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Modern Nigerian Art: A
Sketch
C.
Krydz Ikwuemesi
Department of Fine
and Applied Arts,
University of
Nigeria Nsukka
Modern Nigerian art is roughly 100 years. A product of the
colonial encounter, it began in Lagos, former capital of Nigeria,
largely through the exertions of pioneer artist Aina Onabolu.
Onabolu received art training in England in the heyday of
colonization and returned to Nigeria to teach young Nigerian
students in the colonial school system. In his art, he was
committed to a realist paradigm with which he sought to prove that
the African was as capable of representational art as he was of
abstraction. He soon attracted other young men and women to the art
profession and thus became the teacher of some of Nigerian’s
renowned artists of those days. Of note, among these is Ben Enwonwu,
perhaps Onabolu’s most enterprising pupil who later came under the
tutelage of Kenneth Murray, an expatriate Superintendent of
Education, and subsequently emerged as Africa’s first artist to gain
international renown in the mid-20th century.
Unlike Onabolu, Enwonwu had a glaring culture sense.
Although he was steeped in the British Academy traditions having
studied art and anthropology in England, he understood—thanks to the
teachings of Murray—that art needed to relate with its time and
environment if it was to be meaningful to the people. Thus he
pursued in his work a realist-symbolic vision whose epicenter was
vigourously fortified by a sustained culture consciousness. This
informs the diametric difference between his works and those of
Onabolu. While he painted maiden masked dancers, village beauties,
spirit figures, and other mythic themes, Onabolu favoured portraits
and landscapes. Not that Enwonwu did not do those. After all
Elizabeth II granted him a pose for a realistic bronze bust at
Buckingham Palace in the mid-1950s, and he painted a good number of
other notable people. But his forte was perhaps his ability to
bring a sense of nationalism to art, not only through his graphic
work but also through his position later as Art Adviser to Nigeria’s
Federal Government.
But this not to
say that Onabulu’s art was counter-nationalism. He did not paint
with a strictly Nigeriansed or Africaniesed insight. Yet his work
sought to sustain the African pride in the fact that realism or even
naturalism was not the monopoly of Western artists. Onabulu
certainly was not the first to create realist images in Africa. Some
ancient Benin artists had attempted realistic busts, but he was,
perhaps, among the first in these parts to grapple with realism on
the two-dimensional format, turning art which was once a principal
religious instrument into a professional engagement which could
guarantee the artist’s social and economic well-being. It is
probably here that one may locate Onabulu’s significance in history.
As far as nationalism went, he, Enwonwu, and the Zarianists could
not have done otherwise. Their art, action and vision merely
reflected the challenge and reality of their time.
Thus one could aver that Onabulu and Enwonwu merely set the
stage for the ensuing creative departure that was to occur in Zaria
in the late 1950s. But it was rather Enwonwu’s graphic nationalism
that seemed to propel the vision of these young artists who have
been variously described as ‘‘rebels’’ ‘‘radicals,’’ and
‘‘Zarianists.’’ These young students at the Nigerian College of
Arts, Science and Technology (now Ahmadu Bello University), Zaria,
included Uche Okeke, Bruce Onobrakpeya, Yusuf Grillo, Emmanuel
Odita, Simon Okeke, Demas Nwoko, among others. Historians would
image Zaria as the dramatic turning point in the history of Nigerian
art, but few would readily acknowledge the Zarianist exploitation of
the politico-nationalist pattern of the day as Ademuleya (2003) has
pointed out.
In other words, these young men challenged their school’s art
curricula and sought to celebrate in their art the African spirit
and cosmology, apparently buoyed by Senghor’s Negritude and the
whirlwind of nationalism that was blowing through Africa then,
following the eye-opening out comes of the so-called World Wars.
Perhaps the best way to summarise the activities and contribution of
these “rebels” (as they were called) to Nigerian art is that they
critically amplified at the ideological level what Enwonwu and his
peers sought to do from the cultural standpoint. In addition to
that, their activities seemed to extend the nationalist struggle
that defined the politics of those colonial days.
A composite history of Nigerian art must recognize the role
played by other committed artists in the post-independence era and
the emergence of many more art training centres, universities and
polytechnics that has helped to further develop and diversify the
outlook and content of art in Nigeria. The presence and activities
of art councils, galleries, and museums must be acknowledged even
when they have not performed wonderfully due to the exigency of
several factors. Added to these are some artists’ societies and
cooperatives which help to keep the wheel of art turning. In fact,
if art development depended solely on sheer numbers, Nigerian art
would get all the pass mark. But the history of art is not written
in history books, but on bank ledgers. With little or no funding
available for art and creativity, things tend to revolve around
“bread and butter” in the art arena and at times professionalism
takes a back seat, but one must not deny the resilience of Nigerian
art and artists, a character that enables them to defy the odds,
including those of funding, patronage and scholarship.
But the problem of funding for the arts is not entirely a
Nigerian one. It is probably the same all over Africa. Blame
poverty for it, if you like. But part of the reason could be linked
to ignorance and the apparent inability of Africa’s leaders to
embrace a more holistic concept of development. Development in
Africa often begins and ends with party politics, and anything that
can guarantee crude wealth and power. Unfortunately art has no such
capacity. Thus it commands little or no attention from leaders and
policy makers. Up until now, art and society in Nigeria, for
example, are divorced from each other.
For this reason, the average Nigerian artist, like his
counterpart in other parts of Africa, is like the “blundering beggar
wandering through the green laughters of the cactus fence.” In
spite of a glowing history, art in Nigeria remains a minority
enterprise, truancy from life, as in most places. Only very few
Nigerian artists depend solely on art for their daily bread.
Usually, the average artist has to play a multiplicity of roles to
survive -- like a hydra-headed animal. He/she has to be an art
maker, art marketer, and at times, art critic simultaneously. Yet it
is never easy to be jack of all trades and master of all.
But the
monolithic history that has been woven around the Zaria rebellion
tends to over-simplify the story of art in Nigeria. Chike Aniakor’s
insistence that the Zaria rebels rebelled against nothing and had
made no real impact on the outlook of art in the college at Zaria
remains a matter of controversy, but the trouble with the history of
art in Nigeria is, perhaps, its inability to look beyond Zaria and
engage other landmarks which have extended the Zaria phenomenon with
convincing criticality. Even where the Zaria artists have scattered
in different directions and created new vistas either as academics
or successful students artists, the tendency has been to focus on
them and them alone without using them as a stepping stone to engage
their creative progeny as the vibrant tributaries of the same mighty
river.
Anyone who knows the complex background of Nigeria may wonder
why I talk about “Nigerian art” with such ease. Of course, it has
often been debated whether there is any such thing as Nigerian art,
given the plurality of people and consciousness that frame Nigeria.
But I believe we can talk about Nigerian art in the same way we can
talk about British or American art. That is, from the points of
view ideology and geography. Nigerian art derives its essence from
the infusions of the multiple traditions and the significations of a
uniform geography. Its modernity and Africanity are not
controvertible. Western hegemonic critics and historians have
posited that modern African art is not authentic since it is a
product of Western style education and made mainly with European
tools and materials--perhaps an extension of the earlier claim that
Africa had neither history nor civilization. But the truth is that
modern Nigerian art is a fusion of the African spirit/experience and
Africa’s yearning for new challenges in a highly fleeting world.
Nigerian art made of Western tools and materials, to me, is as
African as an African person dressed in Western style clothes.
Identity is a thing of the spirit. Beyond the spirit, Africa has
been a hybridity since colonization. Both Nigeria and her art are
no exceptions.
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