Background: Independent Nigeria
The modern state of Nigeria originated from British colonial rule, beginning in the 19th century, and the merging of the Southern Nigeria Protectorate and Northern Nigeria Protectorate in 1914. The British set up administrative and legal structures while practicing indirect rule through traditional chiefdoms. Nigeria became a formally independent federation in 1960 and plunged into a civil war from 1967 to 1970. It has since alternated between democratically-elected civilian governments and military dictatorships, until it achieved a stable democracy in 1999.
Art in Nigeria post-independence has been characterized by a continued fusion of European and traditional Nigerian arts, along with a movement to break away from European styles and embrace purely traditional styles once more, as seen in the works of Enwonwu and Okeke and the emergence of the Négritude Movement.
Enwonwu
Odinigwe Benedict Chukwukadibia Enwonwu (1917 – 1994), better known in the western world as Ben Enwonwu, was a premier Igbo Nigerian modernist painter, sculptor, and pioneer. His career opened the way for the postcolonial proliferation and increased visibility of modern African art, especially that of Nigeria. His work has been exhibited around the world.
During his time, Enwonwu was well regarded as an artist, and his art is described as a "unique form of African modernism". Enwonwu studied Fine Arts under Kenneth C. Murray at Government Colleges, Ibadan and Umuahia, 1934–37. Murray was an education officer in charge of art education in the colonial civil service and later director of antiquities. Enwonwu attended Goldsmith College, London, in 1944, and then continued his studies at Ruskin College, Oxford, England, from 1944 to 1946, and at Ashmolean College and Slade School of Fine Arts, Oxford, 1946–48, graduating with first-class honors. During their time together, Enwonwu became Murray’s assistant and was recognized as one of the most gifted and technically proficient student of the “Murray Group”.
His career teaching art, touring, and lecturing spanned the next several decades, all while he held many art exhibitions in London, Lagos, Milan, New York, Washington D.C., and Boston. During her visit to Nigeria in 1956, Queen Elizabeth II commissioned and sat for a portrait sculpture by the artist. During the Royal Society of British Artists exhibition in London of 1957, he unveiled the bronze sculpture. Recognition of his bronze sculpture of the Queen proved that he, as an African modern artist, used his practice to develop a new kind of modern art whose ideals of representation and notions of artistic identity were different from conventional art-historical narrative of European modernist practice.
Okeke
Christopher Uchefuna Okeke (1933 – 2016), known as Uche Okeke, was a contemporary Nigerian artist. Between 1940 and 1953, he attended St. Peter Claver’s (Primary) School, Kafanchan, Metropolitan College, Onitsha, and Bishop Shanahan College, Orlu, during which time he had already begun to demonstrate an avid interest in drawing and painting. Before being admitted to the Fine Arts program at Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology in 1958, Okeke—together with Yusuf Grillo, Bruce Onobrakpeya, Demas Nwoko, and others—inaugurated the Zaria Art Society. In that same year, he opened a cultural center in Kafanchan which later became the Asele Institute, Nimo, which hosted many cultural activities.
In the early 1970s, Okeke was appointed lecturer and acting head of the Fine Arts Department at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where he introduced many new courses into the Igbo Uli art tradition. In 1973, he also designed the first course programme of the Department of Fine and Applied Arts, Institute of Management and Technology, Enugu, and initiated postgraduate courses in the Department of Fine Arts, University of Nigeria, Nsukka.
The Négritude Movement
Négritude is an artistic, literary, and ideological philosophy developed by francophone African intellectuals, writers, and politicians in France during the 1930s. Its initiators included Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor (a future President of Senegal), and Léon Damas of French Guiana. Négritude intellectuals disapproved of French colonialism and claimed that the best strategy to oppose it was to encourage a common racial identity for black Africans worldwide. They included the Marxist ideas they favored as part of this philosophy. The writers generally used a realist literary style, and some say were also influenced somewhat by the Surrealism style; in 1932, their manifesto "Murderous Humanitarianism" was signed by prominent Surrealists including the Martiniquans Pierre Yoyotte and J. M. Monnerot.
The term négritude was meant to be provocative, as it took its roots from a word that was used exclusively in a racist context within France. Negritude sought to re-claim and appropriate the word. The term was first used in its present sense by Césaire, in the third issue of L'Étudiant noir, a magazine which he had started in Paris with fellow students Léopold Senghor and Léon Damas, as well as Gilbert Gratiant, Leonard Sainville, Louis T. Achille, Aristide Maugée, and Paulette Nardal. L'Étudiant noir also includes Césaire's first published work, Conscience Raciale et Révolution Sociale with the heading "Les Idées" and the rubric "Négreries", which is notable for its disavowal of assimilation as a valid strategy for resistance and for its use of the word nègre as a positive term. The problem with assimilation, Césaire argued, was that one assimilated into a culture that considered African culture to be barbaric and unworthy of being seen as "civilized". The assimilation into this culture would have been seen as an implicit acceptance of this view. Nègre previously had been used mainly in a pejorative sense, but Césaire deliberately incorporated this derogatory word into the name of his philosophy.
Aime Cesaire, 2003
An image of Aimé Césaire in 2003 on a desk reading the cover of a book.