[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.
