1 00:00:00,510 --> 00:00:06,930 Thank you so much, Professor Barton, for that amazing introduction. 2 00:00:08,370 --> 00:00:26,370 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. 3 00:00:28,940 --> 00:00:38,390 It is impossible to overstate my gratitude for the invitation to deliver this year's Slate lectures. 4 00:00:39,790 --> 00:00:47,620 I am honoured by this acknowledgement by my peers of my contribution to the field of art history. 5 00:00:48,870 --> 00:00:57,120 But it is not lost on me that my presence here today marks a major milestone for scholars of 6 00:00:57,120 --> 00:01:08,760 African descent who until now had been absent from the hallowed roster of lectures at Oxford. 7 00:01:10,750 --> 00:01:15,880 For these two reasons, I will dedicate each of my six lectures. 8 00:01:16,910 --> 00:01:21,440 Two by two individuals and community of people. 9 00:01:22,330 --> 00:01:29,860 Who have contributed in various ways to my journey as a scholar and art historian. 10 00:01:30,610 --> 00:01:41,589 That is, people who I could not have travelled this long, improbable journey from the University of Nigeria, 11 00:01:41,590 --> 00:01:47,530 Nsukka, where I took my first art and art history classes in the 1980s. 12 00:01:48,760 --> 00:01:52,210 To this podium here. At Oxford. 13 00:01:57,280 --> 00:02:03,520 I therefore dedicate my introductory lecture to my dear friend. 14 00:02:04,880 --> 00:02:13,640 And departed brother open vessel with whom I started while a practising artist. 15 00:02:13,730 --> 00:02:19,520 My earliest forays into art historical scholarship in the early 1990s. 16 00:02:21,320 --> 00:02:28,520 I offer this lecture to the many years we spend together on diverse, scholarly and curatorial projects. 17 00:02:29,150 --> 00:02:34,580 The long nights we shared arguing over ideas big and small. 18 00:02:35,620 --> 00:02:46,900 And our long and unlikely journey as child survivors of the Biafran War to the world of art and art scholarship. 19 00:02:49,140 --> 00:02:57,300 I also dedicate this talk to the late Sidney Littlefield Carswell, my advisor at Emory University, 20 00:02:58,080 --> 00:03:09,150 who not only helped me transition to art history, but also was my ardent academic, cheerleader, mentor and friend. 21 00:03:10,840 --> 00:03:17,499 I'm grateful to both Mr. Edwards and Professor Kasper for the profundity of their 22 00:03:17,500 --> 00:03:23,950 contributions to the making of the field of modern and contemporary African arts scholarship. 23 00:03:25,510 --> 00:03:34,020 And for the friendship we shared. And with that, I turn to my topic for today. 24 00:03:37,790 --> 00:03:42,710 So let me sketch the problem I hope to examine in these lectures. 25 00:03:44,820 --> 00:03:52,470 In the course of which I will focus on the work of five African artists during the second half of the 20th century, 26 00:03:53,310 --> 00:04:03,920 a period marked by political decolonisation and the emergence of charismatic, powerful leaders that I'm calling the big man. 27 00:04:05,810 --> 00:04:10,310 By examining the relationship of art and strongman politics, 28 00:04:10,310 --> 00:04:22,760 I will engage in extended meditation on the politics of power and art in postcolonial Africa and hopefully laid bare art's critical ambitions. 29 00:04:23,820 --> 00:04:35,340 As well as its limits and possibilities as a vehicle for critique of and resistance to regimes of domination in 20th century Africa. 30 00:04:38,170 --> 00:04:47,440 I must confess, though, that I have no idea whether the audience finds the title of this lecture clear. 31 00:04:48,730 --> 00:04:53,650 As I hope. Or as opaque as I suspect. 32 00:04:55,290 --> 00:05:05,220 But I assume that most of us here have at least some reasonable idea about who I mean by African artists. 33 00:05:06,760 --> 00:05:17,960 If not. I offer you the same response Chinua Achebe gave decades ago to the question of who is the African writer? 34 00:05:18,440 --> 00:05:23,950 And as he put it, I quote, It is partly a matter of passports. 35 00:05:24,970 --> 00:05:26,410 Of individual volition. 36 00:05:27,460 --> 00:05:38,740 And particularly of seeing from the African perspective and of seeing Africa as a geographical expression and a metaphysical landscape, unquote. 37 00:05:40,390 --> 00:05:48,700 What that's a bit tells us simply is that who is an African artist is a complicated thing. 38 00:05:49,750 --> 00:05:54,280 That depends on many variables. And I will leave it at that. 39 00:05:56,560 --> 00:06:10,300 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. 40 00:06:11,530 --> 00:06:21,750 Second. To consider how the topic of these lectures relate to our understanding of modern and contemporary African art history. 41 00:06:22,780 --> 00:06:28,930 And third, to briefly comment on my five case studies. 42 00:06:33,960 --> 00:06:40,200 Well, there's no fixed definition of the big man as a trope, though. 43 00:06:40,200 --> 00:06:48,690 Various synonyms such as strongman, autocrat, big shot, warlord, dictator. 44 00:06:49,680 --> 00:06:53,640 They occur in both popular and scholarly literature. 45 00:06:54,420 --> 00:07:05,460 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, 46 00:07:06,660 --> 00:07:16,110 it is the American anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, that in 1963 described this term as we know it today. 47 00:07:17,910 --> 00:07:21,870 In his research on Polynesia and Melanesia, 48 00:07:22,680 --> 00:07:34,200 Sahlins observed that whereas the Polynesian groups with established political structures had chiefs at the helm of their clan formations. 49 00:07:35,320 --> 00:07:45,310 In Milan, SC On the other hand, marked by loose kingship residential groups, the leader figure is the big man. 50 00:07:46,470 --> 00:07:55,920 He tells us that the Polynesian chief is the more universally familiar character whose claim to power is guaranteed and 51 00:07:55,920 --> 00:08:07,650 justified by well-established system of succession and an assertion of authority based on individual qualification or lineage. 52 00:08:07,930 --> 00:08:12,770 As with the Brits. The chief, though, has. 53 00:08:14,160 --> 00:08:22,370 Embodies normative socio political order and is the guarantor or defender of the community's ideals, 54 00:08:22,890 --> 00:08:29,250 its internal cohesion and its relationship with the world beyond its borders. 55 00:08:30,860 --> 00:08:40,490 On the other hand, the Melanesian big man occupies the position of leadership within his community, not so much through the authority of tradition, 56 00:08:41,090 --> 00:08:48,049 as by direct assertion of his personal ambition and the ability to eliminate other 57 00:08:48,050 --> 00:08:54,290 claimants while dominating the rest of society through self-serving coercive power. 58 00:08:55,820 --> 00:09:05,960 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. 59 00:09:07,430 --> 00:09:12,680 To make obvious its function as vessel and locus of power. 60 00:09:14,750 --> 00:09:21,800 As is often the case, he must not only exercise power by concentrating and controlling its modes of expression. 61 00:09:22,890 --> 00:09:29,280 It helps. It is a large, physically powerful and domineering man. 62 00:09:30,030 --> 00:09:38,910 For it is in this way that this brand of personal authority is seamlessly and vigorously expressed and perceived. 63 00:09:40,810 --> 00:09:49,540 Certainly silence was describing a figure of power and authority that is a product of Melanesians, socio political power and structure. 64 00:09:50,080 --> 00:09:54,270 That is because they were organised in small autonomous communities. 65 00:09:54,280 --> 00:09:59,800 They did not develop elaborate long standing traditions of state control. 66 00:10:00,990 --> 00:10:12,900 Such society implied was does amenable to unregulated succession processes and the rise to authority of whoever can claim an asset coercive power. 67 00:10:13,890 --> 00:10:27,790 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. 68 00:10:29,060 --> 00:10:44,540 And more specifically, George Orwell's Animal Farm is that he might have been that noxious, cunning, ambitious, brutal, power hungry character. 69 00:10:45,650 --> 00:10:56,420 The mighty Napoleon. However, there is no reason to think that the big man figure is an invention of Melanesia. 70 00:10:56,420 --> 00:11:04,760 And I must confess that I am not the first to identify this character in African societies and in the modern nations, 71 00:11:05,060 --> 00:11:09,500 mostly created by European powers in the 20th century. 72 00:11:09,830 --> 00:11:17,459 Africa. In fact, I have relied on the work of the Malawian literary scholar Deborah Angulo and the 73 00:11:17,460 --> 00:11:23,730 Cameroonian historian Wassily Mbembe in my thinking about the big man in Africa. 74 00:11:25,700 --> 00:11:36,680 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, 75 00:11:37,130 --> 00:11:43,310 and that they feature in both major and subordinate narrative positions, 76 00:11:43,790 --> 00:11:50,660 with the body becoming the privileged site of representing and performance of their power. 77 00:11:52,690 --> 00:12:03,399 We have in. Idi Amin of Uganda, who frequently boasted of his boxing prowess in your area, 78 00:12:03,400 --> 00:12:09,970 Museveni, also of Uganda, who at 78 might be the king, the country's push up king. 79 00:12:11,200 --> 00:12:18,160 And in the South African president, Jacob Zuma. 80 00:12:19,810 --> 00:12:30,730 His mastery of Zulu manly dance as fine examples of the performative aspect of the African sovereign dig manhood. 81 00:12:32,020 --> 00:12:38,740 Indeed, the very idea of identifying the big man with a particular type of influential figure, 82 00:12:39,760 --> 00:12:46,300 with the context of within the context of the colonial and post-colonial Africa, 83 00:12:46,990 --> 00:12:56,500 helps us to understand the workings of power and authority in both democratic and autocratic political systems in modern Africa. 84 00:12:57,400 --> 00:13:10,030 For in this Africa, the distinction Sahlins makes between the chief and the big man collapses in the sense that the chief. 85 00:13:11,290 --> 00:13:15,670 Performs his authority by drawing on the characteristics of the big man. 86 00:13:16,600 --> 00:13:17,650 And vice versa. 87 00:13:21,290 --> 00:13:32,179 The histories of African kingdoms and empires before the coming of the European colonisers are replete with chiefs and kings who demonstrated 88 00:13:32,180 --> 00:13:43,190 their claim to authority by physically or symbolically asserting their authority through suppression of all perceived or real opposition. 89 00:13:43,850 --> 00:13:48,050 By showing themselves as the finest specimens of manhood. 90 00:13:48,590 --> 00:13:56,960 And by presenting representing their bodies as sites of mystical powers and as the body politic. 91 00:13:58,290 --> 00:14:04,320 In recognition of this fact, but also especially because it was administratively convenient. 92 00:14:04,950 --> 00:14:11,249 European powers frequently relied on the coercive and despotic powers of chiefs, 93 00:14:11,250 --> 00:14:17,580 kings and emirs to facilitate the establishment and maintenance of the colonial state. 94 00:14:18,970 --> 00:14:30,070 Even in fiercely Republican societies such as the Igbo of southeastern Nigeria, that for the most part did not have chiefs or big men. 95 00:14:31,190 --> 00:14:38,479 The British invented what they called warrant chiefs by giving authority to usually 96 00:14:38,480 --> 00:14:44,270 the nastiest and most dreaded men they could find in each autonomous community. 97 00:14:45,630 --> 00:14:54,360 In fact, it is the colonial reliance on these new fangled cheese that led to the about women's war of 1929. 98 00:14:56,480 --> 00:15:03,260 And that forced the colonial office in London to abolish the warrant system. 99 00:15:04,310 --> 00:15:12,560 But the point here is that the colonial regime in both the Igbo and other examples created the big man chief. 100 00:15:13,550 --> 00:15:22,670 Who relied on the colonisers power to assert his authority, yet had all the self-serving characteristics of the big man. 101 00:15:23,890 --> 00:15:32,410 The point here, though, is that the widespread tendency of these modern big men to appropriate and deploy signifiers of 102 00:15:32,410 --> 00:15:40,870 African cultural traditions and the open or tacit investment of official authority on local agents. 103 00:15:42,250 --> 00:15:50,920 Of colonial and neo colonial governments ensured the normalisation of this figure in the modern African state. 104 00:15:52,320 --> 00:16:00,000 In one of the more memorable descriptions of the big man African president, the American writer Norman Mailer. 105 00:16:01,030 --> 00:16:07,480 While visiting the Democratic Republic of Congo, then Republic of Zaire, 106 00:16:07,780 --> 00:16:20,740 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. 107 00:16:21,760 --> 00:16:32,740 And here is the stadium with the big post of Mobutu Sese Seko dominating the stadium where the match was taking place. 108 00:16:33,730 --> 00:16:40,590 So here's what he says, that Mobutu is the chieftain of the country and a king. 109 00:16:42,130 --> 00:16:45,730 It's part of the vital force to be resplendent. 110 00:16:46,780 --> 00:16:51,970 They will respect him less if the expense if his expenses were not larger than life. 111 00:16:52,480 --> 00:16:54,130 He's the leader of the nation. 112 00:16:54,820 --> 00:17:04,990 So a modern equivalent of the president, dictator, monarch, emperor, the children of God and love was solely all in one. 113 00:17:07,020 --> 00:17:13,410 How remarkable it is to compare Mailer's description of Mobutu Sese Seko with 114 00:17:13,500 --> 00:17:19,320 silences characterisation of the Melanesian big man who he says seems so bourgeois, 115 00:17:19,590 --> 00:17:28,200 so reminiscent of the free, enterprising, rugged individual of our own heritage, mean American heritage. 116 00:17:29,160 --> 00:17:40,020 He combines with an ostensible interest in the general welfare, a more profound measure of self-interest, cunning and economic calculation. 117 00:17:40,650 --> 00:17:48,660 His every public action is designed to make a competitive and invidious comparison with others, 118 00:17:49,320 --> 00:17:53,430 to show a standing above the product of his own personal manufacture. 119 00:17:54,900 --> 00:17:58,560 I shall return to Mobutu Sese Seko in my last lecture. 120 00:17:59,340 --> 00:18:06,360 But for the moment, I should note that Maela captures a fundamental aspect of the African big man, 121 00:18:06,360 --> 00:18:16,080 which is that he relies on and harness every available source of authority, whether secular or religious. 122 00:18:18,210 --> 00:18:22,770 Traditional or modern to personalise governmentality. 123 00:18:24,110 --> 00:18:36,070 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, 124 00:18:36,580 --> 00:18:41,620 expelled tens of thousands of Asian Ugandans in 1972. 125 00:18:42,960 --> 00:18:54,700 But only after God spoke to him in a dream. And he made European agents and diplomats treat him as they would their own. 126 00:18:54,700 --> 00:19:00,820 King can see the image on the upper right. 127 00:19:02,050 --> 00:19:09,070 I should note that while the big man may flourish in and perpetuate poorly regulated political systems, 128 00:19:09,580 --> 00:19:19,460 he can as easily thrive in democracies as in apartheid South Africa, in spite of established checks and balances. 129 00:19:19,990 --> 00:19:25,720 By inventing new and infinite ways of stretching and bending them to his will, 130 00:19:26,140 --> 00:19:30,970 often invoking alternative yet familiar bases of power and legitimation. 131 00:19:32,450 --> 00:19:37,550 What we have then in many instances is the self serving re signification, 132 00:19:38,060 --> 00:19:47,420 transmogrified creation and redeployment of chiefly and tradition sanctioned authority by big men at the helm of the postcolonial nation. 133 00:19:48,630 --> 00:19:58,170 To this class. National politics does is a tool for consolidating and channelling state resources in the service of their personal glorification. 134 00:19:58,920 --> 00:20:04,350 To them, the formal mechanisms of governance, whether democratic or autocratic, 135 00:20:04,350 --> 00:20:14,130 are only effective or meaningful to the extent that they support the transformation of the nation into a zone of an unchallenged, 136 00:20:14,430 --> 00:20:23,999 if inherently unstable, authority. But how is it possible in the context of the modern post-colonial state that 137 00:20:24,000 --> 00:20:29,550 the big men are the apex of national power transaction are able to thrive? 138 00:20:30,640 --> 00:20:34,450 Or at the very least, survive, sometimes for decades. 139 00:20:34,570 --> 00:20:40,060 Many achieving great longevity in office despite their dismal records. 140 00:20:41,510 --> 00:20:48,290 I would need more time than this lecture allows to scratch the surface of this important question. 141 00:20:49,070 --> 00:20:56,420 However, a chilling member has advanced the thesis on what he calls the banality of power in the post colony. 142 00:20:56,630 --> 00:21:03,770 That might be insightful in trying to understand postcolonial power relations. 143 00:21:03,770 --> 00:21:12,020 He argues, against easy binaries, such as subjection versus autonomy, domination versus resistance. 144 00:21:12,440 --> 00:21:19,010 Proposing instead that an intimate tyranny links the ruler and the ruled. 145 00:21:19,310 --> 00:21:26,570 Just as obscenity is the very condition of state power and he uses the term common more. 146 00:21:26,690 --> 00:21:35,540 That is the much despised figure of colonial authority to represent the post-colonial authoritarian, 147 00:21:35,540 --> 00:21:44,630 noting that this character seeks to institutionalise himself in order to achieve legitimation and hedge money in the form of a fetish. 148 00:21:45,790 --> 00:21:52,179 Combined with the description of the African Postal Colony as characterised by a 149 00:21:52,180 --> 00:21:58,270 distinctive art of improvisation and by a tendency to excess and disproportion. 150 00:21:58,720 --> 00:22:09,910 What we have then is a sociopolitical setting in which both the authoritarian ruler and the citizenry are engaged in a convivial relationship, 151 00:22:10,300 --> 00:22:19,510 which we have not, which in which we do not have one regulated public space, but multiple domains of discordance. 152 00:22:20,200 --> 00:22:29,650 In such a space, even the most excessive, obscene exercise of power by the authoritarian figure is deflected, 153 00:22:30,190 --> 00:22:39,700 repurposed and signified in part because even the bureaucratised state machinery still lacks the capacity 154 00:22:39,700 --> 00:22:48,370 to fully control subjects that simultaneously simulate adherence to and support of the autocrat, 155 00:22:48,790 --> 00:22:58,660 while relying on modes of popular speech and critical practices found in the culture to make and ridicule the autocrats power play. 156 00:23:00,170 --> 00:23:07,409 And part of what I'll be doing in the subsequent lectures is to show how visual artists 157 00:23:07,410 --> 00:23:15,140 are involved in these complicated responds to postcolonial authority by adopting modes, 158 00:23:15,830 --> 00:23:19,850 various modes of what we might call visual speech. 159 00:23:21,840 --> 00:23:29,430 In case, as I suspect you're wondering, the point of this detour to remember, let me make two relevant points. 160 00:23:29,790 --> 00:23:38,980 First, he allows us to see authoritarian leaders of post-colonial Africa in their tendency to build official dams, 161 00:23:39,030 --> 00:23:49,260 edifices, yet compromise them at will for the sole purpose of vulgar self-identification as product of societies that, 162 00:23:49,800 --> 00:23:55,620 fresh from the traumatic system as desertion of official violence in the colonial era, 163 00:23:56,040 --> 00:24:04,020 see the relationship of the populace and authority as antagonistic player and intimate tyranny. 164 00:24:04,950 --> 00:24:14,879 Second, the people's apparent willingness to tolerate and support autocratic regimes is also because they have developed 165 00:24:14,880 --> 00:24:24,180 informal mechanisms for living with a system rooted in a colonial ontology that normalised official tyranny. 166 00:24:26,150 --> 00:24:38,450 But how do we explain the relative, the prevalence and the unique longevity of African strongmen and big men of power? 167 00:24:39,260 --> 00:24:44,270 Considering that a fifth of them have been in power for more than 20 years. 168 00:24:46,810 --> 00:24:52,120 To this, I suggest that a key factor is, as noted earlier, 169 00:24:52,120 --> 00:25:04,180 the autocrats pensions for co-opting traditional chieftaincy institutions and authority with which the populace have cultural and emotional affinity. 170 00:25:04,840 --> 00:25:17,320 Those guarantee that some guarantee some measure of support from segments of the population to whom these traditional institutions remain important. 171 00:25:18,580 --> 00:25:23,710 Thus for all the claims to political modernity. 172 00:25:24,660 --> 00:25:34,440 A good number of Africa's autocrats and charismatic leaders from the Jomo Kenyatta to Ghana's 173 00:25:34,440 --> 00:25:44,460 Osagyefo Kwame Nkrumah from Zaire's Mobutu Sese Seko to even Muammar Gaddafi of Libya. 174 00:25:44,910 --> 00:25:49,710 They all presented themselves to the populations through their fashion, 175 00:25:50,400 --> 00:25:57,960 behaviour and rhetoric as chiefly figures whose power is sanctioned by indigenous traditions, 176 00:25:58,650 --> 00:26:03,690 though no doubt enforced by state security and bureaucracy. 177 00:26:05,720 --> 00:26:14,240 I must admit, however, that the range of political figures and contexts covered in this lecture. 178 00:26:15,620 --> 00:26:20,450 And the lecture series, including Gamal Abdel Nasser of Egypt. 179 00:26:21,080 --> 00:26:26,540 Hendrik Four Foods of South Africa. Our Memory of Sudan, 180 00:26:27,200 --> 00:26:38,330 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. 181 00:26:40,600 --> 00:26:46,090 I had earlier invoked other times such as strongmen, autocrats and dictator. 182 00:26:47,080 --> 00:26:56,890 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. 183 00:26:57,940 --> 00:27:05,319 Yet none of these terms are capacious enough to account for the variety of political contexts, 184 00:27:05,320 --> 00:27:09,770 individual characters and public perceptions of these leaders. 185 00:27:10,480 --> 00:27:17,650 Nor do they substantially ground them within the African socio cultural experience. 186 00:27:18,640 --> 00:27:28,330 As we shall see, Mary did not have Nasser's charisma, yet survived multiple coups. 187 00:27:28,330 --> 00:27:34,320 The top. Their food. South Africa was a democratic, racist state. 188 00:27:35,650 --> 00:27:39,700 Babangida helmed a classic military dictatorship, 189 00:27:40,600 --> 00:27:48,460 while Nasser and Mobutu seized power as military officers but soon established one party autocracies. 190 00:27:49,540 --> 00:27:58,630 And. Whereas, Nasser spent much of his political capital on Pan Arabist ideology and the Non-Aligned Movement. 191 00:27:59,440 --> 00:28:04,300 Mobutu invested his in an empire of stupendous corruption. 192 00:28:06,040 --> 00:28:14,410 Moreover, the decadal personalisation of state power characteristic of Bend Command more might have applied to Mobutu, 193 00:28:15,220 --> 00:28:18,910 but not quite to Nasser and Foot. 194 00:28:19,930 --> 00:28:28,419 My point is that none of these usual terms are conceptually open and contextually specific enough to 195 00:28:28,420 --> 00:28:35,170 capture the diversity of characters such as the five that I will be discussing in these lectures, 196 00:28:35,350 --> 00:28:39,250 in the way that the idea of the big man does. 197 00:28:39,910 --> 00:28:43,930 Moreover, the big man as a trope is a way of gendering. 198 00:28:44,350 --> 00:28:55,120 The particular form of power in post-colonial Africa, wielded exclusively by men who inherited national governance from colonial regimes. 199 00:28:55,960 --> 00:29:01,300 Yet the brand of power associated with them at once self-serving, 200 00:29:01,420 --> 00:29:10,180 personalised and frequently connected to perhaps even exploitative of aspects of indigenous and cultural traditions, 201 00:29:10,540 --> 00:29:18,520 is such that it is not exclusive to any specific religious, ethnic or socio economic class. 202 00:29:18,550 --> 00:29:23,350 In other words, the big man phenomenon is not an aberration. 203 00:29:24,430 --> 00:29:31,210 Nor is it alien to the imaginations and desires and interests of regular folks who, 204 00:29:31,450 --> 00:29:37,510 in moments of aspirational projection, wish to access power while doing so. 205 00:29:37,780 --> 00:29:42,670 Expect sympathy and support from a section of the imagined community. 206 00:29:43,720 --> 00:29:52,330 Indeed, what we are calling regular folk include a vast range of actors that I want to call the everyday 207 00:29:52,480 --> 00:29:59,410 small that are big men who claim power and manipulated within their own zones of influence. 208 00:29:59,710 --> 00:30:09,790 Be it the university, the government office, the town union or municipality, it is the ubiquity of these small, 209 00:30:09,820 --> 00:30:17,590 big men in the post colony that not only neutralises the spectacular capital that our big men 210 00:30:17,860 --> 00:30:24,970 who might more easily be recognised as dictators and strong men at the helm of the nation state. 211 00:30:26,540 --> 00:30:35,809 To this point. The member has also argued that ordinary citizens, such that ordinary citizens are subject of the dictator, 212 00:30:35,810 --> 00:30:42,260 internalise the authoritarian epistemology to the point where they reproduce it themselves. 213 00:30:43,950 --> 00:30:48,750 In all the main circumstances of everyday life. 214 00:30:49,700 --> 00:30:53,300 But let me note that he is only partially right. 215 00:30:54,050 --> 00:31:02,210 For in the post colony, I want to suggest the citizenry cannot be construed as simply subjects of the sovereign, 216 00:31:02,420 --> 00:31:17,240 who himself could neither establish an efficient administrative state nor even a full command of the of whatever stands for for national bureaucracy. 217 00:31:18,320 --> 00:31:24,270 And rather than think of the citizenry as learning the authoritarian epistemology of the big man. 218 00:31:24,290 --> 00:31:28,130 I would argue that, as in the case of the Melanesian big man, 219 00:31:28,550 --> 00:31:38,420 it is the lack of established systems of power management and succession that serves as the substrate for the growth of big men, 220 00:31:38,930 --> 00:31:45,020 whose qualification for the top position is the ability to assert themselves and 221 00:31:45,020 --> 00:31:50,660 cause others to stand down for the manifestation of their personal ambition. 222 00:31:51,590 --> 00:31:58,999 It is therefore the very nature of the post-colonial state in Africa structurally weak, yet resourced, 223 00:31:59,000 --> 00:32:05,659 with technologies of violence that feeds the authoritarian epistemology shared by the sovereign at 224 00:32:05,660 --> 00:32:12,010 the helm of the state bureaucracy and the non sovereign big men such as the diverse characters. 225 00:32:12,320 --> 00:32:15,500 Nangle, who identifies in the novels of Achebe. 226 00:32:16,250 --> 00:32:23,180 I am a Chima man, and because they are both men, Sam, Ben and Emmanuel don't gala. 227 00:32:24,900 --> 00:32:37,190 In my fifth lecture. The Workable Bureau in Nigeria will offer us a view of the impact on the masses of the socio. 228 00:32:38,120 --> 00:32:41,900 Cultural power of the everyday. And the sovereign. 229 00:32:42,230 --> 00:32:55,430 Big man. Earlier, I had inferred that the African big man is in part the product of colonial governmentality, no less, 230 00:32:55,430 --> 00:33:03,319 because imperial regimes cared more about efficiency and taxation as well as pacification of the colonised. 231 00:33:03,320 --> 00:33:14,540 And those favoured the African version of the disruptive, self-centred political figure sahlins identified in the decentralised polities of Melanesia. 232 00:33:15,600 --> 00:33:23,520 However, the sovereign big men of post-colonial Africa, with the nation's resources at their disposal, 233 00:33:24,450 --> 00:33:31,350 amped up their power by feeding on the Cold War rivalries of the natal and Soviet alliances. 234 00:33:32,950 --> 00:33:43,990 These post-imperial post-war powers, put Cold War powers, in many cases abetted the ambitions of all of the anti-democratic, 235 00:33:44,200 --> 00:33:51,070 corrupt and despotic leaders in Africa, which in turn caused the proliferation of such characters. 236 00:33:51,400 --> 00:33:56,140 And the epidemic occurred the time in the 1960s and seventies, 237 00:33:56,380 --> 00:34:05,110 as well as the widespread political instability of stagnation of democratic processes during the decades covered in these lectures. 238 00:34:06,370 --> 00:34:17,890 Consider, for instance, that Jean-bédel Bokassa of Central African Republic coronation as Emperor of Central African Empire, 239 00:34:18,580 --> 00:34:23,410 which costs 25% of the country's annual budget. 240 00:34:24,850 --> 00:34:31,840 Was paid for by friends. And as a favoured friend of the West. 241 00:34:33,130 --> 00:34:41,170 Mobutu Sese Seko built his village palace, the so-called visi of the jungle. 242 00:34:42,550 --> 00:34:50,980 With its own private runway for his Boeing 7474 use for quick shopping trips to Europe. 243 00:34:52,920 --> 00:35:01,890 While the West looked away in South Africa, Hendrick refused, brandishing his anti-communist credentials, 244 00:35:02,280 --> 00:35:09,660 promulgated his hard core racist apartheid ideology protected by Western powers. 245 00:35:11,120 --> 00:35:15,680 And in Egypt, Gamal Abdel Nasser. 246 00:35:17,240 --> 00:35:23,780 Won over his Soviet friends to fund his Aswan High Dam mega-project. 247 00:35:24,900 --> 00:35:32,820 To the utter displeasure of their Western rivals still upset about losing control of the Suez Canal. 248 00:35:34,090 --> 00:35:43,959 As such, the sovereign African big men that I will be discussing in these lectures were not only the products of their societies, 249 00:35:43,960 --> 00:35:48,970 they were pawns and agents of the natal and Soviet power blocks. 250 00:35:49,510 --> 00:35:50,650 And that is why. 251 00:35:52,500 --> 00:36:03,840 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. 252 00:36:08,460 --> 00:36:13,920 Let me note briefly how I see my line of inquiry in these lectures. 253 00:36:15,380 --> 00:36:21,440 Relate to the landscape of modern and contemporary African art history. 254 00:36:23,490 --> 00:36:28,860 There is a measure of scholarly consensus on the role of art and artists in 255 00:36:28,860 --> 00:36:34,800 the production of national cultures during the African Independence decade. 256 00:36:36,340 --> 00:36:43,629 Quite apart from the fact that the generation of artists joined by their peers in the professions, 257 00:36:43,630 --> 00:36:52,000 public administration, educational industry and others sought to establish institutions for the new nation. 258 00:36:52,570 --> 00:37:01,810 They also participated in the articulation and production of new national cultures, art discourses and related institutions. 259 00:37:02,650 --> 00:37:12,280 But one major area of inquiry that preoccupied leading artists, writers and critics on the continent was language. 260 00:37:13,000 --> 00:37:22,780 That is the place of indigenous and colonial languages, art and design in the making of postcolonial literatures and arts. 261 00:37:23,650 --> 00:37:33,820 For visual artists, a major thrust of their work was in the recovery and redeployment of indigenous art forms, 262 00:37:33,820 --> 00:37:39,310 techniques and aesthetics, often in combination with elements of European modernism. 263 00:37:39,730 --> 00:37:49,900 To define what I called postcolonial modernism in my 2015 study in Nigeria during this period. 264 00:37:51,530 --> 00:38:02,360 Ibrahim El Salahi, who in the who is the subject of my fourth lecture, was a major figure of this period. 265 00:38:03,810 --> 00:38:15,540 However, in a recent work, I argued that what distinguished contemporary African art from post-colonial modernism is 266 00:38:15,540 --> 00:38:23,250 its rejection of the latter's cultural nationalism and in terms of its political posture, 267 00:38:23,730 --> 00:38:31,290 the adoption of critical and even oppositional view on postcolonial governmentality. 268 00:38:33,380 --> 00:38:39,580 This schema is largely still defensible. But there are two important caveats. 269 00:38:40,480 --> 00:38:49,570 First, by foregrounding the role of post-colonial modernists in the establishment of post-independence national cultures, 270 00:38:50,110 --> 00:38:56,920 I do not suggest that they all invariably drank the liberation Kool-Aid, 271 00:38:57,670 --> 00:39:09,850 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. 272 00:39:10,660 --> 00:39:20,500 Indeed, what I hope to show in these lectures is that in some cases the same artists like Gadsby's, 273 00:39:20,500 --> 00:39:29,740 Siri in Egypt and Ibrahim el Salahi in the Sudan who participated in the making of post-colonial modernism, 274 00:39:30,190 --> 00:39:39,130 became critical of the national project as their nation slid into periods and cycles of autocracy. 275 00:39:40,360 --> 00:39:47,439 That is, one might say they moved from the modernists cultural nationalism to contemporary artists, 276 00:39:47,440 --> 00:39:53,320 scepticism and critique of the national projects in the course of their careers. 277 00:39:53,710 --> 00:40:01,300 Those alerted us to the that to the fact that the two categories are neither that chronically 278 00:40:01,300 --> 00:40:09,670 fixed nor are they exclusive to one or that generation of post-colonial African artists. 279 00:40:10,860 --> 00:40:22,050 The second caveat. With my earliest concerns the multiple trajectories and pace of African decolonisation and art histories. 280 00:40:23,490 --> 00:40:31,200 While the years between 1956 and 66 have been aptly described as the independence decade. 281 00:40:32,740 --> 00:40:38,170 Several other countries decolonised before and after this. 282 00:40:39,040 --> 00:40:43,240 Those complicating the location of post-colonial modernism. 283 00:40:43,420 --> 00:40:46,750 Only in that momentous ten year period. 284 00:40:48,360 --> 00:40:49,350 Not only that, 285 00:40:49,860 --> 00:41:01,410 debates about national culture by leading writers and artists that marked the high noon of post-colonial modernism did not register as prominently, 286 00:41:01,740 --> 00:41:04,920 if at all. In many parts of the continent. 287 00:41:06,490 --> 00:41:12,580 For instance, political conditions in the 1950s and 1950s. 288 00:41:12,580 --> 00:41:26,560 South Africa limited debates about national cultures to a network of privileged white artists such as Walter Battis and Eduardo Vila. 289 00:41:27,280 --> 00:41:37,480 While the absence of a sizeable black educated class and autonomous art industry there in South Africa and in the Congo. 290 00:41:38,490 --> 00:41:45,930 At Independence ensured that black artists from these countries were largely absent 291 00:41:46,260 --> 00:41:51,390 in the continental and Pan-African critical and cultural networks of that period. 292 00:41:52,670 --> 00:42:00,229 Thus the clarity of our view of modernism, for instance, in Nigeria, Kenya, Senegal, Sudan, 293 00:42:00,230 --> 00:42:07,970 Ethiopia, Egypt, Morocco and elsewhere at midcentury fails in other parts of the continent. 294 00:42:09,660 --> 00:42:18,060 Given this reality of African decolonisation, timelines, the different contexts of art practices and discourses, 295 00:42:18,870 --> 00:42:27,419 the study of the relationship of art and power of the artist and the big man offers a different and, 296 00:42:27,420 --> 00:42:37,320 I hope, productive perspective on the history of modern and contemporary African art that indeed has continental salience. 297 00:42:40,220 --> 00:42:49,850 We already know from Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, from Argentina to Brazil during the military dictatorships, 298 00:42:50,240 --> 00:42:59,210 that autocratic regimes have either embraced art and artists for the work of propaganda or suppressed them when they raised, 299 00:42:59,390 --> 00:43:04,490 resisted co-optation or were made by artists from victim groups. 300 00:43:05,750 --> 00:43:12,469 What is not as clear in the historical record is how African post-colonial governments, 301 00:43:12,470 --> 00:43:21,560 especially in the era of the big men, estimated or responded to art possibilities as a threat to such regimes. 302 00:43:22,890 --> 00:43:32,610 For sure in South Africa, where Hendricks, a food a Nazi sympathiser, had articulated his idea of what constituted good national art. 303 00:43:33,150 --> 00:43:42,000 We are not surprised that his regime hounded white artists whose work seemed incompatible to his ideology. 304 00:43:44,400 --> 00:43:49,080 Given all the above, we might, how might we explain why in Nigeria, 305 00:43:49,080 --> 00:43:56,760 during the military dictatorships, for instance, anti-establishment art had its finest moment. 306 00:43:57,270 --> 00:44:00,450 Without evidence, oppression by the regime. 307 00:44:00,780 --> 00:44:09,509 It was so bad at the time that this work was shown about 100 metres from what used to be called Jordan Barracks, 308 00:44:09,510 --> 00:44:13,110 where the military head of state lived. 309 00:44:13,920 --> 00:44:24,210 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. 310 00:44:25,020 --> 00:44:28,590 But nothing happened to the artists and the work itself. 311 00:44:29,070 --> 00:44:33,230 So how do we explain this phenomenon? 312 00:44:33,240 --> 00:44:37,590 And we have similar scenarios in Egypt, the Sudan and the Congo. 313 00:44:38,430 --> 00:44:49,920 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? 314 00:44:51,000 --> 00:44:58,620 How was it that the same apartheid regime that prosecuted white artists paid little attention 315 00:44:58,620 --> 00:45:07,770 to the powerful works of M.F.A. that I was sure rejected Purefoods Foods idea of good art. 316 00:45:08,970 --> 00:45:10,980 And Mobutu Sese Seko. 317 00:45:12,670 --> 00:45:23,860 Not see in the outrageous ultra modernity of bodies is a king, a lazy sculptures, a mockery of his nationally imposed authenticity program. 318 00:45:25,630 --> 00:45:29,620 There's one question that haunts these lectures and for which I might. 319 00:45:30,700 --> 00:45:34,090 Alas, not have a convincing and final answer. 320 00:45:34,210 --> 00:45:42,790 Is this why we had fine artists who did not meddle in other sorts of direct action or ideological work? 321 00:45:43,180 --> 00:45:49,240 Largely absent from the long lists of political victims of African big men. 322 00:45:49,480 --> 00:46:00,790 Given their record of violence against perceived opponents that frequently included musicians, writers, dramatists and photojournalists. 323 00:46:02,030 --> 00:46:12,379 Is it simply a matter of fine art dependent on an intimate connection to the ruling class by an umbilical cord of gold, 324 00:46:12,380 --> 00:46:16,310 as the American critic Clement Greenberg once put it. 325 00:46:17,720 --> 00:46:26,330 Or let's put it this way did fine art, often presented in government spaces and foreign cultural centres, 326 00:46:26,720 --> 00:46:33,260 or in private galleries run by the social elite and therefore not accessible to the masses, 327 00:46:33,470 --> 00:46:43,250 seemed less threatening to the big man regimes and interests, regardless of the ferocity of its critical its critique of power. 328 00:46:44,520 --> 00:46:45,599 In the next few weeks. 329 00:46:45,600 --> 00:46:55,590 Therefore, I explore the work of artists across the decades of African independence, during which sovereign post-colonial governmentality, 330 00:46:55,770 --> 00:47:02,790 whether nominally democratic or evidently despotic, was held in thrall by sovereign big men. 331 00:47:03,150 --> 00:47:10,049 And I do this to show the different formal and conceptual tactics devised by these artists to 332 00:47:10,050 --> 00:47:18,150 reckon with or meditate and reflect on the sociopolitical transformations of their societies as 333 00:47:18,150 --> 00:47:24,990 they experience the euphoria of decolonisation and strained under the weight of oppressive and 334 00:47:24,990 --> 00:47:30,930 corrupt governments that evolved around the continent in the second half of the 20th century. 335 00:47:31,870 --> 00:47:37,870 We shall examine different varieties of big men from Egypt, South Africa, Sudan, 336 00:47:38,080 --> 00:47:47,500 Nigeria and the Congo, who typified post-colonial governmentality in Africa in the from the 1950s, 337 00:47:47,500 --> 00:47:54,400 when decolonisation of the continent began in earnest to the end of the 20th century, 338 00:47:55,360 --> 00:48:04,450 and in the context of their tough political practices and the crisis prone social walls that engendered. 339 00:48:05,020 --> 00:48:09,910 I will examine exemplary work of Gatsby's theory. 340 00:48:11,210 --> 00:48:15,080 Do M.F.A. Ibrahim El Salahi. 341 00:48:15,970 --> 00:48:25,190 Oprah did you and Issac bodies King Charles and frequently those of their contemporaries in order to construct 342 00:48:25,880 --> 00:48:36,320 hopefully if fresh but by no means comprehensive account of art and politics in 20th century Africa. 343 00:48:37,260 --> 00:48:37,710 Thank you.