Notes
- Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, originally published 1953 in French, here quoted from P. Williams and L. Chrisman, eds., Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 172–173, 179.
- The information on Edward Wilmot Blyden is from Hollis R. Lynch, Edward Wilmot Blyden: Pan-Negro Patriot 1832–1912 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 196; information on Camille Pissarro is from Stephanie Rachum, “Camille Pissarro's Jewish Identity” (www.tau.ac.il/arts/projects/PUB/assaph-art/assaph5/articles_assaph5/rachum.pdf), and Jean Etsinger, “At Long Last Camille Pissarro is Coming Home to St. Thomas” (from The Islander Trader, 2 October 1996) online at www.pissarro.vi/exhibition.htm).
- John Clark, Modern Indian Art (Honolulu: University of Hawai'i Press, 1998).
- Ibid., 24.
- Everlyn Nicodemus and Kristian Romare, “Konst fran Soder om Sahara,” Konstperspektiv 3(1992): 21. The essay was translated and published in Yang (Gent 1993) as “Kunst bezuiden Sahara.”
- Everlyn Nicodemus, “The Centre of Otherness,” in Global Visions: Toward a New Internationalism in the Visual Arts, ed. J. Fisher (London: Kala Press, 1994), 98. On Onabolu's paradigmatic artistic revolution, I note: “It has been drummed into our heads…how the Cubists in the beginning of this century found formal instruction in the structure of traditional African sculptures…. But it is typical of the arrogant saga of western art historiography that nobody bothered to notice that an appropriation in the opposite direction took place in the same years, 1906–07. It opened up new horizons. It had its own dynamics.”
- Ibid., 98.
- Ibid., 98.
- Basil Davidson, The Black Man's Burden: Africa and the Curse of the Nation State (New York: Random House, 1993).
- Nicodemus, “The Centre of Otherness,” 98. The quotations are from my summing up of Davidson's observations.
- Ulli Beier, Contemporary Art in Africa (New York: Praeger, 1968).
- Marshall W Mount, African Art. The Years Since 1920 (Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1973). The quotations are from the Da Capo reprint of 1989.
- Ibid., 147–158.
- Dapo Onabolu, “Aina Onabolu,” Nigeria Magazine 79(December 1963): 295–298.
- Mount 1989: 74–81, 83–90. The school in Lubumbashi, founded in 1944, was first called Le Hangar and later LAcademie de l'art populaire Congolais. About its workshop philosophy, claiming that avoiding any obvious and direct contact with Western art produced works that were “wholly African,” Mount writes: “‘wholly African’ only in the sense that it was done by Africans in Africa in a style that fits a rather condescending Western stereotype of what African painting should be: above all, decorative, having bright colors, flat forms, and simple compositions.”
- Ibid., 87. The Poto-Poto school, officially known as Centre d'Art Africaine, was founded in 1951 by the amateur painter Pierre Lods. Its popular style was imitated and spread widely, as Mount critically observes, in all of sub-Saharan Africa.
- Susan Vogel, Africa Explores: 20th Century African Art, catalogue of an exhibition at the Museum for African Art, New York, 1991, which also traveled to Europe. The text contains rather speculative classifications of African art and artifacts.
- Jean Kennedy, New currents, Ancient Rivers: Contemporary African Artists in a Generation of Change (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution, 1992). The author, herself an artist/collector, declared that she was primarily seeking “Africanity.” She died a year before the book was published.
- Uche Okeke, “History of Modern Nigerian Art,” Nigeria Magazine (Lagos) 128/129, (1979): 100–118. Okeke, the leading theoretician in the so-called Zaria Rebels group at the art academy in Zaria at the end of the Fifties, told me in an interview in Nimo in 1995 that he had suggested writing a history of modern Nigerian art already as a student but he was turned down by publishers.
- Koju Fosu, 20th Century Art of Africa (Zaria: Gaskiya, 1986). Fosu, writing about Aina Onabolu as one of the “first-generation pioneers” (6), confusingly lumps him together with two artists who were thirty-five years younger.
- Ola Oloidi, “Art and Nationalism in Colonial Nigeria,” Nsukka Journal of History 1(1989): 92–110.
- Uche Okeke, “History”, (1979): 97. See analysis of Onabolu's efforts to define an African aesthetic for his art in Everlyn Nicodemus, “Bourdieu out of Europe?” Third Text 30(1995): 8.
- Oloidi, “Art and Nationalism,” 103.
- Ola Oloidi, “Modern Nigerian Art in Humanistic Focus: An Examination in Art Functionalism,” in Readings in African Humanities, Traditional and Modern Culture, ed. Edith Ihekweazu (Enugu: Forth Dimension Publishing, 1988), 205–22. The illustration referred to is on p. 207.
- Koju Fosu refers to Ola Oloidi's “well documented Ph.D. thesis” to which he obviously had access. Koju Fosu, 1986, 7.
- Olu Oguibe, “In the 'Heart of Darkness”. Third Text 23, Africa Special Issue (1993): 6. Oguibe served as guest editor of this issue.
- Chika Okeke, “The Quest: From Zaria to Nsukka,” in Seven Stories About Modern Art in Africa (London: Whitechapel Art Gallery, 1995), 41. For a comprehensive rebuttal of Chika Okeke's premise of Zarianist eminence in modern Nigerian art, see Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, “Revolution and Evolution in Modern Nigerian Art: Myths and Realities,” in Contemporary Textures: Multidimensionality in Modern African Arts, ed. Nkiru Nzegwu (Binghamton: ISSA, 1999), 121–138.
- Chica Okeke, “Modern African Art,” in The Short Century, Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945–1994, ed. Okwui Enwezor (Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2003).
- Olu Oguibe, “Appropriation as Nationalism in Modern African Art,” Third Text 60(2002).
- See Nicodemus, 1994.
- By scrutinizing Kenneth Murray's informal and in certain aspects retrograde educational philosophy, Oguibe sustains the proposed thesis that there emerged an official policy concerning art education in colonial Africa with the unspoken aim of keeping African artists falling behind Western avant-gardes, a policy that also can be traced to Margaret Trowell's virulently antimodernist attitude in her art school in Kampala, Uganda, as well as to certain missionary initiatives in South Africa. For a comprehensive evaluation of Murray's pedagogy and his influence on modern Nigerian art, see Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, Ben Enwonwu: The Making of an African Modernist (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2008).
- Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (London: Verso, 1993).
- Press release, July 2005, on a lecture by Bashorun J. K. Randle with the notice that J. K (John) Randle (1855–1928) ran afoul of the government but still went on to found Nigeria's first political party, the Peoples Party, in 1908. [http://medicalnigeria.net/hot_lecture_part_1.htm].
- D. Kimble, A Political History of Ghana (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), 98. African doctors were from 1902 even excluded from the West African Medical Service. Oloidi writes: “Onabolu later learnt from Dr. Randle about the latter's bitterness towards the colonial government which gave him an appointment below those of his European counterparts, though he was professionally more qualified than many of them.” And about their reaction to the statement of a foreign newspaper, he writes: “Onabolu abhorred, and was very bitter about the popularly accepted racialist notions…that no African, not even the already culturally Europeanized ones, was endowed with creativity to produce art or true pictures like a white man.” Oloidi, “Art and Nationalism,” 95.
- Ibid., 96.
- Ibid., 97.
- Ian Thomson, Primo Levi (New York: Vintage, 2003), 93.
- Clark, Modern Asian Art, 16.
- Dapo Onabolu, “Aina Onabolu,” 297. He writes: “…the fact that a man responds to a work of art primarily as a human being; and that in the global scene, art forms have emerged which had developed analytical and scientific skills, the knowledge or ignorance of which made the distinctions between the informed and the ignorant artist.”
- Clark, Modern Asian Art, 24.
- Oloidi, “Art and Nationalism,” 98.
- Comte de Gobineau's Essai sur l'inegalite des races humaines (1853), contains the famous line “The Negroid variety is the lowest, and stands at the foot of the ladder.” Quoted here from a translation by A. Collins (New York: H. Fertig, 1967), 205. Within a few years, a series of quasi-scientific works propagated the construction of race and racism, namely Thomas Carlyle's notorious Occasional Discourse on the Nigger Question, published in 1853 (available in electronic form at the Cornell University Library, Ithaca, N.Y.); Robert Knox, Races of Man (London: Renshaw, 1850); John Campbell's Negro-Mania, Examination of the Falsely Assumed Equality of Various Races of Man (Philadelphia: Campbell & Power, 1851); and J. C. Nott and G. H. Giddon's, Types of Mankind (Philadelphia: Lippincott, Grambo, and Co., 1854).
- Elizabeth Isichei, A History of Nigeria (New York: Longman, 1983), 365. See also E. A. Ayandele, The Missionary Impact on Modern Nigeria 1842–1914—A Political and Social Analysis (London: Longman, 1966), 54–69. The quotation in the text is from Akin L. Mabogunje [http://thisdayonline.com/archive/2002/07/03/20020703.bus20.html].
- See Everlyn Nicodemus, “Representing African Art: A Challenge by the Exhibition Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa,” Senri Ethnological Reports 54(Osaka 2005), 116. See also Everlyn Nicodemus, “Art and Art from Africa: The Two Sides of the Gap,” Third Text 33(1995–96), 34: “There is a wide though somewhat diffuse gap between the previous African art system, which perished, and a new one, which was introduced, for instance, by the Nigerian portrait painter Aina Onabolu as early as the first decade of this century, to be completed later by the first modernists, but whose infrastructure and wider anchoring in the society of many African countries has yet to be formulated.”
- This information has mainly been sourced from the internet, [http://lagosblog.blogspot.com/2007/01/freetown-yo-bo-town.html] and [http://city-data.com/world-cities/Lagos-History.html]. For the traditions of education see Michael C. Echeruo, “The Education of Lagosians,” West Africa Review 3, 1 (2001).
- P. O. Esedebe, “Origins and Meaning of Pan- Africanism,” Presence Africaine 73(1970): 109–127.
- A Brief Biography of Martin R. Delany. [http://www.hierographics.org/mrdelanyabbeokuta.htm].
- The main sources are Hollis R.Lynch, Edward Wilmot Blyden: Pan Negro Patriot, 1832–1912 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002; originally published in 1967); and Edith Holden, Blyden of Liberia: An Account of the Life and Labors of Edward Wilmot Blyden (New York: Vantage Press, 1967).
- Lynch, Blyden, 221, note 30. “A committee of fourteen prominent Africans had invited him to give moral support in a bitter dispute between Africans and Europeans about the Niger Mission.” The note mentions among others, “John Randle, a medical doctor.”
- Ibid., 228.
- Ibid., 251.
- Ibid., 244.
- Ibid., 192.
- Ibid., 231.
- Oloidi, “Art and Nationalism,” 98–99. Compare Blyden: “(T)he lives of kings and warriors…the great deeds those heroes have performed” as quoted in Lynch, 229.
- Lynch, 217.
- Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 55.
- See Everlyn Nicodemus, “Modernity as a Mad Dog: On Art and Trauma,” in Over Here, International Perspectives on Art and Culture, eds. G. Mosquera and J. Fisher (New York: New Museum of Contemporary Art and Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2004), 271–272; and Paul Gilroy, Small Acts: Thoughts on the Politics of Black Cultures (London: Serpent's Tail, 1993), 178.
- Gilroy, The Black Atlantic, 39.
- Ibid., 57.