Third Text

ISSN: 0952-8822 (Print) 1475-5297 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ctte20

Appropriation as Nationalism in Modern African

Art

Olu Oguibe

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

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

Published online: 25 Aug 2010.

Submit your article to this journal

Article views: 971

View related articles

Citing articles: 2 View citing articles

Full Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at

https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalInformation?journalCode=ctte20
 Third Text, Vol. 16, Issue 3, 2002, 243-259

0
Appropriation as Nationalism in
Modern African Art
Olu Oguibe

One interesting theatre of nationalist struggle in Africa at the beginning

of the 20th century was the changing space of the visual arts. More
interesting still was the nature of this struggle that resided not in a
direct confrontation with the structures of colonialism, nor in the
tropes of imaging and representation, but was written through a
strategy of appropriation of the forms of imperial culture.
In the second half of the 19th century, Christian missions began to
establish schools in Africa. The missions needed interpreters and junior
teachers, while growing colonial business concerns required cheap,
semi-skilled labour and law enforcement cadres. This specific necessity
determined the scope of the school curriculum. As A D Galloway has
written, the ‘early mission schools … [were] somewhat uninspired in
their conception and excessively utilitarian in their concentration upon
Reading, Writing and Arithmetic (the Catechism being printed
alongside the multiplication tables in their text books)’.1 In Nigeria, the
Revd Birch Freeman’s school timetable of 1848 departed slightly from
this narrow scheme and included Geography. Art education, however,
was not considered necessary or indeed useful. In his history of art
education in Nigeria, Uche Okeke concludes that with the colonial
Christian mission, ‘cultural and creative education was not considered
important for the converts’.2
Beyond the logic of the functionalist argument, though, lay a more
fundamental principle at the heart of colonial discourse, namely the
perpetuation of the fictions of difference upon which the colonial
project was constructed. A crucial device of colonial authority was to
1. A D Galloway,
‘Missionary Impact on
insert and institutionalise a corridor of slippage that granted the
Nigeria’, Nigeria colonised only partial access to the possibility of transition and
Magazine, Special issue, transformation to a modern identity. This boundary of possibility,
October 1960, p 63.
identified by Sir Edward Cust as the cornerstone of colonial policy,
2. Uche Okeke, ‘History of allowed the colonised only a ‘mimic representation’ of imperial culture,
Modern Nigerian Art’,
Nigeria Magazine, such that the colonised was transformed from the extremities of
128–129, 1979, p 103. backwardness which colonial discourse ascribed to her, into a partial

Third Text ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online © 2002 Kala Press/Black Umbrella
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: 10.1080/09528820110120704
 244

presence, one that supposedly existed at the crossroads of barbary and

civilisation. 3 Behind this device, remarked Cust, lay a ‘fundamental
principle … in our system of colonial policy, that of colonial
dependence’. For as long as the colonised was precluded from
acquiring full mastery of colonial ways, for as long as difference was
maintained, colonial dependence could be guaranteed.
Early colonial education was conceived, therefore, to ensure this
dependence by restricting itself to the encouragement of specific skills
for the service of empire, and certainly not those which ascribed full
0 humanity to the colonised by acknowledging full creative abilities in
her. Within colonial discourse art and the aesthetic sensibility were
crucial signifiers of the civilised station, and constituted the
unbridgeable distance between savagery and culture. Like speech, art
was seen as either a signifier or lack, the absence of which relegated the
colonised in the hierarchy of the colonial text. It was into this territory
of performance that the supposed primitivism, and thus inferiority, of
the colonised was written. Writing in the Blackwood Advertiser of
January 1918, for instance, the colonial Governor of the Gold Coast
Sir Hugh Clifford deposited:
The West African Negro has often been reproached with his failure
to develop any high form of civilisation. It has been pointed out ad
nauseam that he has never sculptured a statue, painted a picture,
produced a literature, or even invented a mechanical contrivance
worthy of the name, all of which are perfectly true.4
This under-privileging fiction translated into a pedagogical principle
that questioned the introduction of art into the colonial curriculum. As
a certain George Fowler noted in the visitors’ book of a Lagos artist in
1938, ‘teaching an African the art of a white man is not only a waste
3. Sir Edward Cust, of time but also a misplaced value…’.5 It was further argued that
Reflections on West
African Affairs addressed ‘rather than impose on them [Africans] what will end up being a
to the Colonial Office, torturing load, [i.e. art], they can be taught some aspects of European
Hatchard, London, 1839.
crafts which will be useful to various missions in the colony’.6
4. Quoted in Dapo Onabolu, The substitution of crafts for art on the curriculum was projected as
‘Aina Onabolu’, Nigeria
Magazine, 79, December
an act of philanthropy when in truth it was part of a complex colonial
1963, p 295. strategy of iterative exercise of hegemony, to assimilate the colonised
5. George Fowler, in Aina into regulatory administration of colonial power. However, at a
Onabolu’s visitor’s book, meeting of the staff of Achimota College, Gold Coast, in March 1928,
Lagos, August 13, 1938. G A Stevens, a colonial functionary, strongly deplored this policy and
6. Akinola Lasekan, argued for the recognition of the equal creative and mental capabilities
‘Western Art on African of Africans, and the acknowledgement of their rich creative heritage,
Shores’, unpublished
manuscript, University of by introducing meaningful and non-discriminatory art courses in
Nigeria, Nsukka, 1966. schools in the colonies.7 But in the general scheme of early colonial
7. G A Stevens, ‘The Future relations such arguments could only be dismissed as dangerous and not
of African Art: With at all mindful of what Edward Cust further described as ‘the folly of
Special Reference to
Problems Arising in Gold
conferring such privileges on a condition of society that has no earthly
Coast Colony’, Africa: claim to so exalted a position’.8 It is against this background that
Journal of the Africans began to enter and appropriate cultural forms of modernity at
International Institute of
African Languages and
the turn of the 19th century.
Cultures, III, 1930, While the colonial curriculum ignored art education and
pp 150–160. discouraged the teaching of art to the colonised, the Christian missions
8. Sir Edward Cust, op cit. engaged in the deprecation and destruction of existing artistic
 245

traditions. Artistic practice in traditional idioms was condemned as

idolatry and was therefore violently combated, with tons of art objects
seized and destroyed in bonfires. Converts were warned in damning
language of the harsh and irrevocable consequences of either creating
or keeping indigenous art forms.
One easily finds the frustrating potentials of this strategy in the
sermon of the Catholic apostate who cited African sculpture as the
stumbling block to his mission in the colonies, describing them as ‘the
wretched, irritating and grotesque woods … this annoying block …
0 the shade that dims the light of faith that is already burning in the
hearts of so many natives’.9 The ‘shade’, however, was much more
than the wood. It was the split in the colonising mission that the
persistence of these images inscribed, the germ of fragmentation and
dissolution in the body of the colonial project their perpetuation
symbolised. It signified the writing of colonialism as trespass, and
represented the earliest instances of its rejection. The artist’s
persistence with tradition, or that of his/her clientele and society,
became not merely an aesthetic or temporal act, but a contest of
identities which signaled the beginnings of a new discourse of
nationalism.
The scheme to obliterate colonial claims to culture was carried
out through the combined devices of textual erasure, material
vandalism and cultural protectionism that were carried out in
9. Revd Glover, Record of
Sunday Service, Roman
Africa. The deracination of material cultures among the colonised
Catholic Mission, Esa on the one hand, and the prohibition of access to Western/school art
Oke, Western Nigeria, 8 on the other, provided perfect conditions for the manufacture of the
September 1935.
mimic man, the utilitarian craftsman with no traditions of great art
10. Much of the credit for and no access to Imperial Enlightenment. At the same time, it
this must go to the
detailed but mostly created only two possibilities of resistance, two possibilities for its
unpublished and largely own negation. One was to persist with the indigenous forms which
unacknowledged work of colonialism condemned and sought to obliterate. The other was to
Nigerian art historian Ola
Oloidi, which nevertheless hack, to use a most appropriate colloquialism, into the exclusive
has provided the space of the antipode, in other words to possess the contested
documentary basis for the territory by mastering the forms and techniques of Western artistic
genealogy of modern
Nigerian art. See Kojo expression in order to cross out the ideological principles resident in
Fosu 1986, Susan Vogel its exclusivity.
1992, Jean Kennedy
1993.
11. In his Gallery of Gold
Coast Celebrities, Dr I S
NATIONALISM AND MODERNITY
Ephson writes about
Attabora Kweku Enu The advent in parts of Africa of a new artistic idiom akin to that of
[1742–98], an ex-slave
who became a painter in
Europe in the late 19th century was not intended simply to prove the
Britain and worked ‘in equal competence of the colonised as an end, but in so doing also to
1788 … in the service of undermine the ideological foundations of the colonial project and
Cosway, the first painter
to the Prince of Wales’ [p
overwrite, as it were, the colonial text. In West Africa the artist
31]. Unfortunately, I have generally accepted as the earliest to draw and paint in a modern idiom
been unable to trace Enu’s began this practice without formal training.10 It is known that Aina
slave narrative,
Reflections on the Slave Onabolu (1882–1963) was not the first West African to practice
Trade and the Slavery of painting and the graphic arts in the tradition of Renaissance Europe.11
Negroes, reportedly But he is the earliest recorded in colonial West Africa to defy the
published in English and
French, to which Ephson restriction of the colonised to crafts and begin an art practice by
refers. teaching himself. Onabolu began to draw as a schoolboy in Ijebu Ode,
 246

Western Nigeria, in the 1890s, copying out

illustrations from European religious and business
literature.12 Though formally educated in a
mission school, Onabolu received no art
instruction in school because the curriculum
offered only training in craftsmaking. Nor was he
encouraged in his artistic interests by his
teachers.13 Between 1900 and 1906 when he
finished school and took up a job with the
0 colonial marine department in Lagos, Onabolu
worked on his own, improving his skills in
draughtsmanship and the use of watercolours.
Using connections provided by his job, he
channelled his earnings into obtaining materials
from England, and applied his resources not only
to art practice but also to the teaching of his
chosen idiom.14 At the time, it appears, he was
alone in the region in his peculiar fascination.
Onabolu described realism as the ‘true art’. For
him the canons and devices of realism, like the
science of perspective for which he became widely
known all over Lagos as ‘Mr Perspective’, were
not only European inventions or ciphers of
Western civilisation but part of a universal artistic
Aina Onabolu, Portrait of a Lawyer, oil on canvas, idiom. It is important to note here that realism
size and date unavailable. was also part of Onabolu’s own artistic heritage,
in the form of the traditions of classical Ife court
art. In choosing realism over abstraction,
therefore, Onabolu was not merely mimicking Europe. He was also
beginning to define his idiom as a vehicle for translating and reinstating
his own heritage into new forms in the context of changing reality of
Africa.
Although he did his best to draw public attention to his work,
Onabolu was actively discouraged and on occasion subtly threatened
by Europeans. Ola Oloidi observes that the colonial authorities failed
to distinguish between the classical African forms which they
condemned as heathen, and Onabolu’s work.15 He further notes that
this ‘can be considered a deliberate action, for the Missionaries,
12. Ola Oloidi, ‘Constraints
on the Growth and
especially, who did not want any artistic mode that could remind the
Development of Modern Africans of the age-old traditional art which these missionaries
Nigerian Art in the rejected’. The problem with this explanation, of course, is that it fails
Colonial Period’, Arts
Faculty Seminar,
to equally observe that contempt for Onabolu’s realism was not
University of Nigeria, extended to the very examples of European art which he used as
Nsukka, 1986, models in his self-tuition. In other words, it does not account for the
unpublished, p 24.
evident contradiction in European attitudes to like forms in the colony
13. Aina Onabolu, ‘The vis-à-vis their distaste for appropriation of European techniques, a
Lonely Beginning’, Artist’s
notes, unpublished, 1922. contradiction that is predicated on a discourse of authorial identities, a
contest over author-ity. Clearly Onabolu’s work, though produced in
14. Aina Onabolu, ‘My
Pioneering Efforts’, the same idiom of verisimilitude as most European art in the colonies
Artist’s private document, at the time, was unacceptable for the simple but significant reason that
27 August 1937.
it bore the authorial sign of a colonial. Rather than ‘remind the
15. Oloidi, op cit, p 29. Africans of the age-old traditional art which these missionaries
 247

rejected’, they reminded the Europeans of the fallacy of their

construction of the colonised as an incompetent savage. Within the
frames of that construct, the ability to draw like the European, which
Onabolu had acquired by the end of the century, signified civility
beyond disputation. And the possibility of this acquisition outside the
regulatory powers of colonial authority represented a crack in the
scheme of empire. It signified the possibility of independence and
foregrounded the dangers which Cust identified when he warned that
a colony ‘would not be a colony for a single hour if she could maintain
0 an independent station’.16 Thus the veiled threat in this letter from a
British acquaintance of Onabolu’s, a J Holloway of the Nigerian
Railway, Lagos, to the artist in October 1910.
16. Sir Edward Cust, op cit.
17. J Holloway, ‘Dear Aina’, I am happy you yourself realise the danger of going your forefather’s
Letter dated 4 October way … by creating the type of art that our church can quarrel
1910, archives of the with…. I came back from Abeokuta a few days ago, and I must here
Onabolu family.
bring to your knowledge what the Rev. in our church said. This Rev.
18. In a note in Onabolu’s gentleman strongly rebuked the congregation for their stubborn
visitors’ book of 21 devotion to their idols which he regarded as heathen objects. They
February 1939, a certain
F Miller remarks on the
were considered ungrateful people who could not appreciate what
significance of Onabolu’s God had done in their lives…. Though you once said that your own
work in a time when art is special … I am not trying to discourage your type of art for
Europeans still ‘could not the colony, but knowing your potential very well, you may have to
see how an African could 17
excel’ in an art that was
think well about its acceptance in the colony.
considered Western.
19. Writing about Onabolu in
Though the relationship between Onabolu’s ‘type of art for the
Nigeria Magazine, no 79, colony’ and the ‘heathen forms’ condemned and vehemently combated
December 1963, p 295, by the Christian missions was not apparent, it is obvious nevertheless
his son Dapo Onabolu
describes Onabolu as ‘a
that the anxiety was not over the production of a particular kind of
man who believed in the creative endeavor. It would not be over-stretching the point to infer a
intrinsic quality of his connection between the pseudo-ecclesiastical anxiety of the Church,
people as men who have
identical artistic and overall colonialist desperation to deny the creativity of the native.18
inclinations and potential Protests such as Mr Holloway’s made Onabolu even more determined
with men of other races’. to prove that the arts of drawing and painting were not culture-specific
Elsewhere in the same
article, he notes that and could not, by their very nature, manifest the superiority of one
Onabolu saw all art, culture or people over another. He saw the practice and propagation of
whether Western or the new artistic tendency not only as an opportunity to emphasise its
otherwise, as ‘a human
quantity which was a universality; he equally saw it as a chance to affirm the capabilities of
human legacy, and which his people, and in so doing restate his equality with the European.19 His
like the motor car, the
steamship, and the legacy
intentions were not to achieve validation in the eyes of the white man,
of law, though originating but to invalidate European assumptions upon which the civilising
in its various aspects from mission in the colonies was founded. If the African could perform
different but precise
localities of the world,
equally well in what Europe claims its exclusive domain, then the
was nevertheless part of a former cancels out the tropes of ascendancy and puts Europe in its
general harvest of human proper place.
thought and endeavour’.
Cf. Negritude poet Sedar
Between 1900 and 1920 Onabolu made consistent and relentless
Senghor’s position, which efforts to persuade the colonial education department in Nigeria to
dichotomised between a introduce art in schools, but these met with little or no enthusiasm, as
Europe of science and
mechanics, and an Africa was clear from correspondence between him and the deputy director of
of poetry and rhythm. the department in Lagos in 1919. However, on the advice of a few
(Dapo Onabolu, ‘Aina mission school head teachers, Onabolu wrote to the department asking
Onabolu’, Nigeria
Magazine, no 79, permission to teach art in a number of schools in the Lagos area. In his
December 1963, p 298.) letter, he pointed out the great advantages of introducing what he
 248

described as ‘the prestigious art of drawing and painting’, and referred

to his already proven ability as a practitioner, enclosing
commendations from highly placed figures in the colony. He also
attached his curriculum vitae as well as the names of three referees.
However, in his reply of 3 April 1919, the acting deputy director of
education in the colony, Mr L Richards, regretted that he was not
disposed to grant the permission sought, referring Onabolu back to the
head teachers. He pointed out, however, with not a little touch of
sarcasm, that it was doubtful that the head teachers would need
0 Onabolu’s services.20
Onabolu did not despair. Instead he collected willing enthusiasts
20. L Richards, April 3, 1919,
and began to give them private tuition. Eventually some of the head
letter in the collection of teachers, contrary to the deputy director’s pronouncement, finally
Akinola Lasekan Estate. engaged him, and at some point he was teaching four schools around
21. Ibid. Lagos.
22. Dapo Onabolu, opcit, p Over several years of distinguished practice Onabolu produced
295. numerous drawings and portraits of Lagos elite including colonial
23. In Chinua Achebe’s novel, officials.21 Among his portraits from this period is the 1906
Arrow of God, the chief watercolour, Portrait of Mrs Spencer Savage, considered by scholars to
protagonist, Ezeulu,
explains sending his son
be a masterpiece of realism of early modern African art. In 1920
to join the white man Onabolu went to England to study art at St John’s Wood College,
thus: ‘When we want to London. According to his son, Dapo Onabolu, his mission in England
make a charm we look for
the animal whose blood
was to acquire ‘whatever he could of the sciences of painting,
can match its power…. perspective, anatomy and the other specialisations and ancillary
And our fathers have told disciplines which characterise European art education’.22 Since he had
us that it may happen to
an unfortunate generation
already proved himself quite competent in these skills before he went
that they are pushed to England, a more logical reason for Onabolu’s sojourn there was to
beyond the end of things, obtain a teaching diploma with which he stood a better chance of
and their back is broken
and hung over a fire. gaining entry into the colonial education system. It was his calculation
When this happens they that a teacher’s qualification would more easily gain him the official
may sacrifice their own approval he needed to introduce art into schools.
blood’. The African
Trilogy, Pan Books, Onabolu’s example represents a phase in cultural nationalism in
London, 1988, p 456. It is Africa when the regulated space of colonial education became a theatre
the same conviction that for the colonised to unravel the mystique of colonialism preparatory to
made Elesin Oba,
charioteer and its dislodgement. In his early novels Chinua Achebe details a narrative
commander of the cavalry of differing strategies among the colonised, which coalesce in the logic
for his King, send his son
Olunde to study overseas,
of confronting Europe on its own grounds by mastering it.23 This has
in Soyinka’s Death and been qualified as anthropophagia or the digestion of the West.24
the King’s Horseman. In However, the mastery of Europe speaks to a tactic of overdub rather
the drama, as well as the
real-life story on which it
than one of cannibalism. The appropriation of the European realist
is based, when the tradition in painting and the graphic arts which Onabolu introduced
colonial authorities was a significant part of a process of crossing out Europe’s texts of
interfered in 1946 and
stopped the commander
exclusivity, rather than merely imbibing forms and surfaces.
from fulfilling his state
obligation of ritual suicide
upon the King’s death it
was his son who defied
AFRICAN QUEST FOR MODERNISM VS COLONIAL
them and took his own CONSTRUCTION OF THE AUTHENTIC NATIVE
life as an act of honour in
his father’s stead.
After his return from Europe in 1922, Onabolu eventually received
24. See Susan Vogel, Africa official approval from the colonial administration to teach art in
Explores, Museum of
African Art, New York, schools within Lagos and its environs. By 1926 the teaching load was
1992. understandably too heavy for one teacher, and Onabolu requested of
 249

the education department that another art teacher be appointed. Not

having candidates in the colony, the administration brought in Kenneth
C Murray from England.25 The young Murray had little art education
and no experience in studio practice. But the colonial administration,
still ambivalent over the challenge that Onabolu represented, felt more
comfortable 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, art
supervisor, education officer, and, though unofficially, preserver of
0 Nigerian antiquities, all duties performed almost at the same time’.26
Murray’s appearance signalled a new contest over modernity, a
contest that was replicated eventually in other parts of Africa in an
increasingly addled rhetoric of iteration. Murray admonished his
students to ignore the formal concerns that Onabolu emphasised, and
to occupy themselves only with portraying scenes from their rural lives
as a means of preserving and perpetuating their own identity. He
considered Onabolu’s themes and methods as too steeped in the
European tradition, and taught his students to eschew what he
considered alien to their natural sensibilities. Instead of life studies and
keen understanding of anatomy, chiaroscuro, and the science of depth
and perspective that Onabolu enjoined his students to acquire, Murray
encouraged his own students to concentrate not on the acquisition of
technical skills but on the subject matter of their daily life and
environment. He encouraged them to produce romantic images of
village life: fetching firewood, women going to the stream, children
sweeping the yard or climbing trees. Such images, he contended,
though naive and lacking in technical finesse, were more authentic as
they represented the natives’ world more accurately than what
Onabolu propagated through his portraits, life drawings and exercises
in perspectival representation.
Murray’s understanding of what should constitute appropriate
response to Europe by the colonised thus differed markedly from
Onabolu’s. It also represented a shift in the colonialist stance, one that
was both political and generational. The European was moving from
complete denial of colonial creativity to constructing, and preserving,
the authentic native. Recognising a certain futility in its original
regulatory strategy, the colonial project seemed to have progressed
from trying to efface or even erase the colonised or their claim to
25. See letter to the Education culture. Its new strategy, manifest in Murray’s different understanding
Department, Lagos, by K of and approach to the creative abilities of the natives, seemed to
C Murray, 4 November engage instead in the production of what Fanon describes as the
1937, soliciting that ‘Mr.
Onabolu on whose ‘palatable’ Negro, the admired, authentic colonial.
request I have been Murray was dedicated to the preservation of his ideal of the cultures
brought be given every
possible cooperation
that he met. He failed to understand their predilection for change, and
which will encourage him seemed to loathe their strategy of selective appropriation. This was
to train more boys in manifested in undue zealotry and colonialist fervour on his part –
Lagos’. Papers of K C
Murray, Archives of the
Murray was reputed to possess the energy and restlessness of five men27
National Museum, Lagos. – and a pontifical conservationism. By opposing the acquisition of the
26. Oloidi, ‘Growth and
skills of observation and representation that Onabolu insisted on,
Development’, p 29. Murray produced a strange, new form of naive art which had little to
27. Oloidi, ‘Growth and do with the classical traditions of his pupils’ backgrounds, or with the
Development’, p 114. modern tendencies that were beginning to emerge as a result of the
 250

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

appropriation and domestication of European principles. For the next

three decades Onabolu’s work was thus actively undermined.
During the same period, the discourse of authenticity that Murray’s
methods introduced was played out in other parts of Africa, especially
in South Africa. In his study of South African Art, Steven Sack notes in
The Neglected Tradition that a ‘kind of prescriptiveness, and a desire
to keep the artist “tribal” and untainted by outside influence is
reiterated time and time again’.28 Quoting Tim Couzens, Sack recalls
the experience of John Mohl, one of the earliest black South African
landscape painters:
Mohl was once approached by a white admirer and advised not to
concentrate on landscape painting: but to paint figures of his people
in poverty and misery. Landscape, he was advised, had become a
field where Europeans had advanced very far in perfecting its
29
painting.

In response Mohl brought the subtext of contested identities

running through the above to the fore. He challenged the rhetoric of
fixity and hierarchisation, and the construction of the colonised as a
lack by advancing a teleological argument which significantly
prefigured postcolonial articulation of difference. ‘But I am an
African’, Mohl replied, ‘and when God made Africa, He also created
28. Steven Sack, The
beautiful landscapes for Africans to admire and paint’. Mohl
Neglected Tradition: recognised the attempt to place him within the frames of palatability,
Towards a New History whereby the hegemonic position of the European is acknowledged and
of South African Art
(1930–1988),
upheld. To defy such stipulative borders, therefore, was to break free
Johannesburg Art Gallery, of this hegemony, and in Mohl’s case landscape painting, remarkably,
1988, p 10. was the contested territory which he must possess to achieve this. Mohl
29. Ibid, p 10. verbalised his objectives in terms almost identical to Onabolu’s:
 251

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

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

Though Mohl’s rural and urban landscapes were in themselves

hardly distinguished, they nevertheless spoke to a clear discourse of
cultural defiance. By painting landscapes Mohl thus transgressed
beyond the frame of imperial fiction and expectation of the native.
Gerard Bhengu, a contemporary of Mohl’s and a particularly
talented naturalist painter, could not match his evident talent with the
skill that would be expected of a white artist of his endowment and
creative dedication. Bhengu, according to Sack, ‘was denied the chance
30. T Cousens, The New to acquire formal training’.31 Bhengu’s story parallels those of many
African: A Study of the early artists in the post-traditional manner in different parts of Africa.
Life and Work of H. I. E.
Dhlomo, Ravan Press,
Though his work benefited considerably from the patronage of
Johannesburg, 1985, p European benefactors, Bhengu was nevertheless considered unfit to
253. possess the same skills as a European. A recommendation that he be
31. Sack, op cit, p 11. allowed access to formal training was rejected by the University of
 252

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

Natal on the grounds that he should ‘work in his own way and develop
his own technique’.32 Unlike Mohl, however, Bhengu was unable to
move his practice beyond pastoral illustrations within colonial
acceptability.
Gerard Sekoto, on the other hand, left South Africa for France in
1947 in pursuit of his modernist aspirations. Whereas Onabolu
identified European academicism as the visual signifier of colonial
identity, Sekoto considered modern expressionism the proper space of
contest for modernity in the 1940s. In his determination to occupy a
space in modernity, he drew on post-Impressionism and Fauvism for his
32. P Savory, Gerard Bhengu: urban landscapes and figure paintings, despite the disregard by white
Zulu Artist, Howard
Timmins, Cape Town, authorities and lack of patronage. In some of his early work Sekoto
1965, p 10. referenced Van Gogh, and his undated Girl with Orange, probably from
 253

Gerard Sekoto, Children Playing, 1942–45

the same period, directly quotes Gauguin. Although the extent of

33. Although Sack contends
that of the early artists Sekoto’s influence on art in South Africa is rather uncertain,33 as he had
only Mohl had any chosen to spend the rest of his life in France in his private pursuit of
influence on South modernist subjectivity, he is considered to be an important figure in the
African art (see Sack p
15), there is an obvious development of modernism in Africa. His Self-Portrait of 1943 stands
presence of Sekoto in the as one of the remarkable examples of early modern art in Africa.
work of Ephraim
Ngatane, one of the most
Sekoto belonged to a generation of black South African artists that
engaging artists of the late would choose expatriation and relocation to the European centres of
1950s and early 1960s modernist practice as a way not only to escape the machinery of
who, though he studied
under Sihlali and Skotnes
European supremacy at home but to challenge and defy it, also. For a
of the Polly Street Centre, handful of artists of that generation, proving themselves in Europe
pursued a muscular style where opportunities supposedly exceeded those in a white-dominated
quite distinct from that of
Polly Street. Ngatane died
South Africa was more effective a response to that dominance as
tragically young in 1971. remaining within its reaches to combat it.
 254

Whereas African artists were considered only good enough for

woodcrafts and other media such as clay, Sekoto and Mohl deliberately
defied this limitation. They equally defied the subsequent extension of
these limits when watercolours, the medium in which Bhengu did much
of his work, were implicitly added to the list of mediums in which the
artists were expected to work. Murray’s students in Nigeria worked
exclusively in craft or cheap watercolours and drawing materials, the
same mediums that the authorities encouraged in art courses in South
Africa. Mohl and Sekoto, however, both proceeded to work in oils as
0 well, as Onabolu had done earlier.
The significance of artists such as Onabolu, Mohl and Sekoto in the
construction of modernity in Africa is to be understood when it is
compared with what was produced by the several ‘workshops’ and art
centres that would later sprout all over the continent under the
direction of European art teachers. In all cases, the art was predictably
naive and unaccomplished, which for the colonialists represented the
limits of African ability to represent what they saw as African reality.
Only artists who understood the ideological underpinnings of such art
actively contested these underpinnings and produced work of an
accomplished quality as part of Africa’s aspirations for change through
modernity.
It was the discourse of colonial authentication of the native,
identified by David Koloane as ‘the aesthetic barrier imposed between
black and white artists’ in South Africa, which was also carried on in
Rhodesia under Frank McEwen, a Fine Arts Representative of the
British Council in Paris in the 1970s. McEwen was acquainted with the
Cubist school in Paris, before he went to Rhodesia in 1954 on the
advice of Herbert Read.34 Having helped found the National Gallery of
Rhodesia, McEwen became its director in 1955, and the next year
instituted an ‘informal gallery workshop’ for museum staff and
visitors.35 The products of this ‘informal’ workshop he then began to
push vigorously through powerful, highly placed friends in the art
world. Soon an international clientele developed under McEwen’s
fostering, 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 to
34. F McEwen, ‘Personal folk-tales by Shona labourers at the site of the Gallery in Salisbury that
Reflections’, in
Contemporary Stone he ‘infiltrated potential artists into the security and curatorial staff, …
Carvings from Zimbabwe, [and gave] them crayons and paint…’.36 Shepherd then maintains that,
Yorkshire Sculpture Park,
1990, p 27.
after this, ‘the urge to carve and sculpt – long forgotten in Zimbabwe
and virtually without surviving traces – emerged again spontaneously ,
35. Ibid, p 30.
without his [McEwen’s] planning it’.37 This narrative of colonial
36. M Shepherd, ‘spontaneity’ nevertheless fails to explain how McEwen’s rogue
Contemporary Stone
Carving from Zimbabwe,
curators and security men came to entirely occupy their new sculptural
p 18. tradition with the same folk-tales they related to McEwen, all without
37. Ibid, p 19. Emphasis the latter’s intervention. McEwen was more revealing when he declared
added. in 1968: ‘Once again in the history of art, an umbrella of protection
38. F McEwen, ‘Return to has allowed dormant genius to revive’.38 But of greater importance to
Origins’, African Arts, us is McEwen’s obsession with ‘purity and authenticity’ in the tradition
1:2, Winter 1968. that he fostered, and his exaltation of ‘untutored craftsmanship’ in ‘an
39. Ibid, p 26. unspoilt people’.39 McEwen’s mission in Rhodesia was to produce a
 255

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

new noble savage, a reconstruction of the innocent colonised, the

savage saviour of the world. The product of this reconstruction is a
fetish, an object of European fantasy and containment of the Other, in
which the anxiety of the loss of innocence is displaced but remains an
object of hegemonic regulation in the form of the alterity of the other.
Before he left Paris McEwen was already convinced that ‘a new wave
of ‘Trivialism’ was overtaking the world centre of creative art’.40 He
had come to the conclusion that if ‘some vital new art exists or is about
to exist … it may occur elsewhere, in a different walk of life with a
different raison d’être: prompted by a new environment’.41 It was this
environment, and this new art, that he reified in Rhodesia. Having
constructed his ‘unspoilt’ colonial, McEwen proceeded to fetishise it,
and would spend the rest of his life defending its ‘authenticity’ and
struggling to provide it with an ‘umbrella of protection’.
In the 1960s, McEwen’s experiment was repeated by the young
British artist Georgina Betts in Oshogbo, Nigeria, where, beginning in
40. Ibid, p 26. 1964, she and her German partner Ulli Beier ran four-week workshops
41. Ibid, p 27. that drew participants from a travelling theatre in the little Yoruba
 256

town. As the claim goes, the previously untrained participants were

instantly transformed into competent, professional artists by the
workshops.42 Writing about the experiments, Beier noted that the most
significant thing about the ‘short cut’ artists from the workshops was
that they ‘worked in a kind of euphoria. They did not have any
conception of what an ‘artist’ was and they did not agonise about the
meaning of ‘art’.43 Though Beier maintains that the relationship
between Betts and her students was one of ‘mutual trust [and] not
authority’, he nevertheless admits that she exercised discretion in
0 ‘spotting and pinpointing each artist’s very own personal vision’.44 We
find the same processes of hegemonic replication as were evident in
McEwen’s workshop played out here in both the conceptualisation of
the Oshogbo experiment and the language and formula of its affirming
narrative.
The McEwen workshop echoed Murray’s methods in imaging the
‘untutored’ as the ‘authentic’. The reiteration of this fiction of colonial
discourse provided a matrix of relevance for its fragmentation, for the
continual disruption of colonialism’s constructed identities. In several
parts of Africa similar workshops and centres sprang up where
Europeans fostered their ideals of the ‘authentic’, and vigorously
marketed whatever art this creation produced. In many such centres or
their fringes, tendencies emerged which represented an adoption of a
mercantilist strategy that split the fiction of identities and
authenticities. This had little nationalist pretension. It was within the
context of crossing out the manufactured identities mentioned above
that a nationalist discourse sited itself, and it was there that the works
of Onabolu, Mohl and Sekoto assumed their nationalist significance.

A NEW NATIONALISM
Of the pioneer South African modernists, one deserves mention for
representing a different strategy from those of Onabolu, Mohl and
Sekoto. The new strategy, evident in the work of Ernest Mancoba from
the mid-1930s, involved a redefinition of African modernism by
electing classical African art as its model. It displaced the iconography
of the European Enlightenment and chose African sculpture and forms
as the source of inspiration, the point of departure and yet the frame
of reference. Its intent was a new aesthetic. Conceptually, this new
aesthetic also effectively proposed a confluence of European and
African modernisms by writing African art as the common frame and
subtext of all modernisms. Rather than quote pre-modernist Western
form, as did Onabolu and Mohl, or Western modernism as did Sekoto,
Mancoba referenced African sculpture on the specifically modernist
principle of formalist articulation.
Ernest Mancoba received early instruction in wood sculpture, and
although he eventually studied at the University of Fort Hare and the
42. Ulli Beier, Thirty Years of University of South Africa in the 1930s, he received no further formal
Oshogbo Art, Iwalewa, art training beyond this early introduction. Eventually he left South
Bayreuth, 1991, p 6.
Africa and was later associated with the Cobra group in Europe.
43. Ibid, p 6. Mancoba, like most African artists in South Africa of the period, began
44. Ibid, p 6. by producing ecclesiastical pieces in wood, commissioned by the
 257

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, Cape
Town and Johannesburg 1994, p 44

Christian missions. About 1936, however, a noticeable change

appeared in his sculpture. According to Steven Sack, Mancoba ‘turned
away from ecclesiastical and European sources in exchange for a
keener interest in the sculptural tradition of Africa’.45 Sack quotes a
contemporary newspaper report on Mancoba’s development:
Recently he came upon a book of primitive African sculpture. He
was deeply stirred…. He was fascinated by the ‘pattern within the
pattern’, and the way in which the carvings nonetheless remained
wholes.46
45. S Sack, The Neglected
Tradition, p 12.
Mancoba’s Musician of 1936 abandoned the pseudo-realist finish of
46. The Natal Advertiser, 9
June 1936, quoted in
his earlier pieces, and of Makoanye, Bhengu and the others, for the
Sack, ibid, p 12. planar surface of sculpture from the Congo basin. In Musician
 258

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

Mancoba sought the peculiar dialect of the adze, phrasing his form in
a staccato of cuts and geometric elements, a syncopation of surfaces. In
place of academicist anatomy he chose stylisation, and thus was able
to achieve the strength and affective presence similar to that which
European modernism sought in African art.
Yet Mancoba was not a traditionalist. His approach to African
sculpture was not one of iteration or even direct quotation. Instead he
employed the rhetoric of allusion. And other than the tactic of reaction,
which the colonial regulation of the contest for modernity dictated and
which Mohl and Sekoto adopted, Mancoba identified a different site of
practice outside the boundaries of colonialist intervention.
Conceptually, if not formally, his new aesthetic seemed to parallel the
Negritude aesthetic, then in its formative stages among African
 259

intellectuals and artists in France. At the centre of both was the

relocation of colonial desire from the exclusivist and supremacist sites
of Enlightenment aesthetics to the territory of African forms and
paradigms. Negritude of course ultimately failed to extricate itself
entirely from the enclosures of European contemporary thought and
form. But the new aesthetic that Mancoba introduced existed outside
those boundaries.
Mancoba’s rejection of stipulated as well as preferred frames began
a process of redefinition that would take nearly three decades to fully
0 realise. It prefigured an important turn in nationalist response to
colonial regulation in Nigeria in the late 1950s. By this period a group
of young Nigerian artists began to question the praxis of reverse
appropriation outlined by Onabolu, and to reassess strategies of
response to colonialist hegemony. The artists felt it was no longer of
paramount importance to disprove colonialist superiority, other
historical events having offered the colonised opportunities to do so
sufficiently and effectively. The period of rigorous contestations over
modernity was gone, and the imperative of nationalism, whether
political or cultural, no longer was to engage in a contest of sites with
colonialism, but to dislodge it.
Where Onabolu and his contemporaries pursued a discourse of
humanist universalism, the younger artists initiated what one might
call a discourse of mapped difference, and set about defining and
inscribing that difference. The formation in 1958 of the Zaria Art
Society by a small group of students at the College of Arts, Science and
Technology, Zaria, was precisely for this purpose, namely to rethink
and reformulate attitudes to European forms, and to devise a new
aesthetic akin to Mancoba’s. This aesthetic would locate the nationalist
imperative not in the reverse appropriation of Europe, but in the
translation and foregrounding of colonised forms, and through this the
fabrication of new national cultures, and a new modernism.