Abstract
This article contributes to debates around African cultural heritage preserved in European archives and museum institutions. It offers a critical analysis of the Danford Collection of West African Art and Artefacts (University of Birmingham) that unsettles the collection to reveal its archival silences. Unsettling the archive reveals the power relations underlying practices of accumulation and exhibition. Yet although exposing silences and elisions, it reveals surprising and overlooked presences, such as a rare painting from 1960 by Nigerian artist Clara Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu. The article focuses on Ugbodaga-Ngu’s life and work so as to enrich and expand our understanding of the Danford Collection and the way in which the heritage it contains is presented and understood. It sheds light on the way institutions, such as University of Birmingham, have historically gathered material originating from or relating to the African continent and its inhabitants, whether of colonial or more recent production, which in turn reveals the need for more inclusive approaches to reading the archive that recognise the multiplicity of voices therein.
The agency of African people is often obscured in the space of the ‘ethnographic’ art collection. Typically, this is a gathering of material culture from Africa, Oceania or the Americas that was sourced during precolonial or colonial time frames.Footnote1 The designation serves to encode many assumptions about practices by specific people who make specific things in particular places and spaces. Over the past two centuries narratives surrounding the African art within Western ethnographic collections have predominantly centred on the European male as the principal actor.Footnote2 This leads to what academics have described as ‘archival silences’.Footnote3 Such omissions in the ethnographic archive may cause simplified assumptions about practices and people, which, historically, have compounded the othering of African people and objects.Footnote4 Recent scholarship on the origins of ethnographic collections in the UK has centred on the contact between European men and African men, which is characterised by unequal power dynamics and the forcible removal of art or artefact. Such violent removal is exemplified by the British naval attack that led to the removal of the Benin Bronzes from West Africa in 1897.Footnote5 While the perspectives of African men are difficult to locate within such narratives, it can be almost impossible to trace African women as complex historical subjects in this area. The voices of African women are therefore one of the pervasive ‘silences’ of the ethnographic archive.Footnote6 This article addresses this gap through critical analysis of a small ethnographic art collection held by the University of Birmingham (UoB), the Danford Collection of West African Art and Artefacts. It reveals hitherto marginalised agents within this space and unveils a rich polyphony of voices.
This unique exploration aims to ‘unsettle’ accepted gendered and racialised presentations of the broader ethnographic archive by troubling its silences and elisions. By focusing on gender, it complicates narratives that frame the ethnographic repository as a site of violent masculinity. Unlike collections compiled through rapacious or extractive colonialism, the art and artefacts held by the Danford Collection were gathered from the West African region in the latter half of the twentieth century, and there is no suggestion that anything was looted or stolen.Footnote7 Although the collection demonstrates expected archival silences, deeper research uncovers surprising and overlooked presences, such as the primary roles of women as collectors, donors and artists. Remarkably, although named after John Danford, a British Council administrator in Nigeria, over half the collection comprises donations by four British women from their time in various (primarily West African) countries.Footnote8
Perhaps even more surprisingly, the Danford Collection holds a rare painting by a female Nigerian artist: Clara Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu. This oil on board is titled Abstract and was painted in 1960, during the period described by art historian Chika Okeke-Agulu as ‘postcolonial modernism’.Footnote9 Centring on Ugbodaga-Ngu’s life and work, I suggest that the inclusion of Abstract in the Danford Collection complicates the assumed logic, cartographies, genealogies and visual histories of the ethnographic collection. David Clarke suggests that what is required to fill gaps and archival silences is ‘not simply a more extensive coverage in art historical literature of previously marginalised [African art and artists]… but the opening up of new perspectives on the whole of art history which work to decenter the existing hegemony’.Footnote10 I argue that attention to the presence of Ugbodaga-Ngu in the archive can begin to uncover a polyphonic history of art within the Danford Collection.
I originally presented this work at the Association for Art History conference in 2021, as part of a panel on global art history and the imbalance of power.Footnote11 The conference was hosted by the University of Birmingham, a setting that offered an auspicious opportunity to investigate power imbalance through a case study of the university’s own ethnographic archive.Footnote12 Research was based on my study placement as a researcher-in-residence with the Research and Cultural Collection (RCC) at UoB, who are responsible for the Danford Collection.Footnote13 A short while after the conference, Abstract was displayed on campus in one the university’s main administrative buildings. While Ugbodaga-Ngu’s inclusion in the archive disrupts established power dynamics within the ethnographic collection, the hanging of her artwork in such a prominent position prompted reflection on the nature of power across the university. Inspired by art historian Itohan Osayimwese’s call to emphasise the agency of women artists and find new ways to locate the ‘greatness’ of African woman in art, my research methodology draws on diverse sources.Footnote14 I include archival research, but also consider responses to Ugbodaga-Ngu’s work of the viewing public at University of Birmingham, as well as the responses of artists and curators in Lagos arising from my fieldwork in Nigeria. By amplifying the voices of various perspectives, I give polyphonous texture to the unheard voices within the Danford Collection.
Clara Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu, Abstract, 1960, oil on hardboard, image © Research and Cultural Collections, University of Birmingham
The Danford Collection: A Complex Taxonomy
The Danford Collection of West African Art and Artefacts is described as an ethnographic collection. It is a mixed archive of over five hundred items that originate primarily from Nigeria or other West African countries. The collection is named after John Danford, a British Council administrator who was based in Western Nigeria from the mid 1940s to 1957. A keen artist and art collector, Danford built up a large private collection of art, most of which was purchased or commissioned directly from contemporary working artists. Initially his collection was housed within University College, Ibadan, but when he left Nigeria in 1964 it was moved to the newly formed Centre of West African Studies (CWAS) at UoB. UoB purchased it from his mother after his death in 1975, with the support of the Cadbury Trust, John Cadbury and the V&A Purchase Grant Fund. It formed an integral part of the teaching programme at CWAS from the 1960s to the early 2000s, although today the renamed Department of Anthropology and African Studies (DASA) is reduced in size and utilises the collection far less.Footnote15 Around half the items are exhibited behind glass in a teaching room (the Danford Room) on campus; the rest is in storage. The collection is therefore unavailable for public viewing, which prompts questions around access to material culture and art heritage.
The Danford Collection has expanded over the decades since its inception in 1975. Collectors, donors, makers, artists, creators, academics, researchers, anthropologists, art historians and university administrators have all played a part in amalgamating the wide array of items. The collection has been shaped by the entangled material and social interactions of objects, people, politics and institutions over the last century. Its ‘art and artefacts’ could loosely be grouped into four categories, although demarcation is messy as objects can be read in differing ways and groupings have indistinct boundaries. Firstly, there are items that could be described as domestic: utensils and furniture; calabash containers; woven baskets; musical instruments; clothing and footwear; textiles, cloth, fabric and tapestry; bags; paper and knives; decorative daggers; tins; combs; child’s dolls; mats; axes; cups, bowls, ladles and spoons; fans; leatherwork; folders; water pots; napkin rings; teapots and pipes. The creators of these items are mostly unnamed, and an object is attributed to a ‘group’, ‘tribe’ or ‘people’. Secondly, there are items relating to labour or the process of making: weaving equipment; looms; spindles; gold weights; head load carriers; hunter’s caps; bells; helmets and ceremonial items. Like the first grouping, the creators of these items are mostly unnamed, and an object is once again attributed to a ‘group’, ‘tribe’ or ‘people’. The third category comprises decorative items: wooden carved stools, masks; animal sculptures; bracelets; glass beads; bangles and carved wooden or metal sculptures. The artist is named in several instances, for example there are items by Bámigbóyè or Lamidi Fakeye, although once again many items are attributed to a ‘group’ or ‘tribe’. The fourth and final grouping contains primarily two-dimensional images: paintings created on canvas, board or paper in watercolour, oil or other medium. Many are from the ‘postcolonial modernist’ period aligning with Nigerian independence, and many are named – for example Odinigwe Benedict Chukwukadibia Enwonwu (Ben Enwonwu), Yusuf Grillo, Uche Okeke or Clara Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu. Across all four groupings the collector or donor details are almost always recorded.
The Danford Collection reflects the complex nature of both the ethnographic collection and the university’s art collection.Footnote16 Scholars argue that museums and universities benefited from, and were complicit in, the colonial enterprise from the early period of imperial expansion in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.Footnote17 Historically, African art studies was considered a field related to anthropology and was disregarded within the field of art history.Footnote18 The discipline of anthropology, established in the late nineteenth century, was rooted in a period of scientific knowledge construction that created dominant paradigms linked to early European imperial expansion. At the turn of the twentieth century looted or stolen art objects from Africa were offered to European publics as material evidence of ‘premodern’ societies. Anthropology shaped – and was shaped by – the imperial imagination. This imperial imagination obscured the realities of African societies, in which artistry, craftsmanship and other forms of artistic creation were continually evolving aesthetically. Distorted representations of Africa are linked to the complex history of how Europeans have not only conceptualised and represented Africa but also to how they have treated African objects and African people.Footnote19 These processes explain how the ethnographic repository came to shape an idea of Africa in the European imagination.
The material in the Danford Collection was gathered in the second half of the twentieth century and there is no suggestion that any of it is looted or stolen. However, many of the objects were sourced within the framework of imperialism. Scholarly and artistic perspectives drawn together by Catherine Grant and Dorothy Price in a special edition of Art History journal, titled ‘Decolonizing Art History’, draw attention to institutional and epistemic spaces where the narratives of art history play out.Footnote20 The Danford Collection is just such a space. Grant and Price call for radical re-evaluations of the academy, and, like many other British universities, UoB is coming under increasing pressure to examine the links between its archives and the making of empire. Academics working in the field of postcolonial studies have long elucidated connections between the practice of archiving and structures of knowledge, power and control. Ann Laura Stoler has drawn attention to archival forms and systems of classification, making links between the archive and colonial politics.Footnote21 The Danford Collection can be treated as just such an archive.Footnote22
One of the challenges is that material in the ethnographic collection is often presented and understood in ways that continue to distort representations of Africa and African people. Historically, the ethnographic collection was gathered under and then assigned a ‘primitive’ art construct, which grouped art forms produced by artists working in an variety of conditions to invoke an undifferentiated and ambiguous set of temporal co-ordinates outside, before or beyond history.Footnote23 The deconstruction of modernist primitivism was a central project of 1980s and 1990s poststructuralist scholarship.Footnote24 However, scholars argue that the hierarchies advanced by discredited nineteenth-century theories of cultural evolution continue to pervade late twentieth-century museum displays, popular media, literature and critical texts.Footnote25 Typically, the framing of the ethnographic collection blurs ‘indigenous modernism’ with a wide array of objects. This causes a geopolitical and temporal compression that arbitrarily conflates art and object due to their connections with ‘Africa’.
The Danford Collection reflects the wide temporal, spatial and artistic diversity of West Africa yet subsumes art and object into an ethnographic framing linked to nineteenth-century theories of cultural evolution and early twentieth-century discourses of primitive art. Due to these messy classificatory structures, the collection contains art and objects that are linked to the idea of Africa but which are not coherent in theme, style or period. For example, as outlined, there are paintings on canvas created around the time of Nigerian independence that sit alongside Yorùbá woodcarvings by Moshood Olúṣọmọ Bámigbóyè (c 1885–1975) made in the 1920s or 1930s. This demonstrates Elizabeth Harney and Ruth Phillips’s argument that the residual legacy of aesthetic primitivism is still deeply embedded within museums, the academy and other art institutions and collections.Footnote26 The items in the Danford Collection were created throughout the twentieth century and express the social, artistic, religious and political changes taking place in Africa. It is only by paying attention to each item as an individual work of creativity, by paying attention to the individual life and work of the artist, that we can uncover new perspectives that can begin to destabilise the reductive categorisations of the ethnographic collection.
The discovery of Abstract (1960) by Ugbodaga-Ngu was therefore a significant find. Its presence disturbs representations of the ethnographic archive as the repository of primitivism and complicates debates around modernism, which has been linked with a Western, male-identified position, from which African female artists are excluded. As art historian Isabelle Malz states: ‘most works by female artists of Nigerian modernism are not presented in collections and have been almost completely edited out of art history’.Footnote27 Philosopher and art historian Nkiru Nzegwu argues that, as well as the problematic centring of Europe and America, attention to gender is an overlooked aspect of the debate around modernity.Footnote28 Scholars have articulated and compiled various episodes of African modernism within the larger discourse of twentieth-century modernity, but their focus repeatedly falls on the male protagonist.Footnote29 There has been historical distortion of the role of African women in creative production, partly as a result of the biases inherited from social anthropology but also because of a sexist flattening of complex social realities and artistic histories.Footnote30 The marginalisation of women within Western hierarchies of art, which tie modernism to masculinity, continue to place African women artists in a relegated position within a ‘metonymic chain of otherness’.Footnote31 Maura Reilly describes this as the ‘double colonisation’ of African women – who are rendered unseen both by an art system steeped in bias that privileges male creativity and by the forces of empire.Footnote32 The taxonomical gulf between Western art and African art played a major role in the othering of the continent, which scholars have critiqued as the West’s obsession with difference.Footnote33 It is difficult to locate women in this complex web of othering, when art history is layered with gender ideologies and the input of African women in creativity has been historically obscured by translations of art through the biases of anthropology. Attention to the work of Ugbodaga-Ngu will therefore expand the range of voices that the Danford Collection represents, opening up new perspectives on art history and enabling a more polyphonic historiography.
Clara Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu (1921–1996)
In 2021 Ugbodaga-Ngu’s painting Abstract was displayed in the vice chancellor’s corridor of the Aston Webb building at University of Birmingham – in the heart of the university and its seat of power. In October that year I was delivering a lecture on campus on the life and work of Ugbodaga-Ngu, and took attendees to view the painting in situ.Footnote34 Here is what one attendee said:
We met under the towering phallus of ‘Old Joe’, the clock tower built by the first chancellor of the University of Birmingham, Joseph Chamberlain. Entering the grand Byzantine-style red-brick Aston Webb building, we made our way down the Vice Chancellor’s Corridor, an imposing walkway lined on either side by sombre portraits of previous university leaders. Immortalised on canvas or in marble, the eyes of these many men chart our progress. Everything around us celebrates the success of men. Suddenly a small exhibition disturbs the visual narrative of the space and here is the painting we have come to view, an oil on canvas abstract work by Clara Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu created in Nigeria, 1960. To find this artwork – an artwork created by a Nigerian female artist and painted in the year of Nigeria’s independence from Britain – displayed in this location is a profound experience. It is a most stark provocation to consider how race and gender link to power…
What they point out is how Abstract makes an intervention in the visual commemoration of the service of university leaders and the achievements of Nobel peace prize winners, almost all of whom are men.Footnote35
Vice chancellor’s corridor, Aston Webb Building, University of Birmingham, October 2021, image courtesy of the author
Ugbodaga-Ngu is an important figure in Nigerian art history, but there is sparse information about her in Western academic writing. This reflects what Reilly describes as the widespread historical discrimination against women and the persistent historical erasure of their artistic production.Footnote36 While this may be so, Ugbodaga-Ngu is remembered by artists and curators in Nigeria, who describe the influence she has had on their practice. In The Icons (2020), artist Ngozi Akande, who lives and works in Abuja, Nigeria, pays tribute to Ugbodaga-Ngu and her contemporary Afi Ekong, as well as living artist Dr Nike Òkúndáyé. As she explains, this painting, in which Ugbodaga-Ngu is represented by Beggars (1963) in the upper left-hand corner, ‘depicts three renowned visual artists who have impacted the development of modern art in Nigeria’.Footnote37 Akande’s inclusion of Ugbodaga-Ngu’s artwork hints both at the painting’s permanence and at the artist’s pervasive influence on the next generation of artists, which is described most forcefully by both Akande and other artists in Lagos, Abuja and other parts of Nigeria.Footnote38
Ngozi Akande, The Icons, 2020, acrylic and discarded fabrics on canvas, image courtesy of the artist
Ugbodaga-Ngu was born in Kano, northern Nigeria, in 1921, and taught art in mission schools in the north between 1945 and 1950, before receiving a scholarship from the colonial administration to study art in London. She gained a National Diploma in Design from the Chelsea School of Art and an art teacher’s diploma from the London Institute of Education, becoming a highly trained artist and educator. On her return to Nigeria in the late 1950s, she became a drawing teacher at the influential Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology (NCAST), making her the institution’s first Nigerian teacher and first woman teacher.Footnote39 The department was subject to heavy criticism from Nigerian artists for being slow to decolonise, due to its continued recruitment of teachers from Europe who had little or no knowledge of the country. Ugbodaga-Ngu’s appointment is therefore noteworthy because it placed a Nigerian woman at the heart of one of the key art institutions of the time.
Ugbodaga-Ngu is an example of a modern artist who worked within and across diverse arenas. Nigeria Magazine described her as a ‘gifted sculptress’ and a woman who ‘left behind an essential contribution to Nigerian contemporary painting’.Footnote40 She was a pioneer who created networks between Nigeria and the rest of the world. She and her artwork frequently travelled internationally, and in 1958 she held a solo exhibition at the Commonwealth Institute in London. The first solo art exhibition by a Nigerian woman artist in the UK, it was followed by a solo exhibition in Boston, USA (1963) and group shows such as ‘Contemporary Nigerian Art’ (London, 1968). Her work was shown in Lagos at the ‘Independence Exhibition’ in 1960 and at FESTAC ‘77, where she was one of only seven women out of sixty-three artists. Due to an international profile and network of connections, Ugbodaga-Ngu provokes a reinterpretation of modernity not as a phenomenon of diffusionism but as something that arose through encounter and exchange, prompting questions of how artists remapped existing practices, rejecting, reinvigorating and reimagining inherited forms.
It was during Ugbodaga-Ngu’s time as a teacher at NCAST that the Zaria Art Society was formed. Members of the Zaria Art Society are viewed by scholars, both Western and Nigerian, as the pioneers of postcolonial modernism and as integral to the development of the Nigerian art canon. The idea of natural synthesis developed by the so-called Zaria Rebels ‘named a robust mode of synthetic experimentation by artists who claimed the right to evaluate and appropriate the best of all traditions – old and new, indigenous, and European, and functional and aestheticist – without coercion, injunction, or fear of otherness’.Footnote41 As Ugbodaga-Ngu taught Zaria Art Society students, she must have played a part in shaping their artistic practice and ideology, Nigeria Magazine noting that she ‘taught most of the leading Nigerian contemporary artists’.Footnote42 Ugbodaga-Ngu herself stated: ‘[the] majority of the young men who were my students are Nigeria’s main source of manpower in institutions of higher learning, museums, industries and [the] private sector’.Footnote43 Malz compares the ways in which Ugbodaga-Ngu’s artistic accomplishments have been recorded to those of her male contemporaries, such as the artist Ben Enwonwu:
Both [Ugbodaga-Ngu and Enwonwu] studied in England, exhibited internationally, and developed an idiosyncratic artistic language pervaded not only by European art traditions but also by African motifs and forms… While Ben Enwonwu is recognized as a pioneer of Nigerian modernism… Clara Ugbodaga-Ngu is practically not acknowledged in art histography and her works are not visible in collections.Footnote44
Ugbodaga-Ngu's painting, Abstract, is dated 1960, the year in which Nigeria gained independence from Britain and when Ugbodaga-Ngu was teaching at NCAST. The materiality of this work – its thick, textured oil paint applied using a palette knife – suggests time was taken in its construction. Although most of the shapes are angular and the architectural composition is complex, there is an upward movement towards the top left corner and some of the shapes taper to a point in that direction to propose a forward motion, a layering of past and present, not a static abstraction frozen in time or space.
Given our understanding of the ideologies present at the time, it is likely Ugbodaga-Ngu is satirising the British colonial educator’s belief in the superiority of Western art techniques and methods. Certainly, she rejected any elevation of the Western art canon above Nigerian art and artistry to defy the processes of othering that marginalised her as a colonial subject and as a woman. As Everlyn Nicodemus notes: ‘any claim from an African to be a modern artist [in the eyes of the West] was unthinkable and impudent’.Footnote45 Reacting to this work, contemporary artists in Nigeria, such as Ngozi Akande, told me that deeply gendered and racialised understandings of who could, or should, be an artist in 1960 meant that for a Nigerian woman to be working in this way was a rebellious act imbued with political agency.Footnote46
Ugbodaga-Ngu proclaims her painting to be ‘an abstract’, and even such an obvious naming reads like a provocation. It cannot be known whether the artist herself named this artwork – it may have been the art collector, a broker, or even a university cataloguer or curator. While it is most certainly a visual portrayal of bold symbols simplified to abstraction, the name appears to stand for abstraction more generally – whoever called it such saw not ‘an abstract’ but ‘the abstract’. Ugbodaga-Ngu adopts a rich approach to colour; the hues of the interlocking forms are varying shades of brown, red, yellow and grey, and darker black structures lurk behind the more colourful elements. These ‘earthy’ tones once again hint that Ugbodaga-Ngu is being satirical with the work, perhaps drawing attention to the European modernist fascination with ‘primitivism’, which attempted to frame African people as closer to nature.
Abstract can be read as a defiance of the one-point perspective or formal representational approach adopted by earlier modern artists in Nigeria, such as Aina Onabolu. It clearly does not fit the forms typically associated with colonial schooling, nor the nativist reinvocation of tradition. Art produced in modernist styles, materials and genres by Indigenous people under the shadow of colonialism was often regarded as mere provincial copying of work in the ‘art centres’ of the West, but Abstract is no blind derivation or mimicry. As an expression of Nigerian modernity, it exposes and disrupts the authority of art-historical discourse based on a geographical and temporal centring of Europe and America. Malz notes that ‘[Ugbodaga-Ngu was] held in high esteem for her terracotta works and painting, belonging to a generation [which] played an important role in the development of modern art in Nigeria’.Footnote47 Ugbodaga-Ngu may well have developed this painting to show that Nigerian artists could, and would, work with the language of modern art and abstraction. This was echoed by members of the Zaria Art Society, who blended styles while rejecting any idea that European techniques were superior. Ugbodaga-Ngu plays with the politics of artistic decolonisation by highlighting Africa’s sculptural gifts to Parisian modernism.
Ugbodaga-Ngu demonstrates her political edge throughout her oeuvre. In Beggars (1963) she depicts three men forming an inward-looking, familiar group. Two stand facing us and one stands side on; two are carrying jaunty bags decorated with a simple motif that are casually looped over their arms, and two wear informal wide-brimmed hats. All are dressed in loose clothing or long tunics. Most noticeably, all their mouths are wide open – perhaps they are singing for money, as the figure on the right appears to be tapping or stomping his foot. Such surface joviality masks the probable hunger and sadness of men whose lives are reduced to begging due to limited life chances, poor employment prospects and low income.
Clara Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu, Beggars, 1963, black-and-white image from the National Archives Catalog of the US National Archives and Records Administration: Harmon Foundation Collection, image courtesy of Fisk University Galleries
In 1963 labour strikes in protest at unsatisfactory working conditions and minimal wages had led to widespread unrest in Nigeria. The euphoria of independence was fading and divisions between the north and south, as well as tension between Hausa, Igbo and Yorùbá people – divides that had been constructed and exacerbated by the British colonial policy of indirect rule – were becoming evident. Against this backdrop, Beggars reveals the fragility of the postcolonial transition. Perhaps Ugbodaga-Ngu’s three men represent Hausa, Igbo and Yorùbá ethnopolitical divisions, or an image of dispossession Nomusa Makhubu describes as the ‘precariousness of postcolonial nationalism as well as the social, economic and political predicament of an elusive independence’.Footnote48
Ugbodaga-Ngu’s focus on the social context of Nigeria’s independence and depictions of people going about their daily lives offers a visual portrayal of the transformations in the social life of the newly emerging state of Nigeria. The ‘ordinariness’ of her subject matter is an illusion; her work is distinct because it depicts the social realities of the time. Nigerian modern artists of the period were often preoccupied with creating symbols of the new nation, particularly of postcolonial rebirth or a romanticised precolonial past that fetishised the trope of woman as ‘Mother Africa’.Footnote49 Ugbodaga-Ngu observed and translated the social realities of Nigerian life to comment upon her social milieu.
Market Women (1961) depicts three Hausa/Fulani women tending cows and bringing products to market. Once again Ugbodaga-Ngu highlights suppressed social narratives to challenge the notion that ‘modern’ women were a reason for social concern.Footnote50 The painting visually demonstrates the crucial role market women played in gaining independence in the transition to postcolonial governance. While the power of market women may have been an everyday reality, this was not the narrative of women’s livelihoods in Nigeria that emerged throughout the colonial era. Ugbodaga-Ngu’s work portrays a social and historical context in which women are independent and possess the ability to shape their own lives. She challenges the patriarchal notion that ‘modern’ women were a cause for social anxiety. Ugbodaga-Ngu portrays women working in spheres where they wield influence. A large proportion of market traders were Animist or Muslim, and women were therefore veiled to access the public space of the market. In her depiction, these women display agency, poise and stature; they are in control of their lifestyle and are occupied with their task. Ugbodaga-Ngu would have witnessed such women trading in Zaria and Ibadan and been aware of their engagement in political action and of their ability to influence governance. The contours of the figures demonstrate Ugbodaga-Ngu’s characteristic geometric diamond shaping; the women display confident open postures that denote success, independence, and allude to their ability to earn money and achieve material comforts.
Clara Ugbodaga-Ngu, Market Women, 1961, black-and-white image from the National Archives Catalog of the US National Archives and Records Administration: Harmon Foundation Collection, image courtesy of Fisk University Galleries
The sharp edges, flattened surfaces and geometric elements of both Beggars and Market Women demonstrate the development of Ugbodaga-Ngu’s interest in abstraction. She experimented further with Man and Bird (1963), where two characters become representational symbols and shapes. The bird may be a reference to Yorùbá religious art, which associates birds with the spiritual realm. Man and Bird demonstrates the development of Ugbodaga-Ngu’s idiosyncratic artistic language as she synthesised European art traditions and African motifs and forms. Her use of Nigerian motifs and iconographies achieved a synthesis with Nigerian artistry that drew on rediscovered, reactivated or reimagined local aesthetic traditions.
Clara Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu, Man and Bird, 1963, black-and-white image from the National Archives Catalog of the US National Archives and Records Administration: Harmon Foundation Collection, image courtesy of Fisk University Galleries
Ugbodaga-Ngu’s body of work shows that she translated, and sometimes deliberately mistranslated, models of artistic practice. Her life spanned the complex history of twentieth-century colonial imposition, through decolonisation, to the realities of postcolonial Nigeria. As an artist she responded to the changing social and cultural conditions around her, and the artwork she produced forms a repository of memory that reveals the economic and political highs and lows of the colonial period and its aftermath. A study of Ugbodaga-Ngu and her artwork reveals the entangled relationships and dynamic cultural flows that have formed the Danford Collection. It offers an access point through which to unsettle the accepted narratives of the ethnographic collection and illuminates the construction of meaning through visual art in the space of the ethnographic archive.
Conclusion
The Danford Collection exhibits the typical classificatory issues and taxonomical conundrums that are associated with the ethnographic collection more broadly. An ‘ethnographic’ framing is linked with notions of primitivism, evoking ideas of static people and societies, representing African creativity and African people in ways that can be reductive and unhelpful. Although they have developed over the last century, these ideas have lingering repercussions for the way Africa is presented and understood today. Using the complex grouping of material which forms the Danford Collection as a case study, this article has gone beyond simplistic readings of the ethnographic collection to demonstrate that close attention to the art and artefacts within it can trouble its archival silences.
An in-depth focus on one artist and one artwork opens new perspectives. In many ways this prompts more questions than it answers, but the aim of an unsettling is the destabilisation of one-dimensional readings of this space. Considering the significance of Abstract, along with other modernist artworks by Ugbodaga-Ngu’s Nigerian contemporaries that sit within the Danford Collection, highlights the changing ideas attached to art and artistic movements throughout history. Unsettling and troubling the accepted boundaries of the ethnographic collection challenges the parameters of the Western art canon, which centres the idea that modern art emanated from Europe and America. Ugbodaga-Ngu’s presence in the ethnographic archive complicates and destabilises orthodox understandings of Nigerian female artists and their contributions to modernism.
This article has begun to liberate the multiplicity of voices trapped within the obfuscating structures that frame the Danford Collection. Allowing for a polyphony of voices to emerge also calls for a dialogue with different sources, such as visitors who come to learn about Ugbodaga-Ngu’s work or other artists she influenced. Merely relying on art historians of the past or present and attempting to read the ethnographic archive through previous lenses does not offer new perspectives or open the archive for reinterpretation. Searching for new narratives or ways of understanding can bring to light what is hidden; it can change the stories that are told and the way material is read. Unsettling the Danford Collection reveals multiple narratives and exposes structures of power. Locating a plurality of voices, which includes female artists such as Ugbodaga-Ngu, can offer new perspectives through which to make sense of art history.
I hope to have contributed to this limited critical discourse around institutionally based art spaces linked to the history of empire. I argue for more inclusive approaches to reading such archives, which recognise the multiplicity of voices within. Undertaking detailed analysis of one artist shows that African people (African women in this instance) have agency, that the collection is not an entity constructed by the actions of white male European actors. Foregrounding Ugbodaga-Ngu’s life and work can enrich and expand our understanding of the Danford Collection and illuminate the way in which this heritage is presented. It should be central to any meaningful process of decolonisation that the art histories contained within and represented by university archives are better understood. More work must be done to shed light on the way institutions such as the University of Birmingham have historically gathered material originating from, or relating to, the African continent and its inhabitants, whether of colonial or more recent production.
Notes
1 Leading major ethnographic collections in the UK include Horniman Museum and Gardens, Pitt Rivers Museum and the British Museum. These institutions are often the subject of heated debates about cultural restitution, repatriation and the decolonisation of museums.
2 Zachary Kingdon, Ethnographic Collecting and African Agency in Early Colonial West Africa: A Study of Trans-imperial Cultural Flows, Bloomsbury, New York, 2019
3 Laura Ann Stoler, ‘Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance’, Archival Science, vol 2, 2002, pp 87–109, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02435632; Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1996, p 4
4 See eg Achille Mbembe On the Postcolony, University of California Press, Oakland, California, 2001
5 Dan Hicks, The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution, Pluto Press, London, 2020; Barnaby Phillips, Loot: Britain and the Benin Bronzes, Oneworld, London, 2021
6 Kingdon, Ethnographic Collecting, op cit
7 Although the material was gathered under the framework of imperialism.
8 The Research and Cultural Collections team at UoB, who are responsible for the collection, have recently suggested that the name be changed to ‘Africa Collection’.
9 Chika Okeke-Agulu, Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in Twentieth-Century Nigeria, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, 2015
10 David Clarke, ‘Contemporary Asian Art and the West’, in Jonathan Harris, ed, Globalization and Contemporary Art, John Wiley, Hoboken, New Jersey, 2011 p 250
11 The provocation of this panel, which I co-chaired with Khadija von Zinnenburg Carroll and Azadeh Sarjoughian, was this: ‘Only when a multiplicity of perspectives exists in dialogue can we talk of art history becoming globalised as a discipline.’
12 Due to the restrictions arising from the COVID-19 pandemic, the conference was moved to a digital platform.
13 The research was funded by an Arts and Humanities Research Council grant through the Midlands 4 Cities doctoral training partnership, and was supported by RCC curator Anna Young.
14 Itohan Osayimwese ‘Invisible Woman: Reclaiming Josephine Ifueko Osayimwese Omigie in the History of the Zaria Art Society and Postcolonial Modernism in Nigeria’, African Arts, vol 52, no 2, 2019, p 67
15 CWAS was renamed DASA in 2013.
16 Other university collections in the UK include Manchester Museum, the Hunterian, Pitt Rivers, the Ashmolean, the Sedgwick, the Hancock and the Petrie. Only Manchester Museum and Pitt Rivers have been the focus of in-depth research, respectively Samuel Alberti, Nature and Culture: Objects, Disciplines and the Manchester Museum, Manchester University Press, Manchester, 2012; and Dan Hicks, The Brutish Museums: The Benin Bronzes, Colonial Violence and Cultural Restitution, Pluto Press, London, 2020.
17 Dennis O Flynn and Arturo Giráldez, ‘The Philippines as Imperial Profit Center in the 16th and 17th Centuries’, in Clara Eugenia Núñez, ed, Monetary History in Global Perspective, 1500–1808 Editorial Universidad de Sevilla, Seville, 1998, pp 61–71; Rosalind O’Hanlon and Emma Jinhua Teng, ‘Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History’, in Tony Ballantyne and Antoinette Burton, eds, Bodies in Contact: Rethinking Colonial Encounters in World History, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, 2005, pp xii, 445
18 Ruth Simbao, ‘David Nthubu Koloane (1938–2019)’, African Arts, vol 53, no 2, 2020, pp 6–9
19 John L Comaroff and Jean Comaroff, ‘Postcolonial Politics and Discourses of Democracy in Southern Africa: An Anthropological Reflection on African Political Modernities’, Journal of Anthropological Research, vol 53, no 2, 1997, pp 123–146; Jean Comaroff and John Comaroff, ‘Ethnography on an Awkward Scale: Postcolonial Anthropology and the Violence of Abstraction’, Ethnography, vol 4, no 2, 2003, pp 147–179
20 Catherine Grant and Dorothy Price, ‘Decolonizing Art History’, Art History, vol 43, no 1, 2020, pp 8–66
21 Laura Ann Stoler, ‘Colonial Archives and the Arts of Governance’, Archival Science, vol 2, 2002, pp 87–109, at p 92, https://doi.org/10.1007/BF02435632
22 See eg Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Postcoloniality and the Artifice of History: Who Speaks for “Indian” pasts?’, Representations, vol 37, 1992, pp 1–26; or Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, University of Minnesota Press, Minneapolis, 1996
23 Elizabeth Harney and Ruth B Phillips, eds, Mapping Modernisms: Art, Indigeneity, Colonialism, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, 2018
24 Eg James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature, and Art, Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1988; Hal Foster ‘The Artist as Ethnographer?’, in George Marcus and Fred Myers, eds, The Traffic in Culture: Refiguring Art and Anthropology, University of California Press, Oakland, California, 1995, pp 302–309
25 Elizabeth Harney, In Senghor’s Shadow: Art, Politics, and the Avant-garde in Senegal, 1960–1995, Duke University Press, Durham, North Carolina, 2004
26 Harney and Phillips, eds, Mapping Modernisms, op cit
27 Isabelle Malz, ‘Zaria, 1960’, in Kathrin Beßen, Doris Krystof, Isabelle Malz and Maria Müller-Schareck, eds, Museum Global: Mikrogeschichten einer ex-zentrischen Moderne, Wienand, Cologne, 2018, p 238
28 Nkiru Nzegwu, ‘Transgressive Vision: Subverting the Power of Masculinity’, in Issues in Contemporary African Art, International Society for the Study of Africa, Binghamton, New York, 1998, pp 105–134
29 Eg Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, Ben Enwonwu: The Making of an African Modernist, University of Rochester Press, Rochester, New York, 2008; Sunanda K Sanyal and Maria Kasule Kizito, ‘Modernism and Cultural Politics in East Africa: Cecil Todd’s Drawings of the Uganda Martyrs: [With Commentary]’, African Arts, vol 39, no 1, 2006, pp 50–59; Chika Okeke-Agulu and John Picton, ‘Nationalism and the Rhetoric of Modernism in Nigeria: The Art of Uche Okeke and Demas Nwoko, 1960–1968: [With Commentary]’, African Arts, vol 39, no 1, 2006, pp 26–37, 92–93
30 Nkiru Nzegwu, ‘Crossing Boundaries: Gender Transmogrification of African Art History’, 2000, UCLA: James S Coleman African Studies Center, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/9c62v33t, accessed 07/12/2022
31 Juliana Makuchi Nfah-Abbenyi, Gender, Feminist Theory, and Post-colonial (Women’s) Writing, Palgrave Macmillan, Houndsmills, 2005
32 Maura Reilly and Lucy R Lippard, Curatorial Activism: Towards an Ethics of Curating, Thames & Hudson, London, 2018
33 Eg Bibi Bakare-Yusuf, ‘Rethinking Diasporicity: Embodiment, Emotion, and the Displaced Origin’, African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal, vol 1, no 2, 2008, pp 147–158
34 The lecture was titled ‘Search and Research: Celebrating Clara Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu’.
35 The portraits that line the walls of the corridor celebrate the seven vice chancellors of UoB, who are all male: Lord Bilimoria of Chelsea CBE, 2014–present; Sir Dominic Cadbury, 2002–2013; Sir Alex Jarratt, 1983–2002; Sir Peter Scott, 1973–1983; The Rt Hon Anthony Eden, Earl of Avon, 1945–1973; The Rt Hon Robert Cecil, 1st Viscount Cecil of Chelwood, 1918–1944; The Rt Hon Joseph Chamberlain, 1900–1914. A memorial plaque celebrates UoB’s Nobel Peace Prize winners, namely Francis Aston, Sir Norman Haworth, Lord Robert Cecil, Sir Peter Medawar, Maurice Wilkins, Sir John Vane, Sir Paul Nurse, Professor David Thouless, Professor Mike Kosterlitz and Professor Sir J Fraser Stoddart. University of Birmingham website, ‘Chancellors of the University’ and ‘Our Nobel Prize Winners’, accessed 11 December 2023.
36 Reilly and Lippard, Curatorial Activism, op cit
37 Ngozi Akande, email conversation with the author, July – August 2020
38 Stacey Kennedy, ‘Women’s Agency in the Nigerian Art World: Modernist Legacies and Contemporary Moves across African Art Networks’, doctoral thesis, University of Birmingham, 2023
39 I am referring here to NCAST at Zaria. NCAST started 1953/1954 and was originally located in Ibadan; in 1955 its art programme was fully departmentalised and relocated to a permanent site in Zaria, northern Nigeria, with sixteen students. Chinyere Ndubuisi, ‘Visual Art Appreciation in Nigeria: The Zaria Art Society Experience’, Mgbakoigba: Journal of African Studies, vol 6, no 2, 2017, pp 168–174.
40 Nigeria Magazine 89, 1966, p 138; Nigeria Magazine 99,1968, p 125
41 Anneka Lenssen, ‘The Two-Fold Global Turn’, ARTMargins, vol 7, no 1, 2018, p 87
42 Nigeria Magazine 99, 1968, p 125
43 Ngozi Akande, Uncovered Female Nigerian Artists, Female Artist Association of Nigeria, exhibition catalogue, ImageXetera, Abuja, 2019, p 42
44 Malz, ‘Zaria’, op cit, p 239
45 Everlyn Nicodemus, ‘African Modern Art and Black Cultural Trauma’, doctoral thesis, Middlesex University, 2012, p 32
46 Kennedy, ‘Women’s Agency’, op cit
47 Malz, ‘Zaria’, op cit, p 239
48 Nomusa Makhubu, ‘African Women in Art’, in Oxford Research Encyclopedia of African History Online, 2020, https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190277734.013.489
49 Toyin Falola and Saheed Aderinto, Nigeria, Nationalism, and Writing History, University of Rochester Press, Rochester, New York, 2010
50 Lisa A Lindsay, ‘Working with Gender: The Emergence of the “Male Breadwinner” in Colonial Southwestern Nigeria’, in Catherine M Cole, Takyiwaa Manuh and Stephan Miescher, eds, Africa after Gender?, Indiana University Press, Bloomington, Indiana, 2007, p 241