Thank you so much, Professor Barton, for that amazing introduction.
Let me start by welcoming all of you, ladies and gentlemen, members of the All Souls College, the university community and guests from near and far.
It is impossible to overstate my gratitude for the invitation to deliver this year's Slate lectures.
I am honoured by this acknowledgement by my peers of my contribution to the field of art history.
But it is not lost on me that my presence here today marks a major milestone for scholars of
African descent who until now had been absent from the hallowed roster of lectures at Oxford.
For these two reasons, I will dedicate each of my six lectures.
Two by two individuals and community of people.
Who have contributed in various ways to my journey as a scholar and art historian.
That is, people who I could not have travelled this long, improbable journey from the University of Nigeria,
Nsukka, where I took my first art and art history classes in the 1980s.
To this podium here. At Oxford.
I therefore dedicate my introductory lecture to my dear friend.
And departed brother open vessel with whom I started while a practising artist.
My earliest forays into art historical scholarship in the early 1990s.
I offer this lecture to the many years we spend together on diverse, scholarly and curatorial projects.
The long nights we shared arguing over ideas big and small.
And our long and unlikely journey as child survivors of the Biafran War to the world of art and art scholarship.
I also dedicate this talk to the late Sidney Littlefield Carswell, my advisor at Emory University,
who not only helped me transition to art history, but also was my ardent academic, cheerleader, mentor and friend.
I'm grateful to both Mr. Edwards and Professor Kasper for the profundity of their
contributions to the making of the field of modern and contemporary African arts scholarship.
And for the friendship we shared. And with that, I turn to my topic for today.
So let me sketch the problem I hope to examine in these lectures.
In the course of which I will focus on the work of five African artists during the second half of the 20th century,
a period marked by political decolonisation and the emergence of charismatic, powerful leaders that I'm calling the big man.
By examining the relationship of art and strongman politics,
I will engage in extended meditation on the politics of power and art in postcolonial Africa and hopefully laid bare art's critical ambitions.
As well as its limits and possibilities as a vehicle for critique of and resistance to regimes of domination in 20th century Africa.
I must confess, though, that I have no idea whether the audience finds the title of this lecture clear.
As I hope. Or as opaque as I suspect.
But I assume that most of us here have at least some reasonable idea about who I mean by African artists.
If not. I offer you the same response Chinua Achebe gave decades ago to the question of who is the African writer?
And as he put it, I quote, It is partly a matter of passports.
Of individual volition.
And particularly of seeing from the African perspective and of seeing Africa as a geographical expression and a metaphysical landscape, unquote.
What that's a bit tells us simply is that who is an African artist is a complicated thing.
That depends on many variables. And I will leave it at that.
So I will be doing three things today. First, to examine at some length the big man as a trope and figure of power in post-colonial Africa.
Second. To consider how the topic of these lectures relate to our understanding of modern and contemporary African art history.
And third, to briefly comment on my five case studies.
Well, there's no fixed definition of the big man as a trope, though.
Various synonyms such as strongman, autocrat, big shot, warlord, dictator.
They occur in both popular and scholarly literature.
And although it is a well-travelled and familiar way to describe an astonishingly broad spectrum of men who wield all manners and scales of power,
it is the American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, that in 1963 described this term as we know it today.
In his research on Polynesia and Melanesia,
Sahlins observed that whereas the Polynesian groups with established political structures had chiefs at the helm of their clan formations.
In Milan, SC On the other hand, marked by loose kingship residential groups, the leader figure is the big man.
He tells us that the Polynesian chief is the more universally familiar character whose claim to power is guaranteed and
justified by well-established system of succession and an assertion of authority based on individual qualification or lineage.
As with the Brits. The chief, though, has.
Embodies normative socio political order and is the guarantor or defender of the community's ideals,
its internal cohesion and its relationship with the world beyond its borders.
On the other hand, the Melanesian big man occupies the position of leadership within his community, not so much through the authority of tradition,
as by direct assertion of his personal ambition and the ability to eliminate other
claimants while dominating the rest of society through self-serving coercive power.
And to do this, the big man must show and perform this part, not just by sheer charisma, but also by the appropriate deportment of his body.
To make obvious its function as vessel and locus of power.
As is often the case, he must not only exercise power by concentrating and controlling its modes of expression.
It helps. It is a large, physically powerful and domineering man.
For it is in this way that this brand of personal authority is seamlessly and vigorously expressed and perceived.
Certainly silence was describing a figure of power and authority that is a product of Melanesians, socio political power and structure.
That is because they were organised in small autonomous communities.
They did not develop elaborate long standing traditions of state control.
Such society implied was does amenable to unregulated succession processes and the rise to authority of whoever can claim an asset coercive power.
That is, whoever can become the big man. One way to describe the Melanesian big man to someone familiar with early 20th century English literature.
And more specifically, George Orwell's Animal Farm is that he might have been that noxious, cunning, ambitious, brutal, power hungry character.
The mighty Napoleon. However, there is no reason to think that the big man figure is an invention of Melanesia.
And I must confess that I am not the first to identify this character in African societies and in the modern nations,
mostly created by European powers in the 20th century.
Africa. In fact, I have relied on the work of the Malawian literary scholar Deborah Angulo and the
Cameroonian historian Wassily Mbembe in my thinking about the big man in Africa.
In her study of the Big Man in the African novel, Angulo argues that they are often corrupt, violent, rich and without regard to the rule of law,
and that they feature in both major and subordinate narrative positions,
with the body becoming the privileged site of representing and performance of their power.
We have in. Idi Amin of Uganda, who frequently boasted of his boxing prowess in your area,
Museveni, also of Uganda, who at 78 might be the king, the country's push up king.
And in the South African president, Jacob Zuma.
His mastery of Zulu manly dance as fine examples of the performative aspect of the African sovereign dig manhood.
Indeed, the very idea of identifying the big man with a particular type of influential figure,
with the context of within the context of the colonial and post-colonial Africa,
helps us to understand the workings of power and authority in both democratic and autocratic political systems in modern Africa.
For in this Africa, the distinction Sahlins makes between the chief and the big man collapses in the sense that the chief.
Performs his authority by drawing on the characteristics of the big man.
And vice versa.
The histories of African kingdoms and empires before the coming of the European colonisers are replete with chiefs and kings who demonstrated
their claim to authority by physically or symbolically asserting their authority through suppression of all perceived or real opposition.
By showing themselves as the finest specimens of manhood.
And by presenting representing their bodies as sites of mystical powers and as the body politic.
In recognition of this fact, but also especially because it was administratively convenient.
European powers frequently relied on the coercive and despotic powers of chiefs,
kings and emirs to facilitate the establishment and maintenance of the colonial state.
Even in fiercely Republican societies such as the Igbo of southeastern Nigeria, that for the most part did not have chiefs or big men.
The British invented what they called warrant chiefs by giving authority to usually
the nastiest and most dreaded men they could find in each autonomous community.
In fact, it is the colonial reliance on these new fangled cheese that led to the about women's war of 1929.
And that forced the colonial office in London to abolish the warrant system.
But the point here is that the colonial regime in both the Igbo and other examples created the big man chief.
Who relied on the colonisers power to assert his authority, yet had all the self-serving characteristics of the big man.
The point here, though, is that the widespread tendency of these modern big men to appropriate and deploy signifiers of
African cultural traditions and the open or tacit investment of official authority on local agents.
Of colonial and neo colonial governments ensured the normalisation of this figure in the modern African state.
In one of the more memorable descriptions of the big man African president, the American writer Norman Mailer.
While visiting the Democratic Republic of Congo, then Republic of Zaire,
to cover the 1974 Rumble in the Jungle boxing match between Muhammad Ali and George Foreman says this of Mobutu Sese Seko, the country's ruler.
And here is the stadium with the big post of Mobutu Sese Seko dominating the stadium where the match was taking place.
So here's what he says, that Mobutu is the chieftain of the country and a king.
It's part of the vital force to be resplendent.
They will respect him less if the expense if his expenses were not larger than life.
He's the leader of the nation.
So a modern equivalent of the president, dictator, monarch, emperor, the children of God and love was solely all in one.
How remarkable it is to compare Mailer's description of Mobutu Sese Seko with
silences characterisation of the Melanesian big man who he says seems so bourgeois,
so reminiscent of the free, enterprising, rugged individual of our own heritage, mean American heritage.
He combines with an ostensible interest in the general welfare, a more profound measure of self-interest, cunning and economic calculation.
His every public action is designed to make a competitive and invidious comparison with others,
to show a standing above the product of his own personal manufacture.
I shall return to Mobutu Sese Seko in my last lecture.
But for the moment, I should note that Maela captures a fundamental aspect of the African big man,
which is that he relies on and harness every available source of authority, whether secular or religious.
Traditional or modern to personalise governmentality.
So Idi Amin. Of Uganda, a man of great hulk who prided himself as a boxer in his quest for full control of the economy,
expelled tens of thousands of Asian Ugandans in 1972.
But only after God spoke to him in a dream. And he made European agents and diplomats treat him as they would their own.
King can see the image on the upper right.
I should note that while the big man may flourish in and perpetuate poorly regulated political systems,
he can as easily thrive in democracies as in apartheid South Africa, in spite of established checks and balances.
By inventing new and infinite ways of stretching and bending them to his will,
often invoking alternative yet familiar bases of power and legitimation.
What we have then in many instances is the self serving re signification,
transmogrified creation and redeployment of chiefly and tradition sanctioned authority by big men at the helm of the postcolonial nation.
To this class. National politics does is a tool for consolidating and channelling state resources in the service of their personal glorification.
To them, the formal mechanisms of governance, whether democratic or autocratic,
are only effective or meaningful to the extent that they support the transformation of the nation into a zone of an unchallenged,
if inherently unstable, authority. But how is it possible in the context of the modern post-colonial state that
the big men are the apex of national power transaction are able to thrive?
Or at the very least, survive, sometimes for decades.
Many achieving great longevity in office despite their dismal records.
I would need more time than this lecture allows to scratch the surface of this important question.
However, a chilling member has advanced the thesis on what he calls the banality of power in the post colony.
That might be insightful in trying to understand postcolonial power relations.
He argues, against easy binaries, such as subjection versus autonomy, domination versus resistance.
Proposing instead that an intimate tyranny links the ruler and the ruled.
Just as obscenity is the very condition of state power and he uses the term common more.
That is the much despised figure of colonial authority to represent the post-colonial authoritarian,
noting that this character seeks to institutionalise himself in order to achieve legitimation and hedge money in the form of a fetish.
Combined with the description of the African Postal Colony as characterised by a
distinctive art of improvisation and by a tendency to excess and disproportion.
What we have then is a sociopolitical setting in which both the authoritarian ruler and the citizenry are engaged in a convivial relationship,
which we have not, which in which we do not have one regulated public space, but multiple domains of discordance.
In such a space, even the most excessive, obscene exercise of power by the authoritarian figure is deflected,
repurposed and signified in part because even the bureaucratised state machinery still lacks the capacity
to fully control subjects that simultaneously simulate adherence to and support of the autocrat,
while relying on modes of popular speech and critical practices found in the culture to make and ridicule the autocrats power play.
And part of what I'll be doing in the subsequent lectures is to show how visual artists
are involved in these complicated responds to postcolonial authority by adopting modes,
various modes of what we might call visual speech.
In case, as I suspect you're wondering, the point of this detour to remember, let me make two relevant points.
First, he allows us to see authoritarian leaders of post-colonial Africa in their tendency to build official dams,
edifices, yet compromise them at will for the sole purpose of vulgar self-identification as product of societies that,
fresh from the traumatic system as desertion of official violence in the colonial era,
see the relationship of the populace and authority as antagonistic player and intimate tyranny.
Second, the people's apparent willingness to tolerate and support autocratic regimes is also because they have developed
informal mechanisms for living with a system rooted in a colonial ontology that normalised official tyranny.
But how do we explain the relative, the prevalence and the unique longevity of African strongmen and big men of power?
Considering that a fifth of them have been in power for more than 20 years.
To this, I suggest that a key factor is, as noted earlier,
the autocrats pensions for co-opting traditional chieftaincy institutions and authority with which the populace have cultural and emotional affinity.
Those guarantee that some guarantee some measure of support from segments of the population to whom these traditional institutions remain important.
Thus for all the claims to political modernity.
A good number of Africa's autocrats and charismatic leaders from the Jomo Kenyatta to Ghana's
Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah from Zaire's Mobutu Sese Seko to even Muammar Gaddafi of Libya.
They all presented themselves to the populations through their fashion,
behaviour and rhetoric as chiefly figures whose power is sanctioned by indigenous traditions,
though no doubt enforced by state security and bureaucracy.
I must admit, however, that the range of political figures and contexts covered in this lecture.
And the lecture series, including Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt.
Hendrik Four Foods of South Africa. Our Memory of Sudan,
Ibrahim Babangida of Nigeria and Mobutu Sese Seko of Zaire are significant enough that I need to clarify what qualifies them for the Big Man Club.
I had earlier invoked other times such as strongmen, autocrats and dictator.
And I have referred to members common more to describe the brand of post-colonial African leadership with which I am concerned in these lectures.
Yet none of these terms are capacious enough to account for the variety of political contexts,
individual characters and public perceptions of these leaders.
Nor do they substantially ground them within the African socio cultural experience.
As we shall see, Mary did not have Nasser's charisma, yet survived multiple coups.
The top. Their food. South Africa was a democratic, racist state.
Babangida helmed a classic military dictatorship,
while Nasser and Mobutu seized power as military officers but soon established one party autocracies.
And. Whereas, Nasser spent much of his political capital on Pan Arabist ideology and the Non-Aligned Movement.
Mobutu invested his in an empire of stupendous corruption.
Moreover, the decadal personalisation of state power characteristic of Bend Command more might have applied to Mobutu,
but not quite to Nasser and Foot.
My point is that none of these usual terms are conceptually open and contextually specific enough to
capture the diversity of characters such as the five that I will be discussing in these lectures,
in the way that the idea of the big man does.
Moreover, the big man as a trope is a way of gendering.
The particular form of power in post-colonial Africa, wielded exclusively by men who inherited national governance from colonial regimes.
Yet the brand of power associated with them at once self-serving,
personalised and frequently connected to perhaps even exploitative of aspects of indigenous and cultural traditions,
is such that it is not exclusive to any specific religious, ethnic or socio economic class.
In other words, the big man phenomenon is not an aberration.
Nor is it alien to the imaginations and desires and interests of regular folks who,
in moments of aspirational projection, wish to access power while doing so.
Expect sympathy and support from a section of the imagined community.
Indeed, what we are calling regular folk include a vast range of actors that I want to call the everyday
small that are big men who claim power and manipulated within their own zones of influence.
Be it the university, the government office, the town union or municipality, it is the ubiquity of these small,
big men in the post colony that not only neutralises the spectacular capital that our big men
who might more easily be recognised as dictators and strong men at the helm of the nation state.
To this point. The member has also argued that ordinary citizens, such that ordinary citizens are subject of the dictator,
internalise the authoritarian epistemology to the point where they reproduce it themselves.
In all the main circumstances of everyday life.
But let me note that he is only partially right.
For in the post colony, I want to suggest the citizenry cannot be construed as simply subjects of the sovereign,
who himself could neither establish an efficient administrative state nor even a full command of the of whatever stands for for national bureaucracy.
And rather than think of the citizenry as learning the authoritarian epistemology of the big man.
I would argue that, as in the case of the Melanesian big man,
it is the lack of established systems of power management and succession that serves as the substrate for the growth of big men,
whose qualification for the top position is the ability to assert themselves and
cause others to stand down for the manifestation of their personal ambition.
It is therefore the very nature of the post-colonial state in Africa structurally weak, yet resourced,
with technologies of violence that feeds the authoritarian epistemology shared by the sovereign at
the helm of the state bureaucracy and the non sovereign big men such as the diverse characters.
Nangle, who identifies in the novels of Achebe.
I am a Chima man, and because they are both men, Sam, Ben and Emmanuel don't gala.
In my fifth lecture. The Workable Bureau in Nigeria will offer us a view of the impact on the masses of the socio.
Cultural power of the everyday. And the sovereign.
Big man. Earlier, I had inferred that the African big man is in part the product of colonial governmentality, no less,
because imperial regimes cared more about efficiency and taxation as well as pacification of the colonised.
And those favoured the African version of the disruptive, self-centred political figure sahlins identified in the decentralised polities of Melanesia.
However, the sovereign big men of post-colonial Africa, with the nation's resources at their disposal,
amped up their power by feeding on the Cold War rivalries of the natal and Soviet alliances.
These post-imperial post-war powers, put Cold War powers, in many cases abetted the ambitions of all of the anti-democratic,
corrupt and despotic leaders in Africa, which in turn caused the proliferation of such characters.
And the epidemic occurred the time in the 1960s and seventies,
as well as the widespread political instability of stagnation of democratic processes during the decades covered in these lectures.
Consider, for instance, that Jean-bédel Bokassa of Central African Republic coronation as Emperor of Central African Empire,
which costs 25% of the country's annual budget.
Was paid for by friends. And as a favoured friend of the West.
Mobutu Sese Seko built his village palace, the so-called visi of the jungle.
With its own private runway for his Boeing 7474 use for quick shopping trips to Europe.
While the West looked away in South Africa, Hendrick refused, brandishing his anti-communist credentials,
promulgated his hard core racist apartheid ideology protected by Western powers.
And in Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser.
Won over his Soviet friends to fund his Aswan High Dam mega-project.
To the utter displeasure of their Western rivals still upset about losing control of the Suez Canal.
As such, the sovereign African big men that I will be discussing in these lectures were not only the products of their societies,
they were pawns and agents of the natal and Soviet power blocks.
And that is why.
The end of the Cold War also marked the beginning of the gradual disappearance of the most spectacular spaces of the continent's sovereign diekman.
Let me note briefly how I see my line of inquiry in these lectures.
Relate to the landscape of modern and contemporary African art history.
There is a measure of scholarly consensus on the role of art and artists in
the production of national cultures during the African Independence decade.
Quite apart from the fact that the generation of artists joined by their peers in the professions,
public administration, educational industry and others sought to establish institutions for the new nation.
They also participated in the articulation and production of new national cultures, art discourses and related institutions.
But one major area of inquiry that preoccupied leading artists, writers and critics on the continent was language.
That is the place of indigenous and colonial languages, art and design in the making of postcolonial literatures and arts.
For visual artists, a major thrust of their work was in the recovery and redeployment of indigenous art forms,
techniques and aesthetics, often in combination with elements of European modernism.
To define what I called postcolonial modernism in my 2015 study in Nigeria during this period.
Ibrahim El Salahi, who in the who is the subject of my fourth lecture, was a major figure of this period.
However, in a recent work, I argued that what distinguished contemporary African art from post-colonial modernism is
its rejection of the latter's cultural nationalism and in terms of its political posture,
the adoption of critical and even oppositional view on postcolonial governmentality.
This schema is largely still defensible. But there are two important caveats.
First, by foregrounding the role of post-colonial modernists in the establishment of post-independence national cultures,
I do not suggest that they all invariably drank the liberation Kool-Aid,
thoroughly lost in the euphoria of sovereignty and formal invention, so much so that they fail to see the early signs of coming sociopolitical crisis.
Indeed, what I hope to show in these lectures is that in some cases the same artists like Gadsby's,
Siri in Egypt and Ibrahim el Salahi in the Sudan who participated in the making of post-colonial modernism,
became critical of the national project as their nation slid into periods and cycles of autocracy.
That is, one might say they moved from the modernists cultural nationalism to contemporary artists,
scepticism and critique of the national projects in the course of their careers.
Those alerted us to the that to the fact that the two categories are neither that chronically
fixed nor are they exclusive to one or that generation of post-colonial African artists.
The second caveat. With my earliest concerns the multiple trajectories and pace of African decolonisation and art histories.
While the years between 1956 and 66 have been aptly described as the independence decade.
Several other countries decolonised before and after this.
Those complicating the location of post-colonial modernism.
Only in that momentous ten year period.
Not only that,
debates about national culture by leading writers and artists that marked the high noon of post-colonial modernism did not register as prominently,
if at all. In many parts of the continent.
For instance, political conditions in the 1950s and 1950s.
South Africa limited debates about national cultures to a network of privileged white artists such as Walter Battis and Eduardo Vila.
While the absence of a sizeable black educated class and autonomous art industry there in South Africa and in the Congo.
At Independence ensured that black artists from these countries were largely absent
in the continental and Pan-African critical and cultural networks of that period.
Thus the clarity of our view of modernism, for instance, in Nigeria, Kenya, Senegal, Sudan,
Ethiopia, Egypt, Morocco and elsewhere at midcentury fails in other parts of the continent.
Given this reality of African decolonisation, timelines, the different contexts of art practices and discourses,
the study of the relationship of art and power of the artist and the big man offers a different and,
I hope, productive perspective on the history of modern and contemporary African art that indeed has continental salience.
We already know from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, from Argentina to Brazil during the military dictatorships,
that autocratic regimes have either embraced art and artists for the work of propaganda or suppressed them when they raised,
resisted co-optation or were made by artists from victim groups.
What is not as clear in the historical record is how African post-colonial governments,
especially in the era of the big men, estimated or responded to art possibilities as a threat to such regimes.
For sure in South Africa, where Hendricks, a food a Nazi sympathiser, had articulated his idea of what constituted good national art.
We are not surprised that his regime hounded white artists whose work seemed incompatible to his ideology.
Given all the above, we might, how might we explain why in Nigeria,
during the military dictatorships, for instance, anti-establishment art had its finest moment.
Without evidence, oppression by the regime.
It was so bad at the time that this work was shown about 100 metres from what used to be called Jordan Barracks,
where the military head of state lived.
And journalists were too worried and afraid to look at this work or even come close to the space where it was installed for fear of being arrested.
But nothing happened to the artists and the work itself.
So how do we explain this phenomenon?
And we have similar scenarios in Egypt, the Sudan and the Congo.
So the question is then did these regimes mis recognise art's symbolic and critical power and thus oblivious of the threats posed by artists?
How was it that the same apartheid regime that prosecuted white artists paid little attention
to the powerful works of M.F.A. that I was sure rejected Purefoods Foods idea of good art.
And Mobutu Sese Seko.
Not see in the outrageous ultra modernity of bodies is a king, a lazy sculptures, a mockery of his nationally imposed authenticity program.
There's one question that haunts these lectures and for which I might.
Alas, not have a convincing and final answer.
Is this why we had fine artists who did not meddle in other sorts of direct action or ideological work?
Largely absent from the long lists of political victims of African big men.
Given their record of violence against perceived opponents that frequently included musicians, writers, dramatists and photojournalists.
Is it simply a matter of fine art dependent on an intimate connection to the ruling class by an umbilical cord of gold,
as the American critic Clement Greenberg once put it.
Or let's put it this way did fine art, often presented in government spaces and foreign cultural centres,
or in private galleries run by the social elite and therefore not accessible to the masses,
seemed less threatening to the big man regimes and interests, regardless of the ferocity of its critical its critique of power.
In the next few weeks.
Therefore, I explore the work of artists across the decades of African independence, during which sovereign post-colonial governmentality,
whether nominally democratic or evidently despotic, was held in thrall by sovereign big men.
And I do this to show the different formal and conceptual tactics devised by these artists to
reckon with or meditate and reflect on the sociopolitical transformations of their societies as
they experience the euphoria of decolonisation and strained under the weight of oppressive and
corrupt governments that evolved around the continent in the second half of the 20th century.
We shall examine different varieties of big men from Egypt, South Africa, Sudan,
Nigeria and the Congo, who typified post-colonial governmentality in Africa in the from the 1950s,
when decolonisation of the continent began in earnest to the end of the 20th century,
and in the context of their tough political practices and the crisis prone social walls that engendered.
I will examine exemplary work of Gatsby's theory.
Do M.F.A. Ibrahim El Salahi.
Oprah did you and Issac bodies King Charles and frequently those of their contemporaries in order to construct
hopefully if fresh but by no means comprehensive account of art and politics in 20th century Africa.
Thank you.