Good evening. You're welcome. Today for the fifth slate lectures.
So today I take you to Nigeria in the 1980s and 1990 to consider the fate of art and the broader critical culture in
the time of the two most repressive military dictatorships exemplified by the regime of General Ibrahim Babangida,
the self-described evil genius famed for his photogenic smile.
I focus on the work of the painter Obiora Hilditch,
who also a well-known poet who during this period was at the height of his
powers with drawing and paintings and poetry acclaimed for their lyrical power.
And trenchant social commentary.
I consider the fate of art and the broader critical culture, including the work of other artists at circa and elsewhere,
arrayed against the politics and policies of a dictatorship that reads corruption to state craft and impoverished the citizenry.
But first, let me acknowledge two people who have helped build the field and a scholarship in which only a single voice.
First is my former. Teacher.
In sculpture at an sukkah. El Anatsui.
In the days when our school library did not have access to foreign art magazines.
And that seemed made the point of bringing back these publications from overseas.
And for my generation of students at SOKA,
it was such a privilege to visit his home and studio to stay connected with the international art
scene at a time the IMF Structural Adjustment Program punishingly limited our imaginative worlds.
Second is my dear friend and colleague Salah and Hassan, who, more than anyone I know,
has worked tirelessly to advance the field of modern and contemporary African art through his scholarship and teaching,
but especially by leading the drive despite the odds to establish research and academic institutions.
To support our nascent field. So to Al and Salah, I am thankful for your generosity of spirit.
And with that, I turn to my topic for today.
By every measure will be a prodigious tycoon.
As Steve Dawes, painted in 1980, is an impressive work.
Not least because the orchestration of complementary colours is in fact optically pleasant.
Against a background that shifts from lower section of cloud, a mix of carmine leather in crimson and cadmium orange to the cadmium,
yellow and orange top a cluster of blue green figures proud from the bottom into a tight, unstable bubble topped by a massive head.
While the pictorial composition and narrative might not be easy to untangle, the title invites us to do just that.
The flat and non descriptive red areas do not offer us much except for the stylised handbags suspended in mid-air.
But it is the figural mass that holds the paint in subject.
Here we see four figures with the body of one in front in full view, the other three partially behind all carrying massive sacks on their shoulders.
There might be others hiding under their clothes.
A head with a tall hat in circle, perhaps indicating someone of a different status, lurks in the left corner.
Woodchuck has taken liberties with his representational tactic.
Besides the rapidly drawn out lines, dry brushwork and thinly applied paint,
the figures are rendered in a way that suggests emphasis on the expressive power of the organic line rather than on anatomical fidelity.
Except for one instance, there are no perpendicular lines.
Rather, every movement tends to a curve such that the sinus lines of the heavy sacks create a visual
cadence echoed by the two billowing arcs above them that seem weighted down by a large head.
We soon realised that this head is that of a man dressed in a Yoruba Ashoka cap,
his eyes hidden behind dark sunglasses, his thick lips holding down a large cigar belching distinctly red smoke.
We also realised from the sparrow motifs on the sleeve of one of these visible hand that he is wearing a dress made of what must be expensive lace.
His stubby hand keeping his business bag in aerial suspension as if by some magnetic or magical power.
Here is a man wearing the flowing agbada the dress of choice for wealthy and powerful men of Lagos,
Nigeria's financial capital centre of maritime trade and then seat of government.
This setting is indicated by the horizontal boundary.
The one perpendicular line I referenced earlier of the cadmium, yellow and orange at the top along which boats and ships.
The stevedores and even the fifth figure who might be the foreman are inside the tycoon's body,
trapped within the confines of his bloated self, as if they and their labour constitute indigestible fodder to his insatiable craving.
What is not in doubt is that by conflating the space within which the stevedores
to the work and the fashionably dressed body of the big man with digital signals,
the exploitative nature of the relationship between the tycoon and stevedores.
But why take up this particular subject? In 1980.
What resonance might it have in Nigeria of that period?
And who is the real target of this important painting?
Taken on Steve Doors is a reflection on the culture of Nigeria's post-independence political economy by
non-sovereign big men to fund their profligate and ostentatious lifestyles at the expense of the exploited masses.
It, moreover, speaks to the crucial role played by this class in maintaining the socio economic imbalance and
regimes of despotic and inquisitive democratic governance overseen by the sovereign big man.
Tycoon and stevedores is also significant as it came at a point when digital reached
an inflection point in the evolution of this pictorial mode and thematic concerns.
As I will show shortly,
the previous decade had seen him examining and in the process refining what I might call the aesthetic and rhetoric of the lyrical line,
effectively moving away from painting to drawing.
Tycoon and Stevedores was not only his last major canvas for another decade,
it marked his emphatic turn from years of probing the devastating impact of the Biafran War of 1967 to 1972,
sustained critical commentary on life and politics of the post Biafra nation as he stumbled
from the shaky Second Republic to a 15 year period of three brutal military dictatorships.
In considering Digitas work as I do today, let me note two important topics that it allows me to probe.
First, it affords me the opportunity to address the art historical problem of distinguishing
the modern and the contemporary that I raised in my introductory lecture.
For while it takes as its starting point the cultural identity focus of the independence decade modernists.
It is not so much in the service of a positive mystic production of national culture as engaged in an
insistent commentary on the malfeasance of post-colonial governmentality and its debilitating aftermath.
Secondly, it allows me to examine the modes of address.
That is the rhetorical devices he and other Nigerian artists deployed to speak
to the terrors and depredations of the sovereign and the everyday big man.
But let me begin with a brief recounting of Ditka's work leading up to 1980 and the historical
context of the critical tone represented by tycoon and stevedores and similar work from that period.
When Nigeria. With 250 ethnic groups and more than 500 Indigenous languages gained political independence from Britain in 1960.
The reality of its demographic, cultural and structural complexities soon became apparent.
Its parliamentary system proved inadequate to manage the pressures of ethnic nationalisms.
And in in 1966 in 1966,
a group of young army officers with revolutionary ambitions carried out an unsuccessful bloody coup
that exerted enormous stress on the already weak ties that bound the country's constitution groups.
A pogrom against eastern Nigerians resident in the northern region led to the secession of the East as a Republic of Biafra in 1967,
inevitably leading to the Civil War,
in which up to 2 million children may have died due to starvation policy of the Nigerian government and their European supporters.
Déja vu. Only 21 at the onset of the war witnessed the devastation of that moment in scores of drawings and paintings.
Haunting images of bombed out homes and their masses to children and traumatised populations produced
behind the front lines might be the most comprehensive perspective on the impact of that war by any artist.
In the following years after the defeat of Biafra war, refugees persisted as a theme in his work,
even even as he explored new modalities of image making.
From the realism of the earlier period to the later work, inspired by the aesthetics and ethic of the line.
In fact, you ditch all. And his dual emphases on is social vision, initially forged by the experience of war alone,
the rigorous investigation of and faith in the expressive and symbolic power of the organic line points the way independence,
post-independence political crisis might have fundamentally changed his relationship
with and connection to the national culture orientation of the modernists,
such as his teacher, Usha Och. In 1961,
Utah kicker with whom Ibrahim El Salahi and others participated in the embarrassing club that
I mentioned in my previous lecture began his first experiments with Ebola body drawing,
inspired by his theory of natural synthesis, which called for, as did the Khartoum School.
Combining the formal resources of Western and African artistic traditions in order to develop a new postcolonial modern art.
A competent poet himself. Okay. Examined the structural.
And lyrical equivalencies between Abel's folk song and woolly drawing,
and sought to reaffirm this transmedia connection in subsequent work for which he will gain national and international attention.
In the mid 1960s, Uday met Och and soon began his own research.
On evil art.
With his exceptional draughtsmanship and sophisticated poetic sensibility, he advanced with unparalleled intellectual and technical rigour,
the formal properties of early drawing, which resulted in the visual poetry that his drawing would become.
By the late 1970s. Woodchuck also became familiar with the work of Christopher Okigbo that great.
A poet whose work impacted Woody tremendously.
Well, Keeble was extra ordinary. Poet.
Known as much for his astonishing sampling of world poetic traditions from the Greek tragedian and Virgil to the Victorian Gerald Manley Hopkins
and the modernists Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot from the same bottles from the Symbolists Mallarmé to the Senegalese Négritude poet Leopold Senghor.
Okigbo equally mined African poetry from the ajala of the Yoruba hunters to Akan and Igbo elegiac drumming and dirge performances.
Indeed, because of its layered allusions, its refusal of easy or even reliable interpretation or keyboard's poetry is unquestionably post symbolist.
Yet, because of the level of condensation, suturing and collaging of words and phrases,
it is equally formalist for the reader is often left in awe of the texture and sound of words,
as well as by the silences that hold them in lyrical balance.
In fact, it is the expressive abstraction in the service of poetic lyricism that made Okigbo think of
his poetry as primarily an excursion into musical composition by means of textual ordering.
Those. Whereas Och,
his work may have led Woody to call to recognise the significance of fully art and design in charting a new path within the context of modernist art.
The sheer force of Iqbal's lyrical formalism and symbolism opened up for digital,
the possibility of imagining drawing as a set of complex operations that depends on the dynamic balance of legible or meaningful form and evocative,
yet subjective graphics. Partial gestures.
Okigbo, in other words, allowed Uday to go to sea, drawing as a form of poetic utterance.
That is an expressive statement that does not so much aspire to the realism of academic prose,
drawing as perpetually defer the resolution of the tension between rigorous formalism and layered symbolism.
Aquino's poetry helped you realise that the graphic line drawings most pervasive element.
Can be a potent bearer of meaning and that it can excite our senses through symphonic evocation and allusions to colour sound texture.
In other words, he settled on the deliberate and intuitive deployment of his technical resources towards the formal
refinement of pictorial elements until they approximate the lyrical abstraction of music and poetry.
A third element of Okigbo is poetry evident in his last collection of poems,
Path of Thunder is his deployment of his work to analyse the Nigerian crisis and prognosticate
on its devastating consequences before the war in which he died fighting for Biafra.
I would argue that this willingness to draw on the expressive power of poetry for
sociopolitical engagement is instrumental to the formation of indigenous art and politics.
When the war ended in 1970, Uday returned to Sooka, where he submitted his thesis in 1972,
in which he documented only mural art and analysed its elements, compositional and design characteristics.
Here's how he described his understanding of early in 1998.
An analysis of Igbo drawing and painting reveals that space line pattern, brevity and spontaneity.
Seem to be the pillars on which the whole tradition rests.
It is these same qualities that I strive both intuitively and intellectually to assimilate in my work.
The art historian and artist Nyarko, who also taught at Sooka, put it in a more poetic language.
According to him, only at its best is the rhythmic tempo of a line, like a melodic note plucked from the piano thumb.
Initially the line dances spirals into diverse shapes, elongates, attenuates, thickens, swells and slides,
thins and fades out from a slick point, leaving an empty space that sustains it with mute echoes by which silence is part of sound.
As you did, you experimented with these formal qualities of early the ambition of this drawing chain from describing the world in visual
prose to creating alternative image worlds through the sheer reliance on the dynamic dialogue of line and negative space.
The arching lines and decorative motifs in both his semantically abstract compositions or in highly simplified figural forms,
all testify to the impact and influence of early design and pictorial sensibility.
His post-war drawings thus constitute Uday chuckles inaugural attempts to create lyrical poetry with the graphic line,
decorative motifs and flat pictorial space as his syntax.
This process. Executed with greater focus and conviction, reached full elaboration by the end of the 1970s.
Woodchuck was insistence on the expressive properties of the virtuosic lyrical line earned him substantial critical attention in 1981.
For instance, the novelist Chinua Achebe described Uday Tuku as a poet of clean and eloquent line,
whose clearness of vision is sustained by honesty and humane compassion.
I have no doubt that Achebe saw the artist as a poet of drawing that is,
drawing that had reached a level of formal purity on account of its ascetic yet elegant lines, which in turn implied clarity of artistic vision.
Whether or not Achebe had read the articles essay titled Towards Excellence and Clarity,
published in the wildly circulated Nigerian magazine the previous year.
What is clear to me is that Achebe fully grasped the fundamental elements of the artist's work during that period that is lucid,
eloquent, powerful, formal expression that, like the successful poem, is shorn of prosaic, inessential stuff.
It's a bit more. All of us seem to have understood the articles work as engaged at that point.
With inventive formal play, but also that it had attained the status of inspired utterance similar to keyboards poetry.
But this raises a crucial question. Of what conceptual value is the clear,
unambiguous and assertive line in Indigenous drawing about which he wrote in 1980 when he painted Tycoon and Steve Doors.
Especially given that it does not produce unequivocal images that is easily
apprehend symbol images of the sort we often associate with pictorial realism.
It seems to me that the clean, elegant line, apart from helping Dick to stake a claim to only art and Igbo culture,
as did his modernist mental chill cake, serves as a graphic manifestation of what he call clarity of vision and lucidity of expression.
In other words, it is the assertive mark of the uncompromising and self-assured artistic imagination.
I haven't dwelt at length with this matter of form and aesthetics and we discuss work.
Let me turn slightly away in a different direction to consider how as the experience, if not memories of war receded.
By the end of the 1970s, Uday chuckles.
He increasingly focussed on the broader Nigerian socio political landscape.
Few years after the end of the Biafran War, the victorious Nigerian government,
led by General Gowon, benefited from the oil prices caused by the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.
For a country that until then had not fully exploited the oil discovered in the Niger Delta in 1956,
the 1973 global crisis dramatically changed its economic profile and future.
And the regime went big, increased national spending ten fold and threw its weight around as an international power and leader of Africa.
Gordon's regime splurged on civil servants as well.
So wish he was ruling the UK right now.
An impact also on large scale capital projects.
But you are staking out in a coup d'etat that brought the charismatic Murtala Mohammed to power in 1975.
Mohamed, an ardent nationalist stung by the failing national income after the Middle East war,
decimated the civil service in an anti-corruption campaign,
but was assassinated a year later, replaced by General Obasanjo, who scaled up what was already going to be an expensive national vanity project.
And that is the 1977 Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, a.k.a. Festac 77.
Despite that, the country's economic fundamentals were inherently weak.
He threw open the gates for a global party for black peoples, staged a stupendous musical and theatrical performance.
In the showpiece, magnified copy of a Bulgarian theatre.
And it is said that General Gold loved the structure, the design, because it resembled a military cap.
In 1979, the Second Republic stage managed by General Obasanjo's regime, came to power.
Heralding new political class, an economic elite inebriated by a second oil boom caused by the Iranian revolution.
Taking wasteful spending to new heights, hollowing out a supposedly wealthy nation.
The newly elected president, Shehu Shagari, once in power,
dusted up the delayed the long delayed plan for a national capital in Abuja and opened the coffers to fund the massive project set to be,
at one point, the world's largest urban construction site.
Invariably worsening the country's economic fortunes.
It is within this context that we make sense of the articles taken and Dawes and the equally poignant alhaja from 1978 as declamatory
comments on this new class of non-sovereign big men and women who built their social power through corrupt wealth accumulation.
The tycoon fattened by the Labour of the Exploited Longshoreman and the socially recognisable business woman
who has supposedly made the expensive pilgrimage to Mecca and whose turban like headgear drips with ornaments,
her hand and talent fingers weighted down by subplots of jewellery.
They both cut an impressive image of arrogant wealth.
The themes of woodchips exhibition in Nigeria and Europe during the first half of the 1980s.
Are quite telling for their emphasis on the socio political commentary and critique of the big man's unregulated and corruptive power.
In 1981, he presented no water that travelled to three Nigerian venues and in which we see remarkably elegant compositions that nevertheless
dealt with the rather basic problem of lack of potable water by far segments of a nation supposedly awash with petrodollars.
In one exemplary drawing, a discordant line of water pots, buckets and cans snake from the foreground to the horizon,
a single delicate line rising from the middle distance, walking to the right, touching it dry.
What a tap. Hovering above. The empty vessels.
Following the testamentary posture of No Water Woodchucks exhibition of 1985,
Rhythms of Hunger at the Commonwealth Institute in London referenced the impoverished man
of the masses in an increasingly mismanaged economy run by military and civilian elite.
In the works presented there and at other venues in Nigeria.
During this period, two topics recur. One, a continuation of his critique of the exploitative and corrupt Big Man,
which we see in drawings depicting the familiar cigar and pipe smoking big man riding a horse,
the stomach of which is filled with destitute underclass.
Or a group of them with the R chiefly and clerical hats.
And the ever present tycoon and Alhaji to the right,
all covert and perhaps even fighting for government contracts and kickbacks, but sullied by the muck of corruption.
The hapless masses squished. To the right corner.
Although Lagos was the country's economic and political capital, Abuja was the locus of official corruption.
A rising city without industries or any meaningful, productive sector,
but which readily bestowed stupendous wealth to contractors with only the right connections, and who are adept at the art of bribery.
This is also the portrait of the city in order to close the road to Abuja.
If there's any indication of a road to the future seat of government,
it is the two concave lines one grazing, the artist's signature, rising to the left,
terminating in the midsection of the vertical picture plane and a second double line blocked by what appears to be the bloated body of a dead baker.
An open truck stuffed with standing human cargo.
Tons of the road. And above it, a woman cooks on a wood fired stove under the street lights.
The main characters in the composition.
The Lords of the City are the turbaned figure, clutching a bag filled with British, US and Nigerian currencies,
as well as the Christian Cross and Muslim prayer beads, as if to announce the symbiosis of faith and capital.
Following. This is the who this fellow who might be the alhaja.
Judging by the high heeled. You know, supposedly lady's footwear.
Is our tycoon in business suit. And further back a Christian cleric.
But they are right. What? Procession away from the crowd is blocked by a seated beggar.
Overseeing this motley crowd is an imperious vulture on a lamp post.
In the distance, another sits on a skeletal structure dominating the landscape.
The road to this Abuja is perilous.
The city itself is schizophrenic. Place of poverty, suffering and death.
A citadel of corruption and fast money.
It is the city of economic and political vultures.
We discuss exhibitions and artworks focussed as they were on sociopolitical commentary.
Had everything to do with the five year period that straddled the raucous,
massively rigged second federal elections in 1983 that returned Shehu Shagari to power.
The bloodless coup that ushered in the draconian regime of General Muhammadu Buhari.
And he's no nonsense sidekick to Andy Diamond later that year.
And another coup in 1985 led by General Ibrahim Babangida, who with his beguiling, dimpled smile,
declared a new order shorn of the brutality of the Buhari regime, notorious for its War Against Indiscipline programme that had been designed.
To straighten out the unruly and insubordinate citizenry.
This was the Nigeria that Chinua Achebe. Published about in his incendiary pamphlet, The Trouble with Nigeria in 1983.
With his characteristic directness, Achebe catalogued the evils that had beset the country right from the colonial period,
but especially since independence, not the least of which were corruption, tribalism, mediocrity, political opportunism, social injustice and all.
And he blamed all this on the absence of visionary non-self serving just leadership.
The trouble with Nigeria, a nation of perpetual, perpetual potentiality, but in reality is sorry, disappointment, Achebe argued,
had everything to do with the malfeasance of these arrogant, big men in military uniform or in the tycoon's billowing agbada.
It is also the same Nigeria that the poet Nielsen DeRay, a contemporary of Dutch, who devoted his collection of poetry songs from the marketplace,
also published in 1983, in which one of the poems, Cyrene, called on out the obnoxious power play of the Big Man.
Cyrene, Cyrene, Cyrene.
Police acrobats on bikes wielding whips and with consummate dispatch.
The roads must be cleared at once, for which worthy ruler ever she has the right way.
Cyrene, Cyrene Cyrene.
The languorous convoy of power and power brokers conditioned in messages back far, very far from the maddening crowd.
Four poems like this, which Ocean Direct continued to publish in national newspapers throughout the eighties and after,
and for which he gained national renown. He was frequently visited by state security to explain their meaning and to whom they referred.
About these encounters, Schindler later noted, with not so subtle sarcasm.
By that time I realise that the Nigerian security apparatus had become quite sophisticated, quite literate indeed.
Well. Add to the notion,
DeRay represented an important aspect of Nigerian literature committed to the role of art in the making of the good and just national community.
But where Achebe argued that the artist and writer, like the teacher, must educate their people.
About their pasts, with all its complications about the present as a political reality and about their possible futures,
all with the goal of building a better society.
Or shouldn't that be identified with the Bard or Minstrel, who, through his musical and lyrical art,
serves as the conscience and bearer of sometimes bitter but salvific truths of society.
Who shared with you, shouldn't there be this idea of the poet minstrel as a social critic,
which in fact is deeply embedded in the traditions of many Nigerian and West African cultures?
And he did, you know, frequently demonstrated this through his drawings and paintings depicted are depicting the minstrel.
Armed with only his voice and his both.
The Gourd resonator or Oobleck.
Voila, the stringed bow. In Song of Sorrow from 1989, the minstrel loses his head in sorrow and as a single line.
By the way, an epic display of inspired dress manship shows that he is crouched on a bare floor.
But I wish to call attention to the figure on the right, for he is no destitute minstrel.
Instead, he's chiefly cap. And especially his itchy facial scarification, which until the early 20th century,
sanctified men and women who attained high social and sacred status in the EBO society.
These symbols, the CAP and the estimates,
suggest that his music and the truths to which he testified in his lyrics also serves
as his protective cloak against the vicious impurity of the big man's arrogant powers.
But why the gathering of critical voices that we see in discuss work and in that of his literary contemporaries during and after the mid 1980s.
The answer must be the coming of General Babangida in 1985,
widely welcomed by Nigerians yearning for relief from the Buhari regime's obsession with enforcing military discipline on the entire citizenry.
In his address to the nation on August 27, 1985, Babangida, to the cautious delight of Nigerians,
announced the repeal of the dreaded decree number four, that criminalised unpleasant publications.
Well, those critics are critical of the government and even rumours.
He also released politicians jailed since the end of the second republic, a move to stem the worsening economic crisis.
However, within one year he introduced the IMF Structural Adjustment Program with the attendant austerity measures,
thus supercharging mass impoverishment and collapse of the educational sector, as well as unprecedented brain drain.
And. The leg. You are one of Nigeria's most prominent journalists said to be working on a story involving
drug running that implicated the dictator's wife was assassinated with a letter bomb.
And in the international community, Nigeria had become a de facto narco state, run by highly placed government persons.
Moreover, after charming Nigerians with the announcement in his first year of an elaborate programme of transition to democracy,
he will take the country through a ridiculous process of deception that could have made a fascinating political thriller.
Saddling and postponing four times the elections initially set for 1990 until it held in 1993.
And when the results apparently showed the businessman Moshood Abiola poised for a landslide win, Babangida annulled the elections.
Apparently not ready to relinquish power does plunging the country into a crisis of unprecedented magnitude.
It is for these ornate political manoeuvres that he called himself evil genius.
Though Nigerians prefer to call him Maradona after the Brazilian football star's
Hand of God goal at the 1984 World Cup quarter finals between England and Brazil.
But is Babangida's reputation as a cunning,
equivocating ruler surprised many Nigerians who had not forgotten his declared commitment to foolproof democratic process in 1986,
or shocked others still enamoured by his affable public disposition or even by his killer.
Got to smile, wouldn't you?
Who had as early as 1985 seen him as a chameleon dominating the Nigerian sky with
three figures representing civilian representatives of the three main ethnic groups,
and in-between a disappearing mass of hapless citizenry.
The entire of his plastered plastered with thumbprints.
And in 1989, as the transition process heated up,
along with strikes by students and workers beleaguered by the structural adjustment economy Uday Chico's Inc was drawing.
What the serpent did not see depicted the general as a martial hybrid.
He sports a military beret, but half of his body is in civilian attire, the other in uniform with an epaulette decorated with manly symbols.
Combined with the snake whose invisible forked tongue is a symbol of defeat or deceit.
Lovingly lolling around the general. The image here is of a ruler whose utterance and action could not be trusted.
And if you thought of his political footwork, artful and his bonhomie benign, a close look at the badge on his beret,
showing two vultures guarding to amass seated figures signals the deadly consequences for the nation of his power play.
Let me note, as I'm sure you might be wondering,
that in deploying his work as a tool for sociopolitical commentary, Woody was not alone among artists.
And I am not simply thinking of other poets and writers of his generation,
including the previously mentioned assistant director or to de facto Ndiaye, the author of the dramatic work in Pidgin English or Ghana.
Tiff Man translated The Boss is a Thief or Festus Iyi, whose novels, including Violence,
Insistently explored the devastating impact of elite class corruption on the society.
Indeed, a few prominent artists of the 1980s joined struggle in his critique of the unprecedented institutionalisation of corruption in Babangida's,
Nigeria. But they are modes of address different.
Consider. For instance, can you do token the doyenne of painting at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria,
who until the mid 1980s generally explored cultural and genre themes.
But between 1987 and 1990, at the height of Babangida's reign,
created a cycle of allegorical paintings on the confrontation between an imperious king and the Republic.
In one of the early works from the cycle.
The King shares a joke with his general rendered in the Florid Brushwork and Polychromatic palette he developed years before.
We see the bare chested, powerfully built king with a self-satisfied smile,
holding a crown in one hand as he removes a rather nondescript hat with the other.
He solemn faced general in uniform holds a mirror for him.
But whatever the joke, we do not know. Another painting from 1990.
The King. Queen and the Republic.
We see the royal couple quietly.
We see the royal couple fleeing, expelled by a sword bearing republic.
The same couple that we had seen in 1988.
Moonlighting, oblivious of the crisis below them.
But if you did, you could deployed a lyrical what I might call lyrical realism and or do token pictorial allegory.
Although we bear a former student of Bowditch who at Soka who had gained national renown as a young and Greek poet and painter,
was more decidedly confrontational in his mode of address.
In 1989, he presented an exhibition of his work at the Syrian club, a block away from the barracks General Babangida's residence.
Alongside graffiti paintings on fibre mats, he prominently installed the work and the beast had the face of one.
I know a pen growing of an amorphous beasts, the head of which is collaged.
The face of General Babangida. Such was the magnetic repulsion of the work that a few journalists dared linger in front of it during the exhibition.
And media descriptions of it were advisedly allusive given the threat of the still existing decree.
Number four. Moreover, in the poem, A Gathering Fear, published in the exhibition catalogue of Graeber writes Generals,
surgeons, war lords who feed on blood, carrion eaters, pallbearers.
Ten God who rape where they did not so.
Your shrines are empty. Patriarchs of Crumbling Quarters.
Presidents for life. Founding Fathers who founded only their own states.
Your shrines are empty. But for all the fear that the artwork elicited among its audience and journalists,
Babangida's men never visited the show nor call the artist to explain the work.
To conclude, let me briefly note Ditka's experience at the last with the last dictatorship led by General Sani Abacha,
who, unlike Babangida, was reclusive, profoundly sinister but as fabulously corrupt.
A year after the regime judicially murdered Ken Saro-Wiwa, the writer and environmental activist Uday Tuku was briefly detained,
along with seven other professors at Nsukka and charged to a tribunal for sedition and of all things, arson.
Their real crime was that the big man friend of the dictator who administered the university at the time saw.
Their refusal. To be of good behaviour toward him.
A criminal offence. In any case, on release from jail.
Uday, who went into exile and on arrival in the United States in 1998, created a series of drawings and paintings, including Dark Days to.
Remarkable for its pictorial quality,
its lovingly and deftly worked surface texture with patterns reminiscent of the mural markings of Ebola painting.
But to the left. Within an oval space, several picked two graphically rendered figures of prisoners packed into the endless space.
White light bad from the window, a prison like window touching a prismatic line.
Dividing the interior and exterior space refracts into rainbow streams, bathing in the enclosure in gossamer glow.
In this dark night of the big man who seems to say the power of truth and light will prevail.
And it did as it was finishing this.
I know that works. In the Dark Day series, Sonia Bacha died suddenly in office.
Some say he was poisoned. He was Nigeria's last dictator.
In the first movement of his long poem, what the mad man said would the equal rights.
Truth. Is I a.
Is my ADC. Maggots or worms cannot touch me.
Truth is pregnancy. You cannot hide it.
At nine months. I am frog jumping cannot kill me.
I am winds can I succumb to a snare?
And you, you are. If Kilifi swallowed, I swallowed what?
Swallowed the elephant. There is no escape route for your lover.
Thank you.