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Postcolonial Modernism

Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria

Duke University Press

COLONIALISM AND THE EDUCATED AFRICANS

THERE IS A DIRECT, IF COMPLEX, relationship between colonial politics and culture and African modernity and between colonial education and the foundation of modern African art. Thus my intention in this opening chapter of a book on the history of art is not to attempt a comprehensive history of education in colonial Nigeria and Anglophone Africa; rather, I want to sketch out salient ideas about and episodes in British colonialism, particularly how the encounter between the ideology and practice of indirect rule, on the one hand, and African nationalist visions of modernity, on the other, produced mutually antagonistic models for modern art in Nigeria in the first half of the twentieth century. This sets the ground for chapter 2, where I examine the specific theoretical and conceptual processes that catalyzed the emergence of modern Nigerian art from the ideological conflict between the colonizer and the colonized, as manifested in the work of Aina Onabolu (1882–1963) and Kenneth C. Murray (1903–1972). But this chapter also does something else. It sets the ground, sustained throughout the book, for keeping the evolution of modern Nigerian art on a parallel track with developments in the national political sphere. The objective is to make the reader constantly aware of the ineluctable if fraught and asymmetric relationship of politics, culture, and art.

It is eminently clear from contemporary texts that early twentieth-century British colonial administration was particularly suspicious of what was then called literary education—social science and humanities courses (including fine art)—because such education was believed to breed, in the colonized subjects, critical thinkers and "troublemakers" who constituted a formidable, even mortal threat to the entire colonial system. One cannot help noting the striking similarity between this view of the educated native in the context of colonial Nigeria and in post-Reconstruction United States (the period of the 1895 Atlanta Compromise). Consider, for instance, that moment in W. E. B. Du Bois's short story "The Coming of John" when the white southern judge confronts John, the black son of former slaves:

In their place, your people can be honest and respectful; and God knows, I'll do what I can to help them. But when they want to reverse nature, and rule white men, and marry white women, and sit in my parlor, then by God! we'll hold them under if we have to lynch every nigger in the land. Now, John, the question is, are you, with your education and Northern notions, going to accept the situation and teach the darkies to be faithful servants and laborers as your fathers were—I knew your father, John, he belonged to my brother, and he was a good Nigger. Well—well, are you going to be like him, or are you going to try to put fool ideas of rising and equality into these folks' heads, and make them discontented and unhappy?

What is certain is that the fear of the revolutionary potential of the educated native in post-Reconstruction America, as in colonial Nigeria, was at the basis of the official antagonism toward him. With hindsight, the apologists of indirect rule were, in fact, right on the mark in their distrust of literary education. This is so because, to the early nationalists, education not only provided the intellectual weapons with which to confront the colonial system and its political institutions; it was in itself a battleground for the long-term struggle to define the terms of modern African subjectivity.

The focus in this chapter on the politics of colonial education helps us appreciate the fundamental argument of this book: that the development of independence movements and ideologies of decolonization premised on the invention of a modern African cultural identity provided the basis for the crucial emergence of postcolonial modernism in Nigeria in the 1950s and 1960s.

This chapter prepares us to better appreciate my claim that colonialism resisted rather than chaperoned the emergence of modern art in Nigeria. I concede that this must surely sound heretical to many; after all, we know that Western-style art schools were established during the colonial period in many parts of Africa. I am heartened by recent compelling studies, especially the groundbreaking work by Olufemi Taiwo, who argues that colonialism resisted and ultimately derailed the emergence of modernity and its institutions—in fact, the very idea of modern subjectivity in Africa. His proposition is that if modernity is marked by the triumph of an industrial economy, the rule of law, and a democratic system, then indirect rule colonialism, given its economic and political priorities, was antithetical to these benchmarks and did not demonstrate the will to midwife African modernity. When he proposes that British colonialism used what he has called sociocryonics—which he defines as "the ignoble science of cryopreserving social forms, arresting them and denying them and those whose social forms they are the opportunity of deciding what, how, and when to keep any of their social forms"—to stanch the already substantial march toward modernity initiated by African and black missionaries in the late nineteenth century, I could not agree more with him. In fact, my task in this chapter complements this new way of thinking about the battle for African modernist subjectivity between the apologists and forces of indirect rule and their native antagonists, for whom the question of their autonomous agency was an inalienable right.

Indirect Rule and Colonial Education

In 1908, the maverick governor of the Southern Nigeria Protectorate, Sir Walter Egerton, listed his government's six administrative priorities, all of which were political ("to pacify the country" and "to establish settled government in the newly won districts") or economic (to expand land, water, and railroad networks). The goal of the colonial government, he asserted, was developing the colonies for profit; it did not matter that apologists of colonialism claimed, ad nauseam, that its object was to open up "primitive" and "pagan" peoples to European Christian civilization and progress. African colonization, as a popular refrain had it, was the "white man's burden." In any case, the government's economic motive and the moral imperatives of the Christian missionaries (already operating in the West African coastal regions before the onset of formal colonization of the continent in the years after the Berlin-Congo Conference of 1884/85) more or less meshed. However, this alliance was often riddled with conflict arising from misaligned visions, attitudes, and convictions of the apostles of imperialism and Christian missionaries. The colonial government's primary goal, as outlined by Egerton, was political conquest, euphemistically called "pacification," and exploitation of the economic and natural resources of the colonies. The Christian missions, by contrast, convinced of their duty to bring the Gospel and salvation to pagan peoples, combined evangelization through the church with Western-style education through mission schools.

By the turn of the twentieth century, with colonialism firmly established, the stage was set in the colonies for a clash, ultimately for resolution of the rift, between the gospel and government, between the Bible and the gun. The trouble, as Martin Kisch, a colonial government official in northern Nigeria put it, was that mission education turned the African from the admired, lovable "native" to the despised, disreputable "nigger." The end of this crisis, however, raised the stakes of mutual antagonism between the educated elites from the colonies and the colonial regime—a high-intensity drama that, in turn, laid the grounds for the independence and decolonization movements of the post–World War II era.

A century earlier, it was already clear, given the prevalent imperial assumptions in Europe, that the protocolonial administration favored education but only insofar as it was aimed at giving Africans basic technical training. The 1846/47 report of the commission set up by Earl Grey, Secretary for the Colonies, recommended that colonial education should give the Africans enough training to liberate themselves from "habits of listless contentment" resulting from their inhabiting a bounteous tropical climate. It also envisaged that such education should prepare them for serving in "the humbler machinery of local affairs." Although the report was specifically in response to the question of native education in the West Indies, it was also circulated among governors in the British West African colonies. Little surprise then that, a few years later, B. C. C. Pine, the acting governor of Sierra Leone, possibly influenced by this report, attacked the mission schools for providing the natives literary education, given their lack of a culture suitable for intellectual pursuits.

The Christian missionaries, for their part, saw literary education as a crucial tool of evangelization, for it speeded up the spread of the Gospel and European cultural enlightenment among the natives. Yet by 1865, at the very beginning of British imperialism in Africa, missionary education was already under enormous pressure. Answering questions from the Select Committee on West Africa, Reverend Elias Shrenk of the Basel Mission argued that the natives needed to learn Latin and Greek to enable them to read newspapers; the gift of such education, he suggested, ought to be seen as a reparatory gesture on the part of Britain in atonement of its sordid slavery past. The colonial government, unconvinced of the merits of Shrenk's apologia for missionary education, set its eyes on a different model of education for colonized Africans. Helped in large measure by the work of American missionaries influenced by the work of the African American educator Booker T. Washington, West African mission schools increasingly opted for industrial education, which resulted in the simultaneous retrenchment from literary and humanistic studies and instead supported, willy-nilly, the colonial governments' emphasis on technical and low-grade education in the era of indirect rule.

Indirect rule has a complex history. The best-known and the most influential model of British colonial governance in Africa, it is usually associated with Lord Frederick Lugard—under whose regime Nigeria was formed in 1914—and derived in part from the earlier ideas of the French ethnologist Gustav d'Eichthal, who advised the precolonial British Niger Mission against disrupting the Islamic society of the Fulani Empire in today's northern Nigeria. The mission, he reasoned, would do better to leave the Muslim Africans to develop in their own way, separate from the Europeans. D'Eichthal's ideas, well received in Britain, helped the colonial administration formulate the terms of its later political engagement with Islamic societies in the region. Apart from d'Eichthal, other important voices, such as the anthropologist and self-proclaimed imperialist Mary Kingsley, argued that African colonization must be based on the recognition of the role of African cultural institutions as well as the difference of the African. In fact Kingsley's sympathetic racism, built as it was on her brand of social anthropology, exerted tremendous influence on the development of the theory of indirect rule operationalized in Nigeria by Lord Lugard.

The problem with indirect rule's claim to preserving Islamic/African cultures and political structures lies in the colonialists' underestimation of the impact of their presence as political agents with ultimate coercive and judicial powers in the colonies. Moreover, Lugard's rule in northern Nigeria, legendary for its authoritarian excesses, did not reflect his supposed respect for Islamic culture. In its editorial in response to a famous 1920 speech by Lord Montagu, secretary of state for India at the British House of Parliament, in which he condemned the massacre of Indians at Amritsar, the Lagos Weekly Record drew parallels between official terrorism in India and in Lugard's Nigeria. The journal noted that Montagu's statement

could be made to apply to Nigeria particularly during the terrible administration of Sir Frederick Lugard, to wit: "when you pass an order that in the Northern Provinces all Nigerians must Zaki before any white man, when you pass an order to say that all Nigerians must compulsorily salute any officer of His Majesty the King, you are indulging in frightfulness and there is no adequate word to describe it."

Evidently, the argument for the preservation of Islamic cultures by indirect rule's apologists conveniently justified the systematic alienation of all but a few northern princes from Western education, thereby limiting the scale of popular access to political power within the context of the modern state. From their experience in Lagos and southern Nigeria, the British knew that uncontrolled Western education for the colonized, especially at the secondary and tertiary level, inexorably led to disenchantment with the colonial status quo and to the struggle for independence Given its success in stanching direct access to institutions of modernity by northern Nigerians, indirect rule seemed the most attractive bulwark against the upsurge of anticolonialism, as articulated by the southern educated elite clustered around Lagos in the interwar period. In the hands of Lugard, this system of government avoided meaningful education of the natives, and his critics in the Lagos press—his eternal enemies—never forgave him for that. To his critics, indirect rule colonialism, as Achille Mbembe has persuasively argued, was not just about control of the bodies of the colonized through spectacular violence; its less obvious yet more pernicious objective was disciplining the intellect of the colonized. If colonialism depended on systematically stage-managing the colonized people's access to the liberatory potential of education, the only effective bulwark against it would be sustained counteroffensive and contestation of the assumptions of colonial education policies.

The Educated African as Troublemaker

From the onset of British imperialism, the colonial government distrusted the educated native in unmistakable terms and was patently equivocal in its disposition toward the business of colonial education. More precisely, it preferred industrial education, which, apart from providing low-level manpower required to support the colonial bureaucracy, was less risky than literary education, which eventually led to the emergence of troublesome lawyers, historians, and social scientists who, soon enough, announced their disdain for the colonial system. While some outspoken members of the African elite in colonial Lagos condemned literary education because of its supposed irrelevance—because job prospects for those so trained were slim—others realized its importance in the establishment of a viable literate, progressive, modern society competent enough to assume political power from the colonialists. Lord Lugard, for instance, seemed to have confirmed his preference for agricultural and technical education over "book learning" in response to gratuitous anti–native education statements by two prominent beneficiaries of literary education: Lagosian lawyers Henry Carr and Sapara Williams. Moreover, as Benedict Anderson has shown regarding the connection between the rise of print capitalism and national consciousness, it is far from surprising that the emergence of a vibrant press in Lagos, signifying a considerable literate population, marked the beginnings of political and cultural nationalism in the colony by the late nineteenth century. It was an open secret, shared by colonizer and colonized, that support for and encouragement of literary and higher education invariably implanted the seeds of political opposition amongst the African population and was therefore inimical to the survival of the colonial system. Remarkably, this question of literary versus technical education and their relationship to the rise of the critical politics of the colonial subjects in Lagos was simultaneously played out in the United States in the legendary conflict between Booker T. Washington, who advocated technical education, and W. E. B. Du Bois, who famously called for the literary education of the black "Talented Tenth," on whom depended any possibility of racial uplift during the post-Reconstruction era. My parallel point—detailed in the following chapter—is precisely that modern Nigerian art developed from within an ideological context marked on the one hand by the work of African artists seeking a literary education equivalent of art training emblematized by Aina Onabolu's career and on the other by Kenneth Murray's insistence on technical art education for production of craft.

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Excerpted from Postcolonial Modernism by Chika Okeke-Agulu. Copyright © 2015 Duke University Press. Excerpted by permission of Duke University Press.
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