JANE BRYCE, a professor of African Literature and Cinema in The University of The West Indies, writes on former Managing Editor of The Guardian Sunmi Smart-Cole .
It’s hard to believe this man, whom I first met as Photo Editor of The Guardian in the 1980s, is now in his seventh decade. In those days, I would encounter Sunmi strolling coolly into The Guardian office on Apapa-Isolo Expressway, with some entertaining gist about endangering life and limb pursuing an image on the ever-changing Lagos street.
No matter how hair-raising the experience, he was always immaculate, the consummate calm professional. Now at 70, he strolls out to collect an award at one of the many ceremonies in his honour, just as cool, just as immaculate – and just as professional. He has never stopped working.
This volume is a testament not only to the enduring appeal of his photographic vision, but to the hours and years of dedication to his craft, the images a distillation of a lifetime of looking, observing and recording. Meeting Sunmi today, you would be forgiven for taking him for a member of the privileged class whose rites of passage he so lovingly documents. Yet Sunmi was brought up in Port Harcourt in the 1940s by his dressmaker mother, who was devoted to the Assemblies of God, Nigeria’s first pentecostal church.
It was long before universal education became the norm, in a Nigeria under British rule where schooling was either for the elite or delivered by missionaries. Sunmi, despite being a bright student who qualified for secondary education, was forced to leave school at the age of 14. At 15, he found himself teaching elementary school, living in a small single room with space only for a bed and a pile of magazines on the floor.
The strategy he evolved then has remained his mainstay even till today: buying second-hand copies of Time, Newsweek, National Geographic and Reader’s Digest, he read, voraciously and with intent, sucking up language, information and ideas. In conversation today, Sunmi displays a breadth of knowledge that puts many scholars to shame.
Similarly, growing up in a pidgin-speaking environment, he would get up early to listen to the BBC before going to work, imbibing the sonorous tones of the announcers.
Today, Sunmi code-switches easily between pidgin and the most perfectly expressed “Queen’s English”, equally at home in both. This hard-won facility was not without its cost in pain and insecurity. In some respects Sunmi bears the traces of it still, in his restless drive to achieve at higher and higher levels, in spite of the accolades that routinely come his way.
This is why, far from resting on his laurels, he marks the occasion of his 70th birthday with an exhibition and a major publication of his work. These photographs, taken between 1976 and 2011, rather than being displayed in chronological order, are arranged in such a way as to highlight key thematic trends, placing images dialectically to bring out their common elements even when taken decades apart.
One of these thematic trends is nature, and some of the earliest pictures are from Sunmi’s time in the USA in the 1970s, where he went to work and study. Back in Port Harcourt at the age of 17, he had apprenticed himself to a master draughtsman and taught himself the principles of architecture, and this skill took him to Lagos, Freetown (where he designed the country residence of the Prime Minister, Sir Albert Margai) and thence to California. With a potential career as a senior draughtsman at a California company, what prescience made him enroll at a community college to study photography?
The visual sense that is everywhere present in his work – which we recognise as his personal vision, transmuted and conveyed to us in black and white – must have asserted itself and driven him to this step, which now looks so inevitable. Within two years, Sunmi’s talent was being showcased with his first solo exhibition at Stanford University, Stanford, California, in 1978. Citing the foremost American photographer Ansell Adams as an influence, Sunmi has consistently paid attention to still-life and natural subjects in the many places he has found himself.
Consider the way “From My Home” (2007) and “Happening on El Camino Real” (1977) speak the same language of closely observed detail emerging out of the play of light and shade; or the way grass, leaves, road surfaces and water are texturally rendered, not as back drop, but so as to convey the materiality of daily life and human activity.
Another noticeable thematic trend is music and the musicians who create it, and here Sunmi’s personal participation in the key musical moments of his time lends authority and depth to the framing of his subjects. For, when he was let go from his architectural firm in Lagos in 1957, after they discovered his lack of paper qualifications, he was rescued by the famous impresario and broadcaster, Steve Rhodes, who gave him a job as Artist and Road Manager in his production company.
In this position, he became intimate with Rhodes’s musicians, notably Fela – then Ransome-Kuti – from whom he learnt to play drums by hanging out and listening. In 1966, Sunmi managed Fela’s tour with the Jamaican singer, Millicent Small (of ‘My Boy Lollipop’ fame), and the Ghanaian dance troupe, the Rolling Beats.
He also formed a group, The Soul Assembly, with three others, Segun Bucknor, James and Mike Nelson-Cole, while promoting appearances of the Fela Ransome-Kuti Quintet at the Ivy’s Nest club in the Cool Cats’ Inn, off Apapa Road, Ebute Metta, Lagos. Sunmi made posters by hand and stuck them up on the trees that then lined the roads in Onikan and other Lagos districts.
He was staying in the background, watching and listening, but planning for Soul Assembly’s own professional debut. Fela’s group, under pressure from his redoubtable mother, the social activist Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, was renamed the Koola Lobitos and began playing a high-life inflected jazz. According to Sunmi, Fela was at this stage singing in Yoruba, and it was Sunmi who suggested he switch to pidgin so as to address a wider audience. Eventually, the Soul Assembly got a night a week at the Maharani Club, Martin Street, Lagos Island, where Fela also played one night a week; as a result, he lost his job with Steve Rhodes for conflict of interest, and thus was propelled into a completely different sphere – running a barber shop for the next four years.
The 1984 portrait of Fela, relaxed and smiling after a jam session at two o’clock in the morning, lacks the fierceness of his public persona and reveals the man in the presence of a friend. Sunmi tells how, for six months after he lost his job with Rhodes, Fela made sure he ate at least once a day. Other photographs capture the drama of performance – Ray Charles and the Raylettes, “Seale In Flight” at a concert (2008), D’banj, Christina Aguilera – while others focus on the anonymous traditional musicians of Nigeria’s indigenous tradition: a horn player, a dundun drummer.
It was music that took him to the US for the first time: Sunmi’s barber shop catered to the fashion-conscious at a time when African-American hairstyles led the way, and attracted those who appreciated listening to jazz as he cut their hair, including visiting African-Americans. Through such contacts, Sunmi participated in the African-American Dialogue in Lagos in 1971, when he met Jesse Jackson who invited him to the Black Expo in Chicago.
He made his way across the US by road, and once there, played conga drums with Jullian “Cannonball” Adderley, while Quincy Jones admired his specially designed Ghanaian danshiki (batakari). This experience opened up a world of possibility and led to his next great step into photography.
The musical theme is a sub-set of the portraiture that dominates the collection, and here Sunmi’s extraordinary sensitivity and versatility complement each other. The faces that return our gaze as we look through these pages constitute nothing less than a social history of the last quarter of a century. Here, heads of state, generals, traditional chiefs and the creme de la creme of society rub shoulders with the urban and rural poor who largely populate Nigeria. The achievement of these photographs is the equal respect accorded their subjects, regardless of their social standing.
Even while Sunmi’s intimacy with power – look at the close-up, unmediated portraits of Generals Babangida and Buhari, Mandela caught with his shoes off, Nobel prize winner, Wole Soyinka, in close conversation with Attorney-General, Bola Ige – titillates and enthrals the viewer, we are constantly reminded of the life that presses at the margins of every such encounter. Some of the most powerful images are surely the street snapshots – heightened moments caught on the fly by someone who, we feel, is never off his guard, camera always at the ready for such spontaneous outbreaks of human drama.
A civil defence man and a mini-bus driver confront each other in tatters after a fight; a thief is made to crouch on his haunches by a policeman; another thief is tackled to the ground by plain clothes police outside a tube station in London; a boy does a back-flip on a piece of waste ground. But there are also contemplative moments when the photographer makes us see something we are normally too busy to notice: the shadows of two children on a street in Surelere, a barefoot game of football, two workers relaxing on a temporarily empty cart, the triumph of ordinary people whose lives are a daily struggle for survival and who still have the capacity to appreciate a joke.
Sunmi loves photographing beautiful women, and there are many here. His camera dwells sensually on skin, hair, clothes, but those wide smiles, we feel, are surely for him. The warmth of his personality brings out the best in his subjects, who seem to relax and enjoy the moment. For this reason he is much in demand as a society photographer, but he has taken this role to a higher level – that of social chronicler.
As Editor of Lagos Life (from The Guardian stable), between 1985 and 1988, Sunmi provided an outspoken and illustrated weekly commentary on the exploits of his fellow Lagosians. Sometimes they objected and threatened him with retaliation, but for many he was just another Lagosian having his say (he was later appointed Managing Editor of The Guardian newspaper group). Outside Lagos, our attention is drawn to both the best and the worst of his hugely diverse country.
The black smoke belching from an oil refinery in the Delta tells its own story, as much as the delicate line of froth left by a single wave on an empty shoreline. Lastly, some of the most moving photographs are those which take us into Sunmi’s own life, and his origins in the Saro community from which his absent father came. He expresses great pride in this identity, and the history of educated Sierra Leoneans who spread out across West Africa in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
Sunmi’s own grandfather came to Lagos Colony as a theologian in 1897, and his father also came as a theologian, becoming a curate in Port Harcourt where he met Sunmi’s mother, a Nigerian. Two portraits are of Saro matriarchs: Mrs. Alphonsa Paulina Richard-Sawyerr, a friend’s grandmother, smiles down at the great grandchild in her arms, while facing her is the expressive face, crowned by a gele, of Mrs. Jessica John-Dalley, Sunmi’s cousin. Now 96, she was born in 1914, the year Lord Lugard united north and south Nigeria. Elsewhere, pictures of Sunmi’s son Bankole 30 minutes after he was born, and of Bankole with his elder brother, Tobi, testify to Sunmi’s own part in this extended history. At 70, he marks a further milestone in his family and the nation’s story, and, as ever, shares it with us, his many admirers.
- This piece was published in Cole’s third coffee-table book, entitled: Sunmi’s Lens: A medium between man nature to mark his 70th birthday.
