In 1968, Ben Enwonwu published The African View of Art and Some Problems Facing the African Artist in Présence Africaine, the influential pan-African journal founded by Alioune Diop. Writing in the first decade of independence of African nations and deeply engaged in projects of nation-building and cultural self-definition, Enwonwu sought to articulate what role modern African art ought to play in shaping identity, cultural and political consciousness.
The essay can be read as an important turning point. African art was slowly being rescued from the European category of “primitive art” and was beginning to be reconsidered on its own terms. For Enwonwu, this was as much an art historical correction as it is a political necessity. He argued that “no emergent African State today can afford to ignore the urgent role of Art as we march towards renaissance.” Art, in his view, was inseparable from the advancement of African culture, thought, and personality.
Reading this today causes one to pause and ask: what role ought African art play now, given our present cultural, political, and economic realities?
If we follow the later propositions of thinkers such as Salah Hassan, Olu Oguibe, and Okwui Enwezor, that African art has transcended fixed temporal and spatial limitations, and should no longer be burdened with singular cultural prescriptions, then another question emerges: what role of art is chiefly celebrated by contemporary institutional frameworks today? And does that institutional preference truly reflect this plurality?
Back to Enwonwu.
One of his sharpest criticisms is directed at those critics, curators, and collectors who expected modern African art to remain visually tethered to precolonial forms. He rejected the patronising demand that African art should always appear recognisably “traditional.” He was equally critical of African artists who deliberately manipulated their works to resemble historical forms in order to satisfy this expectation.
There is something strikingly prescient in this position. Enwonwu was envisioning an African modernism free from the burden of proving authenticity through formal resemblance to the past. For him, the African artist’s primary obligation was to respond to the exigencies of the present rather than to perform continuity for foreign validation.
This is especially interesting when considered against the philosophy of the Zaria Art Society and its project of “natural synthesis.” Enwonwu was skeptical of deliberate synthesis as an artistic programme, yet in hindsight both his position and that of the Zaria Rebels are celebrated alike within Nigerian art history and are continuously read as parallel strategies for negotiating African modernity in the end half of the 20th century
Enwonwu then moves toward a deeper historical question: what did art mean within African societies before colonialism imported Western analytic categories?
He argues that African artistic consciousness did not emerge from detached formal analysis but from lived spiritual and communal participation. As he writes, the African artistic view “did not spring from Art itself but from the totality of religio-social significance of the art functioning in the group-mind.” Art was not an isolated object for aesthetic contemplation but an active social force.
This is where his discussion of nka becomes especially illuminating. Nka, as he explains, refers not simply to “art” as object, but to the act and process of making itself — a making inseparable from social function, ritual significance, and professional competence.
From here, Enwonwu turns his critique toward the Nigerian elite and their often superficial relationship to African art. His frustration is palpable:
“The educated or the intellectual African today must equate the financial value of art to the monetary system of the West.”
To dismiss African art as “too expensive,” he argues, reveals a hierarchy of values in which industrial products of Western modernity are granted greater worth than intellectual and cultural production. Worse still, it exposes an educated class often “dabbling” in appreciation merely to appear cultivated, rather than engaging with art as a serious ….. necessity.
This critique remains painfully relevant.
Even today, African art is frequently celebrated rhetorically while remaining structurally under-supported. The market grows, fairs expand, and institutions speak the language of global inclusion, yet local systems of patronage, criticism, education, and public valuation often remain fragile.
Perhaps this is where Enwonwu’s essay remains most urgent. Beyond defending African modernism against colonial misunderstanding, he asks us to confront whether Africans themselves have built the intellectual and institutional conditions necessary for art to flourish on its own terms.
Nearly six decades later, his central provocation still lingers: if art is truly essential to cultural freedom, have we yet created the conditions for that freedom to exist?
Tobi Bolaji Idowu 