The Arts After Nigeria’s Independence

In the conception of the Legacies of Biafra exhibition held at the Brunei Gallery, SOAS in 2018, inspiration was drawn from the historic relationship between the literary and visual arts in Nigeria, which has been a feature of artistic spaces both prior to and in the wake of British colonial rule. The exhibition sought to memorialise the war, and in doing so, it memorialised a particular type of artistic practice. During the Mbari Club days of the early to mid-1960s, writers and visual artists embarked on a series of artistic exchanges, developing a new visual and literary language and navigating Nigeria’s vast cultural heritage and colonial legacy. Whilst the outbreak of the Nigeria-Biafra war curtailed these movements, the immediate post-war era saw a resurgence in the symbiotic approach to the arts, notable in the development of the Nsukka School. For Igbo artists living with the trauma of the Nigeria-Biafra war and seeking to develop a new paradigm, they incorporated the line drawing of Igbo uli art into their design and paired it with the pithiness of poetry, drawing connections which provided further avenues of expression.

This paper examines examples of approaches to the arts which characterised the first two decades following Nigeria’s independence, with an emphasis on the Nigeria-Biafra war and its aftermath. It explores the relationship between text and image, charting how writers and artists have navigated their artistic inheritance to produce work that captured their present condition.