Notes
- In Nigeria, it is common to hear the admonition, “He does not even speak English!” when the speaker means that a person is “ignorant.” Similarly, contemporary African popular discourse characterizes the religious life of two generations ago in pejorative terms, as “fetishism,” “idol worship,” and “devilish practices.”
- Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry Into a Category of Bourgeois Society [1962], trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1989), 57.
- Ibid.
- Jonathan Hess, Reconstituting the Body Politic: Enlightenment, Public Culture, and the Invention of Aesthetic Autonomy (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1999). This is the main subject of Hess' book, but see especially pages 27, 81–82, and 172–173.
- Hess, Reconstituting the Body Politic, 38; Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 57–58.
- This trajectory bears more resemblance to the eighteenth-century French (not German) one, where the Enlightenment is difficult to separate from the rupture wrought by revolutionary culture. Other scholars have made similar suggestions, although the one closest to my own is Fred Omu's, which compares West Africa to the laws proscribing the freedom of the press in early eighteenth-century England, and about which he writes that, “a vocal section of the public was excluded from participation in government which was concentrated in the hands of a particular class or group.” See Fred I. A. Omu, “The Dilemma Of Press Freedom In Colonial Africa: The West African Example,” Journal of African History 9, 2 (1968): 280.
- Hess, Reconstituting the Body Politic, 23.
- Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, 32–40, 42.
- Ikem Stanley Okoye, Hideous Architecture: Feint, Modernity, and Occultation in an African Modern Building Practice, forthcoming; and Ikem Stanley Okoye, “Scratching the Membrane: Photography, Sculpture and Building in Early Twentieth Century Southeastern Nigeria,” in Built Surface 2: Architecture and the Pictorial Arts from Romanticism to the 21st Century, ed. Karen Koehler (London and Oxford: Ashgate, 2002).
- Allison Ezigbo Okoli (neé Uzoka), interview, 9 May 1992.
- Okoli, interview. The colonial government began its local search for exhibitors at Wembley in 1920.
- Alan Jenkins, The Twenties (New York: Universe Books, 1974), 104. See also Donald Knight and Alan Sabey, The Lion Roars at Wembley: British Empire Exhibition, 1924–1925 (London: Barnard & Westwood, 1984).
- H. Egan, “Forty Years On: The British Empire Exhibition 1924–25,” (Illustrated talk given to the Wembley Historical Society, Cricklewood Public Library Empire Exhibition documents, uncatalogued, 17 April 1964).
- Burton Benedict, “International Exhibitions and National Identity,” Anthropology Today 7, 3 (1991).
- Ibid., 8.
- Richard Pankhurst, “An Early Somali Autobiography,” in Africa: Rivista trimestale di studi a documentazione dell instituti Italo Africano xxxii, 2–3 (Guigno—Septembre 1977): 159–176, 355–381.
- Jeffrey D. Cranley (notes, Crickelwood Library Empire Exhibition documents, undated). Cranley reports that Public Records Office document C.O. 555/7 May 1924 contains this report on the complaints by the Union of Students of African Descent.
- Okoli, interview.
- Ibid.
- This is the only possible explanation for the narrative offered by John Uzoka's daughter (Allison Ezigbo Okoli), who herself had never traveled outside Nigeria, and for this reason tells a story replete with interesting, but clearly invented associations—for instance, in her narrative Edinburgh Castle was the residence of Queen Victoria.
- Okoli, interview.
- British Empire Exhibition (1924–1925), The British Empire Exhibition (1924) Wembley, London: Palace of the Arts (London: Fleetway, 1924).
- “Red Light District,” West African Pilot, 13 December 1937.
- “URBANIZATION,” West African Pilot, 10 March 1938.
- For the later historical moment, when the likes of Azikiwe had actually occupied the seats of power, it would be more accurate to make the comparison to revolutionary France.
- “Cons Win Interesting Debate on Capitalism and Socialism,” West African Pilot, 20 July 1938.
- On Onabolu, see D. Onabolu, “Aina Onabolu,” Nigeria Magazine 79, 1963: 295–298; Nkiru Nzegwu, “Representational Axis: A Cultural Realignment of Enwonwu,” and Sylvester Ogbechie, “Revolution and Evolution in Modern Nigerian Art: Myth and Realities” in Contemporary Textures: Multidimensionality in Nigerian Art, ed. Nkiru Nzegwu (Binghampton: International Society for the Study of Africa, 1999); and Everlyn Nicodemus, “Bourdieu out of Europe,” in Reading the Contemporary: African Art from Theory to the Marketplace, ed. O. Oguibe and O. Enwezor (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2000).
- This small group that we today consider a “group of artists” were almost all students of Kenneth Murray, a British art administrator and educator in Nigeria.
- West African Pilot, 20 December 1937.
- The competing claims for authority and space between colonials, Creoles, indigenes, and African elites can only be touched upon in brief here.
- “Weekend Excursion,” West African Pilot, 11 February 1938.
- See Carolyn A. Brown, “We Were All Slaves”: African Miners, Culture, and Resistance at the Enugu Government Colliery (Oxford: James Currey, 2003).
- This included the altering of internal space along “non-official” lines. Clifford Ham, “Competing Modernities: British Intentions and Local Constructions in the Residential Architecture of Colonial Enugu, Nigeria,” paper presented at the 87th Annual Conference of the College Art Association, 1999. See also Patrick U. Mbajekwe, “Land, Social Change, and Urban Development in Onitsha, Eastern Nigeria, 1857–1960,” (Ph.D. diss., Emory University, 2003).
- “Folio of Drawings: African Staff Quarters: Types A—D,” Archives of the (Old) Anambra State Government, Ministry of Works, Old Government Lodge, Enugu. Salary indicated in annotation after each title.
- Whereas in European colonial cities like Lagos there was a visible European presence, in places like Oka the layout did not specifically inscribe race. Europeans were never present in significant enough numbers in Oka for “a space in between” to have been imagined there. See Brian Fetter, The Creation of Elizabethville, 1910–1940 (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press, 1976), 34–35.
- West African Pilot, 22 November 1954.
- For the Congo, see the image (after page xx) in Fetter, The Creation, titled, “Company Housing circa 1940.”
- In contrast to the Pilot, West Africa reported as much news on Africa-related issues in Europe as it did on the local scene in Africa. West Africa therefore would have appealed to company heads and state bureaucrats, as well as to Europeans and Africans in the diplomatic service, more than it would to the African workers, midlevel civil servants, and budding politicians who made up the bulk of the Pilot's readership.
- The UAC, under its earlier name, the Royal Niger Company, was the de facto administrative body in Nigeria under charter from the British crown between 1672 and 1750.
- West Africa, 26 April 1960.
- Okoye, Hideous Architecture.