I have had the opportunity to chew over Chika’s question and the various responses it elicited from. About the question of African art scholarship being in exile, I beg to differ, I see it as being at home in the world. Contrary to what Susan says about the discomfort Chika’s query may have generated I think it is an all too familiar scenario across the entire continent, not just for art history, but in every discipline. So of course, it matters that a great deal of the scholarship being produced in our field (at least the visible ones) are produced outside of the continent.
I see this though as a matter of unfinished historical questions plaguing Africa, namely the crisis of institutions and the crisis of knowledge which flows from that. We need new structures and strategies to overcome the gulf between those who live on the continent and those who do not, but who are producing relevant work. How can we do this: for one we have to politicize in our various institutions the structural deficits between where we produce and the places we study, and the conceptual community we need to imagine for our field, by educating our institutions on various ways of sharing resources and knowledge, encouraging information transfer, supporting research through cross-institutional collaborations and curricula development.
I will share where I am personally in all this. At SFAI, I founded the=2 0Global Institute, a venture, which before the financial crisis, would have allowed us to build several transnational summer institutes in collaboration with art academies involving Africa. At a different level, this idea (like the Africa in Venice initiative which we founded in 2000) is being worked on by Salah Hassan, Manthia Diawara, and myself, and at the invitation of a foundation here in the U.S. we are developing a model of a mobile summer art academy in collaboration with African institutions which would bring scholars, students, and practitioners together, through a series of seminars and colloquia over six weeks each summer in an African city. We are working on a five year pilot program, and have designated five African countries in which the project will rotate. Concurrently we are developing an online academy, with course packages, live discussions, recorded lectures, etc. that will help maintain continuity between the summer programs. The reason for this initiative, is rather than feeling disempowered, and play into the game of divide and conquer (the diaspora has more access and resources, is more privileged, and therefore less authentic: a notion which to me is sinisterly patronizing) we feel empowered by what access to technology can mean in transforming the distance between here and there. Our intention is to bridge the gap, not to create false dichotomies of “African-based” curators who carry European passports and therefore can travel at will whenever they chose and non-African based scholars who are supposedly are better endowed resource-wise. In our project, we see knowledge transfer as part of a new politics of countering NGOism, as a specific critique of the development models that have deracinated institutional capacities and created a culture of dependency and sympathy in Africa. But this venture in itself is not a solution, only a strategy to create a robust global African public sphere of knowledge production without the outmoded boundary marking that seeks to confine the mobility of scholars and their knowledge to sanctioned centers of patronage. We simply can’t wait for when all of Africa has been made whole and self-sufficient before we act.
The nightmare scenario Chika speaks about is not mine. I left Nigeria as a teenager twenty seven years ago before structural adjustment destabilized and destroyed the world I knew, so my perspective is melancholic, not despairing. I have a sister who returned from Europe in the early eighties and worked for years as a medical researcher and lecturer at the University of Nigeria Teaching Hospital in Enugu, her case is a different matter, she succumbed to despair. At some point at the laboratory of the hospital there was nothing with which to carry out experiments and research. In other words her career was killed. She became a born-again Christian, and is today reinventing herself at a theological seminary in New York. Institutional politics at Ns ukka drove Obiora Udechukwu to exile after years of distinguished and influential teaching at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Chika himself was both a student of Udechukwu and Anatsui, and as lecturer a colleague of theirs in the art program of the university, he too left. Similarly Chinua Achebe and thousands of others have gone abroad, and with each exit, a rung in the ladder of ideas is removed. None of these people, regardless of the countries they have moved to, have stopped thinking critically or producing work that involve Africa in a deep meaningful way. And they often reach across to colleagues across different cultural, political, and economic horizons and interests. The challenge for us is what to do about building bridges between the various and varied constituencies of the African world? I point to some of the examples, because it is structurally at variance with Susan’s invocation of insiders and outsiders (intimate or otherwise) or John Peffer’s idea of diaspora to which I do not belong since my ties to Nigeria is not in any sense superficial. There are things we can think of as scholars and then there are other issues that subtend those things. When Europeans live and work across different cultures and societies they are seen as worldly, but when Africans are in a similar situation it becomes a tragedy. The choices we make along our career paths are individual and must not become political football for those who which to deny any of us the mobility constantly afforded by the global world.
In relation to this issue, I very much take Colin to task, because, it is easy enough for us to absolve South Africa from the institutional crisis bedeviling African institutions in the so-called sub-Saharan (shall we for once bury that nomenclature and promise never again to use it to describe any part of Africa, as it strikes me, as term of negation – sort of sub-human – just as saying non-European or non-Western is a designation of negativity – sort of non-person) without pointing to the evident schism in that country between those who have the power to narrate and those who are narrated. South Africa is not an earthly paradise of discourse. It has a lot of historical baggage that is still being worked out. Revisions to accounts to be done. Invitations to the academy yet to be made. Who is actually doing art history in South Africa? Where is all this great art historical scholarship coming out of there? I for one, I am not seeing a flood of it. In looking at the deficits elsewhere, let us not overstate or exaggerate what is going on in South Africa.
I want to return to John Picton, for I very much agree with his point, that it matters not a wit where any scholarship is produced or who is producing it only that it is done well and thoughtfully. It is to the great benefit of Africa that it can be studied from a variety of standpoints, from different disciplinary positions. However, there is a larger complexity to the issue of institutional building that often gets glossed. The active engagement of Africans living abroad in helping sustain even a modicum of stability across different institutional structures across African societies is one. A myopic view of so-called diasporic Africans has developed which awards points for self-congratulatory continentalist essentialism to be deployed carelessly. I am speaking here of the billions of remittances that flow from here to there each year to build institutions, maintain lives, and sustain the future. Let me give an example (and I am very sure Ikem and Chika are familiar with this scenario): each year as a member of the Awkuzu community living in the United States, I pay several levies directed at development projects in the town my family hails from. The levies go towards primary and secondary education, the building of clinics, the maintenance of roads, etc. This again is part the ways in which the diaspora collaborates with the “homeland,” if one can be parochial about it. Rather than working ourselves into paroxysms of despondency, we should be thinking of developing models of conversation, debate, and dialogue around practices, research, and writing. H-Net is one such space. But others can be invented as well. An African art history imprint through a university press is another. Nka can certainly entertain that with Duke University Press with members of this group as part of an editorial collective.
Finally, a word about Ola Oloidi and African scholars working on the continent, I think it is their responsibility to disseminate their knowledge, research, and to get books out to broader readership. African scholars have a responsibility to create the vehicles that would enable all of us to maintain a link with the important work they are doing, but we should also take them to task when there are no tangible solutions in terms of bridging the gap coming from that end as well.
-Okwui Enwezor, San Francisco Art Institute
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