African modernism, defined as a cultural and aesthetic attitude, was
widespread, so there could be an African post-modernism, I'd say.
Were there African modernists? What happens if we take many early
and mid-20th century Africans who called themselves "progressive", or
who were labelled that way by others, and compare how they thought
with the way modernists elsewhere thought? Aren't there lots of
similarities? In southern Africa I'd argue there were.
Take King Sobhuza II of Swaziland for example. He had an acute sense
of modernity, and a playful one. His manipulation of costume and of
media such as photography and radio, and his ironic use of European
images of ostensible African primitiveness (seen is his strategic
displays in non-traditional contexts of his dress for the national
Ncwala ceremony, for instance) were continual and subtle, sometimes
breathtakingly so. Increasingly Sobhuza turned his modernist
sensibility to constructing a traditionalist politics. Is this
post-modernist?
Patrick Harries' recent book, *Work, Culture and Identity: Migrant
Laborers in Mozambique and South Africa, c. 1860-1910*, contains
fascinating material on how migrant workers used costume combining
(in bricolage?) items of commercial and indigenous provenance in a
myriad of ways. They used clothes to demarcate both a sense of
something like modernity (engagement with a radically changed world
produced by industrial labor, and markets in commodities and labor)
*and* to differentiate themselves from their perceptions of the
white/ European culture which produced the clothes they were using.
Popular modernists? Counter-parts to Picasso?
Also I think one would want to look at jazz, modernist music if ever
there was any. Jazz is at least post-African ;-) if not African,
depending on how you define African. And urban Africans were at
least as quick to re-appropriate it as whites were to appropriate it.
One more example. By 1946 at the latest South African mine
recruiters in Swaziland attracted crowds by showing films, using
mobile projectors outdoors, at about the time the drive-in movie was
being invented in the U.S. Films of animals fighting were accounted
the most popular by recruiters; similar scenes were key attractions
in African-located films made for Europeans and North Americans (and
indeed can be ordered via Time-Life videos off the t.v. in the U.S.
today).
Thus I think we should be careful about exaggerating African
isolation, which risks re-inventing primitivism. The primitivism of
modernist Europeans depended on the availability of African art,
which in turn depended on colonialism and the longer history of slave
and other trades, on exactly the breakdown of isolation. James
Clifford's *The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-century
Ethnography, Literature and Art* has interesting reflections on these
relations, including substantial African examples, including not
only colonial appropriations but re-appropriations and transmutations
by the colonized.
"This is a modern world" (The Jam, ca 1978) and it's equally modern
all over the world. The horrific modernity of bureaucratically and
technologically mobilized violence in Rwanda, the dispatch of
high-tech medical SWAT teams to Zaire to combat an Ebola outbreak,
and the near-instant availability of some variety of information,
however distorted, about the same, reveal the connections
superficially.
The subtler point is that modernity depends on uneven geographical
distributions of technologies, social relations, goods, and cultural
items, along with self-conscious reflection on the distributions.
Africans are not less modern or less post-modern, but they are
differently situated in modernity's structures. Only if or when such
differences are homogenized out of existence will modernity and
modernism really be over.
It bears repeating the truism that the "post"s in post-modernism,
post-structuralism, post-colonialism and so on lack positive
definitional content. The phrases imply a reactive phase, which
extends whatever we have allegedly become "post" to, rather than
making a clear break from it. Since many of the features often
attributed to post-modernity (e.g. fragmentation, rapid change,
absence of unified value standards) were also attributed to modernity
by modernists, the idea that post-modernism is really hypermodernism
has a certain appeal.
Perhaps a significant difference is the attitude towards the idea of
progress. The idea of modernity, and modernist ideas, were closely
tied to the idea of progress, where post-modernism seems to vary
between being hostile to it vs. seeing it, in a genially unbelieving
way, as just another narrative, interesting enough if well done.
If questioning "progress" is a defining feature of post-modernism,
then anti-colonial thinkers, including Africans and African-
diasporans like Fanon and Cesaire, would seem at least to be key
pre-cursors. But many or most of them would probably dislike the
reduction of politics to aesthetics which seems to be a risk of at
least some post-modernism.