A challenge for Africa: an open letter to African thinkers, theorists and art historians
by Rasheed Araeen
Whenever and wherever one encounters the debate about Africa and its cultural achievements, there is always the same repetitive voice: "The West has done this and that...". The West has ignored and continues to ignore Africa's real and great contribution to human civilisation. When the West does pay attention to this contribution, it misunderstands, misrepresents or tends to marginalise it by locating it in a moribund past.
These complaints are of course justified, given the continuing power of colonial legacies. But why is the West expected to do anything that is counter to its own interest, its continuing ambitions and needs to perpetuate its dominance? Why should the West do what should and must be done by African themselves? Are Africans then not wasting their creative resources in what has now become a facile discourse of complaints and rhetoric against the West?
My concern here is specific to Africa's contribution to modernism in the visual arts. It is often declared that this contribution has been ignored and excluded from the history of modern art. True. But what is Africa's contribution to modernism besides what is recognised as the part it played in Cubism, Surrealism, and so on?
The work of many artists, from Aina Onabolu of Nigeria to the globally successful artists of today, is cited as an example of Africa's modern achievement. But is the mere citation of this achievement, without showing what this achievement means to the main body of ideas within modernism, enough to claim Africa's place in the history of modernism?
Modern art history is constructed and legitimised on the basis of formal innovations, amongst other things, that produce successive movements from one period to another, giving rise to constant production of new ideas that are fundamental to the dynamic of the system. For Africa to establish its place in modernism's history, it must show that it has entered the mainstream and has provided a push to its central movement. It is Africa's misfortune that while Africa has indeed achieved this, its art historians are either unaware of or unable to grasp its historical significance.
Let us, for example, look at the work of Ernest Mancoba. His work is well known, but no one has bothered to look at it with an attention it deserves. No one has offered a critical analysis or reading of his work that would recognise significantly its historical importance. It would be naive to expect that this job should have been done by the West's own critics or historians. This would have disturbed not only their perception of the other but also demolished the very philosophical framework of Eurocentric modern art history on which their own position is founded. The understanding of Mancoba's work is therefore central to the issue I raise here.
When we look at a painting Mancoba completed in 1940, entitled Composition, what do we find there? Is it just a mixing of African iconography and a modernist technique? Or, is there something more. A gaze that cannot penetrate beyond the sensual level of the work and reach its structural or formal level will fail to understand its true significance.
Look at the painting's structure, the way the things are arranged and put together within a rectangular space, and the rough brush strokes with which things are treated. Don't they indicate something unusual, an extraordinary way of painting in 1940? What emerges from all this is not just an encounter with modernism, but a form whose significance lies not just in its African-ness but, more importantly, in its temporality and historicity. When this form, with is symmetrical structure and expressionistic brush strokes, is fully analysed and is firmly placed in the temporality that produced this form, we begin to understand its real historical significance.
If Mancoba's Composition is a modernist work, where should it be placed? Shouldn't it be placed within the context of what inspired Mancoba to leave South Africa and took him to Europe, and what then inspired him to do this painting in Paris? Would he had done this painting while in South Africa?
For that matter, would Picasso had produced Demoiselles d'Avignon while still in Spain? The answer to both is no, because neither South Africa nor Spain respectively would have provided them with the necessary context for an experiential encounter with a kind of knowledge that would have triggered their imaginations to produce the kind of work they did. If we recognise Picasso's significance in his location between what was there in modernism before and what followed him as a result of his articulation of this location, then there is no reason why we should not approach Mancoba's work in the same way.
If Mancoba did not follow an already established movement, genre or style, nor was he influenced by the work of a particular artist, then we have no choice but to declare the originality of his work. And if, then, we look into what happened some years after his work, and we see things emerging whose signs were already there in Mancoba's work, then we will have to accept that Mancoba's was a precursor or forerunner of what emerged a few years later: abstract expressionism - even though he did not influence the movement. What I am suggesting is that Mancoba's work may represent an historical breakthrough within the mainstream modernism.
This short meditation on Mancoba's work cannot of course establish his historical position. The purpose of this letter is to urge Africans to pay serious attention to Mancoba's work, because his work indicates something more than what we have so far understood. It demands not only much more rigorous critical discourse and theoretical underpinning but also represents a challenge to the established art historical canons.
This task will have to be performed by Africans themselves, because it would be unreasonable to expect the West to pursue something that would demolish the very foundation on which its supremacy is based. Mancoba's work was of course also overshadowed by apartheid in South Africa, which prevented it from getting the attention it deserved: it would have demolished all that underpinned and justified apartheid.
Although it should now be the priority of art historians in South Africa to look into this matter, and claim what to me is an extraordinary achievement of a 'colonised' subject, it should concern all those - African or not - who seek truth.
Mancoba's achievement flies in the face of all the binaries that are constructed by colonialism - White/ Black, Coloniser/ Colonised, Self/ Other, Modern/ Primitive, etc, etc - and whose legacies continue to undermine the freedom of the postcolonial liberated subject, by denying him/ her a place in the genealogy of mainstream modernism. Mancoba has not only challenged but demolished these binaries. Without continuing this challenge now, Africa cannot claim what is, in my view, not only its unique achievement but also surpasses anything realised by other colonised worlds.
Rasheed Araeen is the founding editor of 'Third Text'
Email: thirdtext@kalapress.freeserve.co.uk
