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Third Text, Vol.

24, Issue 2, March, 2010, 277286

Modernity, Modernism and Africas Authentic Voice


Rasheed Araeen
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1. My concern here is only with the problematic nature of modernity in African art. In other areas, such as literature, filmmaking, music, environment, political theory, etc, the achievement of Africa and its diaspora is undoubtedly extraordinary and universally recognised. 2. It is important to note that Africas art writers, curators and historians, particularly those who live in the West, constantly make noises about the oppressive nature of Western art institutions which either ignore Africas modern achievement in art or marginalise it as derivative or inauthentic. But they are the same people who tirelessly engaged with the support and collaboration with these very same institutions, in promoting both within Africa and in the West the mediocrity of most contemporary African artists, which is disguised as the necessary cultural difference of the specificity of Africas encounters, experiences and expressions of the modern world.

The question of Africas authentic voice within modernity can only be resolved within history. History contains both what is imposed upon it often an ideology and what confronts and transgresses it in an endeavour to maintain the ability of human imagination to create with total freedom. Although the former continues to prevail as the dominant discourse in Africa, as elsewhere, it is in what has been created by the latter that we find the true significance of Africas achievement in modernity. In other words, the historical achievement of Africa in modernity is not of a predetermined nature or contained within or by what is imposed upon it. More importantly, it also questions the racially based dogmas of Negritude and gives Africa a uniquely original modern voice; one that emerged in the work of an African artist in Paris in 1939.1 However, this proposition would perhaps be difficult even for Africa itself to accept or recognise, because this voice not only does not conform to what prevails in Africa but confronts the most common perception by Africa itself about the nature of its place in modernity. What is, in fact, generally recognised and celebrated, even by most of Africas own historians, is what began as mimicry under the tutelage of colonial paternalism and patronage. In order, therefore, to recognise Africas true modern voice and its historical significance, it is important to separate it from a misguided notion of Africas entry into modern history. Whatever prevails today is not only due to flawed cultural theories and general ignorance of history, but also the inability of Africas own historians to fully comprehend the historical significance of what has surpassed the endemic mindset of Africas postcolonial ruling elite,2 or the aspirations of a surrogate bourgeoisie that takes pride in mimicking Western values in the name of Africas modern progress. The significance of Africas modern voice or identity lies centrally within the historical trajectory of modernism, not only in what it represents as art but as an allegory of what could have liberated and can liberate Africa from the legacies of both its own moribund, if not fossilised, traditions and what has been imposed on it by colonialism in the name of modern progress.
Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online Third Text (2010) http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals DOI: 10.1080/09528821003722272

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Our concern here is with modern art in Africa, which according to most prevailing art histories began with what was adopted from socalled realism in Western painting and became the basis of art in Nigeria at the beginning of the twentieth century. But, if realism can represent the beginning of modernism in African art, as is believed by many historians, why is it seen particularly in the work of Nigerian artist Aina Onabolu? Why not, for example, in Africas own tradition of realism in the terracotta and brass portraits of Ife during the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries? They represent a kind of realism which surpasses the realism of the Western academic painting with which Onabolu became so fascinated that he had to come to London to learn its technique. It can be argued that at the end of the nineteenth century, when Onabolu began to draw by copying out illustrations from European religious and business literature, information concerning Africas own past was not easily available and he had no choice but to turn to Europe to begin his journey. However, the relationship of Onabolus work with the realism in African tradition is an issue that can only be approached through a concept of history that is capable of recuperating the past in the interests of the present. There seems to be no such discourse as yet or not to my knowledge that connects Onabolus work with Africas own tradition of realism. Not only is empirical evidence needed but also theoretical discourse that connects the past with the present, beyond the facile polemics of the colonised mind. The issue here is not only the relationship of realism with the beginning of modernism in art in Africa, but how and why this particular realism became the beginning of modernism in Africa. Was it a benign creative force that led to this beginning, or was it meant to trap the imagination to serve a specific purpose? The answer to this lies within the new social forces that emerged in Nigeria at the end of the nineteenth century, resulting from the colonially imposed Western ideas of human progress and advancement and they actually produced Onabolu. The realism of his work is a product of colonialism, not an opposition to it as some believe. To understand this, it is necessary to acknowledge that colonialism was not a monolithic regime under which everything was carried out by force of stick or gun. The success of a colonial regime depended not only on its violence but also on liberal means by which it successfully enticed the natives to participate in its consolidation and administration. This produced an educated class in Africa, as in other parts of the colonial world, which accepted the modernity of a Western system and, by adopting it, not only took part in the colonial regime but ultimately took over its very administration in the name of postcolonial independence and self-determination. Onabolus interest in Western-type academic drawing began, I believe, as a young student in a missionary school, which then opened an opportunity for him to take it up professionally. Onabolu went to England, with support from the colony, to equip himself with the necessary expertise of a European-style academic painter and learn the tricks of the trade in order to pursue his professional career. On his return to Nigeria he started painting portraits, particularly of the newly emergent affluent native class of doctors, lawyers, engineers, government officials and so on, also establishing this type of painting as the basis of art education in Nigeria.

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Basic to Onabolus practice is Western academic painting, to which he introduces African subject matter, that gives his work an African appearance. There is no allusion to Africas own tradition in Onabolu s paintings; in fact, he seems to abandon his own tradition in favour of mimicking what he considers to be more attractive and progressive. Onabolus mimicry of Western art is often equated, particularly by some of Africas own historians, with Picassos interest in African art, but by reversing this historical phenomenon and with an absurd suggestion that this makes Onabolu the pioneer of modernism in Africa. Picasso engages with many traditions simultaneously, with his own primarily and that of Africa, out of which comes an entirely new thing in the form of a modern language of art. No such thing happens in Onabolus work. What emerges from his work is a form of premodern European academic painting with African subject matter, which in fact betrays a confusion between subject matter and the content of the work. This perception of modernity in his work is actually the modernity of a surrogate class, which can only mimic but is unable to penetrate what it mimics. The result is a mindset that is constantly in search of what it can mimic. It is this mindset that now prevails in Africa, as in most of the world that was once Europes colony. There is a view that justifies this mimicry, suggesting that by this the colonised not only subverts the colonial power but realises his or her own humanity. But, in my view, the human body can be enslaved but not the mind, not entirely. It has the ability to escape all constraints and find its own genuine voice. Onabolu does, however, represent the beginning of an intellectual discourse whose historical genealogy can be extended beyond Nigeria to include, for example, South African artists such as John Mohl and Gerard Sekoto. By this I do not imply that both Mohl and Sekoto had knowledge of Onabolus work and were influenced by him, or had produced similar kinds of work. It is merely to argue that the social forces or classes which produced Onabolu had also emerged in most of the rest of Africa, and provided Africa with the framework for its intellectual pursuits and struggle for self-determination. In other words, this development took a more or less similar path producing what can now be put together in a chain of progress and considered as a historical genealogy of the whole of Africa. John Mohl and Gerard Sekoto, for example, who are recognised historically as South Africas most important artists, are, in my view, part of a colonial genealogy. They struggled to confront this genealogy in order to move towards liberation from it, but largely failed. This failure was not due to their submission or capitulation to the colonial regime but to a lack of understanding of what was expected of them by the liberal section of the colonial society in which they lived and which provided them with the means to realise their ambitions as artists, both in their own countries and when they migrated to the Western metropolises. What I find disturbing is not only the continuing prevalence of this genealogy in the histories of African modern art written by Africans themselves but the ignorance of what has challenged and liberated it from the colonial regime.

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1 Ernest Mancoba in Johannesburg, 1994, photo: T J Lemon for Tomas Films

If there has been one artist from Africa indeed from South Africa who confronts successfully the colonial genealogy of art in Africa and the Eurocentrity of the mainstream history of modernism, it is Ernest Mancoba. His penetration and understanding of what was expected of him as a black artist led him to a realisation that this expectation was a prison of the benevolent or liberal colonial discourse which he must defy in order to realise and maintain the freedom of his creative imagination. What is extraordinary about this defiance was not only that it challenged and intellectually demolished the very regime or ideology that produced apartheid, ahead of its demise some five decades later, but also gave a vision that was and is necessary for the postcolonial self-realisation of Africa through its own liberated imagination. The historical genealogy in which Mancoba thus locates himself is not separated from that which he challenges. As he enters modernisms central core and confronts it, it is transformed into what he can and does claim for himself and indeed for Africa. With Mancoba, Africas place is no longer peripheral to the mainstream history of modernism but central within it. What interests me here is not only that Mancoba is Africas most original modern artist, but, more importantly, that he enters the space of modernism formed and perpetuated by the colonial myth of white racial supremacy and superiority the very same myth on which apartheid was based and its violence justified and demolishes it from within. He thus rejects the view that the colonised had no choice but to resort to mimicry. It is unfortunate that Mancobas achievement is not yet fully recognised, not even in Africa itself, for in my view without this recognition Africa cannot rid itself of the colonial legacies that still prevail and suffocate its creative energy. I might have simplified or somewhat diverted from the main issue here, but it is important not to separate the discourse of art from the overall social conditions that are fundamental to the production, reception and understanding of art in Africa as elsewhere. What is commonly recognised as art might be a reflection of the social conditions that provide its impetus or dynamics. But art also has the ability to transcend or escape from what becomes restrictive or does not nourish the creativity of artistic imagination. It is therefore not unusual for artists to emigrate; and it seems Mancobas departure from his homeland was an attempt not only to escape from such restrictions, but to find a place which would trigger his imagination to function at its fullest power. When Mancoba arrives in Paris in 1938, he finds himself on extremely fertile but problematic ground. The city is infused with the creative energy of African intellectuals who have come there from both its mainland and its diaspora. But this creativity is also full of contradictions. While it represents a genuine pursuit of self-realisation, it is dependent on the approval of those whose perception of Africa is based on a fascination with the exotic other: the primitive, savage, magical, and so on. This view first emerges in the early century with the interest of some European artists, such as Picasso, in African and Oceanic artefacts that leads to Cubism and is then picked up by Surrealists who see Africa as their unconscious. But the fascination with what was then a fashion for the exotic negro is actually brought to Paris via the Harlem Renaissance of New York, thereby reinforcing the prevailing stereotypes of Africa. By the end of the 1920s, Paris had fallen under the

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Ernest Mancoba in Johannesburg, 1994, photo: T J Lemon for Tomas Films

magical spell of what some writers call Negrophilia, an exotic entertainment industry of musical performances of jazz and tap-dancing, whose central figure was Josephine Baker. Most of these music halls were situated in and around the Paris district of Montmartre where many painters, sculptors, musicians and writers also lived and congregated. In short, the so-called vogue of the Negro became an integral part of Parisian intellectual life. By the end of the 1930s the influence of this negro vogue had somewhat waned, but the stereotypical views of Africa remained dominant in the Parisian avant-garde. Many African intellectuals were aware of this disturbing problem and struggled to deal with it. Among them were Lopold Senghor from Senegal, Aim Csaire from Martinique and sculptor Ronald Moody from Jamaica.

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It is difficult to say who then met whom. But we know that Senghor not only met Picasso many times but had great admiration for him; and Mancoba probably also met him as he was part of a small artistic circle in which both are reported to have moved. There was a constant mixing and exchange of ideas between people of different races within the art community in Paris, but this exchange was often unequal. Some Africans, aware of this, engaged in constant struggle to define Africas own modern identity based on its own self-consciousness. But they were not always successful and the confusion persisted between what was ones own voice and what was stereotypical. This was significantly reflected, though problematically, during one of Senghors visits to Picasso. Senghor himself reminisced about it in 1988:
I still remember Pablo Picassos friendliness, seeing me to the door as I was leaving and saying, looking me straight in the eyes, we must remain savages. And I replied, we must remain negroes. And he burst out laughing, because we were on the same wavelength.3

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3. See Lopold Sdar Senghor, Ce que je crois, in Seven Stories: about Modern Art in Africa, ed Clmentine Deliss, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1995, p 218.

I have great admiration for Senghors struggle for Africas own voice, but when he faces Picasso he is unable to confront what negates it. It seems Senghor cannot separate the stereotypical from the real. Perhaps it is this lack of differentiation that led to Senghors confusion in his own formulation and promotion of what he calls Negro art, a concept which seems not to have originated in Africa but in its American diaspora. It was the result of a nostalgic longing for Africa by African-Americans at the beginning of the twentieth century which was then expressed and legitimised by the Harlem Renaissance. When socalled Negro art arrived in Paris, its ideas became conflated with the stereotypes of Africa in the Parisian avant-garde, particularly Surrealism. There was a particular iconography derived from African traditional sculpture that became the basis of these stereotypes, which unfortunately were also partially adopted by Senghor as the basis of his ideas for Africas modernity. Despite this, I find it necessary to separate Senghors concept of Negro art from his overall vision in which all cultures are in a dialogue on their own terms, from which he envisages the emergence of universal civilisation. But, at the same time, Senghor is unable to formulate an approach that would have helped Africa liberate itself from what he and others encountered in Paris. Picassos view of Africa as savage was his way of admiring what fascinated him. But underneath this admiration or fascination lay something that needed to be confronted by Africa itself for it to regain its true self and freedom. Picassos views on Africa and his experience of African or Oceanic artworks are nevertheless two different things. In his work there is no encounter between the civilised and the savage, the rational and irrational. What Picasso actually brings together is two systems of knowledge with their own rationalities, and in a dialogue from which emerges a new system of knowledge, a synthesis that led him on to a path of twentiethcentury modernism. It is also important to recognise that Picasso did not copy, imitate or steal African art. The talk about Picasso stealing African art is nothing but the silly rhetoric of a juvenile mind a typical postcolonial mindset. Picasso did indeed study African art by copying some of

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Untitled, 1939, ink and watercolour on paper, 26.7 20.6 cm, courtesy Wonga Mancoba and Silkeborg Kunstmuseum, Silkeborg

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its examples, but this is a normal process of learning for all humans, particularly when one enters another culture. It is not Picassos interest in African art that should be objectionable, but his perception of Africa that reduces it perpetually to its past and prevents it from moving forward through its own consciousness of itself and the world around it. For Europe, Africa has always been, and still is, its Other, its suppressed unconscious, the land of savages and primitives frozen in a state of blissful innocence. It cannot therefore explain or legitimise its relationship with Africa except through this otherness. This Western view of Africa held sway when Senghor met Picasso. It was this stereotypical view of Africa that Ernest Mancoba also faced in Paris, and to which he as an African was expected to conform, besides being surrounded by the saturated atmosphere of Surrealist iconography. Surrealism did in fact have a great influence on the African intellectuals of the so-called Negritude movement, among them particularly Csaire and Senghor. But Mancobas absorption of what appear to be some aspects of Surrealism is a very different thing. What Mancoba did was extraordinary. It was Mancobas defiance and confrontation of what he was expected to do as an African or Black artist that enabled him to claim his own modern subjectivity. It can therefore be said that it was not Onabolu but Mancoba who not only began to reflect Africas modern consciousness in art but placed this consciousness right at the centre of modernism. By the end of the 1930s, Surrealism though still a dominant discourse in Paris had become exhausted, because of not only internal feuds and quarrels but also the staleness of its iconography (what I call the pictorialism of Western art, from which modernism struggled to free it, and which has now become the popular medias tool to exploit the masses for its own financial gains). Then came the war, and most artists left Europe for New York. It was only after the end of war that the energy of Surrealism returned, but with a new understanding and freedom that produced CoBrA and Tachisme in Europe and Abstract Expressionism in New York. Mancoba also resumed his work after he was released from a Nazi internment camp where he had been imprisoned during the war, and collaborated with Asger Jorn in the activities of CoBrA. Actually, what emerged as a new form after the war is common, with some variations, to CoBrA, Tachisme and Abstract Expressionism. It manifested the kind of freedom and free expression which had been in part absent from art before. Tachisme is derived from the French word tache, meaning stain; and tachisme (the word first used in 1951) is supposed to represent spontaneous brush strokes, drips and blobs of paint, and sometimes scribbling reminiscent of calligraphy. Dont we see all these features in Mancobas work of 1939 and 1940, seven to eight years before the emergence of the movements mentioned above? In a drawing of 1939, you can clearly see the blobs of paint freely applied to a piece of paper without rendering, with black parallel lines scribbled over them in a criss-cross formation. Later, in a 1940 work titled Kamposition, the whole thing is rendered with spontaneous brush strokes that produce symmetrical configuration. Does all this not make Mancoba a precursor of these movements? The blobs and drips of paint, spontaneous free brush strokes and scribbling of lines are not just formal devices but signify the new
3 2 Untitled, oil 1939, on ink canvas, and watercolour 39 40cm, courtesy on paper, SMAC 26.7 Art 20.6 Gallery, cm, courtesy Stellenbosch, Wonga South Mancoba Africa; and the Silkeborg painting Kunstmuseum, is undated butSilkeborg, presumed provenance: to date from Jan the Groth period 1948 to 1951

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Untitled, oil on canvas, 39 40 cm, courtesy SMAC Art Gallery, Stellenbosch, South Africa; the painting is undated but presumed to date from the period 1948 to 1951

freedom with which modernism revised itself after the war. Mancoba played a central role in this, and it still has an enormous significance for Africa. Africa is now no longer trapped or contained within the dogmas of the past or what is imposed upon it. In his work, Mancoba does not re-present or even represent Africa, but gives it a voice which was not heard before, a voice of liberation and free imagination. Mancoba defies not only Surrealist iconography, as I have said before, but even more remarkable apparently abandons the iconography by which art is and can be recognised as African. And yet Africa is there at the centre of his work. It is in dialogue with the West, on equal and on its own terms. This dialogue also happens in Picassos work, but in the case of Mancoba there is a paradigm shift of both ideological and historical significances which should be recognised not only in the context of his individual development but also as fundamental to Africas modern identity. In Picassos work Africa exists only as an appropriated object in dialogue with a dominant subject of the colonial regime, ie, with Picasso himself. But this is not the case in Mancobas work. This is the most significant aspect of Mancobas achievement, historically as well as culturally. With him, the place of Africa in

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4.

See Rasheed Araeen, Wangari Maathai: Africas Gift to the World and Ecoaesthetics: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century, Third Text, 100th Special Issue, Art: A Vision of the Future, 23:5, Routledge, UK, September 2009, pp 6758 and 67984.

modernity is no longer that of an appropriated object but that of a liberated subject. We do not have enough information regarding the nature of Mancobas involvement with CoBrA, but after CoBrA broke up in 1951, some of its members went on to join the most important postwar avantgarde movements in Europe such as the Situationist International. The main thrust of these movements was to unite art and life. Mancoba himself did not follow these movements as he wanted to focus on his own priorities, but he did provide a stepping stone for many others. It has been argued that Mancoba represents an African spirit, which of course is there. However, this spirit does not exist in its original traditional form, but has been transformed in its endeavour to move towards modernity. For Africa to claim Mancoba as its own artist on the basis that his work has roots only in an African tradition would be wrong. Without understanding his position within the central flow of the ideas of modernism, whatever Africa wants to claim him for will reduce him to (post-)colonial marginalisation. Mancobas importance lies not only in what he himself did in 1939 and 1940, and subsequently, but what seems to be his precognition of what emerged later as CoBrA, Tachisme and Abstract Expressionism. What is extraordinary about Mancobas achievement is that he is very likely the first artist from the whole colonised world Africa, Asia, the Americas, Australasia and the Pacific to enter the central core of modernism at the time when this world, particularly his own country of South Africa, was still struggling under colonialism, and to challenge modernisms historical paradigm on its own terms. The success of his entry not only challenges the Eurocentric notion of modernisms historical agency, determined philosophically, ideologically and culturally by the exclusivity of European subjectivity, but also demolishes the very discourse that racially separates the Self from the Other. And by this he places the creative role of free human imagination above all predeterminations. Moreover, a considered examination of Mancobas post-CoBrA work shows that he has moved on, leaving behind what appears to be the personal angst of his earlier expressionism and adopting what is contemplative and symmetrical, elements fundamental to what later emerged historically Minimalism, and then particularly the conceptualism of the Land Art movement at the end of the 1960s. This is not to suggest any connection between Mancobas work and the above movements, but to locate him within the trajectory that ends with a movement of land transformation in art. And although this movement has failed to realise its potential to integrate art within the dynamics of everyday life, this potential is now being realised as I have suggested elsewhere in Africa; and with this Africa has opened a way forward not only for itself but for what humanity demands from us at the time when the earth is struggling for its future survival.4
This revised essay forms a section of the paper that I wrote on the invitation of Lise van Robbroeck and delivered as the keynote address to the 24th Annual Conference of the South African Association of Visual Art Historians (SAVAH), Stellenbosch University, Stellenbosch, 4 September 2008.

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