Ijele: Art eJournal of the African World (2000)

ISSN: 1525-447X

CHINWE UWATSE EVALUATES THE NIGERIAN ART SCENE

Krydz Ikwuemesi

Chinwe Uwatse, General Manager of Bang and Olufsen, Nigeria, member of the board of Ijele: Art eJournal of the African World, and product of the Nsukka Art School, critically discusses art in Nigeria. This informative and compelling interview took place in Lagos, Nigeria.

Krydz: You studied art at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka. Who were there as teachers during your student days?

Chinwe: Obiora Udechukwu whom I had the luck to have as my academic adviser throughout the five years and later as my supervisor when I got to my 4th and 5th years in the University. Then there was Chuka Amaefuna of blessed memory Mr. (now Professor) Igwilo, Dr. C. S. Okeke, Professors Uche Okeke and Ola Oloidi, and Dr. Aniakor. There were quite a number of lecturers, Mr. Anku, El Anatsui...

Krydz: How did you relate to Uli philosophy which must have been in its bloom then? How did it influence you?

Chinwe: It influenced me quite a lot because Uli is organic. So you'll even find out that still in my art now that there are lot of organic influences. But then when you are in an environment where you find these motifs are used on a daily basis, there is no way it would not appear in your work and there is no way your work will not look like the general kind of thing. Certainly, your work would take on the style in your environment. You don't come off your own until a few years after you've graduated; then you start heading off your own direction.

Krydz: Beyond Nsukka, how have you fared as a practising artist, especially a female one practising in an environment which still exhibits a certain kind of crude masculinity?

Chinwe: Well as a female artist... Well, as an artist, not a female artist, I hate gender- classification, I trained as an artist; I didn't train as a female artist. As an artist who happens to be a woman, I have my own drawbacks because whether the men like it or not, women tend to do a lot more work than they do. For instance, I have to combine a lot of things, like housework, with my normal work as well as practise my art.

After my university education I was in civil service for twelve years and it was not an enabling environment for creativity. The few years in the civil service, I had all the support I needed because in the art and cultural scene, I was lucky enough to have a few professionals around initially. After that, professionalism was thrown to the wind and they started this business of federal character, which meant that anyone from the wrong side of the country dared not progress. It affected my art quite a lot. I was sanctioned for having my own exhibitions and actually the environment was not even conducive for creativity. Well eventually, I left the civil service and I'm now in the private sector, which still doesn't give me enough time to practice my art the way I would love to. There is a lot more freedom of expression now and I can actually sit back and plan exhibitions and carry them out without having anyone looming over my shoulders and wondering why I am doing it or wondering why I should get the publicity. But all in all I must say it's been fine.

Krydz: Well, in spite of your views about gender issue, I think it is still very rife in the society and, you see, during the traditional era, art in certain respects was more or less men's business...

Chinwe: No!

Krydz: In certain respects... I think it was...

Chinwe: It wasn't...!

Krydz: Carving...

Chinwe: You have your history wrong!

Krydz: Carving, for instance, was done mainly by...

Chinwe: You have your history all wrong; go back and read your art history.

Krydz: Then let me...

Chinwe: I have had the opportunity of going all over this country and there are some places in Nigeria now where what is coming to the fore is the stupid male chauvinism which was imported from Europe. In the traditional setting, men and women have their own aspects of art that they practised because art in the traditional sense is always functional. Let us forget this business of gender that was brought about by the West. Our traditional societies were not so split. Among the Efik, the women carved; they also worked with metal; it was not exclusive to men. You find out in other places that women still carve even if they don't carve drums and stuff like that. And in that case, if we are coming to what men are supposed to do, what business have men got in Uli? Because if we are supposed to talk about tradition, it is sacrilege that a man must be practising Uli art because it is body painting...

Krydz: ...I think I agree with you to some extent. In my own place - I come from Ogidi east of the Niger - women didn't carve, and on some special occasions men had themselves decorated with Uli. I can't say now whether they decorated themselves or women did it for them. But the general conviction now among scholars is that men had no business with Uli, which I think can be erroneous. Uli was essentially a feminine tradition but, you see, in those days apart from the body painting, when they did the paintings on the wall for decorations, the end use somehow was made by men; like paintings on the shrines and the rest of them. Granted they executed the art but the utility which you talked about belonged to men.

Chinwe: (cuts in) Who produced the art? It is still male chauvinism of the worst kind. Admit, men have no business in Uli.

Krydz: But, but I...

Chinwe: If a woman were to now take up the textile weaving of stitch and dye of Ukara cloth that will be regarded as sacrilege. I don't care if the shrine painting was done by a woman and it is being used by a man. That as far as I am concerned is crap. There were also female shrines, female deities which were also painted by women but the crux of the matter is that Uli is a feminine art. If a woman decides to carve, jolly well, good for her; if she decides to carve a drum, good for her because quite frankly I am tired of all this business about "This is for men and this is for women and the women are not supposed to be doing this." The woman can do whatever she damn well pleases.

Krydz: There's a contradiction here, because talking about chauvinism I think it has always been there. It's not just Western importation. I think there has always been that attitude to relegate the women to the background in certain societies. But what I am trying to say is that it has always been there, the male chauvinism is not a function of westernisation.

Chinwe: Ide Uli [writing uli] is a woman's job. Ide Uli, Mma nw' uli [writing uli with the uli knife], it is a woman's job. Ichi, sacrification is done by men.

Krydz: But you know in some places, women are not allowed to participate in an art like masking?

Chinwe: There is Nne Mmanwu. When a woman reaches a certain age, she is beyond child bearing and menopause. The woman is initiated into the masking society. That is when she becomes Nne Mmanwu.

Krydz: How many of such women did we have in our traditional societies? You have to think of number. Were they not very few?

Chinwe: It doesn't matter. There might not be many women because of mortality rate; people didn't live that long. When a woman goes beyond menopause she can be initiated, she becomes Nne Mmanwu because she has now transcended the earthly ground, she has taken one step towards the greater beyond.

Krydz: Well, I think it's a matter of opinion...

Chinwe: It's not a matter of opinion

Krydz: In some Igbo communities you had women as Ozo titled people. But they were very few. I remember at a point in time it was just one in my town. If there was no chauvinism on the part of the men, there should have been more, isn't it?

Chinwe: I am not talking about there being more.

Krydz: If we have to really agree that there was not this segregation right with us even before we encountered the West, then I think there should have been more of such things, I mean, Ozo titled women, more Nne Mmanwu's and the rest of them.

Chinwe: There was segregation, there were things that women did that men could not participate in...

Krydz: Like in those days...

Chinwe: For some reason, when history is written women's contributions are normally relegated to the background. That is why I say it also has a lot to do with Western chauvinism. The great traders, women who held forte, women who decided what happened in the greater society, the umu ada [patrilineage daughters], ndi nne [the Mothers] and so on, were very important. Nothing could happen in the traditional society without their contribution. One thing most of us seem to forget is that it doesn't matter how much a man makes a decision, if the women do not stand behind him or behind whosoever the village leader was, he was not going anywhere, he did not get very far. We have managed to super-impose Western ideas on our own traditional ideals and come up with a mix- marsh of a strange philosophy that has nothing to do with the traditional African philosophy.

Krydz: Well, I still don't agree with you because I know...

Chinwe: You can't agree with me because you are a man...

Krydz: No, it's not because...

Chinwe: I have done the research. I have gone right round the country. I have done the research. I have spoken with people and it is still the same.

Krydz: What I am saying is that I know the opinion of women has been important in societies, traditional and modern, but there has always been that segregation. It could have been artificial. In some places, for instance, I know that if you slaughter a chicken they would tell you a woman wouldn't eat certain parts–certain parts which the men obviously saw as delicacies, which I think is stupid. So how do you look at that. Is it a Western idea?

Chinwe: Slaughtering chicken and having a man eating the gizzard and stuff like, that was when the woman wanted to serve him the chicken. If she kills the chicken in her inner chambers and she whacks everything herself (laughter), who cares? As far as I am concerned, that was a very stupid custom, which the men tried to preserve so that they'll always have the choicest part of the meat. But one thing the men seem to forget is that if you are killing a chicken or if she killed a chicken, they only saw one bit of it. That custom, perhaps, came to the fore through literary narratives like Things Fall Apart, but as far as I am concerned it is not really of much importance.

Krydz: The question I wanted to ask before we got into this was, against the background of your own personal experience, how do you look at the position and perception of the female artist in Nigeria and Africa in the contemporary situation?

Chinwe: Because the art scene is controlled by men - pity about that – women artists are being relegated to the background. I hear things like "Oh she's a female. She's trying." That is rubbish. Art should be actually assessed by your abilities not your gender. The thing about it is that most of the people who are in charge of publicity unfortunately, too, are men. They tend to have this sort of condescending attitude towards women in the art and the woman starts thinking that she is dabbling into it because she has nothing better to do with her time. Yes we have good things to do with our time and if you choose to be an artist that is the direction you've chosen to head off a career in life. There are a lot of successful artists in Africa who are women. That they do not get as much publicity or as much visibility as the men do is rather unfortunate.

Krydz: Do you think that the female artists themselves have done much to alter that situation?

Chinwe: Of course there are a lot of women in the arts who have tried to do quite a bit. But you find out that if a woman goes out to seek sponsorship for whatever she has to do she hardly ever gets the sponsorship. If I were to go to a bank now and ask for sponsorship to run an art event, a workshop or something, I am not going to get that sponsorship because it's me. A lot of guys find it easier to do so but that fact notwithstanding, actually, I would rather put the blame squarely on the Society of Nigerian Artists (S.N.A) which happens to be a moribund society as far as I am concerned, because it hasn't done anything to show that art is in itself a profession and should be a respected profession. The fact of the matter is, if the Society of Nigerian Artists had got its act together more likely you would see more women, but unfortunately that has not been. And besides, the reputation of artists and the way people look at artists generally has got to start changing. And who is supposed to do that? It is we, the artists. The sooner we started taking ourselves seriously the better.

You find out that people who call themselves artists are always coming out looking like rejects, dregs of society, looking like hooligans. I think an artist always has to be the best turned out person so that when you walk into a place it is a matter of "What can I do for you?" not "Please can you do something for me?" But we always keep coming across as "Oh, please I'm so so down and out, I need the work to prop me on my feet because, you see, my brain is full of so much creativity that I don't have time for any thing." Which as far as I am concerned is rubbish. Even if you don't have the resources to dress in a designer's suit, at least you can come out looking neat and tidy and not looking as though the world was up.

Krydz: I don't agree with you, with what you said about sponsorship, that it is easier for men to get sponsorship. I don't agree. I think it's a general problem – it's very difficult generally to get sponsorship for the arts in this part of the world probably because of the notion we have about art and culture in particular. I think people would rather support things that have to do with politics and some of its other adjuncts than coming to really sponsor art except in a few cases where you have somebody in the establishment where you are seeking sponsorship. The other issue of artists' appearance and personality, I think is also as a result of the general misconception of what an artist should be. Some of us think you have to look the art, you have to be the art itself, instead of producing it. But I think also this is a serious image crisis which we have created for ourselves.

You also mentioned the Society of Nigerian Artists which I believe has become worse than a political party. But what do you think can be done to turn it around?

Chinwe: To me, the only thing that can be done to turn the S.N.A. around is a very simple matter. We should stop this business of sticking ourselves to the establishment. Look at the Music Society of Nigeria; what they built at Onikan, they built via sponsorships. I don't agree with you that we can't get sponsorships. We can get sponsorships. It depends on how we present ourselves. One thing is that for sponsorships to be possible, you have to push the case that these sponsorships could be tax deductible, especially for huge multinational organisations. Art permeates all aspects of society.

Society of Nigeria Artists is so old. We ought to have offices by now. We should be the ones that the government should be consulting. The government need not set the pace for us. I've always said that even while I was in the civil service. We should be setting the pace. We should be saying the direction in which art and culture should go. Art and culture does not mean dances and exhibitions and stuff like that, alone. As old as we are, as creative as we are in this country, we've had only one serious international workshop which is this "Aftershave." Unfortunately I couldn't attend. As far as I am concerned that is the first authentic international workshop in Nigeria. More of that can happen. If we are able to get ourselves together, get serious about it, and get ourselves a piece of land and start off something, you know, have a secretariat for artists, have a proper place.

As far as I am concerned what is going on in the National Theatre is rubbish. Yes I worked there, my office used to be there. But I am not impressed at all; I am not impressed. Some people may say "Oh, you shouldn't compare Nigeria with other places." But we're part of the world. As old as our artistic traditions are, we should have a lot to show, but we don't have anything to show. Instead everybody is heading off on a different tangent and looking for strange things outside of this place to justify their sense of being and their sense of art. It should come from here; but we are not setting the pace. The Society of Nigerian Artists can be turned around. If we decide to organise ourselves properly, we should be able to have an artistic data; we should be able to have spaces for galleries, workshops, and so on and so forth. We should not depend on the government; we should be able to build up a place that is even more outstanding than the MUSON Centre. The apology that we have at the National Theatre built by the National Gallery and named after Aina Onabulu does not impress anybody. We should do better.

Krydz: Don't you think that the prevalent situation in the Nigerian art scene could be attributed to selfishness on the part of the Nigerian artists, especially the pioneers, those of them who started the Society of Nigerian Artists. Somebody has said to me that the S.N.A. was never really fashioned to be an umbrella group. I think that was Dr. Aniakor talking with me sometime ago, and I think to an extent I agree with him. Something has to be done to turn it around. Or, something else could be engineered in its place. The fact that it has been around since 1964 doesn't mean that it should continue to exist.

Chinwe: It can continue to exist while a new organization could be formed. A new organization could be formed while the Society of Nigerian Artists exists for those who by dint of their selfishness are not seeing the big picture. The S.N.A. is so old that every artist should be proud to be a member. But the older artists themselves have set such low standards. The S.N.A. could continue. Another umbrella organization, a proper umbrella organization could be formed and it could be handled better, more properly. There has to be an art secretariat, there has to be a data bank, and there has to be infrastructure in place. So it is left for us now to start setting the pace that should be followed, which is why I get quite impressed by the things some of these young people are able to come up with and they need all the encouragement. To show the direction in which we should all be heading, you know but like you said before I believe strongly that the whole thing that is making art and artistry most unserious is some of the older artists that have not cared to set a very good example. You find out that some of the ones that even cared to set a good example were pulled down by the voices of many because they were too few.

Krydz: If we may go back to the issue of gender, why do we have so many female art students in the schools now and get very few female artists. Quite unlike in your time the number has gone up considerably.

Chinwe: I can't tell why that is happening. I don't know maybe it's the general trend in things. Now where men don't go to school that much anymore, and you find out that the percentages of the female in each class has increased and there are not many practising female artists because virtually every woman that comes out wants to go and work in one bank or the other. The other point is that you have a lot of impressionable young female artists out there looking out for whom to look up to. Some of the older artists have not created the right impressions or left any serious legacies. Instead what we have is lot of hooliganism and ruffian looking characters that people would not want to be associated with. So that might also have something to do with it. Also I don't know what the entrance exams into the universities are like now but I believe that it might not be as exacting as it used to be in the past, you know. So I don't know what actually informs this business of having more women than men in the arts department, but if you take a census of most students in most universities you'll find out that there are more female students in the universities now than there are men because men are beginning to face other things and they don't think education is very important anymore.

Krydz: Or would you say that the entrance requirements have gone down so considerably that you have too many fellow travellers in the university art departments?

Chinwe: You see the entrance were shot to smithereens when they started all this jamb business, because when we took entrance exams into the university, the University of Nigeria, Nsukka [U.N.N.] used to be the target. Once you passed the University of Nigeria exam then you were certain that you would get into any university you wanted. And for you to pass the entrance exam for U.N.N., in local parlance "your head must be exuding smoke" (laughs).

Krydz: As a painter, tell me about your experiences. What has it been like propagating art in such a country as Nigeria with its twisted concept of life, culture, and art?

Chinwe: As a painter practising in Nigeria, it's really very interesting, because if I were in the artillery I would say Nigeria is cannon fodder because I have a lot of subjects to paint just looking around alone. I love watching people; looking around alone you get a lot of inspiration around you, you know. And you find out that surprisingly, Nigerians do appreciate very good art. I know from the paintings, the people that buy them, they cut across all walks of life. And it's really very interesting that Nigerians could actually go out of their way to collect just to own them and some of them I have come across are very passionate about whatever it is they're collecting, be it painting, sculpture, ceramics and so on. So as a painter I must say that my experiences in Nigeria have been quite positive.

Krydz: But all the same generally, I think it has not been a very pleasant time for the Nigerian artists in the post colonial time, in fact the Nigerian artist - the African artist - is still colonised in so many ways, especially when the West still dictates the pace of art development in so many African countries. How do we keep our identity without being isolated within the widening global village?

Chinwe: We have to keep our own identity by sticking to the practices we have right at the moment and making our voices heard without going out cap-in-hand to beg for handouts from embassies and stuff, which a lot of Nigerian artists have the penchant for doing. A couple of months ago, I was watching the CNN and they were going into raptures about this young Asian artists who were doing wonderful things that had never been done in art before by taking their traditional motifs and paintings and combining them with Western ideas and coming up with contemporary paintings and I was like, "Ah! What have we been doing for the past decades? I mean, since the 1930's? I can simply say that we have people like Akinola Lasekan, Akeredolu, Ben Enwonwu, Yusuf Grillo; we have all these people, some of them are still alive. And yet they are not publicised simply because some people have the crazy notion or the crazy idea that these people, these men had nothing to contribute simply because they did not go the way of establishment or something of the sort or they tried to forge their own way? These men are men we should look up to and hail as the true pioneers in art. We are the ones who have to insist on our voices being heard; we should not go out cap-in-hand. We should not start hailing and praising nonsense simply because one white face has come out to say that this is the direction we should go.

Reading the newspapers, sometimes I get pissed seeing people talk about cubism and stuff. Where the hell did Picasso learn how to paint cubist if he hadn't seen an African mask in his life before? We have always set the pace and the sooner we acknowledge that, the better. That is why I keep going back to "Aftershave." We are the ones that should set the pace. If they don't want to hear our voices, we should be doing things here, we should have workshops, we should come up with new ideas. The thing that Nigerians are getting crazy about now is installation art. Where did the whiteman learn installations? What are out shrines? What is Mbari house if it is not installation? What are the bases of our shrines if they are not installations? You know people are going "Ooh, installation art; Ooh, something great that was founded by the West." As far as I am concerned, that's crap. We have always set the pace and the sooner our artists started realising that we are the ones who've been setting the pace, the better. We shouldn't go out there; we should make them come to us. That way then we should start getting into self-realisation.

Krydz: I agree with you, but then you see that the situation on the ground has more or less encouraged so many artists to continue to look up to the West as the universal avant- garde. There is the tendency to take after whatever comes out of the West. They come up with installations, we believe it is their own invention and then people start getting into that not because they have the divine urge to do that but because they feel it is in vogue in the so called First World. And then you also have this situation where people believe that to have some acceptability, some international repute, you got to exhibit out there to have a kind of stature. So that syndrome, that Western syndrome continues. Now can we really stop it? Some of us know the history and background of what is going on, especially as it concerns the modern and the post-modern. But in a food – and money-oriented society, people want to make money this money. How do we stop ourselves from having to trudge behind the West all the time, taking up ideas from them when, in fact, some of these ideas really came from here?

Chinwe: Well I am not saying we should stop anybody from taking up ideas from the West. What I an saying is that we should project out on identity.

Krydz: But this trend can be anti-identity...

Chinwe: It is not anti-identity. Like you said before, everybody wants to exhibit abroad. I've exhibited abroad. I can tell you if you exhibit abroad you have to dance to their tune because they have fixed ideas about what you have to look like as a person, what you have to sound like...

Krydz: As an African artist?

Chinwe: As an African artist, and what you have to produce, which is why we have this little upstart coming up with elephant dung. Well, that's a different story all together. When you start kowtowing to their idea, they have this idea that there's no sophistication here in Africa. For them to feel good that they are actually doing you a favour you now have to lower your standards or you force your identity down their throats. They will be either forced to accept you or ignore you. More often than not they will try very hard to ignore you and it takes a very strong person to be able to forge ahead.

The best thing I think we should do is to organise more of such events as the "Aftershave" workshop and come up with things that will bring them (the West) here for them to come and see. Most of their young people who do not have such ideas about what they should expect in Africa will willingly come here. When there's this exchange of ideas and they go back and start reeducating their people you'll find out that there is bound to be more acceptance out there for Africa art. We have to create a certain amount of prestige here but it still behooves us as artists to start visualizing, to start freeing our minds from the shackles that are holding us down, shackles of colonialism that make us think we cannot come up with anything positive. Of course we can come up with everything positive! So it's still boils down to one fact that we have to turn inward and start seeing the big picture, start paving our own way. Most of the patrons for my art are Nigerians and it really makes me proud that it is Nigerians who are able to look at my art and say that they understand where am heading.

Krydz: I said what I said because I think most of us still believe so much in the West, America specifically. I was part of a SNA discussion sometime at Enugu. We were talking about the criteria for selecting fellows, SNA fellowship and one of the major criterion they put down was that you had to have an international exhibition and their idea of an international exhibition was going out there [overseas] to have an exhibition and coming back. To that extent, something like the "Aftershave" will not count. We should be able to judge our own art just as Achebe said "A European prize does not make anybody the Ashiwaju of African literature." I think there should be parameters set by us to be able to say this person has achieved so much without somebody having to come and say it for us. There was a book on El Anatsui published by the October Gallery in London and then all of a sudden people [Nigerians] were interested in him even though he has been working here for more than two decades. Why didn't they see that quality in him that needed to be celebrated? Why do we have to wait all the time for people out there to do something and then we say "Oh! This person it is." Take Chris Ofili who you just mentioned, there was a time The Guardian was carrying every bit of information on him. It even did a whole editorial on him. He had been there all the while, why did they wait until others started talking about him in the West before they joined the bandwagon? The point I am making is that we should be able to set our own pace, we should be able to dictate our own development in the art arena.

Chinwe: There are books two new books on African art right now which are available in the bookshops. They are not selling very well here in Nigeria. They are written by a Nigerian who is a lecturer in the United States. Outside Nigeria, the books are doing very well. They are available here in Lagos but people buy them out there and bring them in here. That is also a good example of the problem we are...

Krydz: And who is this author?

Chinwe: Nkiru Nzegwu. She's a professor of art history and philosophy. Now these books are already being used as text in American Universities but I bet you that nobody is even referring to them here. I remember a certain book that Chike Aniakor wrote in collaboration with Herbert Cole. Chike Aniakor is not here but I can safely tell you that Chike Aniakor did most of the work but wherever anybody wants to refer to the book, they refer to it as Herbert Cole. Herbert Cole does not know squat about Igbo culture. Chike Aniakor is an Igbo man and he has done extensive studies into Igbo masking traditions with special consideration on the Ijele masking traditions as well as Omaba mask in Nsukka. He has also studied African architecture. So these are little things that when you see you actually wonder whether there is something wrong with our psyche somewhere. We should set different parameters. I mean to hell with someone trying to say that one has to exhibit in Europe or America for one to be considered for a certain honour. It's an easy matter to have an exhibition abroad, just pile up your works and dress yourself up in the most ridiculous looking Ankra and tie dye outfit and go out there and present some concocted, contorted ideas tell them that that's your philosophy of life coming form the African perspective and it will be bought hook line and sinker and you are on your way. When you try to sort in out, when you try to marshal your thoughts and your strategies in the proper fashion you're looked at as an aberration, that you're not artistic. That brings me to Chris Ofili again. Chris Ofili, as far as am concerned, is not a Nigeria. He was born there (abroad). He doesn't even know where his parents come from. For him to be claiming to be a Yoruba man and is stating all kinds of crap about elephant dung being venerated is rubbish.

They come up with all these strange and exotic things and then people buy it hook line and sinker. People used dung in the past to plaster their floors but the dung was treated, they didn't use raw sewage and it was not elephant or any exotic or human feces or anything of the sort. They used cow dung. It is a well-known fact among the farming societies that they would use dried treated dung with some other herbs and stuff, mix it up with charcoal and clay and use it to surface the floor and some places. Also they would dry it, put it together and burn it to get rid of insects at night. It was done in the West and it was done in Africa. I would have thought that when this whole useless controversy was raging somebody would have raised that issue in the pages of the newspapers. Instead everybody was going off on a tangent by trying to claim him as Nigeria. He is not Nigerian for heaven's sake. He just happens to have a Nigerian name, that's all.

Krydz: Against this background, how do you see the prevalent situation where there is so much interest in African art. There have been so many exhibitions like Africa '95, Les Magiciens de la Terre, Africa Hoy and then lately New Traditions by Ottenberg. Beyond promoting African art what interest do you think the West may have in doing all this. Somebody has talked about cultural monotheism. The threat of cultural monotheism coming down from the West and also the threat of Africa being colonised again culturally. How do you look at that?

Chinwe: How I look at it is like em right now African art is exotica and they are trying to out-do themselves now in who is going to discover something new from this dark continent. We're like an exotic toy, we're fag, we are the current fag and the sooner we realise that one of these days this fag might just fizzle out and then fix another direction the better for us. Which is why I keep saying that we should now start wearing our identity. Oh, they're helping this little Africans find their identity, find their feet in the world. Yes, cultural monotheism! Yes. They're trying to open our eyes to the bigger picture, the way they see it. They are not going to come back to you once you appear as though you are confident. The trend is there. It's obvious all over the place. If you show a little bit of crudity then they believe in that because they believe that African art is supposed to be raw and ready; you are not supposed to be sophisticated enough to be able to compete with them. That is why they would actually bother dignifying elephant dung with artistry.

Krydz: So, finally within the bound of all these issues and experiences how do you hope as a person and as an artist to forge ahead in the new century with all its promises and challenges?

Chinwe: Well I just take it as it comes, let's see what the new century holds. As far as I am concerned, we are going into a New Year which happens to be the new century. Yes. We all get very excited about a change and so on and after a little while, after the celebrations, we will all return to the status quo. What I am hoping is that we just don't return to the status quo.

Krydz: Thank you for the interview.

First published in Post Express (Lagos), November 1, 2000, Lagos

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Ikwuemesi, Krydz. (2000). CHINWE UWATSE EVALUATES THE NIGERIAN ART SCENE. Ijele: Art eJournal of the African World: 1 , 2.