{"id":676,"date":"2011-09-24T09:50:59","date_gmt":"2011-09-24T09:50:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mtls.ca\/issue10\/?page_id=676"},"modified":"2012-07-05T00:54:09","modified_gmt":"2012-07-05T00:54:09","slug":"rikki-wemega-kwawu","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/writings\/essay\/rikki-wemega-kwawu","title":{"rendered":"Rikki Wemega-Kwawu"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Politics of Exclusion<\/strong> (Part 3)<\/h1>\n
Rikki Wemega-Kwawu<\/h6>\n

Yes, there was a mass migration to the West in the 70s, 80s and 90s, mostly due to economic reasons. But interestingly the majority of creative practitioners of art stayed behind or quickly returned home, during that difficult epoch in Africa\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s post-colonial history. Just a handful of African artists actually joined the exodus, understandably because contemporary African creativity was met with very poor reception in the West at the time. In the opening paragraphs of his critique of Africa 95<\/em>, Enwezor vividly captures the squalor and rejection confronting the African artist\/ writer in exile in the West. He prefaces his article with a melancholic quote from the late South African poet Arthur Nortje in \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Waiting\u00e2\u20ac\u009d: \u00e2\u20ac\u0153[t]he isolation of exile is a gutted whore-house at the back of pleasure streets.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d<\/p>\n

Enwezor goes on to further paint a dismal and deplorable picture of the condition of the African creative writer\/artist in exile in the West.\u00c2\u00a0 Their desperation is impotent, with many dying prematurely from the ravages of isolation.\u00c2\u00a0 Their dreams went unfulfilled in a hostile environment unreceptive to their work because it \u00e2\u20ac\u0153defied the authenticity\u00e2\u20ac\u009d test, is \u00e2\u20ac\u0153tainted material,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153insufficiently native\u00e2\u20ac\u009d and contaminated by that virus known as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153contact with the West.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d With pathos, Okwui Enwezor exemplifies his points by pointing us to the exile experience of the aforementioned poet:<\/p>\n

Reflecting his pain, Nortje`s words are charged with a plenitude of emotion, an aberrant eroticism, longings, desire and memory. The act of remembrance makes wanderers of us all, helping us build communities out of skeins of desire and nostalgia, feelings which inevitably succumb to the logic of reality. Forget it boy, your country, continent and century is gone, long gone, like the blast of a gun to the head. Your memory, just like your body, is now an occupied territory; a colonial commodity bought cheaply and sold dearly.<\/p>\n

The question I pose to Okwui Enwezor is, how could a \u00e2\u20ac\u0153gutted whore-house\u00e2\u20ac\u009d yesterday overnight now be the golden theater for the playing out of contemporary Africa art? What has changed? What Enwezor wrote about Nortje in circa 1995 \u00e2\u20ac\u201c the excruciating circumstances and the dire straits in which the African creative artist found himself \u00e2\u20ac\u201c are clearly echoed in Olu Oguibe\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s recent tribute to his friend, Esiaba Irobi.<\/p>\n

Coincidentally, to digress a little, Olu Oguibe and Okwui Enwezor are both protagonists in the modern re-institutionalization of contemporary African Art in the West. They ensured its recognition and acceptance by the mainstream Western art establishment through a number of wonderful collaborative work, which paid off great dividends to the benefit of African art. Their efforts reached its climax with the co-authoring of the famous Reading the Contemporary: African Art, from Theory to the Marketplace<\/em>.\u00c2\u00a0 Unfortunately, however, I learnt they fell out. That is a terrible loss to African art. If they could iron whatever differences between them and get back together, it would augur positively for the growth of African art. It is a pity no attempt has been made by anybody to bring Enwezor and Oguibe together (I stand to be corrected). No matter the grievances between them, they should bury the hatchet and get back together, and get back on course, there is so much to do and there is very little time. They should not forget the African adage about the tongue and the teeth; they occupy the same space, which is, the mouth, but periodically, the teeth accidentally bites the tongue. That does not mean they reject each other.\u00c2\u00a0 They continue to be friends, working together and occupying the same space. The import of this proverb is that, there is bound to be misunderstandings between close associates and very good friends, but that should not drive them apart.<\/p>\n

An infinitesimally small percentage of African creative personalities may have fled into exile from their political persecutors. I know of El Salahi and Olu Oguibe himself. I am sure there were a few more others, but it is grossly erroneous for the impression to be created by Enwezor that most of Africa’s creative people and intellectuals fled to the West, while many got killed in the infernos back home. Actually, at any moment in time during the period Enwezor frames as the exodus of African artists to the West, there were more African artists on the African continent practicing their trade and craft than African artists in the West, a hundred times fold! I wager my last dollar on that.<\/p>\n

I will refer Enwezor and any interested person to a small publication, actually, a lexicon on contemporary African art. This directory of African artists in Africa and abroad is listed by country and media. It also include names of cultural institutions and museums in Africa and in the West interested in contemporary African art, and a roster of intellectuals whose line of scholarship is contemporary African art. It was the French government\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s gift to Africa to support her burgeoning art industry on the continent and the world\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s growing interest in the subject. For artists in Africa in the 1980s and 1990s, it was much easier to know what was happening in the art world in Europe and America than what was happening in a neighboring African country. We did not have the Internet at that time, and mass communication was woefully poor. Communication had to be improved and facilitated among practicing African artists, home and abroad, to have exchanges and to share ideas. Hence, this motivated the French government to sponsor this lexicon. It was compiled by the French Ministry of Co-operation and Development (Minist\u00c3\u00a8re de la Co operation et du D\u00c3\u00a9veloppement) and the Association Dialogue entre les Cultures and edited by Nicole Guez. It was simply titled, <\/strong>L\u00e2\u20ac\u2122Art Africain Contemporain (Guide – <\/strong>Contemporary African Art)<\/em>. The first edition was dated 1992-94, and the second edition, 1996-94.<\/p>\n

In Guide – Contemporary African Art, <\/em>(I have selected Nigeria, being one of African\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s most populous states), seventeen pages were devoted to a listing of practicing artists in the country at the time, with about two hundred artists listed, as against three pages with twenty four listed artists living in the West \u00e2\u20ac\u201c United States, Britain, Italy and Germany \u00e2\u20ac\u201c at that time. Under my country Ghana, the artists listed in this directory are still the leading, actively practicing artists. The eighties and nineties in Ghana, in spite of all the political upheavals and economic woes, were actually the decades the arts really flourished. There were major exhibitions from month to month. That was the period Ghana\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s pre-eminent artists, Ablade Glover and Ato Delaquis, made their mark and influenced a whole generation of young artists. I admit, they were unbearably difficult years. Conditions of living were very deplorable. As a painter, it was almost impossible to readily come by art supplies to sustain your practice. But we survived those years, all the same, and here we are.<\/p>\n

From the few figures cited from the Nigerian section in Guide: Contemporary African Art,<\/em> 1992-1994,<\/em> the lop-sided proportion of home-based artists as against artists abroad, in Europe and the U.S.A, go for all the countries listed in the directory. Some countries did not have any artist at all living overseas. Only one or two war-ravaged countries, like Liberia and Somalia, where the compilers of the directory found it difficult to collect data, were left out in the directory, which I would describe as a fairly comprehensive guide to contemporary African art in the 1980s and the 1990s. It held a mirror to the demographics of continental-based African artists and those living and working in the Diaspora at the time. From the foregoing, I wonder the veracity in Okwui Enwezor\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s claim that the flight en masse of African artists and art writers to the West in the 1980s and 90s when they had to escape unfavorable working conditions and, sometimes, political persecution, shifted the polarity of contemporary African art production and its scholarship to the West. This is a factual inaccuracy Enwezor is peddling. He does not have to throw dust into the eyes of his audience\/readers and mislead them with mendacious claims.<\/p>\n

I have always wondered who the influential art writers \u00e2\u20ac\u201c always talked about by Okwui Enwezor \u00e2\u20ac\u201c are who fled the economic deprivation and political instability and persecutions of the eighties and nineties to the West. We do not have much of an art critical writing culture here in Africa, in the first place, as exists in the United States and in Europe. I know Olu Oguibe had written a few good reviews in Nigeria before embarking on his exile, and did continue writing in London along-side his art practice and studies. I do not know of Okwui Enwezor as a writer of any stature in Nigeria (I stand to be corrected) before his migration to the West. I believe he honed his craft as an art writer and critic in the art world of New York and London. There could have been one or two others \u00e2\u20ac\u201c Hassan Salah?, Dele jegede?, Gilane Tawadros?, Rasheed Araeen? or Simon Njami? Sylvester Ogbechie and Tumelo Mosaka are relatively new on the block. In any case, how could just a handful of people I could count on my five figures be used hyperbolically to justify the claim that masses of African artists and writers fled to the West? The noted writer on the visual arts of the Black-Diaspora and author of Welcome to the Jungle, <\/em>Kobena Mercer (Dr.) was born in the U.K. to a British mother and a Ghanaian father. He grew up in the U.K., apart from his very early years in Ghana. Certainly, he could not have been part of the exodus, or flight from Africa. The curator of Fault Lines: Contemporary Africa Art and Shifting Landscapes<\/em> and former director of Institute of International Visual Arts, U.K., Gilane Tawadros, moved from Egypt to Britain in 1970. Obviously, she could also not have been part of the exodus train Enwezor claims.<\/p>\n

It is interesting to know that most of the artists listed throughout Guide – Contemporary African<\/em> Art<\/em>, apart from a few new names, are still the most prominent and actively practicing African artists in Africa or abroad today. Most of the art experts listed in the directory are still the experts or authorities around today. It is surprising and interesting I did not find Enwezor\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s name in this list. Chika Okeke-Agulu was listed as a painter and sculptor \u00e2\u20ac\u201c possibly a student or a lecturer at the time \u00e2\u20ac\u201c on the campus of the University of Nigeria in Nsukka, Enugu State. The two editions of Nicole Guez\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s directory, Guide – Contemporary African Art<\/em> and, additionally, Bernice Kelly\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Nigerian Artists: A Who\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Who and Bibliography<\/em> are two documentary evidences which should set the records straight, once and for all, that there was no mass migration of African artists to the West in the 1980s and 1990s as purported by Enwezor.<\/p>\n

Of very-well-known Nigerian-born artists in circulation today, Sokari Douglas Camp, OBE, was not part of the exodus in the 1980s. She had always lived in the UK from her childhood, schooling in California at the California College of Arts and Crafts. Likewise Yinka Shonibare MBE; born in the UK in 1962, started growing up in Nigeria, and went back to the UK when he turned 16 to complete his graduate studies at Wimbledon College of Art, Bryn Shaw and the Goldsmith College. As mentioned earlier, he lives and works in London. Odili Donald Odita was born in 1963 in Enugu, Nigeria, but was raised in Columbus, Ohio. He earned his B.F.A. from Ohio State University, Columbus, Ohio in 1988 and his M.F.A form Bennington College, Bennington, Vermont in 1990 and now lives and works in Philadelphia. The Turner Prize Winner, Chris Ofili was born in 1968 in Birmingham to Nigerian parentage. He also grew up in the UK studying art at the Chelsea School of Art, 1988-91, and the Royal College of Art, 1991-93. In fact, Chris Ofili is regarded more a British artist than an African artist. And as much as possible, he himself likes to disassociate himself from Africa, or renounce his being African. I do not know why chroniclers of the history of contemporary African art are still intent on wanting to claim him as a son of Africa. I think he should be left to his faith. So, who were the African artists who moved to the West in the 1980s and changed the whole terrain of practice and discourse on contemporary African art, making the African Diaspora the World Capital <\/strong>of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Contemporary African art\u00e2\u20ac\u009d?<\/p>\n

The empirical and verifiable evidence from Nicole Guez\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Guide – Contemporary African Art<\/em> unequivocally, suggests otherwise, that there were no mass movements by African artists and art writers to the West in the 1980s and 1990s, that what Okwui Enwezor has always described as the exodus is a misinformation, exaggeration and figment of his own imagination. It is not the truth as it stands. It is spurious and misleading. Absolutely fallacious! Enwezor had to weave hard a seemingly credible story to validate his undue fixation with African Diaspora artists, and his own continual stay in the West. It is, however, only in the last few years that the number of young African artists who are migrating to the West, probably, have stepped-up, apparently because they do not see any bright prospects for themselves in Africa, all partly because of the politics of exclusion being perpetuated by Okwui Enwezor and his school. \u00e2\u20ac\u0153To be visible and valued, my brother (sister), you have got to move to the West,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d that is the maxim today.<\/p>\n

I would not mind at all if Okwui Enwezor were to define the kind of contemporary African art he is propagating as \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Contemporary African Diaspora Art,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Contemporary African Art in the Diaspora,\u00e2\u20ac\u009d \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Contemporary African Art Abroad\u00e2\u20ac\u009d or \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Contemporary African Art in the West (USA or Europe).\u00e2\u20ac\u009d But to define contemporary African art which dispenses completely of the African continent and its colonial and post-colonial history, situating it wholly in the West, in the Africa Diaspora, is a distortion of history, an aberration of the truth and a travesty of justice to the African \u00e2\u20ac\u201c an affront to his dignity, self-esteem and ingenuity. Enwezor\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s enunciation of \u00e2\u20ac\u0153Africa is nowhere, Africa is everywhere\u00e2\u20ac\u009d will not hold water and should be challenged to the hilt. How could defining contemporary African art preclude the geographical boundary and terrain of the mother African continent as a vital arena for the production of art? The land mass of the African continent is totally ostracized in Enwezor\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s bizarre definition of contemporary African art. I find this very puzzling. And why should Okwui Enwezor now be attempting to define and redefine what Contemporary African art is when it has been so well defined in the past, and we are all clear in our minds about what it is?<\/p>\n

Because earlier definitions of contemporary African art had always recognized the presence of the African Diaspora as an essential component of the African continent, Nicole Guez\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Guide-Contemporary African Art<\/em>, Editions 1992-94, 1996-1998, feature as well a listing of African artists living and working abroad. Book surveys on contemporary African art, like Kojo Fosu\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s Twentieth Century Art of Africa<\/em> and Jean Kennedy\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s New Currents, Ancient Rivers: Contemporary African Artists in a Generation of Change <\/em>\u00c2\u00a0had always covered African Artists on the continent as well as in the Diaspora, with the higher distribution being African artists in Africa. However,\u00c2\u00a0 Enwezor\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s theoretical definition of contemporary African art, which turns its back to all that has gone on artistically on the African continent, and centers the contemporaneity of African art practice and thought in the Western metropolis, buttressed by the philosophies of Paul Gilroy and V.Y. Mudimbe is, indeed, very disturbing. It is outrageous and bogus, to say the least, and should be rejected outright!<\/p>\n

Yes, the African Diaspora, no doubt, is important. It has contributed in many ways to the motherland, particularly in the remittances of often scarce foreign-exchange back home to shore up ailing economies. It is, however, only an adjunct to the motherland. The African Diaspora can never, ever supplant or subjugate the motherland. If, indeed, the real Africa, as postulated by Okwui Enwezor and his cohorts of curators and writers, is the African Diaspora, then we might as well sell the whole African continent, and ensure all Africans go and live in the West. There will be no need to continue our humble strife at nation building for generations to come, nor continue our implacable determination to build a continent with good governance, good democratic governments, vibrant parliaments, a free press, an energetic private sector, a market economy, rule of law, art galleries, museums and all the modern-day amenities and infrastructure for our comfortable living, just as you find in the West.<\/p>\n

I do not hold anything against my colleagues living and working in the West. Their achievement and success is my joy and pride and the joy and pride of the whole continent of Africa. But their achievement and success will not be complete until it is linked with the total success of their colleagues back home in Africa. African artists in Africa have to be given equal international exposure and value placed on their work like their counterparts abroad. The spotlight has to be brought to bear on them, too. Then African art could be said to have truly arrived at the New Golden Age. As it is now, the seeming success contemporary African art is enjoying is only a charade, and could evaporate before our eyes tomorrow. A typical example of the most recent one of the international mega-shows being skewed in favor of African Diaspora artists is Who Knows Tomorrow<\/em> in Berlin. Three of five of the artists in that show all live and work in Europe. Are Chika Okeke-Agulu and, obviously, his mentor, Okwui Enwezor, telling the world that there are no other deserving artists in Africa to have been in this show?\u00c2\u00a0 Considering the fact that the number of African artists living and working on the continent far exceeds by a thousand-fold the number of African artists living and working in the Diaspora, international mega-shows of contemporary African art should be in the reverse proportion, tilting in favor of African artists living in Africa. This should also go for the choice of artists featured in book surveys on contemporary African art. I can boldly attest to the fact that there are many artists living on the African continent doing very significant and compelling works, with a global outlook, works which fall squarely within Enwezor\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s paradigm and definition of what contemporary African art is. And all these artists are cruelly ignored or bypassed in favor of African Diaspora artists. Okwui Enwezor and his disciples should know that we all could not go live in the West. Many of us continue to live in Africa by choice.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Politics of Exclusion (Part 3) Rikki Wemega-Kwawu Yes, there was a mass migration to the West in the 70s, 80s and 90s, mostly due to economic reasons. But interestingly the majority of creative practitioners of art stayed behind or quickly returned home, during that difficult epoch in Africa\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s post-colonial history. Just a handful of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"parent":46,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","template":"authorpage.php","meta":{"ngg_post_thumbnail":0,"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-676","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/676","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=676"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/676\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1180,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/676\/revisions\/1180"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/46"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mtls.ca\/issue12\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=676"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}