competing with each other, both were and still generally remain, two forms of the same aesthetic-political quest to tame the arrogance and uncanniness of colonization and to give Africa a new cultural/political platform to confront colonization and define itself against the encroaching modernity.

I have postulated that art made cultural nationalism possible, however, once these movements especially negritude, African personality, African authenticity, etc., became full-fledged ideological formations and practices of the African way, they seemed to have suppressed traces of their aesthetic origins and rather turned art into a subservient tool. That is, African art after midwifing the birth of the African ideology became a handmaid to the latter. In the spirit of cultural nationalism, anti-colonialism and the back-to-the-roots reaction that took possession of Africa especially in the heyday of anti-colonial nationalist struggles, art, theatre, dance, music, painting, cinema, etc., became mobilized in the service of the African cause and seemed to have justified its existence primarily on this basis. In those early days of militant Africanism, art was essentially about showcasing the Africanness of Africa; it was a vast and endless curating of the wonders and splendors of original Africa with a view to proving Western colonialism wrong on the one hand, and reassuring us of the validity and beauty of African native civilization, on the other hand. Art became an anti-colonial weapon of war aimed at denouncing the arrogance and pretensions of colonial Europe that had dared badmouth a civilization blessed with such an abundance of native splendors. Art was not so much about creating but confirming, rediscovering, celebrating, and showing off Africanity. Thus art became infinite self-celebration and self-confirmation. Creativity, imaginative novelty became secondary because it was a matter of making explicit and radiant again or revalorizing what was already there or what had been disfigured or partially expunged by colonial vandalism. In Ngugi’s terms, art was a matter of remembering what had been dismembered by the colonial cultural bomb. The visual and performance arts became in cultural nationalist Africa, not really what a creator had concocted from the inner riches of his imagination to add beauty to the familiar world or to shock and defamiliarize the world around him, but whatever hitherto hidden and misrecognized layer of Africanness had to be brought to light and celebrated.

Looking back from our postcolonial standpoint, early modern art comes across mostly as infinite rehearsals of Africanness. But what was this artistic Africanism all about? How did it petrify Africa in an essential Afrophilia? What kind of Africa were the anti-colonial artists bent on celebrating and showcasing? One of the unspoken outcomes of the early political instrumentalization of art – mobilizing art in the service of cultural nationalism and anti-colonialism – was that early modern art in Africa led the way in luring Africa away from the colonial path of cultural change and worldview conversion into a rigid state of Afrophilia. Afrophilia, an ideologically intensified sense of Africanness, as the ultimate ontological horizon in which we Africans live, move, and have our being, is a compound of narcissistic nativism and anti-colonial paranoia. It expresses the complex of deep and wounded racial emotions and identity anxieties that sought to sublimate our intense hate of Europe’s racial arrogance, along with our impotent vengeance against it, into an excessive, overcompensatory love for Africa. It manifests mostly as an alarmist, panicky obsession with defending and upholding the newly constructed non-colonial image of Africa. It also comes across as a paranoid attentiveness to any action word or gesture considered a slight on Africa’s dignity and pride. It is a state in which we live our imagined Africanness, i.e., the abstract trans-tribal Africanity, as both a fixed essence and an ontologically settled principle of thought, feeling, action, reaction, and above all, creation. In other words, in Afrophilia, we claim to have discovered how Africa wants to be spoken about, loved, or hated; what choices, policies, and strategies best suit her specific essence, personality, or character. In a state of Afrophilia, we have recovered our African soul and are therefore very pleased with ourselves. African authenticity that African art celebrates and enacts is this Afrophiliac euphoric feeling of cultural self-satisfaction after the successful self-retrieval from the ordeal of colonial alienation.

The trouble, however, is that in this mostly aesthetically reconstructed state of Afrophilia, what we love about Africa are mostly precisely those things that Europe had badmouthed and condemned as the very sources of Africa’s barbarity and non-evolution. These included the traditions, institutions, beliefs, and worldviews, which, though good enough for our ancestors, could no longer aid human flourishing and growth in the radically changed modern environment into which colonization had thrown us. Under the anti-colonialist spell of cultural nationalism, negritude poetry and arts had blackmailed Africa to re-embrace those very old beliefs and traditions that kept our ancestors stagnant, unprepared, uncompetitive, and therefore colonizable. But in massively returning to the roots, suddenly rendered maladaptive by the advent of world history, Africa, unknown to the cultural nationalists, was depriving herself of the world transformational power of creative destruction carried by the very disruptive power and chaos of the colonial intrusion. For in the aesthetically intensified state of Afrophilia, what was evolutionarily fated to disappear and give way has been kept safe; what was to change has remained not only unchanged, but protected from change; what should have adapted has remained malignantly unadapative and what would have been the forces of change and adaptation were maligned, discredited, and rejected as alien impositions. And so, in a state of cultural Afrophilia fostered and sustained by art, Africa cheated itself of the historic opportunity to avail itself of the external stimulus of conquest to activate in itself the dormant evolutionary drive to change and progress through self-renewal. Afrophilia became something like a self-imposed bear hug choking the very life forces, the evolutionary impulses out of Africa, leaving her culturally a near-empty shell which art then fills up with its eternal recycling and refurbishing of the same old forms and contents. In Afrophilia, perpetual self-celebration and self-confirmation gives the illusion of recovered cultural dignity. Art especially at the performative level, by insisting on showcasing Africanity became not only the most contagious carrier and propagator of Afrophilia but also its greatest cultural Public Relations machinery. Its meta-political role was to launder the image of Africa’s precolonial past and its continuities in its present traditions.

The ‘Picasso Code’ and African Modernism

In its Afrophiliac form, early modern art mostly came across as an open and explicit exaltation of Africa’s ancient tribal roots. Nothing was held back as the artist did all to reproduce and re-dignify in plain realist representations the arcana of the threatened but still fully enchanted traditional world. Art became the major cultural nationalist tool for rescuing the magic-mythic ancestral world from the attempted colonial disenchantment. However, this mostly anti-colonial phase of modern African art as a thinly aesthetically mediated cultural nationalism was soon to be supplanted by the sudden emergence of what is called African modernism. One notable and defining feature of African artistic modernism was that while still claiming to be rooted in African traditions and faithful to the cultural-nationalist/anti-colonialist goals of Afrophiliac art, it surprisingly showed up as a radical departure from and break with the core formal features and techniques of all hitherto known art forms in Africa, including traditional and early modern art. What is African modernism and how did it manage to take over and dominate, almost without transition, the whole spectrum of serious art in Africa? In this section, I will read one major strand of African artistic modernism against the grain by seeing it mainly as an artificially induced birth, i.e., a cultural evolutionary freak, which, though aesthetically triumphant, may have done more harm than good to art and culture in Africa.

To further prepare the ground for a post-African argument against both early modern Afrophiliac art and African modernism, I want to reread the famous Picasso moment that is historically said to have provided the inspirati...