Tate Modern’s latest show opens with a king - the dein of Agbor in Delta State, Nigeria. Stately and handsome, he poses for his lifesize photograph in copious red robes that merge with his red velvet footstool and throne as if he were one with his royal role. In one hand he holds a pressed white handkerchief, as if against the heat (or the cares of office: this dein is known for settling disputes). The monarch in the next portrait sits upon a throne of stone, carved with long chains of cowrie shells. A third appears surrounded by gilded replicas of the Benin bronzes routinely displayed in European museums (give them back).
George Osodi’s dazzling photographs of Nigerian monarchs, of whom the west knows so little, were taken this century. When the British colonised parts of Africa in the Victorian era, hundreds of tribal kingdoms were merged to form the artificial boundaries of Nigeria. Yet the monarchs of these subsumed kingdoms continued to exist, as they do today. These portraits are a record of the present but also the past.
Africa Through Its Own Lens
A World in Common: Contemporary African Photography presents Africa through its own lens. The art is exhilarating, dynamic, compelling, profound. It is a vital experience, just in terms of pure knowledge alone.
Here are girl biker gangs in Marrakech and gay picnics in South Africa, haunted Cameroonian landscapes and dense streets in the megacity of Kinshasa, Mauritanian migrants trying to reach the shores of the Mediterranean.
Lazhar Mansouri’s black-and-white photographs, taken in his village studio in north Algeria in the 50s and 60s, offer staggering glimpses of Bedouin and Berber sitters, some posing with radios, as well as villagers got up like Marlon Brando.
Read also: Experience Fad's Fine African Cuisine
Some of the 36 artists in the show are justly famous - Samson Kambalu (last seen at Modern Art Oxford); Fabrice Monteiro, shortlisted for the Prix Pictet; the venerable James Barnor, whose joyous and uplifting studio photographs of post-independence Ghanaians were shown at the Serpentine Gallery in 2021. Others deserve to be far better known.
Angolan artist Edson Chagas’s fantastical photographs are posed exactly as if for a passport photo. But each sitter wears a highly expressive Bantu mask of the sort historically favoured by western collectors. Just to continue the point, Chagas devises a fictional name for each subject - Salvador Kimbangu, Pablo Mbela - European-African hybrids recalling Angola’s past as a Portuguese colony. Who is allowed to travel, these images appear to ask, compared to which favoured objects?
Chagas’s images are in a gallery devoted to masks, and what they mean in Africa as opposed to Europe. Zina Saro-Wiwa is showing a film alongside, in which she herself appears in a telling variety of masks that make her both more, and less, visible as a contemporary African woman. It ends with a phenomenal shock.
In Wura-Natasha Ogunji’s piercingly titled performance video - Will I still carry water when I am a dead woman? - a procession of masked women haul heavy water canisters along the ground through a district of Lagos. Men gape; women nod, taking photographs in recognition. At one point, in this unforgettable video, a local woman carrying an equally heavy load of liquid in the form of a basin of bottles balanced on her head, passes the procession without being able to turn for a second to look.
The show’s thematic groupings are always judicious. The spiritual section features Senegalese artist Maïmouna Guerresi’s marvellous five-panel polyptych showing an old man in a high black hat reading Sufi scriptures to four girls dressed in bright red, perched on black blocks round a table. They listen, but only while turning pensively towards the greater realities of existence conveyed through the shell case and the sinister petrol can lying on the table.
Read also: The Story Behind Cachapas
Cameroonian artist Em’kal Eyongakpa’s extraordinarily dark landscapes appear haunted by shadowy feet, ancient objects and even, in one shot, a spectral body: the traces of war lying in the land like smoke on water. And there are haunted photographs.
Sammy Baloji’s archival images of Congolese labourers, some of them chained, materialise within contemporary photographs of ruined mines; the industry now as dead as the forced labour. Angolan artist Délio Jasse’s eerie double exposures superimpose period bank and passport stamps, and government letters, over 60s photographs of a colonial Portuguese family. You search for some trace of Angola itself and find only one single black African face, inevitably that of a servant.
I admired a strange conurbation spreading across the floor of a vast central gallery, composed entirely of dusty old box files. Grouped, stacked, felled, they form a low-lying cityscape, the architecture of modern Lagos. And one of these piles takes the shape of Independence House, commissioned by the British, and in which secret documents and photographs were concealed. Some of these boxes now lie open, revealing colonial photographs buried beneath the red and ochre soil of Nigeria. Ndidi Dike’s installation is mordantly titled A History of a City in a Box.
Photography is a means to so many different kinds of art at Tate Modern - massive Cibachrome prints, film installations, multimedia sculptures. A wonderful old-fashioned slide show, in the dark, sets up found photographs of 19th-century Africans in Victorian dress whose identity is sometimes hazy. Each is followed by a question. Are these really their names? What did they do for a living? What is the occasion? And, above all, are these portraits “evidence of mental colonisation” or did they challenge prevailing images of “the African” in the west?
Organised with so much insight, intelligence and sympathy by Osei Bonsu, Tate Modern’s curator of international art, this is a terrific exhibition. And what’s remarkable is the way that so many visions of such an unimaginably vast continent are united, here and there, in microcosmic detail. If only you look as closely as these photographic images encourage.
Read also: Techniques of African Jewellery
The woman carrying a great basin of drinks on her head reappears, in spirit, in emblem, more than once. And eventually in one of Andrew Esiebo’s colossal cityscapes of teeming Lagos, where pedestrians make their own walkways through the chaos, people park their cars on the highways and demolished buildings are propped up as shacks.
Anansi is a figure that appears in many African tales, mostly from the Ashanti tribe within what is today known is Ghana. Ashanti stories made their way to the Caribbean, and to America, during the slave trade when Africans from all tribes and peoples were sold into slavery. In this story, Anansi approaches the Sky King, or sky god, asking to buy his stories so that he can share them with others. Some versions have Anansi wanting the stories so that everyone would know they come from him.
The Sky King, however, does not believe Anansi can afford his stories, and states that whole cities, villages, and tribes have approached him with prices for his stories, but no one has been able to buy them yet. Undeterred, Anansi asks for the Sky King’s price. The Sky King insists that unless he can bring Onini the python, Osebo the leopard, Mmoatia the fairy, and Mmoboro the hornet, he will never obtain the Sky King’s stories.
Anansi wastes no time. He immediately sets off to capture these other animals, and resorts to his clever tricks to do so. For Onini, he asks to measure the length of the python’s body, but eventually tricks the python into tying himself into a knot instead, or ties up the python while he is unaware. He tricks Osebo the leopard into falling into a pit, and capturing the leopard either in his sticky webs, or after he knocks the leopard unconscious so the leopard can’t eat him. He pours water over a banana leaf to fake rain falling on a hornets’ nest, and convinces the hornets to take shelter in his jar or gourd, where he traps them. For Mmoatia, he makes a doll and covers it with sticky gum, then places it with an offering of baked yams. When the fairy eats the yams and thanks the doll, the doll’s silence provokes the fairy into thinking it has bad manners. The fairy strikes the doll, first with one hand, then with the other. With both hands (and sometimes the fairy’s whole body) stuck to the doll, Anansi is able to take the fairy to the Sky King.
With all of the Sky King’s requests captured and delivered, the Sky King consents to giving Anansi his stories, and it is implied that all stories ever told since then are shared because of Anansi’s work. There are many variations of the story, as it has been adapted for children’s books as well as placed in critical collections of folk lore. Sometimes it’s just details that change, such as which animals Anansi is asked to capture, or the exact details of how he captures them.
When Aso is featured in this tale, she is the one who comes up with all the plots to capture the animals for the Sky King. She is depicted as intelligent and witty, perhaps even more so than her husband, but her husband is the one that enacts her plans. But no one is perfect, not even tricky spider dudes. However it does create some interesting retelling opportunities. What if we retold the story where it was Aso doing the capturing, for example? Or what if Aso and Anansi work together to bring stories to everyone?
Anansi often takes part in other humorous adventures, such as when he dines with a turtle, or tricks a tiger that has been stealing his fish, and a whole host of other stories. Some of these stories were changed or created when the people telling these stories were forced overseas as slaves on plantations. For the Sky King story in particular, Anansi becomes a figure resisting a form of oppression. The Sky King is withholding stories from the rest of the world for no other reason than that he is greedy.
Anansi is a complicated figure, whose stories depict him almost simultaneously as a hero and a villain. He lies, traps, and tricks characters in various ways, yet many of the characters he tricks are in need of a moral lesson, such as earning not to steal, to act respectfully, or to stop telling slanderous lies about each other.
This erasure or disappearance of African literature, and Black literature in general, is certainly a problem, especially within the United States. With Black Lives Matter protests going on, and many corporations, businesses, agencies, and even publishing houses standing up for Black workers, artists, and authors, I thought it would be a good idea to do my own tiny part, and share a bit folk lore that too often gets overlooked.
I am eager to learn more about African folk tales and fairy tales, as well as reading retellings, fairy tales, and fantasy literature by Black authors.
WITH MUSEUMS CLOSED and galleries shuttered for months on end in 2020, a succession of new art books focused on Black artists provided much needed solace, insights, and deep dives into the practices of up-and-coming artists and historic figures. When exhibitions dedicated to Kamoinge Workshop, Tyler Mitchell, Jordan Casteel, and Yvette Yiadom-Boakye were temporarily closed or delayed, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, catalogs documenting the shows offered quarantine substitutes. Culture Type picks include monographs of Noah Davis, Ming Smith, and Bisa Butler, among the most-anticipated volumes of the year.
Finally, curator Okwui Enwezor (1963-2019), left forthcoming projects when he died last year. Two of them are represented among the Best Black Art Books of 2020: “Samuel Fasso: Autoportrait,” the first comprehensive monograph of the West African photographer, and “Grief and Grievance: Art and Mourning in America (from Civil Rights to Black Lives Matter),” accompanying the New Museum exhibition opening in January. The following selections are among the positive outcomes of a challenging year.
Key Art Books Highlighting Black Artists
Several art books have emerged that highlight the work and lives of Black artists. Here are a few notable examples:
- "Working Together: Louis Draper and the Kamoinge Workshop" Edited by Sarah Eckhardt, with a foreword by Alex Nyerges, preface by Deborah Willis, and contributions from Erina Duganne, Romi Crawford, John Edwin Mason, Bill Gaskins, and Sharayah Cochran. This catalog covers the first two decades with a focus on Draper and 14 of the collective’s early members, including Anthony Barboza, Adger Cowans, Herb Randall, Beauford Smith, Shawn Walker, and Ming Smith, the first woman to join the group.
- "Mark Bradford: End Papers," by Michael Auping. A conversation between Los Angeles-based Bradford and curator Michael Auping gives insight to the early foundations of the artist’s practice and the practical and aesthetic benefits of “painting” with end papers.
- "Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition," by Adrienne L. Childs, with contributions from Renee Maurer and Valerie Cassel Oliver. These connections and influences are documented in this volume, published to accompany “Riffs and Relations: African American Artists and the European Modernist Tradition.”
- "Jordan Casteel: Within Reach," Edited by Massimiliano Gioni, with a foreword by Lisa Phillips, and contributions from Amanda Hunt, Dawoud Bey, Thelma Golden, and Lauren Haynes. The large-format volume features page-after-page of full-color images of individual works in the show-portraits of young Black men with radiantly colored skin in hues of blue, violet, and green, portraits of people she’s met in Harlem, and more recent portraits of her students at Rutgers University.
- "Samuel Fosso: Autoportrait," Edited by Okwui Enwezor, with a foreword by Artur Walther, introduction by Jean Marc Patras, and contributions by Elvira Dyangani Ose, Yves Chatap, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Quentin Bajac, Claire Staebler, James Merle Thomas, Terry Smith, and Oluremi C. Onabanjo. The fully illustrated volume features new essays and scholarship contextualizing Fosso’s work and a conversation between the photographer and Enwezor.
- "Tyler Mitchell: I Can Make You Feel Good," With contributions by Tyler Mitchell, Isolde Brielmaier, Deborah Willis, and Hans Ulrich Obrist. Complete with an orange ribbon bookmark, the volume is an introduction to the practice of Tyler Mitchell, 25. solo show, the volume showcases Mitchell’s focus on the power, presence, and visibility of his subjects.
- "Noah Davis," Edited by Helen Molesworth. This long-awaited, generously illustrated monograph complements a major presentation of his work first on view at David Zwirner Gallery in New York (curated by Molesworth) with plans for a similar presentation at The Underground Museum.
- "Alison Saar: Of Aether and Earthe," Edited by Irene Tsatsos and Rebecca McGrew, with a preface by Judith Tuch, foreword by Leslie Ito and Victoria Sancho Lobis, and contributions from Evie Shockley, Christina Sharpe, Camille T. Dungy, and Harryette Mullen. The first major monograph of Alison Saar explores four decades of work, spanning 1982 to 2020.
- "Young, Gifted and Black: A New Generation of Artists: The Lumpkin-Boccuzzi Family Collection of Contemporary Art," Edited by Antwaun Sargent, with an introduction by Bernard I. Lumpkin, and contributions from Jessica Bell Brown and Thelma Golden. The handsomely designed, fully illustrated volume is edited by Antwaun Sargent. Both he and Jessica Bell Brown contribute essays.
These books not only provide insights into the artists' practices but also highlight the importance of representation and the ongoing dialogue between African American artists and the broader art world.
'A World in Common' - contemporary African photography at Tate Modern
The son of a father from Panama and a mother with roots in Barbados, E. Ethelbert Miller was born in the South Bronx in 1950. At Howard University, he was born again, “baptized,” as he once put it, in the Black Arts Movement. A first-generation college student, he emerged from those waters committed to Blackness and Black history as traditions of thought, philosophies in the making, and practices of perception: ways of loving people, knowing people, and being a person in the world. Blackness for Miller was not biological or thematic or absolute, it was about the “color of ideas.” Because of his formative experience at Howard, Miller has spent his life “in search of color everywhere”-to borrow the title of his award-winning anthology of African American poetry, which itself was borrowed from a poem by his friend, the poet Elizabeth Alexander.
At Howard, this search began with his mentor, the critic Stephen Henderson. He learned a great deal about poetry’s role in Black world-making and community building from Henderson. A self-described “literary activist,” Miller is a committed servant and administrator of Black institutions. For forty years, he directed Howard’s African American Studies Resource Center. In 2015, when he was dismissed from his position, Elizabeth Alexander wrote: “Generations of writers-myself included-have made the trek to see him as budding young creative people committed to the art of the African diaspora. His generosity is legion.” Since then, Miller’s generosity and commitment have remained steadfast. He continues to work as an anthologist, memoirist, blogger, editor, ambassador, and adroit go-between. As the host of several TV and radio shows, he has interviewed countless writers and scholars including Amiri Baraka, Toi Derricotte, Tyehimba Jess, Edward P. Jones, ,Tony Medina and David Mura. For a decade, he was coeditor, with Jody Bolz, of Poet Lore, the nation’s oldest continuously published literary journal. He also became a founder of the Humanities Council of Washington, DC, and served as commissioner for the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities.
Above all, Miller is a sustainer of poetry. An ardent believer in Martin Luther King Jr.’s Beloved Community, Miller demonstrates that to love poetry means to love oneself and others-and the world-enough to defend and remake them, and be remade by them in turn. June Jordan was another poet committed to King’s “radical revolution of values,” and Miller’s onetime lover and longtime friend. In “Grand Army Plaza,” her poem dedicated to Miller, and which Miller answered with a poem by the same title, Jordan memorably writes that we “survive our love/because we go on//loving.” Miller’s and Jordan’s poems addressed to one another are a record of their dedication to the project of making “revolutionary connections,” as Jordan defined them,
After Jordan’s death in 2002, Miller has continued to make these abiding connections. In “Some of Us Did Not Die: Remembering June Jordan,” Miller quotes a speech Jordan gave celebrating King’s life. “Is there reason for hope?” Jordan asked the audience. “Is there anywhere a trace, a phoenix of revolutionary spirit consistent with Dr. King’s preaching and true to the democratic, coexistent values of Beloved Community?” She answered her own question unequivocally: “I know there is. It may be small. It may be dim. But there is a fire transfiguring the muted, the daunted spirit of people everywhere.” As this folio attests, Miller’s tender, humorous, affirming, undeniable poetry burns with this transfigurative fire, calling us to remembrance and action.
Miller’s later writing-including, notably, his trilogy of baseball poetry books-often turns to the entwined histories of baseball and freedom struggles to work through what revolutionary connection means for those of us living through the crises of the present. As Miller explains in an interview with Krista Tippett for NPR’s On Being, language work entails the recuperation and defense of the vocabulary of Black freedom struggles, which sometimes seem so encroached upon, so co-opted, so appropriated and distorted, that the historical meaning of those struggles feels altogether lost.
At the same time, Miller’s language work creates soundworlds of play and possibility not typically part of the conventional narratives that understate the Black Arts Movement’s Caribbeanness and its ideological and aesthetic diversity. It’s no accident that one of Miller’s earliest elegies is for the Guyanese radical intellectual, Pan-Africanist, and historian Walter Rodney. Miller’s great elegies for Malcolm X came later. Indeed, Miller once remarked that the grounding events of his childhood were neither the assassinations of Martin, Malcolm, and JFK nor the heaving violences of Civil Rights struggle, but, as he writes in the unpublished poem “¿Yo soy de?,” the rhythms of a childhood in which “Puerto Ricans fed my ears sweet Spanish” and “my hips learned the language that translated to my feet.”
The seething presences of the African Caribbean abound in Miller’s work. Miller’s “Haiku Series” revisits icons of the freedom struggle-Martin Luther King Jr., Malcolm X, and Rosa Parks-then shifts to the anticipation, abstraction, and reordering powers of everyday Black life. This move from the familiar tropes of dream and deferral to the multifarious plenitude of “Black Reality” enacts a kind of joyous remonstration. Miller’s inventive use of the haiku form braids together the rich tradition of haiku by Black poets like Lewis J. Alexander, Robert Hayden, Richard Wright, Jordan herself, Sonia Sanchez, Alice Walker, Lenard Moore, James Emanuel, and Kwame Dawes, among others, with the hurricane, that quintessential Caribbean form.
As Kamau Brathwaite observed decades ago, the poetry of Black hurricanes swirls and roars across the “mighty curve” of the African Americas. From the work of Zora Neale Hurston and Miller’s friend Nancy Morejón to Safiya Sinclair and Joshua Bennett, this poetry urges us to re-hear, re-member, re-call, and re-sense the daunted spirit of people everywhere.
Scott Challener is a visiting assistant professor of English and American Studies at the College of William & Mary, where he works on the literature of the Americas. His poems and essays appear in Gulf Coast, Lana Turner Journal, Mississippi Review, OmniVerse, The Los Angeles Review of Books, The Rumpus, and elsewhere.
