They love foreign awards, money and fame more than showing the human face of the African continent

Art must show Africa’s human face or cease to be!

The common objection to the work of many African artists is simple: they oversimplify reality and dehumanise the African experience. As a result, their content is predictable and monotonous. In fact, it is not just an insult but, to a large extent, also a lie.

What I mean is that the African human condition is not just about suffering, war, famine, oppression, poverty and dispossession. It is not just an unending series of the unchanging negative. The African experience is complex, dynamic and takes different shapes.

Human life in the continent is as dynamic, progressive, ever changing and complicated as in any other part of the world. But one rarely perceives or experiences this in African art, be it movies, visual arts, literature, theatre or any other form.

Africans are multifaceted human beings, too, with full human life experiences despite the poverty, unemployment and violent material condition they find themselves in. They have love, joy and happiness or anger, jealousy and rage. But they are, mostly, dehumanised and reduced to victims of colonialism, apartheid, racism and the betrayal of African politicians and government who are considered ‘black colonists,’ too.

What I find disappointing and frustrating about African arts is two patterns. Firstly, Africans are, mostly, portrayed as less than human because of degrading material circumstances. Secondly, they are always portrayed in an unending condition of poverty, war, inequality. In fact, this image of the African does not change. It has become frozen in the human consciousness, including the mind of the African artists themselves.

We must challenge and problematise this portrayal of the African and his circumstance, which perpetuates a negative view of the continent and its people by suggesting that there is neither human progress nor development in Africa. But equally, nobody is denying the fact that Africa, her people and government have serious problems like poverty, for instance. However, this should not make African artists not consider or reflect the possibility that African experience may have some positive elements. Yes, it may not be in a perfect material state but the white European experience is just as imperfect as well.

It is misleading for African artists, particularly, to portray and project the African experience as unique in its imperfection. Unfortunately, white hegemony and economic control makes it almost impossible for African artists to give a different or positive picture of the African experience. Some African artists may want to broaden the depiction of the African human experience. But they find that they are prescribed to and limited by those who open up opportunities for them and thus determine the content of their work. Of course, due to their economic might, white Europeans and Americans control and manage the elite cultural industries and thus dictate what happens and what does not. In fact, what they demand and dictate is that the market wants a negative view of Africa.

This has limited African artistic freedom and has incalculable consequences, including forcing African artists to compromise their integrity and commitment to African self-determination and freedom for short term gains like fame and fortune.
Perhaps African artists should seriously consider banning themselves from creating work that portrays Africa in a negative light. Here one is not suggesting that they should deny the tragic reality of the African experience. But artistic expression should capture and reflect the multi-dimensional African human experience and mirror the changing face of the continent and her people.

Despite the poverty, war and political betrayals, Africans do live full human experiences that cover the gamut of human existence. Unfortunately, many African artists seem to lack the ability to conjure up the human face of the African experience.
It is now time that the African arts – visual, film, literature and theatre – must represent and reflect the human face of the African experience. Thus African art must be willing to explore so that it can shift and change the focus.

In most instances, it is limited and confines itself to a one-dimensional view of African experience: poverty, poverty and more poverty. Africa’s time has come to object to this predictable and monotonous view of the continent and its people.
Africa is not just about poverty, war, crime and corruption.

There will always be people who allege that one wants a rosy view of the failure of African leadership, especially its government for instance, to deliver people from poverty and other social ills. This claim or accusation needs to be dismissed with contempt. Africans must insist that there is much more to African human experience than just poverty and degradation. In fact, what we can infer from how poverty is reflected is to give it a global African face. It is always done in a way that locates it in an African circumstance as if similar dreadful conditions do not exist in white Europe and America.

If African artists should obsess with poverty, then they can place it smack bang in the middle of a sophisticated, world-class shopping mall. They can, if they want, depict the poverty of a security guard, shop assistant or any consumer whose material condition is denied or glossed over by the plush environment. This would be more challenging and inspiring. But in most African artists’ minds, poverty happens in exclusive African conditions and is divorced from white racist capitalism. This is disturbing, indeed.

The predictable projection of poverty as exclusively African, for instance, is inconsistent with the complex world of racial capitalism, globalisation and monopoly of wealth where Africans continue to make sense of the absurd. There is something disappointing in the inability and reluctance of African artists to show how indigenous people express resilience and determination despite the oppression and exploitation. Yet we all know that they have the creative capacity to do that because they not only are highly gifted but are intuitively connected to the plight of their people. But we should understand and appreciate the dictate of the so-called ruthless market forces.
Thus when shown an internationally renowned African artist and we are mostly likely to see a creative soul who is willing to make a devil picture of Africa for them to be accepted by the market forces.

Nevertheless, the idea that poverty, crime and victimisation are the only themes to portray the African experience is something that African artists need to ditch with immediate effect.

Of course, there are people who may sympathise with African artists for the simple reason that they are caught in the pincer grasp of racism and capitalism. Perhaps it can be argued that they do not portray poverty as the face of the continent because they want to insult or lie about Africa and her people. Instead, these African artists need to not only earn a living and make a name for themselves but need to please their bosses.
But we should be frightened when our prophets who should capture, define and reflect the soul of Africa now distort this for money and fame.

Many people, including artists themselves, have confessed and now recognise how they are forced to project a particular negative image of the African continent. As a result, they have become poseurs who share and promote the West’s view of Africa and thus destroy the self-confidence and positive energy of the human experience.
Anything that encourages African artists to not only prostrate themselves before corporate imperialism but leads to a negative portrayal of the African experience is a threat to the continent’s spirit of self-determination.

Much as we expect nothing but the accurate and factual truth from African artists, it is their insincerity and dishonesty that is a matter of urgent concern. The problem of painting a lie about the African continent exists only because of the demands and prescripts of the Western expectations. In fact, the first is only a problem because it is caused by the second, which denies freedom of thought and expression to African artists.

Let us consider the reason why Africans themselves may find the work of their artists boring, superficial and empty of the new. Many Africans come from a poor background, which they have transcended if not lived with every moment of their lives. There is good evidence that this relentless diet of poverty and negative portrayal of Africa not only demoralises them but inculcates self-hate and an inferiority complex.

If there is too much African life in art, the question then would be: what do galleries offer to Africans beyond what they know, already? It is hard not to believe that the domination of poverty and other negative images of the continent are intended to contaminate the mind and soul of the Africa about themselves.

What makes it worse is that in a globalised world, the African is not protected from imitating and believing what their minds are fed by Western media and dictates. In the case of the African artist, they have no choice but to do as they are told: destroy the image of the African in his own mind. Perhaps no one can blame them for succumbing to corporate power and greed in a money-driven world.

If Africa has to contend with spineless but gifted artists, she would rather be without prophets that peddle lies in the name of art. There is a greater reason to worry when African artists harm indigenous people’s minds by too much exposure to what is negative.

Of course, this monocultural diet of negative Africa is not good for anyone except those who dictate it. Indeed, the racist West has something to gain by not only dictating to African artists but controlling the imagination of their people. By promoting ‘corporate’ art in which nothing positive is depicted about the African experience, the West is able to perpetuate its tight grip on the mind.

Of course, Africans have every right to protest against this pattern. But in a world where so-called freedom of artistic expression is the most coveted prize, even licentiousness passes for liberty. However, in the continent artistic expression is, largely, regarded as the golden thread that links the living with the ancestors, the past, present and future.

It is for this reason that it is unacceptable for African artists to be tools of the West.
In fact, it is not just an insult to African history, heritage and self-definition but one of the worst sins to be committed. If African artists must lie for money and a name, then they must cease to call themselves artists.