Publicize, publicity, publish—the semantic relationship of the word “public” with the world of words and letters is no coincidence. The Western notion of the public—or “audience,” for that matter—is primarily a verbal and acoustic one. Modern institutional concepts like “public law,” “public opinion,” or “public sphere” are not only a legacy of the Enlightenment—they also reflect an exclusive reliance on language. As such, they concede the capacity of constituting a critical rational discourse for the legitimacy of power solely to words and the realm of acoustics, leaving the realm of the visual associated with the age-old stigma of suspicion and mistrust. The thrust of the articles presented in this issue of Critical Interventions challenge this perspective. Based on a variety of case studies, ranging from commercial sign board painting in Cameroon and Côte d’Ivoire, and colonial advertisement and religious billboards in Nigeria, to administrative photography in Gambia and political posters Namibia, the authors focus on the visual fabric of the public. Illuminating the complex scope of what it means to speak of “visual publics,” they remind us that readers and listeners are equally viewers and spectators.

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Similar to the blacks’ witch-doctor, to the chieftain of the savages’ tribe.

—Balzac, Louis Lambert Just like Michel Foucault,

who, in The Will to Knowledge, opposed the ever-present theme of sexual repression to the explosion of discussion about sex in the West, we wonder whether the same kind of reflection applies to Africa as well.1 In other words, contrary to what experts on Africa and the Third World maintain, we can say that Africa, or at least its representation, holds an important place in the Western imagination. No longer regarded as a neglected, ailing, economically dry, and intellectually unattractive continent, Africa is today the object of investments in terms of emotions and sensuality. This justifies our intention here to highlight the “sexual intercourse” between the West and Africa, that is, our deeply ambivalent relationship with that continent. Considering the West-Africa relationship as something sublime in the sense meant by Burke and Kant (that is to say—using an oxymoron—in the sense of the pleasant anguish we feel however we speak of it) does not seem far-fetched. Such an image of Africa’s “sublime,” or such a subliminal image of Africa, clearly shows the controversial place this continent holds in our subconscious, i.e., the image of a degenerate entity which is also a source of regeneration.

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On a recent visit to Ghana, I was often addressed as “Auntie,” a term used to convey respect for one’s elders. The honorific brings to mind a well-known saying by the renowned West African historian Hampate Ba: “In Africa, an Elder who dies, is like a library which has burnt down.” In that same spirit, I would like to travel back with you in time, by addressing some of the tectonic aspects of African architecture. For me, like Edward Sekler, the term tectonic refers to the quality of expressiveness and empathy, above and beyond the realization of structural principles and appropriate construction. It is perhaps no accident that Sekler cites the conical earthen structures of the Musgu people in the northern Cameroon as an almost perfect realization of that tectonic quality.

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Our expectations as to what might count as late-colonial period “African photography” have been determined by the striking work of photographers such as Seydou Keïta and Malick Sidibé.1 The African photography depicted in their images, and in studio portraiture, provides a strong contrast to Eurocentric depictions of colonial life.2 Appearing today in galleries, touring exhibits, impressive catalogs, and often available online for purchase, these photographs of Africans living through the end of the colonial period are visually striking, cosmopolitan, modern, chic, and hip. This photography is aesthetically magisterial and appears critically engaged with the advent of independence. The common approach to the study of African photography centers on the auteur-like genius of the individual photographer. In contrast to these exceptional images, there are images produced by the kind of African colonial photography practiced intensively on a daily basis. Little to no attention has been given to this predominant material, perhaps because of its sheer ordinariness. Most African late-colonial photography was not “art” in search of the unique and striking, but rather a form of work or technique in search of the generic and repeatable.3 This article will focus on the civil service photography of the Gambia, examining the uncritical, generic, and repetitive photography that was the standard practice in the final decades of colonial rule.4

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It has been said that the market of Onitsha on the east bank of the river Niger is the largest in the world. I have no means to verify this claim, but walking along the endless rows of stalls that seem to offer more goods than all the department stores put together, one is inclined to believe it. Not only the variety of goods is staggering, but also the enormous number of stalls, which seem to be duplicating the same wares. The large majority are imported manufactured goods. The tourist on the lookout for objects of Nigerian origin will be a little disappointed. However, to his surprise his curiosity will be richly rewarded on the bookstalls. Though the book-sellers mostly stock school textbooks, they also display fascinating local “novels” and plays, which have been written, printed, and published in Onitsha itself and a few other towns of the (former) Eastern Region. Mostly they are small pamphlets selling from one shilling and three pence to three shillings. They are seldom more than 48 pages thick. Any day in Onitsha, one can buy at least a hundred different titles.

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Ethnographic museums in Britain have inherited a problematic legacy in that most were built, in part at least, to play an important role in the promotion of public culture in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Their collections were acquired predominantly during the colonial period (in the case of Liverpool the fastest growth in the African collections took place in between about 1880 and 1916) and reflect collectors’ and curators’ interests in exemplifying contemporary ideologies, including concepts of racial or cultural hierarchy.1 At the City of Liverpool Public Museums (now the World Museum Liverpool), as at other British museums, African ethnology collections were used to construct and disseminate invented ideas of Africa against which a domineering national culture could define itself. A clear demonstration of a display that fits this schema is provided by the “Bushman Cave,” a diorama of a San Bushman couple in a rock shelter that was one of the City of Liverpool Public Museums’ proudest ethnographic exhibits in the 1930s. A photograph of this diorama appears as the frontispiece in the 1931 guidebook to the Museum’s then recently renovated African displays, and shows the male Bushman inspecting a painting of a battle scene rendered on the wall of the rock shelter.

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Mbalmayo, the town I grew up in, is in the middle of Cameroon, near Yaoundé, the capital, and had a lot of commercial activity. They used to sell cocoa, coffee, and timber. I was fascinated by the merchandise exchange that used to take place before my eyes, in the different markets, and by the huge trucks, the “monsters,” as they are called over there. From a very early age I started to draw these colorful, vibrant, scenes in my notebook. I also discovered the work of great artists like Goya, Rubens, and Ingres. After high school I knew that I did not want to become a public servant. In 1989, I decided to leave Cameroon in order to enroll in the School of Fine Arts in Abidjan, Ivory Coast. After four years spent making “copies of copies” of sculptures from the “classical” age, I landed in Grenoble—and then I had a real shock. That was in 1993. At Grenoble they taught very little about technique. Students were autonomous and had a lot of freedom to use the various media. Some years after that I got a scholarship for study at the Kunstakademie of Düsseldorf. There I learned about “German Realism.” And I learned to think, concretize, and materialize an idea in all its dimensions—visual, aesthetic, and intellectual.

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Since the liberalization of the Nigerian economy in the 1980s, the media marketplace has interpenetrated with an increasingly plural religious space to give rise to new contingencies of urban religiosity and commerce. Nowhere is this state of affairs more visible than in Lagos, which, according to Allan Anderson, is “arguably the most Pentecostal city in the world.”1 Over the last decade the urban centers of Nigeria have been transformed into sacred galleries, giving rise to what I call “roadside Pentecostalism,” that is, the signage produced by independent Christian Pentecostalist churches that is displayed on urban roads, streets, and driveways. These signs take form as billboards; posters displayed on pedestrian bridges, utility poles, and walls of buildings; banners that straddle roads; and signboards. They relay the messages of Nigeria’s new Pentecostal churches, for whom we could say, following Chris Lehman (with a nod to Marshall McLuhan): “the medium is the messiah.”2 In this essay I describe the key ways that the public presence of Nigerian Pentecostalism has been constituted through advertisement. The images are diverse, and they form an ever-expanding image economy.3 As I will show, the image economy of Pentecostal advertising has played a significant role in the construction of niches of appeal for churches and their leaders. Advertising is a central mediatory institution of modern market economies—it is the means whereby commercial interests create a mass public for their goods. Through this capacity of advertisement to create a mass public, Nigerian Pentecostal churches have asserted themselves, dominated their environment, mediated a modern, corporate, and “successful” character, and recruited new members. This essay examines how roadside Pentecostalism constructs social visibility, sells personalities, goods, and ideas, and, above all, mobilizes the public in support of the new charsimatic churches.

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Commercial and political posters are imposed on a landscape, breaking the view, on a mission to persuade.1 Posters proliferate—they are images that have been mechanically reproduced and inserted into public spaces. Indeed, it is the very weight of their visual repetition and emphasis that is intended to highlight the importance of the product, party, or personality being promoted. A poster captures and releases its subject in the same breath. The power of the poster can thus not simply be equated with the quality of its design, but must also be related to the ways in which a particular poster is deployed. Two features of poster practices create a tension: while posters are often only seen for a temporary period of time, before their image is stripped or fades, their purpose is to leave a lasting impression on the viewer.

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Judy Seidman is an American-born graphic artist and poster maker who has been participating in South Africa’s struggles for social justice and national liberation for over thirty years. During the 1980s, she was a member of the Medu Art Ensemble, an activist community of mostly South African exiles living just over the border, in Gaborone, Botswana. Medu members produced influential agit-prop graphics and literature that were smuggled into South Africa, and they were key theorists of the “culture of struggle” (following Fanon and Sekou Toure) that became synonymous with “committed art” during the States of Emergency of the 1980s. In 1982, Medu hosted the Culture and Resistance Festival in Gaborone, an event that changed the course of art discourse in South Africa through to the end of apartheid. Seidman is today the Curator of the Posterbook Collective of the South Africa History Archive (SAHA), housed at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg. Below is an excerpt from Seidman’s new book, Red on Black: The Story of the South African Poster Movement (Johannesburg: SAHA and STE, 2007). Critical Interventions asked Judy Seidman to preface this excerpt with a few biographical remarks and her perspective on the archiving and commercializing of struggle imagery.—Ed.

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If I am the other then who are you?
— Chinese proverb

In October 2004, I had the opportunity to participate—as an “African” artist—in a conference on the topic of African memory in European museums. The conference, entitled Kleine Götter [Small Gods]: Contemporary Artistic Practices and Memory in Museum Storerooms, was organized by the Office of Cultural Affairs of the Embassy of France in Germany and the Niedersächsisches Landesmuseum of Hannover. Anna Schmid, head of the ethnology department at the Landesmuseum, opened the debate about the status of African objects in European museums with the following question: “What status should be given to the thousands of ordinary objects that have accumulated in the stockrooms of many museums, without identification or classification?” Schmid’s question referred to the thousands of anonymous African objects that clutter the storerooms of the Hannover museum. However, this question also proves interesting when applied to those African objects that have been labeled as works of art. Evidently, if Africans themselves have remained excluded from this museum economy, it is because the status of an object (African or other) in a museum remains an issue that concerns mostly specialists. Nowadays, Africans who contemplate a religious object in a museum share in the same confessional misunderstanding as European Catholics who contemplate the erection of the cross in a museum. The gaze of the “believing” spectator is truncated, betrayed, or even confiscated by the system, which acts for the benefit of that new monotheistic faith that is the faith in Art.

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Hardly anyone now bats an eye upon encountering the rhetoric of a faction of African leaders from the 1940s and 1950s, which is replete with references to the idea that the “old Africa” was dead or in need of erasure and that the future lay in inventing something completely new. However, in its time, such rhetoric was challenged by those who knew both that the African past, like any history, is never subject to complete erasure and that cultural traditions still offered viable ideas and concepts for entering postcolonial futures. The fact that the essentially Enlightenment leaders, such as Kwame Nkrumah and Namndi Azikiwe, emerged victorious over those who saw more significance in traditional government, culture, and philosophy, such as Ghana’s Nana Ofori Atta, has led to a kind of scholarly occultation. This has its equivalent in the life of the contemporary African public where, alienated to a significant degree from its own history, all kinds of projects for the continued production of “progress” have been enthusiastically embraced.1 The outcome is most visible in urban and architectural aesthetics, where what counts as progress today has essentially become that which is connected to ideas derived from Europe’s Enlightenment and not to the trajectories of African history before colonial occupation. But these other pasts were once also available as material for imagining the future—even a modern one.

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Any convincing account of African art today must weigh the significance of the visual interaction of societies and cultures for the production of local art forms. In particular in urban Africa, where a highly heterogeneous audience underpins a vibrant visual culture, images have to compete with other images. Any image, as a material product, as well as societal and individual imagery, has to convince, to persuade, or to pick up another metaphor, to seduce. Paintings, and especially signboards, have to rely on what might best be termed their “everyday visuality.” They are linked to a specific, in this case urban, audience as well as to the creativity of the artist. But they also have to cope with the vagueness of the field in which they are placed. It is not only the built environment full of other pictures that affects their visual presence, it is also the presence of many other images in the minds of people that pass by and perceive such pictures (Figure 1). Signboards, like anything visual in urban culture, have to address the imagination of the people that live in the city. The visual public extends beyond the materiality of pictures. It is closely linked to the intermediality of visual and other media, and it incorporates the collective and individual imagination.

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