The “Rediscovery” of Religion in Contemporary Nigerian Art History

Nick Bridger/ Sue Yoes

My paper focuses on the influence of the secularization theory of modernity (one piece of what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls the “historicist model”) upon the art historical narrative of Nigerian Contemporary Art during the late 20th century. Briefly, in this theory, which originated during the Enlightenment era, formal religion would not be a continuing part of modernity but should fade away, replaced by secularism and supported by science, as seems to have happened in post-Christian Europe and Canada.

While this degree of secularization has not happened in the U.S., a very different religious pattern has developed in Africa (and Asia). Since 1900, the numbers of Christians in Africa has gone from about 9 million to 360 million by 2000, according to Philip Jenkins (2002). The number of Christians in Nigeria alone is currently estimated as exceeding 40 million. This massive demographic shift of the bulk of Christianity from being white to non-white and from living in the northern hemisphere to living in the southern hemisphere, which has given rise to the terms such as ‘global Christianity’, is a phenomenon of world historic proportions. Consequently, as Professor Ogbechie and others have often reminded us that there are different modernities, so, clearly, African modernity includes a prominent religious (both Christian and Muslim) aspect, despite the secularization theory of modernity and/or the historicist model.

But our secularized Euro-American academy has but slowly integrated this new reality into their perspectives on Africa. In the relatively young field of African art history, scholarly work has conventionally focused on the traditional or customary art and, in recent decades, on the mostly secularized “Contemporary” practice which takes many cues from the secularized Nigerian university art departments and international art markets (London, New York). Few, if any, studies exist of Nigerian or African Christian art.

Inevitably, the question arises, how do we account for the glaring lack of scholarly effort on the visual culture of the 40+ million Nigerian Christians, or the other 300+ million African Christians during this last century? In the Nigerian literature I researched for my thesis, the Oye-Ekiti Workshop is generally acknowledged briefly, and then skipped past quickly, like an odd, momentary speed bump on the highway to a secular Nigerian / African modernity. Father Kevin Carroll, George Bandele and Lamidi Fakeye have been troubling figures for Africanists to categorize: are they imperialist agents, anachronisms, anomalies or Christian modernists? And, for many, this last term itself is a contradiction. But, this is not so, if there is a Christian modernity in Nigeria / Africa, despite being unrecognized in London and New York. Acknowledging the reality of religion in Nigerian art and society will, at a minimum, bring about important changes in the production and reception of this neglected art form, as well as reshaping the narrative of Nigerian art history, and, by implication, that of the whole continent.