The De-Africanization of African Art: Towards Post-African Aesthetics 1032029544, 9781032029542

Citation preview

The De-Africanization of African Art

This book argues for a radical new approach to thinking about art and creativity in Africa, challenging outdated normative discourses about Africa’s creative heritage. Africanism, which is driven by a traumatic response to colonialism in Africa, has an almost unshakable stranglehold on the content, stylistics, and meaning of art in Africa. Post-African aesthetics insists on the need to move beyond this counter-colonial self-consciousness and to considerably change, rework, and enlarge the ground, principles, and mission of artistic imagination and creativity in Africa. This book critiques and dismantles the tropes of Africanism and Afrocentrism, providing the criteria and methodology for a Post-African art theory or Post-African aesthetics. Grounded initially in essays by Denis Ekpo, the father of Post-Africanism, the book then explores a range of applications and interpretations of Post-African theory to the art forms and creative practices in Africa. With particular reference to South Africa, this book will be of interest to researchers across the disciplines of Art, Literature, Media Studies, Cultural Anthropology, and African Studies. Denis Ekpo is Professor of Comparative Literature and Director of multidisciplinary Comparative Literature Programme, at the University of Port Harcourt, Nigeria. He is originator of the concept of Post-Africanism and author of Neither Anti-Imperialist Anger nor the Tears of the Good White man (2004) and Philosophie et Litterature africaine (2004). He has published extensively in journals such as Textual Practice, Neohelicon, The Literary Griot, Social Semiotics, and Third Text. He is a Fellow of the Stellenbosch Institute of Advanced Study, South Africa. His current book project is titled “Forget Fanon: Post-Africanism and the Closing of the Colonial Story in Africa.” Pfunzo Sidogi is a lecturer in the Department of Fine and Studio Arts, Faculty of Arts and Design at the Tshwane University of Technology, South Africa.

Routledge African Studies

38. Blackness in Israel Rethinking Racial Boundaries Edited by Uri Dorchin and Gabriella Djerrahian 39. African Scholars and Intellectuals in North American Academies Reflections on Exile and Migration Edited by Sabella Ogbobode Abidde 40. Healthcare Education in Nigeria Evolutions and Emerging Paradigms Joseph A. Balogun 41. African Transnational Mobility in China Africans on the Move Roberto Castillo 42. Mennonites and Post-Colonial African Studies Edited by John M. Janzen, Harold F. Miller and John C. Yoder 43. Oral Literary Performance in Africa Beyond Text Edited by Nduka Otiono and Chiji Akọma 44. Decolonising Childhoods in Eastern Africa Literary and Cultural Representations Oduor Obura 45. Black–Arab Encounters in Literature and Film Touria Khannous 46. The De-Africanization of African Art Towards Post-African Aesthetics Denis Ekpo and Pfunzo Sidogi For a full list of available titles please visit: https​:/​/ww​​w​.rou​​tledg​​e​.com​​/Afri​​ can​-S​​tudie​​s​/boo​​k​-se​r​​ies​/A​​FRSTU​D

The De-Africanization of African Art Towards Post-African Aesthetics

Edited by Denis Ekpo and Pfunzo Sidogi

First published 2022 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 605 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10158 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2022 selection and editorial matter, Denis Ekpo and Pfunzo Sidogi; individual chapters, the contributors The right of Denis Ekpo and Pfunzo Sidogi to be identified as the authors of the editorial material, and of the authors for their individual chapters, has been asserted in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Ekpo, Denis, editor. | Sidogi, Pfunzo, editor. Title: The de-Africanization of African art: towards post-African aesthetics/edited by Denis Ekpo and Pfunzo Sidogi. Description: Abingdon, Oxon ; New York: Routledge, 2021. | Series: African studies | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021006845 (print) | LCCN 2021006846 (ebook) | ISBN 9781032029542 (hardback) | ISBN 9781032029566 (paperback) | ISBN 9781003185994 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Art, African–Philosophy. Classification: LCC N7380 .D43 2021 (print) | LCC N7380 (ebook) | DDC 709.6–dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021006845 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021006846 ISBN: [9781032029542] (hbk) ISBN: [9781032029566] (pbk) ISBN: [9781003185994] (ebk) Typeset in Bembo by Deanta Global Publishing Services, Chennai, India

For Ingrid ‘Muffin’ Stevens (1952–2019) and Edima Ekpo

Contents

List of contributors Preface 1 Africa Mis-traveling to Modernity: From Modern African Art to African Modernism

viii ix 1

DENIS EKPO

2 Manifesto for a Post-African Art

21

DENIS EKPO

3 The New African Movement and the Artists It Inspired: The Early Post-Africanists

54

PFUNZO SIDOGI

4 Africanity, Litigation Aesthetics, and Openness to Being

77

CHIELOZONA EZE

5 Post-Africanism as Fluid, Feminist, and Agentic Alterity

96

RUNETTE KRUGER

6 The Ruses of the Afrophiliac Condition

119

THABANG MOLATELO MONOA

Index

137

Contributors

Chielozona Eze is a professor of African and African Diaspora Studies at Northeastern Illinois University, where he is Bernard J. Brommel Distinguished Research Professor. He is also Extraordinary Professor of English at Stellenbosch University, South Africa. He is the author of Justice and Human Rights in the African Imagination: We, Too, Are Humans (Routledge, 2021). Runette Kruger is Head of the Department of Fine and Studio Arts at the Tshwane University of Technology, South Africa. She teaches Visual Theory at undergraduate level and supervises postgraduate candidates. She has published articles and has delivered papers at national and international conferences on the themes of social equity and utopia as they relate to time and space theory. For her PhD she created a utopia dedicated to the Other named Distopia, referencing dissidence and difference. Her research interests include Afrofuturism, time-space philosophy, dissidence, utopia, and agency. Thabang Molatelo Monoa is an art historian and curatorial researcher. He has participated in numerous academic conferences and is actively involved in South Africa’s contemporary art space. His intellectual work is concerned with representation, aesthetic theory, Black futurity, Black agency, and more recently, Post-Africanism.

Preface Pfunzo Sidogi

In 2017, Denis Ekpo was invited by the Tshwane University of Technology in Pretoria, South Africa, to present the keynote address at the annual South African Visual Arts Historians (SAVAH) conference themed “Alternative and Current Visual Discourses in Africa and Beyond.” This was Ekpo’s third invitation to the country in four years, and his fairly dense speech was a trans-valuation of the modernist artistic turn in Africa during the twentieth century and how this formative event in Africa’s modern cultural history has been memorialized and theorized. In his address, Ekpo claimed, inter alia, that Africa’s visual creative exploits of the twentieth century, celebrated as the vanguard of what Chika Okeke-Agulu (2015) denotes as “Post-colonial modernism,” were no more than a “copycat” and “sham” modernism. Additionally, and perhaps most provokingly, Ekpo argued that discourses on Africa’s creativity were beset with too much talk about decolonization and the need to Africanize. According to Ekpo, the cure for this Afro-mania is to de-Africanize the African mind. After his keynote address, which left me visibly disturbed, I floated the idea to Ekpo that his pronouncements need to be cataloged in a manuscript that reopens the debate about Africa’s artistic legacies, and how they have been rationalized and historicized. And so this book was conceived. Its title emanated from what was probably the most perceptive statement Ekpo uttered in his opening address, the imperative to de-Africanize African art. Chapters 1 and 2 of this edited volume are expanded versions of Ekpo’s provocative SAVAH conference presentation. Leading up to and post the 2017 SAVAH conference, several critical positions to Ekpo’s ideas by South African-based scholars have surfaced. Our hope is that these introductory essays looking into Ekpo’s call for the de-Africanization of African art through the adoption of what he terms Post-African aesthetics, will garner discursive dialogues and responses, be they complimentary, ambivalent, or divergent to the logic of Post-Africanism. This collection of solicited essays, anchored by Ekpo’s own manifesto for a PostAfrican art (Chapter 2), seek to unsettle the normative discourses about Africa’s historical, contemporary, and forthcoming creative heritage. It has been more than two decades since the first Post-Africanism essay (Ekpo 1995). Since then, outside of Ekpo’s own expansion of the Post-Africanism theorem, there has been limited deep scholarly engagement and critique of

x Preface

Post-Africanism, especially by African intellectuals both on the continent and across the diaspora. On the one hand, this dearth of academic rebuttal to Post-Africanism is alarming, given the seriousness of Ekpo’s claims and how incredulous his ideas are to the prevailing academic clichés of Afrocentricism, postcolonialism, decolonial aesthetics, and the like. Yet, on the other hand, it is extremely taxing to wrestle with and intellectually discredit Post-Africanism because of the hard evidence that seems to support Ekpo’s bold claims. The knee-jerk reaction of most African scholars who are not agreeable with Ekpo’s ideas is to reject and dismiss Post-Africanism as a blasphemous ideology that has no place in an Africa battling against the centuries-old demons of exploitation, colonization, and their after effects. These disavowals are at the core of this book, for we seek to evoke further discourses on Post-Africanism, no matter how difficult the task may be. The work of intellectualizing Africa’s historical and current cultural malaise is, both in practical and in scholarly terms, a demanding vocation. While there have been notable attempts to create a space where open, honest, and difficult dialogue can take place about Africa’s destiny, especially on the cultural front, rarely do these conversations include self-reflexivity wherein Africans question the pitfalls and drawbacks of advancing Africanity. In January 2019, I was a participant in a seminal workshop coordinated and sponsored by the Consortium of Humanities Centres and Institutes (CHCI) that sought to enable Africans to convene these hard talks. Hosted by the Addis Ababa University, in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, this defining symposium brought together emerging and early-career researchers from across the continent to deliberate on the prospects and possibilities of the humanities in Africa, and beyond. Throughout the three weeks we were serenaded by intellectual luminaries like, inter alia, Simon Gikandi, James Ogude, and Rosi Braidotti, whose various talks grappled with what the theme of the gathering had captured so lucidly, “Africa as Concept and Method: Decolonization, Emancipation, Freedom.” However, the session that remains vivid in my memory was the two-day seminar coordinated by Gikandi titled “After Fanon: Decolonization and African Knowledge.” At the core of Gikandi’s immersive and careful rereading of Frantz Fanon’s writings was the imperative to, as Gikandi put it, “explore the possibilities and limits of the discourse of decolonization.” Gikandi reminded us that part of the reason why the work of decolonization had not fully matured throughout Africa, and indeed the entire world, over the past six decades was because the initiators of decolonization politics and rhetoric during the mid-twentieth century such as Leopold Senghor and Aimé Césaire desired not to fully detach Africa from the clutches of their French colonialists, in the case of Senegal and Martinique, but rather sought a democratic and egalitarian inclusion of Africa into the metropole. This original sin, Gikandi argued, was the reason why Africa had been unable to fully achieve conceptual and material decolonization. Of specific interest here is the almost banal and slightly rhetorical question I asked Gikandi after his opening soliloquy wherein he made the indisputable case that colonization and empire are the constant in

Preface  xi

almost every inch of the modern world where ethnic tensions and civil wars persist. Accepting that colonization and imperialism are the causes for much of the world’s problems, I asked, ‘Is decolonization possible?’ With his mesmeric smile, Gikandi responded through the age-old sleight-of-hand deflection, stating that the very purpose of the workshop was to answer such interrogations. I am cognizant of the amazing and century-old repository of scholarship, generated for and by people who were Otherized, which has engaged with this and related questions around decolonization. For example, the tidings of South American sages like Walter Mignolo have provided ‘how to’ guides that nudge the world closer to the promise of decoloniality. Mignolo’s (2009, 2) assertion that reusing monikers such as modernity and postmodernity to explain global creative phenomena unduly centers Western epistemologies as the basis of understanding world history is well taken. While I am sympathetic to the merits of the intellectual positions adopted by Mignolo and Gikandi, among many more celebrated pundits of decolonization, neither have crystallized the solution to the dilemma confronted by formerly and neocolonized peoples as clearly and perceptively as Ekpo and his idea of Post-Africanism. I first learned of Post-Africanism in 2011, after my then colleague at the University of South Africa, Bernadette van Haute (2011), presented a paper titled “Post-Africanism and Contemporary Art in South African Townships” at the yearly SAVAH conference convened at the University of Witwatersrand. Like any other Black person who encounters Post-African thinking for the first time, I was shaken and disturbed by Ekpo’s arguments. To hear a Black African say the things Ekpo had the strength and conviction to utter was both unsettling and transformational. The clarity and directness of Ekpo’s arguments caught me off guard. But equally, Post-Africanism codified and theorized the private thoughts and suspicions I had harbored regarding the state of affairs in Africa, where the continent had failed, spectacularly, to engineer the kind of living standards that every modern human deserves. Post-Africanism seemed to provide the answers to my unease with the messiness of what it meant to be an African in the twenty-first century, an uneasiness that Fayiso Liyang Stevens (2011, 19) captured so eloquently in the opening chapter of his daringly titled book, The African Philosophy of Self-Destruction: “If a Black man does exist, why is he constantly in a state of pandemonium, molestation, disease and backwardness? Can a Black man, or any man for that matter, exist for so long and seem to be doing nothing about his problems?” Post-Africanism clarified this angst through the radical and yet simple solutions it proposes for dealing with the troubles that Africans face. In the main, Post-Africanism posits that instead of looking inwardly for the answers to Africa’s challenges, Africans must synthesize the best of what the rest has to offer in terms of ideas and winning formulae, and pragmatically assimilate those modalities without fear or favor of any philosophical or cultural maxim, both African and Other, to make modernity work for Africa. To this end, Ekpo is unapologetic in his criticism of African-orientated thought systems and cultural practices that continue to relegate Africans to the bottom billion.

xii Preface

In his acclaimed Wealth, Poverty and Politics, Thomas Sowell (2017, 5) implores Africans to guard against “politically convenient or emotionally satisfying” readings of history that blame others, namely Europe, for Africa’s poverty and continued suffering. For Sowell (2017, 2), it is expedient for poorer nations to study the causes of prosperity, rather than find culpability for poverty, because, as he puts it, “[t]here is nothing automatic about prosperity. Standards of living that we take for granted today have been achieved only within a very minute fraction of the history of the human race.” While the obvious and expected criticism of Sowell’s statement will be that Europe and its wealthy nations profited and advanced due to the exploitation and enslavement of others, such responses unfortunately fail to alleviate the poverty and distress experienced by millions of Africans every day. However, in Ekpo’s calculation, Africanist ideals and developmental programs founded on those ideals have been deficient in their attempt to create better standards of living for the African, especially in the areas of healthcare, education, infrastructure, and culture. For Ekpo, cultural practitioners can be the cure to the harmful overexposure of Afrocentric and pan-African idealism which are etched in the hearts and minds of African leaders and policymakers entrusted with realizing a renewed Africa. This introductory volume is rooted in Ekpo’s deep concerns regarding the perpetual resurgence and recycling of images produced by contemporary African artists driven by anti-colonial, pan-Africanist, postcolonial, and Afrocentric impulses. This modern and contemporary African art has resulted in a creative bubble that unwittingly and regrettably fails to inspire the emergence of a rehabilitated Africa that has conquered disease, hunger, and underdevelopment. In his sweeping Philosophy of Fine Art first published in 1885, G.W.F. Hegel (1920, 356) posited that “[e]very work of art is in fact a direct appeal to the intelligence of everyone who confronts it” (my emphasis). Thus, it is inevitable that most, if not all, art will in some way tickle the intellectual convictions of its viewer. Accepting this logic, Post-Africanism contends that much of the art created by African artists who are inspired by theoretical prisms such as postcolonialism, Afrocentricism, and pan-Africanism have induced and continue to induce intellectual responses among their African audiences that unintendedly perpetuate the very precarious order they are representing. According to Ekpo, the Post-African artist must take advantage of the artwork’s communicative power to reimagine Africa and preside as the high priests of imagining and imaging alternate tomorrows where Africa is redeemed from poverty and deprivation. We are well aware of the reality that, as John Iliffe (1995, 4) professes, “[s]uffering has been a central part of African experience, whether it arose from the harsh struggle with nature or the cruelty of men.” African artists have been inextricably linked with this suffering and overwhelmingly use it as stimulant in their creative endeavors. It is fairly easy to locate the response patterns to this heritage of suffering in the works of contemporary African artists, because they are the dominant tropes. But as Sarah Longair (2013, 127) decoded in her analysis of the creativity emanating from South African cultural workers,

Preface  xiii

“[c]riticism of past horrors and inequalities is much simpler than confronting the challenges of the post-Apartheid era.” Sadly, a vast majority of African artists are trapped in the ‘simpler’ and perennial act of capturing the past and current trauma of Africanity. Although some artists have become adept at glamorizing Africanity by producing fantastical and futurist Afrotropes – to borrow from Huey Copeland and Krista Thompson (2017) – their depictions remain steeped in displaying the horror and trauma of being Otherized. This almost automatic and pre-set activist duty has become an inescapable noose that seems to funnel all the artistic energies of Africans toward a default end, that of exploring and expressing themes related to Africa’s pandemonium, molestation, and sometimes inhumane state of being. Although such acts of creative expression are to a large degree necessary and unavoidable, Windsor Leroke (2006, 106) is critical of this “reductionist” ethos which entices and sometimes blackmails African artists to concern themselves continually with the dire condition of the African. For Leroke (2006, 104), “[i]t is the political elite who demand that art in Africa must have a function and that its function must be to advance political transformation.” In other words, contemporary African art is often co-opted by Africa’s political establishment to advance their dictatorial and power-hoarding tendencies. To this end, African art is suspended between the poles of Africanism – the unceasing desire to rediscover a lost Africanity – and contemporary African politics, where artists are incentivized to reproduce images of slavery, colonization, Apartheid, segregation, and struggle, where historical and present-day Black pain is aestheticized into a cultural fetish that helps keep dictatorial and corrupt African governments intact. In light of the current global awakening in race relations consciousness, how dare we, as African scholars, advance the de-Africanization of African art? Besides the incitement implicit in this title, it is in fact a counter-punch to the en vogue Afrocentricism, decolonization, and pan-Africanization calls that have regathered momentum in recent years. These ideologies have purposefully promoted the re-Africanization of creativity emanating from the continent. These demands, which were for the most part contingent on the #decolonize and #RhodesMustFall university student protest movements in South Africa, are so loud that anyone, especially those identified as African, who utters sentences that do not reinforce or advance the Africanist worldview are tagged as culturally rootless bandits serving the interests of a capitalist global order bent on the continued exploitation of Africa. To evoke a reference from political science, the Overton Window within Africa’s creative climate has shifted so far to the left, that is, to the ultra-Afrocentric and Africanist end, that any voices, like the Post-Africanists in this instance, located around the center of the ideological spectrum are branded as alt-right, pro-West, pro-Whiteness, anti-Blackness, self-hating Afropessimist sellouts. The opposite is true. Post-Africanism is decidedly pro-Africa and proBlack. If Post-Africanism is pro-Africa, then there is an ironic case to be made that Post-Africanism’s aporia toward the overexposure of Africanism

xiv Preface

in African art, or rather Post-Africanism’s desire to save African art from Afrocentrism renders Post-Africanism a discourse of Africanity. There is no denying that Ekpo’s dream to generate alternate stories about Africa’s pasts, presents, and tomorrows is predicated on a deep love and sense of responsibility toward the continent. If indeed it is agreeable to consider Post-Africanism as a discourse of Africanity, then we must accept that what Post-Africanism hopes to achieve is to wipe the slate clean and wash the African mind of existing conceptual and material networks that continue to manacle Africa and its creative economy. In other words, the version of Africanity propagated by Post-Africanism is de-traditionalized, unhinged, remodeled, and glistening with possibility. As argued throughout these chapters, Post-Africanism seeks to advance a creative and intellectual climate where art facilitates the humanist project in Africa. To critique Africanism and advocate for a de-Africanized African art is not a denial of the validity of the African experience. As Post-African apologists we are wary of the White voices – both liberal sympathizers and unrepentant supremacists – who jump with excitement when reading or listening to Post-African reason. We are alert to how the Post-African message seems to soothe the White conscience, by lessening their sense of historical culpability and guilt for the horrors committed by their forebears against the dark skinned peoples of the world. Unsurprisingly, within a South African context, the earliest favorable mentions of Post-Africanism were by white scholars who were interested in the dynamics of the post-Apartheid moment in South Africa – see de Kock (1995) and Bundey (1998). South Africa’s affinity to the tenor of Post-Africanism is expected. As home to the largest White population in Africa, South Africa’s socioeconomic character makes it the ideal breeding ground for Post-Africanist thought because of Ekpo’s heavy-handed critique of Africanity. In other words, people of European descent who reside in Africa are agreeable to claims such as those projected by Ekpo – that too much Afrocentricity has failed to achieve the lofty ideals for which it was birthed. While Post-Africanism is a discourse for Africans of all races, to all those White supremacists who enjoy the grammar it adopts, we say, woe to you. At its core, Post-Africanism is, to use the title of Ekpo’s (2004) first book, “neither anti-imperialism nor the White man’s tears.” Post-African is neither for nor against the West. It is what Ekpo terms supra-Westernization, because it transcends the fallacy of European and Western exceptionalism. As Ekpo (1995, 134) wrote in his very first epistle on Post-Africanism: The Post-Africanist mind can retrieve all its power and creative potentials by repossessing himself of the Western Logos and using it as a power tool rather than being possessed and bewitched by it and forced into either a romantic search for an impossible Afrocentricity or the depressive rhetoric of perpetual accusation of the West.

Preface  xv

Elsewhere Ekpo (2004, 7) further notes regarding Africa’s relationship with Europe: Europe’s casual imperial transit into a continent like Africa, no matter how perverse some of its delayed consequences may seem, should not serve as the permanent excuse for getting so shamelessly petrified in a complicated oedipal love-hate fixation on the West. Nor should it serve as the ground for our continuing to think that the West still owes us the responsibility to co-carry the burden of our development. Post-Africanism is unconcerned with appeasing Whiteness. In fact, it seeks to compromise its unjustified dominance in Africa and the world at large, by unshackling the African mind in ways that will eventually disrupt White privilege and perceived White excellence, especially in settler colonial societies like South Africa. Post-Africanism does not advocate for the adoption of Western standards, but rather humanitarian and planetary ideals, which transcend the West. As Frantz Fanon famously concluded in The Wretched of the Earth (1963, 313), “(l)et us decide not to imitate Europe; let us combine our muscles and our brains in a new direction. Let us try to create the whole man, whom Europe has been incapable of bringing to triumphant birth.” According to Post-Africanism, the primary concern of the African cultural critic and scholar should be to locate and appraise works done by African artists who go against the current stasis of Afrocentricity by creating bold, dynamic, and progress-prone representations of the African experience, both figuratively and abstractly. The quintessential Post-African artists are those artists who, through their art, have been able to articulate and turn the dream of modernization for the African into a creative reality. Following the logic of classical pragmatism, a branch of philosophy which “pivots on the functional efficacy of means to given ends” (Rescher 2012, 239), the inherent presupposition of Post-Africanism is that art in Africa can only be qualified as being ‘great’ on the basis that it performs its functional pre-determination to launch a new Africa. A de-Africanized art in Africa must provide alternative visual narratives that empower Africans to take on the baton of modernization from Asia, who showed us the way during the latter half of the twentieth century, so that the twenty-first century can truly live up to its billing of being the century for Africa. I must stress that despite the South African heavy references in most of the chapters, the arguments the authors postulate are multi-African in their framing and implications. An unplanned but important constant that runs through the list of contributors is the fact that each of them has a very intimate and longstanding connection to Ekpo and his ideas. Therefore, and by several measures, these authors are well placed to act as the first respondents to this bold declaration for a de-Africanized Post-African aesthetics. If Africa was indeed an ontological invention by external forces, as Valentin Mudimbe (1988) declared, then what could a Post-African Africa look like? As

xvi Preface

Ekpo argues in Chapter 2, de-Africanized African aesthetics create the space for Africans to articulate a planetary aesthetics, which is not chained by notions of Africanness or Nigrescence. In Chapter 3, I explore how the New African Movement in South Africa and the artists it inspired during the early twentieth century attempted to create a neo-Africa through the modalities that were available to them at the time. In their attempt to articulate a planetary African, the New African artists and intellectuals were limited by the worldviews, systems, and creative conventions that were already dominant in Africa. The existing modalities, techniques, and styles were the raw materials the artists took into their hands to produce inspired images of proto-Post-African identities. Regrettably, the work of the New Africans was stifled by the racist proclivities of successive White governments that sought to disrupt the progress and prosperity of Black people in South Africa and Africa generally. In Chapter 4, Chielozona Eze provides a nuanced reading of the stories Africans tell about themselves through literature and the novel, and how these seemingly harmless and esoteric creative gestures become defining frameworks of Africanness. In an analysis of key African writers, Eze shows how the narratives of resistance produced since the dawn of colonization have produced Africa as a discursive and abstract entity. For Eze, the continued abstraction of Africa does little to create the openness of being that is necessary for the continent to transcend decolonization rhetoric. Eze appropriates the notion of Afropolitanism as a redemptive African label that, in the Post-Africanist spirit, enables openness and an attachment to the world. In Chapter 5, Runette Kruger appraises the potentiality of Post-Africanism as a fluid philosophy that promotes alterity and difference. Acknowledging her positionality as a White female, but gender-neutral, middle-class academic, Kruger appraises how Post-Africanism creates discursive and political space for nonbinary discourses and activist practices for those who are invested in Africa’s advancement, regardless of their color, creed, or locatedness in the world. However, Kruger is also critical of Post-Africanism’s overreliance on antiquated European Enlightenment philosophers – especially Hegel and Nietzsche – as the “soil” upon which to build a de-totalized conception of being African in our complex age. Kruger further questions the harshness of Ekpo’s chastening of Africanist impulses, which renders Post-Africanism a form of Afro-pessimism. As a side note, I too often find myself gasping for air when reading some of Ekpo’s pronouncements on why Africa has failed to come good on its potential. However, knowing the daily battles Ekpo has had to endure, most of which could have been alleviated had the region he resides in adopted global best practice in the fields of health and governance, for example, I tend to appreciate why his tone is extreme, and at times violent toward Afrocentricity. Unlike many of the generational talents in the field of thought who come from Africa but pragmatically relocate to the grand academies in Europe and America, Ekpo has lived on the continent (Nigeria to be specific) his entire adult life. His geographical rootedness within Africa has been the fuel that powers his uncensored rhetoric against Afrocentricity. Finally, in

Preface  xvii

Chapter 6, Thabang Monoa explicates the prevalence of Afrophilia in the most popular telenovelas in South Africa, namely, Generations and Isibaya. These storied and award-winning television series, which hold millions of South African households as captive audiences on an almost nightly basis, are replete with images and narratives that celebrate African Juju enchantments and folkloric mysticism. Monoa peels open the potentially harmful effects that lie beneath the veneer of these well-choreographed Hollywood-like images of zombies and magical manifestations. A thread that runs through all the chapters is how artists and writers can only develop this yet unrealized de-Africanized African art through the tools which their societies accord to them, tools that came to Africa initially via the colonial contact with Europe, and more recently through rapid globalization. Thus, the adoption and appropriation of Western and increasingly Asian creative strategies as a way for visioning a new Africa has unfortunately been misread as the ostensible Westernization/Europeanization or Asianization of African artists. While there might be aspects that appropriate and mimic global aesthetic cultures within a de-Africanized African aesthetics, it is a case of these styles been fatefully and intrinsically planetary, rather than a direct copying of European or Asian ultramodernity by Africans. I do not use the word ‘planetary’ lightly here.While there have been attempts to water down the inclusion of previously Otherized peoples into global systems of thought, politics, culture, and most crucially economics, by punting relativism as the answer to humanity’s challenges, we Post-Africanists will not be duped into believing that the almost copyrighted African brand of suffering and trauma endured by millions throughout the continent is our patent. Post-Africanism does not accept that relativism is the gateway for Africa into the planetary club, for this approach fools Africans to continue to embrace and celebrate the continent’s general underperformance in the areas of social welfare, governance, industry, science, and the creative industries. When it comes to art, which is the subject of this book, I agree with Stephen Eisenman (2011) that notions of cultural relativism have been the “original sin” that have stymied the emergence of a truly global art history. Eisenman (2011, 285) explains that the danger with the relativist logic, which “asserts that every culture is logical and complete within itself,” is that it “disallows critical discrimination.” More alarmingly, he concludes: “And if the relativist gaze suspends evaluation of others, it must also halt evaluation and criticism of one’s own culture and history.” Regrettably, Afrocentricity has thrown African creativity into this relativism quicksand, and it is the aim of Post-Africanism to yank African art from this predicament. The few but erudite chapters in this introductory engagement with Post-African aesthetics are a much-needed critical reevaluation of African art by African scholars who are invested in the historical, contemporary, and future cultural health of the continent. The book does not provide a blueprint of how Post-African art ought to be, rather, it is our contention that if iconography of a de-Africanized Africa does not yet exist, the least we can do is attempt to articulate what it is not.

xviii Preface

References Budney, J. 1998. “Who’s It for?” Third Text 12(42):88–94. doi:10.1080/09528829808576723 Copeland, H., and K. Thompson. 2017. “Afrotropes: A User’s Guide.” Art Journal 76(3– 4):7–9. doi:10.1080/00043249.2017.1412741 de Kock, L. 1995. “The Ruptures of the Particular: Against Generalised Critiques of Generalised Cultural Relativism.” Journal of Literary Studies 11(3–4):43–47. doi:10.1080/02564719508530113 Eisenman, S. F. 2011. “Three Criteria for Inclusion in, or Exclusion from a World History of Art.” World Art 1(2):281–298. doi:10.1080/21500894.2011.603738 Ekpo, D. 1995. “Towards a Post-Africanism: Contemporary African Thoughts and Postmodernism.” Textual Practice 9:121–135. Ekpo, D. 2004. Neither Anti-Imperialism nor the White Man’s Tears: An Anti-Postcolonial Discourse. Ikot Ekpene: Iwoh & Sons. Fanon, F. 1963. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Press. Hegel, W. G. F. 1920. The Philosophy of Fine Art. London: G. Bell and Sons. Iliffe, J. 1995. Africans: The History of a Continent. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Leroke, W. 2006. “Autrui Tragedy as the Aesthetic in Dumile’s Art.” In Dumile Feni Retrospective, edited by P. M. Dube, 103–111. Johannesburg: Johannesburg Art Gallery. Longair, S. 2013. “Unlocking the Doors of Number Four Prison: Curating the Violent Past in Contemporary South Africa.” In Art and Trauma in Africa: Representations of Reconciliation in Music, Visual Arts, Literature and Film, edited by L. Bisschoff and S. van de Peer, 110–130. London: I.B. Tauris. Mignolo, W. D. 2009. “Epistemic Disobedience, Independent Thought and Decolonial Freedom.” Theory, Culture and Society 26(7):1–23. Mudimbe, V. Y. 1988. The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge. London: James Currey. Okeke-Agulu, C. 2015. Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria. Durham: Duke University Press. Rescher, N. 2012. Pragmatism: The Restoration of Its Scientific Roots. New Jersey: Transaction Publishing. Sowell, T. 2017. Wealth, Poverty and Politics. Benin City: Beulahland Publications. Stevens, F. L. 2011. The African Philosophy of Self-Destruction. Cape Town: 3dP New Media. van Haute, B. 2011. “Post-Africanism and Contemporary Art in South African Townships.” Paper presented at the Annual South African Visual Art Historians Conference, South Africa, University of Witwatersrand, 12–15 January.

1

Africa Mis-traveling to Modernity From Modern African Art to African Modernism Denis Ekpo

What prompted these reflections on the fate of African art was an experience I had in 2012 during an international workshop organized by German Scholars Kerstin Pinther and Larissa Forster in Bamako, Mali.1 In the afternoon of the second day the group had visited the Musée National du Mali. In front of the main building was this untitled sculptural installation by the Benin artist Dominique Zinkpè: a ramshackle old mini-bus with sculpted passengers inside, its body painted in many colors (see Figure 1.1). The top of it is overladen with a huge assortment of goods. Both the driver and the passengers appear dazed and in a state of stupor. The wheels of the old vehicle are punctured and stuck in the mud. Immobilized, the wrecked old bus appears to be going nowhere, weighed down as it were by the sheer weight of its incongruous loads and probably by the nonfunctioning state of its engine. Everybody in the group was struck by the baroque beauty of this monstrous contraption. The director of the museum confirmed that though Malians generally do not appreciate what he calls contemporary art that much, this one was an exception. Every visitor wants to pose for a photograph beside it. Most of our group including me took photographs of it. However, what made this work particularly intriguing and revealing to me was the surprising coincidence of its relevance to the paper I had presented earlier that day titled “Art and the defeat of modernity in Africa.” The kernel of that paper was to show how modern African art, powered mostly by the anti-colonial ideologies of cultural nationalism and Afrocentrism, has been largely complicit in the subversion of the modernity project in Africa. Standing in front of this imposing hybridized piece of African contemporary art, my mind quickly raced to my hobbyhorse, namely, the illfated state of Africa in modernity and I half-jokingly told a colleague beside me, “Ah! This is Africa travelling to modernity!” We both laughed at the odd connection but within me I was serious. What I saw before me was nothing less than an allegory of Africa’s heavily troubled, if not totally aborted, journey from its old tribal self to modernity. Every aspect of that baroque iron carcass stuck in the mud and going no way despite its endless motions evoked the many layers of Africa’s shackled journey to a higher state of being. The heavy load of ill-assorted goods that weighed down the vehicle and stalled its movement recalled the state of the hybridized postcolonial mind and of African

2  Denis Ekpo

Figure 1.1 Dominique Zinkpè, Untitled, undated. Sculptural installation. Collection of the National Museum of Mali. © Dominique Zinkpè. Photograph: Denis Ekpo. Reproduced with permission.

lifeworld overburdened with incongruous worldviews, incompatible stages of consciousness, and conflicting values running riot as they ceaselessly bump into each other, contaminating each other and stalling every effort at working out an orderly evolutionary rationality toward the modern form of life. Thus the immobilized vehicle spoke to the sick, disorderly and chaotic stasis of Africa’s postcolonial culture. Every step forward in the journey to development and peace sees Africa crashing down into violence and conflicts under the sheer weight and incongruity of multi-tribal/cross-cultural loads. Africa, like that iron scrap of a bus, mostly always looks stranded in the middle of nowhere regardless of all energies expended. She is like a whale, driven out from the waters, lying in the sandy shores of modernity, as incapable of swimming into the mainstream of global economic prosperity as she is of returning fully to her prior native swamps. This sickly hybridized beast, immobilized between tradition and modernity and bungling every step it takes, is what Zinkpè’s art work allegorized in my mind. In my effort to understand how Africa came to this pass, I realized that art had not only a foundational meta-cultural role to play but that it is still generally playing that role. The dazed and stupefied passengers of Zinkpè’s bus in that ill-fated non-journey are most likely stuck in the mud of a new and

Africa Mis-traveling to Modernity  3

reinforced sense of their Africanness. Art played a crucial role in birthing and normalizing this invented sense of a changeless Africanness. Remembering my previous as well as ongoing work on the imperative of questioning the value of our near-sacred Africanity myth, it occurred to me that perhaps the best place to start a Post-African cultural revolution was African art. Given that Post-Africanism is mostly about revaluating the highest values of the African ideology and that art is closely tied to the earliest construction of Africanism, I thought of a Post-African manifesto around the art, culture and aesthetic practices of Africa. The following are my reflections on the possibility of a PostAfrican art and aesthetic theory. But to build up the case for a post-African art, I will begin by reconstructing what I call the Afrophiliac discourse and ground of Africa’s aesthetic-ideological consciousness and practice.

Art and the Birth of Afrophilia It is not an exaggeration to describe the first stirrings of Africa’s modernity consciousness – Africa’s rude awakening via the colonial canon shot to what G.W.F. Hegel termed ‘world history’ – as an essentially aesthetic phenomenon. The reason is that the vocabulary, the mood and foundational codes of our moral and political responses to colonialism were imagined and created mostly by the pioneer artists. We recall that on the morrow of the first canon shot that had aroused the tribes from their prolonged ethnological slumber, the elders had headed for the oracles to demand to know what had befallen them. The oracles were of little use before so mighty and uncanny a force from nowhere. Then appeared the first colonially acculturated poets and storytellers who claimed they knew what exactly had happened. Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart suggested that it was a civilizational apocalypse signaling the annulment of Africa’s ancient tribal civilizations; another, David Diop’s “Africa My Africa,” depicted it as totally unjust invasion by alien vultures and immediately intoned a hymn of heroic resistance. Before them an intrepid neo-griot named Léopold Sédar Senghor, standing amidst the ruins of the fallen tribal kingdoms and flattened sacred forests, saw nothing but an essentially beautiful, soulful, and eternal Africa lying beyond the reach of the enemy’s racist tongue and Maxim’s gun. He symbolized this eternally beautiful, strong, and indestructible essence of Mother Africa in a poem titled “African Woman.” With these foundational and pace-setting imageries, searing formulas, soul-stirring narratives and daring novelties of voice, the artist – at first essentially the poet and the novelist – was the first to be able to drastically temper the brutality and uncanniness of colonial conquest and to tame its perplexing strangeness by putting some meanings around its many bewildering doings and sayings. Then drawing emotional and aesthetic inspiration from the poet’s trailblazing stories and images, the first visual artists emerged to materialize the poet’s counter-colonial nativist exuberance in more visually sensuous forms. Such pioneers as Ernest Mancoba (1904–2002) in South Africa, Aina Onabolu (1882–1963) and Ben Enwonwu (1917–1994) from Nigeria, and a host of others followed closely

4  Denis Ekpo

on the poets’ trail to counter in paint, sculpture, and drama the all-negative colonial single story of Africa. Thus impelled by the anti-colonialist/culturalnationalist fire first lit by the poets, many of the acculturated artists went back with a vengeance to rediscover and reconstruct in wood, stone, or on canvas, Africa’s colonially disqualified ancient pagan shrines, archaic ancestral groves and other iconic visual memorials to an eternal Africa that continues to defy the colonially driven falling apart of things. Thus Ben Enwonwu’s iconic sculpture and attendant painting appropriately titled Negritude (1957), a visual materialization and confirmation of Senghor’s Afrophiliac poem “African Woman” became paradigmatic of the integrated anti-colonialist and cultural-nationalist mission and vision of all the art forms that emerged at the epochal threshold of Africa’s awakening to world history. Most notable here is that as Africa suddenly found itself at the colonial gate to world history, it was art that first came to Africa’s rescue. With poems, stories, sculpture, painting, performance, drama, and music, Africa was not only able to pull itself back from frightful bewilderment occasioned by the colonial apparition but to pick its way back through the forest of strange happenings and situations, to some measure of emotional self-reassurance as well as cognitive control. By providing Africa the first images, symbols, and motives for its post-conquest self-reassurance, art furnished the basic orientation and shape of Africa’s modern self-consciousness, the basic orientation of Africa’s cultural and political sense of modernity. In other words, art or the aesthetic-affective attitude was called upon to play a fateful meta-cultural role in pioneering how Africa was to feel, what she was to do and how she was going to handle the colonial intrusion of modernity into Africa. However, in some narratives it is often said that art entered the scene as a handmaid to the nascent anti-colonial movement of cultural and political nationalism. But from a certain genealogical viewpoint, it is plausible to say that it was art that made cultural nationalism possible and effective; it was the condition of possibility of the ideological and cultural resistance movements that came to coagulate under the umbrella term of Africanism. Art shaped the imagination of the acculturated elite by supplying the trigger images that gave the theories of negritude or African personality emotional foundation and political efficacy. It was the exuberantly affirmative Afrophilia of Senghor’s “African Woman,” the acutely wounded nostalgia of Diop’s “Africa My Africa”, and the wailing Weltschmerz of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart, not forgetting the negritudian sculptures and paintings of the first visual artists, that fired the imagination of the cultural nationalists and armed their anti-colonialist hands. The gory picture of Okonkwo’s dead body dangling from a tree, after he had killed the colonial messenger without any backup from the community, was a more potent trigger of anti-colonialist anger and cultural nationalist resistance than Fanon’s anti-colonial theories or Senghor’s ontology of Africanness. My point is that African ideology did not create African art; rather it fed on art’s powerful motifs and imageries in order to constitute itself. It is in this sense that one can easily talk of the primacy of art over ideology in shaping for good and

Africa Mis-traveling to Modernity  5

bad, the structure and orientation of our current Afrocentric and essentially anti-colonialist consciousness of modernity. It is also necessary to note here that at the inception of this African modernity consciousness, there was virtually no significant distinction in the agenda-setting role between the visual and literary arts, apart from the fact that the poets in some places preceded the sculptor or painter by creating the primal aesthetic images that awakened and fired the latter’s visual imagination and hands. Both, in reality, drank from the same pool of trigger images in their determination to give form and potency to Africa’s aesthetic-cultural awakening to modernity. In other words, far from competing with each other, both were and still generally remain, two forms of the same aesthetic-political quest to tame the arrogance and uncanniness of colonization and to give Africa a new cultural/political platform to confront colonization and define itself against the encroaching modernity. I have postulated that art made cultural nationalism possible, however, once these movements especially negritude, African personality, African authenticity, etc., became full-fledged ideological formations and practices of the African way, they seemed to have suppressed traces of their aesthetic origins and rather turned art into a subservient tool. That is, African art after midwifing the birth of the African ideology became a handmaid to the latter. In the spirit of cultural nationalism, anti-colonialism and the back-to-the-roots reaction that took possession of Africa especially in the heyday of anti-colonial nationalist struggles, art, theatre, dance, music, painting, cinema, etc., became mobilized in the service of the African cause and seemed to have justified its existence primarily on this basis. In those early days of militant Africanism, art was essentially about showcasing the Africanness of Africa; it was a vast and endless curating of the wonders and splendors of original Africa with a view to proving Western colonialism wrong on the one hand, and reassuring us of the validity and beauty of African native civilization, on the other hand. Art became an anti-colonial weapon of war aimed at denouncing the arrogance and pretensions of colonial Europe that had dared badmouth a civilization blessed with such an abundance of native splendors. Art was not so much about creating but confirming, rediscovering, celebrating, and showing off Africanity. Thus art became infinite self-celebration and self-confirmation. Creativity, imaginative novelty became secondary because it was a matter of making explicit and radiant again or revalorizing what was already there or what had been disfigured or partially expunged by colonial vandalism. In Ngugi’s terms, art was a matter of remembering what had been dismembered by the colonial cultural bomb. The visual and performance arts became in cultural nationalist Africa, not really what a creator had concocted from the inner riches of his imagination to add beauty to the familiar world or to shock and defamiliarize the world around him, but whatever hitherto hidden and misrecognized layer of Africanness had to be brought to light and celebrated. Looking back from our postcolonial standpoint, early modern art comes across mostly as infinite rehearsals of Africanness. But what was this artistic Africanism all about? How did it petrify Africa in an essential Afrophilia? What

6  Denis Ekpo

kind of Africa were the anti-colonial artists bent on celebrating and showcasing? One of the unspoken outcomes of the early political instrumentalization of art – mobilizing art in the service of cultural nationalism and anti-colonialism – was that early modern art in Africa led the way in luring Africa away from the colonial path of cultural change and worldview conversion into a rigid state of Afrophilia. Afrophilia, an ideologically intensified sense of Africanness, as the ultimate ontological horizon in which we Africans live, move, and have our being, is a compound of narcissistic nativism and anti-colonial paranoia. It expresses the complex of deep and wounded racial emotions and identity anxieties that sought to sublimate our intense hate of Europe’s racial arrogance, along with our impotent vengeance against it, into an excessive, overcompensatory love for Africa. It manifests mostly as an alarmist, panicky obsession with defending and upholding the newly constructed non-colonial image of Africa. It also comes across as a paranoid attentiveness to any action word or gesture considered a slight on Africa’s dignity and pride. It is a state in which we live our imagined Africanness, i.e., the abstract trans-tribal Africanity, as both a fixed essence and an ontologically settled principle of thought, feeling, action, reaction, and above all, creation. In other words, in Afrophilia, we claim to have discovered how Africa wants to be spoken about, loved, or hated; what choices, policies, and strategies best suit her specific essence, personality, or character. In a state of Afrophilia, we have recovered our African soul and are therefore very pleased with ourselves. African authenticity that African art celebrates and enacts is this Afrophiliac euphoric feeling of cultural self-satisfaction after the successful self-retrieval from the ordeal of colonial alienation. The trouble, however, is that in this mostly aesthetically reconstructed state of Afrophilia, what we love about Africa are mostly precisely those things that Europe had badmouthed and condemned as the very sources of Africa’s barbarity and non-evolution. These included the traditions, institutions, beliefs, and worldviews, which, though good enough for our ancestors, could no longer aid human flourishing and growth in the radically changed modern environment into which colonization had thrown us. Under the anti-colonialist spell of cultural nationalism, negritude poetry and arts had blackmailed Africa to re-embrace those very old beliefs and traditions that kept our ancestors stagnant, unprepared, uncompetitive, and therefore colonizable. But in massively returning to the roots, suddenly rendered maladaptive by the advent of world history, Africa, unknown to the cultural nationalists, was depriving herself of the world transformational power of creative destruction carried by the very disruptive power and chaos of the colonial intrusion. For in the aesthetically intensified state of Afrophilia, what was evolutionarily fated to disappear and give way has been kept safe; what was to change has remained not only unchanged, but protected from change; what should have adapted has remained malignantly unadapative and what would have been the forces of change and adaptation were maligned, discredited, and rejected as alien impositions. And so, in a state of cultural Afrophilia fostered and sustained by art, Africa cheated itself of the historic opportunity to avail itself of the external

Africa Mis-traveling to Modernity  7

stimulus of conquest to activate in itself the dormant evolutionary drive to change and progress through self-renewal. Afrophilia became something like a self-imposed bear hug choking the very life forces, the evolutionary impulses out of Africa, leaving her culturally a near-empty shell which art then fills up with its eternal recycling and refurbishing of the same old forms and contents. In Afrophilia, perpetual self-celebration and self-confirmation gives the illusion of recovered cultural dignity. Art especially at the performative level, by insisting on showcasing Africanity became not only the most contagious carrier and propagator of Afrophilia but also its greatest cultural Public Relations machinery. Its meta-political role was to launder the image of Africa’s precolonial past and its continuities in its present traditions.

The ‘Picasso Code’ and African Modernism In its Afrophiliac form, early modern art mostly came across as an open and explicit exaltation of Africa’s ancient tribal roots. Nothing was held back as the artist did all to reproduce and re-dignify in plain realist representations the arcana of the threatened but still fully enchanted traditional world. Art became the major cultural nationalist tool for rescuing the magic-mythic ancestral world from the attempted colonial disenchantment. However, this mostly anti-colonial phase of modern African art as a thinly aesthetically mediated cultural nationalism was soon to be supplanted by the sudden emergence of what is called African modernism. One notable and defining feature of African artistic modernism was that while still claiming to be rooted in African traditions and faithful to the cultural-nationalist/anti-colonialist goals of Afrophiliac art, it surprisingly showed up as a radical departure from and break with the core formal features and techniques of all hitherto known art forms in Africa, including traditional and early modern art. What is African modernism and how did it manage to take over and dominate, almost without transition, the whole spectrum of serious art in Africa? In this section, I will read one major strand of African artistic modernism against the grain by seeing it mainly as an artificially induced birth, i.e., a cultural evolutionary freak, which, though aesthetically triumphant, may have done more harm than good to art and culture in Africa. To further prepare the ground for a post-African argument against both early modern Afrophiliac art and African modernism, I want to reread the famous Picasso moment that is historically said to have provided the inspirational impetus as well as the structuring principles for the emergence and proliferation of African modernism. I have termed this crucial non-African genealogical force in African modernist art the ‘Picasso code.’ Every cultural historian repeatedly alludes to and takes pride in the historical conundrum that Africa gave Europe the key to one of its major modernist revolutions, namely, cubism. The story is well known of how Pablo Picasso, on seeing a Congolese mask was transfixed and went home to create Les demoiselles d’Avignon, the inaugural masterpiece of cubism. Generations of African cultural-nationalists

8  Denis Ekpo

and art historians have interpreted the story in a rather overcompensatory sense of Africa successfully reversing the colonial story: rather than Europe coming to draw Africa out of cultural darkness, it is Africa coming to save Europe from aesthetic-cultural atrophy. Chinua Achebe did not mince words on this when he referred to this episode as “Africa’s infusion of life into European art that had completely run out of strength” (quoted in Hyde 2016, 25). Similarly, the negritude poet Guy Tirolien (quoted in Hurley 2000) waxes rhapsodic over Picasso’s Afrophilia in a poem titled “Ghetto.” However the more crucial response was how the anti-colonialist/culturalnationalist generation went on to recuperate the Picasso story as a powerful, unexpected endorsement of African primitivism by the greatest artistic genius of colonial Europe. To the acculturated elite heavily troubled by the unprovoked denigration of traditional cultures, Picasso instantly became the miraculous European weapon not only in the war against cultural colonialism but mostly in the battle to return Africa to its original precolonial cultural authenticity. In order words, Picasso’s game-changing use of African primitive art was framed as a legitimating aesthetic-cultural act which enabled Africa to regain the good conscience of its primitivism and the elite their Afrophiliac self-confidence. However, in the heat of the euphoria over Picasso’s alleged endorsement and promotion of African primitivism, African artists and cultural historians did not seem to pay attention to Picasso’s later disdainful dismissal of and dissociation from primitivist African art. When questioned on the place of African art in his work, he famously replied: “L’art nègre! connais pas” (African art? I know no such thing) (quoted in Howlett 1951). Whether or not Picasso was telling the truth is of no interest here. What interests me is what African artists later made of the Picasso moment and how it revolutionized artistic consciousness and practice and what price modern art in Africa may have paid for coming to being clothed Picasso-like attires. As said earlier, the cultural-nationalist elite were only too eager and quick to log unto and reap from the Picasso episode, an enormous anthropological confidence-boosting as well as mostly aesthetic capital. Strange forms, styles and techniques lifted directly from cubism and related modernist experiments were enthusiastically appropriated and synthesized with or super imposed on contents, themes and motifs mined from the traditional world. The result was the emergence of what became African modernism as an aesthetic-cultural cross-breeding of African contents or motifs with European modernist formal procedures and styles. Overnight the mostly juju-centric traditional world with its shrines, masks, and other esoteric artifacts was no longer foregrounded in heavily realist and transparent representations but was submerged and de-realized, defamiliarized in Picasso-like cubist formal abstractions. No longer were art lovers in Africa treated to the usual mimetic reproductions of African cultures and traditions in paint, sculpture, and drawings [such as found in the early modern works of Ben Enwownu and Onabulu] but were suddenly swarmed by strange bizarre forms often looking more like monstrous childlike doodlings than artistic creations, such as but certainly not limited to the lino prints and

Africa Mis-traveling to Modernity  9

oil paintings by Rufus Ogundele, such as Oba Koso (1964) and Untitled (1983), respectively. People were at a loss about what had happened. Unknown to many, traditional norms of artistic creation and reception had undergone a genetic mutation. To be sure the artists themselves as well as the art historians reassured us that it was still African art in its cultural nationalist contents and goals; only that the traditional worldview background and features were no longer made radiant as before but had to be hidden away or sublimated in the deep forest of nonhuman, nonrealist symbols, shades of paints, and other inscrutable forms. So abrupt and pervasive was this leap-frogging of art into modernist abstractions and dehumanization that when Chinua Achebe asked Uche Okeke [one of the pioneers of modernism in Nigeria] why his students were no longer doing book illustrations, he replied “all my students want to be Picasso” (quoted in Hyde 2016, 35). What was this Picasso magic code that so enthralled the imagination of the early modern artists that without any warning or transition and without waiting for any corresponding cultural mutation, the practice of art in Africa leaped from realist aesthetic intelligence to a tortured and culturally unhoused and orphaned African modernism? Why did modernism take root and spread so fast across Africa?

The Latter-Day European Kurtzs Who Midwifed African Modernism Africa’s alleged originating power over Picasso’s cubism would have remained a minor and obscure detail of cultural-nationalist pride confined to the anticolonialist elite if a few marginal Kurtz-like figures, fleeing Europe’s postwar cultural pessimism, had not landed in Africa in the 1950s. While mostly engaged in other things, these people consisting of a few trained artists, opportunistic dealers, amateur anthropologists, and neo-primitivists became on the spot supervising midwives actively assisting or facilitating the birth of African modernism. The story is already known of how German born Uli Beier, Austrian Susan Wenger, and the British artist Georgina Beier set up between the 1950s’ and 1960s’ art workshops in selected cities in western Nigeria, such as Osogbo and Ibadan.2 In these workshops, mostly illiterate farmers, brick layers, carpenters, hunters, and street corner idlers were gathered together, given paint, brush or pencil and, without any instruction or guidance, were asked to paint or draw or sculpt. About the same time, Pancho Guede in Mozambique and Frank McEwen in Zimbabwe (formerly Rhodesia) and Pierre Lods in Republic of Congo (formerly Congo Brazzaville) were carrying out the same art workshops. Looking at the case of Nigeria, one discovers that the many odd things that happened inside the workshops in which artistic modernism took shape and form can be said to be paradigmatic of the emergence of African modernism as a whole. First we are told that almost all the candidates had no previous knowledge of art – they were mostly farmers, hunters, and curious village drifters. As most of the pioneers later confessed, “we did not know what we were doing and why” (quoted in Adenaike 1979, 205). Their method

10  Denis Ekpo

was not to teach but to inspire. In Zimbabwe, McEwen described his method as the “Blitzkrieg technique,” and Kennedy (1992, 70) notes that “he is not interested in getting his students to produce pretty pictures; their picture making is conceived as series of exercises, a kind of mental limbering up process that will enable them to create more freely later. He wants them to break out of old molds, to work spontaneously and to aim for authenticity of expression rather than beauty.” In other words, untaught, left to their native spontaneities, even the stark illiterates among them, we are told, created some of the most original works. The key “counter-pedagogical” tools emphasized here by the cubist teachers are immediacy, spontaneity, breaking out of molds, free play of the paint or pencil, etc. But such untutored free play points more to a surrealist laboratory of nonart, i.e., of automatic painting or writing, than to a class where absolute beginners in art are formed. This may not be surprising, for most of them were products of postwar surrealistic modernism; for example, Georgina Beier was a practitioner of German impressionism. Only in surrealistic schools does one learn art by not learning or by learning to suspend reason and the senses so that you can give in to the uncensored free play of the imagination through automatic painting or drawing. In Ulli Beier’s Osogbo schools, artistic agency was left uncultivated while artistic power was invoked by a kind of magical contagion. Thus we are told that by merely hanging around “children in the room began to paint” (Kennedy 1992, 80). However, we are also told that the majority of the students did not know what they were doing and why they were there and that “Some of the most original works were created by the stark illiterates” (ibid). What this suggests is that African modernism was not only born in ignorance but also blindfolded at birth. The candidates were not working in accordance with or even against any known artistic tradition. They were abruptly removed from traditional aesthetics and ejected without instruction and transition into a Western surrealistic modernism that operated without rules and knew no boundaries. Thus these pioneer modernist artists came to art as cultural orphans sustained, we are told, solely by their pecuniary needs and by the sheer curiosity of working with white people. What stands out clearly here is the fact that the aesthetic break that birthed African modernism was not backed by any cultural mutation nor change in worldview. We know that mutations caused by cultures in contact are normal features of human development. But the artistic mutations that resulted in African modernism in the visual art seems to be of the very abnormal type; it was not traditional or educated artists incorporating elements of European art and techniques to modernize African art practice [as was the case in the novel and poetry where European modernism serves as the new aesthetic framework for telling African stories. Here we note that the traditional realist mode of narration was not jettisoned but modernized, i.e., adapted to suit the needs of the written medium]. In African visual modernism, all links to formal styles of traditional art were abruptly broken and abandoned in favor of a culturally anachronistic jump to surrealistic abstractions, dehumanization, and de-realizations. But then the paradox of this new-fangled modernism was that having

Africa Mis-traveling to Modernity  11

broken with, rather than recast, traditional realist representation, the artworks created by the Osogbo and other schools were deemed to be rooted still in and about their traditions and cultures; the subjects of paintings, drawings were still said to be the shrines, masks, and other magico-mythic symbols of their native culture. In other words, after having been told by their European surrealist teachers to paint, draw, or sculpt out of the sheer fantasies of their imaginations and to eschew realism, representation, or beauty, they were also told to use their surrealist Picasso-like doodling to celebrate their cultures, the deities, the shrines, and the cultural mores. The result was a situation where an artwork by one of the pioneers purportedly symbolizing a powerful Yoruba deity attracted a comment such as this: “in his art, the sacred, the gods are broken and deformed” (Kennedy 1992, 80). This is so because modernism generally seeks to alienate art from human concerns for it started as a revolt against too much humanization of art. It is putting art in the service of nonhuman abstractions about art. José Ortega Y Gasset (1968) calls it “the de-humanization of art.” The gods are broken and deformed in Osogbo mimic modernism because modernism with its formal abstractions in its native habitat was not evolved to still carry out the wholly realist task of celebrating and exalting gods, rehabilitating archaic deities, and reaffirming our negritude. Deforming them through visual abstractions or breaking them up into inscrutable lines or shades of paint may actually amount, in some cultures, to abominable acts of dishonoring the gods. This paradox of trying to Africanize modernism, i.e., using modernism’s counter-realist formal techniques, to celebrate still very realistically rooted traditions, brings me to the real existential aporias embedded in both the genealogy and the mode of existence of African modernism. First, it is possible to interpret the Picasso code that triggered Africa’s enthusiastic embrace of modernism as a grave misunderstanding of Picasso’s intent and goal. By picking up a formal element of the African mask and incorporating it into modernism’s already ongoing dehumanization of art, Picasso could not have been said to be endorsing or supporting Africa’s so-called primitive culture and art or defending it against colonial acculturation. Whatever Picasso did with the motif from the mask could be seen essentially as an internal self-referential artistic move. Hence his sally: “L’art nègre, je ne le connais pas!” However, African modernist artists understood him to be lending support to the revival of Africa’s cultural primitivism through art. It was that misunderstanding that became creative and gave birth to the Picasso mania in modern African art. Thus when a few wandering often amateur European modernists reintroduced the Picasso code through their surrealist workshops, it met enthusiastic embrace without any resistance. However, given the cultural historicity of modernism, an Africanized modernism born under such circumstances as we have described was bound to become not just a cultural orphan but an evolutionary freak. In the next section we shall examine some forms of African modernism and the art theory that undergird it as a cultural affront to both modernity and tradition.

12  Denis Ekpo

Postcolonial Modernism or Masking the Abortion of Modernity in Africa? One way of normalizing and celebrating African modernism as an authentic African art form is to look for a way to either erase all the marks of its abnormal birth and condition of existence or sublimate and appropriate them into the best version of Africa’s postcolonial self-understanding. The most robust effort in this direction is Chika Okeke-Agulu’s (2015) much acclaimed book titled Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria. Leaving aside the wide ranging art-historical scholarship displayed in this important book, I want to pick on the choice of the trope ‘postcolonial modernism’ and the cultural theory with which the author supports it, in order to illustrate what I consider the concealed congenital as well as existential maladies of modernist/contemporary art in Africa. The overall aim, of course, is to build my case for why I think art needs to be Post-Africanized. In the first and introductory chapter of the book, Okeke-Agulu does not hide his discomfort with the lingering narrative of the colonial origin of modern art in Africa. To him, the cultural-nationalist/anti-colonial energies activated and generated by the decolonization zeitgeist were sufficiently powerful and also inherently creative to drive the aesthetic-cultural revolution that resulted in African modernism in the visual arts. In this process, colonization, including the fact that modern art was first taught in colonial schools, is reframed as mostly a non-active background factor. To be sure the role of external influence is not denied but is reduced to a rather passive supplement or background stimulus. Indeed, the colonial modernist factor is deliberately tamed by highlighting indigenous aesthetic theories such as Uche Okeke’s ‘natural synthesis’ as perhaps the best aesthetic descriptor of African modernism. It is here highlighted as a synthesis in which the synthesizer, the active agent, is the African artist while the colonial influences, in particular Picasso’s modernist abstractions, are simply reframed as mere tools the African artist uses to modernize art in Africa. To support this narrative of African modernism as a mostly self-generated art movement, Okeke-Agulu deliberately limits his examples to artists belonging to the Zaria schools leaving out artists belonging to the better-known Osogbo and Ibadan schools where, as we have already noted, the birth of African modernism was surrealistically midwifed by European modernists via the Picassoesque village workshops they held. Indeed in some accounts, some of the most acclaimed early modernist works were produced in the Osogbo schools. Uche Okeke’s modernist illustrations for Things Fall Apart, despite claiming to be works of autonomous African modernism, are, however, quite Picasso-like in conception and finish. Even as he perhaps rightly claims that the Uli motifs that adorn these illustrations are drawn from his Igbo culture, the overall formal dehumanization and abstraction that makes this work so different from traditional artwork is European in origin and execution. This, however, should not in any way detract from the merit of his aesthetic accomplishments. However, in Okeke-Agulu’s account, postcolonial modernism is genealogically redescribed

Africa Mis-traveling to Modernity  13

and captured as a decolonization-inspired aesthetic that heroically bid farewell to colonial modernity. My question is, why such lingering anxiety over influence? Why still insist on denying, erasing, or downplaying colonial or European modernist influences? What is wrong with external/colonial influences? In nearly all cultures of the world, external influences – exposure to and appropriation of them – are the oxygen of cultural change and human development. Contact and exchanges between cultures remain the most fertile sources of aesthetic evolution or even revolution. In this book, in order not to acknowledge and celebrate the colonial impetus and modernist structuring origin in which modern art takes form and shape, Okeke-Agulu goes to great lengths to argue the endogenous origin, decolonial/Afrocentric autonomy, and ownership of both the political and creative processes that resulted in modernist art in Africa. However, while such academic labors aimed at dousing our Afrophiliac/anticolonial worries and anxieties of external influence may still satisfy or flatter our claims to a self-reliant Afrocentricism, they do not appear to be able to support the postcolonial/decolonial self-confidence we exude while making such claims. Rather, such claims appear to betray the still slimy, simmering inferiority complex still lurking in the psyche, art and art-culture discourses of some mostly diasporic postcolonial critics. Contrary to what many of them might think, the source of this sublimated colonial inferiority complex may not be colonization per se but our failures at leveraging elements of the colonial inheritance for our orderly development. What makes a culture great is often its capacity to leverage external influences for its growth. Conversely, a culture that consistently denies external influences or derives joy in downplaying them might be betraying psychic hangovers mostly caused by the inability to make something good and credible out of external borrowings. But what is more interesting to me here is that while the trope ‘postcolonial modernism’ obviously reveals a lot about the undoubted Afrophiliac impulses that inhabit both the art and art discourse of modern African art, it hides those other elements in modern art that are even more essential for understanding some of the dilemmas facing contemporary art in Africa. What Okeke-Agulu’s preferential decolonialist appropriation of African modernism reveals are essentially two things. One, the essential Afrophiliac impulse that rules practitioners and historians of African art even as such art coquettishly decks itself in formal garments belonging mostly to European modernist/contemporary art. And two, the real aim of art’s eager embrace of the ‘Picasso code’ of modernism was not to discover what it takes to modernize art and culture in Africa but to dodge that task by hooking onto the flimsiest sign of Western support and approval for them to remain stuck in their nativity/Africanity comfort zone. In other words, modernism was only a modern alibi, a veneer under which Africa justified and embellished its resistance to the kind of cultural change that would have ushered in societal modernization as ground and prelude to artistic modernism. What Okeke-Agulu’s thesis succeeds in hiding seems, however, more serious and thought provoking. The first is the fact that an almost blind,

14  Denis Ekpo

untutored leap into modernist abstractions was more like a freakish counterevolutionary mutation than an ordered aesthetic evolution. But it had grave implications for both art and cultural development in Africa. One major aesthetic theory by which the leap into formal modernism was justified and ideologically domesticated was Uche Okeke’s ‘natural synthesis.’ By this he meant that modernist African art arose as a natural synthesis between African traditions and Western modernist artistic techniques. In Uche Okeke’s and Victor Ekpuks’s artworks, traditional motifs like Uli, Nsibidi, etc., found in the native cultures of Eastern Nigeria are rediscovered and synthesized with modernist formal and technical experiments to produce a brand new, African version of modernism. However, in this synthesis the elements being fused together were produced by and belong to two greatly different states and structures of consciousness, two divergent levels of human development. The first, the African, is a product of the magic-mythic stage of near fusion between man and nature. What Senghor refers to as the participatory cosmology that drives life at this stage of culture is what he rightly describes as the foundation of art and culture in traditional Africa. Thus, Senghor’s African aesthetic is founded on the idea that art is the expression and reenactment of the emotive intuitive and rhythmic embrace of man and the cosmos. This stage of consciousness celebrated in Senghor’s African aesthetics is also what is called the natural or primitive stage.3 However, Hegel famously said that since man is essentially freedom, and the natural or primitive state is the stage where man is still in bondage to nature, magic, and myth, then this stage is not the appropriate stage of human freedom. Freedom is defined by him as the liberation of the human spirit from its natural bondage to both outer [physical] nature and inner nature such as myth and magic. Conversely, modernity which produced the modernist techniques and forms, which African modernists appropriated, is the product of a different stage of human consciousness and worldview, namely, the rationalscientific stage. It was here that modernity was created and new structures of consciousness and forms of life made possible by the epistemological break from myth and magic. Modernism, an aesthetic outgrowth of cultural modernity, arose not as a cancelling out of the rational-scientific worldview but as an internal working out in the arts of one of its cultural excesses, i.e., one of the cultural possibilities embedded in it. In reaction to the excesses of representational humanism and its perceived exhaustion as source of aesthetic innovation, some artists decided to try out the dehumanization of art, the destruction of representational meaning, and promotion of the self-referentiality of art. That was how modernism was born, not as a return to pre-modernity but as a cultural excess made possible by the great material accomplishments of achieved modernity. In other words, it would be difficult to divorce artistic modernism from its enabling background of already successful socio-material modernity. A culture’s aesthetic intelligence moves and progresses through various stages of the development of human consciousness. The order of progression is from the magic-mythic to rational-scientific to postmodern. Every growth in the level of consciousness supposes a corresponding change in the aesthetic

Africa Mis-traveling to Modernity  15

intelligence. No stage can be skipped without some consequences for the culture involved. Secondly, between one stage and another a transitional stage, during which the culture parting from the old reality is psychologically prepared to accept the new reality, is always crucial. When we reconstruct the emergence of African modernism along the lines of this evolutionary scheme, what we discover is a complete rigging of a normal aesthetic-cultural history. First, there was a jump without any transition from traditional art to modernism. Above all, there was no corresponding switch or transition from the traditional juju-centric stage of culture to the next stage, namely, the rationalscientific worldview that founded and undergirded modernity. In the case of Africa, the modernist artist sought to aesthetically recreate the African world not in accordance with any internalized new rules of a higher stage of human development but solely by arbitrarily mixing the unchanged grammar of traditional culture with the outer symbols and signs belonging to a wildly different stage of human development. The aesthetic formula for this agrammatical syncretism was called ‘natural synthesis,’ i.e., the mixing of elements from magic and myth with symbols and forms originating from the rational-scientific stage of culture. As Okeke-Agulu rightly argued, the cultural-nationalist/decolonialist pressures of the anti-colonial zeitgeist had imposed the historic necessity to assert Africa’s cultural autonomy, dignity, and pride. Art naturally saw itself summoned to lead the way in freeing Africa from colonial cultural bondage. As Hegel also said, the state of bondage to other men is not the appropriate life of man, for man is essentially freedom. So by rushing to mobilize the resources of modernism to assert Africanity, rather than merely mimicking colonial modernity, art in Africa was convinced that it was fighting the cause of African freedom. But as Hegel also reasoned, if you free yourself from colonial bondage [bondage to other men] without also freeing yourself from the inner bondage to nature-magic and myth, then you are still internally in bondage, bondage to the state of nature, the juju-centric worldview. Therefore, the ‘natural synthesis’ is natural only in the sense that it is partly still steeped in magic and myth; but it is not natural in the sense of a normal evolutionary sequence. In the latter sense, it is indeed an unnatural, arbitrary juxtaposition of antagonistic cultural drives and their aesthetic symbols and signs. It results in what evolutionary psychology calls evolutionary mismatch.4 The natural synthesis aesthetics merely translates into, recreates and at the same time mirrors the condition in which postcolonial culture exists in general. This culture as is well known is characterized by what postcolonial theory celebrates as hybridity or hybridization- a new third culture that arose out of the incomplete colonial acculturation process. But just like Uche Okeke’s natural synthesis in modernist art, postcolonial hybridization is mostly the arbitrary mixing or juxtaposition of cultural elements belonging to two asymmetrical stages of human consciousness. The trouble with Africa’s postcolonial hybridization is the loss of evolutionary cultural clarity. The mixing of mutually opposed elements is not resolved into a higher synthesis through the sublimation work of a dominant meta-cultural force. This situation leaves the postcolonial psyche as

16  Denis Ekpo

a permanent battleground of opposing drives. The so-called multiple identity syndrome or compound consciousness is a highly contaminated, conflictual, and ineffectual state of mind; reason and science clash with magic, tribe clashes with nation and creates psychic disorder, which translates into the progressstalling disorder and chaos that, according to Patrick Chabal and Jean-Pascal Daloz (1999), defines the condition of postcoloniality in Africa. According to this view, postcolonial Africa burdened with incompatible values and worldviews, works only when put on the irrational disorderly mode driven by the endless clash between reason and magic, tribe and nation, modernity and tradition, witchcraft and scientific rationality (Chabal & Daloz 1999). In a way, the modern African artist can be said to embody the maladies of the postcolonial condition at their most heightened level; for he is the typical pathogenic postcolonial subject who in his work tries to give full expression to the multitude of contrary drives struggling for the control of the postcolonial imagination. In many African modernist works, the pathologies of unsublimated hybridizations are turned into the very raw material of art. Thus while artists and critics continue to celebrate the works of African modernism as the evidence of reclaimed postcolonial energies and freedom, a cultural theorist can easily read them as symptoms of the many sicknesses of the postcolonial state caused mostly by the values conflict carried by the chaotic hybridizations that underlay postcolonial culture and society. On the whole, we can see that postcolonial modernism consolidated the illusion of an African modernity that claimed to take its normativity from both the juju-centric traditional world and from the rational-scientific culture of Europe’s modernity. In the name of what Okeke-Agulu (2015, 7) calls “the right to determine and articulate their own vision of modernity,” themes and motifs from the past/traditional world were enlisted and added to forms and motifs from European modernism for the purpose of building a decolonial African modernity. Thus African modernism came to exist as both a leap back into the past and a tiger’s leap across rational/sociocultural modernity straight into aesthetic modernism. But it was not only a false leap but a rigging of both artistic history and its legitimating sociocultural genealogy. However, that blind leap landed Africa’s modernist art in a bizarre modernism which the West until date still considers as African ethnic art and African artists consider as modernist art. In the ensuing cross-cultural confusion, many accusations were initially bandied about but somehow both parties seem to have managed to work out some satisfactory postmodern compromise: the African artist by taking the West’s money and ignoring its badmouthing; the West by being in possession of curious ethnic art and disregarding its claim to modernism. The trouble, however, is that despite the monetary compensation from the West, some modernist/contemporary African artists along with many art historians are not happy that the efforts of African artists are not being fully recognized as authentic contributions to the universal heritage of modernism. Almost every text on African art commences by some ritual denunciation of Western denigration of, and lack of full acknowledgment of, Africa’s contributions to

Africa Mis-traveling to Modernity  17

modernism. Okeke-Agulu’s book took off from Eurocentric habitual misperception of African art. He singles out William Fagg and Margeret Plass as unrepentant Eurocentric denigrators of African modernism (Okeke-Agulu 2015, 8). Rasheed Araeen (2010), founder of Third Text, took issues with Europe’s reluctance or outright refusal to admit African modernist works into the high altar of European modernism. He frowns at the tendency to underrate them and see them as second-hand or copycat modernism. I think on this issue Europe is probably not so wrong. First, unlike us, they are able to perceive the huge discrepancy between the pretensions of African modernists and the nonexistence in Africa of a truly modern form of life against which aesthetic modernism can arise and make sense. Modernism without modernity seems to them a piece of cultural non sequitur. What they see in such African works are not only signs of the neo-primitivism promoted by the surrealist branch of modernism but mostly evidence of an unfinished evolution out of primitive myth and magic. There is no way a purist art critic in the West would not easily have spotted the troublingly muddled aesthetics present in these imitative works built on a monstrous juxtaposition of incompatible cultural energies. They must have perceived the existential, aesthetic, and anthological fraudulences that enveloped African modernist works and dismissed them as incompetent copycatism. I think that what those Western critics are saying is that despite the outer modernist coverings in which these works strut about, aesthetic intelligence in African works is still largely stranded in tribal magic and myth; it has not evolved to a higher level. Modernist formal de-realizations and dehumanizations are only pasted like a bandage over the gaping wounds of cultural and imaginative stagnation. African modernist art wearing modernist and contemporary attire is more like whited sepulcher. The expression modern African art presupposes art made possible after the successful transcending or sublimation of the underlying juju-centric traditional world. In other words, genuine aesthetic freedom that can drive modern aesthetic change or revolution supposes prior freedom of the imagination from the stranglehold of the magical worldview. For now, what the West still sees in our modernist art are the incongruities and the aesthetic fraudulences and so the purists among them withhold their full recognition. African artists continue to be angry that the West should do such. One of the pioneers from the Osogbo school, Ogundele, was called an African Picasso by his European patrons who admired and bought his work. He took offense and defended the African origin of his modernism.5 I think that rather than take offense at being reminded that we may be merely copycat Picassos, we should step back and learn some crucial lessons concerning not just what the modernist jump in art has done to art in Africa but also to Africa’s culture in general. While not defending the old arrogant parochialism of earlier critics of African works and their derisive dismissal of any work by nonEuropean wannabe Picassos, I think it serves Africa art better to also see their criticism as a wake-up call for us to recognize some of the cultural/aesthetic anachronisms embedded in an African modernism that showed up itself mostly

18  Denis Ekpo

as the aping of the cubistic, dehumanizing techniques of European modernity and, at the same time, using such unhoused techniques to still capture the arcana of African traditionality. By so doing African modernism skipped the evolutionary trajectory and production condition of an effective modernism. Secondly, modernism was hijacked by the African artist to fight a battle it is not constituted to fight, namely, defending, upholding, and promoting African traditions. Modernism, as we know it, came into being by revolting against human interest in art. It is the dehumanization of art; it fights for the absolute autonomy of art; therefore, it fights abstract, conceptual, and other nonhuman interests. It is, in a way, a post-human art used mostly to give vent to or cover up the terminal boredom of the overfed and over-spoilt post-development subjects who in the postmodern West are hovering dangerously between a return to pre-human non-meaning and post-human play of forms and signifiers without purpose or end. Postmodern art has, therefore, become a cultural Sahara where little or no life grows, where nothing really happens and anything goes, and yet it is still art. Anybody can see that contemporary modernism in the West is nothing but the coquetry of people who have finished all useful work in the world and therefore can easily see art as the vehicle of their terminal idleness and boredom. By leapfrogging to such Sahara-like formal modernism at a time when Africa is still stuck in magic, poverty, and so many undone social and cultural work, African art dodged its great pedagogical/formative mission [that art had fully played in Europe] which was to assist or drive the transition from maladaptive tradition to a more adaptive modern form of life. Art abdicated its historical role and went for the quick and easy thrills of copycat modernism. The artists made and still make quick money from it as they found it easy to con the gullible last men of the Western art establishment in search of quick frissons of ethnic exoticism. But then art ended up losing any relevance to the vital cultural needs of Africa; outside popular art controlled mostly by quacks, high art became an almost irrelevant sector of culture in Africa. The question is, was modernism the only form in which art could have been modernized in Africa? That is, which art could have either initiated or accompanied the transition from tribe to modernity? Wasn’t a modernized form of representational art better equipped to play the historically necessary social role expected of art in a transitional society? We should not forget that it was realism that assisted the sociocultural modernization of Europe including the disenchantment of the traditional world inherited from the magic-mythic Middle Ages. Holderlin’s “Bread and Wine” captured the nineteenth-century imagination of Europe because it was hymning the flight of the gods from the earth after the irreversible triumph of the scientific worldview. Visual modernism only came as a coquettish formal revolt against established realist conventions after the completion of sociocultural modernization. The modernists came as cultural dandies to discredit reason, humanism, science and technology because they could afford such a purely aesthetic luxury and cultural excess in a society that had already immunized the anti-human artist against hunger, sickness, and

Africa Mis-traveling to Modernity  19

poverty. Aligning with an artistic doctrine that grew out of such hypocritical revolt against reason and human concerns was bound to be fundamentally antithetical to the goals and mission of art and culture in a poverty-stricken and development-hungry Africa still grappling with a huge deficit of humaneness and scientific reason. The question is, why didn’t the better educated artists who supplanted Ulli Beier’s surrealistically manufactured illiterate pioneers see through the cultural/aesthetic abnormality of an Africanized modernism and retrace their steps? Why was every young artist bent on becoming a Picasso? My guess is that modernism was seen as the handiest and the easiest way out for the African artist; it dispensed the would-be artist from talent, competence, and knowledge. In soberer representational art forms, long practice, skills, and knowledge are indispensable for honing talent. In modernism, little or no education may be needed because modernism is essentially “art without beauty” (Kimball 1997) or “art after the end of art” (Danto 1998). In other words, in modernist and contemporary art, with just a little talent and a lot of political agenda, you can doodle your way to fame and money in the West. Thus modernism stayed back and was not abjured by the post-Osogbo generation of educated artists mostly because it was the form of art that did not come with a price. You could and can become a successful modern or contemporary African artist just by adorning yourself in wild colors, wearing weird masks, painting your body in red, and walking down the streets of Europe.6 Thus the skipped stage of art as representation and beauty, especially when art had not even started let alone exhausted its realist social role in Africa, has deprived African modernism of relevance to what matters most culturally to the continent. However, I am not saying that African art could realistically have ignored the aesthetic pressures of the interconnected global world or that it could have totally recused itself from what has become the global language of art in our time. What I am saying is that Africa is sick and poor and needy and therefore demands that all sectors of culture, including art, be mobilized to take Africa out of its current beggarly survival mode. Art in Africa did not finish [did not even start] its pro-progress pedagogical social mission before it absconded to become a mere exotic appendage to the post-material/post-development coquettish worries of the West. In that exotic role, it cannot even play its archaic Afrophiliac role anymore because it is kitted in the ill-fitted garments of modernist non-meaning.

Notes 1 “New spaces for Negotiating Art [and] Histories in Africa,” organized by Kerstin Pinther and Larissa Forster, 12–18 March 2012, at Bamako. I wish to thank Kerstin Pinther for inviting me. 2 I owe my interpretation of the birth of African modernism here mostly to two works. The first is Jean Kennedy’s (1992) account in New Currents, Ancient Rivers: Contemporary African Artists in a Generation of Change. Chapters 5 and 6 titled “Artists of the Shrine, Osogbo” and “The Spontaneous Spirit,” respectively, were very useful. The second source is Tayo Adenaike’s (1979) text “The Osogbo Experiment sixteen years after.”

20  Denis Ekpo 3 Primitivism here is seen as in aesthetic discourse, not as a flaw as in discredited colonialist discourse, but as first in time, the absolute beginning to which all cultures were subjected and from which many have evolved out. 4 A concept in evolutionary psychology that refers to the combination of traits that has become maladaptive because of changes in the environment. 5 Rufus Ogundele is quoted as saying “Europeans also buy my paintings, but sometimes I get annoyed with their kind of compliments; some of them call me ‘the Picasso from Nigeria’” (quoted in Stroter-Bender 1994). 6 I am thinking here in particular of some of Jelili Atiku’s performance artworks mostly done before European audiences. But having also seen a few of his paintings, I believe he is no doubt a talented artist. However, some of these performances, at least from my anti-modernist bias, do not highlight his best artistic skills.

References Adenaike, T. 1979. “The Osogbo Experiment Sixteen Years after.” BA Dissertation, University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Araeen, R. 2010. “Modernity, Modernism and Africa’s Authentic Voice.” Third Text 24(2):277–286. Chabal, P., and J. Daloz. 1999. Africa Works: Disorder as Political Instrument. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Danto, A. C. 1998. Art after the End of Art. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Howlett, J. 1951. “L’art Nègre? Connais pas!” Présence Africaine 10–11(1–2):85–90. Hurley, E. A. 2000. Through the Black Veil: Readings in French Caribbean Poetry. Trenton: Africa World Press. Hyde, E. 2016. “Flat Style: Things Fall Apart and Its Illustrations.” PMLA 131(1):20–37. Kennedy, J. 1992. New Currents, Ancient Rivers: Contemporary African Artists in a Generation of Change. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press. doi:10.1017/S0041977X00006261 Kimball, R. 1997. “Art Without Beauty.” Public Interest Spring: 44–59. Okeke-Agulu, C. 2015. Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria. Durham: Duke University Press. Ortega Y Gasset, J. 1968. The De-Humanization of Art and Other Essays on Art, Culture, and Literature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Stroter-Bender, J. 1994. “The Transformation of Ogun Power: The Art of Rufus Ogundele.” In The Yoruba Artist: New Theoretical Perspectives on African Arts, edited by A. Rowland. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press.

2

Manifesto for a PostAfrican Art Denis Ekpo

In this chapter, we begin with the observation that the visual arts in Africa and the world as a whole are becoming not only increasingly important but called upon to take on a more prominent cultural formative role. This is partly because of the decline of the written form of art. The novel now looks tired and seems to have lost its appeal particularly among the younger generation. The visual medium meanwhile has become the only form of narration the digital age seems to be more and more at home with. Accordingly, in Africa, the visual arts appear summoned to take over the cultural formative role hitherto played by the novel and poetry. But what form should the visual arts in Africa take if they must step into the cultural vacuum created by the decline of literary art? Given the grave moral challenge of being human in a poverty-ravaged and conflict-ridden Africa and especially in the face of the mounting evils wrought by our cultural-nationalistic protectionism toward old tribal traditions and the juju-centric worldview that undergirds them, should art continue to be essentially the wanton affirmation and celebration of Africanity or should it purge itself of Afrophilia and take on the new mission of leading Africa to the progress-prone path of cultural change and worldview modernization?1 Given the maladaptiveness of some of our roots and the many abuses to which they are prone, from which deep cultural forces should art in Africa continue to draw its creative juices and ideological sustenance? Should it continue to draw on the unchanging arcana of our ancestral magic and myth or should it source its themes and motifs from a higher realm of cultural consciousness? Is art condemned to be Afrophiliac or should it free itself from the Afrocentric trap and work toward freeing Africa from the chains of nativity and other forms of anti-modernity atavisms? What the artist should understand is that the cult of traditions, tribal mores, shrines, and masks, which modern art in Africa continues to cultivate even under the guise of modernist abstractions, is the cult of the revolt against the very conditions of progress and growth in modern Africa. To be sure, the artist like every other African is undoubtedly pained and embarrassed by Africa’s ever worsening poverty and miseries. But his art whether traditionalist or modernist, often comes across as a cultural-nationalist balm to prevent the rest of us from feeling the pain and embarrassment of

22  Denis Ekpo

Africa’s smallness and backwardness. His art which often extols that which makes Africa stagnant or in steep decline partakes fully in the overt Afrophiliac program of making Africa comfortable, safe and secure, and self-dignified in its pristine and unchangeable Africanness. Herein lies the unseen negative function of African art: that, unknown to itself, it is complicit in the degenerative sociocultural stagnation and poverty of Africa. Undoubtedly, a major reason identity politics continues to thrive and control art and culture in Africa is our belief that colonization went too far in rubbishing the humanity of the African. We asserted and continue to assert our Africanness in art and culture because of what colonization did to deny our human dignity. Mostly as a result of this undying desire to settle scores with colonialism, the modern African mind can be said to be held hostage by two non-sublimated forces from the past. One is the inherited magic-mythic ancestral consciousness and its traditions; the second is a subsisting more or less unconscious anti-colonial paranoia. Together these two legacies continue to generate the invisible spells that dictate how Africa sees itself, the world, and our place in it. The compulsion to defend the first, (i.e., our ancestral traditions or the African way of life) using the second (our anti-colonial paranoia) as a tool is the basis of the Africanity ideology or Africanism. Art has been perhaps the most potent and most enduring cultural instrument for embellishing and laundering the essentially anti-colonial idea of Africanness and for normalizing it as the basis and driving force of cultural creation and expression. None can talk of renewing art and culture in Africa without first tackling the viral load on the imagination of artists and cultural theorists, of these two burdensome heritages from the past. Post-Africanism is the name of an emerging cultural theory that arose mainly out of the imperative, first, to understand the workings of these cross-cultural legacies on the mind and imagination of modern Africa; secondly, to propose ways to reduce their load on the mind and rescue Africa from some of their invisible but crippling influences. Post-Africanism arose out of the painful awareness that Africa enveloped in and driven by Afrophilia and anti-coloniality has strayed from the more creative and transformative resources and regions of the global human mind. The task of Post-Africanism is to rediscover and empower these creatively transformational parts of the mind that had been held captive or distorted by Africanism. In its more general philosophical formulation, the Post-African turn in thinking is centered around a three-phased intellectual operation, namely (1) redemption from Afrophilia; (2) reprocessing the colonial legacy in a more self-empowering way; and (3) the re-universalization of Africa. In art discourse, Post-Africanism is also mostly articulated via these three processes. The founding question of Post-Africanism applied to the visual art is: given that African art as a whole is deeply rooted in what can be called the Afrophiliac impulse, what would art from Africa be like if it ceases to have the presuppositions as well as the compulsions of both Africanism and anti-colonialism as its raison d’etre and condition of existence? In other words, what kinds of art are still possible in Africa after the imagination of the artist has been freed

Manifesto for a Post-African Art  23

from both the spells of Afrophilia and the burden of anti-coloniality? In this final section, I will briefly sketch what could be considered as the ground and manifesto for Post-African art.

Rescuing Art from Afrophilia As stated in the previous chapter, Afrophilia, the rather unhelpful obsession with our Africanness came about when we were led by the cultural-nationalist/ anti-colonialist pioneers to overidentify with a racially wounded and traumaphiliac sole image of Africa. Art, the major cultural tool of anti-colonialism, became the flag bearer of Afrophiliac cultural politics. According to some of the pioneer Afrophiliac artists like Achebe and Ngugi, Africa needed to rediscover its original wholeness mostly because as Achebe said we do not want to remain mere footnotes of European history and civilization. Since then art and ideology have been expending enormous creative and analytical energies trying to not be Europe’s cultural footnotes. To be sure this Afrophiliac impulse of not wanting to be like Europe nor to be reduced to its insignificant excrescence really helped Africa to develop strong resistance qualities and to build structures of cultural autonomy as well as anti-colonial resistance muscles all of which dominated Africa’s intellectual and cultural scene up to the late 1980s. The decades from 1960 to the late 1980s mark the heyday of identity politics in Africa. The trouble, however, is that about the post–Cold War 1990s when Africa was forced to reopen its economies and politics to the global world, Africanism and its secret driving force Afrophilia had exhausted its cultural and ideological fecundity, both as a way of being and showing up in the world and as a way of doing things that make the African world better. The cycle of anti-colonialism’s impelled nativism had run its course and a new cycle was trying to emerge or was already emerging. The empirical proof of the obsolescence of the Afrocentric paradigm was the chronic failures and the tragic consequences that dogged most Afrophilia-driven projects. From the African path to development to African socialism, the African way of life, action, and thought was strewn with poverty, conflicts, civil wars, dictatorship, and its endless trails of human tragedies. These pointed to the necessity of something else. The time for a new cycle, a post-Afrophiliac cycle of being and becoming had come; it was time for new experiments in ways of being and becoming. But in spite of all these negative signals, we were still stuck in Africanity and all changes were simply variations on the same Afrophilia theme. For example, new shibboleths that reigned in the new millennium such as African Renaissance, The New Partnership for Africa’s Development (NEPAD), African Solutions to Africa’s Problems, etc., were crafted around the deepening rather than the diminution or overcoming of Africanness. What was at stake in this stubborn unwillingness to recognize the signs of the new cycle, the imperative of a review of Africanism? The unconscious driver was Afrophilia, the impulse to an uncompromising rejection of and resistance against the colonial components/ingredients of our modern selfhood; the

24  Denis Ekpo

voluntarist attempt to operate in the modern world from the uncolonized or decolonized core of our African being. Art by its very nature as the enemy of fixity and cultural inertia is known especially in Europe to have alerted the society to the coming new cycle. Art had heard and interpreted before others, the signs of the coming new time. In the colonial moment in Africa, it was art that first captured the sense of a new fate, in the uncanniness of the coming new order ushered in by colonial conquest. But in postcolonial Africa, art notoriously failed to intercept let alone embody the signs of the post-Afrophiliac cycle. Art had become not only stuck in Afrophilia but also the most reactionary bearer of its most atavistic impulses against cultural change and worldview switch. Art became the most stubborn defender of Africanism and the staunchest enemy of cultural change because it apparently most profited from Africa remaining just Africa, that is, a museumic repository of archaic traditions and customs. What counted for change was nothing more than the super-imposition of Africanities upon copycatted trends from Europe, for example, African modernism/contemporary African art. However, not all the forms of art in Africa resisted change or failed to register and reckon with the looming post-Afrophiliac zeitgeist in Africa. The postindependence novel, for instance, despite the prevailing cultural-nationalist mood, made significant inroads into questioning Africanism and Afrophilia. Two historical novelists in particular, namely Ahmadou Kourouma (1981) and Yambo Ouologuem (1983), radically broke the anti-colonialist/postcolonial ranks of the African novel to cast a dark light on the foundation of Africanism, namely the precolonial past and its survival in extant African traditions. In two separate historical novels set in the dawn of European conquest of Africa, the two authors reconstituted precolonial Africa not as the usual paradisiacal kingdom of peasant soul harmony that was felled by the arms of the wicked White man but as an enclave of cruel customs and hideous superstitions that perhaps deserved to fall. In Bound to Violence, first published in 1968, Ouologuem dissected the precolonial past as precisely bound to violence, slavery, savage ignorance, and cruelty. It was that degraded state that opened the fictional Nakem Empire first to the Arab conquerors before handing it over to European colonization. Kourouma in Monenè, outrages et defis opened up and dispelled the myth of the precolonial past as a pagan reserve of peace and plenty. The kingdom of Saba captured in this historical novel at the time of French colonial conquest is shown to be an unconscionable enclave of endless human and animal sacrifice invoked and used as the solution to all problems including warding off colonial conquest. Meanwhile, the visual art at the same time was busy extolling that same past and showing what makes it an indispensable inheritance. The visual arts, including drama, dance, and festivals were not only endlessly hymning the traditional world but showed the mythic past as the only veritable horizon of dignified life in the modern world. The question is, why did the visual arts lag behind in the apprehension of the end of the Afrophiliac cycle in postcolonial history? One reason is certainly the fact that art profited most from Africa remaining stuck in traditionality

Manifesto for a Post-African Art  25

for that state constituted an inexhaustible minefield of themes and motifs. Another likely reason might be the anachronistic intrusion of African modernism as a replacement for a more rational evolution of artistic consciousness in Africa. Flattered in the borrowed and unearned honor of modernism, African art found repose in, and took its ease from merely copying readymade forms and techniques of a modern art culture to which, by virtue of Africa’s premodern stage of evolution, it had yet no right (Africa remains still too stuck in pre-modernity to be able to make cultural sense of the idiosyncrasies of a fully industrialized modernity of Europe). The novel, on the other hand, more liberated and unrepressed, was able to see in the African past and its present infatuation with traditions and archaic customs, the very obstacles to the emergence of not only aesthetic modernism the visual arts were busy impersonating, but the major hindrance to human progress in postcolonial Africa. It saw the need to probe into what made traditional Africa dispensable, i.e., an obstacle to Africa’s growth and prosperity. By focusing on the many aberrations of the human under the throes of superstitions, magic, human sacrifice, etc., Kourouma, for instance, tried to show why colonization was perhaps inevitable and why we should rather embrace the colonial shadows which the visual art and ideology are running away from. Kourouma’s intention is to make the African least enamored of his so-called Africanness, seen as an end in itself, an anthropological terminus, requiring no further evolutionary work. To this end he presents African traditions and the past as the state most injurious to human well-being and growth; it is not the paradise we lost at the hand of the wicked White man, but the very source of our misery, backwardness, and inhumanity. It is a chain that ties us to arrested human evolution. Therefore, he found it necessary to spoil the joy we have in extolling our traditional institutions by highlighting the inhumanities they sponsor; they bred slavery and human sacrifice and continue to breed magic, witchcraft, great ignorance, and superstitions. In his eyes these are highly harmful and disreputable state for modern man. To cement his anti-cultural nationalism, he praises the transformational work of colonization despite its hypocrisies, wanton destruction, and racist contempt. While the novel was punching holes in Afrophiliac aesthetics, modern visual art in Africa, (having) flattered itself in the borrowed garments of modernism (a) lost sight of art’s meta-cultural role as instigator of cultural change and (b) relaxed its acclaimed vigilance over cultural inertia and its cost, namely human degeneration. The novel, more dynamic and insightful, kept its vigilance over the dangers of Afrophilia with its message of remaining stuck in archaic, unadaptive traditions. It picked up the signals of old Africa’s anthropological exhaustion and rose to the historical challenge and demands of the new burgeoning cycle whose unmistakable signs were none other than the many, too many, tragedies that attended every project executed under the dominion of Afrophilia. I believe strongly that what modern art in Africa needs most are the visual equivalents of the Kouroumas and Ouologuems to extract it from its prolonged aesthetic infancy and cause it to come of age.

26  Denis Ekpo

However, the only trouble with the Afropessimism of Kourouma and Oueleguem was that it was taken as an end itself, a final doomsday picture of an Africa that is condemned to the eternal repetitions of its inglorious past. For this reason, the authors were often denounced as Afrophobic self-haters probably in the service of imperialism. In Post-Africanism, we perceive the hidden value of their Afropessimism by seeing it not as an end in itself but rather the road sign to, the preparatory stage of, the full Post-African consciousness that was knocking at the gate since the first two decades of independence. We see those recurring images of Africa’s inglorious past as a prelude to a Post-African awakening, a tool of that awakening, for such an awakening is preceded by intense dissatisfaction with the state of Africa as it is. The task now is to convert this aesthetic pessimism in the novel into the preparatory material for the awakening of a full Post-African consciousness in the visual and other art forms. The question is, how do we envision the materialization of the PostAfrican consciousness in art and other cultural forms after its first burgeoning in post-ideology discourse? What are the ingredients of Post-Africanity in art? If Post-Africanism is mostly about the redemption from Afrophilia, how can we relieve the artist’s imagination of the double burden of narcissistic nativism and anti-colonial paranoia embedded in Afrophlia? One way of doing that is to show that Afrophilia, the protectionist and possessive impulse that drives art and cultural creation, even though historically understandable, is actually the secret virus that most harms art, culture, and life, in general, in modern Africa. This is because whether in culture, art, or politics the Afrophiliac principle is not driven by the urge to grow, expand, and thrive (which is the evolutionary impulse of life as such) but solely by the fear of loss and the vengeful desire to recover or recreate a supposedly lost ancestral wholeness. Hence the nostalgia for a lost past and the recovery mania continue to torment art in Africa. For African art, the ancestral world was not just a beginning, not a stage, but the absolute basis, the beginning, and end of human development in Africa. In our Post-African revaluation, we say that the ancestral traditional world represents only the start of human development; Africanism, the ideological recoding of the traditional world after its clash with colonialist discourse, was supposed to be only a temporary resting place of the mind in our journey toward higher human potential embedded in us, that is, toward the universal human vocation of man in Africa. Afrophilia, the unconscious compulsion within Africanism, unwisely and harmfully froze this temporariness in an artificial essentiality by isolating and framing nativity as our most priced cultural possession, the ultimate source of our being and becoming, and coloniality as a dehumanizing foreignness. In the Post-African reversal of Afrocentric values, we say that the greatness and beauty of the ancestral/ traditional world is that it is not a destination but a bridge, a transition to something higher in us, the greater potentials of the human imagination in us. By its charm and lavishing of techniques, art had removed the bridge/transitional function from traditions and turned them into the sole home and comfort zone of an unchanging African identity. By so doing art was only spreading flowers

Manifesto for a Post-African Art  27

on the chains that shackle the imagination of Africa. For a Post-African art, tradition is no longer home but an evolutionary stage to be overcome, a bridge to the higher reaches of the imagination where art is no longer the restoration of a lost ancestral wholeness but the imagining and creation of hitherto unsuspected new wholenesses. Post-African art is powered by the deliberate disruption of all settled identity claims, of all forms of cultural inertia. As a new instrument for breeding the Post-African consciousness, Post-African art and theory must work conscientiously to spoil the joy in Africanity by presenting it as the stage most inimical to the development of the higher human capacities. Art of a new beginning, it seeks to connect dynamically with the long-suppressed evolutionary drives in the imagination of the artist and to lift creativity from the stasis of Africanness to the unpredictable flow and infinite possibility of human becoming in the global age. Therefore, Post-African creativity is first of all a deliberate transgression of all Afrocentric norms of self-perception and art-making; it is also a repudiation of the allegedly unchanging constraints of a fixed African reality to which art in Africa feels itself subjected. To us the aesthetic fecundity of the mythic-magic stage of life which we call our Africanity is exhausted because the world has changed and art must not just change but drive the new PostAfrican imagination anchored in change and constant renewal. The temporality of the Post-African imagination of art is no longer anchored on the ancestral past but is driven by futurity, the new time consciousness of an Afrophilia-free aesthetic imagination. On this account the juju-centric heritage becomes that which the artistic imagination must endeavor to overcome so as to reconnect with the greater creative potentialities carried by the suppressed futurity impulses in modern Africa. Tradition is now viewed as that in which the progress-prone cultural drives have been imprisoned. As it was art that greatly contributed to the postcolonial re-imprisonment of the African imagination in the archaic world of myth and magic, Post-African art is summoned to initiate the emancipation of the imagination from all forms of nativist atavism. Afrophilia had such a stranglehold on the imagination of artists that they have been made to believe that art can only be African by drawing all its resources from the traditional African world. To be African, art must draw from magic and myth. But juju, magic, and shrines cannot be said to be the permanent traits of Africanness. At best they are no more than manifestations of an arrested cultural evolution caused by cultural nationalism’s atavistic revolt against colonial modernity. Art wallows in them like fish in water. It neither questions nor casts the slightest doubt about their suitability for moral progress and aesthetic evolution in Africa. Suppose they are not the markers of Africanness to be celebrated but aberrations of the human mind that have overstayed in the primitive juju-centric stage of consciousness, would art rather not be the major cultural instrument for hastening their eradication or at least subverting their predominance in the African life world? For now, it is as if art in Africa cannot grow in another kind of social soil; it cannot grow in a more rational-scientific soil because, as

28  Denis Ekpo

some of the cultural-nationalist thinkers believe, the rational-scientific culture belongs to colonial Europe. In Post-Africanism we realize that magic and myth do not belong exclusively to Africa any more than rational-scientific culture belongs exclusively to Europe. Both magic and science belong to the imagination of the human species. Therefore, moving from magic to rational-scientific imagination, from Africanity to modernity does not amount to exiling your imagination from its authentic Africanity; it is only discovering the higher reaches and potential in your human imagination. African art can grow as well in this higher rational realm of the imagination. On this point Europe can teach us many invaluable lessons. Post-Enlightenment art in Europe thrived for more than a century on the greatly disenchanted soil of modernity and produced its greatest social results. As it mostly subjected itself to the rules and conventions of beauty and realist representation, it was able to connect most productively with the rest of culture and contributed enormously to the social transformations of the period. Indeed after the twilight of the gods in Europe it was art that took over from religion the task of moral progress and formative sociocultural work of preparing minds for the transition from a theological worldview to a secular scientific culture of the nineteenth century. Africa’s art can learn from Europe that art is perhaps most effective as a social/moral force when it steps out of the stagnant swamps of magic and myth and connects with the growth-bearing richer impulses embedded in the genius of all human cultures. The second part of the Afrophiliac burden on the artistic imagination is the lingering anti-colonialist paranoia. Today, the Afrophiliac gaze in art and politics sees everything in terms of an already colonialist spoliation of the African world and the imperative to rescue Africa from the prior coloniality of being, creation, and meaning making. But the only thing Afrophilia does not see is its own origin in coloniality, that is, the fact that coloniality is not only its condition of possibility but its real but repressed driving force. There would have been no necessity for an obsessive preoccupation with or love for our Africanness if colonial discourse had not earlier on totally damned Africa and disqualified her from the realm of normal humanity. Africanism arose as a result of the totalized conversion of Europe’s wholly negative idea of Africa into a wholly positive idea of Africanity. Africanism emerged when, as Sartre said, the label African/Negro/Black hurled like a stone against him by colonial discourse was picked up by him and turned into the cornerstone of his highest identity claims (Sartre 1948). In other words, buried at the very foundation of current Afrophiliac identity politics is the colonial shadow. The colonial shadow is none other than what we most repress concerning our modern subjectivity, namely its origin in coloniality. Indeed it can be said that Africanism in art and theory and development strategies is mostly the way we expend our best energies into not being our colonial shadow, escaping from our colonial shadows. The secret driver of artistic creativity is the endless war against the so-called colonial shadows still lurking around many aspects of postcolonial culture. Afrophiliac aesthetics is not just about

Manifesto for a Post-African Art  29

upholding Africanity, but most importantly upholding Africanness by exorcizing, excoriating, and erasing or decolonizing traces of coloniality. What is now called postcolonial modernism in art was invented so that we can hide any cultural debt to colonialism either by denying it or rewriting it as a decolonialist victory over colonial acculturation. The unhidden motive force of Chika Okeke-Agulu’s (2015) book, introduced in the previous chapter, is to counter vehemently the colonial origin of modern art in Africa. Therefore, African art is not only haunted by the ghost of coloniality but it has allowed the obsession with the colonial ghost to considerably deform and distort the productivity, form, and function of art in Africa. Art has been perhaps the most obdurate victim and also the perverse beneficiary of the inability to avoid living off the memory of the crimes of colonization. Indeed, one can say that the African artist cannot just come out of Afrophlia because he can’t just exist or create without anti-colonialism. In other words, our creativity, just like our development efforts, has been chained to our endless, compulsive reactions against our colonial shadows. The anticolonialist foundational drive in Afrophilia acts as both the psychic filter and the ever-watchful sentinel: it sieves out any form of the colonial shadow while retaining all that belongs to our original precolonial core and, at the same time, it alerts us to any misrecognized form of coloniality concealed in the apparently innocent or complimentary gaze or words coming from the ex-/neoimperium. But then when the artist creates under the combined surveillance mounted by the anti-colonial paranoia and the nativist narcissism that frame his postcolonial imagination, the best of his creations are no more than ever-whining reactions to what the White man said or never said, what he did and didn’t do. What that means is that the modern artist has not attained any true state of creative freedom and power. For in that reactive state, we are creating from an amputated, flawed, and ultimately ineffectual state of being in the modern world. The artist is not yet in touch with modern man’s true creative freedom and power, namely the consciousness of life in the world as evolutionary will to power, that is, the creative, ever-increasing thrust for expansion and growth regardless of what someone did or didn’t to us, regardless of what once stood or still stands in our way. Enveloped in our anti-colonialist paranoia, we are stuck at merely decolonizing art and the artistic imagination. Therefore, we are mostly interested in making art that will enable us to not be the once colonized subject but the opposite, namely the fully autonomous Afrocentric agency. Post-Africanism is the radically expanded consciousness that empowers us not only to performatively re-understand the necessity and the self-/worldtransformational utility of the colonial component of our modern African subjectivity, but also to grasp the atavistic/anti-progress dangers of our current pervasive decolonizing Afrophilia. Contrary to postcolonial/decolonial theory, we are saying that it is actually the unconscious anti-modernity compulsions in the Africanization/decolonization paradigm, rather than the legacy of coloniality, that have largely blighted and stunted not only our cultural and artistic creations but also, and more importantly, the ability to achieve rational

30  Denis Ekpo

human and material progress in postcolonial Africa. In Post-Africanism, we set out to reframe colonialism in order to bring out not only its repressed transformational energies but also the disadvantages of getting hung up on decolonizing our minds, art, and ways of being in the modern world. In this reframing, we do not deny the old crimes of colonization; we recontextualize them in a higher, more productive consciousness of that world-historical event that birthed the modern global world as we know it today. We are saying that despite its crimes and brutal ways, colonial conquest was what Africa probably needed most at that moment for its entry into the larger plane of life. What if colonization happened to be the only means through which the benefits of a life in world history, as opposed to life in a tribal state of nature, could have come to Africa? As we know, the premise of Fanonian/ Césairian totalized anti-colonialist discourse on colonialism was that there was an irreconcilable abyss between the claim of a so-called civilizing mission and the utterly inhuman and predatory means used to accomplish colonial conquest and subjugation. How can an end that resorts to such atrocious means be worth anything? Therefore, Europe and colonization are indefensible, Césaire proclaimed. The error here, borne no doubt out of excessive anti-colonial anger, was that instead of looking for a higher or hidden purpose that could explain the necessity for coloniality and its mostly evil means, the Fanonian anti-colonialist in Africa supposed in advance an anti-colonial moral goal of life that totally excluded them. Taking such a moral ideal as the norm on the basis of which we condemned colonization in its totality, Africa has since boxed itself into a masochistically blinded anti-colonial culture that has badly infected not only the arts and culture but also politics and development work. Art can only overcome the contagion of anti-colonialism when the mind and imagination can be led into a total reframing of the colonial moment. While postcolonial theory seeks to solve the problems created by the legacies of coloniality, Post-Africanism shows the advantages of evolving beyond anti-colonialism into a supra-colonial embrace of our colonial fate. One way to do this is to go back to Hegel’s theory of world history and the cunning of reason in it. It must be noted, however, that what I offer here as the embryo of a Post-African theory of colonization recognizes that the colonial episode was for our forefathers an uncannily rude awakening to life as a totally unmerited way of the Cross. However, previous generations and even a large chunk of the current one have seen only the Cross in Africa’s colonial history; hence they have focused solely on the passions ignoring any putative redemptive work concealed however clumsily or inadvertently in it. This viscerally anti-colonialist view of the past appears, in my view, to be one of the unseen forces that have worsened, rather than improve, Africa’s postcolonial condition. I have, therefore, chosen to look for and focus on the Rose in the Cross of Africa’s colonial legacies. I am concerned here with sounding out what can be called the essential Hegelian rationality of the colonial moment in Africa.

Manifesto for a Post-African Art  31

The Cunning of Reason in History and the Colonial Question The Hegel that is most known to Africa is the one that dismissed our continent as a land of childhood without history, reason, or godliness, and lying totally outside the realm of world history and civilization. This Hegel is rightly accused of providing the intellectual justification for Europe’s later imperial seizure of Africa. Yet in the same book namely, The Philosophy of History, in which Hegel had set Africa up for colonization, he had also provided not only the reasons why Africa needed to be brought out of isolation into history but also the philosophical framework for relativizing the violence, brutalities, and exactions that had to be employed in executing the mission of bringing Africa into what he called “the theatre of world history.” Through his great idea called the “cunning of reason”2 in history, Hegel (2001, 47) saw into and theorized the extra-moral rationality that drives major world-historical actions. By this same concept, he sought to understand and come to terms with some of the paradoxes that drive the course of world history and dictate historical changes. He noted that great transformative actions are always initiated by the selfish passions for self-aggrandizement of world-historical leaders or peoples. But then these actions and their results are then captured by what he calls “world reason,” that is, supra-rational forces beyond the knowledge and comprehension of actors, used to accomplish goals that are higher than and different from the selfish calculations of their initiators. Through the idea of the cunning of history, Hegel had sought to explain the rationality of world-historical events by removing them from the sphere of what he terms “school master morality” (Hegel 2001) which is operative in our daily lives, to the sphere of what he calls “world reason” which operates supra-morally and cunningly by using the selfish passions of men to effect beneficial historical change. Colonization more than any other event in the world can be said to constitute the Hegelian world-historical event par excellence. How did the cunning of history manifest in the colonization of Africa? Europe, in taking on Hegel’s challenge a few decades after his death, was mostly interested in annexing the Dark Continent for its selfish commercial profits and political self-aggrandizement. But in African colonization, world history also cunningly operated through the very egoism, violence, and exactions of the conquerors, the traders, the administrators, to achieve an inner purpose different from and higher than the selfish calculations of the operators. That higher purpose I believe was none other than lifting Africa from millennial anthropological isolation and connecting her with the rest of humanity, or in Hegel’s terms, world history. Rereading colonization from Hegel’s supra-moral perspective of the cunning of history seems to induce a quantum intellectual leap, from our ingrained view of colonization as absolute evil, to a new position that makes it not too difficult for the colonized not only to grasp the inner redemptive rationality of colonial conquest but also to appreciate the interconnectedness of the negative, violent and immoral means of colonization

32  Denis Ekpo

with the hidden redemptive goal of its overall outcome. For in Hegel’s terms the crimes of colonization were turned by a higher purpose into means of carrying on the will behind the purpose. The purpose of this Hegelianized reframing of coloniality is to enable Africa to rise from a masochistic anti-coloniality to a new, supra-colonial reappraisal of the role and place of coloniality in our modern lives. Contrary to our anti-colonialist beliefs, Hegelianism is not reducible to an immoral justification or validation of the might and crimes of imperial Europe and its totalized disqualification of Africa. It is above all an expanded rationality of world history that both accommodates the wailings of victims and tempers the hubris of victors. Its reconciliatory supra-colonial logic aims to facilitate a healing elevation of the victim’s mind from the depressive depth of impotent anger and bitterness to the more self-empowering perception of the often beneficial cunning of the strange moves of the world spirit in universal history. As we said already, one of the founding and controlling aesthetic images of anti-colonialist modern art was Achebe’s Things Fall Apart trope. For art, that image framed colonization as unforgivingly guilty of destroying the old tribal civilization of Africa. This is because the loss of the old authentic African cultures occasioned by colonization meant the dehumanization of the African, the loss of Africa’s original soul. In our Post-African reconstruction of colonization and reprocessing of its deeper meaning, we realize that although colonization stole our gold, it did not and could not steal our soul. This is because what fell apart was not our soul, our human spirit but the shells of tradition that in reality were the ethnological prison in which the human spirit in Africa was being held captive. Protracted geographical isolation had kept the human spirit in Africa confined and shut out from the very outside influences that would have triggered change and faster evolution. It was actually the colonial cannon shot that routed the human spirit in us out of its long slumber in tribal anthropology. Indeed in the logic of the concept of creative destruction, we can say that the loss of traditional culture, the falling apart of things, occurred so that the creatively human in us, that which Hegel calls freedom, could emerge out of its imprisonment in the hard tortoise shells of tribal culture. Thus colonization was not destruction only; it was also creative destruction, a destruction which swept away the no-longer adaptive old map of reality, that is, native cultures, so that a more efficient and adaptive one could be worked out. The PostAfrican artist, realizing that there could never have been any new creation in Africa without destruction of old things or any good without evil, rises up to appreciate Hegel’s cunning of world reason that had turned every selfish work of colonial destruction and exploitation into the seed of a new and better construction; every wound into a stimulant for a new and faster growth, every loss into a higher gain. With this higher consciousness of the interconnectedness of all things, the Post-African artist can easily let go of any lingering anti-colonial paranoia for he knows that though strange by the standards of our times, colonization was one of those uncanny ways world history fast-forwarded Africa

Manifesto for a Post-African Art  33

along with other continents into the current single global human community we now celebrate. With the Post-African awareness, we say that art has had a surfeit of the doomsday image of colonization caricatured as nothing else but the falling apart of things, the cultural bomb, the iron in the soul, etc. The decolonial imperative is to not become who we are by dint of our colonial experience and mode of entry into modernity but to decolonize our minds, our art, and our cultures so that we can live and create as if we had never been colonized. This is the ideal canvassed by Ngugi’s re-membering of the colonially dismembered Africa, restoring its precolonial ontological wholeness. The cardinal danger of the anti-colonalist fixation has been the misrecognition and unconscious disavowal of the real nature and source of our modern powers. Tradition with its alleged ancestral wholeness is not the source of our best human capacities. At best, they only hold these capacities in check. The source of modern human capacities is the unbounded creative freedom of the human spirit which colonization, by breaking up the hard shells of millennial traditions, had perhaps inadvertently helped us to recognize and bring out. Afrophilia had shielded us almost completely from knowledge of the reverse side of the anti-colonalist single story; it is not the slaying of the colonial shadow in our lives so that we can return to a pristine precolonial wholeness; it is rather the continuous disconnection from the very mental and cultural channels through which we can become that which we most wish to be, namely competent, creative co-producers of global prosperity and peace. The point I am making here is that so much of Africa’s modern capacities and creative possibilities have been locked up in the so-called coloniality shadows, especially through the masochistic battles to decolonize our minds and arts. In Post-Africanism, we do not decolonize; we confront imperialism with a view to integrating its core human and social evolutionary message while expelling its unusable poisons like racism and world wars. However, in Post-Africanism, we are not defending colonization; we are saying that coloniality being the fate of the modern world, we have little choice but to love our colonial fate in spite of all, not because it is what we would have wished for but because it is all that world history brought upon us (and on virtually all non-European peoples) and it cannot now be otherwise. Above all, we practice amor fati toward the prior coloniality of the modern world because it is the only way for us to reclaim all our modern creative and world-transformational human capacities. Acceptance and willing leveraging of the colonial fate and love of it appears to be the condition for not only a productive cultural health of modern peoples but also the basis of growth and expansion. Those who still hang on to an anti-colonialist interpretation of the global world are the pathetic losers, the dupe and game of the global world process. All the hitherto counter-colonial paths that Africa took have so far taken her to conditions which in many places are often far worse than colonization. But as said earlier, we do not defend colonization; we are attacking the crippling and selfdisempowering role of the persistence of the anti-colonial paranoia in art and

34  Denis Ekpo

life. We are saying that what you lose when you create only as an anti-colonialist or Afrophiliac decolonialist is the full complement of your modern capacities, that is, the infinite powers of your universal human vocation. This is to say that, in reality, anti-colonialism in art has really so far not done art or the artist much good. Apart from assuaging vague imaginary thirst for vengeance, obsessing over coloniality only aggravates the artist’s cultural impotence by putting him in a permanent state of resentment. In other words, the state of resentment, that is, impotent vengefulness, does nothing but continually poison and diminish the imagination and worldview of the artist. Although we know that this is the state in which the bulk of modern/contemporary art is created and talked about in Africa, we also know that this is not the only or the best state for creating and talking about art; indeed we make bold to say that the state of anti-colonial resentment is antithetical to the condition for actualizing the best creative potential of modern Africa. By remaining stuck in the anti-colonial/decolonial mode, art and culture have resisted and continue to resist and oppose the conditions for the coming of age of a fully rational modern Africa. Post-anti-colonial art signals the reinstatement of Africa onto the path of rational cultural evolution. Hence the first major anti-colonial burden that must fall off the aesthetic preoccupation of Africa is this crippling anxiety over colonial influence, this cognitive dissonance of swimming in colonial influence while doing everything possible to deny it. For Post-African art there is no room for such unhealthy self-deception. All cultures grow by borrowing from other cultures. Then there is the undeniable positivity of colonial borrowings. For the African artist, I think that the issue is not what we took from colonial culture but how to convert such cultural debts into sources of new cultural profits for Africa. An African artist may feel that he is handicapped by his cultural indebtedness to colonial Europe and therefore may want to conjure it away mostly by resorting to self-deceptive tricks. In other words, he is destroyed by a depressive sense of an unwanted indebtedness. To us cultural debt only becomes bad debt, a burden when you have not been able to turn it into resources for new, better, and stronger internal cultural growth. In that case you only make a scapegoat of colonization so that you won’t assume responsibility for your failures. What the new art demands is freedom from anti-colonial ressentiment and nativistic narcissism. A mind freed from these cross-cultural burdens automatically gets back into a new state of cultural health that knows how to turn the wounds of the past into stimulants for faster evolutionary change. With cultural health restored, the artist’s imagination has been put back on the road of evolutionary cultural clarity. Cultural clarity is about knowing what kind of art is most needed to put Africa back on the path of progress since going backward to magic or marking time in the sicknesses and indigestions of postcolonial hybridity are no longer viable choices for Africa.

Modernity in Post-African Art Hitherto modernity has served as the unwanted shadow against which African art sought to thrive. The critique of Eurocentric/colonialist darker side of

Manifesto for a Post-African Art  35

modernity has been the staple of postcolonial art discourse. Modernity has been variously framed as the iron in the soul of the native, a stone in our crosscultural digestive system, or the White man’s thing. Even African modernism after borrowing European modernist techniques and other trappings still turns around to frame modernity as an ontological foreignness whose colonial shadow is still a threat to Africa’s authenticity. Hence the drive toward an African modernity as a counter-force to the dominance of Eurocentric modernity. In Post-Africanism we dismiss the idea of an African modernity as a dangerous and self-harming fraud. What is the state of modernity in Africa today? Two words can adequately describe it, namely disorder and monstrosity. This is because what remains of modernity is nothing but the super-imposition of modern institutions and their language games upon still largely tribal lifeworlds and minds. In the cities, the irrationally hybridized or neo-traditional mentalities that drive the so-called African modernity conduce mostly to modern life (especially as politics) as a perpetual chaos of incapacitating muddles and incongruities without end. Modernism in the West arose as a response in one way or another to the sociocultural state of modernity in Europe, whether as a rejection of it or as an exploration of the repressed darker forces in it. Similarly, modernism in Africa should ideally mirror in one form or another, the monstrous state of modernity in Africa. Rather than modern art attending to the many maladies and monstrosities of African modernity, the artists are busy concocting decolonized ethnicities and reconstituting modernist shrines to the exoticist delectation of the Western art world. To stem the tide of degeneration of the modern artistic imagination, we say that the artist must return to a more evolutionarily grammatical idea of modernity by shunning African modernity/modernism. We think that the artist who has freed himself from anti-colonial paranoia must endeavor to make the so-called Eurocentric modernity home again. What stood in the way of our full identification with modernity was the series of aesthetically generated formulas that artists had internalized. Apart from Ngugi’s cultural bomb image, Senghor had stated that Reason is Hellenist while Emotion is African. Modernity has since then been construed as the home of colonial violence and vandalism whose moral impurities are precisely what an authentic Africanity should free itself from. Hence, modern art and culture in Africa has been trying to grow by purifying itself of the colonialist impurities of modernity. Decolonizing art and culture is mostly removing from them all traces of the imperial worldview that indwell borrowed techniques and forms. Thus in art and social theory just as in development strategies, Africa has been trying to modernize and grow without any trace of imperialism and its globalizing vehicle, capitalism. But doing so is like a seed trying to grow without soil. Today, anti-capitalism and anti-globalization constitute the central plank of the political agenda of some contemporary artists. While such anti-modernity slogans may continue to assuage victimly resentment in the artist, it is good to also realize how counter-productive they are for they are busy removing the cultural

36  Denis Ekpo

soil that Africa needs to grow from and lift itself out of poverty and smallness. In Post-Africanism we reason that coloniality, capitalism, globalization, along with the scientific worldview that drives them, being the soil of modernity, we cannot really grow without them but just like plants need rotten materials as manure in the soil, we need those very colonialist/capitalist impurities of modernity as soil and manure. Our art so far has been surviving in the barren soil of the artificially created ontological difference between Africa and Europe, tradition and modernity, etc. In the Post-African new art consciousness, the ontological difference is dismantled. We do not try to solve modernity’s lingering cross-cultural dilemmas the way postcolonial theory does by hanging impotent ambivalences, hybridities, and in-between spaces over them. We dissolve such dilemmas by showing the way to evolve beyond them, including by integrating their apparent evils into a higher growth consciousness. For instance, reason and emotion are no less African than they are European or Asian. Both are modalities of the human consciousness in different stages of human evolution. Modernity is what is left of tradition after a successful evolutionary break with the rule of myth and magic, while tradition is unevolved modernity or modernity still imprisoned in the magic-mythic state of consciousness. In PostAfricanism we show that we do not need hybridities, double consciousness, or in-between spaces as solutions to postcolonial insecurities, for contrary to postcolonial theory, hybridities, double consciousness are not willed postcolonial virtues but are instances of evolutionary mismatch between two or more incompatible states of human consciousness. They result mostly from incomplete or irrational or arrested dominance of the truly rational-scientific modern consciousness. These conditions which we now celebrate as postcolonial virtues only lead to the constant jamming of incompatible evolutionary signals in the brain. Hence, they are the source of the permanent state of chaos and disorder that desolates postcolonial Africa, sometimes making it look, especially in a place like Nigeria, like a quarter-modernized giant madhouse. Art should stop spreading flowers on them or using them as cultural manure. The question is why should art in Africa now make modernity rather than tradition home? Modernity is the state in which the inherent creative capacities of man are best activated and harnessed. Tradition is the state in which those same capacities remain mostly locked up leading to poverty, ignorance, and often, the absence of humaneness. Modernity is actually the only soil in which modern Africa can grow and achieve its universal human potential. Tradition represents that which we fall back on or resort to when we repeatedly fail to modernize and develop, that is, when we have given up on growth and prosperity powered by reason and science. The transition from tradition to modernity does not mean leaving one’s native culture into an alien one but an evolutionary change or shift to a form of life in which man best captures and flourishes in what Friedrich Nietzsche (1968, 539) terms “the eternal fruitfulness of life.” When the African artist appreciates not only the infinite human resources embedded in the modern state of consciousness but also the crucial fact that these resources belong neither exclusively to Europe nor to any other

Manifesto for a Post-African Art  37

people but are the common property of the species, then African art should end all adversary relationship with modernity. Modernity is not the White man’s thing alone for we are joint-heirs to its riches and challenges. When we understand this, art in Africa, rather than jump blindly and superficially to a copycat Picassoistic modernism should be more open to explore and harness the other richer resources of cultural and artistic modernity especially those that can enable it to make itself more relevant to Africa and global humanity as a whole. Truly modern art in Africa – as opposed to merely modernist imitations – will serve not only to release so many stale Afrophiliac as well as anti-colonial emotions but, above all, hasten the emergence of a true PostAfrican creative freedom. What is the Post-African freedom and how does art incarnate it?

Art and Post-African Freedom The problem before Post-African art after the eclipse of Afrophilia and anticolonial paranoia is, how will human experience – in culture, politics, or development – be mapped? How will art be reconfigured so that it can either initiate or accompany the reimagination and re-mapping of human experience in a post-Afrocentric Africa? In other words, how can art make palpable in stone, wood, paint, theatre, movie, song and dance, etc., the new Post-African way of seeing, thinking, feeling, and doing? The artist must first discover for himself what can be described as the Post-African creative freedom. As Hegel (2001, 33) put it, “[t]he history of the world is none other than the progress of the consciousness of freedom.” This freedom can be described in many ways but the core of this new creative consciousness involves the following: recovery of lost or wasted creative energies (i.e., energies hitherto invested in negative identitarian aesthetic pursuits), recovery of his universal human evolutionary impulses lost during the ordeal to reduce his imagination to the limits of his Africanness, re-owning the universal he had hitherto expelled from his Afrophiliac imagination, etc. In place of the image of the African as a modern native, Post-Africanism has discovered an infinitely more potent and transformational image of Africa and of the African. The Post-African is the universal man who had hitherto misunderstood himself by sacrificing his higher, universal human attributes to the false comforts and ontological security of living and showing up in the modern world as a neo-tribesman. That one should learn to hate this neo-tribesman, this involuntary dwarfing of man in Africa by learning to do unAfrican things, think unAfrican thoughts, is the object of the Post-African ideal not only in art but in life. In Post-African expressive art and theory, we have emancipated ourselves from all the performance anxieties and concealed fears and inferiority complexes that unconsciously drove pan-Africa to do things and show up in ways often most harmful to our deepest desire for progress, prosperity, and peace. The pursuit of a cultural self-sufficiency, the disdain for apprenticeship and mentorship are not marks of freedom and strength of character but the masking

38  Denis Ekpo

of inferiority complex. As already noted, art in the Afrophiliac regime was art in the service of regression, of shrinking back into archaic ancestral shells of being. Art was therefore an anti-life force, life as Nietzsche tells us is “will to power,” to expansion and ceaseless growth. In the arena of Post-African freedom, art is reconfigured into a force of life, of ascending life. Therefore, in the light of the new concept, we are not reducible to Africanity; we are not our Africanity, for we also are the world, we carry the universe within us. Accordingly, Post-African freedom is the freedom that is bestowed by enlarged self- and world consciousness which then leads to creation from free choice rather than from the acquired unconscious Afrophiliac programming. It is the freedom to pick, choose, and use materials and resources from any part of the world, provided what is borrowed is relevant to our goals. Indeed, the mark of the genuine sense of universal freedom of the artist is his ability and readiness to use a tool, a skill from anywhere without inferiority complex. It stems from the awareness that whatever that is good, useful, and great invented by men anywhere in the world belongs to the human species as a whole; it does not belong exclusively to the culture that invented it; it is the common property of the species, for it is the working out of a universal software biologically installed in the human species. Hence the greatest creative freedom and fruitfulness, from the Post-African point of view, does not come from the ever ingenious twist of antagonistic, resistant, or decolonizing conception of art but from the conscious and dignified submission to the principles and forces of our uninhibited universal vocation as enacted and exemplified by the best and highest that have already been achieved by the great masters of every culture. Hence it is our contention that there can be no true creative freedom until the African has attained a much higher and enlarged consciousness than is currently exhibited by our theorists and artists. A good example of this is the supra-colonial consciousness that should enable us to love even our colonial fate and embrace its shadows rather than seeking masochistically to flee from them. When artistic imagination has reached this stage, art will be the free flow of the riches of our universal human consciousness, no longer the belabored victimly groans under the self-imposed and self-harming burden of an enforced separatism from our post-tribal universal human vocation.

Post-African Realism: The Untaken Onabulu Path In the section on African modernism, I had asked if there was really no alternative to modernist ‘bricolages’ in the evolution of art in Africa. In Nigeria there was indeed a clear alternative in the form of Aina Onabulu’s pioneering ‘pro-colonial’ realist aesthetics. Although the preferred narrative is to appropriate Onabulu’s art for early African nationalism or in the words of OkekeAgulu (2015, 40), as “part of the radical works of emergent anti-colonialism,” Post-African theory prefers to see this earliest embrace of the conventions and spirit of European realism differently. Rather than claim as Okeke-Agulu (ibid) does that his art “pre-empted post-colonial modernism,” we think that

Manifesto for a Post-African Art  39

his art represents the alternative path that could have been taken not only to a more rational and culturally responsive aesthetic evolution in Africa but also to a more grammatical transition to modernity. He advocated that art in Africa should first put itself through the school of European realism. As Everlyn Nicodemus (2008, 9) puts it, “he was the first to insist that African artists should work with western techniques and styles.” The realist stage was not only the necessary preparatory school for a rule-based disciplining of the artistic imagination and hand but also the vehicle for the development of observational, measuring, and precision skills needed for the leap from magic worldview to scientific rationality. It is on the strength of its training in new perceptual modes that artistic realism is considered in non-Western cultures into which it was introduced as a “marker of the new and of the modernizing moment of change away from domestic art traditions” (Nicodemus 2008, 9). Had art in Africa progressed along this pro-modernity path first cleared by Onabulu’s colonially inculcated realist aesthetics, art would have served creditably as both inspiration and handmaid to a more rational cultural modernization in Africa. Unfortunately, the Picasso-inspired modernist interference turned the evolution of Africa’s aesthetic intelligence from Onabulu’s rational realist path back to magic and the state of nature, that is, those very things that modernizing Africa no longer really needed. However, it was not really art’s copying of Picasso that was at issue from our Post-African perspective; it was copying Picasso by skipping what I think is the indispensable starting point of the aesthetic education of any culture. As it is said, there is nothing wrong with being a copycat as long as you copy the right cat, that is, the cat that is in line with the vision of what you really need. Artists all over the world copy European art by learning at the feet of the great masters – techniques behind their inspirational beauties and formal perfections. The school of the great masters from the Renaissance onward has more to teach the non-European latecomer than the artificial coquetries of a modernism that was staged as a mostly hypocritical revolt against civilization. However, I am not here advocating a return to Onabulu’s realism pure and simple; I am trying to draw attention to what African art must have lost in terms of rational evolution by its skipping the Onabulu-inspired realist stage. Secondly, it is to look for the possibility of leveraging the newly uncovered Post-African creative freedom to bring out the unused realist resources of the skipped Onabulu path to evolve what I call a Post-African realism. What is Post-African realism? Strengthened by the recovered freedom, Post-African art can return to take a second look at the role artistic realism, that is, art as beauty and representation, should play in the new aesthetics. Although the postmodern world claims to have expelled realism, beauty, and reason from art, the truth remains that the seduction of realism and beauty, that is, representation via the beautiful, is natural and cannot really be forced into a sudden death. At worst it only gets weakened when society has no more serious role for art to play; it then allows art to begin to play with itself, that is, to become modernist and postmodernist. When African art suddenly jumped several evolutionary steps to

40  Denis Ekpo

become modernist and contemporary, it landed in a cultural orphanhood and political insignificance. The irrational assaults on the principles of reason and realism in the major contemporary art practices in Africa are wholly imitative and superficial; those assaults have not the flimsiest grounding in sociocultural rationality. Post-African aesthetics believes that art in Africa still has a lot of unexplored social work to do. Art’s phenomenological public role is still far from being exhausted despite the artificial vogue of modernist mimicries. The public in Africa still treats the aesthetic object not as a self-referential artifact but as an invitation to participate in and appreciate an experience of the world, of life in a particular stage of consciousness. Art still offers people clues to the understanding of experience. However, what Post-African theory does is question the rationale and value of the conventions by which an Afrophiliac culture had successfully monopolized the ordering and mapping of human experience in Africa since the contact with colonization. We seek to break that monopoly over the signifying and representation of Africa’s experiences with colonial and postcolonial modernity. The Post-Africanic force, value, significance, or promise of an art work is not simply a matter of new contents or new forms, but most especially the artist’s apprehension of and engagement with the hitherto misrecognized or suppressed universal source and vocation of human creativity in Africa. However, the world into which the Post-African artist is summoned to imagine new forms of creativity has not only changed but changed significantly. The digital age has little in common with the analogue age of early modernity. Although Africa is still mentally partly stuck in the ancestral world, it is an avid consumer of the devices of the digital revolution. It is in the digital age but not yet fully of it. What should a Post-African realism be like? Realism in the old African art was generally about conformity with old roots, old values and ways of life. The Post-African realism is called upon not to conform to any existing roots but to free its self from the tribal prison of old roots, to discover from the rubbles and shells of tradition the unused splendor of the universal human spirit and explore its unbounded creative potentials. In other words, it is a core trait of the newfound Post-African freedom to create brand new roots, new values, new ways of seeing and representing. It is the visionary conformity with and mirroring of an anticipated liberated future of Africa; the envisioning of and the imaginative shape and form giving to an idea of a brand new Africa. I must say here that the real Post-African vision envisaged here is not what the artist adds to existing reality but what he brings out of himself after the artist has successfully evolved out of the smallness of his old Afrophiliac self and reconnected with his larger universal human potential. In that new, expanded state of being, artistic vision will be more like Michelangelo seeing, from his unfettered creative imagination, an angel in a block of wood and chipping away till the angel appears. Out of the rubbles of wrong experiments, abject failures, and the many aborted false starts with which postcolonial Africa is littered, lies a yet to be imagined, discovered or uncovered, and richer Africa. It is left for the gifted

Manifesto for a Post-African Art  41

visionary artist, the great poet, or philosopher to envision it within his enlarged imagination and then to chip away at the many too many nativistic/anti-colonialist layers concealing it until the Post-African Africa, so that the anticipated better future reveals itself and takes on clear actionable outlines and features. It is noteworthy here that the angel that Michelangelo saw in his aesthetic vision and brought out into physical form was not a modernist doodling or a surrealist anti-art but a reality enveloped in the charm and splendor of irresistible beauty. The new Post-African realism is also about a healthy return to art as beauty and beauty as the promise of happiness. It is as beauty that art ministers to human needs and as beauty it becomes, in the words of Nietzsche (2000), the highest metaphysical activity of mankind.

Post-Africanism Is Not Afrofuturism: Overcoming Afrophilia in Black Art and Ideology in America Although I had set out to reflect on a possible alternative route that art and theory in Africa could follow, I feel that I cannot really do justice to the PostAfrican vision if I do not touch –briefly and superficially – on the reverberations of Afrophilia in the art and ideology discourse in Black America. As we well know, what I have come to term ‘Afrophilia’ did not originate in Africa; Africanism, the obsession with a specific African identity, was invented in the Americas. In other words, there would have been neither Negritude nor the whole cultural-nationalist movement of return to African roots if there were no Negro-African Renaissance in America. We can say that one of Afrophilia’s main migratory routes started in America, then crossed the French West Indies to Paris before landing in Africa proper. Today the legacies of Negro Renaissance Africanism are still very active not only in the Blackness discourse but also in art. The art movement called Afrofuturism represents one of the many radical working out of the Afrophiliac ideal in Black artistic consciousness and practice. What is wrong with the persistence and sometimes even radicalization of the Afrophilia in America? What is the relevance of a Post-African theory for an alternative understanding of art and ideology in Black America? In this excursus, I will propose a Post-African reading of the Afrophiliac underpinnings of Afrofuturism, Blackness theory, and possible ways to move beyond them. The futuristic gestures of an art theory/practice like Afrofuturism could easily make people to conflate it with the preoccupations of Post-African theory. Nothing can be farther from the truth. As I hope to show, the futurity of Afrofuturism is mostly a false promise, a false future; in reality, it is a counter-evolutionary will to return to a non-performative past. Afrofuturism, which entered the American art scene in the 1990s, can be considered as perhaps the most radical, sometimes the most counter-cultural, movement in Black art and ideology. Ytasha Womack (2012) even speaks of it as marking a post-Black era in which art, aesthetics, and culture explore the multiple futures for the Blacks in America. Its combination of sci-fi fantasies with technology would have placed this art movement within the ambit of

42  Denis Ekpo

Western postmodern experimental art if not for the ubiquitous and commanding ‘Afro’ referent in it. What justifies the prefix ‘Afro’ in Afrofuturism is making what Jeff Donaldson, one of its pioneers, calls “the continuum with Africa” (quoted in Wollord 2017, 641) the core of its futuristic aesthetic visions and project of a new Black America. Many versions of this movement abound in popular culture including hip hop music, cinema, etc. However, to get to the foundational ideological core of Afrofuturism, I will examine the thoughts and aesthetic proposals of a few of its originators. A recent study by Tobias Wollord (2017) of the movement’s trajectory from the 1970s to the present has captured what I consider the overwhelmingly Afrophiliac inspiration of Afrofuturism’s Blackness ideology as well as the many shapes of its formal experimentations. He traces the movement’s beginnings to Sun Ra’s avant-garde art and his messianic visions, via his music and film, of a future Black redemption. In a film titled Space Is the Place, Sun Ra materializes the Afrofuturistic vision in a story in which he pairs “his futuristic space machine with ancient Egyptinspired divinities and costumes” to bring redemption to the Black people (Wollord 2017, 634). For Wollord, the central inspiration and justification of Afrofuturism is mapping the presence of Africa not just in the life and culture of Black America but as the motoring force of the imagining and creation of radically new futures for the Blacks. Thus, in Afroturism, it is not just the old affirmation of the psycho-cultural continuum with Africa but making Africa the source of the future of Black America. Afrofuturism is about the birth of new Black futures out of the womb of old Africa. What stands out in Wofford’s account of Sun Ra’s Afrofuturist work is undoubtedly the recourse to an over-the-top aesthetic/political messianism deriving its energy from the gods of ancient Egypt and the deities of the Yorubas. The story is said to end in an apocalyptic destruction of the earth after the messianic hero had successfully rescued the Blacks in America. The themes, visuals, and sense of time have been crafted to capture both the uncanniness and the blurred temporality of the Black diasporic experience in America. To justify the recourse to a messianic visioning and temporality in Sun Ra’s Afrofuturism, Wofford (2017, 636) quotes James Clifford: In diaspora experience, the compresence of “here” and “there” is articulated with an antiteleological [sometimes messianic] temporality. Linear history is broken, the present constantly shadowed by a past that is also a desired but obstructed future: a renewed painful yearning. AfriCOBRA is the name of another Afrofuturistic art movement that arose in the 1970s to prepare the way for the coming better and Afrocentric future for Blacks in America. But unlike the Space-dwelling Sun Ra, AfriCOBRA’s futurism sought to blend with and give spiritual backing to the more earthbound revolutionary movements of Black Nationalism such as the Black Panther Party, Black Power, etc. But just like Sun Ra’s art, the defining trait of AfriCOBRA’s revolutionary aesthetic was, as Wofford (2017, 639) says,

Manifesto for a Post-African Art  43

“the turn to Africa.” And that turn was pan-African in its all-embracing and totalizing sweep. To assert his point, Wofford (2017, 639) quotes the artist Jeff Donaldson: Our guidelines are our people—the whole family of African People, the African family tree. And in the spirit of familyhood, we have carefully examined our roots and searched our branches for those visual qualities that are most expressive of our people/art. This radical spiritual re-bonding with Africa is lyrically illustrated in Jeff Donaldson’s art work titled Victory in the Valley of Esu (1971). Esu is the name of a famous Yoruba deity. From Sun Ra’s apocalyptic visions, the revolutionary utopianism of AfriCOBRA and the even more extreme contemporary versions of sci-fi/technology-aided Afrofuturistic artworks, one could be tempted to downplay or dismiss most works of Afrofuturism as just another form of postmodern experimental fantasies currently replacing all serious art-making in the West. But considering both the spirit of gravity that Afrofuturistc artists exude, and the gravity of the condition of Black America that triggered Afrofuturism in the first place, the claims and ways of Afrofuturism must be taken seriously and examined for what they are worth. What is at stake in this latter-day re-invocation of ancient Africa for imagining Black futures in America? What justifies this anachronistic tiger’s leap into a prehistoric African past or its often sick, backward, and poverty-stricken present in search of cultural inspiration and aesthetic resources for the future of Blackness in America? The answer I think is nothing but the frantic search for new cultural resources for the radicalization of Black revolt against their problematic existential fate in America. In Afrofuturism, Africa is not just the ancestral home of Black identity; it is the repository of spiritual/aesthetic weapons for rupturing Blackness from its American frame and putting it back on the path to hitherto unimagined better futures. Africa is spiritually refurbished and aesthetically weaponized to be able to sponsor the reimagination of Black destinies away from what is still largely considered as an anti-Black America ruled by unrelenting White racism. However, despite radical gestures of rupture with old forms of Black protest art and ideology, Afrofuturism’s obsession with Africa is not different in substance from the Afrophilia that drove the cultural politics of the Negro Renaissance pioneers. To be sure, the pioneers related to Africa mostly as the site of origin and of racial/cultural self-assertion, while the Afrofuturists have mostly added to the symbolic role of Africa-as-native land, the power to birth brand new futures for Blacks. But if by Afrophilia we refer to the compulsive unconscious program that frames art and politics as a racial-separatist Black activity, then in Afrofuturism, Afrophilia has been intensified and radicalized way beyond the tame protest moves of the Negro Renaissance artists and poets. Where the invocation of Africa was only a searing cry in the dark to force Black voice to be heard, it has become with the Afrofuturists the full and glaring embrace of the night, the night of the dark

44  Denis Ekpo

forces of ancient Africa, for use in their all-out rebellion against the anti-Black civilization of America. The rejection of symbols and art of White civilization and the provocatively defiant recourse to the atavistic forces of ancient Africa set Afrofuturism apart from all previous forms of Black aesthetics and radical thought. The outrageous extremism often expressed in these artworks as well as political declarations makes one wonder how broken and desperate a group must have felt for some of its artists and cultural activists to resort to such clearly surrealistic and counter-evolutionary cultural politics. W.E.B. Du Bois had once captured the core of the existential predicament of Black America as the sufferings of a double consciousness arising from the double nature, African and American, of the Black American. This duality – two souls, two thoughts, and the irreconcilable struggles between them – is, according to Du Bois, the root of the Black man’s existential troubles. The attempt to tame the uncanniness of this foundational duality has been the driving force of Blackness identity politics and radical art. The question is, does the weaponized invocation of Africa by Afrofuturism, just like the earlier Negro Renaissance’s symbolic return to it, resolve the conflictual existential duality of Black America or has Africa not been magically invoked merely to mask the impasse or outright failure of the double-consciousness model of Black identity in America? If so, is there no alternative to this Afrophiliac model of self-understanding and artistic production in Black America? Before we come to this fateful question, consider first Afrofuturism’s resort to what has been termed messianic temporality in the mapping of Africa-as-future theme. As Wofford (2017, 634) aptly analyses, “the relationship to Africa is situated on a very different temporal continuum from that which mere history can reflect.” But what I see here is really no aesthetic-political messianism at work but the totally implausible and irrational erasure of real history to make way for a wholly invented African past/present capable of bearing the ideological weight of catalyzing the imagined special Black futures. To achieve this goal, the Afrofuturist artist has no choice but to invent ancestors and deities in ancient Egypt and Yoruba land who can invent such a special future for the Blacks in America. Of course this, from the point of view of experimental art, can be considered quite original but a revolutionary aesthetic utopia like this in the context of the Black predicament in America seems to speak more to the concealed depths of Black existential frustration than to the fertility of the Afrofuturist Afrophiliac imagination. Contemplating Sun Ra’s images in Space Is the Place, one has the odd impression that what has here become creative is more likely the pressure of accumulated anger, bitterness, and frustration. The intoxication of the imagination by these violent and depressive emotions can easily lead to desperate moves in artistic conception and practice just as it can trigger crazy revolutionary action. The improbable wholesale reinvention of a future-compliant ancient Africa could be one such desperate aesthetic-revolutionary move. Anyone familiar with history will not fail to ask which Africa that is here being elevated to a sacred futuristic myth? Is it the Africa whose complicity in slavery is total and

Manifesto for a Post-African Art  45

irrefutable, i.e., the once evil mother who ate many of her children and sold even more for paltry gains? White-washing and invoking Africa for use both as the near-sacred redemptive site of freedom and as the spiritual resource for imagining better Black futures seem to speak less to the intrinsic value of the Africa myth and more perhaps to the state of desperate existential emergency of identity politics in Black America. The Afrophiliac impulse in Afrofuturism might not really express love for Africa, for such love and filial devotion to a surrealistic straw Africa is a romantic invention having no bearing in historical reality. It is more likely the hate for the White America and what it has been doing to them that is here using Africa as cover and aesthetic pretext. It is perhaps the sheer creativity of this extreme hate and vengefulness that led to the forging of an Africa that floats above all historicity. If we remove this anti-racist hate for White racist America and the excruciating sufferings of the Blacks in it, there would have been little need for this symbolic search for and return to a native land like Africa. Africa more likely became the compulsive psychological site for a yearned-for origin and self-assertion only because America had for long denied the Blacks a sense of belongingness there. Africa as original home and America as house of exile is a purely mythic inversion triggered by intense and protracted frustration but which has been the fuel and the driving force of identity politics and Afrofuturistic art. However, unknown to the Afrophiliac Afrofuturist who is fascinated by and enamored of ancient and modern Africa, today’s Africa may not have changed much from the ancestral bad-mother state of consciousness. Despite modernity, large slabs of what is known as neo-traditional Africa remain stuck in the same archaic worldview and customs that hitherto had sponsored slavery and human sacrifice. To love Africa so uncritically to the point of mobilizing her archaic spiritual resources for the aesthetic-political project of Black futures in America, the Afrofuturist first has to erase historical memory and de-realize Africa to the point where it becomes a mere surrealistic straw of his own imagining. This improbable wholesale artistic valorization of a totally unreal Africa has been most lyrically celebrated in the recent Black Panther movie in which a never-colonized or enslaved African kingdom has been able to develop a wholly indigenous technology and lives in prosperity and peace. Here it seems Sun Ra’s Afrofuturistic dream of a truly liberated Black world has been fantastically cinematically fulfilled. Wakanda, the fictional uncolonized African kingdom, encapsulates the deepest unconscious wishes lodged in the Black American imagination, namely to never have been enslaved, to never have left Africa, to never have had contact with White racist America. The Afrophiliac impulse in radical Black art is the most powerful and enduring aesthetic carrier of the yearning for an ante/anti-American freedom. The triumph of this impulse in the Black Panther movie is simply breath-taking. It is good art, the whole world especially Africa celebrates it and enjoys it, but still the Africa imagined here, even as a futuristic fantasy, is not only a monumental experiment against history, reality, and truth but perhaps a compensatory masking of the real roots of the cultural malaise of Black America.

46  Denis Ekpo

Saying this, however, does not detract from the historical cogency and necessity of identity politics, radical Black art, and the depth of their yearnings for an ontological anchor outside the site of their troubled American history and experience. The intensity and richness of Black art and theory derive mostly from this fascinating and enduring voluntarism to rewrite their history in a way that not only sublimates the ugly role of their ancestral continent but also deprives their White oppressors of the right and opportunity to prefix Black destiny in their own purely racist terms. This exemplary journey of freedom captured and recorded in Black identity politics and art from Du Bois through Negro Renaissance culminating in Afrofuturism testifies to the power and grandeur of the Black will. Black Panther marks what could be described as the final psycho-cultural triumph of the Afrophiliac imagination in America. However, what is usually not said is that the success and beauty of Black art and cultural politics may also paradoxically conceal the limits and boundaries unconsciously placed on the universal creativity of the human spirit in Black America. In this last section, I want to examine the reverse side of radical Black art and identity politics by shining the torch of Post-African theory on their common ideological underbelly. As stated severally in this chapter, in PostAfricanism, we make bold to say that the conception of Africa that governs both Afrophiliac cultural/aesthetic politics in Africa and the futuristic aesthetic/identity politics in Black America is not only obsolete but may have never really helped the advancement of the modern universal destiny of man in Africa and Black America. To be sure, the Africanity master narrative had been crucially vital for both Africa and Black America in rebuilding a sense of dignified collective self, especially amid the racist assaults of colonial Europe and White America. But we believe that the Africanity meta-myth, by fulfilling the self-reassurance and liberationist mission, had also largely exhausted its historicist political mission as well as its symbolic efficacy as an aestheticcultural resource for human/cultural growth in pan-Africa. The Africa myth has exhausted its fecundity as the symbolic site of self-regeneration not just in Africa but as regards the Black cultural continuum with Africa rhetoric. Post-Africanism is also a reflection on the relationship between the persistent symbolic dominance of the Africanity myth in art, culture, and theory, and the near-total loss of its efficacy in the real world. Getting hung up on Afrophilia whether in Africa or in Black America might have been more pernicious than previously thought. It is for this reason that Post-Africanism suggests that for both aesthetic-cultural evolution and for human-social development in the Black world, Afrophilia/Afrocentrism must be superseded. We must evolve out of Afrophilia in order to be able to access the greater reaches of human creativity in the Black world. Hence the question that drives the Post-African view on radical Black art in America is this: although Afrophiliac Afrofuturism, a fertile principle of the Black radical imagination, may have been good for art and cultural politics, what are its possible effects on the realpolitik of being Black in contemporary America?

Manifesto for a Post-African Art  47

Here the old question of the relationship of art to life pops up again. Nietzsche (2000) once said that the pre-Socratic Greeks invented tragedy because they needed art so that they would not perish of the unfathomable terrors of human existence. It looks like Black America needs Afrofuturism, Black Panthers, etc., so as not to perish of the stubborn persistence of White racism, economic oppression, and daily exactions of anti-Black police and judiciary. But the same Nietzsche also reasoned that art best fulfills its meta-cultural function when it serves as tonic for an ascending life, that is, when it connects with and draws sustenance from life’s greatest impulse, which is the will to power, that is, the will to an ever-increasing expansion and growth of both human consciousness and quality of life. Is Afrofuturistc aesthetics a tonic for the greater life and better future for Black America or is it an escapist flight into utopia? Must art in the Black world remain the intoxication of old anti-colonial anger or present racial frustrations or must it rise to celebrate and invoke the greater will of life as victory over these life-draining emotions? What here becomes creative in Afrofuturism? Is it the will to a better future in America or the satisfaction of old vengeances or in the case of the Black Panther movie, the futuristic compensation for present impotence? Is Africa or Afrophilia the best basis for Blackness art and politics in America? Is there no foundation within America itself on which Blacks could build an alternative to Afrocentric cultural politics and radical art? In this section, I want to excavate what I consider an internal foundation for a post-Blackness/post-Afrocentric art and theory in Black America.

King and the Untaken Universalist Road to Black Liberation Martin Luther King’s civil rights revolution is usually read as the culmination of Black identity politics and resistance to White racism in America. To a large extent, this is true. King’s civil rights movement came as the final push that caused the final explosion in a society built on institutionalized racism with its many anti-Black policies. However, though King’s movement came as the apogee of Black resistance, the framework in which King conceived and implemented his revolution was significantly different from the traditional Black identitarian narrative founded mostly on the invocation of Africa as the ontological source of not only racial and cultural identity but also of the spiritual energy of resistance against White racism. King’s epistemological framework was based on the mobilization of the core spiritual and intellectual resources of the foundational texts of America to demonstrate the anti-American wrongness and injustice of racial inequality and segregation. Latching on to the foundational declaration that all men are born equal and have equal right to life and the pursuit of happiness, he was able to amply demonstrate that segregationist America was operating against the letter and the spirit of the ideals on which it came to be. What made the American founding document unique and compelling was that it was a product of Enlightenment universalism: the belief in the universal

48  Denis Ekpo

vocation of man based on reason, freedom, and the continual perfectibility and progress of man. King’s civil rights revolution was thus mostly an internal wake-up alarm sounded to remind America first of its gross betrayal of the post-ethnic and nonracial universalism that birthed it, and secondly of the absolute necessity to correct the regressive errors of post-slavery segregation against Blacks. Given the repeated emphasis (especially captured in the “I have a dream” speech) on the return to the nonracial universalist premise of the American Constitution, the epistemological framework of King’s fight could be described as proto-Post-African/Blackness in the sense that it was not based on the usual mobilization of Black ancestry and history but precisely on the leap-frogging of the Blackness racial ideology and its obligatory Afrocentricity. Indeed, King’s model can be read as an implicit critique and overcoming of Blackness identity politics. One of the roots of Blackness identity politics is Du Bois’s idea of the doubleness of the Black American identity termed double consciousness and considered as the source suffering and pain. King’s universalist model provided the psychic and intellectual framework for resolving the dilemmas and sufferings of the double consciousness because it called for the sublimation of all separatist, oppositional consciousnesses into the single universal American consciousness that is already fully provided for in the very foundation of America. For King, the source of conflicts, injustice, and segregation was not the absence of a conception of man’s highest (universal) vocation in America but the non-implementation of what is already there; it is the deliberate flouting of the documented provisions of universalist idea of America by White-ruled America. The problem of America was thus the failure to live up to its summons to man’s highest universal vocation inscribed in the American dream and captured in the founding documents. King had summoned both Black and White Americans to come out of their separatist racial/ tribal prison houses and dare to become the universal human they already are and to which the American Constitution is the ascending ladder. The success of the universal ideal in King’s revolution was marked by the termination of institutionalized segregation and overt racism. Post-King America in many respects has been substantially different from old America. However, the success seems not to have caused any significant shift in the motivation and direction of identity politics and art in Black America. Several reasons may account for this, not the least being the persistence of Black feelings of inequality and marginalization in America. In art, the Afrophiliac impulse and its yearning for the presence of Africa, rather than diminish, seem to have intensified in movements like Afrofuturism and Afrocentrism. The continued dominance of identity politics in art and activism in post-King Black America would suggest that either the universalist message in King’s revolution was not apprehended as such or the ethno-racial pressures on art and culture override King’s call for a non-Blackness route to Black liberation. It looks like what Black America really retains from King’s legacy is the universal symbol of the fight for racial equality and justice only. For it has obviously failed to leverage King’s universalist (i.e., non-ethnic, nonracial) frame for multiplying

Manifesto for a Post-African Art  49

and consolidating the fruits of equality and freedom. And so, post-King art and culture by regressing to ethnic-racial identity has ignored King’s call to outgrow race and ethnicity or identity politics. One way I think art and culture in Black America can overcome its fixations is to return to the un-apprehended or unheeded proto-Post-African summons in King’s message and use it as an alternative to the continuum-with-Africa source of aesthetic-cultural renewal in Black America. What would a Post-African/post-Blackness art or theory in America look like? Translating King’s universalism into new principles and inspirational force of art and culture could mean a number of brand new moves as well as the jettisoning of many old fixations. It would certainly mean the end of Black aesthetics, resistance art, Afrophiliac Afrofuturism on the one hand, and the emergence of a post-Blackness art and aesthetics on the other. Like Post-African art, post-Blackness art will be driven by and geared to the exploration and harnessing of the greater, higher universal human and creative potentials that had been locked up in the Black imagination as a result of both the oppressive weight of White racism and the imperious Black existential necessity to fight it mostly by regressing into purely imagined and escapist ancestral shells of Blackness. It would be a post-Afrophiliac art as much as a post-anti-racist/anti-White one. It will be post-race art because in the logic of King’s universalist scheme, racism will be put in its place: it is the burden of the incomplete evolution of a few elements of the White race rather than the evidence of the corruption of the human race as whole. Racism points to an arrested evolution marked by the persistence of malignant tribal traits in the genes of a few marginal members of the Euro-White ethnos in America. In King’s higher universal consciousness, the God-like creativity of the universal human consciousness of post-Blackness/African Black man lies in that part of him that is not affected by racism and other past injuries. Just as in Africa’s modern and contemporary art and cultural theory, the ideological motivation for the persistence of Afrophilia in Black art in America is rooted in the need to rehumanize the Black man dehumanized by history and racism. It is based on the belief that slavery, just like colonization, had dehumanized Africa and Black America. From our Post-African perspective, neither event had really dehumanized the Black man except to the extent to which we have believed they did. In that case, it is more likely the power of our belief than the events themselves that may constitute the feeling of dehumanization. Slavery did indeed torture the mind and body of Black ancestors just like colonization did in Africa. But neither slavery nor colonization took away the soul, that is, the higher self, the infinite human potentiality of the Black man. Only too much indulgence in identity politics and racial Afrophilia paradoxically creates the illusion of Black life in America as perpetual dehumanization. We think that rather than art and culture being in the service of rehumanization, art and culture should profitably be in the service of the reuniversalization of the Black man in Africa and America. By re-universalization we mean the reconnection to those universal archetypal drivers of human

50  Denis Ekpo

creativity and upward evolution which were partly lost in the protracted wars of racial separatism and cultural Afrophilia. Hence in King-inspired post-Blackness thinking, life as well as artistic creation would cease to be perpetual reactions to past and present injuries but active-creative responses to the call of the greater, universal human in the artist. The artist will no longer bleed from old scars of the past but will use both past and present wounds as stimulants for a quicker access to his higher universal consciousness and to the unbounded creativity available at that level. At the level of King’s post-racial universal consciousness, life should no longer be seen as the victimly desolate pit from which the Black artist perpetually sorrows over the woes of history and the wrongs of other men but as will to power, that is, the ever-pushing urge to expansion and growth symbolized in the American Dream. The liberated imagination of the artist creates and grows not by waiting for injustice, racism, or oppression to end but by using these impurities as manure for the growth of new visions, new forms, and new beauties. There should be no more escape to ancient Egypt or to the archaic deities of the Yorubas for help in imagining and building Black futures. America has got a thousand blueprints for the actualization of what is best for the universal vocation of the Black man. All the artist needs to do is to follow King’s lead and come out of the primitive hut of Afrophilia into the universal castle hiding in his Americanness. Therefore, post-Blackness art will mark the triumph over Afrocentrism, especially over the regressive continuum-withAfrica impulse that animates Afrofuturism. The ominous prefix “Afro” which carries the symbolic power of that negative continuum (and which gives us so much pan-African self-satisfaction) may be perhaps the most ominous symbol of what separates Black America from full integration with and actualization of their American dream. The American Dream, by the sheer force of what it has enabled America to become, represents a metaphysical condensation of the unfettered human potential, the uninhibited materialization of the boundless God-like creativity of the human spirit. But Afrophiliac Blackness in identity politics and art amounts to the endless diversion and draining of Black American cultural and emotional energies from the universalist pull of the American Dream into the regressive neo-tribalist seduction of racial selfassertion and cultural nostalgia. Thus while Afrofuturists and other radical Black aesthetics try to construct global Black presence and futures from the highly confined spaces of their mostly forged Afrophiliac souls, post-King/Post-African aesthetics will embrace the vast openness of the universal soul embedded in them. The core artistic task will be how to activate and cause this higher soul to emerge in new visual forms as well as in novel theories. King’s world-historic example has clearly shown that world-transforming human potential and values unfold and are best cultivated at the frontier of man’s post-native, post-racial higher universal consciousness rather than in the lower depths of our ethnic authenticities. Aesthetic Post-Africanism applied to Black American art is about the willingness of Black artists and theorists to explore the repressed, misrecognized, or

Manifesto for a Post-African Art  51

unseen universal path to Black redemption first detected and cleared by Martin Luther King and to leverage its post-ethnic/post-racial/Post-African energies to birth a truly post-Blackness art in America.

Conclusion: The De-Africanization of Art I started this essay in Chapter 1 as a reflection on Dominique Zinkpè’s untitled artwork that I saw in Mali’s national museum. I had in my mind entitled it “Africa traveling to modernity” because I saw the work as an allegory of the condition of postcolonial Africa, an allegory of a stalled state of consciousness. I can now say that the modernity Africa was traveling to in that ill-fated bus is not a place or a state outside Africa; it is within the mind of the African. It is a consciousness that yearns to emerge, grow, and expand but it is still held back by the seduction of Afrophilia and its seeming unwillingness to part with or to give up its old ancestral state of mind. The Zinkpè vehicle stuck in the mud is Africa stranded in incapacitating postcolonial hybridities. Hybridity in Africa’s postcolonial context is the refusal to give up a previous level of consciousness while moving to a higher one; it is keeping both old and new together in a neurotic cohabitation. It is a bit like a snake that has grown too big for its old skin but refuses to shed it, preferring to be shackled in its movement by it. Like this unfortunate snake, self-shackled Africa may continue to find it difficult to grow into its truly universal human potential. The dream of PostAfricanity is about a different Africa: an Africa snatched from the illusions of a return to a primordial state of full nativity and delivered from the delusions of a coloniality-free modernity, is the only Africa that can be delivered over to Nietzsche’s innocence of becoming, realigned with the evolutionary impulses of life and world history, and ready to step into and harness the potentialities of its universal destiny. That is the Africa that promises; that is the Africa that Post-African art is summoned to either assist in midwifing or celebrate in exuberant anticipation. But what exactly is the de-Africanization of art advertised in the title of the book? To ask this question is to ask under what conditions can art in Africa fulfill the promise of a Post-African Africa. Our contention here is that the Post-African utopia we yearn for, the Africa that will be able to reclaim the entirety of its unused or misrecognized universal human creative potentiality will not come to be unless we awaken to the uncomfortable truth that what is holding Africa back is neither colonialism nor neo-imperialism but Africanism. The second inconvenient truth is that Africa cannot grow and prosper and become a modern space for human flourishing unless it is ready and willing to considerably de-Africanize itself. By de-Africanization I mean the epistemic and cultural uncoupling of the idea of human destiny in Africa from all hitherto theories and cultural narratives that have kept Africa imprisoned in the obsolete rhetoric and practice of Africanness, that is, the African way of life, African identity, Afrocentricity, African modernity or African path to development, African Renaissance, etc. The cumulative experience of chronic human

52  Denis Ekpo

and systems failure in Africa has proven that mostly in the case of Black Africa, there can be no native road to modernity; there is no African path to development and human well-being. De-Africanization means having the courage to draw the only logical inference from the repeated empirical failures of Africanism, namely taking Africa off the life-support theories, narratives, and practices that have kept Africa in the pathological state of a failed and still failing continent. If today Africa remains the only continent that has most disastrously failed to capture and harvest the benefits of colonial contact with modernity, it is mostly because Africa is the only continent that saw the re-Africanization of its already colonized world as the best response to colonial disruptions. Hence it failed to apprehend and leverage the essential creativity of colonial disruptions (what Hegel calls the ‘cunning of colonial reason in history’) to lift itself out of nativism into the modern world process. Today Africa still wears the Africanization paradigm as a badge of cultural dignity and heroic anti-colonialist resistance. But all that Africanism has achieved so far via its chief pathogen named Afrophilia is to have sponsored not just the retreat into a narrow, atavistic racial-cultural collective self or the African identity – but also and more importantly, the forgetfulness of the unfixed, infinite potentiality of the human in Africa. Africanness is the cultural self-satisfaction we feel when we have been able to think and act African. De-Africanization is the awareness that thinking and acting African most often amounts to a self-amputation from our higher and more adaptive human potential. De-Africanization is about the work we have to take upon ourselves, our imagination and mind, and our bodies so that we can reconnect with the lost or unused forces and capacities of the universal human vocation repressed in us but ever unfolding in the globalizing modernity. De-Africanization is what precedes Post-Africanity. It is the necessary preparatory epistemic and cultural work that Africa must take upon itself before the advent of a Post-African consciousness as well as human experience in Africa. In other words, Post-Africanity is the state that ensues after the successful de-Africanization of Africa. The de-Africanization of art is the aesthetic byproduct and outcome of cultural de-Africanization. Cultural de-Africanization is about the massive disconnection of the creative imagination of artists and creators from the deep ancestral structures of the magic-mythic worldview where art in Africa originated and to which it seeks to remain tethered forever. In other words, de-Africanization involves a good deal of disenchantment of native Africa (as well as the neo-traditional hybridized swamps we call postcolonial society) to make artistic imagination ready for and receptive to the lost creative freedom resident in boundless archetypal reaches of the universal artistic imagination. In a de-Africanized state, the limit of Africanity is no longer the limit of the artist’s imagination but solely a stage in its limitless unfolding. If art in Africa has not grown beyond nativism and facile anti-colonialism, it is because the human imagination in Africa is still held hostage by Afrophilia. Only after the imagination has been freed from the regressive compulsions of Afrophilia will art in Africa become Post-African, that is, able to create and

Manifesto for a Post-African Art  53

blossom in the unfettered splendor of an Africa redeemed from its self-imposed tribal fate and reunited with the limitless creative vocation of man in the modern era.

Notes 1 By ‘mounting evils of cultural Africanism,’ I mean the recrudescence of human sacrifice, blood-thirsty rituals, the ravages of archaic practices and customs including widowhood tortures, female genital mutilations, child bride, enslavement of women, and Albino massacre in Tanzania, among others. 2 The term was introduced in Hegel’s infamous book on world history, first published in 1837. Hegel’s theory of history is founded on his belief that Reason governs the world and has consequently governed its history. In relation to this Reason, which is universal and substantial in and for itself, all else is subordinate, subservient, and a means for its actualization (Hegel 2001).

References Hegel, G. W. F. 2001. The Philosophy of History. Translated by J. Sibree. Ontario: Batoche Books. Kourouma, A. 1981. The Suns of Independence. Translated by A. Adams. New York: Holmes & Meier Publishing. Nicodemus, E. 2008. “The Black Atlantic and the Paradigm Shift to Modern Art in Africa.” Critical Interventions 2(3–4):7–20. doi:10.1080/19301944.2008.10781339 Nietzsche, F. 1968. The Will to Power. Translated by W. Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale. New York: Vintage Books. Nietzsche, F. 2000. The Birth of Tragedy. Translated by D. Smith. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Okeke-Agulu, C. 2015. Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria. Durham: Duke University Press. Ouooguem, Y. 1983. Bound to Violence. Portsmouth: Heinemann. Sartre, J. 1948. “L’orphee noir.” In Anthologie de la nouvelle poesie africaine, edited by L. S. Senghor. Paris: PUF. Wofford, T. 2017. “Afrofutures: Africa and the Aesthetics of Black Revolution.” Third Text 31(5–6):633–649. doi:10.1080/09528822.2018.1431472 Womack, Y. L. 2012. “Afrofuturism: An Aesthetic and Exploration of Identity.” Accessed 12 June 2018, https​:/​/ie​​et​.or​​g​/ind​​ex​.ph​​p​/IEE​​T2​/mo​​re​/wo​​​mack2​​01201​​04

3

The New African Movement and the Artists It Inspired The Early Post-Africanists Pfunzo Sidogi

The likeness in the metaphysics of Post-Africanism and the New African Movement, which emerged almost 100 years prior to the release of the first Post-African epistle by Denis Ekpo (1995), is fatefully uncanny. At the core of my argument in this chapter is that the hopes and fears cited by the founding voices of the New African Movement during the late-nineteenth and earlytwentieth centuries and Denis Ekpo’s Post-African vision of a de-Africanized African creativity in the twenty-first century (see Chapter 2) are irrefutably identical. Like Post-Africanism, the architects of the New African Movement, such as Tiyo Soga, Solomon T. Plaatje, Henry Selby Msimang, John Tengo Jabavu, Herbert Isaac Dhlomo, Richard V. Selope Thema, William Wellington Gqoba, F.Z.S. Peregrino, and others, were determined to repurpose the tools of modernity so as to hasten Africa’s journey toward the apex of the modern world. As one of the first Black students at Columbia University during the 1900s, Pixley Ka Isaka Seme delivered his famed “Regeneration of Africa” speech, which became the unofficial manifesto of the New African Movement. The much quoted address was later published in the African Affairs journal in 1906 and I have annexed a portion of it which speaks directly to Post-African rationalism: Yes, the regeneration of Africa belongs to this new and powerful period! By this term, regeneration, I wish to be understood to mean the entrance into a new life, embracing the diverse phases of a higher, complex existence. The basic factor, which assures their regeneration, resides in the awakened race-consciousness. This gives them a clear perception of their elemental needs and of their undeveloped powers. It therefore must lead them to the attainment of that higher and advanced standard of life … The regeneration of Africa means that a new and unique civilization is soon to be added to the world. (Seme 1906; my emphasis) The commanders of the movement summoned every available cultural and artistic resource to drive these objectives, which were unfortunately countered by very powerful racist forces that ultimately hindered the realization of a new Africa. This chapter is a reappraisal of the artistic achievements of the first

The New African Movement and the Artists It Inspired  55

generation of the South African modernists who overtly and tacitly responded to the New African Movement preaching and created what I will term ‘protoPost-African art’. In varying degrees, this proto-Post-African art resembles and fulfills the Post-African aesthetics incantations presented by Ekpo in Chapter 2.

The New African Movement The centrality of the New African Movement within the imagery of the first generation of Black artists who appropriated modernist forms of artistic creation during the early twentieth century cannot be denied. Ntongela Masilela’s (2007, 2013, 2014) brilliant monographs on the genealogy of the New Africans are without exception the most exhaustive and perceptive accounts of the soul of the movement and provide us with what Chika Okeke-Agulu (2015, 3) calls an “expansive history” which will be useful in my discussion of early twentieth-century art produced on the backdrop of the New African logic. Masilela (2013) identifies the formation of critical knowledge transmitting networks such the Imvo Zabantsundu (African Opinion), “the first newspaper owned by Africans,” in 1884 by John Tengo Jabavu, as a significant spark in the making of the New African Movement into a major intellectual engine of facilitating Black South Africans into global modernity. Later in 1901, F.Z.S. Peregrino, originally from Ghana, established the South African Spectator which, building on the work started by Imvo Zabantsundu, sought to galvanize a pan-African fervor within the New African Movement. They were followed by other prominent publications such as Ilanga la se Natal in 1903, Umteteli wa Bantu and The Bantu World in the 1920s and 1930s, respectively. All these forums, amongst others, provided the growing cohort of Western-educated and urbanized Black Africans during that critical transitional phase with cultural and intellectual oversight “that would give guidance and be synchronous with this new historical experience” (Masilela 2013, 175). Using the various communication systems highlighted above, the New African Movement became the dominant ideological compass for the increasingly urbanized Black populace. A fundamental tenet of the movement was the hope that its worldview and political approach would convert the ‘colonialist’ syndrome harbored by the White imperialists who controlled the systems of capitalist modernization. Although the New African intellectuals hated and sought to depose the oppression and inconsistencies engendered by the very Western modernity they converted, their mostly liberal attitudes, which were later challenged by more militant and radical voices (Lodge 1983), filtered across multiple social platforms such as politics, literature, journalism, education, and especially the arts, where artists were urged to “articulate new forms of artistic representation” in line with the epistemology of the New African Movement (Masilela 2013, xvii). As fate would have it, the rise of the New African Movement paralleled the explosion of industrialized modernity in South Africa where the country, through European imperialist networks, “was incorporated into the capitalist world-system” (Munslow Ong 2018, 7). This reality necessitated a holistic

56  Pfunzo Sidogi

engagement, led by cultural and political efforts, between Black Africans seeking their share of the newfound riches and White European industrialists bent on the maximum exploitation of minerals and Black labor. By the mid-1930s the urban Black population stood at over 1.5 million with close to 90% of them residing in the Witwatersrand region (Johannesburg1 and surrounds) due to the gold boom in that area (Callinicos, quoted in Eloff & Sevenhuysen 2011, 25). These urbanized Africans leaned on the leadership provided by the New Africans and political organizations they formed such as the African National Congress (ANC) – established in 1912 as the South African Native National Congress until it evolved into a more pan-African disposition in 1923 – to confront the racist strategies deployed by successive White governments which stripped Blacks of their civil and property rights, relegating them to expandable laborers who participated at the periphery of the capitalist modernization of the country. Through the unintended but subversive efforts of the Christian missionaries who laid the foundation for the emergence of a modernized Black class,2 the New African Movement intellectuals championed the socioeconomic emancipation of Black South Africans, but their success in this regard was mixed. This situation led to a rapture in the movement which Masilela reorganizes into two generations, the first being the ‘old New Africans’ of the late nineteenth century, namely Tiyo Soga, Solomon T Plaatje, Elijah Makiwane, Pixley Ka Isaka Seme, and others, and the second as ‘new New Africans’ of the early to mid-twentieth century such as H.S. Msimang, Richard V. Selope Thema, and Herbert I.E. Dhlomo. Whilst both factions operated under a singular banner that advocated for a purposeful exchange between Black Africans and their White colonial antagonists – who also doubled as the transmitters of capitalist modernity in Africa – there were tensions in how the ‘old’ and ‘new’ factions imagined this exchange was to unravel. The ‘old New Africans’ like Seme were conservative modernizers who believed that change should and would arise without the horrors of violent revolution (Masilela 2013, 4). The conservative attitude by the first generation of New Africans who sincerely and perhaps naively assumed that their efforts to assimilate into and master Western modernity would weaken the racist and oppressive mind-set of the imperialists is exemplified in how the leadership of the ANC in 1914 strategically but, as history would reveal, foolishly, suspended their campaign against the Natives Land Act as a goodwill gesture to the British-affiliated Union of South Africa government when World War I commenced (Gleeson 1994). This misplaced and perhaps naïve hope of equality was transmitted to the formative generation of ‘modern’ Black artists like George Milwa Pemba who also harbored hopes that his art, in the same terms as the failed politicking of the ANC, would “bridge the gap between colonizer and colonized” (van Robbroeck 2008, 219). By the second half of the twentieth century it was clear that the capitalist modernization of South Africa, as unfair and inhuman as it was to the Black constituents, could not be reversed to an idyllic precolonial state and the New

The New African Movement and the Artists It Inspired  57

African intellectuals who were initially hopeful that their ideals would result in wholesale transformation benefitting Black Africans were slowly replaced by more revolutionary temperaments. The Afrikaner-engineered Apartheid regime that replaced British colonial rule during the mid-twentieth century brought with it a strange paradox with regard to the evolution of industrialized modernity in South Africa. On the one end, the militant grip on politics, education, and the economy by the Afrikaner nationalists essentially cleansed any form of Black progress that had flaggingly materialized during the first half of the twentieth century. This aspect is most evident in the decimation of the missionary-based education system that had facilitated the transition of the growing Black urban populace into Western-style learning. While the missionary-led education which facilitated the creation of a Westernized Black petit bourgeoisie during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries was itself not fully benevolent, the introduction of the Bantu Education system in the 1950s created forms of learning that were “both separate and unequal” (Weeks 1967, 12). Paradoxically, Bantu Education3 actually increased the number of Black students in urban schools, but the investment in the actual schools decreased substantially, which impacted the overall quality of the education.4 Problems of high teacher-learner ratios, poverty (the need for learners to find employment early) and as Bonner (1988, 403) terms it, “sheer boredom,” discouraged many Black children from progressing further within the system. On the other end, the Apartheid state accelerated the industrialization of South Africa exponentially by building on the foundations the British capitalists had instituted before them. As the rest of Africa was attempting to unbundle itself from colonial domination, starting with Ghana in 1957, South Africa entered a stage wherein the gains from the mining of mineral resources were recycled and reinvested back into the country. Unlike the rest of decolonized Africa where the colonial-style extraction of the resources continued unabated, South Africa intensified its industrial modernization by developing localized manufacturing, laying expansive rail and road networks, expanding the urban metropolises, and investing in higher education. These gains were of course underpinned by a racist fervor that excluded Blacks from partaking in the fruits of this development. Thus, the intolerable irony embodied within the New Africans throughout the twentieth century was that their Blackness, both legally and symbolically, was the unshakeable barrier that stood between them and the attainment of Africa’s modern Renaissance which Seme had envisioned in 1906. Yet ironically, as members of the educated middle class, they possessed some level of economic and class leverage over the majority of their own people, and in some cases over snippets of the White community. Lucky Mathebe (2016, 92) sketches how this “psychological conflict … between class and racial identity” expressed by the Drum5 writers during the 1950s and 1960s had a devastating impact on their psyche and ultimately led to their tragic demise.6 For example, David Goodhew (1993, 246) recounts how in 1934 Andries Maletsani, a wealthy landowner in Sophiatown, tried to use his financial clout to eschew

58  Pfunzo Sidogi

a pass offense, where he was caught in an area designated for White people without the necessary documentation. However, his social standing did not supersede his Blackness and he was eventually arrested. Mathebe (2016) sees the forced removals from Sophiatown, a mixed race suburb in Johannesburg, during the 1950s as the death nails in the aspirations and self-concepts of the mid-twentieth century Black middle class, for they were compelled to accept that they would never be equal to Whites, in lifestyle or legal standing. These erstwhile urban elites were now forced to move from their relatively comfortable homes into the government-built matchbox clusters in what became Black townships/shantytowns, alongside their factory worker brothers and sisters, and the multitude of unemployed Blacks. For these disillusioned New Africans, exile and/or delinquency were the only alternatives to what they saw as a coerced and subhuman urbanity within the ‘Black city’ of Soweto. When the urban Black middle classes were forced to stay near their less-educated, mostly unemployed kin, Goodhew (2000, 264) chronicles the tension that developed between the Black establishment who were trying to transform the system from within through “respectable values – those with a stress on practices such as religion, education, law and order,” and the radical, mainly youthful, dissenters who hated every facet of the system, including the existence of a Black petty bourgeoisie. Unfortunately, the complicated ‘colonial’ context in which the New African Movement was birthed impeded their progressive ideals from taking root. The swamp of bigoted state oppression, coupled with the capitalist exploitation of Black labor, meant that the wish of a truly unique capitalist modernity generated by and for the benefit of Africans could not germinate organically nor in a manner that would yield the type of outcomes the founding New Africans had envisioned. Whilst Masilela traces the end of the New African Movement to the 1960s, others like Keyan Tomaselli (2008, 131) are of the opinion that the movement “was never defeated intellectually or culturally.” Instead, the New Africanism evolved into the Sophiatown Renaissance. However, Masilela is dismissive of the Sophiatown Renaissance, noting that even though there was an explosion of photography, music, and art throughout the 1950s and beyond, “intellectually speaking, the Sophiatown Renaissance was not on the same level as the preceding intellectual constellations of the New African Movement” (Masilela 2013, 248). Whilst there is a hint of a biased drift toward the literary expression of the New African writers of the early twentieth century in this assessment, Masilela (ibid.) concedes that the success of the Sophiatown Renaissance was the “secularization of the imagination of the New African Movement” as opposed to the religiously constrained precursors of the Xhosa intellectuals during the 1880s and their Zulu counterparts in the 1940s. I would like to suggest that the ‘post-New African Movement’ climate of the late twentieth century, which, through more militant and confrontational strategies, realized the democratic environment the nineteenth-century New Africans could only dream of, beckons the regeneration of the Africa first imagined by Seme, Selope Thema, and Dhlomo.

The New African Movement and the Artists It Inspired  59

From New African to Post-African Denis Ekpo’s conception of the Post-African is a contemporary and twentyfirst century rebirth of the New African Movement rationalism. The nerve center of Post-Africanism is the demand to unbundle the African mind from attitudes and beliefs that unintentionally mire the modernization project in Africa. Ekpo’s key insight is that the political wins garnered by the decolonization movements of the mid- to late twentieth century – for example, the anti-Apartheid campaigns in South Africa – were necessary for the emancipation of Africa politically. However, their freedom work is done and Africa must now awaken to the realization that “modernism as cultural production exists in a dialectical relationship with the geopolitical and economic structures of capitalist modernity” (Munslow Ong 2018, 4) and that the continent cannot realize genuine human-centered development outside this paradigm. I contend that the New African intellectuals and the early twentieth-century Black artists they inspired possessed a cerebral awareness of the continuum between modernity and capitalism. Furthermore, I see their creative production as proto-Post-African artifacts that typify the notion of Post-African aesthetics introduced by Ekpo in the preceding chapters. In a reading aptly titled “Ernest Macoba: A New African Artist,” Masilela (2006) befittingly designates Mancoba as the quintessential embodiment of New African creative expressionism. I do not aim to restate Masilela’s lucid and defining argument, but, in keeping with my declaration that the New Africans were precursors to the Post-African logic, I instead reinterpret the creativity of these “New African artists” through the prism of Post-African aesthetics. In his epistle on Mancoba, Masilela (2006) acknowledges the criticality of Ekpo’s ideas, but concludes that Post-Africanism – specifically referencing the article titled “The Abortion of Africa’s modernity” (Ekpo 2005) – is of little relevance to Mancoba’s art. Whereas this may be the case for some of Mancoba’s later oeuvre, especially after he relocated to Paris in the late 1930s, my counterclaim is that a PostAfricanist reevaluation of his early art and the rest of the creativity of ‘that magnificent generation’ (1920s–1960s) is critical for two reasons. Firstly, in the wake of persistent cries to decolonize South Africa’s society, including the visual arts, the early modernists are a good place to start imagining both a deAfricanized and a de-colonial artistic expressionism. Secondly, while there are some aspects that point to mimicry or, as Ekpo (Chapter 2) puts it, “copycat modernism” in the pastiche-style oeuvres of these first Black modern artists, there is nevertheless an often underappreciated artistic genius of the figurative and naturalistic trope, which was inspired and triggered by the pro-modernization gospel preached by the New Africans. The present-day political vanguard in South Africa, and indeed the rest of Africa, have the historic opportunity of fashioning a fully industrialized and modernized society where poverty, disease, and underdevelopment are bygone problems. The key question Ekpo and many other critics, scholars, and social commentators have asked is, what then is the role of art in realizing this dream?

60  Pfunzo Sidogi

My take is that the creative concerns of the first Black modernists who made art infused by the New African idealism provide us with a credible schema of how African artists can contribute to genuine modernization and industrialization through their images. Therefore, the art created by these first Black modernists is prototypical of the kind of visuals that go hand in glove with the modernizing mission; however, as argued above, the colonial sociopolitical and economic conditions of the early twentieth century were an unescapable noose. Having already determined the theoretical synergies between Post-Africanism and the New Africans of a century prior, I shift to the artistic achievement of the first Black modernist artists. In this instance, ‘modern’ should not be read as being intrinsically non-African, since classical African art also contained visual and stylistic attributes akin to ‘modern Western art.’ Rather, modern should be appreciated as a descriptor of a different kind of artistic convention attached to the advent of capitalist modernity in Africa, which introduced fundamentally new ways of creating and consuming art that were uncommon to the African creatives at that historical moment. The emergence of African artistic modernity during the early twentieth century, primarily through the mission-linked conservatories, was an opportunity for African artists to explore different forms of creative and cultural expressionism, through the use of materials such as oil on canvas, drawing, lithography, etc., which had been imported into Africa by the European colonizers. For the early Black modernists, the use of already existing modes of art-making, such as wood carving and engraving, was not relegated to primitivism, as the colonial cultural anthropologists suggested, but was treated as another tool of image-making that stood alongside the new formats and techniques of creating art – which were external to Africa at the time. With risk of regurgitating contents from the previous chapters, allow me to magnify some salient aspects from Ekpo’s manifesto for a Post-African art. Perhaps the most radical insight relates to the understanding that Africa’s artistic modernism must perform a “phenomenological public role” (Ekpo, Chapter 2). To this end, Ekpo argues that modern art in Africa should transcend “modernist imitations” of Western fads. In a similar vein, and referring to art produced during the latter half of the twentieth century, Elizabeth Rankin (1990, 30) found it disturbing that “the more sophisticated forms of Black art do not speak directly to the majority of people in South Africa who, belonging to the Black working class, have poor educational opportunities and limited exposure to art through a lack of cultural facilities.” This estrangement between high art and the general Black populace is at the core of Ekpo’s critique of more contemporary forms of African modernism and, more to the point, is in tune with the beliefs the New African artists and intellectuals had about the role of art within Black society. This societal responsibility of art was at the heart of the exploits of the early modernists, who hoped that their art would help entrench modernity in Africa for the benefits of Africans. The painter Gerard Bhengu (1910–1990) confided in Matsemela Manaka (1989, 14) during an interview before his passing that “The people around you can make you an artist by their approval of your work. The people far away from you can easily turn you into a

The New African Movement and the Artists It Inspired  61

commercial machine” (my emphasis). Here, Bhengu was problematizing the tension the early twentieth-century Black artists had between, at the one end, creating art for an exclusively White market, which was already deeply hostile toward their art, and, at the other, keeping their creativity relevant to their communities. At the twilight of his career, George Milwa Pemba (1912–2001) displayed a similar sentiment by telling Manaka (1989, 14) in another revealing interview that At this stage, my people may not be in a position to buy our art, but it is even more rewarding to find your own people appreciating your work. My dream is to see my people appreciate my work while I am still alive. (My emphasis) For Mancoba, his art had to have an instrumentalist function which needed to, in the first instance, benefit his kin. Commenting on Mancoba’s views, van Robbroeck (2008, 224) attributes this longing for internal approval by his own constituents to the “incompleteness and insufficiency of his own modern identity,” which is a different way of saying that Mancoba knew that he and his art would never be fully accepted by the White market. Thus, these pioneer modernist artists created their work with a clear instrumentalist intention guided by the New African axioms, and whereas it was important for them to gain recognition in the formal art market for pragmatic and economic reasons, it was of equal, if not of far greater, significance for their own people to admire and be inspired by their images. John Koenakeefe Mohl (1903–1985) who studied painting at Namibia’s Windhoek School of Art, and settled in Dusseldorf for five years, had also tried to persuade Gerard Sekoto, who had relocated to Paris in 1947,7 to return to South Africa in order “to paint our people, our life, our way of living, not speaking in the spirit of Apartheid or submission” (Couzens 1985, 252). Although Mohl valued global exposure, having himself studied in Europe – and I image that he also understood why Sekoto had left South Africa in the first instance – he still felt that Sekoto was wasting his creativity by living and producing art in Europe, more so for an indifferent European society. For Mohl and the New African ideologues, the ultimate creative calling for the Black artist was to make art that advanced the interests of Black Africans.

Proto-Post-African Art and the Capitalist Art Market By Ekpo’s own admission, the most basic litmus test for the irrelevance of much of contemporary African art to the African imaginary is the reality that it survives and it could be argued exists due to the patronage it receives from European and American private and institutional customers. If this rubric is applied to the early twentieth-century production by the first Black modernists, the results are fatefully ambiguous. On the one end, Black artists produced art for an indifferent White colonial market which, besides all benevolence, never appreciated Black creativity in the same terms as the art created by the

62  Pfunzo Sidogi

alpha White artists, who were mostly male. And inversely, the racist policies of the era denied the emergence of Black patronage on mass, with only a small vanguard of mission-educated Blacks being the supporters of Black art. Thus White patronage was a clandestine and, in some cases, overbearing influencer of how the initial Black modernist artists operated. In an unfiltered and sadly rare chastising of “opportunistic” publications on contemporary Black art that were “rife with academically unfounded generalizations and popular rhetoric,” van Robbroeck (1990, 37–38) bemoaned the “reluctance” of some authors to trace the role of White patronage “as determinant of content and style of urban Black art.” For van Robbroeck, the invisible White hand was ubiquitous, in varying degrees, in the art produced by the early Black modernists, be it the altruistic mentoring of a White “master” teacher (evident in spaces like Polly Street Arts Centre in Johannesburg), or the influence of the patron, which was either the church or benevolent buyer. Rankin (1990, 31) asserts that White patrons played the dual function of “promotion” and “exploitation” of modern Black art. Ivor Powel (1995, 13) explains this phenomenon in more direct speech, pronouncing that the story of modern Black art produced after the 1950s can be characterized as “[a]rt made, largely under the direction of Whites. By Blacks. For the consumption of Whites.” There are recorded examples of artists such as Samuel Makoanyane, Nelson Makhuna, Dr Phuthuma Seoka, and Noria Mabasa who were “censured” from depicting European figures by patrons such as C.G. Damant, so as to straitjacket their creativity “towards the curio end” (Powel 1995, 13). There were of course rare moments when Black artists were commissioned by their constituents, especially during the early twentieth century. The petit bourgeois class of urbanized Blacks that mushroomed around the 1930s and 1940s were extremely supportive of art produced by their kin. Artists such as Mohl were central in creating a space for Black artists to trade within Black communities by staging the “Artists under the Sun” exhibitions to circumvent the “expensive commercial galleries” and provide a space where Black patronage could flourish (Rankin 1990, 26). Mohl also established the first art studio to service Black creatives in Sophiatown during the 1940s. Intellectuals such as Professor D.D.T. Jabavu commissioned the likes of Pemba to create their portraits. Speaking of Pemba’s portrait of Jabavu, van Robbroeck writes: “Jabavu’s dignity and civility drastically overwrites the debased colonial stereotype of the savage” (van Robbroeck 2008, 220). Further to this, Black artists also benefited from positive critical art reviews in Black-owned and Black-oriented print publications. For example, in 1932 one of the leaders of the New African Movement R.V. Selope Thema wrote that the purpose of The Bantu World publication was to provide content that would be “interesting and instructive” and “foster the growth of Bantu arts and crafts, literature and music” (Masilela 2013, 21). Thema had stressed in a prior article in Umteteli wa Bantu (1929) that the Black intelligentsia, which included visual artists, were mandated “to create an intellectual awakening which will stimulate thought and set out our faculties in motion” (Masilela 2013, 251). As such, it was not uncommon to find

The New African Movement and the Artists It Inspired  63

meaningful and progressive reviews of art in these newspapers as the arts were seen to be a necessary contributor to the renewal of Africa. The vexing and entangled issues that limited Black patronage demand further articulation, but suffice it to say here that even though Black people bought and commissioned work from their kin, the White-owned gallery system was by far the largest and, in many instances, the only purchasers of Black art, especially within a capitalist paradigm that excluded Black participation beyond the level of an expendable labor force. Ultimately, the fact that their work could not be wholly consumed and become the heritage of their own people – a trend which worryingly still continues in twenty-first century Africa – remains the gaping regret of many pioneer modern Black artists. This regret was expressed by the early modernists who were conflicted by the situation wherein their own people could not afford their creations, which reflected the plight of Black working class. Edward J. de Jager (1973, 21) recognized the significance of Black artists being able to “satisfy the aesthetic needs of their own people and society,” going as far as suggesting that the artists should have considered reducing their prices for Black audiences. At the twilight of his career, Mancoba candidly and with a tinge of sadness acknowledged that his production existed in a society “devoted to the satisfaction of material needs as its first priority” (quoted in Thompson 2006). In other words, although Mancoba hoped that his art possessed the transcendental qualities asked for by the New African Movement, he also understood that the work was tied to the capitalist art market which was unconcerned with the historical aims of the movement. During the 1950s, both Mancoba and Sekoto, later followed by Louis Maqhubela, began to evolve their style and expressionism into abstraction. Marilyn Martin (1991, 38) makes an impassioned case for abstraction in South African art and how it can be a catalyst for the realization of the ‘New African,’ speculating that Black abstract painters “may be the harbingers of our new future – post-protest, post-Apartheid South Africa.” The aesthetic prowess of abstract images is certainly irrefutable, but the suggestion that non-figurative and unintelligible art, in and of itself, can somehow usher mass sociocultural progression and new realities remains untested (in Chapter 2, Ekpo voices his doubts about the usefulness of non-figurative art). In any event, whether or not abstract images can engineer the results the New Africans hoped for is immaterial, rather, it is the understanding that in moving into abstraction, Mancoba and company were responding to the promptings of the White art market and not the aesthetic leanings of their own Black audiences. Since the early modernists produced art for an exclusively White market, they inevitably created images for a ‘White gaze.’ But this does not erase the fact that if the sociopolitical system had been egalitarian, these artists would have created artifacts targeted to and relevant for the urbanized modern African.

Proto-Post-African Aesthetics Although the influence of White protagonists in the story of art produced by the early modern Black artists is undeniable, the artists themselves had very

64  Pfunzo Sidogi

clear articulations about the purpose of their creativity. In keeping with the maxims outlined by the New African ideologues who wanted Africa to become “a new and unique civilization” (Seme 1906), the art of the early modernists and modes of production, therefore, became the unofficial visualization of this neo-Africa. Part of the renewal necessitated the symbolic de-Africanization of imagery pointing to antiquated Africa. Thus the de-Africanization of art in Africa commenced with the ‘new historical experience’ of capitalist modernity at the start of the twentieth century. This rapture between “classical African art” and twentieth-century “modern art” was predicated on the “new conditions” and “mobility” offered to the Black creative, who de Jager (1992, 3) described as a “free agent,” that fashioned an individuated art which was “judged by more objective and universal aesthetic criteria.” In Nigeria, for example, Olu Oguibe (2002, 245) sees Aina Onabolu (1882–1963) as the first West African artist to “draw and paint in a modern idiom” underpinned by a Post-African DNA. To this end, Onabolu’s works were intensely realistic, a creative inclination which Onabolu himself appreciated as being universal rather than exclusively Western. However, Rasheed Araeen (2010, 278) is incredulously critical toward historical readings, like Oguibe’s, which attribute the emergence of artistic modernism with realism, denouncing them as “the facile polemics of the colonized mind.” Araeen questions why the twentiethcentury version of modern realism is not traced back to Africa’s own golden age of naturalistic art during the thirteenth to sixteenth centuries when the truly magnificent terracotta and brass heads were commissioned in the Ife Kingdom for example? He goes on to state, quite emphatically, that the Benin heads “represent a kind of realism which surpasses the realism of the Western academic painting” (Araeen 2010, 278). Whilst Araeen’s misgivings are on the one hand unfairly harsh toward historians like Oguibe, they conversely induce us to see the early modern Black art as a revival of the creative modes of civilization, which, although present in parts of Africa’s artistic heritage – exemplified by the splendid Benin sculptures of the fifteenth century – had been lost to the aesthetic memory of African artists, much in the same way that naivety, crudeness, and primitiveness, a feature of Gothic and Medieval art, had been eschewed from the imaginary of High Renaissance and Dutch Realism artists. In other words, the artistic choices of early twentieth-century Black artists who gravitated toward realism and naturalistic depictions, using Western forms and tools of art-making, was in effect a return to Africa’s own artistic golden age. However, in order to return to this forgotten high point of creativity, the artists had to de-Africanize themselves and their art from the artistic conventions that had prevailed throughout Africa during the prior centuries, a period which can be considered, artistically, scientifically, and progress-wise, as Africa’s own ‘dark ages.’ However, this rediscovery of a universal visual language came at a cost. Among other accusations, these artists were branded as pro-West and antiAfrica, and as Manaka (1989, 13) puts it, they “were criticized for producing artworks which did not have a clear and strong African character in style.” In

The New African Movement and the Artists It Inspired  65

other words, their naturalistic, though also imaginative, depictions of their surrounds were technically and finish-wise no different from European or Asian realism, but more decisively, “The more the drawings looked like photographs, the more modern they appeared …” (Wits Art Museum 2016). However, these criticisms were miscalculated for two reasons. Firstly, because they were borne from a colonial binary that confined the African aesthetic to a particular ‘primitive’ trope. Secondly, these criticisms were undue because they were essentially saying that the Black African artist cannot tap into the planetary impulses of creativity. In South Africa, Ernest Mancoba’s Black Madonna (1929) sculpture, which is also referred to as the African or Bantu Madonna, commissioned by the St Mary’s Chapel at Grace Dieu, is a symbol of early twentieth-century realism (see Figure 3.1). Mancoba solicited Edith Mtomtela, a Black female, to pose for him which resulted in the foremost visualization of a biblical character of significance, in this instance the Virgin Mary, as a Black African. While it was common for Africans to be inserted into biblical scenes as “supporting figures such as congregants,” and whilst Elizabeth Rankin (2003, 90) speculates

Figure 3.1 Ernest Mancoba, Black Madonna or African Madonna, 1929. Yellowwood sculpture, 86 × 22 × 17 cm. Johannesburg Art Gallery Collection. Courtesy of the Johannesburg Art Gallery. Reproduced with permission.

66  Pfunzo Sidogi

that Mancoba’s creation of a Black saint was necessitated by the demographic of the “intended congregation” where the sculpture would reside, Mancoba’s artistic agency in producing a Black saint was a formative creation of the “New African” foretold by Seme and Selope Thema (Masilela 2006). More to the point, Mancoba’s sensitive realism, “which exemplifies the synthesis or fusion of African aesthetics,” in this case the youthful beauty of the Black model and “Western artistic forms” (Masilela 2006) – i.e., the European sculptural tradition – is indicative of Ekpo’s Post-African realism, which is not the preserve of European artists, but is an artistic heritage of humanity. The Madonna was synonymous with the New African Movement’s dialectical position, which on the one hand was a logocentric continuation of Christian servitude and purity, but, similarly, embodied a Post-African mantra of transporting Africa into a paradigmatically modern disposition. As noted before, the physical manifestation of the New African could only find form through the immediate visual references within the artist’s context, which in Mancoba’s case was the Christian religion. Despite their best attempts, the early modernists could not escape the context of their colonial subjugation. In 1964 the University of Fort Hare’s Department of African Studies through the stewardship of Professor Edward J. de Jager established a university collection of “Contemporary South African Black art,” which was the first institutional attempt at cataloging and archiving the aesthetic achievements of the first modern Black artists. Two years later, as part of the university’s fiftieth anniversary, the Fort Hare Jubilee Art Exhibition showcased many of the new acquisitions from this collection and it was during the opening of this exhibition that O.F. Raum delineated the recurring emphasis on ‘man’ within almost all the art. Responding to Raum’s observation, de Jager (1973, 20) confirms that the “images of man” trope highlighted “the African artist’s knowledge and awareness of human nature and experience, of man’s aspirations, shortcomings and hopes” (my emphasis). This fixation with ‘man’ was consistent with the questions and manifestos of the New African Movement which had called for the Black intellectual to concern themselves with the conceptual and artistic engineering of the modern African who has been freed from the dual bondage of colonization and traditionalism. Artists such as Mohl, Sekoto, Pemba, Mancoba, and others who were part of the emerging educated Black class, and had been contaminated by these ideas, naturally preoccupied themselves with creating images that would somehow bring this ‘New African’ man into reality. Regrettably, these ‘images of man’ such as George Pemba’s early paintings were incorrectly seen as being merely “ethnographic images” (Nettleton 2005, 10). Another artist whose work was degraded to mere visual ethnography was Gerard Bhengu (1910–1990). Bhengu was intimately influenced by Herbert I.E Dhlomo, a towering figure within the New African Movement who interacted with Bhengu “on several occasions” (Leeb-du Toit 2017, 93). Besides other types of images, Bhengu was renowned for his near-photorealistic portrait paintings of ordinary Black folk. Although Bhengu produced a range of imagery from landscapes, to book illustrations, his most iconic artworks are the

The New African Movement and the Artists It Inspired  67

series of painted portraits he made of Zulu individuals and himself during the mid-twentieth century. I would like to borrow from Ruth Simbao (2011, 43) and suggest that Bhengu’s portraits “can be viewed as representing resistance in their insistence upon self-identification and self-reclamation of African history and power.” Anitra Nettleton (2005, 8) uncharacteristically miscalculated Bhengu’s portraits as “simply avoiding engagement” with the viewer, going on to juxtapose them with European portrait tradition where “the viewer is confronted by the direct gaze of the sitter, in an interchange that raises the question of which party is being observed.” Unfortunately, Nettleton’s assessment of Bhengu fell on the sword of colonially driven assessments of art produced by Black artists, which cannot fathom that such art can match and surpass Westernized realism. I do not see a major divide between Bhengu’s portraits and those produced by any of the celebrated European masters, like say Diego Velázquez (1599–1660). Bhengu was also commissioned by the Wesleyan Methodist Institute to create a series of murals (1942–1943) which were reviewed in the Ilanga Lase Natal newspaper (2 November 1943) as a “Mural depicting the Nation’s rebirth,” a mantra which was consistent with Dhlomo’s poems (Leeb-du Toit 2017, 95). Besides representations of the modern African, some artists produced depictions of the land, be it the urban, rural, or domestic spaces. On account of the divisive land situation in South Africa, images of the land, produced by both Black and White artists, have become extremely politicized. The prevailing postcolonial critique is that White artists such as Thomas Baines (1820–1875) and Jacobus Hendrik Pierneef (1886–1957), who painted images of Africa as “a land virtually empty, uncultivated and open for colonization and occupation,” contributed to legislation that left Black people landless (Stevens & Munro 2008, 45). The Natives Land Act of 1913, which prohibited the ownership of land by Black South Africans, was certainly justified in part by such artistic depictions; however, the influence of the actual artworks to this continuum should not be overstated. The correlation between the images of empty land created by White artists and the false idea that these lands were uninhabited when White people took them, should not be seen as the causation for the landlessness of Black people in South Africa. As noted above, the ANC dropped their campaign against the Land Act of 1913 as they had hoped that pledging allegiance to the British crown during its time of need would translate to political and economic equality for Black people back in South Africa. As Themba Ngcukaitobi (2018, 3) confirms, the Black educated political elites sought to undo the problematic land treaties through the already fraught “‘constitutional’ system,” instead of taking a more radical, confrontational stance. They were completely misguided. Black South African soldiers were denied the opportunity to fight alongside their White peers during the Great War, and the British-led Union of South Africa Government did not offer any meaningful concessions to the Black franchise after the end of the war either. Due to this difficult history, any Black artist who created an image of the landscape was seen as ostensibly making an artistic-political statement related

68  Pfunzo Sidogi

to land dispossession. While artists were certainly cognizant of the land issues, my sense is that many of them, on both sides of the fence, were simply using the natural environment as a preferred subject matter, as it has been throughout history. Representations of the land, surpassed only by the portrait, are the most pervasive trope in art historical images. Therefore, it should not be a surprise that many Black and White artists produced countless images of the land, because that is what artists generally do. Tladi was of course an anomaly for he almost exclusively painted landscapes and garden domesticity. It is unclear whether he was attuned to the intellectual climate forged by the New Africans. In all the written material about Tladi’s oeuvre, there is little to no mention of the ideological underpinnings in his art (Caccia 1993, 2000; Read Lloyd 2009). Tladi was perhaps the first modern Black artist to exhibit in a professional exhibition in 1929 at the tenth South African Academy exhibition in Johannesburg, which was incorrectly cited as 1930 by both Spiro (1989) and Sack (1988) (Caccia 1993, 6). An article in the Umteteli wa Bantu (18 February 1928) periodical introduced Tladi as a self-taught “genius” whose work showed “unusual merit” (Couzens 1985, 249). In 1939 Tladi exhibited alongside Gerard Sekoto, who was a more accomplished artist at the time. However, the prices of Tladi’s paintings matched and in some instances surpassed those of Sekoto (Read Lloyd 2009, 68). In many of Tladi’s landscape paintings, such as Two Hillocks (undated), references to the land ownership debate are hard to decipher (see Figure 3.2). Tladi was more interested in mastering the representational techniques of painting and reproducing realistic depictions of his primary subject matter, the land. Tladi was not beholden to the ideal of cultivating a particularly African-orientated style of painting, and equally, he was not interested in copying the conventions of the European masters to whom he had been exposed during his visits to the Johannesburg Art Gallery. Although inspired by the art he encountered at the Johannesburg Art Gallery, Tladi was a proto-Post-African artist because his art transcended the expectations and limitations of his Blackness during a period in history when Black creatives were not encouraged, nor it was erroneously believed, unable, to create the type of art he made. Other Black artists like Gerard Bhengu (1910–1990) who also depicted the highly contested African acreage created space for a more politicized reading of their work. While Bhengu’s paintings were similar to Tladi’s work in their stylistic conventions, the mere inclusion of Black figures cultivating “their” land was, according to Mzuzile Xakaza (2006, 39), a symbolic reclamation of the land by “expressing ideals of rightful ownership and its perpetuation.” Sure enough, Black artists such as Bhengu were keenly aware of the political symbolism embedded in their visualizations of Black people tiling the ground. However, when I look at some of his iconic paintings of the land, such as Veld fire (undated), it is reaching to suggest that Bhengu was more concerned with these political debates in making this painting (see Figure 3.3). Rather, my Post-Africanist conclusion is that Bhengu was driven by the artistic imperative of expressing this scene of someone replenishing the land through a controlled

The New African Movement and the Artists It Inspired  69

Figure 3.2 Moses Tladi, Two Hillocks, undated. Oil on board, 19 × 24 cm, excluding frame. The Bongi Dhlomo Collection, The Javett Foundation. © Javett Foundation. Photographer: Thania Louw. Reproduced with permission.

Figure 3.3 Gerard Bhengu, Veld Fire, undated. Watercolor on paper, 14 × 25 cm, excluding frame. The Bongi Dhlomo Collection, The Javett Foundation. Photographer: Thania Louw. Reproduced with permission.

70  Pfunzo Sidogi

fire as sincerely as the watercolor medium could allow him. In line with this reasoning, I concur with Olu Oguibe (2002, 251) who sees artworks of the land by the first modernists in apolitical lenses, instead opting to view them as agentic forms of self-expression that signaled the Black artist as a virtuoso who could image whatever they desired, further highlighting that these artists “transgressed beyond the frame of imperial fiction and expectation of the native.” In other words, Black artists at the time were not expected, by the White-dominated art market that is, to create scenic images of the South African land and the likes of Tladi, John Koenakeefe Mohl (1903–1985), and later David Mogano (1932–2000) were uncharacteristic in their artistic veneration of the environment. It is conceivable to read these images of the land as an artist’s rendition of nature, without any preconceived political overtones. Put simply, their images of the land were no different from the work of classical European painters who were celebrated for their depiction of nature in their art.

Dispelling the Tradition/Modernity Binary In order to successfully rethink the creativity of the first generation of Black modernists in South Africa as proto-Post-Africanists, we also need to undo the damage inflicted by White intellectuals and historians who wrongfully decoded this era of creativity in the tradition versus modernity, Africa versus the West binary. The words of van Robbroeck (2008, 228) provide the most stable foundation to dispel this colonial dualism: Tradition and modernity must thus be re-imagined as a continuum rather than a break – a continuum, moreover, that is not imagined as the gradual transmutation of one into the other, but as a web of constant exchange and cross-infusion that manifests as a rich broth in which empowerment and dispossession are hardly distinguishable from one another. In other words, and as noted earlier, the modern experience should be acknowledged as another phenomenon that was foreign to Africans at that historical crossroad. Unfortunately, when reading the creativity of the pioneer Black modernists, White writers could not unshackle their thinking from, for lack of a better word, the racist logic that diagnosed all modern Black art as an expression of some deep African personality. Put differently, there was overcompensation from White writers who literally invented connections between the modern Black art and African idioms. Elza Miles (1994, 36) fell into this trap in her comparison of Mancoba’s dense use of paint with the application of cow dung in African homesteads. How could Mancoba, an international artist who was attuned to the global artistic fads of the day, have realistically tapped into the cow dung application techniques when painting in his Paris home? Laura Smalligan (2010, 275) is critical of this ‘Africanization’ of Mancoba, writing that it “demonstrates an attempt to see his gestural brush

The New African Movement and the Artists It Inspired  71

strokes as tied not to similar mid-century modernism, but to the ‘traditional’ homes of Black South Africans.” According to van Robbroeck (2003, 173), such “overgeneralization is a discursive strategy adopted to counter the threat of full individuation posed by the Black ‘stranger’ who dares to trespass the exclusive White terrain of Modernism.” De Jager (1973, 19) also succumbed to the anthropological trap of seeing African artists as having “innate and inherent artistic ability” that had “remained dormant over the centuries.” Thus, when de Jager started collecting artworks produced by urban-based Black artists during the 1960s, for him, those images represented the pent-up creative energy within African artists, and not the creative impulses of the New Africans. Selby Mvusi (1929–1967) was perhaps the most quintessential proto-PostAfrican modernizer who attempted to erase this binary. Unfortunately, his PostAfricanism crusade was tragically cut short in a motor vehicle accident in Kenya. Mvusi obtained a BA degree from the University of Fort Hare in 1951, and as he puts it in his own words, “[i]t was during my years at Fort Hare that the spark of art in me suddenly made itself consciously felt” (quoted in Miles 2015, 5). Post Fort Hare and frustrated by the lack of opportunities in South Africa, Mvusi moved to America to obtain two master’s degrees in art education (1959) and fine arts (1960) from Pennsylvania State University and Boston University, respectively. Among several other achievements, his most significant contribution to African creativity was establishing the School of Industrial Design at the University of Nairobi in 1965, which was the first of its kind on the African continent (Miles 2015, xii; Magaziner 2015). Mvusi was the archetypical postmodern African. Even before going to America, Mvusi was already experimenting with abstracted and highly expressive images, such as Many Faces (1955), which was produced a year before Mvusi participated in the first Quadrennial Exhibition of South African Art in 1956 (Miles 2015, xii). Many Faces (1955) is an oil painting of multiple figurative and abstracted heads, clustered together around two birds in flight (see Figure 3.4). The composition is cubist in its personality, while the use of color and brushwork are decidedly expressionist. Although Ekpo might disagree with my position here, this concoction of styles and varied image-making conventions was paradigmatically Post-African. In a lucid and insightful commentary on his body of work, Daniel Magaziner (2015, 271) stresses that Mvusi, through his writings and art, continually cautioned Africans, and indeed the world, “not to obsess over the achievements of the African past, because such achievements yielded insights only into those times.” In other words, the first modern Black artists were not interested in excavating or preserving a bygone African sensibility, but more so in cataloging the vibrant and change-prone urban experiences of Africans living in the globalized world. Instead of oversubscribing what Jade Munslow Ong (2018, 11) terms the “primitivist discourse,” which is a “hallmark of South African modernism,” I propose that we consider alternative readings. A connection that has not been adequately acknowledged in art historical scholarship is that the visual language of the early Black modernists was, to some degree, akin to the type of cultural

72  Pfunzo Sidogi

Figure 3.4 Selby Mvusi, Many Faces, 1955. Oil on board, 55 × 39 cm. The Bongi Dhlomo Collection, The Javett Foundation. © Javett Foundation. Photographer: Thania Louw. Reproduced with permission.

nationalist trope commissioned by Afrikaner leaders during the 1940s and 1950s. The kind of visual purity seen in the works of Laurika Postma, which point to an untainted identity and sanctity of the Afrikaner, created “fantasy sculpture” (Duffey, in Werth & Harmsen 1993, 57), such as Zulu Girl, which resonated with the socio-magical realism found in some of the early work by Pemba and Mancoba. I have used the term “socio-magical realism” to describe the art of the early Black modernists because, although concerned with depicting the realities of the urban Blacks, which were for the most part precarious, there was always an imagined component in their images, which was motivated by a dream to transform race-based segregation into redemptive futures. To define this brand of socio-magical realism, I turn to the words of Nicholas Kramer (2014, 228) who argues that social realism8 has the potential of generating a “Marxist vision of transformation as the antidote for the poverty, inequality, and corruption.”

Conclusion This chapter sought to extrapolate the Post-African character in the work of South Africa’s first modern Black artists. This was achieved by pointing out the synergies between the New African Movement which emerged during the early twentieth century and its contemporary Post-African reincarnation. The

The New African Movement and the Artists It Inspired  73

first generation of Black artists in South Africa were ideologically possessed by the New African Movement to fashion images that would bring forth the modern renaissance of Africa. Sadly, the aesthetic, educational, economic, and overall social achievements of the New African Movement-influenced artists could not grow into its final maturation because of the powerful colonial and Apartheid forces that stunted and frustrated its development. A key insight that can be gained from this is that the imaginative potential of artistic realism, first explored by the proto-Post-African modernists such as Mohl, Bhengu, Tladi, and Mancoba, did not evolve to its ultimate “call to create brand new roots, new values, new ways of seeing, and representing” (Ekpo, Chapter 2). Be that as it may, this history is instructive for contemporary African artists who are struggling to invent styles and tropes which will guarantee that the twenty-first century will indeed be Africa’s century. As a postscript, I must emphasize the historical imperative of relabeling the modern Black art of the twentieth century, as others have done (see van Robbroeck 2006). There is a harmful categorization of urban-based Black art called ‘Township Art,’ which, among other publications (for example, Nettleton & Hammond-Tooke 1989; de Jager 1992), was etched into the South African art theory canon by Gavin Younge’s (1988) Art of the South African Township. Van Robbroeck (1998, 14) bemoans how “the label Township Art reduces all the variety, complexity and individualism of Black artistic endeavor to a single, depersonalized phenomenon which does not require closer scrutiny.” In many ways, the pervasiveness of the ‘Township Art’ trope is a variation of the tradition/modernity and urban/rural dichotomy, which seeks to pigeonhole Black creativity to a state that is non-modern.

Notes 1 At this juncture, it is worth highlighting that Johannesburg was not the catalyst of African modernity, but, through platforms such as Drum magazine and The Bantu World newspaper, it became its torch bearer (Masilela 2013, 27). It was what we would call the rural-based mission churches in the Eastern Cape and KwaZulu-Natal regions where the ideas of New African modernity were birthed. 2 David Attwell reminds us that the mission-generated literature of the New Africans saw religion, or more specifically Christianity, as the harbinger of “the future” of Africa (Attwell 1999, 272). For example, Herbert I.E. Dhlomo acknowledged European missionaries as “pioneers” in several “spheres of African progress” such as written African language/literature and music (ibid). Masilela (2006, 31) notes that “whereas in Europe the making of modernity was a process of secularization, in Africa modernity was constructed through a process of religious proselytizing.” Elsewhere, Masilela (2013, 248) interprets that “this contrast may be at the center of the African crisis in modernity.” 3 Rebusoajoang (1979, 229) emphasizes that Bantu Education failed in producing the apolitical law-abiding Black populace it hoped for, rather “it created instead a revolutionary class.” 4 In 1953 the state was spending $26 on every Black pupil and the number went down to $17 by 1963 (Weeks 1967, 13). 5 The establishment of the Drum magazine in 1951 created a transnational publication which proliferated in Anglophone countries.Tom Odhiambo (2006, 159) highlights that

74  Pfunzo Sidogi “Drum’s significance appears to have been its capacity to initiate, carry and disseminate debates/discussions on the very ‘idea of Africa’.” 6 Mathebe (2016, 92) surmises the abrupt deaths of some of the brightest writers of the Drum heydays, such as Henry Nxumalo who was bludgeoned to death whilst in drunken state, Nat Nakasa who committed suicide, and Bloke Modisane who died in exile on account of alcohol abuse. 7 Sekoto left the country in search for better career prospects in Europe. Before relocating, Sekoto’s oeuvre was dominated by images of the Black experience, especially within the urban milieu. While in Paris Sekoto continued to reproduce similar images, but also adopted “a Negritudist tone” (Eyene 2010, 430). 8 In an exposition of magical realism in Sudanese literature, Xavier Luffin (2018, 246) identifies several traits which are useful for this discussion of Post-African realism such as “cultural hybridity, the appropriation of language, the revision of history, the denunciation of violence and the use of humor.”

References Araeen, R. 2010. “Modernity, Modernism and Africa’s Authentic Voice.” Third Text 24(2):277–286. Attwell, D. 1999. “Reprisals of Modernity in Black South African ‘Mission’ Writing.” Journal of Southern African Studies 25(2):267–285. Bonner, P. L. 1988. “Family, Crime and Political Consciousness on the East Rand: 1939– 1955.” Journal of Southern African Studies 14(3):393–420. Caccia, A. 1993. “Moses Tladi (1906–1959): South Africa’s First Black Landscape Painter?” de arte 28(48):3–22. Caccia, A. 2000. “Rediscovering Moses Tladi: Recent Findings Concerning the Work and Life of South Africa’s First Black Landscape Painter.” de arte 35(62):20–39. Couzens, T. 1985. The New African: A Study of the Life and Work of HIE Dhlomo. Johannesburg: Ravan Press. De Jager, E. J. 1973. Contemporary African Art in South Africa. Cape Town: C. Struik. De Jager, E. J. 1992. Images of Man: Contemporary South African Black Art and Artists. Alice: Fort Hare University Press. Ekpo, D. 1995. “Towards a Post-Africanism: Contemporary African Thoughts and Postmodernism.” Textual Practice 9:121–135. Eloff, S., and K. Sevenhuysen. 2011. “Urban Black Social Life and Leisure Activities in Johannesburg, Depicted by Township Art (1940s to 1970s).” S.A. Tydskrif vir Kultuurgeskiedenis 25(2):21–44. Eyene, C. 2010. “Sekoto and Négritude: The Ante-room of French Culture.” Third Text 24(4):423–435. Gleeson, I. R. 1994. The Unknown Force: Black, Indian and Coloured Soldiers through Two World Wars. Johannesburg: Ashanti Publishing. Goodhew, D. 1993. “The People’s Police-Force: Communal Policing Initiatives in the Western Areas of Johannesburg, circa 1930–1962.” Journal of Southern African Studies 19(3):447–470. Kramer, N. M. 2014. “Marvelous Realism in the Caribbean: A Second Look at Jacques Stephen Alexis and Alejo Carpentier.” Atlantic Studies 11(2):220–234. Leeb-du Toit, J. 2017. “Whose War, Whose Enemy? Gerard Bhengu’s War Imagery in Context.” de arte 52(1):88–104. Lodge, T. 1983. Black Politics in South Africa since 1945. Johannesburg: Ravan Press.

The New African Movement and the Artists It Inspired  75 Luffin, X. 2018. “Sudanese Magical Realism: Another Kind of Resistance to the Colonial/ Imperialist Power?” Interventions 20(2):243–253. Magaziner, D. 2015. “Designing Knowledge in Postcolonial Africa: A South African Abroad.” Kronos 41(1):265–286. Manaka, M. 1989. Echoes of African Art: A Century of Art in South Africa. Johannesburg: Skotaville Publishers. Martin, M. 1991. “Is There a Place for Black Abstract Painters in South Africa?” de arte 26(44):25–39. Masilela, N. 2006. “Ernst Mancoba: A New African Artist.” In In the Name of All Humanity: The African Expression of Ernest Mancoba, edited by B. Thompson, 31–40. Cape Town: Art and Ubuntu Trust. Masilela, N. 2007. The Cultural Modernity of H. I. E. Dhlomo. Trenton: Africa World Press. Masilela, N. 2013. An Outline of the New African Movement in South Africa. Trenton: Africa World Press. Masilela, N. 2014. The Historical Figures of the New African Movement, Volume 1. Trenton: Africa World Press. Mathebe, L. 2016. “Ideology and the Crisis of Affiliation and Association in the Professional Life and Career of the Drum School Writer, Can Themba (1924–1968).” South African Review of Sociology 47(2):78–94. Miles, E. 1994. Lifeline out of Africa: The Art of Ernest Mancoba. Cape Town: Human & Rossouw. Miles, E. 2015. Selby Mvusi: To Fly With The North Bird South. Pretoria: University of South Africa Press. Munslow Ong, J. 2018. Olive Schreiner and African Modernism: Allegory, Empire and Postcolonial Writing. New York: Routledge. Nettleton, A. 2005. “Presenting the Self for the Gaze of the Other: Ethnic Identity in Portraits by Black South African Artists.” de arte 40(72): 4–16. Nettleton, A., and D. W. Hammond-Tooke. (eds). 1989. African Art in Southern Africa: From Tradition to Township. Johannesburg: Ad. Donker. Ngcukaitobi, T. 2018. The Land Is Ours: South Africa’s First Black Lawyers and the Birth of Constitutionalism. Cape Town: Penguin Random House. Odhiambo, T. 2006. “Inventing Africa in the Twentieth Century: Cultural Imagination, Politics and Transnationalism in Drum Magazine.” African Studies 65(2):157–174. Oguibe, O. 2002. “Appropriation as Nationalism in Modern African Art.” Third Text 16(3):243–259. Okeke-Agulu, C. 2015. Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria. Durham: Duke University Press. Powel, I. 1995. “...Us Blacks...: Self-Construction and the Politics of Modernism.” In Persons and Pictures: The Modernist Eye in Africa, edited by R. Burnett, 12–25. Johannesburg: Newtown Galleries. Rankin, E. 1990. “Black Artists, White Patrons: The Cross-Cultural Art Market in Urban South Africa.” Africa Insight 20(1):25–32. Rankin, E. 2003. “Africanizing Christian Imagery in Southern African Missions.” English in Africa 30(2):85–100. Read Lloyd, A. 2009. The Artist in the Garden: The Quest for Moses Tladi. Cape Town: Publishing Print Maters. Rebusoajoang. 1979. “Education and Social Control in South Africa.” African Affairs 78(311):228–239.

76  Pfunzo Sidogi Sack, S. 1988. The Neglected Tradition: Towards a New History of South African Art. Johannesburg: Johannesburg Art Gallery. Seme, P. K. I. 1906. “Regeneration of Africa.” Accessed on 18 November 2017, https​:/​ /ww​​w​.sah​​istor​​y​.org​​.za​/a​​rchiv​​e​/reg​​enera​​tion-​​afric​​a​-spe​​ech​-p​​ixley​​-se​me​​-5​-ap​​ril​-1​​906. Simbao, R. 2011. “Self-Identification as Resistance: Visual Constructions of ‘Africanness’ and ‘Blackness’ during Apartheid.” In Visual Century: South African Art in Context, 1907– 2007, Volume 3, edited by M. Pissarra, 38–59. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Smalligan, L. M. 2010. “The Erasure of Ernest Mancoba: Africa and Europe at the Crossroads.” Third Text 24(2):263–276. Spiro, L. 1989. Sekoto. Johannesburg: Johannesburg Art Gallery. Stevens, I. E., and A. Munro. 2008. “Meetings with Others: A Critique of Multiculturalism.” South African Journal of Art History 23(2):42–52. Thompson, B. (ed). 2006. In the Name of All Humanity: The African Expression of Ernest Mancoba. Cape Town: Art and Ubuntu Trust. Tomaselli, K. G. 2008. “Paradigms in South African Cinema Research: Modernity, the New Africa Movement and Beyond.” Communicatio 34(1):130–147. Van Robbroeck, L. 1990. “A Question of Objectives.” de arte 25(41):37–42. Van Robbroeck, L. 1998. “‘Township Art’: Libel or Label?” de arte 33(57):3–16. Van Robbroeck, L. 2003. “Writing White on Black: Identity and Difference in South African Art Writing of the Twentieth Century.” Third Text 17(2):171–182. Van Robbroeck, L. 2006. “Writing White on Black: Modernism as Discursive Paradigm in South African Writing on Modern Black Art.” D Phil Diss., University of Stellenbosch, Stellenbosch. Van Robbroeck, L. 2008. “Beyond the Tradition/Modernity Dialectic: African Nationalist Subjectivities in South African Print and Visual Culture of the Early Twentieth Century.” Cultural Studies 22(2):209–233. Weeks, S. G. 1967. “African Education in South Africa.” Africa Today 14(2): 12–13. Werth, A., and F. Harmsen. 1993. Our Art 4. Pretoria: Foundation for Education, Science and Technology. Wits Art Museum. 2016. Black Modernisms in South Africa (1940–1990). Johannesburg: Wits Art Museum. Xakaza, M. M. 2006. “From Bhengu to Makhoba: Tradition and Modernity in the Work of Black Artists from KwaZulu-Natal in the Campbell Smith Collection.” In ReVisions: Expanding the Narrative of South African Art, edited by Hayden Proud, 34–45. Pretoria: SA History Online and Unisa Press. Younge, G. 1988. Art of the South African Townships. London: Thames & Hudson.

4

Africanity, Litigation Aesthetics, and Openness to Being Chielozona Eze

In 2015 and 2016, South Africa experienced waves of student movements that went by the name of fallism, with the toppling of the statue of Cecil Rhodes as one of the culminating points. Removing the statue of one of the architects of colonialism in Africa seems to be the easier part of the need to change the face of South Africa and bring about well-being for all. The theoretical justification and the modus for the remaining aspect of decolonization pose more complex challenges. Some see the blueprint for decolonization in Afrocentrism and other similar concepts such as Africanity and Africanism. But what exactly do they mean? If it is true that we are the stories we tell ourselves, what are the moral assumptions of those stories? I argue that the African effort to liberate itself from colonial and imperial violence is still stuck in Afrophilia – an abstract love of Africa. The challenge, however, is to move from abstraction to more feasible steps that can ensure human flourishing on the continent. I suggest a cosmopolitan moral disposition as a step forward, one that privileges human encounter without regard to race, ethnicity, or any other marker of difference.

Fallism: The Last Stage in the Decolonization of Africa In his latest installment of controversial paintings and pronouncements about Nelson Mandela, South African painter Ayanda Mabulu portrayed Mandela as a Nazi (Malingo 2018). This is in line with his assessment of Mandela as having “sold out Black people”; one who didn’t have the interest of his people at heart. Mandela did not love Africa, he claims (Nkosi 2016, 5). Born in 1981, Mabulu does not technically belong to the born-free generation – those born after the fall of Apartheid – but he shares the generation’s instincts in relation to the forces that had held their people down for ages. By virtue of his activism, which seeks to topple all authorities and institutions and institute new ones according to their dreams, he belongs to the fallist movement. To his credit, he has also painted less flattering portraits of Jacob Zuma and other politicians whose ideology he disagrees with. According to Fikile-Ntsikelelo Moya (2016), fallism “comes from the campaign that something or someone must fall.” The fallist movement came to prominence with #RhodesMustFall, which was born of the combination of

78  Chielozona Eze

White people’s insensitivity to the condition of Black people and the palpable absence of vision on the side of post-Apartheid Black leaders. Nigel Gibson (2017, 585) argues that “it would be a mistake to consider #RhodesMustFall as the beginning of the fallist movement though it garnered the most publicity. Each university had its own student movement and each contested different tendencies.” The #RhodesMustFall social movement began on 9 March 2015, when Chumani Maxwele poured human faeces on the statue of Cecil Rhodes at the University of Cape Town (UCT). In mid-October 2015, another movement #FeesMustFall began at the University of Witwatersrand (Wits). Fallism attracted sympathies on the continent and in the diaspora because of its nature as a universal expression of global Black pain. Wandile Ngcaweni (2016), junior researcher at the Faculty of Political Economy at the Mapungubwe Institute for Strategic Reflection, a South African independent research institute, states that students from the University of KwaZulu-Natal and Tshwane University of Technology were the first fallists. They were shutting down their campuses and calling for the removal of the barrier to entry known as tuition fees, many years before Wits and UCT’s social media hashtags. Shutting down campuses is a euphemism for burning down “several buildings” on campuses (Susan Svrluga 2016), setting artworks on fire, etc. #RhodesMustFall and other incidents are to be seen as symbols of the sincere desire to eradicate all traces of colonialism in Africa. Decent Africans desire nothing less. Fallism is by all means the last stage of Africa’s long and painful process of decolonization. Yet, it would be a mistake not to examine its underlining philosophy and moral assumptions. If it is true that we tell stories to make sense of our lives and that we are the stories we tell ourselves, then it is imperative that we examine the stories we tell in order to understand what we have become, what we intend to become, or perhaps even how our stories work against us.1 Since the beginning of the fallist movement a few articulate voices have emerged out of the seeming noise and confusion attending the justified anger at the South African condition. One of such voices is the already mentioned Wandile Ngcaweni. In “Revisiting the ABC of Decolonial Paradigm of Fallism,” he (2016) lays out the blueprint of the fallists’ notion of decolonization. One of such is the restoration of ‘Afrocentricty’ or what he beautifully refers to as the renaissance of the “Afrocentric prescriptions,” which had fallen victim to the colonial goal of “attempted epistemicide of African thought.” To understand the contexts of his theorizing, and with it the premise of the fallist movement, it is important to recall that in the course of European colonization of Africa, over the centuries, the colonizers had maintained a rigorous and systematic negation, and even overt destruction of the African image, values, and worldviews. Thus in 2015 there was a new awakening to the need for a renaissance of what had been denied. How feasible is this umpteenth effort at

Africanity, Litigation Aesthetics, and Openness to Being  79

the African renaissance? I call it umpteenth because recourse to African renaissance or authentic African solution has been the fallback recipe to any African problem. The undying desire to assert what had been denied is at the core of Ngcaweni’s well-crafted explanation, which I believe captures the essence of the many other demands to do away with everything that has a Western imprint on it, including science, and start all over again (Science Must Fall 2016). But Ngcaweni and his peers are actually following, at least conceptually, the path of prominent South Africans, one of whom is Archie Mafeje, whose definition of Africanity is worth considering in detail if only to help us establish the contexts of our critical examination of the concept and examine its applicability today. Shaped by brutal Apartheid racial politics, Mafeje (2000, 66) aptly called Africanity a “combative ontology,” that is, existence conceived from the perspective of resistance. As an anti-Apartheid activist whose obvious talent was denied due to his being Black, he was determined to affirm what he had been denied. It is from this perspective that he sees Africanity as “an assertion of an identity that has been denied; it is a Pan-Africanist revulsion against external imposition or refusal to be dictated to by others” (Mafeje 2000, 68). On its face, this definition is, indeed, natural and without problems. The greater challenge, though, is the nature and content of what is affirmed and what purpose it serves. To be sure, Mafeje (2000, 67) acknowledges that this conception of Africanity “has an emotive force.” For him, “its connotations are ontological and, therefore, exclusivist. This was to be expected because its ontology is determined by prior existing exclusivist ontologies such as White racist categorizations and supremacist European self-identities in particular.” Regardless of its emotive appropriateness at the time it was proffered as an antidote to the epistemic violence visited on Black people at the time, Mafeje’s Africanist ontology does not have an independent existence. The reason is simple: it was conceived in an oppositional frame, which makes it dependent on what is being opposed; it needs enemies real or imagined, past or present. Certainly, there is an abundance of enemies. Africans need only look back at the past or, in the case of South Africa, at the enduring legacy of the horrors of Apartheid. Affirming a part of oneself that had been denied by others, no doubt, has an emotive reward, but there is also a downside to conceiving of oneself as a necessary affirmation of what was denied or as an essential opposition of the other. One necessarily attaches and restricts oneself to the definitional paradigms established by the enemy. Secondly, the other against whom one defines oneself is perpetually ingrained in one’s consciousness; that is to say, as long as one sees one’s ontology as rooted in opposition, one perpetuates the image of the object of contrast in one’s mind.2 One, therefore, is never truly free, but rather only objects and negates whatever is deemed to be related to the original object against which one contrasts oneself. Concerning Mafeje’s conception of African ontology, the White man becomes an integral, albeit negative, part of the African person’s ontology. Sadly, the White man never becomes an equal partner in existence; he is always the evil, superior Other

80  Chielozona Eze

who must always be negated. Again, the sad truth is that conceiving of one’s existence in this way makes one’s existence opportunistic, or more accurately, parasitic on that of the Other. One can therefore hardly conceive of oneself as capable of exercising an independent existence, as a master. In social and moral terms, energy invested in negating the abstract White man is never invested in asserting oneself precisely because one has no desires, and one has no desires because one’s existence is framed via negativa, i.e., what it is not. It is not conceived in the modality of ‘I am X’ but rather in that ‘I am not Y.’ Given Africa’s chequered history with resistance, the most recent of which is Robert Mugabe’s petty game with anti-imperialist rhetoric, we must ask: at what stage then do resistance and its narrative begin to subvert the interests of the resisters? Is the twenty-first century instantiation in South Africa of the twentieth-century African liberation rhetoric relevant in apprehending the contemporary condition in Africa? I argue that Mandela rightly figured out the unproductive nature of Africanist conception of identity and history; that is why he called for openness as a new approach to African ontology. In the next section, I provide a sketch of the history of the effort by the thinkers of African descent to articulate a sense of self that is opposed to what the West thought it to be. I am interested in how these counter narrative efforts manifest themselves in narratives, in novels and poems, and how they have created a constricting framework for African being-in-the-world. I conclude by discussing openness to being as a way out of the bog of Africanity discourse.

Counter Narrative, Litigation Aesthetics, and Afrophilia The effort to reconstruct the battered image of the person of African ancestry is old. It began in the African diaspora, and the most famous example is the narrative of Olaudah Equiano (1745–1797). Equiano wrote to prove his humanity by proving the humanity of Africa. Equiano (2014) spoke glowingly about a part of Africa he claimed as his birthplace and projected African virtues as a rhetorical strategy to oppose slavery, at times comparing his Eboe culture with that of Jews. His rhetorical strategy was effective to the degree that it helped White abolitionists to make the argument that the Black person, whom the modernist philosophy had dismissed as incapable of thinking much less articulating his story in writing, could do just that. Edward Wilmot Blyden (1832– 1912), popularly known as the intellectual father of pan-Africanism, stretched Equiano’s and other African diaspora writers’ efforts to control the narrative about themselves. He was the architect of the Black man’s divine purpose of restoring humanity to the world ravaged by Western science. Blyden (quoted in Lynch 1970, 63) argued that in regard to “higher purposes of humanity,” science, which the White race mastered and through which it conquered the Black race, “is a dead organism of latent forces unless it is taken up by the moral nature, unless it is animated by earnest purpose and inspired by a great spiritual idea.” Of course, the African, who did not master the secret of science, provides that missing link. Thus the Black race derives its identity

Africanity, Litigation Aesthetics, and Openness to Being  81

from being the opposite of the White race at least in terms of being unscientific, that is, not being destructive to nature. This strain of Blyden’s argument has reemerged in different forms in many Africans’ defense of the African community. Words such as humanity, care, and closeness to nature are used to delineate the differences between the European and the African, implying, of course, that the European possesses the opposite of all these qualities.3 Blyden effectively weaponized the unenviable position that Africans occupied in the world by imputing moral quality to the African person’s failure to master the intricacies of science. That became the first truly political picture of the efforts at counter narrative. The person of African ancestry becomes a custodian of humanity simply for not having made any scientific discovery, by grace of his weakness. The African becomes innocent by grace of being conquered and colonized. It is unclear whether this was intended to convince or console Africans. Whatever it is, it took a life of its own among Africans living in Europe in the early days of anticolonial movement, one of whom was Leopold Sedar Senghor. If Blyden weaponized weakness, Leopold Sedar Senghor effectively put the weapon to use in his understanding of the African person. With his notion of negritude, he is to African poetry, and to a degree, philosophy, what Chinua Achebe is to prose narrative. Influenced by the thoughts of Africans in the diaspora, Senghor perceived Africa in contrast to Europe. The European, he writes, is a man of reason, while the African is a man of emotion. The African is shut up inside his black skin: he lives in primordial night. He does not begin by distinguishing himself from the object, the tree or stone, the man or animal or social event. He does not keep it at a distance. He does not analyse it. Once he has come under its influence, he takes it like a blind man, still living, into his hands. (Senghor 1965, 29–30) Of course, Senghor is factually wrong. But that is beyond the point. His goal, in the long run, is not to deny the African capacity for objective thought. Rather, he is reconstructing the African race morally, infusing some dignity into humans who had been denied such. Senghor is ready to grant the European pure reason in order to allow the African the exclusive right to real humanity, which, for him, is synonymous with being natural. He has therefore to dismiss the European thus: “White men are cannibals,” an old sage from my own country told me a few years ago. “They have no respect for life.” It is this process of devouring which they call “humanizing nature” or more exactly “domesticating nature.” (Senghor 1965, 29) In a tongue-in-cheek manner, Senghor turns the table on Europeans who had called Africans cannibals and uncivilized. Implicit in this counter insult is

82  Chielozona Eze

the notion that Africans cannot be cannibals because they feel, they are close to nature, and they respect life. He allows that anonymous sage, a signifier for the whole of Africa, to produce the contrasting judgment about Africa and Europe, morally privileging Africa. Senghor is delineating the essential quality of Africanity,4 which, as Reiland Rabaka (2009, 166) has observed, is understood as “values common to all Africans and permanent at the same time.” Even for a twenty-first-century African, Senghor’s retort provides some gratifying emotional jolt even when he knows that Africa is not the paradise Senghor suggests. Indeed, Senghor’s retort has no truth value to the degree that it has little to do with the African reality. His goal is to indict Europe, and he might have achieved it. His triumph, which is purely emotional and indeed pyrrhic, has, however, established the contours of postcolonial African litigation aesthetics. By litigation aesthetics, I mean forms of art whose goal is not to explore the human condition, but rather to indict (the West) and to invent what is believed to be the true (African) humanity. Postcolonial African litigation aesthetics can be subtle or overt. Overt litigation aesthetics seeks to show how the White man has put a knife on the thing that held Africans together and things fell apart. The more subtle form mostly presents Africa as Edenic. Writers such as Camara Laye (1954) would artfully recreate the idyllic African world in novels such as The African Child – recently translated as The Dark Child. The protagonist of the novel tells of his encounter with black snakes, which appeared in his dreams and spoke to him in reality. His people were excellent goldsmiths, thanks to their ability to learn scientific secrets from black snakes. The characters in The African Child appear like in Amos Tutuola’s (1952) Palm Wine Drinkard, but Tutuola’s was an original narrative in the tradition of Yoruba magical realism. The novel belongs to the genre of what Eileen Julien (2006) calls extroverted African narratives – such that have a different audience in mind other than African. The original French title and the English translation make it clear that Africa was not the intended audience. Camara Laye was constructing an African cosmology that, in his thinking, must necessarily differ from that of the West, one that must reassert the worth and dignity that the West denied it. His goal was to present an exotic Africa, but one whose exoticism must be appreciated for its extraordinary and redemptive qualities. Thus Laye’s imaginary Africa got its scientific truth and knowledge of the world not from the African person’s quest for meaning and the ingenuity to control his world, but from snakes, that is, from nature. Nothing can be more triumphantly exotic. The African Child is without doubt an important text in African intellectual history. Its importance, though, lies especially in the fact that it litigated the colonial narrative framing of Africa and provided an alternative story. It is, however, largely burdened by the need to give a narrative support to the dominant concept of negritude. The African Child explained Africa to the World, or posited Africa as an environmental and moral alternative to the West, and in so doing it produced a utopic Africa, one that no African can recognize.

Africanity, Litigation Aesthetics, and Openness to Being  83

Very few poems have had such a sweeping influence on the postcolonial popular imagination as Okot P’Bitek’s (1984) “Song of Lawino,” first published in 1966. The poem documents the struggle against modernity from the perspective of an uneducated Acholi woman accusing her husband of having abandoned their traditional ways for Western civilization. The first two stanzas highlight some of the core areas of contest in the clash of cultures. For example: “And you cannot sing one song / You cannot sing a solo / In the arena. // You cannot beat rhythm on the half-gourd / Or shake the rattle-gourd / To the rhythm of the orak dance!” This is an apotheosis of litigation framed in a mythopoeic format, and the backdrop of the litigation is the evil West. The man being accused here is, of course, symbolic of those Africans who have supposedly fallen for the lures of modernity. The accusation is directed at them. Guilt, an ideological tool, is designed to force a return to the roots, to Africanity. Other notable poems such as David Diop’s Africa and Senghor’s Black Woman bear the same imprints of abstract love of Africa, the kind of love that the patriarchal Africans profess for women even while the women are denied rights. Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s early novels, such as The River Between and Weep Not Child, were also integral in the making of the world of Africanity. One major issue with litigation aesthetics and the counter narrative it produces is that one writes not in order to understand one’s world, but rather to have the world understand oneself. In much of counter narrative, what is being explained is often stuck in an ideological intent. Every explanation, apologetic as it were, serves to reconstruct the original distorted image. In that process, new unrealistic, sometimes grotesque, images are produced. Henry Louis Gates (1988) addressed a similar concern in his critique of the New Negro, a concept that embodied the African-American post-Reconstruction efforts to challenge the racial denigration of their image. The invention of the defiant image of the Black person, thought to contrast the racist images such as sambo, and infuse life into the African-American self, was necessary given the history of racist stereotypical depiction of Blacks especially during the Jim Crow era. But it led to the production of the equally fantastical images of the Black person. More dangerously it produced a specter of an ascribed identity that cast its shadows over the reaches of African liberation thought, notably in the writings of the first generation of postcolonial African writers and thinkers some of whom I have discussed above. Much of the nationalist literature of the first-generation African writers, exploring the clash of culture, produced Afrocentric images of Africa, which constitute the core of different forms of Africanism we see today in African discourses. To be sure, I bring a sympathetic understanding to the efforts of earlier generations of African and African diaspora thinkers who had to fight their overwhelmingly racist world, hence their recourse to nativist, relativist, and autochthonous arguments as a means to fight erasure. African narrative has not yet emerged from the need to ‘write back’ to the center of the empire and extract some moral fulfillment. Whether it is in the form of Achebe’s (1977) critique of Joseph Conrad in “An Image of

84  Chielozona Eze

Africa: Racism in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness,” his memoir, The Education of a British Protected Child (Achebe 2009), Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s (2009) “The Danger of a Single Story,” or Binyavanga Wainana’s “How to Write About Africa” (2005), the African imagination has been primed to begin any discourse with the premise of Western guilt and implicit innocence of Africa in order to assert Africanity. In that way, it inadvertently valorizes the West and creates a discourse culture in which meaning is intimately tied to Africa’s colonial experience; however, it is only to the degree that Africa accuses or, as Ekpo (1996, 3) states, engages in “ineffectual moral posturing.” Beginning a discourse by positing the violence of the West inevitably defines the parameters of the African imagination, because the African is forced to instinctively defend the status quo, or whatever is thought to contrast him or her with the West. This instinctive defense of Africa is often understood as a profession of true love of Africa, but it is no more than what Ekpo (2016) calls Afrophilia – “a compensatory over-protectionist sensitivity to the image of Africa and the African resulting in a quarrelsome, paranoid attentiveness to any gesture, act or word considered a slight on Africa’s dignity and pride.” Afrophilia, which produces Africanism, is a manifestation of an attachment to Africa in the abstract.5 Afrophilia can be read as a logical consequence of a reactionary and oppositional attitude to the world; it is what remains after the African scholar or artist has indicted the colonial world. Afrophilia is an inevitable position that results from what I have termed the syllogism of pain, one that issues directly from a wounded psyche. The syllogism functions by orchestrating a condition that keeps the pain and shame of Africa’s defeat at the hands of the West alive precisely because it gives the African a feeling of moral superiority to the West. Each of the premises of this syllogism contains an operative concept that viscerally captures at least one central aspect of Africa’s painful encounter with the West. The first premise: the evil nature of the West. What is needed here is to mention anything related to the historical enemy, including Whiteness, White people, colonial encounters, Eurocentrism, capitalism, imperialism, and so forth. The second premise: oppressed, innocent Africans. What is needed here is to allude to any aspect of African life denigrated by the West, such as culture, aesthetics, religion, and personhood. Sometimes, expressions such as Black pain, soul wound, and Black experience satisfy the requirement for this premise. The conclusion: search for an undying love for authentic Africa. Anything thought to be truly African is welcome – the past, heritage, ancient Egypt, voodoo, magical thinking, and so forth. The justification for this worldview is provided by history, as articulated in the first and second premises. The operative force and justification for any action or ideology adopted by the colonized or the oppressed such as the fallists lies entirely in the fact of pain, present or past, real or imagined. In some cases it is, indeed, a cry for help. The above syllogism of the wounded psyche thrives in the narrow world of the binary Black/White, oppressor/oppressed. This binary is a necessary condition of the psyche’s perception of reality, and its goal is to activate guilt,

Africanity, Litigation Aesthetics, and Openness to Being  85

which is more rhetorical than socially functional. The function of the binary is to win an argument of purely emotional value. In addition to the immediate emotional jolt, it fulfills the ideological function to protect the status quo, which arises when the truth of the African condition must be sought in the conclusion. The trick is obvious enough. If history already judges the oppressor and finds him and his world wanting, truth must be found in what remains, and which is packaged as an expression of love.6 But given that this profession of love is reactionary and shallow, and given that it is merely “an ideologically intensified sense of Africanness” (Ekpo, Chapter 2), it carries enormous risks for lives in Africa. People lose their lives in hundreds of thousands. People are stuck in poverty. It is, anyhow, cheaper to accuse the White man than to think of ways to improve the lives of people we encounter daily; it is cheaper to indulge in thoughts of post-revolutionary utopia than to provide daily bread for the needy. There are several examples of this kind of syllogism of the wounded psyche spread across Africa’s intellectual and political landscape, one of the most notorious of which was Thabo Mbeki’s response to the South African AIDS crises. In July 2000, at the height of the South African AIDS epidemic, Democratic Party leader Tony Leon accused President Thabo Mbeki (a Black man) of not responding to the epidemic in a realistic manner. Mbeki suffered from a “‘near obsession’ with finding African solutions to every problem, even if this meant flouting scientific facts about AIDS in favour of ‘snake-oil cures and quackery’” (News24 2000). To be sure, the South African minister of health under Thabo Mbeki, Manto Tshabalala-Msimang, had notoriously prescribed nutrition instead of anti-retroviral drugs as a cure for AIDS. More specifically, she promoted garlic, beetroot, and lemon (le Roux 2006). Mbeki himself expressed doubt that HIV caused AIDS. He accused Tony Leon (a White man) of having contempt for African solutions, because of his racist dispositions to Africa. Mbeki appealed to the history of Black people’s humiliation at the hands of Whites: This racism has defined us who are African and Black as primitive, pagan, slaves to the most irrational superstitions and inherently prone to brute violence. … It has left us with the legacy that compels us to fight in a continuing and difficult struggle for the transformation of ours into a nonracial society. (News24 2000) Mbeki easily resorts to the history of Western oppression of Africa. That history, which clearly establishes him as the victim and Leon as the oppressor, also grants him the right to produce answers, African answers, to African problems. It is assumed that these answers are right because White people must be wrong, and they must be wrong because they colonized Africa. Conversely, African solutions must be right because, well, they are African. Mbeki thus simply reproduces Africa’s hackneyed postcolonial accusatory response to the West. In

86  Chielozona Eze

him litigation attains a point in the political life of a people at which it began work against people’s lives. His reluctance to address the real-life issues of AIDS cost hundreds of thousands their lives (Boseley 2008). Before he finally relaxed his denial, hundreds of thousands of people had already lost their lives to AIDS (McGreal 2006). In choosing to defend the image of Africa, rather than realistically caring for the millions of South Africans living with HIV, Mbeki manifested a particularly dangerous case of Afrophilia. He revealed an uncritical, obsessive attachment to the abstract notion of one’s race. Like ethnophilia, Afrophilia is dangerous for its lack of objectivity in moral judgment. For the person of that conviction, ethnophilia becomes a moral category determining the permissibility or impermissibility of acts. The moral imagination of an ethnophiliac is not concerned with whether an act is inherently good; that is, whether it can withstand universal critical standards. An act is good to the extent it serves my people. Moreover, my people are not necessarily actual people; my people are an abstraction of the community. I qualified Ngcaweni’s articulation of the philosophy undergirding fallism as umpteenth, because to those of us who grew up in other African countries, the slogans of fallism and decolonization rhetoric sound all too familiar and empty. As undergraduate students we sang Bob Marley’s song in honor of Zimbabwe’s struggles. As young African intellectuals we watched with disappointment Robert Mugabe betray some of the hopes we had invested in him; we watched with dismay how he turned the abstract love of Africa into a weapon against his own people, including the genocide in Matabeleland. And thus Zimbabwe turned from the breadbasket of Africa in the 1980s to one of the poorest countries in Africa. His love of Zimbabwe culminated in his failed effort to install his wife Grace in office to replace him. Africanity and Afrocentric prescriptions – which are but manifestations of Afrophilia – are sustained by a relentless recourse to history as a source of validation of the thought that those prescriptions inhere. Owing to the perceived need to confront the West rather than engage with reality, a need resulting from the pain of humiliation, there is therefore a carefully orchestrated pattern of discourse that is best understood as a carousel, a sweet merry-go-round of intellection. This discourse model, the African carousel of discourse, begins with the fact of European colonialism, moves on to African victimhood, and ends with Western guilt (neo-imperialism, capitalism, etc.) in the current dysfunction in African societies, which traces back to colonialism. It makes no difference that many African leaders have siphoned billions of dollars from the government coffers, and have added no meaningful infrastructure or functioning institutions to what they inherited from the colonial masters. There is always a way of linking their malfeasance and ineptitude to colonialism.7 Ironically, the purveyors of this kind of thinking deny the African the ability to do evil, which also implies the lack of agency for goodness. The immediate need for one to prove that one is right and the other is morally wrong overrides the instinct to thrive and master

Africanity, Litigation Aesthetics, and Openness to Being  87

one’s world; thus, African memory is only that of pain and humiliation suffered at the hands of others. In this constellation, therefore, memory freezes the imagination in a condition that produces an enduring affective disposition that thrives only in the glow of a conquered state. Memory becomes a moral and existential validating instance: to remember is to indict, and to indict is to be in the right. This can be addictive because of the soothing effect it has on the mind. There is nothing as comforting as the belief that one’s enemy is evil. It helps one evade the more challenging task of introspection and character building.

Keeping Africa Open Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne has provided an insightful discussion of Jean-Paul Sartre’s analysis of Africanity as championed by Senghor and other poets of negritude. Sartre titled the preface to the collection edited by Senghor “Black Orpheus”; in it he identifies these champions of Africanity as Orpheus who recalls his dead wife Eurydice from the land of the dead with the power of his music. But Eurydice stays with Orpheus only for a while; indeed, she did not follow him back home; she disappeared half way back, when Orpheus went against Persephone’s condition for release of Eurydice and turned to look at her. Eurydice’s resurrected life was therefore destined to be only for a while. Negritude, or the notion of Africanity, which the philosophy of these poets stood for, is merely a stand-in, a Eurydice. It has no objective existence. But we understand that Orpheus was in deep grief, a condition that made him to take refuge in art. Diagne (2001, 21) observes that Not much attention has been paid by the fathers of Negritude to the fact that a leading White intellectual like Sartre spoke in his preface of the poet as a Black Orpheus, and understood the Africanity he expressed as a condemned Eurydice. That is precisely the poetical beauty of the swansong, the “vibratory disappearance” of it. Sartre was a bit too optimistic about the nature of Africanity as a process just as he had hoped that a jolt of anti-racist racism would eventually give way to a much desired equality of all races. He was right to observe that Africanity, like Eurydice, has no objective existence. In Africa, though, that product of litigation aesthetics has assumed a life of its own, perhaps thanks to its soothing effect on the soul, or perhaps the deceptive promises it held. How then does Africa liberate itself from the hallucinogenic narrative it crafted in its confrontation with the West? I am drawn to Diagne’s aptly titled interjection “Africanity as an Open Question,” which suggests a love of Africa that does not rely on nativist or essentialist sentiments. It suggests that there is a middle way between Afrophilia and Afrophobia, or outright Afro-pessimism. This middle way lies in openness to reality, which is too complex to be fitted into neat categories.

88  Chielozona Eze

My central goal has been not to dismiss the effort by the earlier generation of African thinkers to challenge the Western shaping of the African personhood. Living in the twenty-first century, though, and being privileged to occupy a position from which I can examine the logical and moral contents of their ideas, I feel compelled to highlight how those ideas are now working against Africa. I, too, love Africa. More specifically, I want every person on that continent to have as much opportunities for decent living as people elsewhere do. This, however, requires a certain degree of openness; it requires examining ideas that can contribute to human flourishing regardless of the provenance of those ideas. I endorse Mandela’s (2010, 17) claim that at a time when some people are feverishly encouraging the growth of fractional forces, raising the tribe into the final and highest form of social organisations, setting one national group against the other, cosmopolitan dreams are not only desirable but a bounden duty; dreams that stress the special unity that holds the freedom forces together – [in] a bond that has been forged by common struggles, sacrifices and traditions. I find the concept of Afropolitanism to be closest to Mandela’s wish of keeping Africa open. I have discussed the concept extensively (Eze 2014, 2016b, 2018). I have also highlighted its weakness as a backdoor embrace of cosmopolitanism. I am not a fan of fixing “Afro” to any idea just to make it palatable to the African mind. But I embrace it as a Eurydice-term that is designed to introduce the African imagination to the wealth of openness as an ethical attitude in the world, one that Mandela spoke of. To be sure, the notion of openness to the world has always been present in African thinking. Thinkers such as Kwame Anthony Appiah’s (2006) Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers and Achille Mbembe’s (2001) On the Postcolony have consistently argued for a cosmopolitan attitude in Africa. Afropolitanism was coined by Taiye Selasi (2005) to capture the condition of people of African descent whose identities do not fit into essentialist categories, those who do not interpret their being African in narrow formats, but who are rather open to many ways of being human. Achille Mbembe argues forcefully for an expansive understanding of the concept. He states: Awareness of the interweaving of the here and there, the presence of the elsewhere in the here and vice versa, the relativization of primary roots and memberships and the way of embracing, with full knowledge of the facts, strangeness, foreignness and remoteness, the ability to recognise one’s face in that of a foreigner and make the most of the traces of remoteness in closeness, to domesticate the unfamiliar, to work with what seem to be opposites–it is this cultural, historical and aesthetic sensitivity that underlies the term “Afropolitanism.” (Mbembe 2007, 28) I find Mbembe’s notion of the interweaving of the here and there, the presence and elsewhere to also endorse the notion that one is not tied to one’s

Africanity, Litigation Aesthetics, and Openness to Being  89

past, or one’s ancestral roots. Identity, understood in this way, is always a mixture of the past and the present, indeed, the interweaving of the here and there, the known and the unknown. What is at stake here is the necessity to keep Africa open – to paraphrase Diagne (2001). Not everyone believes that Afropolitanism is a positive development in African thought. Amatoritsero Ede (2016, 88–89) suggests it is elitist “a transnational material and ideological condition, which leads to an inherent individualism and identity politics when it is confronted by metropolitan racial/class tensions and politics of difference.” I think that the above concerns are some of the weaknesses of Afropolitanism as an interpretive model of African experience. I do not believe that the weaknesses therefore negate the concept’s usefulness, especially regarding its ability to open new vistas for examining Africa’s moral spaces. Selasi gives a more defined explanation of the Afropolitan condition. She states that “There is at least one place on the African Continent to which we tie our sense of self: be it a nation-state (Ethiopia), a city (Ibadan), or an auntie’s kitchen” (Selasi 2005). Yet Afropolitans do not lose the awareness that they are ethnic mixes and cultural mutts. They admit their connection to Africa, but they are willing “to complicate Africa – namely, to engage with, critique, and celebrate the parts of Africa that mean most to them” (Selasi 2005). They are of African ancestry, but they do not derive the impetus for self-definition exclusively from that. Selasi (2005) declares unapologetically, “We are Afropolitans: not citizens, but Africans of the world.” What characterizes these people is the refusal to narrow their self-conception to one essential paradigm. On the contrary, they understand themselves as composite of narratives; they implicitly admit of the presence of others in their lives. For Selasi (2005, n. p.), [it] is the refusal to oversimplify; the effort to understand what is ailing in Africa alongside the desire to honor what is wonderful, unique. Rather than essentialising the geographical entity, we seek to comprehend the cultural complexity; to honor the intellectual and spiritual legacy; and to sustain our parents’ cultures. In Selasi’s (2005) thinking, therefore, consciousness makes the difference between being an Afropolitan and not being one; it informs the Afropolitan’s ability to create “an identity along at least three dimensions: national, racial, and cultural – with subtle tensions in between.” In establishing the traits of Afropolitanism, Selasi outlines some of the qualities of modernity. These include the recognition of the complexity of modern cultures and the rejection of essence or tradition, above all. Afropolitanism recognizes the liminality of identity today; it is, therefore, a rejection of the conventional postcolonial notion of African identity rooted in opposition; it is an expression of African modernity, which signals a journey rather than an arrival. For those of us, who address ourselves to the world in another man’s language, there a nothing authentic to return to. But this experience of dislocation, or alienation if you

90  Chielozona Eze

will, is not unique to Africans. Every part of the world exhibits some aspects of other parts of the world. And this goes as far back as recorded memory in human civilization. That might, after all, be what creates and sustains civilizations; the ability to learn (or copy) from others.

Love of the Body as the Beginning of Openness The central concern of this essay has been to explicate the complexities of the narrative of resistance that has characterized African ontology from the early days of colonialism till date. What is common in these narratives is the abstract love of Africa, and the implicit, sometimes, overt accusation of the West. Loving Africa in the abstract, often prefaced on the critique of colonialism, has not advanced the understanding of the African condition. Litigation of the West has not helped Africans to understand one another, build schools, hospitals, roads, and strengthen social and political institutions. Litigation of the West has merely postponed the more demanding and consequential task of Africans confronting their own moral failings the way Asians and Europeans do. The ultimate question a society ought to be asking itself is not how bad other societies are, but rather how good it can be. In the same way the task of every good government in Africa ought to be how to elevate African people’s living conditions to a globally decent level. As we have seen in the exchange between Thabo Mbeki and Tony Leon, Mbeki became a victim of a longstanding narrative about Africa rooted in abstraction. One wonders how his thinking would have turned out if he had given himself time to think of the actual bodies ravaged by HIV-AIDS, if he had taken time to understand how anti-retroviral drugs worked. A Black person being ravaged by AIDS does not want to know where retroviral drugs were manufactured; it wants to live. Any thinking in Africa that does not begin with this premise might just be delusional. Any love of Africa that does not begin with the thriving of actual existing body is mere sound and fury. There is much more to Africa than resistance to the West. There is a better way to engage Africa than burning down school buildings and seeking to bring everything to a fall in the hope that somebody will rebuild them. Africa must remain open to possibilities including learning from erstwhile enemies. Given the importance I have placed on the African body, I conclude this essay with a reflection on Chris Abani’s (2006) poem The New Religion, which stands as an example of the openness to being and which begins with the affirmation of the African body as it is. Unlike the first-generation postcolonial African writers, some of whom I have discussed, contemporary African writers take the actual body as the starting point of the narrative about Africa. These include Zukiswa Warner, Petina Gappah, Chimamanda Adichie, Chika Unigwe, NoViolet Bulawayo, Chinelo Okparanta, and so on. In their presentation of the actual African body rooted in place and time, they showcase more complex entities that are ironically more African than the abstract representations by first-generation African writers. I have discussed some of these writers

Africanity, Litigation Aesthetics, and Openness to Being  91

elsewhere (see Eze 2016a). Chris Abani believes in the triumph of the body as demonstrated in The New Religion. The body is a nation I have not known. The pure joy of air: the moment between leaping from a cliff into the wall of blue below. Like that. Or to feel the rub of tired lungs against skincovered bone, like a hand against the rough of bark. Like that. “The body is a savage,” I said. For years I said that: the body is a savage. As if this safety of the mind were virtue not cowardice. For years I have snubbed the dark rub of it, said, “I am better, Lord, I am better,” but sometimes, in an unguarded moment of sun, I remember the cowdung-scent of my childhood skin thick with dirt and sweat and the screaming grass. But this distance I keep is not divine, for what was Christ if not God’s desire to smell his own armpit? And when I see him, I know he will smile, fingers glued to his nose, and say, “Next time I will send you down as a dog to taste this pure hunger.” (Abani 2006, 56) It is revealing of Abani’s cosmopolitan sensibility that this poem begins by juxtaposing the body and the nation: “The body is a nation I have not known.” It is intriguing that the speaker (we take the speaker to be the author) refers to his body as an unknown entity. At the same time, that entity is where he resides and from which he derives his identity. His body is to him what that geographical (or imagined) space called ‘nation’ is for people with common descent, history, culture, language, or life. His body is the source of his history, culture, aspiration, language, and lifestyle. Yet, he does not know that body, signaling it is yet to be discovered and that he cannot make a definitive, essentialist statement about it. The body is not the temple of the Holy Spirit as Christians believe. He takes the body as it presents itself to him, without any ideological predisposition. In a twenty-first-century nation, heterogeneity rather than homogeneity is the norm; the unknown, not to be mistaken for the abstract, commands attention as much as the known. Indeed, the known is tenuous and must be approached with caution. The known must defy absoluteness. The speaker’s joy of pure air parallels that of his knowledge that his tired lungs rub against his bones. This undeniable tactility of his body is part of what assures him of his citizenship of his body. The tactility is a test of citizenship and love. But the speaker does not come to this knowledge perchance. Indeed, he had lived in the denial or demeaning of that body, taking refuge in the safety of

92  Chielozona Eze

the mind, without being grateful to the body for housing that mind. We do not know the history behind this denial. We can only assume that as a postcolonial subject and as one who had learned the epistemologies issuing from Christiancolonial education, steeped in the Platonic world of ideas, he must have been taught to despise his body. It is a relief that he reaches the epiphany that the body is a source of joy, signaling that he lives there and is aware of it. The realization comes to him “in an unguarded moment of sun,” that is, in the open, when the scales of colonial and Christian education have fallen from his eyes, in the open in which reality has been laid bare. At that moment, when he does not need to hide anything or to pretend to be what he is not, he remembers his true, ordinary self, the self that had not acquired false consciousness, the self of his “childhood skin thick with dirt and sweat.” What is amazing and even more convincing is the part of nature that he remembers at the same time that he recalls his childhood skin. It is the “cowdung-scent,” the most ordinary, stinky thing, a thing as normal as life. This is not idyllic. It is not magical. It is transient and therefore commands care and attention. The ordinariness of life that is perceived through the senses of touch and smell, as has been demonstrated thus far in the poem, is the location of life. It is also what the speaker has in common with God, whose deepest desire was to smell himself. The desire to become a body prompted God to incarnate in a human body, to “smell his own armpit.” One might be tempted to equate smelling one’s armpit with navel-gazing. It is true that both acts focus on the individual, but the latter refers specifically to egomania while the former suggests the individual embracing the less flattering part of self. Armpits remind us of our bodies as ever-decomposing entities. They must therefore be accorded attention. Abani’s reference to incarnation not only reveals the anthropomorphic conception of God; according to Christian belief, it signifies God reaching out to humans in order for humans to do the same to one another, incarnate in one another, care for one another. Incarnating in one another is only possible through the power of imagination, through empathy, which enables us to put ourselves in the position of the other, especially those suffering gratuitous pain. This is the locus of the new ethics of being and becoming that openness seeks to capture. The moral logic here is that if I conceive my body as transient and therefore deserving care and attention, the other bodies require no less. It is therefore only logical that henceforth, with attention to the body as a vulnerable space, an entity requiring care, narratives in Africa, the stories we tell one another and the world must issue from the position of care of the given. It must be grounded in openness to reality which begins with the body that must not be allowed to waste, the body that must flourish.

Notes 1 For more on the relationship between the stories we tell and the moral world we occupy, see Arthur W. Frank (2010) and Alasdair MacIntyre (1981). 2 In most anthologies of world literature in the West, one can hardly read Achebe without reading Joseph Conrad. One can, however, read Conrad on his own merit. So, Achebe needs Conrad to be. This is not a compliment.

Africanity, Litigation Aesthetics, and Openness to Being  93 3 It does help to note that Blyden might have been influenced by the vision of reality developed of the Romantic Age. 4 For the purpose of this book I follow this conception of Africanity, though, later in my discussion, I will subsume the concept within a discursive term, Africanism. 5 A trait we see in all African dictators of life-term heads of state who exhibit what Achille Mbembe has called the aesthetics of vulgarity and the banality of power. They flaunt symbols and gestures associated with African authenticity such as Mobutu Sese Seko’s leopard hat, or in most cases an odd mixture of awe-inspiring Western regalia and African gestures. 6 This syllogism also supports much of multicultural knowledge production whereby what is not Western is ipso facto acceptable regardless of how painful or inimical it is to individual members of the communty. 7 It is estimated that within seven years of Jacob Zuma’s tenure in office in South Africa, the State lost up to 500 billion rands (circa 62 billion dollars) to state capture. See Eyewitness News (2018) and Jacques Pauw’s (2017) acclaimed book, The President’s Keepers:Those Keeping Zuma in Power and Out of Prison.

References Abani, C. 2006. Hands Washing Water. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press. Achebe, C. 1977. “An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad’s ‘Heart of Darkness’.” Massachusetts Review 18 (4): 782–794. Achebe, C. 2009. The Education of a British Protected Child. New York: Knopf. Adichie, C. N. 2009. “The Danger of a Single Story.” TED Global, Accessed 18 July 2018, https​:/​/ww​​w​.ted​​.com/​​talks​​/chim​​amand​​a​_adi​​chie_​​the​_d​​anger​​_of​_a​​_sing​​le​_st​​o​ry​ ?l​​angua​​ge​=en​. Appiah, K. A. 2006. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: W. W. Norton & Company. Boseley, S. 2008. “Mbeki Aids Denial ‘Caused 300,000 Deaths’.” The Guardian, 26 November, Accessed 16 September 2018, https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​guard​​ian​.c​​om​/wo​​rld​/2​​ 008​/n​​ov​/26​​/aids​​-​sout​​h​-afr​​ica. Diagne, S. B. 2001. “Africanity as an Open Question.” In Identity and Beyond: Rethinking Africanity, edited by S. B. Diagne, A. Mama, H. Melber and F. B. Nyamnjoh, 19–24. Uppsala: Nordiska Afrainstitutet. Ede, A. 2016. “The Politics of Afropolitanism.” Journal of African Cultural Studies 28(1):88–100. Ekpo, D. 1996. “How Africa Misunderstood the West: The Failure of Anti-West Radicalism and Postmodernity.” Third Text 35:3–13. Ekpo, D. 2016. “Slaying Négritude’s Last Shadows: Post-Africanizing Senghor, Dakar and Dak’Art.” Obieg 1, Accessed 14 September 2018, http:​/​/obi​​eg​.u-​​jazdo​​wski.​​pl​/en​​/nume​​ ry​/da​​kar​/s​​layin​​g​-neg​​ritud​​e--​-s​​-last​​-shad​​ows--​​post-​​afric​​anizi​​ng​-se​​nghor​​-​-dak​​ar​-an​​d​ -dak​--​-ar​​t. Equiano, O. 2014. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African. Written by Himself. Scotts Valley: CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform. Eyewitness News. 2018. “Zuma’s Role in State Capture Has Cost SA R500bn, Says Analyst.” Accessed 18 September 2018, https​:/​/ew​​n​.co.​​za​/20​​18​/11​​/09​/l​​isten​​-zuma​​-s​ -ro​​le​-in​​-stat​​e​-cap​​ture-​​has​-c​​ost​-s​​a​-​r50​​0bn​-s​​ays​-a​​nalys​​t. Eze, C. 2014. “Rethinking African Culture and Identity: The Afropolitan Model.” Journal of African Cultural Studies 26(2):234–247.

94  Chielozona Eze Eze, C. 2016a. Ethics and Human Rights in Contemporary African Women’s Literature. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Eze, C. 2016b. “We Afropolitans.” Journal of African Cultural Studies 28(1):114–119. Eze, C. 2018. Race, Decolonization, and Global Citizenship in South Africa. Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press. Frank, A. W. 2010. Letting Stories Breathe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gates, H. L. 1988. “The Trope of a New Negro and the Reconstruction of the Image of the Black.” Representations 24:129–155. Gibson, N. 2017. “The Specter of Fanon: The Student Movements and the Rationality of Revolt in South Africa.” Social Identities 23(5):579–599. Julien, E. 2006. “The Extroverted African Novel.” In The Novel. Volume 1. History, Geography, and Culture, edited by F. Moretti, 667–702. New Jersey: Princeton University Press. Laye, C. 1954. The Dark Child. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. le Roux, M. 2006. “Eat Garlic, Beetroot and Lemon, Manto Repeats.” IOL, 7 June, Accessed 20 December 2018, https​:/​/ww​​w​.iol​​.co​.z​​a​/new​​s​/sou​​th​-af​​rica/​​eat​-g​​arlic​​-beet​​ root-​​and​-l​​emon-​​manto​​​-repe​​ats​-2​​80721​. Lynch, H. R. 1970. Edward Wilmot Blyden: Pan-Negro Patriot. London: Oxford University Press. MacIntyre, A. 1981. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press. Mafeje, A. 2000. “Africanity: A Combative Ontology.” CODESRIA Bulletin 1:66–71. Malingo, B. 2018. “Ayanda Mabulu Labels Mandela a Nazi in ‘Unmasked Piece of Sh*t’ Painting.” The Citizen, 10 September, Accessed 14 September 2018, https​:/​/ci​​tizen​​.co​.z​​ a​/new​​s​/sou​​th​-af​​rica/​​20070​​01​/ay​​anda-​​mabul​​u​-lab​​els​-m​​andel​​a​-a​-n​​azi​-i​​n​-unm​​asked​​-pie​ c​​e​-of-​​sht​-p​​ainti​​ng​/am​​p/. Mandela, N. 2010. Conversations with Myself. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Mbembe, A. 1992. “The Banality of Power and the Aesthetics of Vulgarity in the Postcolony.” Public Culture 4(2):1–30. Mbembe, A. 2001. On the Postcolony. Berkeley: University of California Press. Mbembe, A. 2007. “Afropolitanism.” In Africa Remix: Contemporary Art of a Continent, edited by S. Njami and L. Durán, 26–30. Johannesburg: Johannesburg Art Gallery. McGreal, C. 2006. “South Africa Ends Long Denial over Aids Crisis.” The Guardian, 30 November, Accessed 16 September 2018, https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​guard​​ian​.c​​om​/wo​​rld​/2​​006​ /n​​ov​/30​​/sout​​​hafri​​ca​.ai​​ds. Moya, F. 2016. “Fallists Need Future View Too.” The Mercury, 9 March, Accessed 14 September 2018, https​:/​/ww​​w​.iol​​.co​.z​​a​/mer​​cury/​​falli​​sts​-n​​eed​-f​​uture​​-view​​​-too-​​19956​​ 21. New s24. 2000. “Mbeki, Leon in ‘Snake-Oil’ Row.” Accessed 14 September 2018, https​:/​ /ww​​w​.new​​s24​.c​​om​/Ne​​ws24/​​Mbeki​​-Leon​​-in​-s​​nake-​​oil​-r​​​ow​-20​​00081​​1. Ngcaweni, W. 2016. “Revisiting the ABCs of the Decolonial Paradigm of Fallism.” The Daily Vox, 30 September, Accessed 18 September, https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​daily​​vox​.c​​o​.za/​​ wandi​​le​-ng​​cawen​​i​-rev​​isiti​​ng​-ab​​cs​-de​​colon​​ial​-p​​​aradi​​gm​-fa​​llism​/. Nkosi, B. 2016. “Is Icon a Sellout?” Sowetan, 18 July . P’Bitek, O. 1984. Song of Lawino. Portsmouth: Heinemann. Pauw, J. 2017. The President’s Keepers: Those Keeping Zuma in Power and Out of Prison. Cape Town: Tafelberg. Rabaka, R. 2009. Africana Critical Theory: Reconstructing the Black Radical Tradition, From W. E. B. Du Bois and C. L. R. James to Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral. Lanham: Lexington Books.

Africanity, Litigation Aesthetics, and Openness to Being  95 Science Must Fall. 2016. “UCT Science Faculty Meets with ‘Fallists’.” Accessed 1 January 2020, https​:/​/ww​​w​.you​​tube.​​com​/w​​atch?​​v​=C9S​​​iRNib​​D14 Selasi, T. 2005. “Bye-Bye Babar.” The LIP Magazine, 3 March, Accessed 18 September 2018, http://thelip​.robertsharp​.co​.uk/​?p​=76. Senghor, L. S. (ed). 1945. Anthologie de la Nouvelle Poésie Négre et Malagache. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Senghor, L. S. 1965. Prose and Poetry. Translated by J. Reed and C. Wake. London: Oxford University Press. Svrluga, S. 2016. “University Shut Down after Student Protesters Set It Ablaze.” The Washington Post, 25 February, Accessed 1 January 2020, https​:/​/ww​​w​.was​​hingt​​onpos​​ t​.com​​/news​​/grad​​e​-poi​​nt​/wp​​/2016​​/02​/2​​5​/stu​​dent-​​prote​​sters​​-torc​​h​-sou​​th​​-af​​rican​​-univ​​ ersit​​y/. Tutuola, A. 1952. Palm Wine Drinkard. London: Faber & Faber. Waninana, B. 2005. “How to Write about Africa.” Granta 92, 2 May, Accessed 18 July 2018, https​:/​/gr​​anta.​​com​/h​​ow​-to​​-writ​​e​-abo​​ut​-​af​​rica/​.

5

Post-Africanism as Fluid, Feminist, and Agentic Alterity Runette Kruger

This chapter is written in response to the call for a Post-Africanist consciousness and art as clarified in the opening chapters of this volume, and I do so from my position as a White, female-bodied but gender-neutral, South African, middle-class, middle-aged, feminist academic of settler descent. Any potential or inadequacies in the current analysis are attributable to the convergence of these and other vectors. I propose a globalized, fluid, feminist, and agentic interpretation of Post-Africanism. A close reading of the opening call for a Post-African stance and aesthetic reveals a number of generalizations I briefly highlight, including what I regard to be a troubling Afropessimism. This position is particularly strong in the section on Afrofuturism, which is criticized mainly for relying on African and Black tropes to reimagine an equitable future. Reliance on such tropes render the founding Afrofuturists desperate and irrational, and Ekpo (Chapter 2) encourages African American Afrofuturists to embrace universalism rather than Afrocentrism. The elision of ‘Afro’ from futurism would render the struggle against discrimination more successful. Added to this, the notion of universal humanity as propounded strongly invokes European Enlightenment values. The following section unpacks these dynamics, after which what I regard to be the productive aspects of the current framing of Post-Africanism are considered. There are a few generalizations including the notion of an undifferentiated ‘African art.’ This amalgam – African art – is further described to have broken, in total, from a generally representational mode embedded in social function upon intensified contact with Western nonrepresentational art during the mid-twentieth century: a break which, again, in total, dehumanized it. A differentiation is made between ‘serious’ art produced by the cultural elite, and that made by ‘illiterate farmers’ and ‘corner idlers,’ but the inescapable fate of African art remained: the visual arts of a continent became derailed upon contact with that of another civilization. Significantly, this derailment is not argued to have occurred because modernity (as disseminated by empire) was instrumental in disturbing and destroying African practices in the visual arts or African ways of life, or for actively attempting to eradicate and marginalize African systems of thought and belief. On the contrary, African art, the

Post-Africanism as Fluid, Feminist, and Agentic Alterity  97

fruits of colonial contact from which Africa could have benefited more had it only resisted less, has become ‘irrelevant’ because its emergence has not been accompanied by a deep-structural and cultural evolution which could serve as the solid foundation from which to make the shift from representational to nonrepresentational art. In other words, Africa’s history unfolded at a different sequence to that of the West, resulting in an irresolvable gap between the continent’s art and level of development. Modern African art consequently comprises surrealist, nonhuman, abstract doodles – an entire continent’s take on the work of one European artist: Picasso. This newly abstract African art is perpetrated by the African artist who is blinded by Afrophilia – an ideology that (so it is argued) overemphasizes the importance of tradition and primitive myth and magic. In a desperate attempt to regain a sense of self-worth in the face of the onslaught of Western imperialism, the African artist tried to regain a sense of their original African roots, and dug too deeply. The African (visual) artist adopted the stylistic trappings of European modernism (believing these primitivist explorations to signal a European condonation and validation of their own traditions), which only entrenched the backward-looking stance from which they must escape or remain stagnant, unevolved, regressive. The African artist seemingly can only react, and has reacted in one way only – by overzealously demonizing the colonizer, and by fetishizing a culture mired in backwardness. In this account of the unfolding of African art, space and time have been fused into one, unending moment of anti-colonial reactionism in the form of Afrocentrism stretching itself out over the ahistorical, non-differentiated geographical zone that is Africa. But who is this African artist? Upon closer scrutiny it appears that it is the (apparent) ‘juju-centrism’ of West Africa specifically that has become the undifferentiated common lot of the continent, manifested in its arts. Thus, to summarize, modernist art (in the West) is the outcome of an effort to grapple with the fruits of a culture so successful that its excesses became the fertile soil of a completed cultural evolution. The African artist, mired on the African continent, had no such cultural resources and adapted the modernist form blindly, in one non-evolutionary leap. Against this picture of civilizational torpor, the culture of the colonizer is painted in bright colors. The Enlightenment paradigm, in particular, is framed as a triumphant epistemological break with myth and magic. Furthermore, it is according to the teleological dynamic of the Hegelian world spirit at work on Western civilization that it (Western civilization) finally came to its full fruition in nineteenth-century secular scientific Europe. After this zenith, wherever the West diverged from its destiny rooted in Enlightenment values and institutions, it lacked wholeness and effectiveness, embraced chaos and meaninglessness. This intensifying dissolution of high culture has subsequently culminated in the quagmire of postmodernity, a cultural Sahara (notably an African hinterland), from which nothing of value can come, and it is here that the fates of Western and African art converge, both now comprising ‘monstrous hybrid’ fabrications unable to signify wholeness or sense.

98  Runette Kruger

But if Africa is still ‘behind’ the West, how should a Post-African culture and art be worked out against this civilizational gap? Should Africans first ‘catch up,’ that is, ‘go back’ and undertake the long labor of getting up to speed – the epistemological equivalent of eating their vegetables? And where is it that Africans should go back to? An ‘African foundation,’ or eighteenth-century Europe, in which case, would Africans not still merely be emulating a ‘superior’ culture without an accompanying epistemological evolution? Besides these challenges in temporality and in choosing the correct basis from which to proceed, seemingly the first step toward reclaiming a Post-African culture is to love Africa less, and the West more – particularly the Enlightenment West. For the artist this would mean creating works of beauty and realism, argued to be the only signifiers of meaning and worth in art. I regard the assessment of modern European culture as the pinnacle of human development (an assessment based on the philosophy of an eighteenthcentury European philosopher – G.W.F. Hegel – who sought to universalize his own culture and time), as inauspicious soil in which to nurture new art forms emerging from the African continent, or in reference to the continent: its people, cultures, histories, accomplishments, and defeats. One could make two fairly simple counter-observations in response to the basic assumption outlined above. The first is that the Afrophilia so derided as centralizing an ‘own’ culture beyond reason, is a self-aggrandizing project equally displayed by European artists and philosophers when they seek to universalize and normalize their own culture as a global culture (with the important difference that Eurocentrism speaks from the center, and Afrocentrics from varying positions of exteriority). The second counter-observation one could make is that hybridity can equally well be interpreted as the current unfolding of world history (a synthesis between the West and ‘Africa’), rather than as a bungled ‘blending’ of incompatible cultures. Unless one argues that world history for some reason ceased to unfold ‘correctly’ after the eighteenth century there is no sound basis, even from a Hegelian perspective, to reject the postmodern moment (and Africa’s hybridization of Western culture) so categorically. Lastly, the clues left as to what a ‘reformed’ art might resemble are unappealing not only politically but also from a creative perspective. Art as the pursuit of beauty, defined as that which acts as the signifier of happiness, is rooted in eighteenth-century European tropes and historicity. Instead, I would like to ask what are the conditions we are currently, as Africans on a world stage, laboring under? How should ‘we,’ or more importantly, how are we responding to these conditions? Who are we? Before discussing the work of various artists who are grappling with these converging concerns, there are powerfully cogent aspects in the current call to Post-Africanism that I attempt to unpack below. The current call is made firstly in answer to an essentialization of African identity and culture as ‘already worked out.’ This is indeed the basis of the rejection of Afrophilia, defined as “the ultimate ontological horizon in which we Africans live, move and have our being,” an imagined Africanness framed

Post-Africanism as Fluid, Feminist, and Agentic Alterity  99

in “abstract trans-tribal” terms as “both a fixed essence and an ontologically settled principle of thought, feeling, action, reaction” (Ekpo, Chapter 1). In my response to this call I was guided, as an ostensibly female-bodied person, by a resonance between this aversion to a pre-concluded/inescapable ontological ‘African condition,’ (namely an imperative Afrophilia as the outcome of a seemingly inescapable postcolonial burden), and my antipathy toward ideologies and constructs that reduce female agency, identity and even emancipation to a biological capacity for reproduction and maternal nurturing. In this way, even certain feminisms insist on framing the protest against patriarchy in reproductive terms: posters of the uteri and ovaries held up as symbols of feminist power at the women’s march after the inauguration of president Donald J. Trump, are an example. Such location of female agency in the reproductive system centralizes heteronormative conceptions of womanhood and excludes, for instance, transpeople who do not have nor wish to have ovaries/a uterus, as well as any person who does not define their identity or agency in terms of reproductive capacity.1 This limited and limiting categorization of the feminine is what Donna Haraway deconstructs with her alternative concept of post-human agency in A Cyborg Manifesto (1991). Haraway’s particular concept of the post-human is useful for a consideration of what Post-Africanism might entail. In her attempt to dislodge the prescriptive notion of ‘woman,’ always necessarily formulated as the antithesis (in less ideal form) of ‘man,’ Haraway critiques the linguistic and sociopolitical framework of dualisms by which woman is relegated to an inferior position. For Haraway (1991, 163, 173), “dichotomies … are all in question ideologically,” and “[Hegelian] dialectics too is a dream language, longing to resolve contradiction.” According to this framework, the primary contribution to be made by the Other is in (secondary) relation to the Same, and the sole value of Otherness manifests in its dialectic function of annulling conflict. It bears emphasizing that this eradication of difference (across the Same/Other binary) is invariably accomplished by neutralizing Otherness, whilst preserving Sameness intact. This dynamic unfolds in a kind of reversal of the creation myth whereby woman was created from the rib of man: dialectically she is reabsorbed, restoring man (the Same) to wholeness and singularity. Haraway illuminates the repressive dynamic of thinking (and governing, legislating, and institutionalizing human relations) in dualistic terms, and her observations are detailed here. She notes: [C]ertain dualisms have been persistent in Western traditions; they have all been systemic to the logics and practices of domination of women, people of colour, nature, workers, animals – in short, domination of all constituted as Others, whose task is to mirror the self. Chief among these troubling dualisms are self/Other, mind/body, culture/nature, male/female, civilized/primitive, reality/appearance, whole/part, agent/ resource, maker/made, active/passive, right/wrong, truth/illusion, total/partial, God/man. The self is the one [or the Same] who is not dominated. (Haraway 1991, 177)

100  Runette Kruger

Constitution of the self (the Same) as an autonomous, whole, and superior entity thus necessitates the constitution of an Other, who, in the same instance of being called into existence, challenges the autonomy of the self (the Other can never be fully appropriated or annulled), thereby exposing the agonizing flaw in the would-be integrity of the Same. To summarize, the Other firstly needs to be constituted as such, and subsequently becomes the carrier of all that is threatening to the Same. It is for this reason that Haraway (1991, 156) explicitly frames anti-colonialist discourse as the praxis of “dissolving the ‘West’ and its highest product – the one who is not animal, barbarian, or woman; man, that is, the author of a cosmos called history.” The dynamic whereby woman (the Other) is considered an entity only in relation to the Same has more recently been opposed by, for instance, using the term ‘womxn’ rather than woman – reference to ‘man’ disappears, emphasizing the existence of womxn as an independent subject position. Similarly, it might be strategic to avoid using the term ‘Other’ to refer to those with minority sociopolitical status, as the ‘Other’ is a category enunciated by the Same over his objectified/abjectified antagonist. The term ‘Alter’ might more effectively indicate Otherness utilized as an opportunity to amplify alterity and agency.2 The feminist re(pro)ductive framing of ‘woman’ also finds a foundation for her ‘power’ in her materiality more generally, in response to the patriarchal trope of the abstract universal male as the concluded human subject (that is, the spiritual/intellectual male who rises above the corporeal as the final fulfillment of human potential, reducing woman’s corporeality to a shameful liability). In reaction to such universalization and abstraction, an ‘earth mother’ embodied feminism, however, comes dangerously close to (or rather in some cases cannot effectively be distinguished from) a patriarchal fixation on women’s ability to bear children for their mates. A further nuance of the dynamic by which the sexuality of the Other (or Alter) only ever serves as a supplement to that of the Same, occurs when it (the sexuality of the Alter) is not so much repressed as hyper-valorized (or rather, is repressed through being hyper-valorized). Hypervalorization of the sexuality of the Alter happens in those instances where it can be exploited unhindered by the full human representation of the object of attention in the imagination of the Same, or where such effective exploitation is longed for. Such fetishization is, lastly, often framed as a form of liberation bestowed upon the Alter. By the same dynamic, the body of the ‘African Alter’ becomes the simultaneous dehumanized object of fixated desire and repressive scorn and hatred. Much has been asserted by the Same about the body and being of the Alter. To summarize, the notion of limiting the ‘African’ to the uncritical avowal of African ‘tradition’ is potentially as problematic as having one’s identity and value as a woman measured in terms of either being able to bring forth and multiply (and subsequently to nurture and rear), or to be the bearer of a body that can be effortlessly consumed. Both Africa and ‘woman’ have been and continue to be essentialized, fetishized, and romanticized, in the same instance of being relegated a secondary, supplementary, or sociopolitically abject status, ignoring the particularity and diversity of lived experiences.

Post-Africanism as Fluid, Feminist, and Agentic Alterity  101

The development of Post-Africanism as a dismantling of such stereotyping of the ‘African’ is crucial. Besides constituting an attempt to escape essentialist notions of Africanism, Post-Africanism as an antidote to Afrophilia is a response to a seemingly inescapable postcolonial burden, framed in terms of a perpetual victimhood. PostAfricanism is, instead, indexed for Ekpo by a condition of possibility. This possibility is conceptualized by Ekpo as the cessation of criticality of the West, as it is argued that what it means to ‘be African’ currently need not be reduced to reacting to colonialism. Haraway (1991, 176–177) similarly seeks an alternative paradigm for the post-human agent, who recognizes herself as “fully implicated in the world … [refusing] the ideological resources of victimization so as to have a real life.” However, it would be equally prescriptive to necessarily excise an interrogation of the postcolonial experience from the Post-African consciousness (which is what Ekpo urges). Here arises the main predicament of the framing of PostAfricanism as it stands: how to work out a consciousness predicated on agency, within a sociohistorical framework that has undeniably sabotaged Africa (her colonial history). I am fearful that the formulation of a Post-Africanism that completely allows ‘bygones’ to be bygones, in a bid to escape a consciousness of ‘victimhood,’ will be happily embraced by those who benefit most from the still prevailing disparity in geopolitical power, which also undeniably currently still manifests as the ideology and institutionalization of White supremacy. In my response I argue that it is possible to contribute to the notion of PostAfricanism as de-essentialized, embodied experiences of Africanism(s) freed from a consciousness of victimization (which is not the same as the acknowledgment of actual harm experienced), without foregoing an anti-colonial criticality. Navigating the emergence of a Post-African moment cannot be based on the premise that African subjects, particularly Black African subjects, are in reality equal to Western subjects (or to the majority of White Africans) in terms of income, opportunity, and sociopolitical power, even if this is the ideal. The poignant account by Sara Ahmed (2017) of why feminism is necessary against the grain of post-feminist claims of an already existing equality, refers. She notes: A significant step for a feminist movement is to recognize what has not ended. And this step is a very hard step … We might think that we have made that step only to realize we have to make it again. It might be you are up against a fantasy of equality [or the belief] that women … would have [equality] if they just tried hard enough … We could call this a postfeminist fantasy [that] feminism has been so successful that it has eliminated its own necessity. (Ahmed 2017, 5) Similarly, contrary to the notion that any lingering inequality is the fault of the African subject, current racial inequalities need to be lucidly attributed to

102  Runette Kruger

historical and current global dynamics. Blaming Africa for all of its own sociopolitical and economic woes amounts to gas lighting, and the argument that Africa could ‘catch up’ unhindered by Western interference if only Africans would be more ‘reasonable’ (that is, more Western), comes particularly close to the dynamic of blaming women for their own lingering oppression in a patriarchal system. In other words, Africa’s lack of development comes down to a deficit of will to engage with global paradigms (in tandem with an ‘illogical rejection’ of the colonizer), in the same way that women are oppressed as second class citizens because they refuse to or are unable to become more accomplished in the specific ways that men purportedly are. Men and women are equal (stated as if this is a fact and as if the observation corresponds with the lived experience of the majority of women), and if women continue to suffer it is because they are unwilling to align themselves to a dominant paradigm determined by and worked out for the benefit of the male-bodied. We (Africans, women), bring marginalization upon ourselves, or merely mistakenly convince ourselves that it exists in the first place. Post-Africanism as the kind of denialist post-feminism described by Ahmed would exonerate continuing aggressions and merely serve to maintain the current real. Given these dynamics, how could one set about formulating PostAfricanism(s)? Ekpo raises the question as to whether the Post-African artist should continue to draw on the unchanging tradition (of Africa), or source her themes and motifs from a ‘higher’ (read ‘Western’ or ‘modern’) consciousness, to which a reasonable answer seems to be: neither. This is not a feasible dichotomy (the dubious status of dichotomies is highlighted above), as its foundational premise is that what is African is inferior. Surely, Afropessimism should be avoided for the same reasons that the (current formulation of) Afrophilia should, namely the foreclosure of possibility and renewal. Of the three proposals forwarded as a means to a productive Post-Africanism (namely eschewing Afrophilia, re-universalizing Africa, and “processing the colonial legacy in a more self-empowering way” (Ekpo, Chapter 2)), I propose the latter as the most encouraging avenue. In tandem with this focus on agency, further promising areas of exploration include forging new identities, futurity, and an awareness of global/African interrelationships. To elaborate, working toward the “deliberate disruption of all settled identity claims” (Ekpo, Chapter 2) encourages an exploration of new modes of psychosocial agency and of being in the world, spoken and enacted from the specificities of real struggles for recognition, justice, restitution, and dignity. Similarly, a call for a futurity, a “new time consciousness” (Ekpo, Chapter 2) highlights possibilities of newness and renewal, an agentic Afrofuturism. Lastly, the contextualization of Post-Africanism against the rigors (and possibilities) of “human becoming in the global age” (Ekpo, Chapter 2) positions the Post-African artist as a global citizen – not as an (elitist) carefree global cosmopolitan, but as part of a concerned collective which can bring its power to bear on the perpetrators and enablers of injustice. These themes, identified as potentially productive from/ of a Post-African perspective, resonate through the work of artists Moussa Ag

Post-Africanism as Fluid, Feminist, and Agentic Alterity  103

Assarid and Jonas Staal, who have collaborated extensively on projects such as the New World Embassy (2014), that of diasporic artist Martine Syms, particularly her formulation of A Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto (2013), and of South African (Berlin-based) installation artist Candice Breitz, whose work Love Story (2016/2017) will be considered here. The work of Martine Syms, an African-American artist, is included here to broaden the notion of ‘Africanity’ beyond being born on the continent, and because her specific framing of Afrofuturism creates an important context for Post-Africanism as futural, global, and hybrid, but also as temporally situated, specific, and tangible: in short, as mundane. Afrofuturism in the Sun Ra (1914–1993) tradition reworks history by means of a detour through a mythological past in which extraterrestrial beings, the progenitors of African peoples, bestowed gifts such as Funk (a healing substance) upon humanity. Here Afrofuturism manifests as a symbolic reclaiming of outer space, and constitutes self-humanization through experimental jazz and aesthetic interventions. It is in the Afrofuturist spirit that Zambian teacher and self-appointed director of Zambia’s space program, Edward Mukuka Nkoloso, endeavored to explore neighboring planets. His ensemble of twelve trainee astronauts were members of the “Dynamite Rock Music Group when … not space cadets,” and Nkoloso lobbied tirelessly, but failed, to gain the financial support he needed to send a female astronaut, two cats, and a Christian missionary to Mars in 1964 (UNESCO demurred on providing the several million pounds requested to make this journey a reality) (Serpell 2017). Though routinely ridiculed, these mid-twentieth-century Afrofuturists were self-consciously ironic and at the same time were also earnest in reimagining their identities and futures, combining visual art, performance, music, and philosophy to constitute a new history from which an unfathomably altered (and equitable) future might be coaxed. They were making (re)history. As a politico-cultural strategy, however, Afrofuturism has its detractors. Martine Syms addresses what for her is the danger of a misguided, cosmological fantasy that has failed to transcend the White supremacist deep structure of our current so-called civilization. Her 2013 Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto (Syms, [S.a.]) reads as follows: In looking for a new framework for black diasporic artistic production, we are temporarily united in the following actions. The Mundane Afrofuturists recognize that: We did not originate in the cosmos … An all-black crew is unlikely. Magic interstellar travel and/or the wondrous communication grid can lead to an illusion of outer space and cyberspace as egalitarian. This dream of utopia can encourage us to forget that outer space will not save us from injustice. The Mundane Afrofuturist, like Benjamin’s angel of history, observes a growing pile of disasters, (now manifesting as a mountainous heap of hackneyed tropes), but with the more incendiary intention of setting this conglomeration

104  Runette Kruger

alight. For Syms (ibid.), this “bonfire of … Stupidities” includes, but is not limited to: Jive-talking aliens; Jive-talking mutants; Magical negroes; Enormous selfcontrol in light of great suffering; Great suffering as our natural state of existence; Inexplicable skill in the martial arts; Reference to Wu Tang; Reference to Sun Ra; Reference to Parliament Funkadelic and/or George Clinton … Egyptian mythology and iconography; The inner city; Metallic colors; Sassiness; Platform shoes; Continue at will. Sharing Gil Scott-Heron’s scepticism of the benefits of the space race for people of color – for instance Heron sings: “A rat done bit my sister Nell (with Whitey on the moon)” – Syms regards fantasies of space travel as somehow missing the point of tangible liberation, of measurable improvement in the lived experiences of the marginalized, and as, at best, a form of black aspiration that entrenches rather than dislodges the status quo. Shunning cosmological Afrofuturism as escapist and politically ineffective, Mundane Afrofuturism, does not, however, dismiss the constructive role of radical imagination. Mundane Afrofuturism outlines the challenge of envisaging an alternative future based on full cognizance of the present, and of the likelihood that we will never be able to merely decamp to another planet. Such a terrestrial manifestation of Afrofuturism emphasizes the “possibilities of a new focus on black humanity … science, technology, culture, politics, religions, individuality, needs, dreams, hopes, and failings,” whilst/by constructively grappling with the real and positions Mundane Afrofuturism as the “ultimate laboratory for worldbuilding outside of imperialist, capitalist, white patriarchy” (ibid; emphasis added). In her work, Syms is hence more intent on documenting ordinary journeys than psychedelic travels. These journeys range in scale from the personal gesture, in which she seeks to capture the “subtle choreographies of black womanhood” (St Félix 2017), to the emotional and geographical journeys undertaken by her mother, aunts, and grandmother, to the scale of the Great Migration, which saw the relocation of six million African Americans from the rural south to northern cities between 1916 and 1970. These themes are explored in her works Notes on Gesture (Single Channel Video, 10:33, 2015. See Figure 5.1), Incense, Sweaters and Ice (Single Chanel Video, 75 minutes, 2017), and Projects 106 (MoMA, 27 May–16 July 2017), respectively. Notes on Gesture formed part of the solo exhibition Vertical Elevated Oblique hosted by the Bridget Donahue Gallery, New York (2015). In a single-channel video installation, an African-American actress performs various gestures accompanied by facial expressions (such as the one captured in Figure 5.1), against a purple backdrop. She is responding to cues and title cards bearing phrases of AAVE (African-American Vernacular English) such as UOENO – explained as a kind of onomatopoeic shorthand for “you don’t even know” (What Does UOENO Mean? 2013). These flashes of text appear “on-screen like the captions that often accompany animated GIFs” (Young 2015). Young

Post-Africanism as Fluid, Feminist, and Agentic Alterity  105

Figure 5.1 Martine Syms, Notes on Gesture, 2015. Single Channel Video (color, sound), 10:33 minutes. Courtesy of the artist and Bridget Donahue NYC. © Martine Syms. Reproduced with permission.

(ibid.) explains the communicative power of GIFs, noting that they “often feature snippets of movies and TV shows that can then be used as a kind of digital parlance, conveying, on image boards and in chat forums, what words alone cannot.” The title, Notes on Gesture, is taken from Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben’s chapter by the same name, from his monograph Means without End: Notes on Politics (2000). Of the gesture, he notes: “What characterizes gesture is that in it … something is being endured and supported … the gesture is essentially always a gesture of not being able to figure something out in language … to compensate a loss of memory or an inability to speak” (Agamben 2000, 56, 58). In Notes on Gesture, then, Syms powerfully brings to our attention the cultural specificity and opaqueness of gesture, against the notion of gesture as a universal language as formulated by seventeenth-century physician John Bulwer, whom Syms refutes (Young 2015). Gesture as explored here furthermore embodies a willful reclamation of language (the ability to express oneself on one’s own terms), from the mainstream (White capitalist) web of signification. As such, the gestures are hybrid – both inside and outside the system they reject, a dissident positionality unpacked below. And, as such, these gestures point to productive newness in the face of erasure that could be a central strategy for Post-Africanism. In a similar way, Syms’s Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto encapsulates the sociocultural and political work of imagining a Post-African future free of racial discrimination and predicated on agency – speaking from and as a self that is neither an Other nor an aspiring Same (thus, Alter). Syms (ibid.) notes:

106  Runette Kruger

“While we are often Othered, we are not aliens.” This non-alien(ated) self is not reliant on mainstream (or White) validation, or ‘fact’ and ‘science.’ Nor does the work of establishing Post-Africanism through, among other strategies, the creation of Post-African art (argued here to include the work of Syms) stop at imagining the new. Post-Africanism as praxis would consist not in aligning with White supremacy, but in dismantling it; such praxis would be “complex, violent, and have global impact” (ibid.). In her invocation of “intertextuality, double entendre, politics, incongruity, polyphony, and collective first-person-techniques” (ibid.), Syms again calls to mind the power of hybridity in tandem with specificity – not hybridity as a misaligned medley of incompatible cultures (Ekpo, Chapter 2), but as an insidious threat to the power base of the Same, that is, closer to Haraway’s framing. In fact, the vilification of hybridity is an indicator of its destabilizing potential, a point Homi Bhabha (1994) also makes. For Haraway (1991, 154), the hybrid, of which her cyborg is the embodiment, invokes “potent fusions, and dangerous possibilities,” including escaping the dead end of dualisms and preconcluded subject positions. The post-human subjectivity is a heterogeneous amalgamation of self-chosen identities that embrace partiality and contradiction and materializes through the open-ended construction of a simultaneously personal and collective self (ibid. 157). In embracing mixity and subject positions that cannot be used by the Self to bolster his own centrality, complete his own story, we find ourselves to be “cyborgs, hybrids, mosaics, chimeras,” and subsequently able to build new kinds of solidarity, “across race, gender, and class” (ibid. 177, 173). I would argue for Post-Africanisms – identities, ideas, and art in, from, and about Africa – that are chaotic/hybrid in this sense, and also irreverent when necessary. Lastly, Syms’s insistence on a reality check for imagination, in order to make imagination more politically productive, is similar to African-Canadian scholar Christina Sharpe’s call to recognize Black experience as a kind of ‘Weather.’ In her work In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (2016), Sharpe insists on a sober recognition of the inescapable actuality of lingering Black exclusion. She refers to this ontological ground of Black existence as the Weather: that is, “antiblackness as total climate,” a global meteorological dynamic that perpetuates the production of “the conventions of antiblackness” (Sharpe, quoted in Terrefe 2016; Sharpe 2016, 21). The wake to which Sharpe refers invokes several simultaneous states of being and consciousness: the wake is the trail of turbulence behind a (slave) ship; careful ministration to the dead; and a propensity for being awake to current sociopolitical realities, that is, for being woke. Sharpe’s call is not based on defeatism, nihilism, or resignation, however, but on a self-possessed recognition that the current real is the only sociopolitical material at our disposal to work on. Syms and Sharpe thus seem to formulate similar strategies in the face of a potentially overwhelming cognizance of the ubiquity – the depth, range, and apparent indestructibility – of ongoing disparity in basic life opportunities across the race divide. Sharpe and Syms set about challenging this structural ‘Weather’ through the efforts of their daily work,

Post-Africanism as Fluid, Feminist, and Agentic Alterity  107

proceeding from the present, mundane real, as it stands – a strategy worth implementing in Post-Africa. To summarize, the specific kind of futurity that Syms advocates through her art and writing (a future which is different to the one which seems to be bearing down on us at present), and which can only be brought about by foregoing escapism and denial, is compatible with a Post-African stance and art if these are based on the real (which constitutes tangible discrepancies in political agency), and simultaneously on an alternative un-real (the unfathomably new). Post-Africanism as a hopeful lived condition beyond the current given is also addressed in the collaborative work of Moussa Ag Assarid and Jonas Staal. Ag Assarid, a Tuareg activist born in the region of Gao, Northern Mali, and Staal, a Rotterdam-based visual artist who engages with global and interpersonal politics around the theme of democracy, co-created the New World Embassy (2014) to mark the recognition of the autonomous existence of the newly established state of Azawad. Ag Assarid has been involved in the independence struggle of Azawad. It declared itself an independent state on 6 April 2012 after an armed struggle led by the MNLA3 against the Malian military in 2011–2012. Subsequent to his involvement in this struggle as international spokesperson for the MNLA and as a member of the State of Azawad Transitional Council (TCSA), established in 2012, Ag Assarid has been elected vice president of the World Amazigh Congress, a body representing the interests and rights of sixty million Amazigh dispersed across Northern Africa and in diaspora across the globe. The Amazigh – a Berber group, of which the Tuareg are a subgroup – are autochthonous to Northern Africa and fight the dual battle of what they regard as Arabic colonization of their respective territories across Northern Africa and of being discriminated against as (ironically) part of an undifferentiated ‘Arab Other’ on the world stage (Mahjar-Barducci 2012). This elision of Amazigh peoples from their own history is evident in the way in which the widespread liberation struggles of the Amazigh against oppression in Arab regimes that erupted in 2011, is merely collectively referred to as the “Arab Spring” (Ben Khalifa in New World Embassy 2014). (For more analysis on the political struggles of the Amazigh in their respective Arab states, see Bayle 2016.) Soon after the successful struggle for Azawadian independence, the region was overrun by extremist groups such as MUJAO and AQIM4 involved in global organized crime and purportedly enabled and encouraged by the Malian government in a bid to destabilize Azawad (Flood 2012; New World Summit Brussels 2014; Bayle 2016). Faced with the unappealing prospect of a conclusive secession by Azawad and bourgeoning rogue movements in the region, the Malian government requested armed assistance from the French, who deployed Operation Serval in January 2013, replaced by Operation Barkhane in 2014 once it seemed that the jihadist movements had become more widely dispersed. A further operation, namely the United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA), originally led by Dutch foreign minister Bert Koenders, was launched in July 2013.5 However, despite

108  Runette Kruger

the presence of Barkhane and MINUSMA, extremist activity has increased across the region (Hickendorff and van der Lijn 2017). (For a concise though somewhat journalistic overview of the structure and ideology of the MNLA and its role in establishing Azawad, as well as the subsequent disruption of its program soon after independence, see Mahjar-Barducci 2012.)6 This brief background is provided to clarify the kaleidoscopic juncture of the global and the particular against which Post-Africanisms are unfolding – Africa does not exist in a vacuum, and global interests impact on the choices available to African citizens, activists, and artists. The creation of the New World Embassy is discussed here as an example of a Post-African project in which Africans seize (or create) opportunities for sociopolitical renewal and new ways of being ‘African’ in the world. The New World Embassy was an artistic installation created in Utrecht, the Netherlands, between 6 September and 12 October 2014. The purpose of the installation was to address the status of Azawad as an independent state, and also, more generally, the notions of statehood and statelessness and the plight of unrecognized states. The Embassy was formally inaugurated on 9 September and the event was covered by BBC Africa and other media outlets. The intervention simultaneously served as an installation artwork created to conscientize a global audience about a new nation’s claim to independence, and as an ‘actual’ temporary diplomatic mission, the functioning embassy of a democratic state (Ag Assarid in “Ambassade” du MNLA aux Pays Bas 2014). At the opening, several speakers involved in the creation and representation of Azawad, including Ag Assarid and activist Fathi Ben Khalifa (former president of the World Amazigh Congress), along with political scientist Jolle Demmers, Jeroen Zandberg from the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples Organization, political party members, and independent journalists, were seated around a table in the shape of Azawad, the outlines of which were also mirrored in black lines on the floor of the venue, and on the wall (see Figure 5.2). Azawad comprises approximately two thirds of the territory of Mali, namely the three arid northern regions Timbuktu, Gao, and Kidal. The status of the New World Embassy as an artwork in Utrecht, but also as co-constituting a concrete geopolitical artifact – the state of Azawad created on the African continent – indicates the literally creative aspect of agentic self-dispensation on the one hand, and the deeply political nature of art, on the other. Staal (2014) highlights the confluence between art and sociopolitical praxis in the Embassy, describing it as one part of the “mass-performance” by those involved in creating the new state. Ag Assarid (2010) refers to such constructive/creative praxis as the collective cultivation of “a range of possibilities.” The art (and struggle) of Ag Assarid and Staal demonstrate that artists and activists imagine new ways of life and being, but can also concretize such visions.7 Hassan and Staal (quoted in In der Maur et al. 2016, 8) note: “New worlds only become reality when the imaginary of politics and the imaginary of art meet.” In this sense, Ekpo’s assessment of the centrality of art and creative practice in the constitution of Post-Africanism is borne out. I contend

Post-Africanism as Fluid, Feminist, and Agentic Alterity  109

Figure 5.2 Moussa Ag Assarid and Jonas Staal, New World Embassy: Azawad, 2014. Installation, produced by BAK, basis voor actuele kunst, Utrecht. © Ernie Buts. Courtesy of the artist. Reproduced with permission.

that Post-African art entails the creation – both artistically and politically – of concrete materializations of social justice. The last work to be discussed within the current framing of Post-Africanisms is by Berlin-based South African artist Candice Breitz. The work Love Story was publicly screened in 2017 at the 57th Venice Biennale (13 May–26 November), where artists Breitz and Mohau Modisakeng represented South Africa.8 The curators of the pavilion were Musha Neluheni and Lucy MacGarry. Love Story consisted of an installation of seven screens in two separate spaces. In the second space, accessible only through the first, six monitors were installed along one wall, each screen relaying an interview with one of six refugees (see Figure 5.3). To reach this ‘second’ space, the viewer had to first traverse a room in which, on a large, cinematically sized screen, actors Julianne Moore and Alec Baldwin performed extracts from the original interviews verbatim (see Figures 5.4 and 5.5). This processional choreography – the predetermined sequence by which the viewer first becomes aware of the existence of the six displaced refugees through the retelling of their stories by Western celebrities – is calculated to highlight the unfortunate phenomenon of easy identification with famous personalities and with fictional drama, but an inability to engage empathetically with first-hand accounts of hardships by ordinary people (or the ‘Other’). Celebrities and actors have more social capital, are more ‘human’ and humanized than refugees, seen for the most part as a non-differentiated group

110  Runette Kruger

Figure 5.3 Candice Breitz. Love Story, 2016. Featuring Alec Baldwin and Julianne Moore. Left to Right: Shabeena Francis Saveri (03:38:51), Mamy Maloba Langa (04:15:36), Sarah Ezzat Mardini (02:47:51), Farah Abdi Mohamed (03:31:36), José Maria João (03:27:58) and Luis Ernesto Nava Molero (03:49:53). SevenChannel Video Installation. Commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria, Outset Germany and Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg. Installation View: Arken Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj, 2018. Photograph: Anders Sune Berg. Courtesy of the artist. Reproduced with permission.

of dark-skinned people who roam the globe voluntarily and are opportunistically imposing themselves upon the host nations of the world. Their stories are, however, humbling. Of the six refugees, only three had been granted asylum or refugee status at the time of the interviews in late 2015. Twenty-year-old Sarah Ezzat Mardini fled Syria in August 2015 and was granted asylum in Germany, and Venezuelan political dissident Luis Ernesto Nava Molero had been granted asylum in the USA. Former Angolan child-soldier José Maria João had been granted refugee status in South Africa. Having been abducted to become part of the rebel UNITA militia at the age of twelve or thirteen, José was forced to perpetrate and also suffered extreme violence until the age of twenty-seven, when he fled on foot to the Namibian border. His courage and ability to imagine a life beyond the vicious one in which he came to adulthood, is remarkable. The remaining three refugees had not succeeded in their respective applications at that point. Mamy Maloba Langa fled the Democratic Republic of the Congo in 2006 after revenge attacks, which included rape and torture, on known supporters of opposition leader Jean-Pierre Bemba. She had been in

Post-Africanism as Fluid, Feminist, and Agentic Alterity  111

Figure 5.4 Candice Breitz, Love Story, 2016. Featuring Alec Baldwin and Julianne Moore. Seven-Channel Video Installation. Duration: 73 minutes, 42 seconds, loop. Commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria, Outset Germany and Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg. Installation View: Arken Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj, 2018. Photograph: Anders Sune Berg. Courtesy of the artist. Reproduced with permission.

South Africa for nine years at the time of being interviewed without being granted refugee status, although she has to travel to Johannesburg every three to six months to renew her status as an asylum seeker, or face the consequences of becoming an illegal alien. South African Home Affairs is notorious for reneging on its human rights obligations in this regard. The Department is described as “one of the most criticized sectors of the South African public service,” characterized by a pervasive culture of “dehumanizing, criminalizing, or pathogenizing immigrants” (Segatti, Hoag & Vigneswaran 2012, 124, 138– 139). Their presence is regarded as fundamentally illegitimate, understood only as a threat to South African development by the very officials who could grant them ‘legitimacy’ in the midst of their precarious living conditions (ibid.). Mamy relocated to Cape Town in 2008 after suffering injuries in the wave of xenophobic violence which swept Johannesburg in that year. Farah Abdi Mohamed from Somalia, currently residing in Berlin, and transgender activist Shabeena Francis Saveri from India, now living in the USA, have similarly not been able to secure permanent residence. In addition, two of the interviewees, Mamy and Shabeena, requested that their full interviews not be made readily available online while their applications are still pending, and Farah has (bravely) appeared in disguise, under an assumed name, fearing retribution

112  Runette Kruger

Figure 5.5 Candice Breitz, Love Story, 2016. Featuring Alec Baldwin and Julianne Moore. Seven-Channel Video Installation. Duration: 73 minutes, 42 seconds, loop. Commissioned by the National Gallery of Victoria, Outset Germany and Medienboard Berlin-Brandenburg. Installation View: Arken Museum of Modern Art, Ishøj, 2018. Photograph: Anders Sune Berg. Courtesy of the artist. Reproduced with permission.

from his Somali fellow refugees for his atheistic views (Love Story Interviewees 2016). In just under twenty-two hours of footage, the perspective and experiences of each refugee slowly emerges, with stories and events related with evident anxiety and distress, with hopeful earnestness that this engagement with a global audience (mediated by famous celebrities) would improve the plight of refugees in general, or with bold disdain: Sarah, one of a handful of refugees in her group of twenty who could swim, and who helped them to survive the crossing from Izmir (Turkey) to the island of Lesbos, responds to the backlash she has faced in Germany: My message for the stupid people that … think that the refugees … are coming in to steal your job I am saying for them we are refugees from war not refugees for money … We are not coming here to have another war … the message I wanted to give to [the] world [is] we are refugees, we are human like everyone … refugees are educated and they are good people. (Ezzat Mardini 2016a, 2016b)

Post-Africanism as Fluid, Feminist, and Agentic Alterity  113

In terms of its structural arrangement, where the plight of the invisible is related by hyper-visible Western actors, as mediated through the work of a privileged artist, Love Story manifests two convergent spatialities at the same time (the space of the Same and that of the Alter). In this sense, it is similar to the double presence of the New World Embassy, which existed in Utrecht and Azawad simultaneously. In both cases (New World Embassy and Love Story), the marginalized have furthermore tactically addressed their own respective plights by agentically enlisting the agency of their collaborators. This work provides an opportunity to reflect on the kind of Post-Africanisms that would be worth pursuing. Firstly, the agency and courage of each of the refugees interviewed here, and of the vast majority of violently displaced populations currently seeking a better life, point to the notion that Africans are certainly not merely victims, but co-creators of their histories. Secondly, it befits Post-Africans to consider the ways in which we are treating each other. The lingering notions of exceptionalism among South Africans which has led to several waves of xenophobic violence since independence, for instance, should show us that we cannot exact human rights for Africans if we cannot provide common decency in the form of freedom from exclusion and persecution based on prejudice, to each other. As Post-Africans we need to inform ourselves of the dynamics (social, historical, psychological, institutional), through which current injustices can continue to prevail, whilst working toward the eradication of those enabling circumstances (and prejudices) by which we harm each other. In her interview with Venice Biennale co-curator Lucy MacGarry, Same Mdluli (2017) perspicaciously observes: “In events such as the biennale, nations tend to choose in accordance with the politics of the time and the message they are trying to convey to the world about themselves.” Love Story, if anything, can enlarge our sense of being in the world, and, more importantly, of being with others in the world, as a point of departure for Post-Africanisms.

Conclusions The current reflection is an attempt to expand on the notion of Post-Africanism as a necessary de(con)struction of essentialist framings of all that is African and a refusal to succumb to a victim stance. My current subject position has led me to engage with the topic from a feminist perspective which foregrounds alterity in disputation to the claims of the Same. I have therefore approached the notion of Post-Africanism through the lens of several feminist formulations of agency which seem appropriate to the task of dismantling essentialism (including the essentialist position of the ‘victim’), without thereby attempting to merely conflate a feminist with a Post-African stance. This attempted formulation of a de-essentialized Africanism accordingly leads to an exploration here of Post-Africanisms, in the plural. Haraway’s work on post-human identity is useful in dismantling the repressive dynamic by which thinking and living in binaries operates. Exposing the mechanism by which binaries consign secondary status to some subjects (the

114  Runette Kruger

‘Other,’ woman) provides a conceptual framework for the formulation of Post-Africanisms which evade essentialist categorizations of the ‘African’ as primitive (as opposed to civilized), non-White (rather than just Black), nonEuropean, etc. Haraway’s concept of the post-human thus opposes being consigned a secondary status by the Same, and also evades being cornered into a position of having to choose between alliance with one of two contrasting subject positions. The term Alter has been introduced here to replace ‘Other’ as part of the strategy of escaping an identity and status irrevocably yoked to that of the Same. Post-Africanisms thus entail the constitution of identity founded on alterity rather than on being ‘Other’ or Othered, and refusing the invocation of the term ‘Africa’ only ever as lack. Such work embraces a fluidity and confluence of subject positions, against the strictures of predetermined identities emanating from the need of the Same to contain its nemesis. Being PostAfrican consciously invokes this fluidity. For the same reason, self-identifying as Post-African does not depend on hailing from Africa, or residing in Africa. Post-African identities are not settled by ‘origin’ or domicile, but by a commitment to the liberation and welfare of the continent and its people. The fluidity of an alter position furthermore tactically invokes the power of hybridity: hybridity has the ability to convene the agency of the Same with that of the Alter, shrewdly exploiting a liminal position which cannot merely be dismissed, opposed, or eradicated by the Same. Haraway furthermore rejects the utilization of victimhood by the Alter as an ideological resource, in line with Ekpo’s call for an agentic Post-Africanism founded on possibility. Eschewing victimhood as a resource, however, in no way entails denying past and current violations of human rights and dignity. Sara Ahmed’s feminist rebuttal of the notion of ‘post-feminism’ is similarly applicable to conceptualizing Post-Africanisms. Ahmed rejects the dissimulating construct of ‘postfeminism’ as based on the erroneous assumption that feminism has achieved its task of instituting gender equity: that gender discrimination has somehow ceased to exist. A Post-African consciousness should equally proceed from the measured assessment of what ‘has not ended,’ namely exploitation, disruption, and destabilization of the ‘developing’ world by the Western bloc and the tangible effects of these processes on the body and being of the Alter. Besides utilizing these feminist strategies in the service of constructing an oppositional underpinning for Post-Africanisms, three productive themes identified by Ekpo have been explored further. These are the possibility inscribed in an alternative time consciousness or futurity; agentic self-determination; and, lastly, Post-Africanisms as fully embedded and implicated in the machinations of the world. These converging concerns also reflect in the work of the artists discussed here. Martine Syms revisits Afrofuturism with a view to situating it on earth, foregoing the exoticism of outer space. Her formulation of Mundane Afrofuturism echoes Ahmed’s rejection of chimerically resolved social ills and also resonates with Christina Sharpe’s engagement with the Weather – that is, anti-Blackness as the prevailing current real. Syms and Sharpe furthermore identify the ways in which racial oppression, White supremacy, and capitalism

Post-Africanism as Fluid, Feminist, and Agentic Alterity  115

function in tandem to amplify the Weather. They respectively identify focusing on the political aspects of everyday life lived as Black and female, and on a conscious demeanor which can be summarized as caring from a woke perspective, as the antidote to oppression and its effects on the psyche. Syms and Sharpe lastly perceive feminist struggles against anti-Blackness on a global scale. Proceeding from a position of full cognizance of the real enables an alternative, futural un-real (lived social equality), in the present by short-circuiting denial – a potent and attractive enabler of injustice. In the New World Embassy, created by Ag Assarid and Staal, the global impact of state-driven capitalism and supra-national processes of exploitation alike are the focus of their agentic and subversive political/artistic praxis. The nature of their praxis highlights Post-Africanism as the outcome of self-determination, as a social, political, and cultural phenomenon currently being created by artists, activists, and innumerable fluid, hybrid, threatening Alters. The New World Embassy and Azawad also demonstrate how imagining the new is the first step toward achieving the new, and that imagination is therefore a method of dissident resistance indispensable for world-making (or for, in Ag Assarid’s words, cultivating possibility). Lastly, the global scope of current oppositional praxis, the necessity of self-determination, and the fluidity of identity work are evident in Breitz’s work Love Story. Here, the Alter is represented by six refugees whose efforts at self-determination include firstly surviving brutalizing conditions in their home territories and then dehumanization in exile. Some of the refugees are from African countries, and some have settled here or are trying to. The stories of people like Mamy, who struggle for a decade to obtain permanent residence (a measure of basic recognition for her humanity and a livable level of dignity), yet endure ostracism and physical violence by the system and her fellow Africans (that is, by xenophobic South Africans), contrast strongly with what Post-Africanism should strive to be if it earnestly seeks to dismantle the apparatuses of disempowerment of the Alter. If we, the Alter, in our varying capacities cannot muster empathy for each other, our chances of establishing a human-friendly alternative horizon of being is considerably diminished. It, in fact, disintegrates and a new world is destroyed before it has begun, and by our own hands. Post-Africanism, in closing, might be envisaged as the intersection of the global (the mechanisms of capitalism, patriarchy, and racism, but also supranational solidarity in the face of these mechanisms) with the particular (selfdetermined identity and modes of being). It is futural. In other words, it operates as a basis for newness, but situates the future in the present. PostAfricanisms will be fluid and hybrid, not singular or concluded, as these latter characteristics will merely serve to metamorphose them into yet more versions of universalizing patriarchy and empire. The agency of the Post-African consists in addressing deficits in social equity in the here and now by utilizing a combination of tactics according to need and context. These contexts range from successfully escaping a war zone to dismantling othering tropes and the subtle (or perfectly evident) ways in which these enable lingering exclusion.

116  Runette Kruger

Lastly, the work of the Alter in self-determination of identity, in some cases in the face of life-threatening oppression, indicates that Post-Africanisms will be established through the practice of courage, or not at all.

Notes 1 In teasing out similarities (for me) between an urge to escape the mantle of Africanism (as necessarily reactionary) and ‘woman’ as primarily fecund (and even here there are convergences in stereotypes of ‘Africa’ and ‘woman’), I do not mean to reduce the conditions of struggle against one paradigm to those against another. Any sympathies that there might be between the evasion and dismantling of these limiting categorizations (‘African,’ ‘woman’) are merely useful as a means of thinking through converging concerns. 2 The notion of the term Alter as a substitute for the ‘Other’ crystallized in conversation with fellow theorist Thabang Monoa. 3 Mouvement National de Libération de l’Azawad. 4 Mouvement pour l’Unicité et le Jihad en Afrique de l’Ouest and Al Qaeda in the Islamic Maghreb, respectively. 5 In June 2017, the United Nations Security Council reaffirmed the mandate of MINUSMA to be extended to June 2018 (Hickendorff and Van der Lijn 2017). JeanClaude Cousseran, former head of the Direction Générale De La Sécurité Extérieure (which coordinates French foreign intelligence), has described Mali (Azawad) as the future “Afghanistan of France” after France’s armed intervention unaccompanied by any positive political vision for the region (Beau 2017). In December 2020, MINUSMA is still in place, with 13,209 authorized military personnel and an approved budget of $1,221,420,600 for the 2019–2020 financial year (MINUSMA Fact Sheet 2020). 6 Against this miasma of international involvement/interference and competing agendas and claims to natural resources in the region, MNLA unity suffered a serious rupture when its leadership signed the Algiers Accord (20 June 2015), which certain members (including Ag Assarid) regarded as an unreasonable compromise and betrayal of the cause of autonomy for Azawad (Konaté 2016; Nyirabikali 2015). Some months later, on the last day of the Third Ordinary Congress of the MNLA, held in Kidal from 7–11 April 2016, Ag Assarid permanently dissociated himself from the MNLA and created the movement Free Azawad (Abba 2016; Monti 2016). 7 Furthermore, in contravention to the notion that art depoliticizes projects of this nature (that is, the sociopolitical struggle for regional autonomy that evades manipulation by foreign-backed regimes), Ag Assarid counters that the creation of the Embassy for Azawad has indeed at times provided the liberation project with crucial negotiation leverage and political capital (Hagen 2017). 8 Before the Biennale, the work appeared in 2016 for the first time at the Kunstmuseum Stuttgart and again in 2017 at KOW Gallery in Berlin. The work was also on show at the NGV Triennial in Melbourne, Australia, which opened in December 2017. Breitz temporarily changed the name of the work to Wilson Must Go in protest of the fact that the National Gallery of Victoria was at that stage making use of the services of the security firm Wilson, which has been implicated in human rights abuses in refugee camps on Manus Island and Nauru (Cascone 2017; Harmon 2017).

Bibliography Abba, S. 2016. “Moussa Ag-Assarid, le Touareg qui prône la séparation du Mali en deux Etats.” Le Monde Afrique, 25 November, Accessed 31 December 2016, http:​/​/www​​

Post-Africanism as Fluid, Feminist, and Agentic Alterity  117 .lemo​​nde​.f​​r​/afr​​ique/​​artic​​le​/20​​16​/11​​/25​/m​​oussa​​-ag​-a​​ssari​​d​-le-​​touar​​eg​-qu​​i​-pro​​ne​-la​​ -sepa​​ratio​​n​-du-​​mali-​​en​-de​​​ux​-et​​ats​_5​​03801​​7​_321​​2​.htm​​l. Ag Assarid, M. 2010. “Mon Souffle a Partager.” Le Blog Officiel de Moussa Ag Assarid, 26 November, Accessed 2 January 2018, http://moussa​-blog​.azawadunion​.com/. Agamben, G. 2000. Means without End: Notes on Politics. Translated by Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Ahmed, S. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press. “‘Ambassade’ du MNLA aux Pays Bas.” 2014. BBC Africa, 10 September, Accessed 2 August 2015, http:​/​/www​​.bbc.​​com​/a​​friqu​​e​/reg​​ion​/2​​014​/0​​9​/14​0​​910​_m​​nla. Bayle, T. 2016. “Les enjeux de la ‘question touarègue’ au Sahel.” Le Monde Afrique, 4 July, Accessed 2 January 2018, http:​/​/mon​​dafri​​que​.c​​om​/le​​s​-enj​​eux​-d​​e​-la-​​quest​​ion​-t​​ouare​​​ gue​-a​​u​-sah​​el/. Beau, N. 2017. “Emmanuel Macron au Mali renforce une coopération régionale balbutiante.” Le Monde Afrique, 2 July, Accessed 2 January 2018, http:​/​/mon​​dafri​​que​.c​​ om​/em​​manue​​l​-mac​​ron​-m​​ali​-v​​eut​-r​​enfor​​cer​-c​​ooper​​ation​​-regi​​o​nale​​-balb​​utian​​te/. Bhabha, H. K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Cascone, S. 2017. “More Artists Join Candice Breitz’s Creative Protest of Museum’s Link to Abusive Refugee Camps.” Art Net News, 15 December, Accessed 4 January 2018, https​:/​/ne​​ws​.ar​​tnet.​​com​/a​​rt​-wo​​rld​/w​​ilson​​-secu​​rity-​​natio​​nal​-g​​aller​​y​-of-​​victo​​ria​-a​​rtis​t ​​ -prot​​est​-1​​18102​​4. Ezzat Mardini, S. 2016a. “Love Story / Sarah Ezzat Mardini / Message for Julianne.” Accessed 7 January 2018, https://vimeo​.com​/170374313. Ezzat Mardini, S. 2016b. “Love Story / Sarah Ezzat Mardini / On Prejudice.” Accessed 7 January 2018, https://vimeo​.com​/180305256. Flood, Derek H. 2012. “Between Islamization and Secession: The Contest for Northern Mali.” Combating Terrorism Center, 24 July, Accessed 9 August 2015, https​:/​/ww​​w​.ctc​​ .usma​​.edu/​​posts​​/betw​​een​-i​​slami​​zatio​​n​-and​​-sece​​ssion​​-the-​​conte​​st​-fo​​​r​-nor​​thern​​-mali​. Hagen, I. 2017. “New World Embassy: Rojava.” Temporary, 11 January, Accessed 4 January 2018, http:​/​/tem​​porar​​yartr​​eview​​.com/​​new​-w​​orld-​​embas​​sy​-​ro​​java/​. Haraway, D. J. 1991. “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.” In Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. The Reinvention of Nature, 149–181. New York: Routledge. Harmon, S. 2017. “International Artists Join Protests against NGV Use of Wilson Security.” The Guardian, 14 December, Accessed 7 January 2018, https​:/​/ww​​w​.the​​guard​​ian​.c​​om​ /au​​stral​​ia​-ne​​ws​/20​​17​/de​​c​/14/​​inter​​natio​​nal​-a​​rtist​​s​-joi​​n​-pro​​tests​​-agai​​nst​-n​​g​v​-us​​e​-of-​​ wilso​​n​-sec​​urity​. Hickendorff, A., and J. van der Lijn. 2017. “Renewal of MINUSMA: A Missed Opportunity for New Generation of DDR.” Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 30 June, Accessed 1 January 2018, https​:/​/ww​​w​.sip​​ri​.or​​g​/com​​menta​​ry​/bl​​og​/20​​17​/re​​newal​​ -minu​​sma​-m​​issed​​-oppo​​rtuni​​ty​-n​e​​w​-gen​​erati​​on​-dd​​r. In der Maur, R., Jærn Pilgaard, K., Staal, J., and B. K. Wallstrøm. (eds.). 2016. New Worlds. Oslo: KORO Public Art Norway/URO. Konaté, D. T. 2016. “L’indépendantiste Moussa Ag Assarid quitte le MNLA.” Le 360 Afrique, 29 April, Accessed 1 January 2018, http:​/​/afr​​ique.​​le360​​.ma​/m​​ali​/s​​ociet​​e​/201​​6​ /04/​​29​/20​​36​-li​​ndepe​​ndant​​iste-​​mouss​​a​-ag-​​assar​​id​-​qu​​itte-​​le​-mn​​la​-20​​36. “Love Story Interviewees.” 2016. Accessed 5 January 2018, http:​/​/www​​.cand​​icebr​​eitz.​​net​ /a​​ssets​​/docs​​/Love​​Story​​_INTE​​RVIE​W​​EES​.p​​df. “Love Story Images.” 2016. Accessed 5 January 2018, http:​/​/www​​.cand​​icebr​​eitz.​​net​/a​​ssets​​ /docs​​/Love​​Story​​_IMA​G​​ES​.pd​​f.

118  Runette Kruger Mahjar-Barducci, A. 2012. “The MNLA’s Fight for a Secular State of Azawad.” Accessed 1 January 2018, https​:/​/ww​​w​.ict​​.org.​​il​/Us​​erFil​​es​/Az​​awadI​​CT​%20​-​%20B​​arduc​​ci​​%20​​final​​ .pdf. Mdluli, S. 2017. “SA Artists to Poke Holes in African Stereotypes in Venice.” Mail & Guardian, 5 May. “MINUSMA Fact Sheet.” 2020. United Nations Peacekeeping, 29 December, Accessed 29 December 2020, https​:/​/pe​​aceke​​eping​​.un​.o​​rg​/en​​/miss​​ion​/m​​​inusm​​a. Monti, C. 2016. “Moussa Ag Assarid (Free Azawad): ‘Les Corses nous écoutent et nous aident à faire passer notre message’.” Corse Net Infos, 11 August, Accessed 31 December 2016, https​://ww​w.cor​senet​infos​.cors​ica/M​​oussa​​-Ag​-A​​ssari​​d​-Fre​​e​-Aza​​ wad​- L​​ e s​- Co​​ r ses-​​ n ous-​​ e cout​​ e nt​- e​​ t​- nou​​ s​- aid​​ e nt​- a​​ - fair​​ e​- pas​​ s er​- n​​ o​t re-​​ m essa​​ g e​_ a2​​ 2682.​​html. New World Embassy. 2014. “Inauguration Part 2.” Accessed 29 July 2015, https://vimeo​ .com​/127142054. New World Summit Brussels. 2014. “Moussa Ag Assarid.” Accessed 1 August 2015, https:// vimeo​.com​/112339806. Nyirabikali, G. 2015. “Mali Peace Accord: Actors, Issues and Their Representation.” Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, 27 August, Accessed 1 January 2018, https://www​.sipri​.org​/node​/385. Segatti, A., Hoag, C., and D. Vigneswaran. 2012. “Can Organizations Learn without Political Leadership? The Case of Public Sector Reform among South African Home Affairs Officials.” Politique Africaine 128:121–142. Serpell, N. 2017. “The Zambian ‘Afronaut’ Who Wanted to Join the Space Race.” New Yorker, 11 March, Accessed 10 September 2017, https​:/​/ww​​w​.new​​yorke​​r​.com​​/cult​​ure​/ c​​ultur​​e​-des​​k​/the​​-zamb​​ian​-a​​frona​​ut​-wh​​o​-wan​​ted​-t​​o​​-joi​​n​-the​​-spac​​e​-rac​​e. Sharpe, C. 2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University Press. St Félix, D. 2017. “How to Be a Successful Black Woman.” New Yorker, 8 July, Accessed 10 September 2017, https​:/​/br​​idget​​donah​​ue​-me​​dia​-w​​2​.s3-​​us​-we​​st​-2.​​amazo​​naws.​​com​/f​​ iles/​​H65CI​​g4lTV​​​OM​-9D​​Xcn0T​​ow​.pd​​f. Staal, J. 2014. “To Make a World, Part II: The Art of Creating a State.” E-flux 60, December, Accessed 1 August 2015, http:​/​/www​​.e​-fl​​ux​.co​​m​/jou​​rnal/​​to​-ma​​ke​-a-​​world​​-part​​-ii​-t​​he​ -ar​​t​-of-​​c​reat​​ing​-a​​-stat​​e/. Syms, M. [S.a.] “The Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto.” Accessed 21 May 2017, http:​/​/mar​​ tines​​yms​.c​​om​/th​​e​-mun​​dane-​​afrof​​uturi​​st​-m​a​​nifes​​to/. Terrefe, S. 2016. “What Exceeds the Hold?: An Interview with Christina Sharpe.” Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge 29, Accessed 12 August 2017, https:// doi​.org​/10​.20415​/rhiz​/029​.e06. “What Does UOENO Mean?” 2013. KISS.FM, 12 June, Accessed 27 December 2020, https://kisselpaso​.com​/what​-is​-uoeno/. Young, G. 2015. “Martine Syms.” Art in America, 17 November, Accessed 27 December 2020, https​:/​/ww​​w​.art​​news.​​com​/a​​rt​-in​​-amer​​ica​/a​​ia​-re​​views​​/mart​​ine​​-s​​yms​-6​​2051/​.

6

The Ruses of the Afrophiliac Condition Thabang Molatelo Monoa

Representation is arguably one of the most significant and difficult things to mediate in the twenty-first century as it has a profound aesthetical function in as far as relating human experiences. This is quite telling considering how through different modalities in contemporary visual culture – be it in film, print, or in a painting – representation plays a crucial role in making sense of and aestheticizing the world as we perceive it. More crucially, representation functions within a symbolic economy where it has the power to inscribe, reinforce, and/or perpetuate deeply contentious ideals and values. Stuart Hall (1993, 111) dares to remind us of the fraughtness underlying the “politics of representation” when he argues: We have only, as it were, to express what we already know we are. Instead, it is only through the way in which we represent and imagine ourselves that we come to know how we are constituted and who we are. There is no escape from the politics of representation. To a large degree, representations function to visibilize the most constitutive parts of our identities. However, simply stating this is likewise cumbersome as it comes with posing some rather unavoidable and indeed crucial questions about some of the visual cultural practices unfolding in Africa. Working within the ambit of Post-Africanism, I question whether these practices fulfill the necessary role of successfully modernizing our cultures, and consequently, our societies, as per Ekpo’s provocation. Reading his diagnosis, which is so comprehensively explained in the introduction, it would seem not as he compellingly argues that Afrophilia has perversely intruded into and clouded the African imagination to a point of irredeemable obscurity. Here interrogated from a visual cultural lens, I examine the orientation of a set of visual tropes, through an analysis of two South African television series – a brief reflection on Generations: The Legacy (hereafter Generations),1 and a more expansive reading of Isibaya, which thematizes, among other things, highly volatile visual tropes of witchcraft and occult practices. My aim is to make apparent the latent, and at times explicit, presence and persistence of the Afrophiliac consciousness. More pertinently, I intend to show how representation is complicit in the

120  Thabang Molatelo Monoa

stimulation of this consciousness. A reflection such as the one I am undertaking here is, despite its limitations, timely as there has been very little critical scholarly engagement with South African soapies; more so these two that I discuss. Although my discussion is fundamentally rooted in visual culture, it is worth mentioning that soapies are a peculiar institution, which has cultural significance in South African popular culture. As a country emerging from a traumatic past and equally immersed within the intricacies of development, soapies have been formative in molding societal attitudes and relating varied cultural values. This is precisely what makes pop culture so interesting as a domain. It may be argued that popular culture can significantly partake in the construction, disruption, and negotiation of dominant ideologies. Accordingly, popular culture, in the form of television and soap operas in particular, can be powerful vehicles for the dissemination of those dominant ideologies. I mention this to simply highlight that these soapies, which I address, have an equal footing and relevance in South African popular culture in as much as they have a place in the visual domain. Nonetheless, it is from within the visual cultural space where rich elucidations on these excessive tropes of witchcraft and/or occult practices can be made with sufficient criticality. Some important scholarly work is being undertaken by theorists such as Nomusa Makhubu (2013), who in her doctoral dissertation examines “the increasing popularity of Nigerian video-film,” also referred to as Nollywood. Her study, appropriately titled, “The Fantastic Subject: A Visio-Cultural Study of Nollywood VideoFilm,” gives meaningful attention to the thematics around magic, magic realism, and the occult. Though not undertaken from a Post-African framework, her work is acknowledged here for it provides a suitable context from which a Post-African critique of these thematics can be undertaken. Preceding her, Grace Kumwendo (2007) similarly considers the nature of the Nigerian video film industry, noting in particular its excessive representations of themes concerned with the occult, magic, and witchcraft. She, however, also observes that though these films sustain a fair amount of criticism, they do nonetheless command a lot of attention from local audiences, which speaks to their general palatability.2 One of Denis Ekpo’s (2014) points of contention within his Post-African logic is the seemingly incompatible marriage in African visual culture between ancestry and the rationalism that underpins Enlightenment modernity. More specifically, how ancestral practice, which is often misrepresented as witchcraft, is forced into a symbiotic relationship with modernity. My chief focus here is unraveling how this takes form through a type of visual storytelling that employs highly potent motifs of occult and witchcraft practices. This is inspired by Ekpo’s (2014) caveat, which holds that Afrophilia is most persistent in African arts. Thus, any attempt to stimulate a culturally healthier and modernized Africa should begin with an exhaustive critique of Afrophilia’s functionality in the arts3, with the aim of redirecting the potential of the arts to serve as catalyst of a Post-African consciousness. The breadth of Ekpo’s theorization of Afrophilia somewhat simplifies this task as he has already laid

The Ruses of the Afrophiliac Condition  121

out the ideological impulses and influences that inform this notion. However, complexity is never absent when thinking about representations that thematize African ancestral practices, particularly when they are conveyed through imagery. Thus, I will briefly recount and crystallize some salient aspects of his critique to make my intervention more meaningful.4

Discerning the Afrophiliac Consciousness In his canonical treatise titled Philosophy of History, first published in 1837, Georg Hegel (2001) mounts a contentious interpretation of what he considers ‘world history’ wherein he renders a demeaning ‘image’ of Africa by declaring: [At] this point we leave Africa, not to mention it again. For it is no historical part of the World; it has no movement or development to exhibit. Historical movements in it – that is in its northern part – belong to the Asiatic or European Worlds. [W]hat we properly understand by Africa, is the Unhistorical, Undeveloped Spirit, still involved in the mere conditions of nature and which had to be presented here as only on the threshold of World History. (Hegel 2001, 173) In this widely quoted passage, Hegel follows a host of European thinkers such as Immanuel Kant and David Hume in mercilessly designating Africa as being ahistorical; the perpetual Other of civilization, and a place in need of urgent deliverance from all sorts of heathenism. He argues for its dismissal; that being its diverse cultures, its societies, and furthermore implicates the geographical space that it is, with its mostly Black inhabitants, as being ‘undeveloped,’ having no sense of mobility and thus making no contribution to civilization and history. With this claim, he goes onto identify four historical worlds – Oriental, Greek, Roman, and German – which possess what he refers to as ‘Geist’ (world spirit): the essence that enables the progression of history. Notably, Africa is not mentioned amongst these historical worlds and is evidently devoid of this essence, thus warranting its exclusion from ‘world history.’ While indeed a towering figure whose century-old discourse still forms part of the West’s conception of Africa where she continues to be (re)presented as the antithesis to the West, Hegel goes further than simply identifying Africa’s absence of an essence (or Geist). He offers that her grounding of what in the West may be perceived as backwardness, alluding to African spirituality, is expressive of a civilization yet to fully mature into progress. Thus his resolution to never mention Africa again is not only an extreme form of disapproval, but equally so, a rather assured condemnation of civilizations which were rooted in their own rationalities. It is not unfounded, therefore, to suggest that his phantom-like presence still lurks. His disparaging tropes of a backward Africa find constant reiteration in the modern world. As Achille Mbembe

122  Thabang Molatelo Monoa

(2015, 2) reminds us: “Africa still constitutes the metaphors through which the West represents the origin of its own norms, develops self-image, and integrates this image into the set of signifiers asserting what is supposed to be its identity.” However, what is of interest to me here, and is certainly what summarizes the Post-African inquiry, is how Africans respond to these Hegelian-like badges of disapproval. For there is, as Ekpo establishes, a phenomenon taking form; one borne out of the trauma of having one’s subjectivity severely denigrated. Thus, in his conception of Post-Africanism, Ekpo considers Afrophilia as the embodiment of a psycho-existential neurosis at best. He intones that Afrophilia is, in fact, revealing of psychological complications that have affected our selfunderstanding and world interpretation, particularly in consideration to how African “self-hood” is constructed. As noted, Afrophilia, the induced response to colonial denigrations on Africa, her cultures and histories, best connotes an ideological attempt to recuperate the image of Africa through a radical embrace of all things African. This of course is not without precedence nor context. In modern African philosophical discourse, we can refer to the earliest articulations of négritude, particularly the Senghorian strand, as having served this function well for it pronounced, amongst other things, a nostalgia for Africa’s precolonial past and a return to the “Motherland” for those displaced in the diaspora. Certainly, the corollary between these two notions is evident. However, beyond the assumption of racial and cultural pride, which négritude professes so ardently, Afrophilia, as Ekpo discerns, surmises the profoundest expression of the love for Africanity along with a measured hatred for European colonialism. And indeed this is where the complication arises, because Afrophilia is essentially the construction of an identity and love for Africa, based on a hatred for Europe. When tracing its genealogy, Ekpo notes that, while it is rooted within the meta-narrative of ‘Africanism,’ Afrophilia is not, necessarily speaking, a selfgenerated idea but rather a mutation emerging out of a need to recuperate, reformulate, and re-aestheticize, symbolically, the colonially disparaged Africa (Ekpo 2014). Thus, what is thought to be the love for Africanness is for Ekpo a perverse mutation of lingerings of colonial trauma that, further, manifest as a form of cultural protectionism. Another layer of complexity is that accompanying this profound love for Africanness is a deeply entrenched hatred of colonialism, and the “mistrust of imperial Europe” (Ekpo 2014). This second aspect is further complicated by Ekpo’s claim that despite this hatred for Europe, there is additionally a coveting of its modernism – alluding to its economic, cultural, and technological advancedness. Ekpo sees these two aspects as functioning simultaneously. Henceforth, what conditions the Afrophiliac consciousness is a combination of two structures: the first which expresses itself as an affirmation of African culture and pride – ultimately an affirmation of African identity – and the second being a rebuke of Europe’s colonial inscription on Africa. From this, what abounds is a split consciousness of sorts. A persistent need to satisfy

The Ruses of the Afrophiliac Condition  123

two conflicting desires: the much revered values and customs rooted in our ancestry and the rationality embedded in Europe’s modernization. The severity of such a diagnosis may come across as surprising. The radicalism of Post-African critique, and indeed the tenor with which it is rendered, registers a peculiarity of sorts. Speaking to the first dimension of Afrophilia, why should this expressive love for Africa be perceived as being problematic in any sense? Surely in acknowledging the persistence of the age-old Hegelian and like-minded scientifically racist tropes, there should be a recognition of the need to reaffirm Africanness? With African cultures and values having been so denigrated, is the revalorizing of them unnecessary? I want to suggest here that the meta-critical posture underlying Post-African critique does not disavow this fact but instead inquires about the psychic implications latent in Afrophiliac consciousness. Crucial is how Afrophilia, perhaps unwittingly, manifests in contemporary Black visual culture.5 Working on the assumption that representations innately possess suggestive power, the internalization cum perpetuation of Afrophiliac impulses in visual culture has implications that go beyond the reach of the storyteller or the artist. Could it be that the proliferation of particular representations is precisely what gives birth to some of the societal conditions and cultural ills that continue to manifest in modern Africa? On this note, Luz. E. Nagle and Bolaji Owasanoye (2016) refer to instances where witchcraft, as practiced through the invocation of ancestry and/or the “supernatural,” has been used to facilitate human trafficking as seen in some West African countries where such acts, though some may seem frivolous, are surprisingly not unfamiliar. John Boakye (2017) highlights similar instances wherein in Ghana occultism is used to bring back lost lovers;6 his contempt for such practices being expressed thus: Many Ghanaians want easy way out of their problems. They simply spiritualize them and blame unseen forces for their failures. A woman having difficulty with pregnancy may think that a blood relation has removed her womb and hidden it under a tree. She will seek help from mallams or fake pastors instead of medical help. Boakye (2017) further suggests that these practices have become such an integral part of “life” that they prevail in schools, churches, football, business, marriage, family life, and relationships. Ekpo’s contention, which I here corroborate, is that Afrophilia has engendered a specific form of self-understanding. He clarifies this by saying, Afrophilia has become malignant, taking on a life of its own by providing a definitive grid of self and world interpretation … Africa became under the impulse a culturally over-protected, perpetually celebrated transcendental Mother who can do no wrong and whose core ways are eternal, beautiful and good-in-themselves. (Ekpo 2014)

124  Thabang Molatelo Monoa

In Ekpo’s view, these practices are questionable in as far as their applicability to today’s modernizing world governed by rationalism. It becomes interesting thus decoding how representations of ancestry, no matter how perverse or obscured, are meted out as extensions of African culture, reclamations of African cultural pride.

Visualizations of Afrophilia In some South African television soap operas, representations of ancestry, which is mostly conflated with and communicated as witchcraft, have, over the past few years, become excessive; almost to a point of fault. This is where Generations and Isibaya come under scrutiny. Over the past decade, I can easily recall how some of these stories were conveyed with an acute sense of realism, particularly in their depictions of African people; their cultures, customs, and likewise, their social and economic mobility. Certainly, themes of ancestry and traditional healing have been a feature in these stories although quite interspersed in their dissemination. However, in the last decade or so, there has been an extreme indulgence into the portrayal of the more “peculiar” forms of these representations where, for example, depictions connoting Black economic ascendancy have been tangled with the use of witchcraft in order to attain social, political, and cultural prominence. To be sure, some of these stories have been met with harsh responses from the public, who have condemned the often unsavory and careless depictions of African spirituality and ancestry.7 A case in point is a storyline that ran in the early months of 2016 in Generations8 wherein one of the female protagonists, Tshidi, a woman seeking power and wealth, enlists the counsel of a witchdoctor to help her fulfill her ambitions, using African ‘juju’ (magic) to manipulate situations and gain control over her conquests and subordinates (Bambalele 2016). Upon visiting this witchdoctor, she is inaugurated with a snake named Mamlambo9: a deity that serves as a repository for her powers. Of consequence for Tshidi though is that she has to acknowledge and revere this snake as her master, which, despite granting her wishes, requires perverted forms of sacrifice such as spilling blood and other abnormal doings in order to attain wealth and power. Unavoidably, this storyline, though quite interesting in its thematic inflections as there is often curiosity around encounters involving African ancestry and spiritual practices, received harsh criticism for the implicit, and at times explicit, suggestions therein. These criticisms essentially claimed that the representations failed to clarify the difference between divination practices or traditional healing and witchcraft. Adam Ashforth (2005, 212–213) simplifies this distinction by centralizing the use of muthi; which he refers to as various substances contrived by a person who has the required training and knowledge to achieve either positive ends of healing that involve cleansing, strengthening, and protecting a person from evil forces, or the negative ends of witchcraft which bring illnesses, misfortune, and death to others, in order to attain wealth and power.

The Ruses of the Afrophiliac Condition  125

Ashforth (2005, 212) clarifies that witches are understood to be involved with the dishonest and harmful use of the powers of muthi; whereas healers use it to enable a form of well-being and thus lay focus on its medicinal or restorative value. Ostensibly, the functions of the two are uncritically conflated in the soapie. This is unsurprising as Ashforth further observes that these two aspects, witchcraft and ancestral healing, are complicatedly related. Though traditional healers are generally well intentioned in their practices, their muthi is still capable of causing death. It is this delicate and sensitive distinction that perhaps Generations failed to establish but, more importantly, failed to furnish with the necessary nuance.10 This brief elucidation on Generations is a microcosm of the broader problematic of these types of representations, which Isibaya has explored in some rather interesting ways. Isibaya (which in isiZulu means the kraal) is produced by The Bomb Shelter Productions11: the iconic production house that has fashioned some the most compelling stories which, with unusual profundity, tell of the many quotidian experiences that define South Africa. When one considers its oeuvre, which comprises shows such as Yizo Yizo, Zone 14, Ayeye, The Road, Jacobs Cross, and Shaka, to name a few, Isibaya sits comfortably in this impressive catalog. What this production house has been able to achieve through these shows (and many more), with their specific focuses and themes, is to render intelligible the complexities that shape the present-day South Africa; yet with equal attention to how the present is often shaped by complex and at times unresolved histories. The controversial three-part series Yizo Yizo series evidenced this – from its reflections on intersecting issues such as poverty, Black upward mobility, crime, different forms of violence, and aspects of historical trauma, this series confronted these themes with notable acuity. Certainly, in regards to storytelling, what has distinguished Bomb Shelter Productions is its inventiveness – the kind which one can affirm spills over into Isibaya. In its initial setting, this drama series revolved around an age-old feud between two rival families, the Zungu’s and the Ndlovu’s, who both happen to be influential taxi business families that strive for wealth and power in Bhubhesini in the Thukela Valley of KwaZulu-Natal. The fraught relationship between these families is usually explored through taxi war violence, where the two families pronounce hate for each other. However, there is also Shakespearean bent to this feud in the form of a romantic bond between the eldest children of the families: Thandeka Zungu, daughter to Mpiyakhe Zungu (see Figure 6.1), who finds herself caught by the charms of Sibusiso Ndlovu, son to Mpiyakhe’s adversary Samson Ndlovu. The period from March to May 2017 saw an interesting inflection in this telenovela where the protagonist Mpiyakhe, the patriarch of the Zungu clan, found himself negotiating a rather difficult space of alienation; one essentially caused by his inability to protect his family from the looming violence at the hands of a rival businessman. Seemingly, it is this very detail that delineates the nature of this character: his protective role as the head of the family, which I lay emphasis on to enrich my discussion. Noticeably, this character is multifaceted.

126  Thabang Molatelo Monoa

Figure 6.1 The Fictional Character Mpiyakhe Zungu, Played by Siyabonga Thwala. Courtesy of The Bomb Shelter Productions & Mzansi Magic. Reproduced with permission.

Besides being a patriarch who is deeply rooted in his culture, he is also a successful businessperson with political shrewdness. His entire existence is validated on what he means to those close to him, particularly his family. That is to say, he is a provider, a protector, a loving father to his children, a caring brother to his sister, a devoted husband to his wives, a revered community leader, a great friend to his peers; is always composed and never showing any weakness; highly rational in his thinking and largely considerate of other people’s well-being. It is arguable that these symbolic roles and titles he assumes allude to the rational part of his being. Conversely, there is an alternative side to this rational ‘self’: a zombie named Mgijimane (in short Mgijimi, which means the runner in isiZulu), whom we can understand to be Mpiyakhe’s antithesis or alter ego (see Figure 6.2). Mooted as being bestial, dangerous, irrational, hyper-masculine; a being that acts upon impulse and or instruction rather than a logical thinker; he is, at once, human and animal; ruled by rage and devoid of rationality. Mgijimi represents Mpiyakhe’s unconscious – his repressed state where his actions and impulses supersede all rational thinking. He is a site for Mpiyakhe’s muted frustrations – his fears, his anxieties, and perhaps even his unspoken aspirations. What is unsaid in Mpiyakhe’s composed self, spills out in Mgijimi in a heap of unmeasured anger. Although these are separate consciousnesses, they exist in one body and can thus be understood as being the same person.  In explaining the nature of this characterization, it is useful to further contextualize this split consciousness between Mpiyakhe and Mgijimi. I am less interested in, for example, a psychoanalytic reading that renders this split

The Ruses of the Afrophiliac Condition  127

Figure 6.2 Mgijimi, Mpiyakhe Zungu’s Alter Ego, Walking through the Wilderness. Courtesy of The Bomb Shelter Productions & Mzansi Magic. Reproduced with permission.

Figure 6.3 Close-Up Shot of Mgijimi. Courtesy of The Bomb Shelter Productions & Mzansi Magic. Reproduced with permission.

128  Thabang Molatelo Monoa

consciousness as a form of ambivalence where, drawing from Freudian psychoanalysis, identities are neither distinct nor complete but are, conversely, torn within themselves and occupied by external conflicts and contradictions. This Bhabha-esque (1994) reading illustrates the dismantling of the dichotomous relationship between ‘Self’ and ‘Other.’ The split personality or ambivalence rendered in this strand of psychoanalysis refers to two oppositional instincts or desires (Hernandez 2010, 41–45). Similarly, a Du Boisian reading may also be applicable here. In clarifying the notion of ‘double consciousness,’ Rutledge Denis (2003, 15) explains it as being composed of two themes. The first simply describing the nature of two opposing forces. Consequently, the second theme offers the possibility of a synthesis between those two opposing forces.12 These readings are not ineffectual; the latter is in fact resonant with the type of reading I prefer for interpreting the nature of this character. The Hegelian dialectic, with its threefold schema which sees Mpiyakhe, the rational being, rendered as the thesis, and his unconscious, repressed self Mgijimi rendered as the antithesis; thus both amounting to a synthesis which sees a reconciliation of both these characters as an inseparable identity. This is asserted on the basis that, essentially, these two states of being are in fact inseparable. Reiterating my earlier contention, what is understood to be Mgijimi is borne from Mpiyakhe’s muted anxieties. To be sure, Mgijimi is indeed an ancestral entity that is imbued with superhuman powers. Though excavated from Mpiyakhe’s repressed compulsions, the actual process of bringing him to life is undertaken through a profound appeal to Mpiyakhe’s ancestors who, as transcendent beings, transfer supernatural strength into Mpiyakhe’s body thus giving him immeasurable physical powers and hyper-sensory capacity.13 This very detail is essential for it explains Mgijimi’s purpose in the story, which comes about when Mpiyakhe, the seemingly holistic man, falls short when having to protect his family. Facing the wrath of another one of his adversaries, then Samson Ndlovu’s ally Judas Ngwenya, whose evil nature wills him to torment Mpiyakhe’s family, kidnap his children, and use them as leverage to assume power of the Bhubhesini taxi industry – the latter finds himself engulfed in a state of helplessness; incapable of protecting his clan from this evil force. Upon seeking the counsel of his trusted traditional healer, known in the story as Mehlemamba, Mpiyakhe sets about the dangerous and potentially irreversible task of rekindling the zombie, Mgijimi – who is well hidden within him, in order to retrieve his family and dispose of the enemy (see Figure 6.4). In the end, he achieves both quite successfully. What interests me about this representation is the glaring thematic assertions such as the idea of invoking an ancestral ordained spirit to remedy a situation that, arguably, requires careful and perhaps more, dare I say, sensible modes of engagement. Mpiyakhe, in his rational yet alienated awareness, decides to invoke the bestial side of himself that was initially created for evil purposes14; only this time he reorientates Mgijimi’s function to better serve his family by galvanizing his physical and supernatural qualities (see Figure 6.5). Yet his choice to do this is a curious one. His problem, I argue, is not of such nature

The Ruses of the Afrophiliac Condition  129

Figure 6.4 Mpiyakhe Zungu Being Threatened by His Adversary, Judas Ngwenya. Courtesy of The Bomb Shelter Productions & Mzansi Magic. Reproduced with permission.

Figure 6.5 The Invocation of Mgijimi Undertaken by the Mpiyakhe Family’s Sangoma (Diviner). Courtesy of The Bomb Shelter Productions & Mzansi Magic. Reproduced with permission.

that it required such a response. While this may be overly simplistic considering that this narrative is semi-fictional, the danger with narratives of this kind, in their compelling representation, is that they affect Black social and cultural life in a profound manner; where the reversion to ancestral values, regardless of the complexity of the problem, become reflexive. However, one can furthermore speculate that the thinking that informs such narratives is in fact

130  Thabang Molatelo Monoa

derived from the revered philosophies from some African polities. I bring into conversation here the great sage and African philosopher, Vusamazulu Credo Mutwa, whose thought still reverberates strongly amongst Africanists. As a cultural conservationist, Mutwa is still held in high regard, especially amongst some sections of the South African Black youth who observe the importance of revisiting his ideas around notions of ancestry and spirituality. I consider him here for his philosophical claims on Africanity, which are not starkly different from Senghor’s.15 Mutwa’s (1998) thinking around ancestral heritages, despite its symbolic efficacy and resonance, is not invulnerable to Post-African scrutiny and is in fact, the very foundation from which the latter departs. In his highly acclaimed tome titled, Indaba, My Children: African Tribal History, Legends, Customs, and Religious Beliefs, first published in 1964 Mutwa (1998) goes through great fictitious and discursive labors to explain the cultural foundations on which Africanity is founded. Most notable in the text is his manner of argumentation, which partly lambasts Western culture for its contamination of Africa and everything sacred to her and, in the same breath, aestheticizes the many cultural and traditional facets that connote a distinct sense of Africanness. In Ekpoian terms, this is the most vivid characterization of Afrophilia. This careful attention to Mutwa’s text addresses some crucial aspects for me. Though articulated nearly fifty years ago, one finds that the philosophical foundations conveyed through Mutwa’s text still inform some of the aesthetic sensibilities and thematic inclinations in stories such as Isibaya. I consider the text most fascinating in how it has, perhaps inadvertently, similar ideological foundations as négritude as argued by Senghor. This is captured in Mutwa’s assertion, which reads thus: “The challenge to every Bantu is to bring about a glittering renaissance of the cultures and the arts of Africa” (Mutwa 1998, 693). In a similar way to Senghor, Mutwa is calling for a rebirth of African cultural values, which are inherent in the artistic practices of Africa. However, unlike Senghor, Mutwa seems more explicit in excavating the more peculiar aspects of our erstwhile ancestral practices. This is explained in the following statement: The fate of Africa lies in the hands of its witchdoctors. One single witchdoctor in a position of authority can do more to repair the damage done in a strife-torn country in Africa […] The ordinary Bantu, no matter how educated or “civilized,” are still firmly rooted to the beliefs of their forefathers. No matter how much they have been subjected to Christian influences, they still have greater confidence in the local nyanga (or witchdoctor) than in the local priest. (Mutwa 1998, 579) Mutwa’s words are significant and invite us to pay particular attention to how he renders Africa’s fate as being in the hands of its witchdoctors. There seems to be a denial of civilization, which he seemingly identifies as a Western thing, and argues instead that the Bantu (read Black/African) is intrinsically bound to his ancestral roots and therefore antithetical to Western civilization;

The Ruses of the Afrophiliac Condition  131

a fact that supersedes everything else. This illumination is helpful in making sense of the problematic highlighted in Isibaya, that being Mpiyakhe’s resolve to invoke an ancestral entity to solve the unfortunate situation he is confronted with. In stressing the uniqueness that undergirds Africa and her dark skinned peoples, Mutwa (1998, 692) claims: “The sons of Africa must let the world know that we can do well without civilization if this means that we have to throw our own culture, beliefs and way of life overboard.” This assertion opens up more interesting questions, particularly around how we engage with and frame African cultures and values. On this note, Ekpo (2014, 4) observes that: The Afrophiliac trap signifies Africa’s unwillingness to question the suppositions upon which our beliefs about our African selves, African cultures, African values…, are founded. It is our libidinal attachment to and preference for our ancestral cultural norms, our native African ways and our unwillingness to question them even when it is obvious that they have become globally uncompetitive and progress resistant. What he clearly identifies as the unwillingness to question our ancestral-cultural mores translates into an understanding of [African] culture as a fixed and static entity; a thing that is complete in itself and needs no external influence nor alteration. He explains this further in the following extract: [U]nder the spell of Afrophilia, culture is not what it is for most successful peoples of the globe, namely, active, dynamic, and adaptive activities that thrive on endless borrowings, discardings, and adaptations and whose goal is to help people get what they want. In the discourse of Africanism, African culture is a badge of an already fully formed African identity that dares not be tinkered with, improved or changed even when it sometimes turns out to be a hindrance to us getting what we want. (Ekpo 2014, 4) Noting Ekpo’s diagnosis, culture has quite an immutable understanding in its Africanist form, and the inquiry into why there exists this impenetrable idea of it persists. To make sense of this, an assessment of négritudist thought is once again necessary here. Senghor, as John Mcleod (2011, 78) asserts, argued fervently how Western imperialism had, in Hegelian fashion, dismissed African cultures as being primitive and backwards. Thus, in his prose and poetry, he celebrated the sophistication of African cultures, endorsing a ‘return to the source’: his impassioned appeal to all Blacks in Africa and in the diaspora to realign themselves with their erstwhile cultural values and by so doing, embrace their Africanity. Arguably, this ‘return to the source,’ as it were, connotes the excavation of even the most peculiar aspects of Africa’s ancestral heritage, including its witchcraft practices. There seems to be no crystallization of which cultural values

132  Thabang Molatelo Monoa

are worth recuperation. The Afrophiliac mindset is seemingly uninterested in, and/or dismissive of, this dimension of the debate. What it seeks instead is to repurpose, as Senghor invites this type of speculation with his aphoristic claim that Africa is not the Other of civilization yet is a different civilization altogether; one immersed in its own peculiarities. I concede that this reading might not be the tidiest in relation to my discussion of Isibaya. While an association between Senghor’s notion of returning to the source and the visualizations of ancestry can be made, such a reading, I suggest, under-describes the possible presence of colonial trauma as an orientating feature behind the call to return to the source. Elsewhere, Ekpo discusses a variant dimension of Senghor’s thought; one unshackled from the cultural nationalistic impulse that governs the universalized négritude. Referring to this as Senghorism, Ekpo notes how Senghor reasoned that [T]he ancestral past, though beautiful in itself and worthy of respect, was not a directly relevant heritage or resource for the kind of unprecedented apprenticeship involved in transiting to the modern order. However, the past was not for that reason redundant, for it was called upon to play a vital role of therapeutic reassurance for the psychically mangled, racially disqualified, colonized subject. (Senghor, quoted in by Ekpo 2010, 179) With this, Ekpo does two things: the first is that he communicates PostAfrican discourse as engaged and highly reflective of the cathartic agency latent in African ancestry. Secondly, he relays the unapologetic firmness of PostAfricanism and its position of the incessant invocation of the ancestrally rooted values, for he surmises that this is where the fundamental tension exists. While appreciating the need to heal from trauma while recuperating our historically denigrated cultures and ancestral heritages, the Post-African belief is that it has become difficult to discern the therapeutic from harmful aspects of our revered cultures. Whether they manifest materially through perverse occult practices, as explained earlier, or through excessive visual representations, the inability to de-emphasize our embrace of Africa’s ancestral heritage is truly what engenders Afrophilia.

Conclusion In coding Post-African aesthetics, Ekpo attempts to relay that art has a foundational, meta-cultural role to play in enabling societal and cultural progress; and that it will continue to play that role. Of the many forms in which art is expressed, representation, which operates within visual culture, can either be complicit in reinforcing the stagnancy of Africa’s modernization, or materializing it into actuality. In reflecting on Afrophilia, it is expedient to acknowledge the varying trajectories through which it manifests, but it is even more expedient to interrogate the grand African doctrines that provide the ballast that keeps

The Ruses of the Afrophiliac Condition  133

this notion alive and allows it to persist. In some of the visual cultural practices of Africa, we see that Afrophilia has masochistically morphed into a specific aesthetic sensibility that sees a symbolic and aesthetical return to the most arcane cultural values and practices. This is consistent with the inclination to venerate and protect Blackness – in its somewhat fixed ancestrally orientated, nativist mold. My attempt has been to relay how this manifests in visual storytelling; to show how some of these representations, particularly those dealing with ancestral heritage, are effortlessly Afrophiliac in character. And yet, as I have observed, this Afrophiliac impulse to be operational within a particular strand of visual cultural output from some of South Africa’s premier channels, one is hopeful that the tide is turning when observing recent shows that engage with themes of ancestry in a far more rational way. For instance, from the very channel that produced Isibaya, Mzansi Magic, a show entitled Dlozi Lami (2020) has, in my opinion, offered a more stable representation of the ancestral. That the show is even titled Dlozi Lami, which directly translates as ‘my ancestor’ in isiZulu, is curious precisely because it does not adhere to the highly charged Afrophiliac impulses that I have identified in select television productions in this chapter. Granted, the show is not about fictional storytelling and is, in fact, a reality television program that sees a Black female clairvoyant administer counsel to people hoping to mend situations and relationships with those who are no longer living. This does not, however, disqualify the ways in which this act is done. To put a finer point to it, despite this show having a utilitarian purpose of a kind, the way in which it unfolds and operates within the realm of representation is noteworthy: there is very little evidence of the hyperbolic tropes of ancestral invocation that typically include blood spilling, snake charming, child sacrifice, and other grotesque gestures that have come to signify a troubled idea of Africanness. Instead, what unfolds is that the clairvoyant, a woman known as Thembi Nyathi, communicates with the dead, uniting them with the living through some kind of generative dialogue – a dialogue that one could say converges toward healing. From the time in which I became aware of it, in the year 2020, it has since garnered a wide sense of attention from the visual cultural consuming public – not only for the ways in which it sensibly relays the nuances of ancestral invocation, which has been disparaged through colonial discourse, but also for the ways in which it perhaps affirms a more constructive ideation of ancestry. As I see it, this largely comes down to how its representation is rendered. Hall (1993) resonates profoundly in deducing that the politics of representation are inescapable. The Post-African framework, then, is highly critical of representations that are (un)consciously Afrophiliac. Noting how they have become such constitutive part of our visual diet, they can be seen as being disadvantageous for a people in search of a visual grammar required for modernizing themselves. Thus, Ekpo’s careful interrogation of the Afrophiliac condition is not argued in a vacuum, but is articulated in hope of materializing the type of aesthetics that will give birth to a culturally healthier Africa.

134  Thabang Molatelo Monoa

Acknowledgments A significant part of this research was conducted while I was affiliated with the South African Research Chair in South African Art and Visual Culture at the University of Johannesburg. Opinions expressed and conclusions arrived at are those of the author and are not attributable to the SARCHI Chair.

Notes 1 The show was renamed Generations: The Legacy in 2016. Since its inception in 1994, it was solely referred to as Generations. 2 Although these respective studies are strictly academic, I have not encountered sustained critical engagements with such topics, particularly that which focuses on South African visual culture. 3 Ekpo speaks of the ‘arts’ in the broadest manner, denoting various creative outputs such as music, drama, and literature; however, I refer to specifically the visual arts. 4 I primarily interpret a conference paper Ekpo presented in 2014 where he examined Afrophilia exhaustively. 5 The term ‘Black visual culture,’ as used here, draws from Gen Doy’s (2000) framework which is concerned with analyzing ways in which Black people and by extension Black cultures are represented. 6 My point here is that although these practices (witchcraft and occultism) may differ slightly in definition, they are considered here as being rooted in a common premise. 7 Aside from the general public, more recognized associations such as the Traditional Healers Organization were at the forefront of accusing the South African Broadcasting Corporation (SABC) of unfair, and quite frankly un-nuanced, portrayals of African spirituality and ancestry (Bambalele 2016). 8 Generations plays from Mondays to Fridays, during a prime-time slot from 20:00–20:30. It is, undoubtedly, one of the most successful telenovelas aired by the SABC. 9 Mamlambo is commonly understood to be deity in South African and more particularly Zulu mythology; often described as a snake-like creature that dwells in water-filled spaces such as rivers and lakes. 10 Relatedly, also during the early months of 2016, the soapie Muvhango (loosely translated conflict in Tshivenda) which airs on the SABC 2 channel during weekdays (Mondays to Fridays from 21:00–21:30) was equally criticized when it explored a narrative whereby the son of chief was almost turned into a zombie, induced through ancestry. Allegations against the storyline further contested the proposition that people can communicate with dead in the form of zombies (Bambelele 2016). 11 The Bomb Shelter is a South African television production company that produces high-caliber and multi-award winning films, dramas, documentaries, and commercials. 12 In his seminal work titled The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois (2014) explains the idea of a double consciousness as a separation of identity into two (or more) parts, thus making it difficult to obtain a unified identity or sense of self. 13 What I find interesting here is that in the story, both a witchdoctor (Sunday Nkabinde) and a healer/diviner (Mehlemamba) have invoked Mgijimi’s spirit yet for different uses. Whereas the former Mgijimi for evil intentions, the latter, upon acting on Mpiyakhe’s instructions, invoked Mgijimi’s spirit for good intentions. Both had the knowledge and ability to do so. This places more emphasis on the distinction between witchcraft and traditional healing/divination practices. 14 In the first season, which aired in 2013, Mpiyakhe was first turned into the zombie Mgijimi by his rival and enemy Samson Ndlovu with the aid of an evil witchdoctor named Sunday Nkabinde. Observing Mpiyakhe’s nature as a volatile human being, they

The Ruses of the Afrophiliac Condition  135 set about using his rage, which is expressed through aggression and physicality, to kill Samson’s enemies in his quest to attain power over the taxi industry in Bhubhesini. 15 Mutwa’s ideas are principally rooted in Zulu mythology and culture.

References Ashforth, A. 2005. “Muthi, Medicine and Witchcraft: Regulating ‘African Science’ in PostApartheid South Africa?” Social Dynamics 31(2):211–242. Bambelele, P. 2016. “Soapies Under Fire.” Accessed 20 December 2017, https​:/​/ww​​w​.sow​​ etanl​​ive​.c​​o​.za/​​news/​​2016-​​02​-26​​-sabc​​-soap​​ies​-​u​​nder-​​fire/​. Bhabha, H. K. 1994. The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Boakye, J. 2017. “Can Juju Get Your Ex Back?” Accessed 23 December 2017, https​:/​/ww​​ w​.gra​​phic.​​com​.g​​h​/lif​​estyl​​e​/rel​​ation​​ships​​/can-​​juju-​​get​-y​​our​​-e​​x​-bac​​k​.htm​​l. Denis, R. 2003. “W.E.B Du Bois’s Concept of Double Consciousness.” In Race and Ethnicity. Comparative and Theoretical Approaches, edited by J. Stone and R. Denis, 13–27. Oxford: Blackwell. Doy, G. 2000. Black Visual Culture: Modernity and Postmodernity. New York: I.B. Tauris. Du Bois, W. E. B. 2014. The Souls of Black Folk. New York: Pocket Books. Ekpo, D. 2010. “From Negritude to Post-Africanism.” Third Text 24(2):177–187. Ekpo, D. 2014. “Redemption from Afrophilia: Considering Post-African Solutions to Africa’s Problems”. Paper presented at the African Unity for Renaissance Conference. Human Sciences Research Council, South Africa, 22–24 May. Hall, S. 1993. “What is This ‘Black’ in Black Popular Culture?” Social Justice 20:104–114. Hegel, G. W. F. [1837]2001. Philosophy of History. Translated by J. Sibree. Ontario: Batoche Books. Hernandez, F. 2010. Bhabha for Architects. London: Routledge. Kumwendo, G. 2007. “The Portrayal of Witchcraft, Occults and Magic in Popular Nigerian Video Films.” MA Diss., University of Witwatersrand, Johannesburg. Makhubu, N. 2013. “The Fantastic Subject: A Visio-Cultural Study of Nollywood VideoFilm.” PhD Diss., Rhodes University, Grahamstown. Mbembe, A. 2015. On The Postcolony. Johannesburg: Wits University Press. Mcleod, J. 2011. Beginning Postcolonialism. Manchester: Manchester University Press. Mutwa, V. C. [1964]1998. Indaba, My Children: African Tribal History, Legends, Customs, and Religious Beliefs. Virginia: Paybeck Press. Nagle, L. E., and B. Owasanoye. 2016. “Fearing the Dark: The Use of Witchcraft to Control Human Trafficking Victims and Sustain Vulnerability.” South Law Review 45: 562–593.

Index

**Page numbers with an “n” reference notes. Abani, Chris 90–92 Achebe, Chinua 3, 8–9, 23, 32 Adichie, Chimamanda Ngozi 84 Africa 121 “Africa My Africa” (Diop) 3 African Alter 100 African art 96–97 African body 90–92 African carousel of discourse 86 The African Child (Laye) 82 African condition 99 African memory 87 African modernism 7–9, 16–18; European Kurtzs 9–11 African modernity 35 African National Congress (ANC) 56 African ontology 79–80 African renaissance 78–79 “African Woman” (Senghor) 3, 4 Africanism 5, 22, 28, 41 Africanity 38, 79, 82–84, 87, 122, 130 Africanness 5, 27 AfriCOBRA 42 Afrocentricity 48, 78 Afrofuturism 41–43, 47, 102–103, 114 Afropessimism 26, 102 Afrophilia 3–7, 41, 43, 84, 86, 97, 98, 119–120, 122–123, 131–133; discerning consciousness 121–124; rescuing art from 23–30; visualizations of 124–132 Afrophiliac consciousness 121–124 Afropolitanism 88–89 Ag Assarid, Moussa 102–103, 107–109, 115 Agamben, Giorgio 105 Ahmed, Sara 101, 114 AIDS epidemic, South Africa 85–86 Alter 100, 115 The Amazigh 107

America: Afrofuturism 41–43; Black identity 44 ANC (African National Congress) 56 ancestry 120, 130 anti-colonialism 4–5, 23, 30, 34 Apartheid 57 AQIM 107 Arab Spring 107 Araeen, Rasheed 17, 64 “Artists under the Sun” exhibitions 62 Ashforth, Adam 124–125 Attwell, David 73n2 Azawad 107–108 Bantu Education system 57 The Bantu World 62 Beier, Georgina 9–10 Beier, Uli 9–10 Bemba, Jean-Pierre 110 Benin heads 64 Bhabha, Homi 106 Bhengu, Gerard 60–61, 66–69 Biennale, Venice 113 Black America 45 Black identity 44, 46, 47 Black liberation 47–51 Black Madonna (Mancoba) 65 Black Nationalism 42 Blackness identity politics 48–50 “Black Orpheus” 87 Black Panther 45 Black Panthers 47 Black patronage 62–63 Black/White binary 84–85 Blitzkrieg technique 10 Blyden, Edward Wilmot 80–81 Boakye, John 123 body 90–92

138 Index The Bomb Shelter Productions 125 bondage 15 Bonner, P. L. 57 Bound to Violence (Ouologuem) 24 “Bread and Wine” (Holderlin) 18 Breitz, Candice 103, 109–113, 115 Bulwer, John 105 capitalism 59 capitalist art market and, proto-PostAfrican art 61–63 Chabal, Patrick 16 clairvoyants 133 Clifford, James 42 coloniality shadows 33 colonization 22, 25, 30–34 compound consciousness 16 Conrad, Joseph 83–84 copycat modernism 59 counter narrative 83 cubism 7 cultural nationalism 5–6 culture 131 cunning of reason in history 31–34 Daloz, Jean-Pascal 16 The Dark Child (Laye) 82 de-Africanization of art 51–53, 64 decolonization, fallism 77–80 de Jager, Edward J. 63, 64, 66, 71 Demmers, Jolle 108 Denis, Rutledge 128 Dhlomo, Herbert I.E. 66, 73n2 Diagne, Souleymane Bachir 87 Diop, David 3, 83 discerning Afrophiliac consciousness 121–124 Dlozi Lami 133 Donaldson, Jeff 42–43 Drum 73–74n5 dualisms 99 Du Bois, W.E.B. 44 Ekpo, Denis 54, 59, 60, 84, 101, 102, 120, 122–123, 131–132 Ekpuk, Victor 14 Enlightenment paradigm 97 Enlightenment universalism 47–48 Enwonwu, Ben 3–4 Equiano, Olaudah 80 “Ernest Macoba: A New African Artist” (Masilela) 59 ethnophilia 86 European Kurtzs, African modernism 9–11 Europeans 81

exhibitions: “Artists under the Sun” exhibitions 62; Fort Hare Jubilee Art Exhibition 66; “Vertical Elevated Oblique” 104 Ezzat Mardini, Sarah 110, 112 Fagg, William 17 fallism 77–80 #FeesMustFall 78 feminine 99 feminism 101, 114 Fort Hare Jubilee Art Exhibition 66 Freedom 14–17, 29, 32–34, 45–46; PostAfrican freedom 37–38 Gasset, José Ortega Y 11 Gates, Henry Louis 83 Generations: The Legacy 119, 124 gesture 105 Ghana, occultism 123 “Ghetto” (Tirolien) 8 Gibson, Nigel 78 GIFs 105 Goodhew, David 57–58 Guede, Pancho 9 Hall, Stuart 119, 133 Haraway, Donna 99–101, 106, 113–114 Hegel, G.W.F. 3, 14, 31, 37, 98, 121 Hegelianism 32 human trafficking 123 hybridity 51, 98, 106, 114 hyper-valorization 100 identity 114; Afropolitanism 88–89; Black identity 44, 46–47 Imvo Zabantsundu (African Opinion) 55 In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Sharpe) 106 Isibaya 119, 124–131 Jabavu, D.D.T. 62 Jabavu, John Tengo 55 João, José Maria 110 Julien, Eileen 82 Kennedy, J. 10 Khalifa, Fathi Ben 108 King, Martin Luther 47–51 Koenders, Bert 107 Kourouma, Ahmadou 24–25 Kramer, Nicholas 72 Kumwendo, Grace 120 land dispossession 67–68 landscapes 67–68

Index  139 Langa, Mamy Maloba 110–111 Laye, Camara 82 Leon, Tony 85, 90 Les demoiselles d’Avignon (Picasso) 7 litigation aesthetics 82–83 litigation of the West 90 Lods, Pierre 9 love for Africa 83–85, 90–91 Love Story (Breitz) 109–113, 115 Luffin, Xavier 74n8 Mabulu, Ayanda 77 MacGarry, Lucy 109, 113 Macoba, Ernest 59 Mafeje, Archie 79 Makhubu, Nomusa 120 Maletsani, Andries 57 ‘man’ 66 Manaka, Matsemela 60, 61, 64 Mancoba, Ernest 3, 61, 63, 65–66, 70 Mandela, Nelson 77, 88 Many Faces (Mvusi) 71–72 Maqhubela, Louis 63 Martin, Marilyn 63 Masilela, Ntongela 55, 58–59, 73n2 Mathebe, Lucky 57–58 Maxwele, Chumani 78 Mbeki, Thabo 85–86, 90 Mbembe, Achille 88, 121–122 McEwen, Frank 9–10 Mdluli, Same 113 memory 87 Miles, Elza 70 mimicry 59 MINUSMA (United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali) 107–108 MNLA 107 modernism 17–19, 59 modernity 1–2, 5, 14, 34–37, 59–61 Mohamed, Farah Abdi 111 Mohl, John Koenakeefe 61–62 Molero, Luuis Ernesto Nava 110 Monenè, outrages et defis (Kourouma) 24 Moya, Fikile-Ntsikelelo 77 Mtomtela, Edith 65 Mugabe, Robert 80, 86 MUJAO 107 multiple identity syndrome 16 Mundane Afrofuturism 104, 114 Mundane Afrofuturist Manifesto (Syms) 103, 105–106 Mutwa, Vusamazulu Credo 130–131 Mvusi, Selby 71–72

Nagle, Luz. E. 123 Natives Land Act (1913) 67 natural synthesis 14–15 negritude 4–6, 41, 81–82, 87, 122, 132 Negritude (Enwonwu) 4 Negro-African Renaissance 41 Negro Renaissance Africanism 41 Neluheni, Musha 109 neo-traditional Africa 45 Nettleton, Anitra 67 New African Movement 54–59, 66 New Negro 83 ‘new New Africans’ 56 “The New Religion” (Abani) 90–91 New World Embassy 107–109, 115 Ngcaweni, Wandile 78–79 Ngcukaitobi, Themba 67 Nicodemus, Everlyn 39 Nietzsche, Friedrich 36, 41, 47 Nigerian video film industry 120 Nkoloso, Edward Mukuka 103 Nollywood 120 Notes on Gesture (Syms) 104–105 occultism 123 Oguibe, Olu 64 Ogundele, Rufus 9, 17 Okeke-Agulu, Chika 12–13, 16–17, 29, 38, 55 Okeke, Uche 9, 12, 14 ‘old New Africans’ 56 Onabolu, Aina, 3, 38, 39, 64 Ong, Jade Munslow 71 openness 87–88 Operation Barkhane 107 Operation Serval 107 oppressor/oppressed 84–85 Other 99–100 Otherness 99–100 Ouologuem, Yambo 24 Owasanoye, Bolaji 123 Palm Wine Drinkard (Tutuola) 82 P'Bitek, Okot 83 Pemba, George Milwa 56, 61–62, 66 Peregrino, F.Z.S. 55 Philosophy of History (Hegel) 121 ‘Picasso code’ 7–9, 13 Picasso, Pablo 7–8, 11 Plass, Margeret 17 pop culture 120 Post-African art 26–27; modernity 34–37 Post-African freedom 37–38 Post-African realism 38–41

140 Index Post-Africanism 3, 22, 26–30, 35–36, 41– 47, 59–61, 101–102, 104–107, 113–116; Love Story (Breitz) 109–113; New World Embassy 108–109 Post-Africanism rationalism 54 Postcolonial Modernism 12–19; Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria (Okeke-Agulu) 12 post-feminism 114 post-human agency 99 post-human identity 113–114 Postma, Laurika 72 Powel, Ivor 62 proto-Post-African 59–60; capitalist art market and 61–63 proto-Post-African aesthetics 63–70 Rankin, Elizabeth 60, 62, 65 Raum, O.F. 66 realism 64–66; Post-African realism 38–41 refugees 110–113 regeneration 54 “Regeneration of Africa” (Seme) 54 rehumanizing the Black man 49 representation 119; Afrophilia 124–132 reproductive capacity 99 rescuing art from Afrophilia 23–30 re-universalization 49 Rhodes, Cecil 77–78 #RhodesMustFall 77–78 Saeri, Shabeena Francis 111 Same 99–100 Sameness 99 Sartre, Jean-Paul 28, 87 Scott-Heron, Gil 104 Sekoto, Gerard 61, 63, 68, 74n7 Selasi, Taiye 88–89 Seme, Pixley Ka Isaka 54, 66 Senghor, L. S. 3–4, 14, 35, 81–83, 87, 131–132 Sharpe, Christina 106, 114 Simbao, Ruth 67 Smalligan, Laura 70 soapies 120 societal responsibility of art 60 socio-magical realism 72 “Song of Lawino” (P’Bitek) 83 Sophiatown Renaissance 58 South Africa 55–57; AIDS crises 85–86; soapies 120; visualizations of Afrophilia 124–132 South African Spectator 55 space 103–104 Space Is the Place 42

Staal, Jonas 103, 107–109, 115 Sun Ra 42, 103 Syms, Martine 103–107, 114 Thema, R.V. Selope 62, 66 Things Fall Apart (Achebe) 3, 32 Thiong’o, Ngugi wa 83 Tirolien, Guy 8 Tladi, Moses 68–69 Tomaselli, Keyan 58 ‘Township Art’ 73 tradition/modernity binary 70–72 Tshabalala-Msimang, Manto 85 Tutuola, Amos 82 Two Hillocks (Tladi) 69 United Nations Multidimensional Integrated Stabilization Mission in Mali (MINUSMA) 107–108 universalism 49 University of Cape Town (UCT) 78 University of Witwatersrand (Wits) 78 Untitled (Zinkpè) 1–2 van Robbroeck, L. 61–62, 70–71, 73 Veld Fire (Bhengu) 69 “Vertical Elevated Oblique” 104 Victory in the Valley of Esu (Donaldson) 43 visualizations of Afrophilia 124–132 Wainana, Binyavanga 84 Weather 106, 115 Wenger, Susan 9 White market 63 White patronage 62 White supremacy 106 witchcraft 120, 123–125, 133 Wofford, Tobias, 42–44 Womack, Ytasha 41 women 99–100 womxn 99–100 world history 31, 121 world reason 31 wounded psyche 84–85 Xakaza, Mzuzile 68 Yizo Yizo 125 Young, G. 105 Younge, Gavin 73 Zandberg, Jeroen 108 Zimbabwe 86 Zinkpè, Dominique 1–2, 51 Zulu Girl (Postma) 72