AN ART HISTORY AFRICA BADLY NEEDS

Everlyn Nicodemus

Everlyn Nicodemus argues that a professional, well thought through and seriously analytical art history is what modern artists in Africa badly need as a map and as a backbone to their explorations. Because institutions and infrastructure still are underdeveloped and resources are lacking in most African countries, efforts and co-operation to develop a well researched art historical scholarship as one among tools have to be made in a wider context, involving scholars in Africa, in the diaspora and in other parts of the world, of course including the West. Considering the burden of colonial defamation, especially the imposition of a prejudiced idea that black Africa was a continent without history, which has been floating in a primitive time-lessness, what African modern culture really needs today is certainly not to get rid of an historical perspective but to have the historical consciousness – including that communicated through art history – strengthened and deepened by doing away with Eurocentric prejudices. This might be done by adopting a wider view. Six centuries of confrontations and interpenetration between parts of the world may have enabled an aggressive Europe to amass wealth and knowledge that happened to make the West into the engine of modernity. But both the wealth and much of the knowledge emanated from elsewhere, and the knowledge is today rightly to be seen as a global inheritance. On the way towards a great global convergence of what art as a human enterprise deals with, we should leave behind western discourses of being first and being centre. By studying how Modernism has emerged and developed in non-western cultures around the world, it is not the evidently triggering role of the confrontation and exchange with Europe and the West which finally helps us to understand things better but rather the changes and enriching new aspects produced in the process. Africa is no exception. First to write about visual production in Black Africa were ethnographers and anthropologists, who originally acted in accordance with the colonial enterprise. Too long they were, according to Nicodemus, allowed to dominate the discourse. The art historical discipline should be used consciously to tidy up the mess they left and still are leaving.