Chika Okeke, 'The Quest for a Nigerian Art: Or a Story of Art from Zaria to Nsukka'
In: Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace. Edited by Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor. London: Institute of International Visual Arts, 1999, pp. 144-165.
Charting the Journey The standard history of modern Nigerian art begins with the pioneering efforts of Aina Onabolu (1882-1963), who studied and copied what he believed was ‘true’ painting: academic portraiture. The most significant events in that history, however, began in the late 1950s when a group of young artists at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology, Zaria, formed an association for the primary purpose of reconsidering the validity of the ubiquitous Onabolu legacy.
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The members of the Zaria Art Society were clearly aware of the continuing elision of the art traditions of their own peoples in the evolution of the new art that was being taught in the academy. There was, in their estimation, something fundamentally wrong in this apparent self-denial by the emerging Nigerian artists. A reversal was needed if the true, modern Nigerian art were to be established. In order to focus their thoughts, the Zaria Art Society advanced their theory of Natural Synthesis which, essentially, called for a merging of the best of the indigenous art traditions, forms and ideas with the useful Western ones.
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A possible foundation had been laid by the British art teacher, Kenneth Murray, who came to Nigeria in 1927, at the suggestion of Onabolu, to help in the development of art teaching. He taught his students, Ben Enwonwu among them, to reflect their cultural environments in their art. But the ‘reflection’ hardly called for vigorous study or analysis of the conceptual and formal nuances of indigenous cultural manifestations. It was only much later that Enwonwu, perhaps alone among his peers, moved further in ‘reflecting the art traditions of his people in his art. The Zaria Art Society took up the challenge from that point, employing more dialectical means in its quest for a truly modern Nigerian art.
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Then, in Zaria in the mid-1970s, there was a reversal: a rejection of the idea of synthesis developed in the very institution in which it was born. This reversal represents a continuation of the ideas of artists who, in the 1960s, had a different attitude from the ‘Zarianists’ in articulating the new art. For the later Zaria artists, the art experience had to be founded on the individual, not so much on collective inheritances. They saw a contradiction in the Zaria Art Society’s attempt to define a uniquely, ‘Nigerian’ art in an evolving, multicultural world. The new art, they believed, must reflect this transcultural, even globalist identity in their work. This attitude later devolved to other art schools – an example of which is the Auchi Polytechnic whose artists have made some impact on recent painting in Nigeria. [2]
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The Story Ben Enwonwu is arguably the first important post-classical Nigerian artist who became conscious of the sculptural traditions of his people. That awareness profoundly affected the nature of his art, which in turn set in motion the renegotiation of the earlier construction of modern Nigerian art.
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From the earliest period of Enwonwu’s ‘African style’, he seems to have been preoccupied with two major ideas: the woman and the masked dancer. His Négritudist leaning may have informed his initial interest in the idea and form of the African woman, who was both Mother Africa and the alluring beauty whose colour elicited superlatives, her body the object of much poetic contemplation. The Enwonwu woman is a dancer, and dance, Senghor said, is the unifier – the natural, physical, even emotional expression - of all African peoples. The female dancer is the icon, the essence, of a cultural expression that had been discouraged, debased and heathenised by colonialism and its institutions.
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Critics of Enwonwu see in his art the quintessential split personality of the confused African artist, trapped at the cultural crossroads with the Mazruian ‘Triple Heritage’. The reasoning is that Enwonwu’s method of delivery remains technically faithful to the academy, even if his subject does not. If his earlier Agbogho Mmuo or Ogolo appear illustrative, suggesting Négritudist nostalgia, they are also the beginning of a sustained attempt to capture and tame the evanescent spirit behind the mask, relocating it from the space/time reality of the market square to canvas and bronze. The members of the Zaria Art Society were later to become known as the ‘Zaria Rebels’ due to their supposedly radical approach to the new art. Rather than ingest all Western models and methods taught by a largely European faculty, the Society preferred to raw directly from art forms indigenous to the various cultural backgrounds. Yet as if to build one more resilient foundation, Natural Synthesis – the theoretical basis on which their art derived sustenance – advocated a merging of the best in indigenous and foreign (Western) art forms and ideas. To Uche Okeke, the ideologue of the Society, uli became the art form upon which he founded his new art.
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We may recall that the members of the Zaria Art Society derived much impetus from the euphoric pre- and post-Independence nationalism. But as has been suggested earlier, they were not alone in that quest for a new art. Several other young artists who formed no associations, but were conversant with the political and cultural currents of the time, were equally involved. A number of these trained in the technical institutes and colleges while a few were taught in Europe. They all shared the belief (which differed markedly from that of the ‘Zaria Rebels’) that there was no future for a modern Nigerian art located in, and defined and sustained solely by, indigenous art traditions. For them the spirit of political independence also dictated a replacement of colonial academic art with avant-garde, modern (read Western) forms and ideas. Erhabor Emokpae was amongst the most prominent of the artists who advocated this new sensibility. Emokpae trained at the Yaba Technical Institute, Lagos. Like Zaria, Yaba had a conservative academic style. However, after his two-year training there, Emokpae took to abstraction and severe stylisation, especially in paintings. That change was his own way of rejecting colonialism, of celebrating the collective political independence, and of expressing his personal creative freedom: the freedom to create something new. But he did not, like Okeke or Onobrakpeya, seek new forms based on the art of his own people, the Edo, whose traditions are among the richest anywhere in the world. Nothing bound him to any cultural specifics.
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By the mid-1980s, further developments in the Nsukka experience continued with Ndidi Dike. Dike trained as a painter, but later took to sculpture. Her painting experience continued to modify her glyptic sensibilities. In her painting, she explored a variety of natural media, especially dried Banana fibres, seeds and sand. She did not adopt uli in the manner of Obiara Udechukwu or Uche Okeke: her interest in drawing was perhaps not sufficient to sustain the demands of uli for linear elegance and stylisation of forms.
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A purer response to uli aesthetics is evident in Oguibe’s Nsukka Triptych where he simulates classical uli design with a simple, clean format that provides a clear background for the graffiti. As in the earlier National Graffiti, the phrases, words and signs allude to historical and political issues that form part of our collective national experience. The social commentary championed by Udechukwu becomes more biting, more declamatory and turns into a form of protest. Graffiti gives the artist an opportunity to give vent to his gut feelings about his society. It is also the vox populi from which one can read the times. Oguibe continues a tradition that is long-established inside prison cells, public toilets and railway stations. Against the backdrop of a rich art tradition, we hear the individual and collective voices of a society in the throes of change.
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In the Arena
But what is that essence for which all the artists in the story seek? Is it even likely that there is an essence, a collective goal that may be called Nigerian? A characteristic product, a common quest? This is where we seek explanations in the phenomenon of masquerade: [6] the masquerade that exists in and beyond the world of finite senses; the masquerade of several parts, each as spectacular, awesome, beautiful, intriguing, different, yet complementary to the other. Like the Igbo ljele mask, the masquerade is a summation of a people’s culture and philosophy. Its beauty can hardly be comprehended in stasis, rather, in its pirouetting movement; its constantly changing position; and its ‘multiplicity of frames’ is its beauty, its essence. The artists presented here are like masqueraders. As we have seen, they continuously change their interests, attitudes and techniques as dictated by their individual enquiries into the nature and essence of art, or due to associative influences from other artists. Each artist takes part in the masquerade, performing before an active audience.
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2] By the early 1990s, Edwin Debebs, Sam Ovraiti, and Zinno Orara from Auchi were already recognised for brilliant, Impressionistic colour that has become the hallmark of the Auchi School.
[6] The Masquerade concept outlined here is largely drawn from Olu Oguibe’s Masquerade theory of African art, in which he proposes a multi-perspectival critical strategy for the reading and appreciation of the work of the modern African artist. See Olu Oguibe, ‘The Paintings and Prints of Ozu Egonu: 20th Century Nigerian Artists’, Ph.D. Thesis, without the chapter on the Masquerade theory, was published as Uzo Egonu: An African Artist in the West, (London: Kala Press, 1995).