araeen modernity, modernism and africa's authentic voice

Third Text, Vol. 24, Issue 2, March, 2010, 277–286

Third Text

ISSN 0952-8822 print/ISSN 1475-5297 online © Third Text (2010)http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals

DOI: 10.1080/09528821003722272

Modernity, Modernism andAfrica’s Authentic Voice

Rasheed Araeen

The question of Africa’s authentic voice within modernity can only beresolved within history. History contains both what is imposed upon it– often an ideology – and what confronts and transgresses it in anendeavour to maintain the ability of human imagination to create withtotal freedom. Although the former continues to prevail as the domi-nant discourse in Africa, as elsewhere, it is in what has been created bythe latter that we find the true significance of Africa’s achievement inmodernity. In other words, the historical achievement of Africa inmodernity is not of a predetermined nature or contained within or bywhat is imposed upon it. More importantly, it also questions theracially based dogmas of Negritude and gives Africa a uniquely originalmodern voice; one that emerged in the work of an African artist in Parisin 1939.

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However, this proposition would perhaps be difficult even forAfrica itself to accept or recognise, because this voice not only does notconform to what prevails in Africa but confronts the most commonperception by Africa itself about the nature of its place in modernity.What is, in fact, generally recognised and celebrated, even by most ofAfrica’s own historians, is what began as mimicry under the tutelage ofcolonial paternalism and patronage. In order, therefore, to recogniseAfrica’s true modern voice and its historical significance, it is importantto separate it from a misguided notion of Africa’s entry into modernhistory. Whatever prevails today is not only due to flawed cultural theo-ries and general ignorance of history, but also the inability of Africa’sown historians to fully comprehend the historical significance of whathas surpassed the endemic mindset of Africa’s postcolonial ruling elite,

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or the aspirations of a surrogate bourgeoisie that takes pride in mimick-ing Western values in the name of Africa’s modern progress. The signifi-cance of Africa’s modern voice or identity lies centrally within thehistorical trajectory of modernism, not only in what it represents as artbut as an allegory of what could have liberated and can liberate Africafrom the legacies of both its own moribund, if not fossilised, traditionsand what has been imposed on it by colonialism in the name of modernprogress.

1. My concern here is only with the problematic nature of modernity in African art. In other areas, such as literature, film-making, 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 Africa’s 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 Africa’s 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 Africa’s encounters, experiences and expressions of the modern world.

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Our concern here is with modern art in Africa, which according tomost prevailing art histories began with what was adopted from so-called ‘realism’ in Western painting and became the basis of art inNigeria at the beginning of the twentieth century. But, if ‘realism’ canrepresent the beginning of modernism in African art, as is believed bymany historians, why is it seen particularly in the work of Nigerian artistAina Onabolu? Why not, for example, in Africa’s own tradition of real-ism in the terracotta and brass portraits of Ife during the thirteenth tosixteenth centuries? They represent a kind of realism which surpasses therealism of the Western academic painting with which Onabolu becameso fascinated that he had to come to London to learn its technique. It canbe argued that at the end of the nineteenth century, when Onabolubegan to draw by ‘copying out illustrations from European religious andbusiness literature’, information concerning Africa’s own past was noteasily available and he had no choice but to turn to Europe to begin hisjourney. However, the relationship of Onabolu’s work with the realismin African tradition is an issue that can only be approached through aconcept of history that is capable of recuperating the past in the interestsof the present. There seems to be no such discourse as yet – or not to myknowledge – that connects Onabolu’s work with Africa’s own traditionof realism. Not only is empirical evidence needed but also theoreticaldiscourse that connects the past with the present, beyond the facilepolemics of the colonised mind.

The issue here is not only the relationship of ‘realism’ with the begin-ning of modernism in art in Africa, but how and why this particularrealism became the beginning of modernism in Africa. Was it a benigncreative force that led to this beginning, or was it meant to trap theimagination to serve a specific purpose? The answer to this lies withinthe new social forces that emerged in Nigeria at the end of the nineteenthcentury, resulting from the colonially imposed Western ideas of humanprogress and advancement – and they actually produced Onabolu. Therealism of his work is a product of colonialism, not an opposition to it assome believe. To understand this, it is necessary to acknowledge thatcolonialism was not a monolithic regime under which everything wascarried out by force of stick or gun. The success of a colonial regimedepended not only on its violence but also on liberal means by which itsuccessfully enticed the natives to participate in its consolidation andadministration. This produced an educated class in Africa, as in otherparts of the colonial world, which accepted the modernity of a Westernsystem and, by adopting it, not only took part in the colonial regime butultimately took over its very administration in the name of postcolonialindependence and self-determination.

Onabolu’s interest in Western-type academic drawing began, Ibelieve, as a young student in a missionary school, which then opened anopportunity for him to take it up professionally. Onabolu went toEngland, with support from the colony, to equip himself with the neces-sary expertise of a European-style academic painter and learn the tricksof the trade in order to pursue his professional career. On his return toNigeria he started painting portraits, particularly of the newly emergentaffluent native class of doctors, lawyers, engineers, government officialsand so on, also establishing this type of painting as the basis of arteducation in Nigeria.


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Basic to Onabolu’s practice is Western academic painting, to whichhe introduces African subject matter, that gives his work an Africanappearance. There is no allusion to Africa’s own tradition inOnabolu’ s paintings; in fact, he seems to abandon his own traditionin favour of mimicking what he considers to be more attractive andprogressive.

Onabolu’s mimicry of Western art is often equated, particularly bysome of Africa’s own historians, with Picasso’s interest in African art,but by reversing this historical phenomenon and with an absurd sugges-tion that this makes Onabolu the pioneer of modernism in Africa.Picasso engages with many traditions simultaneously, with his ownprimarily and that of Africa, out of which comes an entirely new thing inthe form of a modern language of art. No such thing happens inOnabolu’s work.

What emerges from his work is a form of premodern Europeanacademic painting with African subject matter, which in fact betrays aconfusion between subject matter and the content of the work. Thisperception of modernity in his work is actually the modernity of a surro-gate class, which can only mimic but is unable to penetrate what itmimics. The result is a mindset that is constantly in search of what it canmimic. It is this mindset that now prevails in Africa, as in most of theworld that was once Europe’s colony.

There is a view that justifies this mimicry, suggesting that by this thecolonised not only subverts the colonial power but realises his or herown humanity. But, in my view, the human body can be enslaved butnot the mind, not entirely. It has the ability to escape all constraints andfind its own genuine voice.

Onabolu does, however, represent the beginning of an intellectualdiscourse whose historical genealogy can be extended beyond Nigeria toinclude, for example, South African artists such as John Mohl andGerard Sekoto. By this I do not imply that both Mohl and Sekoto hadknowledge of Onabolu’s work and were influenced by him, or hadproduced similar kinds of work. It is merely to argue that the socialforces or classes which produced Onabolu had also emerged in most ofthe rest of Africa, and provided Africa with the framework for its intel-lectual pursuits and struggle for self-determination. In other words, thisdevelopment took a more or less similar path producing what can nowbe put together in a chain of progress and considered as a historicalgenealogy of the whole of Africa.

John Mohl and Gerard Sekoto, for example, who are recognisedhistorically as South Africa’s most important artists, are, in my view,part of a colonial genealogy. They struggled to confront this genealogyin order to move towards liberation from it, but largely failed. This fail-ure was not due to their submission or capitulation to the colonialregime but to a lack of understanding of what was expected of them bythe liberal section of the colonial society in which they lived and whichprovided them with the means to realise their ambitions as artists, bothin their own countries and when they migrated to the Western metropo-lises. What I find disturbing is not only the continuing prevalence of thisgenealogy in the histories of African modern art – written by Africansthemselves – but the ignorance of what has challenged and liberated itfrom 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 andthe Eurocentrity of the mainstream history of modernism, it is ErnestMancoba. His penetration and understanding of what was expected ofhim

as a black artist

led him to a realisation that this expectation was aprison of the benevolent or liberal colonial discourse which he must defyin order to realise and maintain the freedom of his creative imagination.What is extraordinary about this defiance was not only that it challengedand intellectually demolished the very regime or ideology that producedapartheid, ahead of its demise some five decades later, but also gave avision that was and is necessary for the postcolonial self-realisation ofAfrica through its own liberated imagination. The historical genealogy inwhich Mancoba thus locates himself is not separated from that which hechallenges. As he enters modernism’s central core and confronts it, it istransformed into what he can and does claim for himself – and indeedfor Africa. With Mancoba, Africa’s place is no longer peripheral to themainstream history of modernism but central within it.

What interests me here is not only that Mancoba is Africa’s mostoriginal modern artist, but, more importantly, that he enters the space ofmodernism formed and perpetuated by the colonial myth of white racialsupremacy and superiority – the very same myth on which apartheid wasbased and its violence justified – and demolishes it from within. He thusrejects the view that the colonised had no choice but to resort tomimicry. It is unfortunate that Mancoba’s achievement is not yet fullyrecognised, not even in Africa itself, for in my view without this recogni-tion Africa cannot rid itself of the colonial legacies that still prevail andsuffocate its creative energy.

I might have simplified or somewhat diverted from the main issuehere, but it is important not to separate the discourse of art from theoverall social conditions that are fundamental to the production, recep-tion and understanding of art in Africa – as elsewhere. What iscommonly recognised as art might be a reflection of the social conditionsthat provide its impetus or dynamics. But art also has the ability to tran-scend or escape from what becomes restrictive or does not nourish thecreativity of artistic imagination. It is therefore not unusual for artists toemigrate; and it seems Mancoba’s departure from his homeland was anattempt not only to escape from such restrictions, but to find a placewhich would trigger his imagination to function at its fullest power.

When Mancoba arrives in Paris in 1938, he finds himself onextremely fertile but problematic ground. The city is infused with thecreative energy of African intellectuals who have come there from bothits mainland and its diaspora. But this creativity is also full of contradic-tions. While it represents a genuine pursuit of self-realisation, it isdependent on the approval of those whose perception of Africa is basedon a fascination with the exotic other: the ‘primitive’, ‘savage’, ‘magi-cal’, and so on. This view first emerges in the early century with theinterest of some European artists, such as Picasso, in African andOceanic artefacts that leads to Cubism and is then picked up by Surreal-ists who see Africa as their unconscious. But the fascination with whatwas then a fashion for the ‘exotic negro’ is actually brought to Paris viathe Harlem Renaissance of New York, thereby reinforcing the prevailingstereotypes of Africa. By the end of the 1920s, Paris had fallen under the


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magical spell of what some writers call ‘Negrophilia’, an exotic enter-tainment industry of musical performances of jazz and tap-dancing,whose central figure was Josephine Baker. Most of these music hallswere situated in and around the Paris district of Montmartre wheremany painters, sculptors, musicians and writers also lived and congre-gated. In short, the so-called ‘vogue of the Negro’ became an integralpart of Parisian intellectual life. By the end of the 1930s the influence ofthis ‘negro vogue’ had somewhat waned, but the stereotypical views ofAfrica remained dominant in the Parisian avant-garde. Many Africanintellectuals were aware of this disturbing problem and struggled to dealwith it. Among them were Léopold Senghor from Senegal, Aimé Césairefrom Martinique and sculptor Ronald Moody from Jamaica.

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


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It is difficult to say who then met whom. But we know that Senghornot only met Picasso many times but had great admiration for him; andMancoba probably also met him as he was part of a small artistic circlein which both are reported to have moved. There was a constant mixingand exchange of ideas between people of different races within the artcommunity in Paris, but this exchange was often unequal. SomeAfricans, aware of this, engaged in constant struggle to define Africa’sown modern identity based on its own self-consciousness. But they werenot always successful and the confusion persisted between what wasone’s own voice and what was stereotypical. This was significantlyreflected, though problematically, during one of Senghor’s visits toPicasso. Senghor himself reminisced about it in 1988:

I still remember Pablo Picasso’s friendliness, seeing me to the door as Iwas leaving and saying, looking me straight in the eyes, ‘we must remainsavages’. And I replied, ‘we must remain negroes’. And he burst outlaughing, because we were on the same wavelength.

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I have great admiration for Senghor’s struggle for Africa’s own voice,but when he faces Picasso he is unable to confront what negates it. Itseems Senghor cannot separate the stereotypical from the real.

Perhaps it is this lack of differentiation that led to Senghor’s confu-sion in his own formulation and promotion of what he calls ‘Negro art’,a concept which seems not to have originated in Africa but in itsAmerican diaspora. It was the result of a nostalgic longing for Africa byAfrican-Americans at the beginning of the twentieth century which wasthen expressed and legitimised by the Harlem Renaissance. When so-called ‘Negro art’ arrived in Paris, its ideas became conflated with thestereotypes of Africa in the Parisian avant-garde, particularly Surrealism.There was a particular iconography derived from African traditionalsculpture that became the basis of these stereotypes, which unfortunatelywere also partially adopted by Senghor as the basis of his ideas forAfrica’s modernity.

Despite this, I find it necessary to separate Senghor’s concept of‘Negro art’ from his overall vision in which all cultures are in a dialogueon their own terms, from which he envisages the emergence of universalcivilisation. But, at the same time, Senghor is unable to formulate anapproach that would have helped Africa liberate itself from what he andothers encountered in Paris. Picasso’s view of Africa as ‘savage’ was hisway of admiring what fascinated him. But underneath this admiration orfascination lay something that needed to be confronted by Africa itselffor it to regain its true self and freedom.

Picasso’s views on Africa and his experience of African or Oceanicartworks are nevertheless two different things. In his work there is noencounter between the ‘civilised’ and the ‘savage’, the rational and irra-tional. What Picasso actually brings together is two systems of knowledgewith their own rationalities, and in a dialogue from which emerges a newsystem of knowledge, a synthesis that led him on to a path of twentieth-century modernism. It is also important to recognise that Picasso did notcopy, imitate or steal African art. The talk about Picasso stealing Africanart is nothing but the silly rhetoric of a juvenile mind – a typical postco-lonial mindset. Picasso did indeed study African art by copying some of

3. See Léopold Sédar Senghor, ‘Ce que je crois’, in

Seven Stories: about Modern Art in Africa

, ed Clémentine Deliss, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London, 1995, p 218.


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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 Picasso’s interest inAfrican art that should be objectionable, but his perception of Africa thatreduces it perpetually to its past and prevents it from moving forwardthrough its own consciousness of itself and the world around it.

For Europe, Africa has always been, and still is, its Other, itssuppressed unconscious, the land of savages and primitives frozen in astate of blissful innocence. It cannot therefore explain or legitimise itsrelationship with Africa except through this otherness. This Westernview of Africa held sway when Senghor met Picasso.

It was this stereotypical view of Africa that Ernest Mancoba alsofaced in Paris, and to which he as an African was expected to conform,besides being surrounded by the saturated atmosphere of Surrealisticonography. Surrealism did in fact have a great influence on the Africanintellectuals of the so-called Negritude movement, among them particu-larly Césaire and Senghor. But Mancoba’s absorption of what appear tobe some aspects of Surrealism is a very different thing.

What Mancoba did was extraordinary. It was Mancoba’s defianceand confrontation of what he was expected to do as an African or Blackartist that enabled him to claim his own modern subjectivity. It cantherefore be said that it was not Onabolu but Mancoba who not onlybegan to reflect Africa’s modern consciousness in art but placed thisconsciousness right at the centre of modernism.

By the end of the 1930s, Surrealism though still a dominant discoursein Paris had become exhausted, because of not only internal feuds andquarrels but also the staleness of its iconography (what I call the ‘pictori-alism’ of Western art, from which modernism struggled to free it, andwhich has now become the popular media’s tool to exploit the massesfor its own financial gains). Then came the war, and most artists leftEurope for New York. It was only after the end of war that the energy ofSurrealism returned, but with a new understanding and freedom thatproduced CoBrA and Tachisme in Europe and Abstract Expressionismin New York.

Mancoba also resumed his work after he was released from a Naziinternment camp where he had been imprisoned during the war, andcollaborated with Asger Jorn in the activities of CoBrA. Actually, whatemerged as a new form after the war is common, with some variations, toCoBrA, Tachisme and Abstract Expressionism. It manifested the kind offreedom and free expression which had been in part absent from art before.

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Untitled

, 1939, ink and watercolour on paper, 26.7

×

20.6 cm, courtesy Wonga Mancoba and Silkeborg Kunstmuseum, Silkeborg, provenance: Jan Groth3

Untitled

, oil on canvas, 39

×

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

Tachisme is derived from the French word

tache

, meaning stain; andtachisme (the word first used in 1951) is supposed to represent spontane-ous brush strokes, drips and blobs of paint, and sometimes scribblingreminiscent of calligraphy. Don’t we see all these features in Mancoba’swork of 1939 and 1940, seven to eight years before the emergence of themovements mentioned above? In a drawing of 1939, you can clearly seethe 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 renderedwith 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 andscribbling of lines are not just formal devices but signify the new


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freedom with which modernism revised itself after the war. Mancobaplayed a central role in this, and it still has an enormous significance forAfrica. Africa is now no longer trapped or contained within the dogmasof the past or what is imposed upon it. In his work, Mancoba does notre-present or even represent Africa, but gives it a voice which was notheard before, a voice of liberation and free imagination.

Mancoba defies not only Surrealist iconography, as I have saidbefore, but – even more remarkable – apparently abandons the iconogra-phy by which art is and can be recognised as African. And yet Africa isthere at the centre of his work. It is in dialogue with the West, on equaland on its own terms. This dialogue also happens in Picasso’s work, butin the case of Mancoba there is a paradigm shift of both ideological andhistorical significances which should be recognised not only in thecontext of his individual development but also as fundamental toAfrica’s modern identity. In Picasso’s work Africa exists only as anappropriated object in dialogue with a dominant subject of the colonialregime, ie, with Picasso himself. But this is not the case in Mancoba’swork. This is the most significant aspect of Mancoba’s achievement,historically as well as culturally. With him, the place of Africa in

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


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modernity is no longer that of an appropriated object but that of a liber-ated subject.

We do not have enough information regarding the nature ofMancoba’s involvement with CoBrA, but after CoBrA broke up in 1951,some of its members went on to join the most important postwar avant-garde movements in Europe – such as the Situationist International. Themain thrust of these movements was to unite art and life. Mancobahimself did not follow these movements as he wanted to focus on hisown priorities, but he did provide a stepping stone for many others.

It has been argued that Mancoba represents an African spirit, whichof course is there. However, this spirit does not exist in its original tradi-tional form, but has been transformed in its endeavour to move towardsmodernity. For Africa to claim Mancoba as its own artist on the basisthat his work has roots only in an African tradition would be wrong.Without understanding his position within the central flow of the ideasof modernism, whatever Africa wants to claim him for will reduce himto (post-)colonial marginalisation.

Mancoba’s importance lies not only in what he himself did in 1939and 1940, and subsequently, but what seems to be his precognition ofwhat emerged later as CoBrA, Tachisme and Abstract Expressionism.What is extraordinary about Mancoba’s achievement is that he is verylikely the first artist from the whole colonised world – Africa, Asia, theAmericas, Australasia and the Pacific – to enter the central core ofmodernism at the time when this world, particularly his own countryof South Africa, was still struggling under colonialism, and to chal-lenge modernism’s historical paradigm on its own terms. The successof his entry not only challenges the Eurocentric notion of modernism’shistorical agency, determined philosophically, ideologically and cultur-ally by the exclusivity of European subjectivity, but also demolishesthe very discourse that racially separates the Self from the Other. Andby this he places the creative role of free human imagination above allpredeterminations.

Moreover, a considered examination of Mancoba’s post-CoBrAwork shows that he has moved on, leaving behind what appears to bethe personal angst of his earlier expressionism and adopting what iscontemplative and symmetrical, elements fundamental to what lateremerged historically – Minimalism, and then particularly the conceptual-ism of the Land Art movement at the end of the 1960s. This is not tosuggest any connection between Mancoba’s work and the abovemovements, but to locate him within the trajectory that ends with amovement of land transformation in art. And although this movementhas failed to realise its potential to integrate art within the dynamics ofeveryday life, this potential is now being realised – as I have suggestedelsewhere – in Africa; and with this Africa has opened a way forward notonly for itself but for what humanity demands from us at the time whenthe earth is struggling for its future survival.

4

This revised essay forms a section of the paper that I wrote on the invitation of Lisevan Robbroeck and delivered as the keynote address to the 24th Annual Conferenceof the South African Association of Visual Art Historians (SAVAH), Stellenbosch

University, Stellenbosch, 4 September 2008.

4. See Rasheed Araeen, ‘Wangari Maathai: Africa’s 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 675–8 and 679–84.


araeen modernity, modernism and africa's authentic voice

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