Tag: Land

In 1986, United States based Nigerian scholar Prof dele jegede held a solo exhibition, Paradise Battered, in condemnation of what he perceived as the government’s insensitivity. Almost three decades after, he says in this interview with Assistant Editor (Arts) Ozolua Uhakheme that Alhaji Shehu Shagari’s administration that was truncated by the military may literally look like Nigeria’s golden era, given the magnitude of abuses these past years.

You once described your art thus: My art is cathartic. What do you mean?

My art—specifically my paintings and, to some extent, drawings—are outlets for my pent-up emotions. They provide an effective lever for my personal musings and creative monologues. I remain committed to the philosophy of engaged and catalytic art, an activist art that has relevancy in the way that it seeks to tug at the conscience of the nation, provoke a level of personal reflections, even reactions, at the same time that it historicizes its period. The luxury of vacant aesthetics is something that I do not often indulge in; there is too much agony in the homeland—far too many traumatised mothers, too many brutalized children—for art to miss the opportunity to inveigh against annoyingly obtuse leadership. In fact, whichever direction you look, the artist could not have asked for better topics to focus upon. If your interest is in landscape art, how about the cataclysmic environmental degradation that we all have continued to be party to in the Niger Delta region? What gave you the right to think that water was not critical to human life? The ecosystem is being laid to waste right under our nose. Our streets have been taken over by vituperative generators that spew soot in our face and are on a mission to impair our hearing. Yet our country continues to wallow in abysmal poverty of ideas, leadership, and implementation. Of course, the laudable Millennial Development Goals of the United Nations have become, in the mouths of Nigerian leaders, nothing more than mere usernames and passwords that facilitate access to the political treasury. The artist has an unmistakable responsibility to be the social conscience of his or her era; to de-legitimise all unwholesome acts that are now routinely left in the hands of “Baba God.” Piquant art and soothing balms of color are not mutually irreconcilable.

How much of social conscience do we find in our artists’ works of today?

It is difficult for me to say with any degree of certainty, given the constraints that I have to work with as a result of (dis)location. Artists of the African Diaspora have opportunities that are not afforded their colleagues who are on the continent. But artists of African descent who live and work on the continent also have tremendous opportunities to help shape the discourse of social conscience through their work. This is one area in which our writers have logged appreciable success. Specifically, Nigerian artists have the chance and space to conscientise their audience to the economic depravity and the abdication of responsibility that seem to have become normative among some key actors of the political class. For sure, all art has whatever freedom it may claim to affirm its legitimacy. And again, I should emphasize that I simply do not want to be prescriptive; you cannot dictate who should do what when it comes to the exercise of individual expression. But there is need for our artists to hone their skills and target their message. Nigeria is an open canvas.

At the presentation of your book by CBAAC, Prof Salah Hassan described the most exciting artists as those who live simultaneously in the centre and at the periphery. What is your take on this?

Salah Hasan’s reference to the center and the periphery recalls the discourse of dualism and dialogic presence in a global creative environment that remained, until less than two decades ago, firmly in the grip of Western culture. That artists who live simultaneously at the center and the periphery are exciting is borne out of the vast vistas that are opened up to those who are bold enough to liberate themselves from the hegemonic restrictiveness of monolithic thinking. For example, the notion that works by African artists must conform to the standards bequeathed to society by dead white artists is no longer considered relevant. Let us face the fact: there is no longer a universally acknowledged center in the art world if by that we mean that such a center has monopoly on modes of cultural production. The idea that certain cultures belong in the periphery, which is itself a quaint carry-over of the primitivising tenets that once held sway in the West, has been ruptured by the presence and work of a coterie of artists, writers, and scholars. From Nigeria, for example, there is such a strong and aspiring painter as Nina Fabunmi who is currently rocking the world in San Francisco. There are also Nnena Okore and Marcia Kure, who bring such diversity and newness to the art world in the same way that Chimamanda Adichie has done in literature that you can no longer talk of centre and periphery as discrete spaces.

You held a solo show Paradise Battered at the National Theatre in 1986. Three decades after, will you still retain such theme given what the nation is going through now?

My 1986 exhibition, Paradise Battered, has turned out to be an epochal event not only because of the artworks but also because of what has become a manifesto of profound import. You will observe that Paradise Battered came after a quarter century of independence. Babangida was in his first year as the new dictator, having pried Buhari from his self-imposed mission of sanitising the nation. In the early 1980’s some of us had complained quite vociferously about the direction that Nigeria was going. We challenged Umaru Dikko’s notion of poverty, which posited that there was no poverty until Nigerians had taken to scavenging. We berated our then Minister of Information, Walter Ofonagoro of the infamous Verdit 83 saga, for such puerile fawning and cavorting in the discharge of his duties. My exhibition of the time attempted to use art as a viable critical platform. There was abject poverty in the land. The Paradise that was envisioned at independence had been battered by Nigerians who had looted and vandalised national treasury. Within this set-up, the poor had become even poorer, traumatised by a bureaucracy that celebrated pomp and pageantry but signified sheer narcissism and indecisiveness. The administration of Alhaji Shehu Shagari was seen as mild-tempered: an administration that was largely insensitive to the yearnings of my generation for bold policies in the area, for example, of technology. It was considered tone-deaf, and relished its power to create a burgeoning bureaucracy. It was the era of substantives and subordinates in government establishments. There was a Minister of, and a Minister for Water, for example. This meant that one minister would dig the borehole, and the other would drink the water. My popular anecdote of the period was taken from the contention of a colleague of mine at the University of Lagos, who had threatened that if he died he would not come back to Nigeria. Rather, he would reincarnate in Saudi Arabia as a camel! Reference to the camel was to emphasise that in Saudi Arabia, even camels lived a more dignified existence. Now, is Nigeria of 2015 better than Nigeria of 1986? Given the myriad of problems that have assailed and continue to assault the national psyche, and the gratuitousness of many Nigerians in the public sphere, given the attitude that you could get away with murder, literally, the Shagari years are now made to look like Nigeria’s golden era. I would love to see more artists embrace their role as the voice of the underprivileged and the conscience of the nation. Or as visionaries who care more about the art and the message than about the auction market.

Do you believe the boundary-breaking efforts of some artists in the Diaspora have shored up the value of African art on global market?

It is important to contextualize the visibility that African art has continued to enjoy in recent years. My view is that there is a certain degree of inexorability to it; it is meant to happen at one point or another in the course of art development and the age of globalization. It certainly helps that there is a coterie of artists in western countries who are able to key into this development. But we should not neglect the fact that the current visibility is the result of a number of separate but interrelated developments, all of which have coalesced in the rise in the value of African art on a global scale. Look, for example, at the curatorial work by key African curators who are based in the West. Then consider the cumulative impact of the scholarship of African art. The fact is that in the last decade or two, the focus has shifted from traditional arts of Africa to the contemporary area. In 1983 when I defended my dissertation, contemporary African art was viewed with disdain and apathy. Today, graduate students are more inclined in favor of modern and/or contemporary African art. And then there are artists of the African Diaspora who are quite versatile in utilizing the means, mode, and language of the West even as they express Africa-centric views. There is also the business dimension to all of this: the emergence of auction houses on the continent, and a reciprocal exploration of modern/contemporary African art by both established and emerging auction houses in the West. In short, there simply cannot be one single entity claiming the prize for stirring this visibility in African art. It has been decades in coming.

During your tenure as director cultural studies, Unilag, there was a popular Unilag music festival. What was the inspiration?  

I took over the reins of directorship of the Center for Cultural Studies in 1989, the same year that I became President of the Society of Nigerian Artists. It was a period filled with excitement. With my colleagues, including the late Bode Osanyin, Duro Oni, Abayomi Barber, Joy Nwosu, Uwa Hunwick, and the late Afolabi Alaja-Browne, we strove to live up to our role as a center for research into visual culture and the study of popular and material culture. The Center for Cultural Studies was solely responsible for managing all auditoria on the campus at that time: the University Auditorium, the Arts Theatre, and the College of Education Auditorium. We came up with the Unilag Popular Music Festival in our effort to raise the profile of our musicians, especially budding ones such as Shina Peters and Adewale Ayuba. Of course, we yielded the platform to established artists such as Ayinla Kollington and Ayinde Barrister among others. It was a win-win project, one that allowed us as practitioners, professionals, and scholars to continue our research into sundry aspects of popular culture at the same time that we raked substantial revenue into the coffers of the University of Lagos. The Popular Music Festival was but an aspect of our agenda—the domestic agenda—of maximum exposure during my tenure as Director at the Center for Cultural Studies. At the international level, the Performing Arts Troupe, which was headed by Bode Osanyin, with a 21-person-strong team of actors and drummers, undertook two international tours during my tenure. In 1989, we took Bode’s play, Orisa, to Jamaica, with another tour of Germany in 1992.

1989 to 1992 were eventful years for you as president, SNA, director cultural studies. How did you manage the task before you then?

By the time I became President of the Society of Nigerian Artists in 1989, the association had laid comatose for a while. Although the Lagos branch of the society remained active, that was about it for an organisation that our founding fathers, including Yusuf Grillo, Bruce Onobrakpeya, Erhabor Emokpae, T.A. Fasuyi, had nursed with high hopes. I was quite fortunate in having such dedicated and motivated members on my Executive Council. I had the privilege of working with such practitioners as Okpu Eze, B.A. Aina, Bisi Fakeye, Ndidi Dike, and Ola Oloidi, and my National Vice-President, L. T. Bentu, among others. It was during my tenure that we democratised the structure of the Society, created and empowered state branches, and backed this up with a legal instrument. It was during my time that we registered the Society as a legal body, with all that that entailed. We inaugurated a series of activities that took place outside of Lagos. In 1989, we were in Zaria and Kaduna with a major lecture and a slate of activities that brought attention to the national scope of the society. We annualized a national exhibition, which brought together artists from all over the country, and paid attention to our own history through ample documentation and exhibition catalogs. We celebrated our elders at the same time that we opened ourselves up to budding members. We were insistent on going to bat for our members and the Society on all matters pertaining to art at the national level. We called our Minister of Culture Lamba Gwom to order on his ill-advised attempt to subsume the nascent National Gallery of Art under the Arts Council. We took out a full page advertorial in the Sunday Times to plead our case for the establishment of the National Gallery of Art as an independent government parastatal in tandem with enunciations in the cultural policy. Indeed, this last issue was one of the major achievements of the SNA under my leadership. Quite sadly though, we are yet to have a national edifice as our National Gallery. In fact, we are on a slippery slope on this score, if the information that the National Theatre is now with a concessionaire is true. What made us so successful at that time was that we were quite idealistic and bold. We were passionate about building upon the legacy bequeathed to us by the founding fathers. We believed strongly in the notion that leadership was not necessarily coterminous with huge budgets, flamboyant pronouncements, but little accomplishments. We dared.

Are there such artists in Nigeria who can dare the economic realities as well as be the voice of the voiceless?

Becoming the voice of the voiceless, or producing art that is focused on social issues has less to do with an artist’s economic buoyancy and more with personal perspectives or ideological bent. I believe that the art market does not discriminate on the basis of subject matter, as art is largely an issue of aesthetics and, of course, perspectives. If you are not an economically successful artist, it is probably not necessarily because of the subject matter that your work extols although I can see where, in certain areas, a subject matter may be so provocative as to create social uproar. (Here, I have in mind such sensitive issues as religion and sexuality). But in terms of highlighting the social malaise that Nigeria has found itself in-the inequalities in living conditions; the pallid conditions in which most people live; the non-availability of basic conditions that are conducive to healthy life; even social systems such as the police-these and many other aspects are aspects that a socially conscious artist can draw attention to. Economically successful artists are not necessarily going to be impelled, all of a sudden, to become art activists if that simply is not what excites them.

You were very popular with your cartoons in Sunday Times with Kole the menace in the 70s. Considering the state of Nigerian media now, did you miss the newsroom activities?

The cartoons that I produced intermittently from the mid-70’s to through the early 90’s were a celebration of my penchant for humor. But, as you know, this was a period dominated largely by the military. (I was out of the country during the reign of Shehu Shagari). So much has changed between then and now, in terms of the Nigerian media. The newsroom has gone global. With technology, access to information has been democratised. The Internet now furnishes humanity with an inordinate amount of news, breaking or cold, at little or no cost, and accessible in real time. In the 70’s the source of information was quite predictable. Domestically, it was either Radio Nigeria, the NTA, or the Daily Times under Alhaji Babatude Jose. This is the sense in which I miss newsroom activities. As Art Editor at Kakawa, I miss the camaraderie that often prevailed in the studio, what with Cliff Ogiugo, the late Yomi Wilson, and the ever-ebullient Josy Ajiboye, with whom I have continued to share indissoluble affinity. Yes, I miss my colleagues in the Daily Times of the 1970s: Tunde Agbabiaka; Lade Bonuola; the late Terry Agbelemoge; Banji Ogundele; Livinus Okereafor; Achike Okafor; Clement Okosun; and, of course, the late Tunji Oseni for whom my respect and admiration continue to endure. Oseni was a principled gentleman who neither lucre nor power could sway from whatever he considered righteous. Cartooning was at its infancy at that time although this should not be misconstrued as implying that the dominant cartoonists of the time were infantile. Far from it. When you look at the cerebral drawings of somebody like Bisi Ogunbadejo in the early 1980s at the Guardian, or the pesky cartoons of Kenny Adamson of the Punch, you couldn’t but sit up, especially if you fell within their operational orbit. Josy Ajiboye’s trademark remained jokes that were inspired by the pedestrian and the marginalized. Still, all of us were at the vanguard of a profession that was at its early stages of development, notwithstanding the pioneering efforts of Akinola Lasekan at the West African Pilot, or even Ayo Ajayi of the Daily Times. Nowadays, the advent of technology has considerably facilitated incredibly memorable cartoons, with particular regard to production.

How fulfilling were those years as cartoonist and any regret while you were running the column?

Those were quite fulfilling years and I have no regrets whatsoever. For sure, cartooning came with its perils and pleasures. You were not sure if you would spend the night with your family; if an unmarked car would come for you on account of a cartoon that you did, but which probably riled a soldier. Fortunately, I never once had such unpleasant experience as going to Alagbon, an idea made popular by the indomitable musician, Fela. This had less to do with my brashness though, and more—a lot more—to do with the prudential stance of the editors. You may call it self-censorship and I will not quibble about that. All I can say it that, given the prevailing climate—remember the Tunde Thompson and Nduka Irhabor saga—it worked. I particularly relished the discipline that meeting submission deadlines imposed on me as a cartoonist. And the beauty of production was yet another draw: all I needed was paper and pen. This meant that I could execute my drawings in the sparsest environment. There was, of course, the issue of ideas. There is no doubt that ideas are superior to execution with regard to art in general and cartooning in particular. Regardless of how pretty your drawing is, if it is not embedded within a workable idea, it is not a cartoon. It may be just an illustration but it will definitely not be a memorable cartoon.

Often time, people easily identify you with the beret cap. Is it driven by the activism in you or what?

The beret is as much an aspect of my love of fashion as it is a part of my expressive personality.

Between art history and studio practice, which is your attraction and why?

I am drawn to both and I do enjoy writing as much as I do studio work. Each brings its own pangs and joys. There is pleasure, for example, in research and scholarship, especially where one has the opportunity to impact one’s field. On the other hand, you simply cannot beat the reckless abandon that painting or drawing brings. While a certain degree of meticulousness and deference is warranted when it comes to writing, such constraints are not characteristic of studio practice although this by no means annuls the challenges that studio practice harbors. It is the process that marks the shift in both instances: shift in mentality and outcome. With respect to art history, I consider myself privileged to be able to contribute to perspectives that assert the integrity of my ancestry. As for my studio practice, this is a forever thing.