The photo in Fig. 1 was likely taken during the 1940s on the premises of the Achimota School. The student's watercolour painting depicts three men, probably village elders, in loincloths. She arranged the men neatly in the foreground with a number of dwellings and a female figure in the background.
Student painting at Achimota campus. Year and photographer unknown. Information Services, Accra, Ghana.
The art style and subject matter of the painting are reminiscent of the type of art commonly seen in today's galleries and tourist markets in urban Ghana: ‘African’ cultural scenes carried out in representational styles. Some artists and their patrons reject this type of art as pandering to the taste of foreign visitors.Footnote 1 Such a view overlooks the fact that naturalistic portraits of Ghanaian life have a history that dates back to colonial times, when the foundation for Ghanaian modern art was laid. The notion that art education in colonial Africa was limited to the teaching of vocational ‘crafts’ such as basket weaving or carpentry, or that art only became included in school syllabi when educated Africans demanded it, does not apply to all of colonial Africa.Footnote 2 Taking into account both the medium (easel painting) and style (highly naturalistic representation), this painting illustrates well how the formation of modern art in Ghana was linked to the rise of higher education in the colonial period.
Painting as a medium of expression was not foreign to precolonial West Africa; people had long created patterns on canoes and compound walls.Footnote 3 Moreover, artistic imitation of reality was not unknown as is evident, for example, in the female fertility dolls, akuaba. Yet, it is also undeniable that the conceptual model reflected in easel painting and formal art education differed from indigenous art forms that were often embedded in everyday life or ritual.Footnote 4
A number of scholars have studied how national concerns frequently informed modernist art production in newly-independent African countries.Footnote 5 By contrast, the influence of colonial art education on modern art movements has yet to attract a great deal of scholarly attention. This strikes me as a serious shortcoming, given that modern visual art in countries such as Ghana, Nigeria, Sudan, and Uganda was mediated through colonial schooling.Footnote 6 The majority of modern art pioneers in the Gold Coast received their art education at Achimota School. Among the school's most notable graduates are Kofi Antubam, Amon Kotei, Saka Acquaye, and Vincent Kofi. Achimota School contributed in no small way to both the formation of modern art in Ghana and the revaluation of certain indigenous art practices.Footnote 7
European art teachers at Achimota challenged colonial notions of cultural essentialism and the widespread belief that blacks were inherently incapable of mastering European aesthetic forms. They did not view modern art as a Western prerogative. Rather, they sought to adapt local art forms to the benefit of a new, modern society. From the foundation of Achimota School in 1927, European art teachers inculcated in pupils the idea of the intrinsic value of what they termed ‘African art’.Footnote 8 Teachers worked with art forms that were predominantly Akan, such as carved stools, objects identified as ‘primitive art’ in the European marketplace and explicitly contrasted with modern art expressions. Achimota art teachers resisted Christian efforts to hold ‘fetish’ objects up to scorn and, like some of the colonial administrators who advocated ‘indirect rule’, expressed admiration for African ‘tradition’.Footnote 9
The transformation of African objects in European museums into primitive art had a profound influence on the Achimota teachers, who were hired precisely because their positive view of African art fit with the school's broader outlook. Their approach was also influenced by the Arts and Crafts movement in Europe, which was characterized by a romantic view of crafts that called for their greater appreciation. The Art and Crafts movement emerged as a reaction to the industrialization of society and development of highly specialized divisions of labour.Footnote 10 It romanticized the ‘purity’ of handwork from the middle ages, and deplored the loss of skilled artisanship. Writer, art critic, and artist John Ruskin (1819–1900), who was one of the most important thinkers whose writings inspired the movement, condemned industrialization as the cause of many social ills, and proclaimed the virtues of traditional crafts.Footnote 11 In line with Ruskin's ideas, the art teachers at Achimota encouraged students both to draw from their own imagination and to observe nature and emulate it in their work. These teachings would later be conveyed to art students at the Kumasi College of Technology, Science and Arts, now known as the Kwame Nkrumah University of Science and Technology.Footnote 12 In January 1952, the arts and crafts curriculum at Achimota School was transferred with its entire staff to the Kumasi College, where it constituted the autonomous School of Fine Arts, the forerunner of the current Department of Painting and Sculpture.
Alec G. Fraser, Achimota's first principal, trusted individual teachers with the authority to judge which local cultural traditions were worth promoting. No standardized textbooks or syllabi were used.Footnote 13 The seeds of ‘modern Ghanaian art’ were sown in the art classes at Achimota, where teachers sought to create a modern African art style that reflected both the ‘primitive past’ and the contemporary world.Footnote 14 As such, the art teachers laid the foundations for modern art education in Ghana, and defined the terms of what modern Ghanaian art would look like – terms that would be hotly disputed during the coming decades.Footnote 15 Specifically, that debate would focus on the questions of whether or not modern art in Ghana should be rooted in precolonial forms and subjects and, if so, how to nurture this foundation.Footnote 16
AFRICA AND THE WEST: SYNTHESIZING TWO TRADITIONS IN EDUCATION
Achimota School was officially opened in 1927 by what Cati Coe refers to as ‘expatriate romantics of African culture and history’ who sought ‘to wed the best of Africa and the West [in order to] to educate African leaders who, for the greater development of their country, would at once be in touch with “the people” and serve as brokers of Western ideas'.Footnote 17 The coeducational boarding school was located about six miles north of Accra in a quiet rural setting, and eventually offered schooling from kindergarten up to teacher training and university classes.Footnote 18
A White Paper on colonial education, published in 1925 by the British government, promulgated the view that colonial subjects should be trained for eventual self-governance.Footnote 19 These plans were in line with the agenda of the African intelligentsia, who wanted a greater share in the administration of the colony in the wake of its contribution to the First World War.Footnote 20 Sir Frederick Gordon Guggisberg, governor of the Gold Coast from 1919 to 1927, made education one of his policy priorities. He was convinced, as were many of his subordinates, that a first-class, government-run secondary school based on local institutions and customs was ‘a first and foremost step in the progress of the races and the Gold Coast’.Footnote 21 Such thinking aligned well with colonial policies of ‘indirect rule’ that sought simultaneously to provide an inexpensive form of colonial governance, and to respect and uphold African beliefs and practices. Guggisberg dedicated himself to the ‘preservation’ of local institutions and rulers. He sponsored ethnographic research on indigenous institutions and made it possible for Asantehene Prempe I, who had been in exile since 1896, to return to Kumasi in 1924.Footnote 22 Part of this faith in African culture as a vehicle of social cohesion resulted from anxiety over the social disintegration that appeared to plague postwar European metropolitan centres.Footnote 23
Achimota School officially opened in 1927 with one hundred students under the age of twelve and soon received applications from students from across sub-Saharan Africa. The school's piano-key logo, with its accompanying motto Ut omnes unum sint (That all may be one) – a phrase perfectly understood by students as Latin was a compulsory subject – was at the core of Achimota's philosophy. James Aggrey, a Fante who studied and taught in the United States for 22 years and later became the assistant vice-principal at Achimota in 1924, made the following statement regarding the piano-key metaphor: ‘You can play a tune of sorts on the black keys only; and you can play a tune of sorts on the white keys only; but for perfect harmony, you must use both the black and the white keys.’Footnote 24 Combining European and African culture at Achimota in ‘perfect harmony’ proved difficult in an elitist, anglicised, and profoundly Christian school – where the majority of staff were European, while the students were Africans of diverse social, linguistic, and cultural backgrounds. At Achimota, the promotion of African culture entailed the study of four vernacular languages, as well as African history, music, dance, and art and crafts.Footnote 25 The paternalism of Achimota's staff, council, and commission, who felt a duty to engender a profound appreciation among the African students of their own customs, art, and history – sometimes in the face of these students’ considerable resistance – generated challenges.
In his speech at the opening of the school, Guggisberg expressed concern regarding the potential of European education to alienate educated Africans from their fellow countrymen. Such alienation, Guggisberg argued, was why it was so important for each pupil to keep in touch with his or her ‘tribal customs’ through, for example, study-camps in rural villages.Footnote 26 In a similar vein, Guggisberg worried that future anglicized leaders might not understand and respect the semi-literate masses with whom he envisioned them working in rural areas.Footnote 27 Achimota sought to bridge the gap between European and African forms of knowledge. The coexistence of European and African cultural events at the school made one teacher, who had just arrived in the Gold Coast, remark with joyful excitement how ‘a performance of a Haydn symphony one evening and a display of tribal drumming the next is typical for the amazing combination of European and African cultures which is characteristic of Achimota’.Footnote 28
Yet, despite the efforts of its art teachers, a fusion of African and European culture did not evolve easily at Achimota. Rather, the early curriculum presented European and African cultures as opposite poles with specific spatial and temporal dimensions. English school uniforms were worn during the week, for example, whereas ‘tribal dress’ was reserved for free time and Sundays.Footnote 29 Saturday nights were reserved for ‘tribal drumming’ identified with four ethnic groups (Ga, Fante, Ashanti, and Ewe) while the school orchestra practiced European classical music on Friday evenings and Saturday mornings.Footnote 30 The belief that different ‘races’ exhibited essentially different characteristics and qualities informed the notion that African and European cultures had developed along different lines of ‘progress’, and should be kept apart from one other.Footnote 31
Given Achimota's status as an elite institute, its graduates often ended up attending universities in Great Britain, or attaining prestigious posts in the colonial administration of the Gold Coast. ‘Achimota's success was not due to the “African” components in its curriculum but was rather in spite of them’, noted Philip Foster, an early scholar of colonial education.Footnote 32 This point is in keeping with a suspicion voiced by some African intellectuals and leaders that the teaching of African dance, music, and crafts was merely a colonial strategy to ensure that Africans remained ‘backward’.Footnote 33 Nevertheless, other educators and government officials viewed the teaching of ‘African culture’ as a panacea for cultural alienation.Footnote 34 Moreover, following independence, some influential Ghanaian artists argued that art disconnected from African culture resulted in nothing more than shallow imitations of Western art.Footnote 35
Achimota not only educated artists who later became pioneers of modern Ghanaian art.Footnote 36 It also helped create an educated elite from which a vast number of public figures, policymakers, politicians, and Ghanaian heads of state eventually emerged. Achimota influenced both state formation and the creation of modern Ghanaian art. At present, Achimota is a government-run boarding school that still enjoys a good reputation. The green grounds and white colonial buildings form quite a contrast to the bustling city of Accra that is now within a short walk of the school (see Fig. 2).
The Administration Block, Achimota School, Ghana. Photograph taken by author, July 2008.
CREATING A MODERN AFRICAN ART STYLE
The colonial government drafted an Education Code in 1887 that included the subject ‘hand and eye training’, derived from the program of the Science and Art Department in South Kensington, a British government body that promoted and funded art and science education.Footnote 37 Pupils in mission and government schools in the Gold Coast and other British colonies were taught to produce still-life works on paper or clay sculptures of everyday objects such as biscuits, bananas, and Bibles. The study of form, colour, and design, as well as art appreciation, art history, and art criticism remained absent in the Education Code.Footnote 38 According to artist, curator, and intellectual Olu Oguibe, the main purpose of early colonial education was to provide training in vocational skills that served the British empire and to preserve colonial dependency by granting African subjects only partial access to a full art curriculum; according to colonial logic, art and aesthetic sensibility belonged to the domain of a highly civilized culture. By denying the colonized access to a complete Western art education, Oguibe argues, colonizers assured the continued inferiority of ‘primitive’ subjects.Footnote 39 Countering this colonial tendency, teachers at Achimota believed that Africans should be taught more than mere ‘handwork’, and hand and eye training.
George Alexander Stevens, a British art historian and researcher of West African culture, joined the school in 1927 to work in the Teacher Training Department. During the two previous years, he had worked at the Accra Teachers Training College and had studied indigenous art forms in the surrounding region.Footnote 40 According to Stevens, the ‘dry and boring’ subject of hand and eye training was not consistent with the ‘needs of the African people’. He strove ‘to establish friendly relations between the despised art of the “bush African”, past and present, in wood carving, weaving etc., and the art of these sophisticated and superior school boys’.Footnote 41 Stevens found such efforts very rough going as his students openly scoffed at the ‘crudity’ of indigenous artists. Students associated wooden sculptures with ‘paganism’, pottery with dirty women's work, and weaving with work suitable for villagers but not useful for Achimota students who wore imported clothes from Manchester.Footnote 42 Paradoxically, a British art teacher found it necessary to instil a love for African art traditions in African students eager to abandon them. According to Stevens, however, students ‘soon ceased to jeer’ when he showed them how a potter could build almost perfect circular pots without the help of a potter's wheel, and how a woodcarver could construct symmetrical features without using any measurements.Footnote 43 Stevens also showed his students slides of masks from Congo, convinced as he was of the aesthetic affinity between art forms in the Gold Coast and in the rest of sub-Saharan Africa. At the same time, Stevens did not try to shield his students from work made in European art academies, as would European teachers in African art workshops that emerged in the 1940s and 1950s in Congo, Nigeria, and Rhodesia.Footnote 44 At Achimota, students were subjected to conventional European art rules in terms of learning to draw, and to use perspective and correct body proportions. This kind of education was later rejected by the European workshop teachers as part of their efforts to protect ‘unspoiled’ African artists from European influences and art history. George Stevens, by contrast, exposed his students to art from Europe, Egypt, Asia, and Persia, and decorated the school's art room with copies of masterpieces by Raphael and Leonardo da Vinci hung side-by-side with copies of Greek sculptures and friezes. Under each work, he provided notes to draw attention to its particular artistic merits.Footnote 45 As Stevens explained in an article on his teachings at Achimota, his goal was to invalidate the idea that everything good came from Europe, and to show that each culture continuously developed, even when absorbing outside influences.Footnote 46 In line with this thought, Stevens exposed students to European, Asian, and African art history.Footnote 47
In a short essay for a catalogue that accompanied an exhibition of drawings by Achimota students, Stevens recalled how, in 1925, before his official appointment, he was asked to organize the annual art exhibition at Achimota. Disappointed by the available products of the hand and eye training, which consisted of coloured drawings of inkbottles and candles in holders, Stevens went to the dormitories in search of something more compelling. He wrote with palpable excitement about what he discovered:
Here was the germ of the African art of the future, for some of the more waggish of the students had drawn, surreptitiously and unaided, what were really satirical cartoons representing incidents in the daily life of the college, students and staff mercilessly portrayed in humorous and revealing situations … . These cartoons became the basis of my teaching.Footnote 48
Stevens encouraged his students to be original, and to draw upon their imagination, values he derived from his own schooling in Britain. He felt the ‘African genius’ beginning to blossom through his method would lead to a ‘kind of Renaissance’,Footnote 49 wherein ‘the finished work bore less and less resemblance to second-rate European drawing and more and more resemblance to the forms of the older indigenous art … as if the race spirit, after lying dormant for so long, had found itself again’.Footnote 50 Although he did not use specifically Jungian terminology, Stevens's belief in racial differences resonated with Carl Jung's popular idea of a collective unconsciousness inscribed with archetypical forms. In the Jungian view, such forms were retrievable from the collective cultural memory, even by those who had never produced ‘traditional’ art.Footnote 51 Stevens's students were also exposed to drawing landscapes, portraits, and village scenes from observation and memory. In addition, Stevens organized drawing excursions to places outside of the college compound.Footnote 52
Fellow British art teachers in colonial Africa, such as Kenneth C. Murray (1903–72) who came to Nigeria in 1927, embraced a similar approach in their teaching. Murray encouraged African students to draw and paint scenes from their daily life and environment, and tried to instil in his students a love for local art forms. Oguibe argues that Murray discouraged his Nigerian students from adopting the style of academic realism because of his desire to keep Africans in an ‘authentic’ state.Footnote 53 But there was another compelling reason why colonial art teachers discouraged such efforts. Stevens was an admirer of Roger Fry, from whom he sought advice when creating Achimota's art curriculum.Footnote 54 Fry (1866–1934) was a well-known English artist and critic who argued that art should not be judged by how accurately it represented reality, but rather by its use of colours and tones, and its arrangement of forms. Fry rejected academic realism in favour of a freer impressionist and post-impressionist painting style represented by Manet and Cézanne, among others. Hand and eye training represented everything that Fry opposed, and he advised Stevens in a letter ‘to get rid of all that South Kensington nonsense’.Footnote 55 From the beginning of the twentieth century, photography and film had challenged mimeses in painting. Such challenges had led artists like Fry to loosen their commitments to realism in art. Instead, Fry embraced the formal aspects of African sculpture as a liberation from mimetic representation, describing them as greater ‘than anything we produced’.Footnote 56
Fry and colonial art teachers such as Stevens and Murray were also dedicated followers of Marion Richardson's teaching methods, which challenged traditional art practice in British schools.Footnote 57 Richardson (1892–1946), in turn, was a protégée of Fry. She discouraged copying, and instead asked school children to paint and draw imaginary as well as local scenes.Footnote 58 In line with new developments in European modern art and art teaching methods, colonial teachers at Achimota advocated a freer form of picture making. At the same time, these teachers paternalistically viewed their students as possessing an innate, natural talent for the use of African textures and proportions that from a Western viewpoint appeared distorted, suggesting that these intrinsic skills should be fostered in art classes.Footnote 59
Stevens embraced a belief in primordialism and viewed primitive African art, partly defined by its distorted proportions, as pure, sincere, and unselfconscious. At the same time, he encouraged his students to use foreign art styles, materials, techniques, and ideas, and to then forge these into a new but recognizable ‘African’ frame. According to Stevens, the modern drawings and paintings that resulted from his teaching revealed a peculiar feeling for textures and surface qualities that echoed much of indigenous weaving and woodcarving.Footnote 60 While Stevens believed that African culture was on the verge of collapse as a result of the devastating effects of colonialism, he advocated its revitalization through modernist intervention.Footnote 61 As stated earlier, Achimota typically kept African and European subjects separate in its curriculum. Stevens, however, was an exception, convinced as he was that an African style would emerge from his student's aesthetic subconscious and in some way manifest itself naturally in pencil and water colour drawings.
AFRICAN AND EUROPEAN ART AS SEPERATE ENTITIES
George Stevens resigned in 1929 and, a year later, woodcarver and illustrator Gabriel Pippet (1880–1962) took over as the art headmaster. It is interesting to note here that Pippet's own work, influenced as he was by the Arts and Crafts movement, reflected an interest in mosaic, woodcuts, and medieval European manuscript design. Through his position in the Gold Coast, Pippet further explored his interest in crafts by inviting local carvers to Achimota to serve as instructors in what he called ‘Negro Art’.Footnote 62 While Stevens had attempted to reconcile African and European art, Pippet kept the two forms strictly separate. Yet what the two art masters shared was a belief in a primordial African identity – one that could be cultivated in art classes.
Pippet brought in a local carver, Mr. Hin, whose work he believed showed little or no trace of European influence.Footnote 63 While Pippet initially viewed the indigenous tools and modes of carving as dangerous to fingers and hands, he soon realized to his relief that ‘the African boy’ had an ‘aptitude (no doubt inherited) for using a tool in this manner’.Footnote 64 Given that few of his two hundred students had any experience with carving, Pippet suggested that they were using the tools with an instinctive aptitude as ‘Africans have a really fine feeling for sculptural forms’.Footnote 65 The students had a certain amount of freedom to choose their subjects under the direction of the master carver.Footnote 66 Pippet himself encouraged students to carve native objects of Akan origin, such as state swords (historically made from metal), combs, fufu mortars, and chiefs' stools. He advised his students ‘to do something else’ when they wanted to carve models of airplanes, bicycles, or automobiles.Footnote 67
The drawing and painting classes taught by Pippet were based on British art education methods. Students learned classic rules of perspective, and mastered the proportions of the human body in watercolour, pencil, pen and ink, chalk, or charcoal.Footnote 68 Thus, while Pippet encouraged students to carve native objects instead of airplanes, he also encouraged them to sketch events witnessed during sport practice or school games during memory-drawing classes. He valued distorted proportions as a positive feature in woodcarving but maintained the opposite view when it came to drawing. Remarking on the drawing classes in the Achimota report for 1933, Pippet complained about the difficulty that African pupils initially had with the proportions of the human body, given that their figures ‘always tend to have large heavy heads on attenuated bodies’. ‘But’, he continued, ‘the students have grasped the principle and finally have taken pride in well proportioned and sometimes athletic looking fellows’.Footnote 69 For Pippet, ‘African’ woodcarving and ‘European’ drawing operated in two separate domains with different rules, methods, and techniques; students showed an inherited talent when it came to their ‘own’ cultural expression, but initially lacked aptitude when it came to drawing in proper perspective.
‘THE BAUHAUSING OF WEST AFRICAN CRAFTS’
Pippet resigned in 1936 and was succeeded by the sculptor and designer Herbert Vladimir Meyerowitz who came to the Gold Coast from South Africa with his wife, who worked as an artist and ethnographer. Meyerowitz was born in St Petersburg in 1900 to a German father and Russian mother. After the First World War, Meyerowitz attended an arts and crafts school in Berlin, where he met his future wife, Eva Lewin Richter. They shared a passion for African art, especially from West Africa, and ‘used to devour together all the books about it that they could find’.Footnote 70 Meyerowitz continued woodcarving at the Berlin Kunstgewerbeschule (School of Arts and Crafts) and after his studies, he worked as a woodcarver and art teacher at the University of Cape Town. His interest in African art led him to study local art forms in what is present-day Lesotho and to organize an exhibition of ‘African Arts and Crafts’ in what was Southern Rhodesia. At this particular exhibition, Meyerowitz expressed his admiration for the ‘traditional’ forms and designs of Africa.Footnote 71 However, the work brought in from schools, said Meyerowitz, made him ‘bitterly ashamed of all this trash’ that was no more than a mere copy of ‘tenth-rate European designs’. The story goes that the deputy director of education of the Gold Coast approached Meyerowitz after his speech and said, ‘Since we are so bad, I wish you would come over and help us.’Footnote 72 Shortly afterwards, Meyerowitz was contacted by the principal of Achimota College, Reverend H. M. Grace, who offered him a job as arts and crafts master in the school. Meyerowitz and his wife embraced the opportunity to travel within the West African region, and to survey indigenous arts in the Gold Coast.Footnote 73
Meyerowitz was even more disposed than his two predecessors to traditional arts. Meyerowitz believed that those of the Gold Coast were in danger of extinction and that they did not receive the recognition they deserved. Pippet's efforts to teach the students perspective and correct proportions were abandoned in favour of ‘a freer and more imaginative form of picture making’.Footnote 74 Meyerowitz's remark was typical of the ‘hands off’ approach of white teachers who would later establish workshops in several parts of Africa. However, Meyerowitz retained the drawing of landscapes and human figures in the curriculum, and he continued to regard perspective and anatomy as important.Footnote 75 He believed in the primordial existence of an African aesthetic and held that the reproduction of local objects was ‘at least as important’ for his students as Western modes of expression. In 1937, he wrote:
The art teaching at Achimota will be unsatisfactory if its sole result is to bring about an admiration for European art and laborious attempts to absorb European art traditions. It must enable the eyes of the students to see and their hands to express the African beauty that lies about them; and their expression will be more natural and therefore probably more valuable if it follows the lines of African tradition. For this reason the modelling, carving, basketwork, and other crafts are at least as important as work with pencil and paint brush. The African has always gone for wood and clay to express himself, pencils, brushes and paint are foreign to him.Footnote 76
Pencils and brushes were, of course, far from foreign to the students at Achimota, who often came from mission schools. Meyerowitz attracted African and European teachers and artists to the school in order to teach new subjects, such as weaving and mural painting, that he introduced to the curriculum. His request that the Asantehene Nana Otumfuo Sir Osei Agyeman Prempeh II send his master carver to Achimota was honoured when the talented Osei Bonsu joined the staff of the school. Bonsu specialized in carving royal paraphernalia such as linguist staffs, umbrella tops, state sword handles, and drums. Meyerowitz also introduced a scholarship scheme for successful students that enabled them to study abroad, and he launched a three-year program in arts and crafts at Achimota in 1935 that would later be transferred to the Kumasi College of Technology in 1952.Footnote 77
Meyerowitz sought to adapt local craftsmanship to modern techniques while retaining ‘the essential genius and style of the people involved in the transition’.Footnote 78 To that end, Meyerowitz and headmaster H. M. Grace formulated an extensive plan for a ‘West African Institute of Arts, Industries and Social Sciences’, including a huge pottery and tile factory in a place not far from Achimota School called Alejo (see Fig. 3). The program was intended to lead to what his assistant potter Michael Cardew called ‘the “Bauhasing” of West African crafts’.Footnote 79 The institute received the green light in 1943 when the British government in London released the necessary funds. The ceramic factory that formed part of the ambitious scheme would supply the whole of West Africa as well as the occupying British army with earthenware from local clay. Achimota students were sent to the pottery workshop to work as apprentices, as in the local system. Many, however, soon resented the emphasis on craftsmanship. Cardew, who was in charge of the factory, wrote in his memoirs that some apprentices may have felt that white teachers looked down on Africans as only fit for making ‘crafts’.Footnote 80
Ceramic research and pottery at Achimota College in the 1940s, photograph by Margot Lubinski. Courtesy of Cambridge University Library/Institute of Education Collection, reference Y3011 U/236.
In an attempt to remain relevant in a school where many students preferred European to indigenous art, Meyerowitz wrote:
An Achimota student may indeed prefer the European styles and traditions to the African. But we want his preference to be based on a reasoned comparison of the two; our teaching will be to blame if he despises African art through ignorance of what it has accomplished.Footnote 81
Artists who studied under Meyerowitz later expressed their admiration for the way he inspired a whole generation of Ghanaian artists and craftsmen through his efforts to revive African art.Footnote 82 However, not all of his former students embraced his teaching philosophy.
The debate over the place of African elements in Achimota's curriculum played out in art classes. Painter Amon Kotei (1915–2011) was interested in modelling realistic portraits. One day, he presented a portrait of a woman in clay to his art teacher. Meyerowitz exclaimed that the clay sculpture was ‘horrible’ because it looked European rather than African.Footnote 83 Kotei exercised the right to practice realistic artistic styles often associated with European art; however, students were expected to make African pots in the pottery classes, not sculptures of living models. Meyerowitz did not appreciate Kotei's transgression as he expected students to follow realistic, European styles only in their drawing and painting classes. Meyerowitz's efforts to revive African art traditions, however, were applauded by other artists such as Kofi Antubam who wrote in the 1960s that even though Meyerowitz was by then dead and gone (having committed suicide in 1945 following episodes of manic depression), his influence lived on among the numerous artists and art teachers in contemporary Ghana, who had studied under him.Footnote 84
Contrasting reactions to Meyerowitz's approach were not unique to Achimota but were rather part of a broader debate between supporters and critics of African components in school curricula.Footnote 85 The African intelligentsia, who had at first enthusiastically welcomed Achimota as an African Oxford, criticized the school's emphasis on local languages and vocational subjects such as agriculture, hygiene, ‘crafts’, and the like.Footnote 86 In their view, the colonial government denied students access to Western knowledge, and kept Africans from being admitted to universities in England. Teachers at Achimota faced criticism for including both too many and too few African elements in the curriculum.
THE INFLUENCE OF ACHIMOTA ON MODERN ART PRACTICE
After Meyerowitz's death in 1945, the Scottish artist Jim M. MacKendrick took charge of the Arts and Crafts Department in 1951.Footnote 87 The school moved, in January 1952, with its entire British and African staff to the newly built Kumasi College of Technology, Science and Arts.Footnote 88 MacKendrick, who taught composition and drawing, was succeeded by the painter Professor Ernest V. Asihene in 1962. Asihene became the first African dean of an art college in sub-Saharan Africa.Footnote 89 The carver Osei Bonsu, who had worked with Meyerowitz as part of the African staff, now taught students woodcarving at the university.Footnote 90
Like the pupils at Achimota, students at Kumasi learned composition, perspective, and proportions by both drawing in the studio and working outside to paint landscapes. The teachers at Achimota had been influential in introducing new notions of aesthetics. The use of colours and imaginative compositions in drawing and painting were more important than an exact representation of static objects, as taught in hand and eye training. The Arts and Crafts Department became a faculty and subsequently a College of Art and, as was typically the case in British art academies, students were trained to become artists or art teachers.Footnote 91 School subjects echoed those taught at Achimota and included drawing and painting, poster design, figure composition, life drawing, graphic art, pottery and ceramics, and sculpture and textile design.Footnote 92 Most of the subjects were similar to those taught at the Slade School of Art and the Royal College of Art, both in London.Footnote 93 The emphasis on indigenous art forms that Pippet and Meyerowitz introduced to the curriculum did not disappear but resurfaced in another academic department established by Asihene: the Integrated Rural Art and Industry Department. Students there studied local crafts and materials with the aim of improving industrial production and preserving Ghana's cultural ‘heritage’ for posterity.Footnote 94
The terms through which Ghanaian visual artists discussed their work following independence were embedded in a colonial past that positioned African tradition as both preceding and opposing modernity. And, just like the art teachers at Achimota, modern artists considered primitive art to have roots stretching back into a timeless past. But while modern artists incorporated local aesthetics into their work, they no longer imitated traditional objects in the way that they had done at Achimota. Indigenous art was reinterpreted as an important cultural repertoire that needed to be developed into a personal and modern style. African and European art were no longer pigeonholed into separate domains, and the emphasis shifted towards the creation of cultural syntheses between African and European aesthetic traditions, and also between European-derived techniques and African subject matter.Footnote 95 In creating a new aesthetic, artists reshaped what they had learned at Achimota in order to respond to changing social and political conditions. Artists came to work in different art styles and with different materials in order to give expression to their own forms of modern art. The work of two Achimota alumni illustrates how artists interpreted this synthesis differently.
Painter Kofi Antubam (1922–64) spent nine years at Achimota School where he completed an upper primary course, a teacher training course, and a three-year specialization in art and crafts. In 1951, Antubam returned to Achimota as the new arts and crafts master. While a student at Achimota, Antubam began painting cultural scenes on the school's walls.Footnote 96 Many murals and paintings followed and most of them were romanticized scenes of everyday (village) life or royal depictions of chiefs with their linguists (see Fig. 4). Antubam's compositions often comprised separate scenes united by a continuous landscape, with objects in the foreground such as piles of cacao pods or wooden stools. Such compositions sought to enhance the feeling of depth, and employed a technique that Antubam learned from his art teacher Meyerowitz.Footnote 97 Antubam challenged modern artists to use the skills of their art training at Achimota as a tool to express African culture and tradition. Sophisticated art styles, he argued, were only a vehicle to express what lay within; the content of any work should reflect the uniqueness of Ghana's heritage and culture.Footnote 98 Ghana's most prolific contemporary art collector and Achimota alumnus, Seth Dei, recalled that Antubam forbade his pupils from painting ‘un-African’ subjects. He would, for example, beat children on their heads with a pencil when they depicted the city of London instead of a Ghanaian cocoa farm.Footnote 99 As an official ‘state artist’ appointed by Kwame Nkrumah, Antubam attempted to present Ghana as a fully-fledged nation.Footnote 100 He was one of the first artists to introduce adinkra symbols into works of fine art commissioned by the new government in the early 1960s. Antubam designed, among other things, the panelled doors of the legislative assembly in Accra, a parliamentary maze based on a traditional linguist staff, and a presidential chair that was partly modelled after a ceremonial stool.Footnote 101 Symbolizing and legitimizing the idea of a modern Ghanaian nation state, Antubam evoked precolonial traditions of state making and recontextualized Akan symbols as national icons.Footnote 102 Atubam also challenged the still widespread view that African artists should not ‘copy’ European art forms. In the journal Présence Africaine, Antubam reported some of the reactions that his work evoked in European viewers, one exemplary comment being ‘La peinture est strictement européenne: cést donc anti-africaine de peindre.’Footnote 103
Kofi Antubam, How Much, oil on board, 1954. Collection: National Museum in Accra. Photograph taken by author, October 2007.
The seminal sculptor Vincent Kofi (1923–74), for his part, ascribed the use of realistic styles to an unnecessary inferiority complex that led African artists to do everything they could to show that they were capable of working in representational art styles.Footnote 104 He rejected naturalism as foreign, and aimed instead to develop his own personal style, inspired by the forms in akuaba fertility dolls and terracotta funerary heads of Akan origin. Committed to crafting a pan-African aesthetic, Kofi chiselled modest grooves in his statue of a chief drummer that resembled patterning found in stilt-step figures from the South Pacific (see Fig. 5).Footnote 105 Kofi's work was displayed in several major exhibitions in Africa, Europe, and the United States and foreign critics soon heralded Kofi as being the most important sculptor in West Africa.Footnote 106 The label that Kofi attached to his own work, neo-African art, suggests continuity with older African art forms. However, his work differed in essential ways from his forefathers. Kofi's use of artistic concepts dating back to the European Renaissance (such as the division between art and craft), his Western clients, and his efforts to create a pan-African aesthetic all pointed to the genesis of a new art form that transcended a simple continuation of traditions that artists like him had discovered at Achimota, during study abroad, and in ethnographic museums in the West.Footnote 107
Vincent Kofi, Okyremang (Chief drummer), Manzonia wood, 1959. Collection: University of Ghana, Accra. Photograph taken by author, May 2010.
For pioneering modern artists like Antubam and Kofi, the recreation of objectified traditions served goals that went beyond the local. Each in their own way used traditional art and culture to overcome colonial legacies and present Ghana on a world stage as a modern nation with its own unique history and culture. The idea of synthesis spoke to them as a way of creating art that was both anticolonial, and part of Ghanaian and African modernity.
CONCLUSION
The European art teachers discussed here undertook a revaluation of selected local art forms such as sculpture, ceramics, and weaving, influenced as they were by the Arts and Crafts movement and the embrace of primitivism by the European art world. The discursive field in which art teachers in colonial Africa mobilized traditional art was underpinned by primitivist ideas that placed a higher value on some forms of African art over others.Footnote 108 Like the avant-garde artists in Europe, these art teachers defined primitive African art as pure, sincere, and unselfconscious. At the same time, colonial art teachers had little in common with primitivists such as Pablo Picasso who, from a Parisian studio, projected whimsical fantasies about Africa onto wooden sculptures. Simon Gikandi has convincingly argued that Picasso sought to challenge European art conventions by separating African art from African people, and by making art objects stand in for Africa itself.Footnote 109
Although the art teachers at Achimota deplored what they saw as an important loss of great African art, they also felt that a complete return to traditional styles would be undesirable for their Christian students. Stevens, for example, did not force students at Achimota to work in the style of their ancestors in spite of, as he wrote, ‘the sentimental despair of intellectuals in Europe deploring the decay of primitive art under the influence of our civilization’.Footnote 110 Stevens's successors organized art classes where local carvers trained students. This was, however, done with the idea of adapting traditional arts to the benefit of a new society. The art teachers at Achimota encouraged the production of new images that incorporated European influences. The teachers thus favoured the introduction of new techniques or resources for the purpose of adapting traditional forms to European models.
At the same time, colonial art teachers refused to believe that African students were essentially different from their immediate ancestors. They were convinced that, as Stevens wrote, ‘what the African had done in one form, he could do again in another’ and that a special African quality ‘would flow into these new forms’.Footnote 111 These convictions were clearly reflected in their discussion of fundamental differences between the black and white races. They were also evident in the widely used terms Negro art or, in German, Negerkunst. Despite the emphasis on African art forms at Achimota, the school's organizational structure and artistic concepts remained largely European. The ideological separation between European and African art, the implementation of crafts as a hobby, the displays of completed artwork in annual exhibitions, and provision of art education in group classes were all based on European ideas of art and aesthetics. This substantially differed from local practices in which apprentices learned carving or weaving from a master by assisting him at work.
Until at least the 1990s, Euro-American curators and art critics have charged modern art in African countries with lagging behind the times. This view suggests that Europe provided a master narrative that was subsequently adopted – without innovation – by artists in Africa through Western-style education.Footnote 112 Such an account portrays Africans as passive recipients of modernity and denies the capacity of artists to manipulate, distort, transform, and appropriate foreign ideas and art styles to their own purposes, and in response to changing sociopolitical realities. As Gikandi notes, it is curious that European artists and curators have generally minimized the influence of African artists on modernism, referring to their impact through rather weak terms such as ‘convergences’, ‘affinities’, or ‘connotations’.Footnote 113 At the same time that avant-garde artists looked to Africa as a continent of artistic regeneration, appropriating formal aspects of African sculptures into their work, Africans began appropriating elements from European art.Footnote 114 These two processes took place simultaneously and were importantly entangled in the movement of people, objects, and ideas between Africa and Europe.
This history challenges the idea that colonial teachers rejected everything African as pagan and uncivilized. It was a common assertion among intellectuals in Ghana that, in the years immediately preceding and following independence, contemporary artists regained pride in a local culture that had been denigrated as tribal, barbaric, and primitive by colonial rulers and missionaries.Footnote 115 This representation of colonial rule as a time in which African culture was completely destroyed and denigrated was part of a political strategy to affirm the ‘African self’ and shake off British domination. Kwame Nkrumah wrote, for example: ‘We were taught to regard our culture and traditions as barbarous and primitive.’Footnote 116 The portion of the Achimota curriculum that sought to foster among young Africans an appreciation of indigenous culture is a prime example of a colonial-sponsored initiative that promoted and romanticized traditional culture in ways similar to the efforts of African artists following political independence. Many of the colonial art teachers at Achimota, in fact, shared with Kwame Nkrumah and many other African nationalists a faith in the existence of an African cultural identity. As far as I know, Nkrumah's ‘African personality’ was more based on the idea of a shared sociocultural history than on biological notions of race.
Ghanaian artists' work has evolved in relation to, and in dialogue with, the complicated history of colonial and postcolonial encounters between Africa and the West in which new ideas and modes of conduct were internalized to such an extent that synthesis itself became an intrinsic part of local identities.Footnote 117 Cultural synthesis helped define national and pan-African ideals, and fostered pride in a cultural past and present. The reclamation of African sculptures, textiles, and symbols in the work of modern artists contributed both to a form of anticolonial modernity. This reclamation resulted, in part, from the dual emphasis of Achimota's colonial art teachers on European art education and the revaluation of indigenous forms of artistic expression.
