Postcolonial modernism : art and decolonization in twentieth-century Nigeria

In Postcolonial Modernism, Chika Okeke-Agulu discusses how ideologies of pan-Africanism, decolonization, and nationalism influenced the emergence of postcolonial Nigerian artistic modernism. Okeke-Agulu focuses on the Art Society, a group of young artists who studied at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology in Zaria in the late 1950s. Okeke-Agulu demonstrates how the artistic works of the Art Society “show both a deep connection with local artistic traditions and the stylistic sophistication” (2) of twentieth-century modernist art, revealing how artists translated Nigeria’s political independence from Britain into artistic modernism.
Okeke-Agulu analyzes not only the aesthetics of contemporary Nigerian visual art, but also the intellectual and institutional history of colonial art schools, particularly the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology (NCAST), Zaria. The founding of the Arts Society by former students of NCAST, and particularly the works of Uche Okeke (b.1933), represented postcolonial Nigerian artistic modernism, which in many ways was an improvement over earlier versions of colonial modernism. Okeke-Agulu argues that Uche Okeke’s theory of “natural synthesis,” the selective use of artistic resources and forms from Nigerian/African and European traditions, inaugurated postcolonial modernism in Nigeria. Colonial and post-colonial modernism resisted both “uncritical nativism” and undue Western artistic influence. Okeke-Agulu coins the term “compound consciousness” to explain the tensions and oppositional ideological influences on Nigerian artistic modernism. To better illustrate this point he explains that “postcolonial Nigerian art constantly reconstituted itself by selective incorporation of diverse, oppositional, or complimentary elements”. Apart from art, compound consciousness in itself is illustrative of the ways in which the “Westernized” colonial elites such as Herbert Macaulay were “thoroughly immersed in Victorian Lagos culture” and yet deeply anticolonial. The concept also explains why artists like Uche Okeke and Bruce Onobrakpeya, as practicing Catholics and ethnic Igbo and Urhobo, saw no contradictions in depicting themes from the Bible and their respective indigenous religions and folklore. Though Nigerian artistic modernists such as Aina Onabulu, Uche Okeke, and others rejected European imperialism, they appropriated that continent’s knowledge base and aesthetics in their struggle for decolonization.
Okeke-Agulu maps the artistic, nationalist, and intellectual influence of the Art Society in the Nigerian cities of Zaria, Ibadan, Lagos, and Enugu, skillfully weaving together the relationships among African and black diasporic literature, drama, and arts. In chapters 3, 4, 5, and 6, Okeke-Agulu recounts the intellectual history of Nigerian art institutions and the history of Nigerian literature and drama. He also discusses the making of Nigerian artistic modernism, including the paradox that this largely nationalist and pan-Africanist movement also expressed a cultural nationalism that was unified in response to military interventions, ethnic nationalism, and the Biafran secession and civil war. For example, Uche Okeke’s depiction of Nwanyi Mgbolod’ala, a legendary Igbo Amazon, as the leader of the anticolonial Aba Women’s riot in 1929 emphasizes Igbo ethnic nationalism.