When solidarity falls apart
Daniel Nelson
Things Fall Apart is an exhibition that recalls another time, another Africa – one with which Jeremy Corbyn would feel comfortable (and that's more praise than criticism).
It’s an Africa of the Non-Aligned Movement, of the Soviet bloc’s education of communist cadres for nascent African civil services, of the common currency of words like liberation and struggle.
Some of the work on display is from that other time, such as the images from the archive of the President of Yugoslavia, Josip Tito. Others are more recent interpretations of the fraternal liberation friendships of the 1950s and ‘60s – for example, South Korean artist Onejoon Che’s fresh look at the links between North Korea’s Dear Leader and several African cou ntries.
The statues and portraits of the Dear Leader on which the artist focuses were only part of the story: I remember how a North Korean diplomat came to the newspaper I was editing in Kampala and paid cash for a full-page ad praising Kim Il-sung. Other North Korean diplomats in other African countries did the same, and I assume they all sent copies to Pyongyang to prove to their President that, thanks partly to the diplomats’ efforts, the world loved him.
Film features strongly in the exhibition, one paradox among many because there were and are so few cinemas in Africa. Film was seen as an important propaganda tool in the Soviet bloc, but was largely ignored by governments in Africa, apart from some of the former French colonies, particularly Burkina Faso, which built on the French tradition of according cinema intellectual respectability. Isaac Julien’s photographs include a roundabout in Ouagadougou that celebrates the mechanics of camera and projector. That would be unthinkable in Anglophone Africa.
Similarly, maquettes by Maputo-born, South Africa-raised, Lisbon-based Angela Ferreira pay homage to post-independence workshops in Mozambique by French film-maker Jean Rouch whose aim was to use “Super 8 film as a tool for development.”
It all sounds embarrassingly earnest and self-consciously intellectual to British ears, but that’s one of the main points of interest of this show: it forces us to look at countries of which we know virtually nothing, such as Guinea; at African experiences of which we also know next to nothing, such as the independence wars in Portugal’s African colonies – which were hardly reported here; and to confront our ignorance and cynicism about Africa’s anti-colonial struggles.
It also provokes thoughts about the disappearance of what the exhibition blurb calls “the militant aesthetic”, of current attitudes in parts of Africa to the blandishments of foreign capital, and of course to the reaction and racism in Russia and East Europe after the fall of communism.
When years ago I went to Hungary to discuss with activists whether East Europe, Africa and Asia might work together on environmental issues I was told in no uncertain terms that East Europeans were Europeans, with whom they would throw in their lot, and had nothing in common with developing countries.
I was told that part of the reason for this pulling away from the Third World (“a third element in the binary world politics after 1945”) was that solidarity with Africa and Asia had been an official Soviet command and now that citizens were free they wanted to disassociate themselves with this (en)forced sentiment.
The title of the exhibition comes from Chinua Achebe’s 1958 novel “and uses this association to focus on a similar loss of utopian perspective following the end of the Cold War and collapse of the Communist Bloc’s investment in African cultural and political developments.”
* Things Fall Apart: Affective communities and the Cold War is at Calvert 22, 22 Calvert Avenue, E2, Wednesdays-Sundays, midday-6pm, free, until 3 April. Info: 7613 214
+ Red Africa — A season of art, film, talks and events at Calvert 22
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