better story than a prostrate and defenceless African, fixed in that interminable dilemma called death, waiting for a tale that seems forever buried beneath the charm of good intentions. One's naivete oi perhaps overdetermined good faith would lead many to believe that curatorial practices in the 90s are too sophisticated to become entangled with the same kind of visual logic that fills our television screens. But how mistaken we all are as we struggle to make intelligible stories of Africa.

Nortje and Marechera are good examples of the way we tell the story of 20th century African arts. Because they both lived in the West and practised in a manner that defied the 'authenticity' test, their work gets deliberately lost in the shuffle. In other words they are tainted material, insufficiently native, contaminated by that virus known as 'contact with the West1. Reflecting his pain, Nortje's words are charged with a plenitude of emotion, an aberrant eroticism, longing, desire and memory. As we know, all exiles live through memory. The act of remembrance makes wanderers of us all, helping us build communities out of skeins of desire and nostalgia, feelings which Occupied inevitably succumb to the logic of reality. Forget it boy, your country ,continent, and century is gone, long gone, lie the blast of a gun to the head. Your memory, jus* like your body, is now an occupied territory, a colonial commodity bought cheaply and Territories sold dearly. Dislocated to the west, like many African artists, writers, and intellectuals, and far from the fitful POWER, ACCESS & AFRICAN ART upheaval* that tarnish the doily reality of Africans in T7ie isolation of exile is a gutted wharehoute the continent, I, too, feel perpetually suspended at the back of pleasure streets between reveries of unfulfilled desires made more - Arthur Nortje, 'Waiting" vivid by the frustration of Africa's misrepresentation in the western metropolis. For many of us now, Africa it a memory, not a place. Each attempt at self- recognition inexorably marred by the lack of freedom Okwui THESE lines were written while Nortje's body of self-narro»ion, a state that Olu Oguibe has referred Enwezor and psyche lay ravaged by the dissipation of to O* '(he legislative code of speech1. This code, drugs and loneliness wrought by exile in however, reveals the limitations of language within England. Brilliant but troubled, the South African discourse. It seems to melhat while self-narration has poet - like his Zimbabwean compatriot, the often employed the syntax of signifiers, it is the writer Dambudzo Marechera - is emblematic of enunctati vg component of text that leaps off the page a generation of African cultural producers whose to embracedifference. In replacing oratory as a more works are yet to be sufficiently recovered within permanent and contestable emblem, text is the the canons of 20th century African arts and necessity towards freedom that is so intricately enmeshed and iterated in the constant contest for letters. possession of one's own voice that is only made The parallel between the uneasy roods Noftje plural by the contingency of history. But to face hi story and Marechera both travelled towards artistic fulfilment with a predetermined outcome of events is no choice is eerie. Nortje would succumb to depression and, in at all. It is within such a choiceless terrain, where the 1970, die at 28 of an accidental drug overdose. silenced narratives of those who have borne severely Marechera would die similarly young, more than a the sentence of history have suffered constant revisions, decade later, and not long after leaving England. Do that the exhibitions and conferences making up the not ask me why England was such an inhospitable mega festival of African arts called africa95 opened place for these two young men. As the nightly news in . has consistently informed us, nothing makes for a

African Quarterly on thf Arts V,LIIN03 Billed as a season of events from the clutches of the colonial project. the conversation that seeks to deny the celebrating African creativity, from the But much has changed in the continent. legislative authority which values Africa visual arts to music, drama, dance, and Major artists, intellectuals, and writers only as an idea, a free-for-all zone to be literature, africa95 started about three pressurised by totalitarian regimes have liberally conjured up through a given years ago as a loosely organised series of either fled into exile or have been silenced narrator's imagination, an affective but exhibitions managed under one umbrella by censorship. Younger artists, in a climate nonetheless false memory (best discribed logo. Aimed at the professionals that of apathy and dire economic and political as the Margaret Mead Syndrome). make up the cadres of the academy, conditions, are no longer indebted to a Foucauldianscholarand philosopher V.Y. popular journalists and a general public vision of pan-Africanism which was Mudimbe ironises this concept of Africa largely ignorant of the 'true' story of supposed to be a binder of African as an idea by naming his influential book Africa, the festival saw its role as helping consciousness and identity, and have The Invention of Africa, in other words to shape debate on issues of artistic joined the exodus. The unfortunate suggesting Africa, as we know it, to be the practice coming out of Africa and to outcome of this flow of talent has meant figment of other people's imagination. examine the wide dimensions and that a great many African artist who either Edward Said argues in his book dynamism of the African experience, once contributed or would have Orientalism that the Orient is not only a particularly in the 20th century. While contributed immensely to the debate of career but an invention and locality of one can argue about whether a festival Africa's 20th century are no longer resident Western desire, and to be effective, such format is the means through which the art in the continent. This is a major shift, a conceptualisation of Africa has to be of any continent can be sufficiently reversing much of the pioneering work projected onto the binary logic of the 'self examined and studied with perspicacious undertaken in the 50s and 60s. made more potent through the emphasis scrutiny, africa 95 nonetheless shaped up of the 'other's' limitations. However, as as a unique event in a moment when Ignorant, perhaps, of these basic Mudimbe argues, this division is intolerance toward the non-westerner has facts, the fatal mistake of the organisers misleading because between the two been on the rise in Europe. Never before was to assume that the history of 20th extremes there is an intermediate space in has there been such a concentration of century Africa could be sufficiently which social, political and economic voices (forget for one moment that many represented only by those living in the contingencies define the extent of were actually engaged in some strange continent today. While some of the marginality This observation precisely soliloquy). The grand selling point of the participants do live outside Africa, it taxes the dominant notion of the dichotomy season foreshadowed the relative scarcity remains a fact that their contributions to which is at the heart of analysis of of any sustained interest in Africa that the debate were neither cherished nor contemporary African studies. Furthering does not privilege its marginality. What this illusion, the transition from one state to the organisers failed to tell the public was totally welcomed, remaining peripheral another is often emphasised by that africa 95 was unique only because of in all areas, especially in the exhibitions. constructing a progressive lineage for the West's usual reluctance to address Africa is gigantic one cannot begin African artists. issues of representation that do not place to know even the strange behaviour furthest the West on top. In terms of diversity and south in my xenophobic department. size, despite all the hype, this festival was This strategy - buried deep in the 2 never going to come close to the Leopold - Arthur Nortje core of africa 95- has helped institute the Sedar Senghor-sponsored 'World Negro fragmentation of discourses around Africa Arts Festival' organised in Dakar in 1 965. The organisers' second mistake, into little-occupied principalities. africa95 Nor would it approximate or replicate the symptomatic of most approaches to Africa, took this imaginary progression like a stupendous ambition and success of was to treat a complex land mass such as relay race by micro-managing all the FESTAC 77 in 1 2 years later. And Africa as a monolithic structure - in other events, jumping from one paradigm to the only recently had the Johannesburg words like a country. Here again Nortje next: primitive to modern, rural to urban, Biennale joined biennales in Dakar and recapitulates the one fact that has remined secular to religious, sacred to profane Cairo as venues where the cultural events a thorn in the side of many would-be Those who no longer have anything to say of disparate African realities are truly historians, which is the provocative yet about African representation were invited given force. basic inference of the continent's plurality, as people of the moment. At the opening its unrepresentability as a mono cultural, conference 'African Artists: school, studio socio-political landscape While lacking and society1 at University of London's Indeed, on the African continent in novelty, the inference of Africa's School of Oriental and African Studies, a itself many broad-based festivals objective reality as plural ought to be an so-called 'celebrated scholar' from object lesson to all hack historians • celebrating the continent and shaped by , to the audience's astonishment, beginning with the organisers and the perspectives of Africans have been delivered a 30 year-old paper The participating institutions - of a nascent successfully staged. Since the events of conference itself was an endless parade African art discourse. 1965 and 1977, celebrations of Africa of mediocrity of the most base kind, a have tended to be shaped in the matrix of retrograde performance that reinforced idealism and hope, signifying the Recently, many African intellectuals the erroneous idea of Africa's modernity unfettering of the African imagination have taken up the challenge and entered as essentially fictive and non-existent

Afntait Qiururly on the Anj Veil I NO 3 These are the least troubling aspects implications of Africa's post modernity, game in a dangerous time, especially if of what africa95 portrayed. Implicit in its the locationary and migratory (mental one considers that the pendulum of power mission is the musty aura of egalitarianism, and physical) disruptions palpably between the North and the South seems of equal partnership between the evident in works of artists such as Bili to be swinging towards a re-conquering organisers and African artists, curators Bidjocka, Ike Ude, Yinka Shonibare, Olu strategy of doublespeak and double- and scholars. But the evidence revealed Oguibe, Folake Shoga, Kendell Geers, dealing undefined by the rhetoric of otherwise. What seemed lost in all the Antonio Ole, Oladele Bamgboye, rational logic. Objectivity, here, is only euphoria was the fact that the encounter Lubaina Himid, and Ouattara, to name simulated, hiding a prejudiced institutional between Africa and the West often revolves just a few. Why do we never consider the subjectivity that suppresses any parity in around the discourse of power-the fraught achievements of those artists who at the distribution of resources, space, and relations between the dominator and the great professional cost and individual access. While the obvious demand is for dominated. And nowhere is this made isolation have not only transcended but an involved and rigorous critical more glaringly valid than in the have equally transfigured the borders discourse, Westerners instead adopt a historicisation of, and debate around, the constituting the notion of Africanity? How strategy of isolation that loses contemporary cultural production of could anyone serious about contemporary African culture in the Africa. contemporary art in Africa overlook the peripheral discourses of power, eventually importance of artistic practise that breach regarding it as inconsequential. For Africa's contemporary artists working all over the world, the dismissiveness which precedes their entrance and limited incursions into inter- nationalism is a fiercely institu- tionalised situa- tion. Strange cargoes are broughttous in the form of voodoo priests such as C y p r i e n Tokoudagba from Benin; the coffin maker Kane Kwei from Ghana; and KwaNdebele muralist Esther Mahlangu whose wall decorations have been Osman Waqialla, ' Opening of Surat Ya Sin'. Ink and gold on handmade paper. transplanted to 18 x 23 cm, 1982. canvas, Comme des Garcons boutiques, and BMWs to the etiquettes of racial determinism and Here then is the major flaw of most make consumption of her work more national origin, of boundaries and of the events in africa95. By casting all palatable. They are consistently given the territories within Africa? their chips squarely in contested genres, sanction of institutional patronage as the or discourses of the past, most of the pride of contemporary African The evident astonishment one feels participating institutions missed a great representation Conversely, discussion is in this foray into what is supposed to opportunity not only to situate Africa in the never elevated to a pitch that allows for constitute a delimited African art discourse present but genuinely to engage and even the most rudimentary debates around is that while Africa is in the throes of the address her future. Historians and curators contemporary Africa's post-colonial most brutal evisceration • politically, socially of Africa suffer incessantly from enunciation, theoretical strategies, and and economically-africa 95 still adopts the thisobsessive character of a misplaced 1 artistic practice. Neither do such most simplistic commentary to address a 'salvage paradigm. conversations ever consider the deep very difficult subject This is a dangerous

Afruan Quarlfri) on tht ATU Vol 1/NII i A notable chief architect of the exhibition, could not exception was decide whether what she wanted to tell 'Self Evident' at was one story, her story, five stories or Birmingham's Ikon seven. This pas de deux with disaster was Gallery and its the result of a volatile mixture or good insightful intentions, unpreparedness, and blind catalogue essay obduracy. The perpetually changing press by Kobena releases charted the progress of the Mercer. Co- project's descent into indecisiveness and organised with confusion. Divided into seven sections Autograph, the representing a total of seven countries, show brought with 62 artists and curated by five people, together the work 'Seven Stories...' was meant to chart the of two pioneering trajectory of artist-led movements within African the story of modern African art. To describe photographers - it as academic and uninteresting is to be Mama Casset from generous and cover up the mark of injustice Senegal and to modern African artistic expressions it Seydou Keita from leaves in its wake. Mali - around whose vintage The problem with the exhibition photographs three began soon enough with the Nigerian contemporary section curated by Chika Okeke. Poorly Black British artists installed and over-crowded, a coherent were story was nearly impossible to make out. commissioned to If Okeke's sometimes trenchant catalogue make work. essay illuminated and elucidated the Oladele Ajiboye sweep of the Nigerian story, his helter- Bamgboye from skelter, badly chosen works and artists Nigeria presented undermined his efforts. Erhabor a video and slide Emokpae's painting Struggle Between installation which Life and Death, though, had a Striking dealt with issues of presence. A beautifully worked and loss and return, impastoed black and white exercise in Zarihun Yetmgeta, 'Scale of civilisation' 1988 mixed gender and geometric and minimalist economy, the media on wooden looms. 100 x 62 cm. sexuality. While painting's bisected halves engaged in a Ingrid Pollard (born in Guyana) evoked While the Royal Academy's 'Africa: push-and-pull tussle with two semicircles ideas of longing, desire and crossing with Art of a Continent' was mesmerising and that join to form a full circle in the middle her magnificent painterly colour stupendous, my view must be tempered of the painting. This work suggested a photographs, Maxine Walker, originally with discomfort at the questionable possibility that never materialised in the from Jamaica, explored the ever-present provenance and controversy surrounding story. 's attempt at issues of masquerade, passing and altered many of the pieces in the show. Of note installation art was confusing and identities, articulating in a melancholic are those works still very much the subjects manner an issue with which diasporan inconsequential, a disservice to his regal of international legal contestation, artists must always contend in their search and unique relief technique of plastocasts, particularly those expropriated to Britain for a home away from home. Obiora Udechuku, a master of the elegant by British soldiers after the sacking of line and spatial disruption wgs under- Benin in 1897. Whatever the ethic (moral represented, as was Ben Enwonwu, and legal) of this show, only limitedly did Of all the individual exhibitions of arguably Nigeria's first major art star. it, or any of the related contemporary africa95, 'Seven Stories About Modern Olu Oguibe's work was hung way too exhibitions push the boundaries of Art in Africa' at London's Whitechapel high, almost in the rafters, while El received wisdom to transcend the Gallery fared the worst. Much anticipated Anatsui's usually majestic sculptures a mediocrity of the prosaic. Search as one and heavily proofed, 'Seven Stories' was and wood reliefs suffered from the might in the africa95 programme, there doomed to fail from the moment of its overcrowded ambience of the space. was little evidence of that slice of sobriety conceptualisation. Once the list of that is the mark of an art exhibition participating artists began to emerge you Perhaps the Sudanese and invested with candour, knowledge, daring knew there was something wrong. Firstly, Ethiopian sections curated by Salah and inventiveness. there were too many artists. Secondly, Hassan showed the greatest promise. right to the end, Clementine Deliss, the Two powerful works by the Sudanese

African Quarterly I 1 on the Am master Ibrahim El Salahi - The Last Sound Title (hand, two from the early 60s and The Inevitable feet, foot) made in (1984-85), a work of skilful manipulation graphite one of line, volume and mass, depth and liquid wax on shallowness - conspired with the enigmatic, paper. girded and circular pictograms of Kamala Ibrahim Ishaq and the calligraphic and Finally, the aqueous luminosity of Osman Waqialla Kenyan and to make the Sudanese story the lone section Uganda stories, to dislodge the stereotypes that plague curated by modern Africa art. The Ethiopian section W a n i i k u was a slightdisappointment, again owing N y a c h a e , to limitations of space and the placing of provided an works up against one another. Despite the appropriate coda hanging, Zerihun Yetmgeta's Scale of to the dishevelled Civilisation (1988) successfully reinvents narrative of 'Seven traditional Ethiopian scroll painting, Stories'. Most of affecting an attitude of fragmentation and the works here fell postmodern seriality while still bending into two the rules that artificially seek to bisect the categories. The traditional and the modern Of additional first privileges a note in the Ethiopian section were the kind of inverted works of Skunder Boghossian, Wosene neo-colonial kosrot and Elizabeth Atnafu. If there was sensibility and any consolation in 'Seven Stories...' it social satire, for was the surprising way in which Yetmgeta's example Richard work dove-tailed with that of Nigerian Onyango's work sculptors Ndidi Dike and El Anatsui in the of road disasters, Nigeria section. This cross-cultural affinity or Sane Wadu and shared language within modern and Joel African art also extended to the calligraphic Oswaggao's traces and marks in Salahi, Udechukwu, canvases packed Babaear Sedikh Traore, Yorkshire sculpture park Rashid Diab in the Sudaneie section and tightly with Soulemane Keita's work in the Senegalese 1 grotesque figures doing things which I section. this section represents the' story of Senegal, is an enigma to me. supposed many would find endearingly African. The second category, By the time one got to the Senegalese The South African section curated represented by the work of Etale Sukuro section, one's patience was already by David Koloane, though well installed, favours a kind of social realism which is frayed. Curator El Hadji Sy's pretentious, failed to register the volatility of the event just too earnest to be ironic. shallow and dunder headed translocation (Steve Biko's death) around which the of the site-specificity of Dakar's Laboratoire story was woven. Why, for instance, was That which the Whitechapel Agit-Art's active environment to an there no Willie Bester, if the implicitcharge miserably failed to address was enclosed space was simply a travesty. was directed at the level of resistance poignantly engaged by 'On the Road', a Sy's shameful capacity for self-promotion against apartheid's cruelty and modest show curated by Linda Givon at meant that he had twice as many objects hegemony? Rather what we got from Delfina Studios with artists from South in his section than the other two artists most of the artists (including Koloane Africa, Angola, Mozambique and combined. His minuscule essay was even himself) was distanced and introverted, if Zimbabwe. The exhibition took as its more surprising, given the impressive not timid. The inclusion of Dumile (Feni) theme the migratory indeterminacy of the history of modern Senegalese art. Add to Mhlaba's large charcoal on paper entitled post-colonial space of Southern Africa, this the unsettling feeling that nepotism African Guernica would have been funny encompassing its shared legacy of played a role in Sy being awarded a had its reference to Picasso's famous violence, dislocation and movement. section to souvenir T-shirts and we have a work not made the work seem purely Working from a premise that is meant to very messy affair indeed (no pun intended). derivative. Sam Nhlengethwa's It left him address forcefully, if at times Why anyone would believe that Sy's cold-death of Steve Biko(] 990) similarly problematically, the wide fissures opened paintings on rice sacks along with was so literal in its reference that its up by apartheid hegemony, 'On the Souleymane Keith's mannered canvas impact was blunted on contact. One Road' nonetheless took a bold stab at confection, Issa Sambi's wire sculptures interesting inclusion, though, was Paul suggesting the direction in which recent and other assorted detritus gathered in StopfortVs dark, brooding triptych No art by contemporary artists from Africa is

African Quarterly on the Arts Veil I NO i moving. Contrasted with the elegiac utopianism of Bodys Kingelez. My exhibition. As if we have not already poetry of Antonio Ole's immense rusted objection centres around the insistence of been told enough that Africa is a 'country' boat, Berry Bickle's evocative rustic vessel, curators Julia Peyton-Jones and Andre of shamans, the museum's contribution to Kendell Geers' subversive and self- Magnin that work from one millionaire's the so-called debate on Africa centres consciously Duchampian hypertext, and collection (Jean Pigozzi) represents the around the idea of trance. In the exhibition Willie Bester's terrifying machines of last word in what's interesting from Africa. 'Vita', installed in three airy and sunny carnage, the show's approach seemed To put it mildly, their decision to promote galleries, the work of three artists, Cyprien more satisfying than anything attempted work which in the main encompasses one Tokoudagba (another retread fr^m by either the Whitechapel or the person's taste, is ill advised, inappropriate Pigozzi's collection who also showed at Serpentine Gallery. and offensive. the Serpentine), Farid BriKohia, and Touhami Ennadre strayec dangerously For those unaware of the intimate Pigozzi's imprimatur, herecarefully into kitsch. One ceases to be amazed at politics and abuses of power evident in hidden from the public, effectively plays the capacity for kooky statements around the world of African art collecting, the on the access provided by his money and contemporary African art, but the opening Serpentine Gallery's exhibition 'Big City' powerful connections. He has used them line of Abdelwahab Meddeb's essay in would seem ready-made for the kind of in an accelerated campaign through the 'Vital' catalogue adds a new wrinkle revisionism thatgrants Africa the sanction alliances with major institutions, publishers to this lunacy. Meddeb asserts that 'the for authenticity through the sly evocation and write-ups in important publications to originality of the African contribution to of the naive artist doing wondrous things legitimise and valorise many questionable art lies undoubtedly (emphasis added) in in a contemporary manner. My quarrel artists in his collection, pushing them to its relation to trance.' All one can say with 'Big City' isn't with the majestic the world as the only 'authentic' artists here is that the only trance one photographs of Seydou Keita, the odd from Africa. This way debate and criticism experienced while at the Tate was agglomerations and visual tone poems of is either silenced, foreclosed, or pushed to occasioned by boredom in front of Farid Georges Adeagbo (a genius artist who the periphery. While a sunny Belkahia's insomniac tracings on goatskin identifies and transforms everyday refuse carnivalesque, celebratory and and Tokoudagha's meaningless affections into profound ciphers of decay, loss, and ethnographic discourse is woven around of what has been described as voodoo transcendence), the perverse charm of the various appropriate artists in his imagery. Touhami Ennadre, a Tunisian Frederic Bruly Bouabre's naughty pictures, collection, major institutions, in clear artist whose deep-hued nocturnal or the wondrous postmodernity and violation of their own policies towards photographic triptychs of isolated body other forms of parts (hands, feet, and wrinkled skin), representation, images of death and birth, rapturous unnecessarilytow celebrants at a religious ceremony, and the party-line, the traces of the 'exhumed dead of allying themselves Vesuvius' are the height of exquisite with what is artistry, and made the only contribution basically a con worth dwelling on. Yetthis potential saving game. The grace was travestied by the gallery's Serpentine is no insistence on forcing Ennadre's work into Id exception here. It the perverted frame of an Arcadian is the height of imaginary by directing the viewer's The Editorial Board of YORUBA IDEAS invites well cynicism and lazy attention principally towards those of researched articles from scholars of Yoruba Studies. curatorship to go Yoruba language, literature, philosophy, History, the artist's images that invoked a state of to a collector's Religion and Culture are our focus. trance. That a major institution like the house, select a The papers, which should be of high quality, should be Tate can afford to be naive or callously few objects, then type-written double spaced on one side of A4 size indifferent to the basic epistemology of paper and should not exceed 30 pages. An abstract of present them to art history, as well as the art they chose about 200 words should also be enclosed. the world as to present, is the larger struggle that The author's full name, address and telephone number, jewels of a artists and institutions alike have to if any, should be attached. Notes and references should civilisation's overcome. The over-determined readings appear at the end of the paper. Manuscripts should be material and written in English Language. of critics, curators and scholars who cultural would force a reading like trance into Submit articles to the: interpretation of work such as Ennadre's is yet another. The Editor, the world. GR Yoruba Ideas Shop C4, Falomo Shoppinq Complex This was 1. Arthur Nortje, Dead Roots: Poems. P. O. Box, 50914, also clearly South West - Lagos Pub. Heinemann African Writers Series, apparent in the Tel: 01-2692762 Oxford, 1971 Tate Liverpool

African Quarterly on the Arts Vol.1/NO 3