HE Yemi Osinbajo to give the 3RD Africa World Lectures at AWI, Princeton, Nov. 13

Yemi Osinbajo, Photo courtesy, Mo Ibrahim Foundation

His Excellency, Prof. Yemi Osinbajo, the immediate past Vice-President of the Federal Republic of Nigeria, will give the 3rd Africa World Lecture at Princeton University on Nov. 13, 2025. Since his tenure in Abuja, Osinbajo, an ardent advocate for innovation as driver of African development and futures, has keep a busy international profile. One of his most consequential recent appointments is his role as the Guardian of the UNDP-supported Timbuktoo African Innovation Foundation. He is presently leading the international election monitoring mission for the presidential elections in Cote d'Ivoire this month. The previous lecturers were the Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, who gave the inaugural lecture (2023), and the Nobel Laureate Abdulrazak Gurnah (2024). To register for the lecture and for online access, visit the Africa World Initiative website. 

On the Louvre Museum Robbery

I sympathize with the people of France for the theft of several objects of great value to their nation. This is a terrible thing. I understand that these objects were commissioned by their past rulers for themselves and their wives, though they have since become part of their national patrimony. So, when French commentators say that the theft of these treasures is like the stealing of France’s soul, I get it.

Two things though.

First, I hope the people of France, in the wake of this national hurt, can now understand what if feels like to have national treasures of West African societies looted by French agents in the age of empire, just a few generations ago. I hope they (and their European cousins) can understand the hurt they caused the people of Asante, Dahomey, Benin, etc., whose entire national treasures they carted away and now kept in their museums for the delight of their visitors.

Second, I hope the people of France can now see the hollowness, or rather insensitivity of reminding Africans ad nauseam how unsafe their museums and palaces are and, following from that, why Europe’s great museums are the only institutions fit for storing and displaying the world’s art and cultural heritage. Two years ago, it was the British Museum, this week, the Louvre. Are these museums safe places to keep Africa’s and the world's captive treasures?

Anyway, I hope they return the stolen treasures.

We all hurt.

African art and artists deserve more continental art history and criticism

[From the Editor: Nka: Journal of Contemporary African Art, no. 56, May 2025]

In the fall of 2023, I was invited to Cape Town to give a keynote at a symposium held at William Kentridge’s Centre for the Less Good Idea. The subject of my presentation, which was in response to the prompts sent by the organizers, the BMW Art Generation, was what I believed then and still to be an appallingly low-level production of high-quality academic and scholarly publications in the field of modern and contemporary African art within the continent. There are historical reasons for this, such as the absence of art history, visual studies, and criticism programs in many universities and other tertiary institutions across the continent, which often have established departments of fine and applied arts. In Nigeria, which possibly has the highest number of MA and PhD programs in Africa, although studio art was established in several universities by the late-1960s, standalone art history programs at undergraduate level is still rare; at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, whose art department started in 1961, the first art history postgraduate student enrolled in the late 1970s. To date, relatively few of these postgraduates continue with art history scholarship as their primary focus. In other words, academic institutions on the continent are not producing enough professional art historians and critics who could build a robust field of scholarship in modern and contemporary African art.

But it is not simply a matter of universities and professional art history and historians.

In fact, academic art historians are only but a segment of knowledge producers within the art industry. Before the professionalization of art history, and before it became a discipline in mid-twentieth-century US and Britain, the practice of art history and criticism already had a long and distinguished tradition in Germany and Austria. And many key figures in the field worked outside of the academy. In a few African countries, like South Africa, Egypt and a bit later Nigeria, scholars, writers, and journalists with a particular interest in art published in newspapers, literary and cultural journals, and in popular media platforms. Their writings accompanied the work of emerging modernists in these countries. For sure, political conditions in the three countries were different at midcentury, with Egypt in revolutionary fervor, Nigeria newly independent, and South Africa in the stranglehold of a high apartheid regime. Yet, art writing in various media seemed to track developments in contemporary art on nearly commensurate scale.

What has happened is that art criticism and art history on the continent have not grown in tandem with artistic production. Take Kenya, for instance. In the 1960s, anyone from there and in all of East Africa wishing to train in fine arts had only one viable choice: the venerable Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. Today, Kenya alone has a handful of art and design schools, and nary a full-fledged program in art history or visual studies, much less art criticism.

Apart from the dearth of opportunities for formal training in art scholarship and criticism, informed discourse in popular and elite platforms has also not grown at pace. During the independence decade, with the new nations funding and promoting national cultures, a generation of late-colonial era Europeans still active in the continent’s nascent art industry, joined by young African writers and artists, enabled a fair amount of postcolonial art writing in Black Orpheus (Nigeria), Transition (Uganda), and occasionally in Drum (South Africa, Nigeria, Uganda), and Al-Kawakeb (Egypt). Daily newspapers and weekly magazines in Nigeria and South Africa published regular art criticism. One thing is certain: nothing I have seen since the early 1990s, when we started this journal, tells me that art writing on the continent, with the obvious exception of South Africa, has built on the promise of yesteryear, nor has it matched the exponential growth in quality and scope of art production.

And this was the point I made at the Cape Town symposium, apparently, to the displeasure of several of the panelists who argued otherwise. A particular claim made at that forum was that there are numerous people writing on internet platforms, mostly blogs and social media. Another was that my critique sounded like an imposition of Western models and value systems on African knowledge production. To them, all is well with continental art writing, criticism, and art history. I do not think so. For, despite the obvious pervasiveness of comments and debates on social media chatrooms and private spaces about art, such, with rare exceptions, have little influence and impact on decisions made by the artworld’s legitimating institutions—museums, collections, and the scholarship. And to the extent that most African countries have not developed these institutions, the success of their artists on the international scene inevitably depends on curators, art historians, and critics overseas supporting their work through articles, reviews, books in print, and online journals and sites. If continental knowledge producers wish to be on the driving seat; if they wish to “tell our own stories,” they must write and publish these stories in the available and relevant venues at home and abroad. Otherwise, others, increasingly attracted to the work of African artists, will.

As Chinua Achebe once asked: “A man who does not lick his lips, can he blame the Harmattan for drying them?”

***

In this issue, we introduce a new section, “First Look”, the first since the early years of our journal. This is necessitated by what we see as an opportunity to present the work of emerging or mid-career artists who might not have received full scholarly and critical attention in the pages of Nka (and elsewhere) but who we believe are prime candidates for such. In doing this, the objective is to raise awareness about these exciting artists and to encourage scholars, critics, and curators to take a second look and, we hope, see them as deserving of proper, in-depth study.

Our inaugural First Look artist is the Kenyan-born, Nairobi-based artist BeatriceWanjiku. I hope you are as thrilled as I am about her work as a painter. 

The War Against African American Cultural History and Art Institutions

Museum of African American History, Boston, MA

This small but respectable institution, Museum of African American History in Boston, has just been notified by the Trump administration that it will no longer receive federal funding, as do most museums in the US.

Two weeks ago, the President Trump announced that his administration has set its eyes on eviscerating the National Museum of African American History Culture, Washington, DC, for what his executive order describes as "divisive narratives that distort our shared history," If all of this is simply anti-DEI and not the barefaced campaign that it is to bankrupt Black and African American history and memory institutions and to erase the contributions of a particular group of people to the making of the United States, then why is this admin not cutting funds from these other "DEI" institutions that primarily conserve histories and cultures of racial/ethnic/cultural groups, including: * American Swedish Historical Museum, PA * Chinese Historical Society of America, CA * French Heritage Museum, IL * German American Heritage Museum, DC * Hispanic Society Museum and Library, NY * Holocaust Museum, NY * Irish American Heritage Museum, NY * National Indo-American Museum, IL * Philadelphia Museum of Jewish Art, PA * The Museum of Russian Art, MN * Weitzman National Museum of American Jewish History, PA * ETC? So, when they wield the DEI sledgehammer only against African American institutions, we must see instead a new war against America's original sin. We watch.

Sings of things to come: The era of US Big Man

I am finally moving to Bluesky

After many years on Twitter/X, and given the cesspoolthat platform has become since Mr. Elon Musk took it over, I have decided to move to Bluesky, the new platform. If you are interested in and want to follow me, here is my Bluesky handle: 

Featured in Princeton University's "Audacious Bets" Video:

This really nice video was recently produced by Princeton University for its Venture Forward: "Audacious Bets." Proud to be featured in this program and for the recognition of my work at the university.  

Full video: 

On Belgium's Kind Leopold II and the "Congo Holocaust."

In preparation for my seminar course on Kongo Art this semester, I have been reading new stuff and revisiting filed materials on the history of the Kingdom of Kongo, the Congo Free State, and the Congo DRC. And I keep coming back to the 20 years that did what 400 years of industrial slavery could not do to a vast land and its people.

Men with severed hands

I refer to the sometimes-called “Congo Holocaust” perpetrated by the Belgian King Leopold II (between about 1885 and 1905), which by some accounts reduced the population of the Congo by half. With the initial support of the US Congress, and subsequent approval of the European powers Leopold had claimed the Congo territory--ironically called "Congo Free State"--as his personal property at the Berlin-Congo Congress of 1884-85. Below is an excerpt from John Daniels’ 1908 comment on the 1905 Report of the Commission of Inquiry into King Leopold of Begium’s Congo Free State. That report was the basis for the successful international human rights campaign that forced Leopold to hand over the territory to the Kingdom of Belgium, which in turn colonized and voraciously exploited the territory until 1960. The Congo region never recovered from King Leopold’s crime.

“The [1905] Report of the Commission of Inquiry shows that the great underlying iniquities in the Free State are: first, the wholesale theft by the "State" of all the land except the merest hut spaces, leaving the natives landless in their own country; second, as a necessary concomitant of the theft of the land, the seizure of all the produce of the land with which the natives might and should engage in legitimate trade for their own betterment, and by the almost total lack of which they are rendered possessionless in their own country; third, the enforcement upon the natives of a so-called tax in labor (that being, as the Congo officials naïvely contend, the only commodity left to the natives with which to pay taxes) which is so enormous, as actually enforced, that it keeps the natives at work for the State almost incessantly, making of them at last slaves in their own country.”

John Daniels, “The Congo Question and the "Belgian Solution" The North American Review, Vol. 188, No. 637 (Dec., 1908), pp. 891-902.