The Time and Arts of Africa’s

Modernity
Emmanuel C Eze
Department of Philosophy, DePaul University, Chicago, IL, USA;
eeze@depaul.edu

For specialists in African arts as well as those with general cultural or

political interests in Africa, the Chicago events of the year 2001 must
include the Museum of Contemporary Art’s sprawling exhibition,
“The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa,
1945–1994.” Curated by Okwui Enwezor under the direction of
Museum Villa Stuck, Munich, “The Short Century” exhibited at the
Stuck from 15 February to 22 April 2001, the House of World Culture
in Berlin from 18 May to 22 July 2001, the Museum of Contemporary
Art, Chicago, from 8 September to 30 December 2001; and the Museum
of Modern Art in New York from 10 February to 5 May 2002. The
works on display are by some 63 artists, mainly Africans and African-
descended, but also non-Africans who work within as well as outside
the continent. The modern African artists are drawn from at least
54 countries, including the Seychelles. The artistic genres on display
are equally encompassing: painting, cloth, posters, political tracts,
photography, architecture, music, theatre, the novel, film and video.
The thesis of the exhibition is very direct, even blunt: the 20th century
ushered Africa into modernity, and the African artists included in this
exhibition are chroniclers of the continent’s modern political and cul-
tural emergence. Among the obvious observations that must be made
about this remarkable work, therefore, the most crucial are as follows.
This is not an exhibition of Africa’s “traditional” arts. If, for example,
a visitor is only interested in the “primitive” arts of Africa, the exhibition
couldn’t be more disappointing. Likewise, if one’s interests in African
arts or in the continent itself are motivated by a desire for the arts’ or
the peoples’ “non-Western” and “nonmodern” features, “The Short
Century” would also be a great disappointment. This, in short, isn’t
an exhibition for the purist: there is no suggestion of a primordial
originality—or “essential” authenticity—to these arts. Everything is
focused on and organized around the idea of the modern, and the

© 2003 Editorial Board of Antipode.

Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street,
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The Time and Arts of Africa’s Modernity 393

layouts of both the exhibition and the accompanying publications go

to great lengths to alert the visitor to this fact. The curator’s major
argument seems to be that even the quest for an insular and authentic,
“untainted” Africa is itself a very modern—also very African—idea.
“The Short Century” is, all round, a determined artistic celebration of
Africa’s self-conscious step into modernity.
In Paris in 1947, when poets Leopold Sedar Senghor, Aimé Césaire
and Alioune Diop—in collaborations with Jean-Paul Sartre and Pablo
Picasso—launched the Négritude movement, including the art house
and the journal Présence Africaine, they declared as their aim to “explain
the originality of Africa and hasten its appearance in the modern
world” (Diop 1947:1). “The Short Century” could be interpreted as
evidence—if evidence were needed—that the Négritude movement
was a success. Africa and its arts are original and, it is argued, this
originality is to be found not just in the “primitive” arts of the past but,
as “The Short Century” shows, in a modern artistic presence.
This perspective, of course, unsettles, among other things, the
expectation that the modern is always the “Western,” or the claim that
the ways of European arts and culture to modernity are the only
universal ones. On this question, the position of “The Short Century”
couldn’t be clearer: there are many paths to modernity and modern-
ism. While Africa’s experience of modernity may parallel, even mirror,
the European adventures—for example, those modern European
adventures manifested in the events of imperialism and colonialism in
Africa—“The Short Century” bears witness to Africa’s own inventive-
ness and originality in anti-imperial and countercolonial performances
of modernism and the processes of modernization. As Négritude
intended and “The Short Century” reveals, Africa initiated—on the
continent and in the Diaspora—alternative modernities. African artists,
politically as well as aesthetically, signify not only on their precolonial
and premodern traditions but also on the African experiences of
the brutal encounters with the cultural agents of Euro-American
modernities.
In light of the fact that Négritude was formally born in Paris in 1947,
it is hardly surprising that “The Short Century” chose nearby 1945
as a marker of Africa’s emergence into artistic modernism. Nor is it
remarkable that the curator chose to privilege this short century as op-
posed to a longer artistic vision of Africa’s modern one. Undoubtedly,
this is a version of the history of Africa’s adventures in modernization
that wilfully refuses to separate modern African arts from modern
African politics, and therefore equally ideologically refuses to acknow-
ledge any meaningful conceptual separation between aesthetics and
history. Though this is an ordinarily troubling ideological stance, “The
Short Century” must be admired for the steadfastness of its commit-
ment to this form of political art.
394 Antipode

The admiration is merited for at least two reasons. Given the neces-
sity to redeem, epistemologically speaking, the cultural and political
assertion in a universal context of Africa’s artistic “originality,” and in
light of the identitarian presuppositions evident in contemporary
African artists’ longing for national and transnational authenticities
in the face of mass and largely commercial postcolonial and postmodern
cultures, it is hardly surprising that there would equally arise, in an
exhibition of this size and ambition, a will to conflate—even confuse—
the otherwise separate demands of politics and art. The curator, Okwui
Enwezor, in fact, offers a form of justification for these epistemological
and ideological choices. The exhibition, he (2001:14) says, “seeks to
demonstrate” that “the construction of African modernity in the
twentieth century is inextricably bound to the defense and legitimation
of all and every sphere of African thought and life.” If this is the case,
then, it seems “unnecessary … to make an argument that does not take
the totality of this manifestation (political, social, economic, identity,
culture, etc.) into full account.”
How does art “account” for and legitimate all and every sphere of
life? Isn’t the modern presupposition against precisely such an idea of
the totalization of life from the point of view of art? These questions
constitute a challenge to Enwezor’s modern Africa’s self-conception
—which is also an artistic self-conceit.
As early as the late 1960s, Wole Soyinka had developed an elaborate
response to questions about why and how African aesthetics differed
from the Euro-American. On one occasion, he tried to convince a
British audience of the supposed cultural differences by recommend-
ing that it consider the following graphic metaphor: “Picture,” the
pre-Nobelite Soyinka (1976:123) demanded,

a steam engine which shunts itself between rather closely spaced

suburban stations. At the first station it picks up a ballast of allegory,
puffs into the next emitting a smokescreen on the eternal landscape
of nature truths. At the next it loads up with a different species of
logs which we shall call naturalist timber, puffs into a halfway stop
where it fills up with the synthetic fuel of Surrealism, from which point
yet another holistic worldview is glimpsed and asserted through psy-
chedelic smoke. A new consignment of absurdist coke lures into the
next station from which it departs giving off no smoke at all, and no
fire, until it derails briefly along constructivist tracks and is towed
back to the starting point by a neoclassic engine.

For Soyinka—and, it seems, the curators of “The Short Century”—

this is the “occidental creative rhythm, a series of intellectual spasms”
that, it is claimed, is radically different from the African—even,
apparently, a modern African—vision of the aesthetic.
The Time and Arts of Africa’s Modernity 395

The African perspective on art and the creative process, unlike the
Western “period dialectics” illustrated above, displays, it is presumed,
a supposedly exclusive and immense “cohesive understanding” of the
“irreducible truth” of art (Soyinka 1976:123). The truth in question, in
the case of “The Short Century” is, of course, the facts of Africa’s
colonial and postcolonial existences. Unlike Soyinka’s largely meta-
physical concerns, “The Short Century”’s preoccupation is decidedly
—even hyperbolically—political. For example, Soyinka concluded, using
drama as his prime example, that “the serious divergence between a
traditional African approach … and the European will not be found
in lines of opposition between creative individualism and communal
creativity.” He also asserts that the difference shall not be found
in “the level of noise—this being the supposed gauge of audience
participation—at any given performance.” Instead, the difference is to
be located “in what is a recognizable Western cast of mind: a com-
partmentalizing habit of thought which periodically selects aspects of
human emotion, phenomenal observations, metaphysical intuitions,
and even scientific deductions and turns them into separatist myths
(or truths) sustained by a proliferating superstructure of presentation
idioms, analogies, and analytical modes.” To show how this Western
view of the dramatic art was misrepresentative when applied to the
African aesthetic sensibility, Soyinka unhesitatingly returned to an
Africa source, in this case, a play he had witnessed at Ihiala in Nigeria,
“at its appropriate time of year … on a farm clearing”—not some
“itinerant variation on the same theme”!—and argued that African
arts in general, not just this dramatic example, always reveal a social
collective and cosmic “struggle with chthonic presences,” a struggle
whose goal is the “harmonious resolution for plenitude and the well-
being of the community” (Soyinka 1976:123). Curiously, “The Short
Century” is assiduously silent on this and similar, by now canonical,
debates about African “metaphysics” of art.
In fact “The Short Century” does not appear to have noted any con-
flicts of interpretation between a “traditional African” approach to art
and, following this logic, a “modern European” approach. It makes no
suggestion that a traditional approach to art and creativity could not
be extracted from Africa’s or Europe’s premodern cultures, or, for that
matter, from antimodern European or African romantic artists and
critics—the examples of Rousseau, Goethe, and the philosophical critics
of modernity like Heidegger, on the one hand, and bolekaja critics like
Chinweizu and Jemie, on the other, come to mind. Since the cultural
conflicts of the metaphysical points of view underwriting the idea of
the aesthetic are not a problematic of “The Short Century,” there is
absolutely no suggestion that the African “world view,” as defended
by a Soyinka or a Chinweizu, is a useful product, or even a relevant
frame of reference for considering the significance of this exhibition.
396 Antipode

Likewise, by explicitly anchoring the collected artifacts in the idea

of the modern, by consciously adopting black Diaspora figures (e.g.,
Fanon and Césaire) as historical critics, and, finally, by foregrounding
the artifacts over—in fact, without—the metaphysics of the artists,
“The Short Century” appears to be, Africa-wise, artistically at once
traditional and antitraditional, modern and antimodern. It is also
self-consciously politically as well as geographically ecumenic: the
perspectives are African, Afro-European, and Afro-American. Ideo-
logically, the arts on exhibition are to be seen as indifferently secular
and religious—animist, even Buddhist in inspiration, yet with ex-
plicitly Christian and Muslim themes. This form of “universalism” no
doubt reflects the historical condition of Enwezor’s prime object d’art:
namely, “Africa” itself. It is to this idea of Africa that “The Short
Century” lavishly presents itself as a fin de siècle witness.
But if modern African art could never be reduced to imitation of
African reality—if it must remain an ecstatic mode of existential and
aesthetic suffering and, above all, a philosophical interpretation of
life—then critics may well be justified in believing that “The Short
Century” is a work of curatorial representation that only reluctantly
accepted the burden of its intrinsic artistic mission. Or, the critic might
conclude that modern African art is always primarily a political art. For
example, by blatantly refusing to acknowledge the ontological fact of
an artistic detotalization and differentiation of life in modern cultures
—after all, art is not politics and not economic exchange and not
religion—“The Short Century” raises questions about its own, largely
assumed artistic self-understanding. The curator could, of course,
argue that neither European nor African nor American societies and
cultures are everywhere, everytime “modern.” It would not, therefore,
be remarkable if one asserted, all at once and in the case of Africa, the
modern and the traditional or the modern and antimodern, as in this
example. But even in this African instance, the usual opposition
between traditional and modern arts is not entirely without bases
in the social and cultural facts of life on the continent. There are also
powerful ideological and political incentives behind the equally stand-
ard oppositions of “Africa” and “the West,” even in those places where
the sociological imperatives of contemporary mass cultures and world
politics dictate other kinds of interpretations of the forms of relations.
“The Short Century,” curiously, refuses to accentuate in its rhetoric
the purely aesthetic dimensions—and the moral benefits—of these
African historical and cultural competitions among the spheres of life
on the continent.
The conflicts between “the West and the rest of us” as theorized, for
example, by African modernists such as Soyinka and Achebe, could
take many forms. For Soyinka, the conflicts might be about inter-
pretations of the “essential” versus the “accidental” as a metaphysical
The Time and Arts of Africa’s Modernity 397

and anthropological problem of the human condition, and the aesthetic

requirements of any adequate responses to this most important
general question of humanity. For Achebe, on the other hand, similar
conflicts might arise in the form of questions regarding, for example,
the epistemological statuses of supposed divisions between “truth”
and “myth,” science and religion, or mechanics and creativity. Even
where the motives for these conflicts over metaphysics or the element-
ary epistemological principles of artistic creativity were “merely” political,
the ideological overtones encompass significant cultural contests over
appropriate modes of aesthetic projects of self-retrieval (eg, autonomy
versus heteronomy, or internal versus extraverted frames of self-
apprehension) by European artists, too, but especially by citizens of
African countries that had—after decades of colonial rule and, in some
cases, centuries of cultural degradation—barely achieved constitutional
independence. Once the general, transcultural, and even transhistor-
ical nature of these and similar philosophical problems in the debates
of art in Africa is taken into consideration, it is not clear what to make
of “The Short Century”’s insistence that Africa’s modern artistic sensi-
bilities were shaped in a very short—though exemplarily traumatic—
fifty years of a century.
“The Short Century,” clearly, embodies and presents to the viewer
a series of ambitious claims: “[T]he processes of African independence
and liberation that began in the period after World War II produced an
epistemological change in the Western conception of the universal
subject.” This transformation in the idea—and ideal—of the subject,
it is also claimed, challenged and transformed “the ontological limits
imposed by European hegemony over African histories and societies”
(Enwezor 2001:13). A third and final claim, implicit but poignant in
the bodies of the exhibition, is, of course, the question about whether
the earlier European ideal of the “universal” subject was ever really
universal, or whether it was merely particularly European. In these
contexts, it appears commendable to presuppose that once the African
difference is recognized, once Europeans realized the errors of the
imposition of contrived illegitimate ontological and epistemological—
and, let’s not forget, aesthetic—limits on African and black existence,
then the truly universal dawn of the truly postimperial, post-raced,
and postcolonial universal African subject is indeed upon us. But
we know that this expectation and the schema are too simplistic and
hide a more complex truth: “The Short Century” presents us with
a showcase of Africa’s parallel modernism, a modernism that is at
once African and European in inspiration, with a will to transcend
the usual facile cultural and artistic opposition between “Africa” and
“the West.” In this re-collection of history, however, Africa and the
modern African subject remain, without doubt, sites of traumas of
modernity.
398 Antipode

On the other hand, while one easily understands that the African
continent was terrorized—culturally, economically, and politically—
by modern Europe from at least the fifteenth century, “The Short
Century” refreshingly asserts another, often hidden, dimension of this
historical fact. Europe’s modernity—a modernity that only too eagerly
presumed itself “universal”—was shocked in its confrontations with
an Africa that was equally enthusiastically presumed “particular.” While
most artists and critics choose to emphasize the Manichean nature of
this confrontation between the European Same and its African Other,
“The Short Century” literally shows that out of the colonial conflict,
thanks to the events of independence and liberation movements, Africa
has “emerged from, survived, and transcended European colonialism”
(Enwezor 2001:7).
The adversarial and idealistic voices of the arts in Africa’s anti-
colonial and postcolonial movements are very well captured in “The
Short Century.” The confrontational artistic expressions are every-
where evident. But also embedded in the structure of the exhibition is
a powerful will to disrupt both Europe’s and Africa’s familiar antag-
onistic aesthetics. The European perspective must take another look
and recognize in Africa a familiar alterity; and the African perspective
cannot resist this flamboyant invitation to reread modern Africa’s
political aesthetics and cultural history and recognize the processes
of Africa’s visceral incorporation into Europe-inspired circuits of
cultures—and exchange.
It is certainly possible to question, even on the strengths of the
forensic evidence amassed by this exhibition, whether or not Africa—
if we think more historically of, say, Algeria, South Africa, or Zimbabwe
—has indeed “transcended” its legacies of political and cultural
struggles against the imposed elements of European traditions. But
the force of will is there: the fact of the matter is the unmistakable
existence, in the artifacts on exhibit and in the overriding orientation
of “The Short Century,” of a longing to overcome a tiresome Europe.
This artistic and curatorial longing—provoked by, as it were, a yawn
that was in turn excited by modern European pretensions—could hardly
be impugned, historically or ethically, since the effort at transcend-
ence of at least the negative aspects of colonialism and neocolonialism
in Africa and on African-descended peoples is a project of independ-
ence and liberation that, simply, must go on.
Yet, a discerning viewer of “The Short Century” could not fail to think
of the necessary care that must be taken against all easy declarations
of “transcendence” of Africa’s antagonistic modern heritage. The
declarations, suspiciously, could mask a sense of fatigue on our part.
If it was not only “traditional” Africa that bore the mark of “modern”
Europe’s adventures on the continent—if Europe, too, and, more
crucially for the arguments of “The Short Century,” modernity itself
The Time and Arts of Africa’s Modernity 399

have been irrevocably marked by Africa—then we must demand

further forms of evidence of our overcoming—the overcoming of the
negative impacts of modern and postmodern versions of colonialism
—other than declarations that could be mistaken for an African
surrender. “Like the cracking of the slave ship,” it is argued, “the
relationship of African modernity to Europe’s construction of the
universal subject”—this subject being the paradigmatic historical ideal
of the modern—“is both a critique and modification.” It is said that
Africa’s political and intellectual critiques of, and moral and aes-
thetic challenges to, modernity thus constitute “a rip in the body of the
colonial text” (Enwezor 2001:13). Thus, it is asserted, “The Short
Century”’s oblique re-presentation of 20th-century European prac-
tices of imperialism and colonialism in Africa—practices pretexted on
the idea of spreading modern “civilization,” namely, capitalism,
Christianity, and “culture,” to “backward” peoples—must be seen as
both a dialectical critique and a transcendent “modification” of the
master colonial narrative. By anchoring its representational perspec-
tive around Africa’s “independence and liberation” movements, “The
Short Century” could then show the yoke of colonialism for what it
was: an epochal event that inspired and continues to inspire political
arts in Africa and the Diaspora.
Cautiously, however, wherever we suspect “The Short Century” of
deliberately suggesting aesthetic or political triumphalism, we must
not hesitate to refuse the invitation to such ambitious “independence”
celebrations: from experience, such celebrations are often as sym-
bolically necessary as they are realistically premature. For example,
does “The Short Century”’s critique of the modern idea of “the uni-
versal subject” go deep enough? Or is this, in fact, merely a modernist
African re-entrenchment of the idea of the colonial subject? The
challenge to projects like “The Short Century” must remain how
to critique—and celebrate—Africa’s colonial and, some would say,
neocolonial relations to the international politics and cultures of arts,
including the art markets, without conferring “ethical luck” on the
events of imperialism and colonialism. Similarly, it must be noted that
the idea of “transcendence” of all sorts—and in this case, a supposedly
“universal” transcendence of, clearly, highly particular and specifiable
negative aspects of European colonizations of Africa—holds a
perpetually powerful but sometimes perilously exclusivist attraction
to incorrigible seers, prophets, and revolutionists. At the end of The
Wretched of the Earth, Fanon (1963:315) exhorted: “For Africa, it is a
question of … starting a new history of Man, a history which will have
regard to the sometimes prodigious theses which Europe has put
forward, but which will also not forget Europe’s crimes.”
If “The Short Century” is fully aware of Europe’s criminalizable
(yes, strong word, but the United Nations have declared some of them
400 Antipode

“crimes against humanity”) acts against Africa, it curiously chose to

entirely concentrate the origins of Europe’s colonial adventures in
Africa in the purely legalistic—some would say illegal and certainly
unjust—event of the Berlin conference of 1844–1845. Why not 1545,
when the first Portuguese ships landed in the kingdom of Congo and
sailed back to Portugal with six captured and enslaved Africans? Why
not 1800, when, with the French and American Revolutions and their
declarations of a presumably universal “liberty, equality, and frater-
nity” already bloodily proclaimed, Africans were still being bought
and sold in Europe and throughout the Americas? What about the
insurgent and liberationist protest and artistic commodities—photog-
raphy, newspaper and magazine reports and cartoons, diaries and
travelogues, posters, religious tracts, novels—soon after 1845, in Africa
as in Europe, that were produced to expose and defeat the atrocities of
organizations like the United Trading Company and Leopold II’s
“protective” Force Publique in preindependent Africa? By entirely
focusing on the exceedingly sovereign-static forms of “independence
and liberation” movements of only the last fifty years, “The Short
Century” offers the viewer the details and the depths of a very short
artistic span of Africa’s time and politics indeed, and suggestively
leaves doors open for further explorations of the aesthetic dimensions
of other periods of Africa’s modern political protests and achievements.
In the main, “The Short Century” ought to be characterized as a
highly attractive bricolage—of events, peoples, and things—that
presents itself as a total aesthetic: an Africa-centric, modernist, artistic
conversation de l’universel. Like its main subject, modern Africa, the
exhibition is a true grab bag of mixtures of the high and the low, in
every imaginable—and, for some, unimaginable—media. In its willful
politicization of art as a historical totality, “The Short Century” tri-
umphantly celebrates the authentic and the alienated. It also happily
blurs the lines between the domestic and the foreign and the near and
the far, as well the distinctions between the spirits of creativity and
competitive enterprise. The exhibition embodies, above all, a com-
pelling ethical impatience—animated by an artistic and a collector’s
vision—to transcend with the remedy of art the challenges posed by
modern Africa’s conflicted colonial legacy.
Different kinds of purists will surely be offended by the facts that
instead of choosing between premodernity and modernity, between
Africa and the West, or between art and politics, the curator’s creative
vision instead embraced the “totality of all spheres of production in
Africa … both by Africans and Europeans,” and insisted on what was
called the “paradox of all modernities, namely that they are simultan-
eously inward-looking and totally open to all influence and receptive
to rich dialogues” (Enwezor 2001:14). Kinder critics, on the other
hand, might suspect that this “vision” of the curator has conveniently
The Time and Arts of Africa’s Modernity 401

functioned as a substitute for greater demand for rigor—even the

rigor of an understanding of the idea of the aesthetic. On its own
terms, “The Short Century” is therefore very open, yet—on account
of, for example, its celebratory but inadequately reflective undiffer-
entiation of the domain of art—insufficiently modern. But even on
this point, the critic only has to bring back to mind the ethnographic
chose du text in order to explain this paradox: “The Short Century”’s
declared mission is to communicate that Africa has modernized itself
and the world—in very African ways. Thus, to the question “What is
Africa to modernity?”, “The Short Century” provides, as a response,
a conversation whose time is here but that must be continued.

References
Diop A (1947) Presence Africaine 1 (November–December):1 Introduction
Enwezor O (ed) (2001) The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in
Africa, 1945–1994. New York: Prestel
Fanon F (1963) The Wretched of the Earth: The Handbook for the Black Revolution That
Is Changing the Shape of the World. Translated by Constance Farrington. New York:
Monthly Review Press
Presence Africaine (1947) 1(November–December)
Soyinka W (1976) Myth, Literature and the African World. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge
University Press