1 00:00:00,180 --> 00:00:08,700 Good evening. You're welcome. Today for the fifth slate lectures. 2 00:00:11,400 --> 00:00:26,520 So today I take you to Nigeria in the 1980s and 1990 to consider the fate of art and the broader critical culture in 3 00:00:26,520 --> 00:00:37,770 the time of the two most repressive military dictatorships exemplified by the regime of General Ibrahim Babangida, 4 00:00:38,550 --> 00:00:45,330 the self-described evil genius famed for his photogenic smile. 5 00:00:47,160 --> 00:00:50,790 I focus on the work of the painter Obiora Hilditch, 6 00:00:50,790 --> 00:00:57,089 who also a well-known poet who during this period was at the height of his 7 00:00:57,090 --> 00:01:03,750 powers with drawing and paintings and poetry acclaimed for their lyrical power. 8 00:01:06,110 --> 00:01:08,960 And trenchant social commentary. 9 00:01:11,030 --> 00:01:20,150 I consider the fate of art and the broader critical culture, including the work of other artists at circa and elsewhere, 10 00:01:20,960 --> 00:01:33,290 arrayed against the politics and policies of a dictatorship that reads corruption to state craft and impoverished the citizenry. 11 00:01:36,080 --> 00:01:50,180 But first, let me acknowledge two people who have helped build the field and a scholarship in which only a single voice. 12 00:01:51,530 --> 00:01:56,710 First is my former. Teacher. 13 00:01:58,490 --> 00:02:02,810 In sculpture at an sukkah. El Anatsui. 14 00:02:04,660 --> 00:02:12,220 In the days when our school library did not have access to foreign art magazines. 15 00:02:13,270 --> 00:02:19,420 And that seemed made the point of bringing back these publications from overseas. 16 00:02:20,660 --> 00:02:23,930 And for my generation of students at SOKA, 17 00:02:23,930 --> 00:02:32,690 it was such a privilege to visit his home and studio to stay connected with the international art 18 00:02:32,690 --> 00:02:42,020 scene at a time the IMF Structural Adjustment Program punishingly limited our imaginative worlds. 19 00:02:43,730 --> 00:02:52,430 Second is my dear friend and colleague Salah and Hassan, who, more than anyone I know, 20 00:02:52,850 --> 00:03:01,700 has worked tirelessly to advance the field of modern and contemporary African art through his scholarship and teaching, 21 00:03:02,570 --> 00:03:11,690 but especially by leading the drive despite the odds to establish research and academic institutions. 22 00:03:12,890 --> 00:03:21,730 To support our nascent field. So to Al and Salah, I am thankful for your generosity of spirit. 23 00:03:23,410 --> 00:03:27,640 And with that, I turn to my topic for today. 24 00:03:30,730 --> 00:03:34,629 By every measure will be a prodigious tycoon. 25 00:03:34,630 --> 00:03:39,880 As Steve Dawes, painted in 1980, is an impressive work. 26 00:03:41,550 --> 00:03:50,700 Not least because the orchestration of complementary colours is in fact optically pleasant. 27 00:03:52,060 --> 00:04:03,010 Against a background that shifts from lower section of cloud, a mix of carmine leather in crimson and cadmium orange to the cadmium, 28 00:04:03,010 --> 00:04:15,880 yellow and orange top a cluster of blue green figures proud from the bottom into a tight, unstable bubble topped by a massive head. 29 00:04:17,450 --> 00:04:26,750 While the pictorial composition and narrative might not be easy to untangle, the title invites us to do just that. 30 00:04:28,580 --> 00:04:38,000 The flat and non descriptive red areas do not offer us much except for the stylised handbags suspended in mid-air. 31 00:04:39,740 --> 00:04:43,940 But it is the figural mass that holds the paint in subject. 32 00:04:45,200 --> 00:04:56,420 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. 33 00:04:57,620 --> 00:05:00,440 There might be others hiding under their clothes. 34 00:05:01,640 --> 00:05:11,660 A head with a tall hat in circle, perhaps indicating someone of a different status, lurks in the left corner. 35 00:05:13,790 --> 00:05:17,840 Woodchuck has taken liberties with his representational tactic. 36 00:05:18,500 --> 00:05:24,740 Besides the rapidly drawn out lines, dry brushwork and thinly applied paint, 37 00:05:25,460 --> 00:05:36,710 the figures are rendered in a way that suggests emphasis on the expressive power of the organic line rather than on anatomical fidelity. 38 00:05:38,540 --> 00:05:42,830 Except for one instance, there are no perpendicular lines. 39 00:05:43,370 --> 00:05:52,099 Rather, every movement tends to a curve such that the sinus lines of the heavy sacks create a visual 40 00:05:52,100 --> 00:06:01,280 cadence echoed by the two billowing arcs above them that seem weighted down by a large head. 41 00:06:03,210 --> 00:06:10,950 We soon realised that this head is that of a man dressed in a Yoruba Ashoka cap, 42 00:06:11,730 --> 00:06:23,460 his eyes hidden behind dark sunglasses, his thick lips holding down a large cigar belching distinctly red smoke. 43 00:06:24,360 --> 00:06:36,960 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. 44 00:06:37,920 --> 00:06:47,010 His stubby hand keeping his business bag in aerial suspension as if by some magnetic or magical power. 45 00:06:49,270 --> 00:06:58,210 Here is a man wearing the flowing agbada the dress of choice for wealthy and powerful men of Lagos, 46 00:06:58,720 --> 00:07:05,470 Nigeria's financial capital centre of maritime trade and then seat of government. 47 00:07:06,790 --> 00:07:11,550 This setting is indicated by the horizontal boundary. 48 00:07:11,560 --> 00:07:23,080 The one perpendicular line I referenced earlier of the cadmium, yellow and orange at the top along which boats and ships. 49 00:07:24,910 --> 00:07:34,360 The stevedores and even the fifth figure who might be the foreman are inside the tycoon's body, 50 00:07:34,600 --> 00:07:45,820 trapped within the confines of his bloated self, as if they and their labour constitute indigestible fodder to his insatiable craving. 51 00:07:47,710 --> 00:07:53,590 What is not in doubt is that by conflating the space within which the stevedores 52 00:07:53,590 --> 00:08:00,129 to the work and the fashionably dressed body of the big man with digital signals, 53 00:08:00,130 --> 00:08:06,070 the exploitative nature of the relationship between the tycoon and stevedores. 54 00:08:07,910 --> 00:08:13,490 But why take up this particular subject? In 1980. 55 00:08:14,740 --> 00:08:19,270 What resonance might it have in Nigeria of that period? 56 00:08:19,870 --> 00:08:23,230 And who is the real target of this important painting? 57 00:08:26,100 --> 00:08:35,520 Taken on Steve Doors is a reflection on the culture of Nigeria's post-independence political economy by 58 00:08:35,520 --> 00:08:45,240 non-sovereign big men to fund their profligate and ostentatious lifestyles at the expense of the exploited masses. 59 00:08:46,410 --> 00:08:55,170 It, moreover, speaks to the crucial role played by this class in maintaining the socio economic imbalance and 60 00:08:55,170 --> 00:09:02,700 regimes of despotic and inquisitive democratic governance overseen by the sovereign big man. 61 00:09:04,320 --> 00:09:10,560 Tycoon and stevedores is also significant as it came at a point when digital reached 62 00:09:11,160 --> 00:09:17,190 an inflection point in the evolution of this pictorial mode and thematic concerns. 63 00:09:18,150 --> 00:09:19,740 As I will show shortly, 64 00:09:21,030 --> 00:09:32,160 the previous decade had seen him examining and in the process refining what I might call the aesthetic and rhetoric of the lyrical line, 65 00:09:33,750 --> 00:09:38,410 effectively moving away from painting to drawing. 66 00:09:39,720 --> 00:09:45,750 Tycoon and Stevedores was not only his last major canvas for another decade, 67 00:09:46,260 --> 00:09:57,690 it marked his emphatic turn from years of probing the devastating impact of the Biafran War of 1967 to 1972, 68 00:09:57,690 --> 00:10:05,820 sustained critical commentary on life and politics of the post Biafra nation as he stumbled 69 00:10:06,390 --> 00:10:14,550 from the shaky Second Republic to a 15 year period of three brutal military dictatorships. 70 00:10:16,760 --> 00:10:24,590 In considering Digitas work as I do today, let me note two important topics that it allows me to probe. 71 00:10:25,820 --> 00:10:32,660 First, it affords me the opportunity to address the art historical problem of distinguishing 72 00:10:32,660 --> 00:10:37,310 the modern and the contemporary that I raised in my introductory lecture. 73 00:10:38,480 --> 00:10:46,760 For while it takes as its starting point the cultural identity focus of the independence decade modernists. 74 00:10:47,360 --> 00:10:56,870 It is not so much in the service of a positive mystic production of national culture as engaged in an 75 00:10:56,870 --> 00:11:04,700 insistent commentary on the malfeasance of post-colonial governmentality and its debilitating aftermath. 76 00:11:05,930 --> 00:11:09,770 Secondly, it allows me to examine the modes of address. 77 00:11:09,770 --> 00:11:16,730 That is the rhetorical devices he and other Nigerian artists deployed to speak 78 00:11:17,480 --> 00:11:22,520 to the terrors and depredations of the sovereign and the everyday big man. 79 00:11:25,240 --> 00:11:32,469 But let me begin with a brief recounting of Ditka's work leading up to 1980 and the historical 80 00:11:32,470 --> 00:11:41,140 context of the critical tone represented by tycoon and stevedores and similar work from that period. 81 00:11:45,800 --> 00:12:00,070 When Nigeria. With 250 ethnic groups and more than 500 Indigenous languages gained political independence from Britain in 1960. 82 00:12:00,820 --> 00:12:07,600 The reality of its demographic, cultural and structural complexities soon became apparent. 83 00:12:08,760 --> 00:12:15,900 Its parliamentary system proved inadequate to manage the pressures of ethnic nationalisms. 84 00:12:16,500 --> 00:12:20,250 And in in 1966 in 1966, 85 00:12:20,970 --> 00:12:29,430 a group of young army officers with revolutionary ambitions carried out an unsuccessful bloody coup 86 00:12:30,540 --> 00:12:37,560 that exerted enormous stress on the already weak ties that bound the country's constitution groups. 87 00:12:38,890 --> 00:12:49,900 A pogrom against eastern Nigerians resident in the northern region led to the secession of the East as a Republic of Biafra in 1967, 88 00:12:50,470 --> 00:12:53,500 inevitably leading to the Civil War, 89 00:12:53,890 --> 00:13:04,510 in which up to 2 million children may have died due to starvation policy of the Nigerian government and their European supporters. 90 00:13:05,850 --> 00:13:19,600 Déja vu. Only 21 at the onset of the war witnessed the devastation of that moment in scores of drawings and paintings. 91 00:13:21,140 --> 00:13:29,990 Haunting images of bombed out homes and their masses to children and traumatised populations produced 92 00:13:29,990 --> 00:13:39,050 behind the front lines might be the most comprehensive perspective on the impact of that war by any artist. 93 00:13:41,060 --> 00:13:51,920 In the following years after the defeat of Biafra war, refugees persisted as a theme in his work, 94 00:13:52,340 --> 00:13:57,350 even even as he explored new modalities of image making. 95 00:13:58,160 --> 00:14:07,010 From the realism of the earlier period to the later work, inspired by the aesthetics and ethic of the line. 96 00:14:08,900 --> 00:14:19,459 In fact, you ditch all. And his dual emphases on is social vision, initially forged by the experience of war alone, 97 00:14:19,460 --> 00:14:33,320 the rigorous investigation of and faith in the expressive and symbolic power of the organic line points the way independence, 98 00:14:33,780 --> 00:14:40,340 post-independence political crisis might have fundamentally changed his relationship 99 00:14:40,700 --> 00:14:47,360 with and connection to the national culture orientation of the modernists, 100 00:14:48,380 --> 00:14:55,550 such as his teacher, Usha Och. In 1961, 101 00:14:55,550 --> 00:15:06,890 Utah kicker with whom Ibrahim El Salahi and others participated in the embarrassing club that 102 00:15:06,890 --> 00:15:15,170 I mentioned in my previous lecture began his first experiments with Ebola body drawing, 103 00:15:15,170 --> 00:15:24,830 inspired by his theory of natural synthesis, which called for, as did the Khartoum School. 104 00:15:25,460 --> 00:15:35,270 Combining the formal resources of Western and African artistic traditions in order to develop a new postcolonial modern art. 105 00:15:36,690 --> 00:15:42,390 A competent poet himself. Okay. Examined the structural. 106 00:15:44,390 --> 00:15:49,610 And lyrical equivalencies between Abel's folk song and woolly drawing, 107 00:15:49,820 --> 00:16:00,800 and sought to reaffirm this transmedia connection in subsequent work for which he will gain national and international attention. 108 00:16:03,910 --> 00:16:10,150 In the mid 1960s, Uday met Och and soon began his own research. 109 00:16:13,370 --> 00:16:14,900 On evil art. 110 00:16:16,740 --> 00:16:27,930 With his exceptional draughtsmanship and sophisticated poetic sensibility, he advanced with unparalleled intellectual and technical rigour, 111 00:16:28,560 --> 00:16:38,880 the formal properties of early drawing, which resulted in the visual poetry that his drawing would become. 112 00:16:39,510 --> 00:16:49,700 By the late 1970s. Woodchuck also became familiar with the work of Christopher Okigbo that great. 113 00:16:51,680 --> 00:16:58,550 A poet whose work impacted Woody tremendously. 114 00:17:00,030 --> 00:17:04,380 Well, Keeble was extra ordinary. Poet. 115 00:17:05,770 --> 00:17:18,879 Known as much for his astonishing sampling of world poetic traditions from the Greek tragedian and Virgil to the Victorian Gerald Manley Hopkins 116 00:17:18,880 --> 00:17:34,690 and the modernists Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot from the same bottles from the Symbolists Mallarmé to the Senegalese Négritude poet Leopold Senghor. 117 00:17:36,370 --> 00:17:49,390 Okigbo equally mined African poetry from the ajala of the Yoruba hunters to Akan and Igbo elegiac drumming and dirge performances. 118 00:17:50,530 --> 00:18:05,410 Indeed, because of its layered allusions, its refusal of easy or even reliable interpretation or keyboard's poetry is unquestionably post symbolist. 119 00:18:05,440 --> 00:18:13,900 Yet, because of the level of condensation, suturing and collaging of words and phrases, 120 00:18:14,590 --> 00:18:24,819 it is equally formalist for the reader is often left in awe of the texture and sound of words, 121 00:18:24,820 --> 00:18:29,920 as well as by the silences that hold them in lyrical balance. 122 00:18:30,670 --> 00:18:41,020 In fact, it is the expressive abstraction in the service of poetic lyricism that made Okigbo think of 123 00:18:41,020 --> 00:18:49,330 his poetry as primarily an excursion into musical composition by means of textual ordering. 124 00:18:51,240 --> 00:18:52,460 Those. Whereas Och, 125 00:18:52,530 --> 00:19:02,910 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. 126 00:19:03,840 --> 00:19:11,340 The sheer force of Iqbal's lyrical formalism and symbolism opened up for digital, 127 00:19:11,730 --> 00:19:26,370 the possibility of imagining drawing as a set of complex operations that depends on the dynamic balance of legible or meaningful form and evocative, 128 00:19:26,490 --> 00:19:29,760 yet subjective graphics. Partial gestures. 129 00:19:31,410 --> 00:19:37,610 Okigbo, in other words, allowed Uday to go to sea, drawing as a form of poetic utterance. 130 00:19:38,030 --> 00:19:46,159 That is an expressive statement that does not so much aspire to the realism of academic prose, 131 00:19:46,160 --> 00:19:56,840 drawing as perpetually defer the resolution of the tension between rigorous formalism and layered symbolism. 132 00:19:58,740 --> 00:20:07,800 Aquino's poetry helped you realise that the graphic line drawings most pervasive element. 133 00:20:09,110 --> 00:20:21,620 Can be a potent bearer of meaning and that it can excite our senses through symphonic evocation and allusions to colour sound texture. 134 00:20:22,370 --> 00:20:31,129 In other words, he settled on the deliberate and intuitive deployment of his technical resources towards the formal 135 00:20:31,130 --> 00:20:39,890 refinement of pictorial elements until they approximate the lyrical abstraction of music and poetry. 136 00:20:41,750 --> 00:20:47,060 A third element of Okigbo is poetry evident in his last collection of poems, 137 00:20:48,200 --> 00:20:57,679 Path of Thunder is his deployment of his work to analyse the Nigerian crisis and prognosticate 138 00:20:57,680 --> 00:21:04,820 on its devastating consequences before the war in which he died fighting for Biafra. 139 00:21:06,750 --> 00:21:12,360 I would argue that this willingness to draw on the expressive power of poetry for 140 00:21:12,360 --> 00:21:19,650 sociopolitical engagement is instrumental to the formation of indigenous art and politics. 141 00:21:21,730 --> 00:21:30,100 When the war ended in 1970, Uday returned to Sooka, where he submitted his thesis in 1972, 142 00:21:30,580 --> 00:21:41,410 in which he documented only mural art and analysed its elements, compositional and design characteristics. 143 00:21:43,050 --> 00:21:48,210 Here's how he described his understanding of early in 1998. 144 00:21:50,090 --> 00:21:59,780 An analysis of Igbo drawing and painting reveals that space line pattern, brevity and spontaneity. 145 00:22:01,180 --> 00:22:05,170 Seem to be the pillars on which the whole tradition rests. 146 00:22:06,190 --> 00:22:14,620 It is these same qualities that I strive both intuitively and intellectually to assimilate in my work. 147 00:22:16,390 --> 00:22:25,210 The art historian and artist Nyarko, who also taught at Sooka, put it in a more poetic language. 148 00:22:26,080 --> 00:22:38,110 According to him, only at its best is the rhythmic tempo of a line, like a melodic note plucked from the piano thumb. 149 00:22:39,530 --> 00:22:50,839 Initially the line dances spirals into diverse shapes, elongates, attenuates, thickens, swells and slides, 150 00:22:50,840 --> 00:23:05,330 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. 151 00:23:07,640 --> 00:23:17,540 As you did, you experimented with these formal qualities of early the ambition of this drawing chain from describing the world in visual 152 00:23:17,540 --> 00:23:28,340 prose to creating alternative image worlds through the sheer reliance on the dynamic dialogue of line and negative space. 153 00:23:29,880 --> 00:23:39,660 The arching lines and decorative motifs in both his semantically abstract compositions or in highly simplified figural forms, 154 00:23:39,660 --> 00:23:46,260 all testify to the impact and influence of early design and pictorial sensibility. 155 00:23:48,160 --> 00:23:57,280 His post-war drawings thus constitute Uday chuckles inaugural attempts to create lyrical poetry with the graphic line, 156 00:23:57,820 --> 00:24:02,860 decorative motifs and flat pictorial space as his syntax. 157 00:24:04,180 --> 00:24:16,520 This process. Executed with greater focus and conviction, reached full elaboration by the end of the 1970s. 158 00:24:18,690 --> 00:24:30,120 Woodchuck was insistence on the expressive properties of the virtuosic lyrical line earned him substantial critical attention in 1981. 159 00:24:30,720 --> 00:24:40,560 For instance, the novelist Chinua Achebe described Uday Tuku as a poet of clean and eloquent line, 160 00:24:40,620 --> 00:24:48,840 whose clearness of vision is sustained by honesty and humane compassion. 161 00:24:51,410 --> 00:24:59,000 I have no doubt that Achebe saw the artist as a poet of drawing that is, 162 00:24:59,000 --> 00:25:11,720 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. 163 00:25:13,870 --> 00:25:21,730 Whether or not Achebe had read the articles essay titled Towards Excellence and Clarity, 164 00:25:22,240 --> 00:25:27,220 published in the wildly circulated Nigerian magazine the previous year. 165 00:25:28,060 --> 00:25:38,620 What is clear to me is that Achebe fully grasped the fundamental elements of the artist's work during that period that is lucid, 166 00:25:39,010 --> 00:25:50,230 eloquent, powerful, formal expression that, like the successful poem, is shorn of prosaic, inessential stuff. 167 00:25:52,070 --> 00:25:57,830 It's a bit more. All of us seem to have understood the articles work as engaged at that point. 168 00:25:59,230 --> 00:26:08,680 With inventive formal play, but also that it had attained the status of inspired utterance similar to keyboards poetry. 169 00:26:10,840 --> 00:26:17,770 But this raises a crucial question. Of what conceptual value is the clear, 170 00:26:17,770 --> 00:26:27,970 unambiguous and assertive line in Indigenous drawing about which he wrote in 1980 when he painted Tycoon and Steve Doors. 171 00:26:28,360 --> 00:26:37,150 Especially given that it does not produce unequivocal images that is easily 172 00:26:37,780 --> 00:26:42,640 apprehend symbol images of the sort we often associate with pictorial realism. 173 00:26:44,440 --> 00:26:54,640 It seems to me that the clean, elegant line, apart from helping Dick to stake a claim to only art and Igbo culture, 174 00:26:55,060 --> 00:27:06,970 as did his modernist mental chill cake, serves as a graphic manifestation of what he call clarity of vision and lucidity of expression. 175 00:27:07,840 --> 00:27:17,800 In other words, it is the assertive mark of the uncompromising and self-assured artistic imagination. 176 00:27:21,770 --> 00:27:27,670 I haven't dwelt at length with this matter of form and aesthetics and we discuss work. 177 00:27:28,720 --> 00:27:40,270 Let me turn slightly away in a different direction to consider how as the experience, if not memories of war receded. 178 00:27:40,720 --> 00:27:44,440 By the end of the 1970s, Uday chuckles. 179 00:27:45,640 --> 00:27:51,520 He increasingly focussed on the broader Nigerian socio political landscape. 180 00:27:54,720 --> 00:28:01,680 Few years after the end of the Biafran War, the victorious Nigerian government, 181 00:28:01,770 --> 00:28:09,990 led by General Gowon, benefited from the oil prices caused by the 1973 Arab-Israeli war. 182 00:28:11,550 --> 00:28:19,890 For a country that until then had not fully exploited the oil discovered in the Niger Delta in 1956, 183 00:28:20,580 --> 00:28:26,670 the 1973 global crisis dramatically changed its economic profile and future. 184 00:28:28,990 --> 00:28:41,200 And the regime went big, increased national spending ten fold and threw its weight around as an international power and leader of Africa. 185 00:28:42,940 --> 00:28:46,479 Gordon's regime splurged on civil servants as well. 186 00:28:46,480 --> 00:28:51,850 So wish he was ruling the UK right now. 187 00:28:54,930 --> 00:28:59,280 An impact also on large scale capital projects. 188 00:29:01,020 --> 00:29:10,500 But you are staking out in a coup d'etat that brought the charismatic Murtala Mohammed to power in 1975. 189 00:29:11,960 --> 00:29:20,870 Mohamed, an ardent nationalist stung by the failing national income after the Middle East war, 190 00:29:21,620 --> 00:29:26,300 decimated the civil service in an anti-corruption campaign, 191 00:29:26,990 --> 00:29:43,490 but was assassinated a year later, replaced by General Obasanjo, who scaled up what was already going to be an expensive national vanity project. 192 00:29:43,790 --> 00:29:53,690 And that is the 1977 Second World Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture, a.k.a. Festac 77. 193 00:29:55,890 --> 00:30:00,690 Despite that, the country's economic fundamentals were inherently weak. 194 00:30:01,840 --> 00:30:14,500 He threw open the gates for a global party for black peoples, staged a stupendous musical and theatrical performance. 195 00:30:15,100 --> 00:30:21,730 In the showpiece, magnified copy of a Bulgarian theatre. 196 00:30:23,110 --> 00:30:31,030 And it is said that General Gold loved the structure, the design, because it resembled a military cap. 197 00:30:34,230 --> 00:30:41,580 In 1979, the Second Republic stage managed by General Obasanjo's regime, came to power. 198 00:30:42,720 --> 00:30:53,220 Heralding new political class, an economic elite inebriated by a second oil boom caused by the Iranian revolution. 199 00:30:54,740 --> 00:31:01,580 Taking wasteful spending to new heights, hollowing out a supposedly wealthy nation. 200 00:31:03,320 --> 00:31:07,820 The newly elected president, Shehu Shagari, once in power, 201 00:31:08,660 --> 00:31:21,500 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, 202 00:31:21,860 --> 00:31:25,910 at one point, the world's largest urban construction site. 203 00:31:26,450 --> 00:31:30,710 Invariably worsening the country's economic fortunes. 204 00:31:32,460 --> 00:31:47,100 It is within this context that we make sense of the articles taken and Dawes and the equally poignant alhaja from 1978 as declamatory 205 00:31:47,100 --> 00:31:56,400 comments on this new class of non-sovereign big men and women who built their social power through corrupt wealth accumulation. 206 00:31:57,880 --> 00:32:06,730 The tycoon fattened by the Labour of the Exploited Longshoreman and the socially recognisable business woman 207 00:32:07,120 --> 00:32:16,419 who has supposedly made the expensive pilgrimage to Mecca and whose turban like headgear drips with ornaments, 208 00:32:16,420 --> 00:32:21,730 her hand and talent fingers weighted down by subplots of jewellery. 209 00:32:22,600 --> 00:32:26,590 They both cut an impressive image of arrogant wealth. 210 00:32:30,210 --> 00:32:35,940 The themes of woodchips exhibition in Nigeria and Europe during the first half of the 1980s. 211 00:32:37,100 --> 00:32:48,770 Are quite telling for their emphasis on the socio political commentary and critique of the big man's unregulated and corruptive power. 212 00:32:51,380 --> 00:33:04,970 In 1981, he presented no water that travelled to three Nigerian venues and in which we see remarkably elegant compositions that nevertheless 213 00:33:05,150 --> 00:33:16,220 dealt with the rather basic problem of lack of potable water by far segments of a nation supposedly awash with petrodollars. 214 00:33:18,040 --> 00:33:29,320 In one exemplary drawing, a discordant line of water pots, buckets and cans snake from the foreground to the horizon, 215 00:33:30,310 --> 00:33:40,270 a single delicate line rising from the middle distance, walking to the right, touching it dry. 216 00:33:40,750 --> 00:33:45,750 What a tap. Hovering above. The empty vessels. 217 00:33:48,830 --> 00:33:56,930 Following the testamentary posture of No Water Woodchucks exhibition of 1985, 218 00:33:56,930 --> 00:34:03,799 Rhythms of Hunger at the Commonwealth Institute in London referenced the impoverished man 219 00:34:03,800 --> 00:34:10,760 of the masses in an increasingly mismanaged economy run by military and civilian elite. 220 00:34:12,420 --> 00:34:15,989 In the works presented there and at other venues in Nigeria. 221 00:34:15,990 --> 00:34:25,380 During this period, two topics recur. One, a continuation of his critique of the exploitative and corrupt Big Man, 222 00:34:26,070 --> 00:34:35,399 which we see in drawings depicting the familiar cigar and pipe smoking big man riding a horse, 223 00:34:35,400 --> 00:34:40,320 the stomach of which is filled with destitute underclass. 224 00:34:41,410 --> 00:34:46,600 Or a group of them with the R chiefly and clerical hats. 225 00:34:48,410 --> 00:34:53,210 And the ever present tycoon and Alhaji to the right, 226 00:34:53,930 --> 00:35:04,970 all covert and perhaps even fighting for government contracts and kickbacks, but sullied by the muck of corruption. 227 00:35:05,780 --> 00:35:11,020 The hapless masses squished. To the right corner. 228 00:35:13,290 --> 00:35:23,100 Although Lagos was the country's economic and political capital, Abuja was the locus of official corruption. 229 00:35:24,570 --> 00:35:30,150 A rising city without industries or any meaningful, productive sector, 230 00:35:30,720 --> 00:35:41,670 but which readily bestowed stupendous wealth to contractors with only the right connections, and who are adept at the art of bribery. 231 00:35:43,700 --> 00:35:49,700 This is also the portrait of the city in order to close the road to Abuja. 232 00:35:52,750 --> 00:35:57,220 If there's any indication of a road to the future seat of government, 233 00:35:58,030 --> 00:36:04,530 it is the two concave lines one grazing, the artist's signature, rising to the left, 234 00:36:04,840 --> 00:36:17,140 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. 235 00:36:19,990 --> 00:36:24,070 An open truck stuffed with standing human cargo. 236 00:36:24,700 --> 00:36:33,130 Tons of the road. And above it, a woman cooks on a wood fired stove under the street lights. 237 00:36:34,930 --> 00:36:37,120 The main characters in the composition. 238 00:36:37,420 --> 00:36:47,020 The Lords of the City are the turbaned figure, clutching a bag filled with British, US and Nigerian currencies, 239 00:36:47,680 --> 00:36:56,380 as well as the Christian Cross and Muslim prayer beads, as if to announce the symbiosis of faith and capital. 240 00:36:58,390 --> 00:37:04,510 Following. This is the who this fellow who might be the alhaja. 241 00:37:05,140 --> 00:37:11,240 Judging by the high heeled. You know, supposedly lady's footwear. 242 00:37:12,770 --> 00:37:19,240 Is our tycoon in business suit. And further back a Christian cleric. 243 00:37:21,060 --> 00:37:25,740 But they are right. What? Procession away from the crowd is blocked by a seated beggar. 244 00:37:27,770 --> 00:37:33,200 Overseeing this motley crowd is an imperious vulture on a lamp post. 245 00:37:34,280 --> 00:37:40,310 In the distance, another sits on a skeletal structure dominating the landscape. 246 00:37:42,840 --> 00:37:46,170 The road to this Abuja is perilous. 247 00:37:47,040 --> 00:37:53,790 The city itself is schizophrenic. Place of poverty, suffering and death. 248 00:37:54,780 --> 00:37:57,990 A citadel of corruption and fast money. 249 00:37:59,240 --> 00:38:03,950 It is the city of economic and political vultures. 250 00:38:07,600 --> 00:38:13,510 We discuss exhibitions and artworks focussed as they were on sociopolitical commentary. 251 00:38:13,930 --> 00:38:20,140 Had everything to do with the five year period that straddled the raucous, 252 00:38:20,440 --> 00:38:29,470 massively rigged second federal elections in 1983 that returned Shehu Shagari to power. 253 00:38:31,030 --> 00:38:37,300 The bloodless coup that ushered in the draconian regime of General Muhammadu Buhari. 254 00:38:39,390 --> 00:38:43,950 And he's no nonsense sidekick to Andy Diamond later that year. 255 00:38:45,360 --> 00:38:56,790 And another coup in 1985 led by General Ibrahim Babangida, who with his beguiling, dimpled smile, 256 00:38:57,420 --> 00:39:09,780 declared a new order shorn of the brutality of the Buhari regime, notorious for its War Against Indiscipline programme that had been designed. 257 00:39:12,180 --> 00:39:16,770 To straighten out the unruly and insubordinate citizenry. 258 00:39:18,770 --> 00:39:32,720 This was the Nigeria that Chinua Achebe. Published about in his incendiary pamphlet, The Trouble with Nigeria in 1983. 259 00:39:33,980 --> 00:39:41,660 With his characteristic directness, Achebe catalogued the evils that had beset the country right from the colonial period, 260 00:39:42,020 --> 00:39:52,730 but especially since independence, not the least of which were corruption, tribalism, mediocrity, political opportunism, social injustice and all. 261 00:39:53,570 --> 00:40:01,880 And he blamed all this on the absence of visionary non-self serving just leadership. 262 00:40:03,540 --> 00:40:13,350 The trouble with Nigeria, a nation of perpetual, perpetual potentiality, but in reality is sorry, disappointment, Achebe argued, 263 00:40:13,890 --> 00:40:22,950 had everything to do with the malfeasance of these arrogant, big men in military uniform or in the tycoon's billowing agbada. 264 00:40:24,310 --> 00:40:36,670 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, 265 00:40:37,180 --> 00:40:49,510 also published in 1983, in which one of the poems, Cyrene, called on out the obnoxious power play of the Big Man. 266 00:40:50,970 --> 00:40:54,060 Cyrene, Cyrene, Cyrene. 267 00:40:55,500 --> 00:41:01,530 Police acrobats on bikes wielding whips and with consummate dispatch. 268 00:41:01,620 --> 00:41:08,400 The roads must be cleared at once, for which worthy ruler ever she has the right way. 269 00:41:09,240 --> 00:41:12,270 Cyrene, Cyrene Cyrene. 270 00:41:12,270 --> 00:41:22,260 The languorous convoy of power and power brokers conditioned in messages back far, very far from the maddening crowd. 271 00:41:24,480 --> 00:41:31,500 Four poems like this, which Ocean Direct continued to publish in national newspapers throughout the eighties and after, 272 00:41:31,830 --> 00:41:42,840 and for which he gained national renown. He was frequently visited by state security to explain their meaning and to whom they referred. 273 00:41:45,330 --> 00:41:52,230 About these encounters, Schindler later noted, with not so subtle sarcasm. 274 00:41:54,160 --> 00:42:03,160 By that time I realise that the Nigerian security apparatus had become quite sophisticated, quite literate indeed. 275 00:42:04,860 --> 00:42:08,939 Well. Add to the notion, 276 00:42:08,940 --> 00:42:19,590 DeRay represented an important aspect of Nigerian literature committed to the role of art in the making of the good and just national community. 277 00:42:20,430 --> 00:42:27,120 But where Achebe argued that the artist and writer, like the teacher, must educate their people. 278 00:42:29,080 --> 00:42:37,510 About their pasts, with all its complications about the present as a political reality and about their possible futures, 279 00:42:37,930 --> 00:42:41,230 all with the goal of building a better society. 280 00:42:41,800 --> 00:42:49,720 Or shouldn't that be identified with the Bard or Minstrel, who, through his musical and lyrical art, 281 00:42:50,080 --> 00:42:57,700 serves as the conscience and bearer of sometimes bitter but salvific truths of society. 282 00:42:59,090 --> 00:43:04,729 Who shared with you, shouldn't there be this idea of the poet minstrel as a social critic, 283 00:43:04,730 --> 00:43:12,200 which in fact is deeply embedded in the traditions of many Nigerian and West African cultures? 284 00:43:14,370 --> 00:43:24,450 And he did, you know, frequently demonstrated this through his drawings and paintings depicted are depicting the minstrel. 285 00:43:24,900 --> 00:43:28,890 Armed with only his voice and his both. 286 00:43:31,250 --> 00:43:34,520 The Gourd resonator or Oobleck. 287 00:43:34,520 --> 00:43:47,310 Voila, the stringed bow. In Song of Sorrow from 1989, the minstrel loses his head in sorrow and as a single line. 288 00:43:47,970 --> 00:43:58,790 By the way, an epic display of inspired dress manship shows that he is crouched on a bare floor. 289 00:44:01,060 --> 00:44:09,580 But I wish to call attention to the figure on the right, for he is no destitute minstrel. 290 00:44:10,000 --> 00:44:22,879 Instead, he's chiefly cap. And especially his itchy facial scarification, which until the early 20th century, 291 00:44:22,880 --> 00:44:31,700 sanctified men and women who attained high social and sacred status in the EBO society. 292 00:44:33,200 --> 00:44:37,279 These symbols, the CAP and the estimates, 293 00:44:37,280 --> 00:44:47,210 suggest that his music and the truths to which he testified in his lyrics also serves 294 00:44:48,260 --> 00:44:55,910 as his protective cloak against the vicious impurity of the big man's arrogant powers. 295 00:44:58,740 --> 00:45:10,560 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. 296 00:45:12,010 --> 00:45:17,620 The answer must be the coming of General Babangida in 1985, 297 00:45:18,730 --> 00:45:29,230 widely welcomed by Nigerians yearning for relief from the Buhari regime's obsession with enforcing military discipline on the entire citizenry. 298 00:45:30,680 --> 00:45:39,290 In his address to the nation on August 27, 1985, Babangida, to the cautious delight of Nigerians, 299 00:45:39,560 --> 00:45:47,300 announced the repeal of the dreaded decree number four, that criminalised unpleasant publications. 300 00:45:48,020 --> 00:45:52,760 Well, those critics are critical of the government and even rumours. 301 00:45:54,650 --> 00:46:03,410 He also released politicians jailed since the end of the second republic, a move to stem the worsening economic crisis. 302 00:46:06,540 --> 00:46:15,990 However, within one year he introduced the IMF Structural Adjustment Program with the attendant austerity measures, 303 00:46:16,890 --> 00:46:26,040 thus supercharging mass impoverishment and collapse of the educational sector, as well as unprecedented brain drain. 304 00:46:27,210 --> 00:46:36,510 And. The leg. You are one of Nigeria's most prominent journalists said to be working on a story involving 305 00:46:36,510 --> 00:46:43,410 drug running that implicated the dictator's wife was assassinated with a letter bomb. 306 00:46:45,980 --> 00:46:54,950 And in the international community, Nigeria had become a de facto narco state, run by highly placed government persons. 307 00:46:56,300 --> 00:47:06,440 Moreover, after charming Nigerians with the announcement in his first year of an elaborate programme of transition to democracy, 308 00:47:07,370 --> 00:47:16,790 he will take the country through a ridiculous process of deception that could have made a fascinating political thriller. 309 00:47:17,510 --> 00:47:27,290 Saddling and postponing four times the elections initially set for 1990 until it held in 1993. 310 00:47:28,760 --> 00:47:41,420 And when the results apparently showed the businessman Moshood Abiola poised for a landslide win, Babangida annulled the elections. 311 00:47:41,660 --> 00:47:50,360 Apparently not ready to relinquish power does plunging the country into a crisis of unprecedented magnitude. 312 00:47:52,070 --> 00:47:59,510 It is for these ornate political manoeuvres that he called himself evil genius. 313 00:48:00,440 --> 00:48:06,710 Though Nigerians prefer to call him Maradona after the Brazilian football star's 314 00:48:06,920 --> 00:48:14,210 Hand of God goal at the 1984 World Cup quarter finals between England and Brazil. 315 00:48:16,110 --> 00:48:19,650 But is Babangida's reputation as a cunning, 316 00:48:19,680 --> 00:48:29,250 equivocating ruler surprised many Nigerians who had not forgotten his declared commitment to foolproof democratic process in 1986, 317 00:48:29,970 --> 00:48:39,690 or shocked others still enamoured by his affable public disposition or even by his killer. 318 00:48:40,320 --> 00:48:43,360 Got to smile, wouldn't you? 319 00:48:43,410 --> 00:48:52,649 Who had as early as 1985 seen him as a chameleon dominating the Nigerian sky with 320 00:48:52,650 --> 00:48:57,570 three figures representing civilian representatives of the three main ethnic groups, 321 00:48:58,170 --> 00:49:03,390 and in-between a disappearing mass of hapless citizenry. 322 00:49:04,200 --> 00:49:09,180 The entire of his plastered plastered with thumbprints. 323 00:49:11,540 --> 00:49:15,770 And in 1989, as the transition process heated up, 324 00:49:16,220 --> 00:49:26,300 along with strikes by students and workers beleaguered by the structural adjustment economy Uday Chico's Inc was drawing. 325 00:49:27,170 --> 00:49:33,500 What the serpent did not see depicted the general as a martial hybrid. 326 00:49:34,830 --> 00:49:48,600 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. 327 00:49:50,280 --> 00:49:57,960 Combined with the snake whose invisible forked tongue is a symbol of defeat or deceit. 328 00:49:58,860 --> 00:50:07,980 Lovingly lolling around the general. The image here is of a ruler whose utterance and action could not be trusted. 329 00:50:09,270 --> 00:50:23,160 And if you thought of his political footwork, artful and his bonhomie benign, a close look at the badge on his beret, 330 00:50:23,820 --> 00:50:34,350 showing two vultures guarding to amass seated figures signals the deadly consequences for the nation of his power play. 331 00:50:36,330 --> 00:50:39,540 Let me note, as I'm sure you might be wondering, 332 00:50:40,380 --> 00:50:48,390 that in deploying his work as a tool for sociopolitical commentary, Woody was not alone among artists. 333 00:50:49,380 --> 00:50:56,010 And I am not simply thinking of other poets and writers of his generation, 334 00:50:56,010 --> 00:51:06,239 including the previously mentioned assistant director or to de facto Ndiaye, the author of the dramatic work in Pidgin English or Ghana. 335 00:51:06,240 --> 00:51:18,060 Tiff Man translated The Boss is a Thief or Festus Iyi, whose novels, including Violence, 336 00:51:18,690 --> 00:51:26,220 Insistently explored the devastating impact of elite class corruption on the society. 337 00:51:26,250 --> 00:51:38,639 Indeed, a few prominent artists of the 1980s joined struggle in his critique of the unprecedented institutionalisation of corruption in Babangida's, 338 00:51:38,640 --> 00:51:43,170 Nigeria. But they are modes of address different. 339 00:51:44,770 --> 00:51:50,500 Consider. For instance, can you do token the doyenne of painting at Ahmadu Bello University in Zaria, 340 00:51:51,790 --> 00:51:58,780 who until the mid 1980s generally explored cultural and genre themes. 341 00:51:59,620 --> 00:52:05,440 But between 1987 and 1990, at the height of Babangida's reign, 342 00:52:06,160 --> 00:52:15,370 created a cycle of allegorical paintings on the confrontation between an imperious king and the Republic. 343 00:52:17,140 --> 00:52:20,170 In one of the early works from the cycle. 344 00:52:20,410 --> 00:52:28,930 The King shares a joke with his general rendered in the Florid Brushwork and Polychromatic palette he developed years before. 345 00:52:29,590 --> 00:52:36,190 We see the bare chested, powerfully built king with a self-satisfied smile, 346 00:52:36,220 --> 00:52:42,700 holding a crown in one hand as he removes a rather nondescript hat with the other. 347 00:52:44,480 --> 00:52:49,520 He solemn faced general in uniform holds a mirror for him. 348 00:52:51,350 --> 00:52:58,580 But whatever the joke, we do not know. Another painting from 1990. 349 00:52:58,910 --> 00:53:02,150 The King. Queen and the Republic. 350 00:53:03,900 --> 00:53:07,170 We see the royal couple quietly. 351 00:53:14,040 --> 00:53:20,850 We see the royal couple fleeing, expelled by a sword bearing republic. 352 00:53:22,430 --> 00:53:26,990 The same couple that we had seen in 1988. 353 00:53:28,920 --> 00:53:34,770 Moonlighting, oblivious of the crisis below them. 354 00:53:36,730 --> 00:53:45,610 But if you did, you could deployed a lyrical what I might call lyrical realism and or do token pictorial allegory. 355 00:53:46,420 --> 00:53:57,130 Although we bear a former student of Bowditch who at Soka who had gained national renown as a young and Greek poet and painter, 356 00:53:57,760 --> 00:54:01,360 was more decidedly confrontational in his mode of address. 357 00:54:02,740 --> 00:54:13,600 In 1989, he presented an exhibition of his work at the Syrian club, a block away from the barracks General Babangida's residence. 358 00:54:15,450 --> 00:54:24,359 Alongside graffiti paintings on fibre mats, he prominently installed the work and the beast had the face of one. 359 00:54:24,360 --> 00:54:32,670 I know a pen growing of an amorphous beasts, the head of which is collaged. 360 00:54:34,060 --> 00:54:49,060 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. 361 00:54:50,150 --> 00:55:01,100 And media descriptions of it were advisedly allusive given the threat of the still existing decree. 362 00:55:01,100 --> 00:55:13,730 Number four. Moreover, in the poem, A Gathering Fear, published in the exhibition catalogue of Graeber writes Generals, 363 00:55:13,850 --> 00:55:20,239 surgeons, war lords who feed on blood, carrion eaters, pallbearers. 364 00:55:20,240 --> 00:55:24,230 Ten God who rape where they did not so. 365 00:55:25,420 --> 00:55:30,149 Your shrines are empty. Patriarchs of Crumbling Quarters. 366 00:55:30,150 --> 00:55:35,730 Presidents for life. Founding Fathers who founded only their own states. 367 00:55:37,420 --> 00:55:48,780 Your shrines are empty. But for all the fear that the artwork elicited among its audience and journalists, 368 00:55:49,920 --> 00:55:57,360 Babangida's men never visited the show nor call the artist to explain the work. 369 00:55:59,990 --> 00:56:10,970 To conclude, let me briefly note Ditka's experience at the last with the last dictatorship led by General Sani Abacha, 370 00:56:11,600 --> 00:56:19,160 who, unlike Babangida, was reclusive, profoundly sinister but as fabulously corrupt. 371 00:56:20,750 --> 00:56:32,389 A year after the regime judicially murdered Ken Saro-Wiwa, the writer and environmental activist Uday Tuku was briefly detained, 372 00:56:32,390 --> 00:56:43,070 along with seven other professors at Nsukka and charged to a tribunal for sedition and of all things, arson. 373 00:56:45,100 --> 00:56:54,370 Their real crime was that the big man friend of the dictator who administered the university at the time saw. 374 00:56:56,860 --> 00:57:02,620 Their refusal. To be of good behaviour toward him. 375 00:57:03,370 --> 00:57:09,850 A criminal offence. In any case, on release from jail. 376 00:57:09,860 --> 00:57:22,520 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. 377 00:57:24,830 --> 00:57:27,200 Remarkable for its pictorial quality, 378 00:57:27,440 --> 00:57:38,360 its lovingly and deftly worked surface texture with patterns reminiscent of the mural markings of Ebola painting. 379 00:57:39,800 --> 00:57:49,760 But to the left. Within an oval space, several picked two graphically rendered figures of prisoners packed into the endless space. 380 00:57:51,050 --> 00:58:00,470 White light bad from the window, a prison like window touching a prismatic line. 381 00:58:02,230 --> 00:58:12,280 Dividing the interior and exterior space refracts into rainbow streams, bathing in the enclosure in gossamer glow. 382 00:58:14,000 --> 00:58:21,920 In this dark night of the big man who seems to say the power of truth and light will prevail. 383 00:58:23,420 --> 00:58:28,460 And it did as it was finishing this. 384 00:58:29,420 --> 00:58:36,800 I know that works. In the Dark Day series, Sonia Bacha died suddenly in office. 385 00:58:37,250 --> 00:58:42,800 Some say he was poisoned. He was Nigeria's last dictator. 386 00:58:45,610 --> 00:58:51,970 In the first movement of his long poem, what the mad man said would the equal rights. 387 00:58:53,380 --> 00:58:56,760 Truth. Is I a. 388 00:58:57,740 --> 00:59:05,420 Is my ADC. Maggots or worms cannot touch me. 389 00:59:05,660 --> 00:59:09,290 Truth is pregnancy. You cannot hide it. 390 00:59:09,590 --> 00:59:14,919 At nine months. I am frog jumping cannot kill me. 391 00:59:14,920 --> 00:59:18,220 I am winds can I succumb to a snare? 392 00:59:19,450 --> 00:59:25,089 And you, you are. If Kilifi swallowed, I swallowed what? 393 00:59:25,090 --> 00:59:31,360 Swallowed the elephant. There is no escape route for your lover. 394 00:59:32,370 --> 00:59:32,850 Thank you.