"Heroes": Principles of African Greatness Part 7—Free Africa Faces Forward

 They came. They saw. They organized.

Before he was globally celebrated for his works in found metal, El Anatsui first pursued sculptural forms in ceramics and found wood. He notes, “I look at textures of my work in process and I think about the texture and grain of Africa’s history; I look at  the authentic colors of the different types of wood and they remind me of the real colors of history.” 

The Ancestors Converged Again is a relatively rare example of figurative art in wood from this Ghanaian master. Using the expressive forms of the wood he gathered, Anatsui transforms scraps of wood into embodiments of once-distant, now-present spiritual and historical figures through minimal sculptural interventions and the process of ordering and re-ordering his sculptures.

One of the most conceptually innovative elements of El Anatsui’s sculptural practice is his openness—indeed, to some extent, his insistence upon—the idea that his sculptures may be reordered and reshaped each time they are installed. 

Art, he insists, must reflect life and, in so doing, it must evolve and change to reflect the circumstances in which it is being deployed. 

With that in mind, his Ancestors may be seen in Heroes to be thinking about their roles as vanguards for future collective action. Eyes wide, taking in the troubled current moment in which they have been called together, these ancestors confer—and plan their response.

·   The ‘Big Six’ were the leaders of the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC), a political party founded by J.B. Danquah in 1947 to push for self-government. 


·   On Feb. 28, 1948, a peaceful demonstration in Accra for pay owed to veterans who fought for Britain in World War II was met with gunfire, killing three people. Horrified by the incident, the ‘Big Six’ called for full and immediate self-rule. They were all arrested. 

·   In prison, the group earned their collective nickname, and became a symbol for the country’s self-determination. One—Kwame Nkrumah—would use the added notoriety to build a new political party, which would eventually carry him to power.

Theirs were the inescapable voices of Egyptian possibilities.

In this artwork, he visualizes the complicated, iconic, and unavoidable roles two larger-than-life Egyptians—Nasser and Kalsoum—played in that country’s mid-20th century.

He was the voice of Egypt’s political future, the military officer who helped overthrow the monarchy, led Egypt from 1954 until his death in 1970, nationalized the Suez Canal from British and French interests, and became an icon, however fleetingly, of secular secular pan-Arab nationalism. 

At the height of the Cold War, Gamal Abdel Nasser promoted a political philosophy of nonalignment and solidarity among formerly colonized peoples. 

She was perhaps his only true rival on the mid-century radio. “The Voice,” not just of Egypt, but of the entire Arab-speaking world, Om Kalsoum was one of the 20th century’s most celebrated vocal artists. 

Her supreme talent, musical virtuosity, and glamour made her a global celebrity as she interpreted modern and classical Arab verse through improvisation and vocal stylization. 

Sporting her trademark sunglasses and handkerchief, she stands above script that reads “سافر و شاهد” (“travel and see”), suggesting Kalsoum’s star-studded life of tours throughout the Arab world spreading, among other messages, Nasser’s central plank of Arab unity.

Let them kill Nasser! What is Nasser but one among many? I am alive, and even if I die, all of you are Gamal Abdel Nasser!
—Gamal Abdel Nasser, after surviving an assassination attempt, 1954

· A military officer, Nasser helped to overthrow the monarchy, led Egypt from 1954 until his death in 1970, nationalized the Suez Canal from British and French interests, and became an icon of secular pan-Arab nationalism.

· Never short on ambition, Nasser saw himself as a potential leader for Arab-speaking countries, Africa, and the greater Islamic world. From 1958 to 1961, he led Egypt and Syria jointly in a United Arab Republic. 

· Nasser’s legacy remains particularly complicated—he was a global symbol of anticolonial solidarity, built the Aswan Dam, and led the industrialization of Egypt. Yet, he also ruled a police state and fought and lost two wars with Israel.

O Nile, you have been praised by God and celebrated in the Torah. The origin of civilization around you is a fact, and its outcome is your virtue. It was born and you were its cradle . . . 

The people, who were privileged and protected over centuries, are thankful to you.
They express their gratitude to the Lord for His creation.
And may God keep on His blessings.
—“Al Nil,” Om Kalsoum signature song (lyrics by Ahmad Shawqi)

· One of the 20th century’s most celebrated global vocal artists, Kalsoum was known for her talent, musical virtuosity, and glamour.


· Kalsoum interpreted modern and classical Arab verse through improvisation and vocal stylization. She was known to riff and extend a song at considerable length if the audience’s emotions were with her.

· Throughout the century’s turmoil, Kalsoum maintained a reputation as a patriotic Egyptian and a devout Muslim—and a good friend of Nasser’s.

He led a new generation into higher education and leadership.

Tom Mboya was already accomplished, at the young age of 28, as the leader of a workers’ union and for his assumption of the mantle of Kenya’s nascent independence party, the Kenya African National Union (KANU). He met with then-Senator John F. Kennedy in 1959 to promote a campaign to bring hundreds of Kenyan students to the United States for higher education. 

The effort already had the support of individuals like Jackie Robinson, Harry Belafonte, Sidney Poitier, and Martin Luther King Jr. Convinced by Mboya’s vision of the need to train a new generation of postcolonial leaders, the Kennedy Family Foundation agreed to fund the early “airlifts.”

Graduating at the top of his class, he met and married American student Ann Dunham. Their son, Barack H. Obama Jr. was born in Hawaii on August 4, 1961.

Pan-Africanism is changing the arbitrary and often illogical boundaries set up by the colonial powers in their mad scramble for Africa. Many . . . are asking us what sort of governments we hope to set up when our freedom is won…

What we shall create should be . . . enriched by our ability to borrow . . . what is good from other systems, creating a synthesis of this with the best of our own systems and cultures.
—Tom Mboya, Makerere University, Kampala, Uganda, 1958

· A labor activist from an early age, Mboya organized his fellow Nairobi civil servants into the Kenya Local Government Workers’ Union in the early 1950s. Mboya became general secretary of the Kenya Federation of Labour, where he won an international profile by helping striking dock workers in Mombasa get a 33 percent pay raise.

· Mboya joined the nascent independence party, the Kenya African National Union (KANU). When the British banned the party and most of its leaders during the Mau Mau conflict, Mboya was entrusted with the party’s control.

· Mboya joined the nascent independence party, the Kenya African National Union (KANU). When the British banned the party and most of its leaders during the Mau Mau conflict, Mboya was entrusted with the party’s control.

· An outspoken critic of government corruption, Mboya was serving as a government minister when he was assassinated in 1969. The full story of his murder has never been determined.

She dances and sings her own truth, with poise and pride. 

Ben Enwonwu is arguably one of 20th-century Africa’s most important and influential artists. Recognized worldwide for his modernist examinations of Nigerian and pan-African ideas and images, his works by mid-century came to represent African self-determination, innovation, and excellence in an era in which the continent was finally regaining its sovereignty. 

The Africa Dances series, begun in 1949 as a response to performances observed in his home city of Onitsha, became a subject to which Enwonwu would return throughout his career. In the series of sculptures made between 1980 and 1984, the artist isolated each figure in space, imbuing their features with a liquid flow that captured the essence of a body in motion. 

This piece is a cold-cast resin predecessor to a 1982 bronze casting of Africa Dances. Identical in form to the later bronze, the cold-cast resin version was likely cast, because of its material, by the artist. Enwonwu also likely painted the surface of this piece in order to understand how the light would shine across its form.

This image of a beautiful, confident young woman striding with purpose and grace on a global stage is, of course, necessarily allegorical. But, in both its symbolic intention and formal realization, this sculpture thus evokes the iconic role that a woman like Miriam Makeba—“Mama Africa,” the voice of a generation fighting for, and winning, self-determination—plays in the memory of an age in which Africa danced back into freedom.

I do not sing politics. I merely sing the truth.
—Miriam Makeba, as quoted in the documentary Mama Africa, 2011


Miriam Makeba
Unidentified photographer, 1969
© Binder/ullstein bild/Getty Images

· Raised in Sophiatown, a township on the outskirts of Johannesburg, Makeba rose to prominence singing in South Africa in the early 1950s. Her appearance in an anti-apartheid documentary caught the attention of Harry Belafonte, who invited her to the  United States in 1959.

· In the U.S., Makeba recorded a large number of songs in Xhosa, Zulu, and English. She became a global celebrity and one of the continent’s most recognized faces and voices, bringing African music to many Western audiences for the first time. She was the first African artist to win a Grammy (1965) with Belafonte.

· The South African government refused her reentry to the country in 1960 and banned her records and revoked her passport in 1963. Makeba, meanwhile, became a vocal and highly visible critic of the apartheid regime, both in her songs and in her growing role as a civil rights activist.

· After marrying Black Panther leader Stokely Carmichael in 1968, Makeba and her husband left the U.S., first for Guinea. She would tour Europe and Africa in the decades that followed, performing at a number of new African nations’ independence celebrations.

· Nelson Mandela invited Makeba to return to South Africa in 1991—the freedom she had called for had finally come to her homeland. She was named a United Nations Goodwill Ambassador in 1999 and continued to speak out for humanitarian causes.

Strike a fashionable blow for freedom!

The official portrait of Kwame Nkrumah, the first leader of the independent republic of Ghana, is the central focal point of this commemorative cloth. Although Nkrumah was not Asante, he chose to wear the red, yellow, and green colors—associated with both Asante kente cloth, worn widely in Ghana, and with unconquered Ethiopia—as a symbol of his leadership and of pan-African pride. 

In addition to Nkrumah’s official portrait, the cloth also includes the seal and motto of the new nation (“Freedom and Justice”) as well as the date of independence, March 6, 1957, for which the textile was likely originally produced.

European traders introduced factory-printed cloths to African markets in the 19th century. Early fabrics were based on Indonesian batiks. As advancements in photographic reproduction developed, portraits began to appear on cloth. 

Known as “fancy” cloths, these printed textiles became very popular in the 1950s and 1960s, when many African nations attained independence, and remain important historical documents of an era filled with new possibilities. 

We face neither East nor West: we face forward.
—Kwame Nkrumah, Commonwealth 
Prime Minister’s Conference, 1960


Commemorating Prime Minister Kwame Nkrumah’s visit to USA and Canada 
Photograph by Ghana Information Services, c. 1958
EEPA Postcard Collection, GH-20-09
Eliot Elisofon Photographic Archives, Smithsonian National Museum of African Art
© Ghana Information 

· Nkrumah was an outspoken advocate for pan-Africanism, as both a cultural and political platform, from which he anticipated Ghana would lead the rest of the continent from occupation. He became a global symbol for Black liberation.

· Nkrumah’s government became increasingly authoritarian. He won a referendum in 1960 that made Ghana a republic and Nkrumah president (he became president-for-life in 1964).

· Ghana’s army staged a coup in 1966, ousting Nkrumah from power. He lived the remainder of his life in exile. Ghana subsequently faced a series of intermittent, disruptive military coups in the following three decades.

The fashion for Pan-African solidarity endures.

Sotiba, a textile manufacturer in Dakar, Senegal, made several versions—some with gold, some without—of this fancy cloth with a photographic engraving of American activist Malcolm X.

It has been suggested that this version may have been intended for the foreign market because its gold sometimes turns black when worn in Senegal’s hot, humid climate. Commemorative cloth is often bought to save—as an insurance policy, a long-term savings certificate, or a souvenir—rather than to be cut up and worn.

Whether intended as a souvenir or a fashion statement, a cloth like this offers its bearer an intimate connection to the image of Malcolm X. With it, you can literally wrap yourself in the aura of this global icon for civil rights, social justice, and Black pride and liberation. 

Photograph by Ed Ford, 1964 New York World-Telegram and the Sun Newspaper Photograph Collection, Library of Congress 

. . . During the past eleven days here in the Muslim world, I have eaten from the same plate, drunk from the same glass—while praying to the same God—with fellow Muslims, whose eyes were the bluest of blue, whose hair was the blondest of blond, and whose skin was the whitest of white. 

And in the words and in the actions and in the deeds of the “white” Muslims, I felt the same sincerity that I felt among the black African Muslims of Nigeria, Sudan, and Ghana. We were truly all the same . . . I could see from this, that perhaps if white Americans could accept the Oneness of God, then perhaps, too, they could accept in reality the Oneness of Man . . .
—Malcolm X, in letter from Mecca following his hajj, 1964

· Malcolm X quickly became one of the Nation of Islam’s most prominent leaders and public advocates, articulating positions of Black racial pride while giving voice to a generation of Black Americans’ frustrations during the civil rights movement. He was the intellectual leader of the United States’ growing Black Power movement.  

· Malcolm Little converted to the Nation of Islam, an African-American organization that combined Islamic teachings with Black nationalism, while incarcerated between 1946 and 1952. He adopted the new surname “X.”

· Malcolm X publicly fell out with the Nation of Islam’s leadership in 1963. He credited his hajj to Mecca the following year as a second conversion, taking the name El Hajji Malik El-Shabazz. 

· Newly awakened to a sense of global solidarity with brothers and sisters throughout the formerly colonized world, Malcolm became an advocate of pan-Africanism—arguing that African Americans’ struggles intersected with global struggles for liberation.   

· Malcolm X was assassinated while speaking in Harlem on February 21, 1965. Three members of the Nation of Islam were convicted of the murder and sentenced to life in prison.

· His memoir, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), became a global touchstone—the story of a man’s journey from a troubled childhood to human rights activist and global icon of Black solidarity.