This past week, I received an urgent mail from an art history graduate student working in an American University. April-May months are what in academic-speak is referred to as “crunch time,” with end-of-year seminar paper deadlines, exams and tests due in a few weeks.
This student had proposed to write a paper on the contemporary Art exhibition organised as part of the Second Black and African Festival of Arts and Culture (FESTAC) in 1977, but on conducting preliminary research came up with no bibliographic information on the catalogue of that exhibition. Perhaps, he was looking in the wrong places? Perhaps, there was some database somewhere he had not searched? This was the gist of his inquiry.
I remember having had the occasion, some years ago, to research publications produced for the FESTAC, particularly the contemporary art exhibitions organised for the event. And so, I had to deliver the bad news to our graduate student: there was in fact no general catalogue of the contemporary art exhibition, which makes research on the subject a precarious affair; his best choice was to find a different topic for his research paper.
Of course, what I recount here is obviously the problem of one unfortunate student, but it speaks to the enduring effects of a key shortcoming of the FESTAC, which is the fact that despite securing its place in history as perhaps the most spectacular celebration of the richness of black and African cultures, it was, as it turned out, short on intellectual heft, and this is nowhere more evident than in its contemporary art exhibitions.
According to oral traditions—yes, because you just have to rely on personal accounts by people who were there—the contemporary art exhibition was not only immense, but had indeed included the work of so many important African and black artists; which means that if it was well organised, it must have been a truly memorable show. But alas after all that work, the show now is the stuff of folklore, without any proper publication to preserve it in the public domain, as approximately as the best catalogues can, for posterity and for future research.
In the course of searching for the elusive catalogue, you would find that several countries, including Tanzania, the United States and Congo published their own exhibition catalogues, and there was a catalogue of the National Book Exhibition by Nigeria.
More important, there was an African Architectural Technology exhibition catalogue, which is not surprising given that this show as organised by the scholar and architect, David Aradeon; and a small brochure of the Nigerian art exhibition. But these are, when you think of it, like the parts of the mythic elephant described by the blind men of Hindustan! Because, the very modest—in the case of the Nigerian art show, too modest—size and content of these “national” catalogues do not by any stretch of the imagination give us today a sense of what must have been the incredible richness and scale of the exhibition.
Because exhibition catalogues involve images and texts, they are not easy to produce especially in places like Nigeria of the 1970s without an already established art publishing infrastructure (recall that The Nucleus, the maiden catalogue works in the collection of the National Gallery of Modern Art, Lagos was produced overseas in 1980).
But given that the Nigerian government of those years was not bashful about spending its petro-Naira, it must be that the organisers of the FESTAC did not see any value in spending the necessary resources and time to produce a general catalogue of the contemporary art exhibition, complete with images of the works and scholarly texts that either articulated the concept of the exhibition or provided critical insights to the artworks included in the show.
It is often tempting to compare the 1966 First Negro Arts Festival in Dakar, organised under the auspices of Senegal’s first President, the poet Leopold Sedar Senghor and FESTAC 77 conceived during the regime of General Gowon but which was eventually realised by the government of General Olusegun Obasanjo.
On the one hand, Dakar was motivated by the ideological convictions of Senghor who used the occasion to proselytize his by then expiring idea of Negritude; on the other hand Lagos happened simply because Nigeria had the resources to organize a follow up festival, and it seized the opportunity to flaunt its wealth and political influence.
While one can still remember with pride—at least by reading the proceedings of the conferences—the substantive issues about the black experience and histories debated in Dakar, you have to be an ardent patriot to feel the same way about the Lagos conference.
But there is one area where the two festivals were in alignment: the cavalierly treatment of the contemporary art exhibitions. Looking back to both Dakar and Lagos, there is pretty much nothing in the public domain that tells you what exactly the art they showed looked like. And that is sad.