Art, Socialism, and
Solidarity at the
International Congress of
Africanists, 1962–1973

Kate Cowcher

In 1963 Kenya’s minister of labor, Tom Mboya, pub-

lished “African Socialism” in the journal Transition.
Writing in the wake of independence, Mboya argued
that African societies were inherently predisposed
to socialism through their traditional structures and
philosophies, but that developing “African socialism”
required a commitment to interpreting and implementing the
concept in the context of a decolonizing Africa. The first “respon-
sible” group comprised “intellectuals”—would they, he asked,
having read his discussion of the “socialist outlook in our tradi-
tion … pick up the threads and help us defeat intellectual impe-
rialism?” (Mboya 1963: 19). In service of African socialism, the
intellectual was, in Mboya’s mind, to confront the frames that
had historically bounded knowledge about the continent. The in-
tellectual must dismantle deleterious colonialist epistemologies.
The task, no matter the discipline, was a political one.

In the early 1960s, reclaiming the writing of Africa’s cul-
tural and political history was a major priority. History was, as
Chinua Achebe and others had made clear, the site of colonial
violence.1 Rethinking approaches to artistic heritage was key to
this endeavor. At the newly founded International Congress of
Africanists, the challenges of such work were top of the agenda.
As befit the Cold War context of its inauguration, socialist ideas
were at the forefront of the congress, whose first iterations oc-
curred in Accra (1962), Dakar (1967), and Addis Ababa (1973).
While many African delegates subscribed to an African socialism
premised on the notion, proffered by Mboya and others, that the
continent’s precolonial history predisposed it to communal own-
ership and collective responsibility, some, such as South African

Kate Cowcher is Lecturer in Art History at the University of St An-
drews. She completed her PhD at Stanford in 2017, and is currently
working on her first book, entitled “Beyond the Feudal Fog: Art and
Revolution in Ethiopia.” kc90@st-andrews.ac.uk

14 | african arts AUTUMN 2021 VOL. 54, NO. 3

writer Esk’ia Mphahlele, contested any such idealizing. Speaking
in Accra, Mphahlele (Bown and Crowder 1964: 228) nonetheless
pushed socialist-oriented concerns by foregrounding the com-
plex lived experiences of the poorest in society as a priority for
the African writer and artist. If the congress provided space for
African delegates to debate socialism’s relevance on the continent,
it was also a place where delegates from the Soviet Union came to
propose new socialist-oriented frames of analysis for the making
of art and the writing of its history. These first meetings of the
International Congress of Africanists provided contact points on
the continent for many groups interested in exchanging ideas but
also in proclaiming solidarity.

Within the wider Cold War, Soviet authorities expressed con-
cerns about “African” socialism, stressing that socialism could
come in only one variety: scientific socialism, a keystone of
Marxist-Leninism. Many African socialists, including Mboya,
were not committed to achieving communism. Rather, they
saw African socialism, approached pragmatically and flexibly,
as the most equitable means for developing new, independent
nations—the preferable alternative to capitalism.2 Yet, despite
points of contention over socialism’s ideological boundaries,
the Soviet and African intellectuals achieved a notable rapport,
with the former framing academic research as being in service
to anticolonial struggle. In 1958, for example, the historian and
ethnographer Ivan Potekhin, who soon became a leading pro-
ponent of the International Congress, hosted Senegalese writer
Alioune Diop in Moscow.

Though he could not accept the notion of a specifically
“African” socialism, Potekhin did accept that a distinct “African
road to socialism” existed and must be supported (Skorov 1964:
447). Potekhin’s phrase sounded similar but differed notably in
concept to what Senegalese poet and the country’s first president,
Léopold Sédar Senghor, called “la voie africaine du socialisme”
(the African way of socialism) (Senghor 1971: 283–90). Potekhin’s
idea was a compromise, one that acknowledged that attention
must be paid to recovering African social mores and historic

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1 Bruce Onobrakepya, cover design for First
International Congress of Africanists DOCUMENTS,
lino block printing, 1962.
Photo: permission of the artist, courtesy University of
St Andrews Library

2 Cover design for Lalage Bown and Michael
Crowder (ed.), Proceedings of the First International
Congress of Africanists: Accra, 11th–18th December
1962, London: Longmans, 1964.

traditions but that, nonetheless, held that the ultimate goal was
scientific socialism. Senghor’s “la voie Africaine,” with which
Diop had much sympathy, was first formulated in the late 1940s
and elaborated in Nationhood and the African Road to Socialism
(Senghor 1962) and On African Socialism (Senghor 1964b). The
latter argued that Karl Marx’s “methods and means” (Senghor
1964b: 103), particularly the emphasis on class conflict, were not,
in themselves, automatically relevant to Africa; rather, the con-
tinent was predisposed to socialism because it was a place that
“bases its general activity on the group” rather than the individ-
ual (Senghor 1964b: 93). If Potekhin’s “African road” prioritized
political and economic concerns, Senghor’s “la voie Africaine”
was steeped in humanist readings of Marx (Stibbe 1961: 242–43;
LeMelle 1965: 334–35). Though the tenets of Senghor’s Négritude
philosophy were not fully synonymous with his interest in social-
ism, his concept of “la voie Africaine” was, in fact, prefaced on
the idea that transforming African society required “integrating
socialism with Négritude” (Senghor 1964b: 165); that is, integrat-
ing socialism with a philosophy prefaced on the ontological dif-
ference between Europe and Africa.

Despite the seeming disjoints between African intellectuals like
Senghor and Diop and the more orthodox socialism of Potekhin,
the two constituencies shared certain key priorities. Like Diop,

Potekhin vocally denounced European imperialism. With Diop,
he advocated for the International Congress of Africanists, insist-
ing that it not be a dry academic forum. In keeping with both
the broader Soviet African studies agenda and the concerns of
many African intellectuals, Potekhin believed it was essential
to shift the geographic center of so-called Africanist scholarship
away from the West. The new congress, he argued, must have “a
militant, activist character” (1962: 35). Research shared there, he
insisted, must be in “the service of the African people struggling
for a final liquidation of colonialism and … the most progressive
paths of development” (1962: 35).

In this article, I examine the intersections of art and socialism
in and around the first three congresses. Rather than provide a
comprehensive survey of all that occurred at each, I focus on the
recurrent, shifting concerns regarding socialism’s relevance to the
study and making of art in Africa. In doing so, I seek to document
the unexpected sites of solidarity, as well as persistent tensions
around socialism’s applicability in African contexts. Following an
outline of the congress’s origins and the Cold War context, I exam-
ine Accra (1962) and Dakar (1967) in turn. In Accra, African so-
cialism was both celebrated and contested, particularly as regards
the symbolic and political utility of the continent’s historic arts.
Five years later in Dakar, Soviet delegates asserted themselves,
proclaiming solidarity with African scholars and artists while
proposing a materialist approach to historic and contemporary

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3 Stamp design featuring Kofi Antubam’s
design for the Asεsεgua (Seat of State), 1967.
Photo: courtesy of the author

proceedings for some, elsewhere at the congress other splits were
emerging. In the “Africa Section,” Nigerian historian Modilim
Achufusi argued that Africa should no longer be a subsection of
the orientalists’ congress (Potekhin 1960: 3).5 In the wake of inde-
pendence, Achufusi argued for a new, separate forum dedicated
to the dissemination of research on and about Africa. His reso-
lution passed, and the first International Congress of Africanists
took place on the continent within two years.

Achufusi’s proposal was greeted with broad enthusiasm.
Potekhin wrote to Black American intellectual W.E.B. Du Bois
that it fit well with their shared interest in organizing a conference
to discuss the writing of an “Encyclopedia Africana.” Potekhin
subsequently encouraged Du Bois to contact Professor Kenneth
Onwuke Dike, principal of University College, Ibadan, and one
of the members of the congress’s organizing committee (Potekhin
1960: 3). If Potekhin was personally invested in the founding of the
new congress, the encouragement of an “Africanist” field of study,
discrete from the “Orientalist” one, also fit the USSR’s broader
political priorities. Under Nikita Khrushchev, the Soviets firmly
shifted their attention to decolonizing Africa. In 1960, the Africa
Institute opened in Moscow, headed by Potekhin, and a “complex
approach” (i.e., an interdisciplinary one) to the continent’s study
became the priority (see Telepneva 2019: 3–4). This southward
pivot was tracked by American academics throughout the 1960s, as
they were equally concerned with the development of a new “area
studies” approach to Africa. In 1969, Arthur Jay Klinghoffer (1969:
51) analyzed Soviet interest in African socialism. He noted that in
1960–1961 Soviet academics had made clear efforts to distinguish
between Africa and what was understood as the “Orient.” Evidence
of this, Klinghoffer argued, could be seen in new journal names; for
example, Problemy Vostokovedeniia (Problems of Oriental studies)
became Narody Azii i Afriki (Peoples of Asia and Africa).

Though the drive to separate the Orientalist and Africanist
fields meshed with new Soviet priorities, the energy behind the
new international congress came from African scholars. They
sought to take control of the narrative, both in the wake of colo-
nialism and amid geopolitical tensions. The configuration of the
congress’s organizing committee openly acknowledged Cold War
fault lines. The heads of universities in Ghana, Nigeria, Ethiopia,
Tunisia, Senegal, and the Congo were asked to serve alongside
representatives from the International African Institute, the
Africa Institute of the Academy of the Sciences in the USSR, the
African Studies Association of the United States, and the French
Africanists (“International Congress” 1961: 47). The committee
reflected the desire to redress the balance in African studies in
favor of African voices, but also to welcome the other key players
of the era. Attendance at the first committee meeting in Ibadan
in 1961, encompassing just four representatives, reflected politi-
cal fault lines: Dike and Nana Kobina Nketsia IV, vice chancellor
of the University of Ghana, were joined by Soviet representative

arts. The third congress, in Addis Ababa (1973), took place amid
the stirrings of socialist-oriented dissent, a forerunner to rev-
olution in Ethiopia just months later. The significance of these
international congresses has been overlooked, yet they were a
critical part of the effort by African intellectuals to reclaim the
“Africanist” endeavor just as international academic interest in
the continent was burgeoning. Though, as events in Addis Ababa
made clear, academic discussions were not always in sync with
realities on the ground, the first three congresses were key sites for
intellectual exchange on the continent for those presumed to be
divided either by the Iron Curtain or the policy of nonalignment.3

FOUNDING THE CONGRESS AND THE
CULTURAL COLD WAR
The International Congress of Africanists was founded
during one particular session of the International Congress of
Orientalists in Moscow in August 1960. Then, delegates gathered
for the twenty-fifth iteration of the latter, an academic forum
which included the study of (and delegates from) sub-Saha-
ran Africa alongside more familiar studies in Asia, the Middle
East, and North Africa.4 The 1960 Congress of Orientalists was
the first to be held in the USSR since the Bolshevik revolution;
Cold War tensions inevitably bubbled. British historian Roderick
MacFarquhar (1960: 114–18) reported, for example, on the nonar-
rival of a Chinese delegation, despite expectations its members
would attend. If deteriorating Sino-Soviet relations overshadowed

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4 Picture released on April 1, 1966,
of Andre Malraux (l), French Minister of
Cultural Affairs, and Léopold Sédar Senghor
(r), president of Senegal, at the opening
of the First World Festival of Black Arts
(FESMAN), in Dakar.
Photo: AFP via Getty Images

Potekhin and American William Jones, president of the new
African Studies Association. Dike, as chairman, opened the meet-
ing by stating his hope that “foreign scholars” would understand
that Africans must now “speak for ourselves.” Africans were obli-
gated, he argued, to “study with thoroughness and depth our own
past … our own present and our own prospects” (“International
Congress” 1961: 47).

The overt inclusion of American and Soviet interests on the
congress’s organizing committee contrasts with familiar narra-
tives about the cultural Cold War and covert efforts by the su-
perpowers to infiltrate and influence African cultural production.
The US Central Intelligence Agency’s clandestine sponsorship of
the Congress of Cultural Freedom, Soviet funding for cultural
education and film festivals, and Chinese support for organiza-
tions such as the Afro-Asian Writers’ Association were all ways
in which the United States, the Soviet Union, and China hoped
to insert themselves into Africa’s era of independence (see, e.g.,
Saunders 1999; Scott-Smith 2002; Friedman 2015; Nash 2016;
Matusevich 2019). Other studies have countered narratives of
superpower propaganda by emphasizing African agency (Popescu
2019). Matthew Eatough (2019), for example, highlights the ways
in which Mphahlele, the head the Congress of Cultural Freedom’s
Africa program, borrowed from both US and Soviet literary dis-
courses to inform his vision for literary criticism that was equally
occupied with creative freedom, the fragmentary nature of the
African experience, and class consciousness.

The International Congress of Africanists did not escape en-
tanglement in the covert Cold War networks. University College,
Ibadan (the location of the first committee meeting), for example,
received funds from the Rockefeller and Ford Foundations in the
early to mid-1960s (Parmar 2012: 158). Yet, as the committee’s
make-up made clear, there was little interest in pretending an at-
mosphere of ideological rivalry did not exist. Rather, the congress
created a space in which rival approaches—alongside questions
about the definition of an “Africanist” and who had the right to
produce “Africanist” knowledge—were presented and appraised
at the invitation of the continent’s leading thinkers.

ACCRA, 1962
The University of Ghana hosted the first International
Congress of Africanists in 1962. The brochure, published by
Caxton Press in Ibadan, features a design by the Nigerian artist
Bruce Onobrakpeya. The cover image, which was also reproduced
in black and white on the congress “Documents” (Fig. 1) and in
two colors on the Proceedings (Bown and Crowder 1964; Fig. 2),
featured a Yoruba Ogboni drum. Historically, these drums, called
agba, meaning “barrel or canon” (Ojo 1973: 50), were both mu-
sical and sacred objects in the Ogboni society of southwestern
Nigeria. They were used to announce meetings, rites of passage,
and to guide spiritual worship. The number of visible pegs in the

image suggests that Onobrakpeya represented the largest form of
Ogboni drum, known as iya ilu or “mother” drum (Drewal 1989:
136). Up to thirty inches high, the skin of these drums is held by
thirteen pegs (Ojo 1973: 50). Ogboni drums are elaborately dec-
orated, typically featuring an anthropomorphic carving on one
side that depicts the “face of worship” (Drewal 1989: 136). This
face provides a focus for the divine forces associated with the
drum’s role, and Onobrakpeya’s design centers attention on it. On
the congress’s brochure it is an apposite icon, invoking the sacred
gathering of a group of initiates. Reflecting on this commission,
Onobrakpeya reports he primarily focused on the drum as “a
symbol of dissemination of information.”6

By 1962, Onobrakpeya had a reputation for innovative design
and was involved in print-making workshops with Ulli Beier’s
Mbari Artists’ and Writers’ Club in Ibadan (Stanley 2011: 22).
He was associated with the Zaria Art Society and the debates
about the significance of cultural traditions—in his case, the
folktales of the Urhobo people—and how they might come to
serve modernist expression in the newly independent Nigeria
(see Okeke 2006: 26–37). Onobrakpeya’s stylized rendering of the
Ogboni drum departed from his more experimental paintings of
Urhobo mythologies, but its presence on the brochure resonated
with the interests of his fellow artists in Zaria and elsewhere to
assert the utility of cultural heritage within new nation-states.
In Accra, the drum provided the principal visual reference,
carried on the brochure from panel to panel by every delegate.
Its strong, graphic outlines made an impression; in her report
on the congress, delegate Dorothy Porter (1963: 202), librarian
from the Moorland-Spingarn Center at Howard University in
Washington DC, marked out Onobrakpeya’s “attractively de-
signed” cover for praise.

The drum also resonated with wider debates at the congress
regarding the need to recenter the continent’s historic arts and
cultural practices as critical to the development of new states. By
1962, the principle tenets of Senghor’s Négritude and its centering

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of historic artistic culture as evidence of an African civilization in
stark contradistinction to a European one (Senghor 1956: 57–58)
were well known. In configuring Africa’s arts as manifestations
of the continent’s knowledge systems, Senghor framed objects
like the Ogboni drum as emblematic of Africa’s contribution to
the “Civilization of the Universal” (1994: 32; see also Gbadegesin
1991: 30–45). Humanity could not be understood in its totality
without recognition of such arts—and their corresponding spiri-
tual significance—on their own terms.

In an address in Oxford the year before the Accra gathering,
Senghor had further insisted that Négritude was “traditionally so-
cialist in character” [emphasis original] for reasons like those later
invoked by Mboya; namely, that “Negro-African society” was
“classless” and “community-based” (Senghor 1964a: 264–66).
Senghor had been at pains to differentiate his “African Mode of
Socialism” from that of Europe or the USSR. He cited Potekhin,
signaling his awareness of the “socialist experiments of Eastern
Europe” and their “positive achievements” (Senghor 1964a: 266),
but he ultimately dismissed the economic idealism of the latter,
arguing that though socialism was morally superior to capital-
ism, Africa needed capital. Senghor’s economic pragmatism was
counterbalanced by his own humanist idealism when he argued
that “spiritual needs, which weigh so heavy in Negro-African
hearts” (Senghor 1964a: 266) ultimately underpinned African so-
cialism in a way that neither Marx nor Potekhin could appreciate.
Senghor’s critique of Marx’s “scientific” inclination dated to the
late 1940s when he was reading Marx’s early works in the library
of the French Parliament (Rippert 2017: 139–41). Against the

18 | african arts AUTUMN 2021 VOL. 54, NO. 3

5 Afewerk Tekle
The Total Liberation of Africa (1963)
Stained glass; 150 m x 150 m
Located in Africa Hall at the headquarters of
the United Nations Economic Commission
for Africa (UNECA), Addis Ababa.
Photo: Goodwin Ogbuehi

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backdrop of France’s last attempts at colonial development in the
postwar period, Senghor became broadly committed to social-
ism. He grew increasingly occupied with the idea that socialism
was less about radically changing African society and more about
uncovering and preserving its existing inclinations (LeMelle
1965: 331–32). In the early years of independence, he reempha-
sized this message and went further: the objective of ending the
exploitation of African men and women, he argued, could be sat-
isfied only by revivifying the “black soul” (Senghor 1964a: 265).
Liberation from oppression meant striving not simply for “mate-
rial well-being” but for spiritual redress; only art could express
the “rapture of the heart, of the soul” (Senghor 1964a: 266) that
this moment called for.

Ghana’s president, Kwame Nkrumah (1970), would later con-
test Senghor’s “idyllic” conception of African socialism prefaced
on the notion of a “classless” continent, but at the first congress
Nkrumah’s arrival at the University of Ghana, of which he was
chancellor, was choreographed both to stir hearts and to contrast
starkly with European precedents. American Charles J. Patterson
provides a description: delegates mingled in the university’s Great
Hall while Eine Kleine Nachtmusik played from loudspeakers.
“Abruptly,” however, “the music of Mozart [was] over-awed by the

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belligerent booming” of drums (Patterson 1962: 2). These were not
Ogboni agba, however, but Akan drums heralding Nkrumah’s
arrival. This fit with the tabula rasa tone of Nkrumah’s opening
address, which recounted scholarly interest in Africa from its ori-
gins in Persia, Greece, and Rome, through Arab and Chinese en-
deavors, to the European efforts of recent centuries. If the former
were motivated by scientific curiosity, he argued, the latter were
motivated by nefarious economic interests and had contributed to
the continent’s subjugation. A rebirth of the “Africanist” endeavor
was essential. “Africanists everywhere,” Nkrumah argued, “must
… help in building the spiritual and cultural foundations for the
unity of our continent” (Bown and Crowder 1964: 10).

Dike followed with a similar tone but warned against roman-
ticizing Africa’s history, particularly relative to its art. “We must
accept the glories of Benin art with the human sacrifices,” he
argued, “just as the Spaniards accept the horrors and bigotries of
the Inquisition with the achievements of El Greco and Cervantes”
(Bown and Crowder 1964: 22). Dike critiqued the idealizing over-
tones of Négritude and, by extension, African socialism’s ten-
dency to deemphasize difficult indigenous histories. His note of
caution, however, was followed by a call to action for those in-
vested in the academic study of Africa’s arts; it was, he argued, of
paramount importance to elevate artistic traditions to the status
of world culture, as broad human “achievements” not “products
of so-called ‘primitive’ and ‘backward’ societies” (Bown and
Crowder 1964: 22). After all, Dike insisted, the arts of Africa had
regenerated European culture only a few decades previously. Here
he was aligned with Senghor, who had argued that after the fail-
ure of the “Greco-Roman aesthetic” (the approximation of art
with an imitation of nature), European art had been revived only
through its “encounter” with the arts of Africa (Senghor 1956: 65).
Diop subsequently cut to the chase with the congress’s diverse
audience, which included delegates from across Africa, from
Europe, North and South America, the USSR, the Middle East,
and Asia. He disliked the term Africanist, which, he argued,
farmed Africa as a “passive object of scholarship” (Bown and
Crowder 1964: 46). A decade earlier, the journal Présence Africaine
had published “L’art nègre” (Diop 1951) in a special issue stress-
ing that scholarship on Africa’s arts must serve decolonization
efforts. The emphasis on the political urgency of the study of art
resurfaced in Diop’s Accra address when he stated that “cultural
consciousness” was inseparable from “political and economic
consciousness” and that all were bound up in an age of revolution.
The emphasis now fell on the “building up of African authorita-
tiveness.” But, he stressed, “authoritativeness in cultural matters”
could not be realized until “political authority [was] in the hands
of the people” (Bown and Crowder 1964: 49). Intellectuals must be
anticolonial activists; artistic culture needed to resonate at both
the national and the continental level. “Men of culture have … [a]
clear responsibility,” he argued; “they must provide a structural
pattern for … national consciousness, as well as the consciousness
of Africa as a whole” (Bown and Crowder 1964: 48–49).

Diop’s insistence on activism and colonial liberation as precon-
dition to “authoritativeness” appeared to affront the myopia of the
“colonized intellectual” in Frantz Fanon’s recently published The
Wretched of the Earth (1961). The latter, Fanon argues, were mis-
guided in their quest to recover some lost, unifying “African” cul-
ture. In focusing on correcting the oppressor, they simultaneously

confirmed the generalizing assumptions of the latter and ne-
glected realities on the ground (Fanon 2001: 170–71). Yet if, like
Fanon, Diop saw anticolonial struggle as precondition to “au-
thoritativeness,” he nonetheless configured Africa’s “men of cul-
ture” in a manner that Fanon would have challenged. While Diop
called upon the latter to forge a blueprint for national (as well as
continental) consciousness, Fanon stressed that culture could not
itself create but was rather derived from national consciousness;
that is, from the people (Bown and Crowder 1964: 49; Fanon 2001:
188). Fanon insisted that only the struggle for the creation of a
new nation could give birth to national cultural forms. He would,
therefore, have contested Diop’s inverted configuration of the
latter as “structural pattern” for the consciousness of the former.

Fanon, sadly, died months before the Accra congress. His own
rebuke of Négritude’s more romantic presuppositions and gener-
alizing tendencies of African socialism was, therefore, absent from
the proceedings. Yet voices of dissent were raised, most notably by
Mphahlele, who took Senghor to task (Bown and Crowder 1964:
220–32). In his presentation, Mphahlele cited Senghor’s poem
“Prayer to Masks,” which begins with the lines:

Masks! Oh Masks!
Black mask, red mask, you black and white masks,
Rectangular mask through whom the spirit breathes,
I greet in silence! (Bown and Crowder 1964: 226–27).

Mphahlele acknowledged the “nobility of tone and feeling” of
Senghor’s writing but insisted that the reverent imagery found in
such prose obscured the fact that it referenced no “tangible expe-
rience” (Bown and Crowder 1964: 227). The emphasis on collec-
tive rapture displaced individual reality. Mphahlele was a known
critic of Négritude. Not long before he appeared at the Accra con-
gress, his collection The African Image (1962) had been published.
In it he confronts the obsession with exhibiting only the “tradi-
tional or indigenous” arts (Eatough 2019: 144). The pursuit of that
which was definitively “African” involved glossing over diversity
with a pretense of unity.

Mphahlele cautioned against literature focused on “African-
ness,” fearing that it produced only “fodder for the Africanist”
(Bown and Crowder 1964: 228), another term he disliked. If
Mphahlele was critical of Négritudist themes, he was also con-
cerned that social realist writing in European languages was
valued purely for its “African” “sociological” content. Here he
rebuked not only Western scholars but Soviet Africanists who
actively encouraged social realism as documentation of African
societies in transition. Mphahlele charted a course between two
socialist visions for African postcolonial culture, stating that nei-
ther truly made visible or, more important, impacted the lives of
the poorest in society. There was no singular African literature, he
argued, and creative culture should not be motivated by a “gen-
eral ephemeral notion of African solidarity” (Bown and Crowder
1964: 231) but rather should be “nourished by local experience,”
for which he proposed both community workshops and a greater
appreciation for the sophistication of vernacular forms.

Mphahlele’s presentation preceded the “Art and Music” section
of the congress, chaired by the Ghanaian artist Kofi Antubam.
The two shared some concerns. Antubam was a renowned artist,

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6 Traditional artworks for public viewing
during the World Festival of Black Arts,
Dakar, Senegal, April 1966
Photo: Priya Ramrakha/The LIFE Picture
Collection via Getty Images

closely associated with the pageantry of independent Ghana
(Hess 2006). He was also a writer and, at the time of the congress,
was preparing his book Ghana’s Heritage of Culture (1963), which
documents the diversity of Ghana’s artistic traditions while em-
phasizing the country’s “contribution to the arts” (Hess 2006:
187), a sentiment that aligned with Négritude’s recuperative as-
pirations. Yet Antubam was more interested in the concept of the
“African personality,” popularized by Nkrumah, which shared
with Négritude what Archie Mafeje calls “an ontology of being
black in a white-dominated world” (1990: 162). The difference
between the two, Mafeje argues, was that Nkrumah’s “African
personality” was concerned with shared sociological traits rather
than artistic embodiments of the Black soul. Antubam did not
draw specific distinction between Négritude and the African per-
sonality; however, when he wrote about “tribal masks,” he was,
unlike Senghor, unmoved by them. They were a “great source of
symbolic art,” he states, but “there [was] no place for this particu-
lar form of art in Ghana today” (1963: 191). In Antubam’s model,
certain cultural traditions belonged to societies past; they were
important and should be studied, but their principle utility was
in supporting new, composite forms for the symbolic repertoire
of the new nation. These ideas, and their commitment to making
use of hybrid historic and contemporary imagery for a new po-
litical present, are conspicuous in his own civic art, such as the

20 | african arts AUTUMN 2021 VOL. 54, NO. 3

Asεsεgua (Seat of State). This chair for Ghana’s head of state com-
bines the historic forms of the Akan Golden Stool with newer
symbols, such as the black star of anticolonialism, which also
appeared on the Ghanaian flag (Hess 2001: 65; Yorke et al. 2017:
1610). In 1967, it was one of several new national icons to be show-
cased on Ghana’s stamps (Fig. 3).

Atta Kwami (2013: 227) speculates that Antubam was influ-
enced by Marxist ideas about art’s utility, encountered via Soviet
contacts in Nkrumah’s administration. Most likely Antubam was
encouraged to develop his long-standing interest in historic art
in Ghana into a book while in East Germany (GDR), where, in
1961, his Art of Ghana exhibition had opened.7 Ghana’s Heritage
of Culture, funded by the GDR’s German-African Society,
was a continuation of that exhibition, and, as Gerald Götting’s
“Preface” notes, served to affront the idea that African art was
“primitive,” an idea propagated by the “so-called civilized apolo-
gists of colonial or neo-colonial policy” (Antubam 1963: 11). This,
along with lines that stressed the GDR’s desire to “give real help to
the cultural development of Africa” (Antubam 1963: 12), echoed
the interests of Soviet African studies, as expressed by Potekhin,
to be both distinct from the Africanist approaches of former co-
lonial nations and in active service of decolonization. In Accra,
therefore, Antubam likely agreed with Mphahlele on the need
for contemporary art to be grounded and useful, while rejecting
the suggestion of dispensing with pan-African aspirations. The
combined concern for continental scale and local, material real-
ities that seemed to underpin Antubam’s 1963 publication was
one that Soviet scholars would elaborate further at the next con-
gress, in Dakar in 1967.

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7 Gebre Kristos Desta
Golgotha (1963)
Oil on hardboard; 183 cm x 122 cm
Photo: reproduced with permission of the Gebre
Kristos Desta Center, Addis Ababa

DAKAR, 1967
Diop was the chair of the 1967 congress. In Accra, he had been
“the most voracious, intellectual pouncer” (Patterson 1962: 3). In
Senegal, he struck a more diplomatic tone, calling for a silence
to mark the recent deaths of Melville Herskovits and Potekhin,
“old friends” of “different ideologies” (“Second Session” 1968:
202). At the Accra meeting, these men, as the respective heads of
the American and Soviet Africanist fields, had been prominent.
Certainly their “different ideologies” had been evident: Potekhin
was accused of preaching “a sermon in full accord with Soviet
economic theology” (Patterson 1962: 9), while Herskovits lob-
bied against the Soviets in an effort to ensure the congress would
be controlled by individual scholars rather than governments
(Gershenhorn 2004: 228). Despite representing rival sides, how-
ever, they also worked together. Their coauthorship, for example,
of the congress’s constitution was held up as evidence that this
new Africanist forum represented a “moratorium on Cold War
politics” (Crowder 1963: 251).

The Dakar congress opened a year after the landmark First
World Festival of Negro Arts (Fig. 4). Referring to the latter as
the “Imaginary Museum” of the Black world, Diop proposed
that the congress was its intellectual corollary. If the festival was
“the illustration of the values of Negritude,” Diop stated, the con-
gress aspired to “study of the organization of these values for the
development of Africa” (“Second Session” 1968: 203). Senghor
surely approved of Diop’s conflation. He used his own speech as
host nation president to suggest that Négritude—a term, he said,
he knew was not appreciated by all—was essentially the same
as “Africanism” and that, therefore, a congress of Africanists
shared its principal concerns for uncovering and making visible
the “Negro-African civilisation” (“Second Session” 1968: 213).
Nkrumah had looked back at that which came before; Senghor
looked resolutely forward, emphasizing the grand scale of the task
ahead. He called for a move away from “fragmentary” or “atom-
is[ed]” research (“Second Session” 1968: 210–11). Scholars must,
he stressed, consider the “totality of African history” [emphasis
original], dating back not “six thousand” but over a “million”
years (“Second Session” 1968: 211). Only by pursuing research on
such a scale could the African contribution to the “Civilisation of
the Universal” be seen.

Though he did not make explicit the connection, Senghor’s as-
pirations for a “total” African history echoed those of the recently
deceased Potekhin, the man whose version of socialism Senghor
had previously found too doctrinaire. Potekhin had been a leading
advocate of rewriting the entire history of Africa, which, he stated,
had previously been written by the “scientists of colonial coun-
tries … [and] distorted and falsified beyond recognition” (1962:
35). For Soviet Africanists the question of rethinking the “totality
of African history” was critical. If, for Senghor, this was about
restoring Africa’s centrality in global history, for Potekhin and
his colleagues it was bound to Marxist teleology, whereby Africa’s
history could be shown as progressive development in which co-
lonialism was a stage out of which the continent was emerging.

Their motivations were not entirely the same, but Senghor’s and
Potekhin’s ambitions correlated in interesting ways.

Unsurprisingly, therefore, the papers at Dakar that spoke
most closely to the scale of Senghor’s aspirations were deliv-
ered by Soviet delegates Vil’ Borisovich Mirimanov and Galina
Chernova. Mirimanov’s paper (1967) addressed “Some Problems
of the History of Fine Arts in Tropical Africa,” while Chernova’s
contribution (1967) chronicled the work of contemporary artists
from across the continent. From the outset, Mirimanov stressed
that Soviet interest in the arts of Africa was distinct from that
of Western Europeans. While artists in France and Germany
were, he argued, enthralled by “so-called ‘primitive art’” (a
term he distained), a Latvian art critic who published under the
Russian pseudonym V.I. Markov had written “the first publica-
tion to regard African statuettes and masks … as works of art”
(Mirimanov 1967: 3). Mirimanov was referring to Markov’s Negro
Art, prepared in 1913 and published posthumously in Petrograd
in 1919 (see Howard, Bužinska, and Strother 2015). Having estab-
lished the Russian/Soviet pedigree for writing respectfully about
art from Africa, Mirimanov went on to stress that the Soviet
Union was deeply committed to developing such study and that
it had held several important exhibitions in the 1960s, drawing
on collections in Leningrad, Moscow, and Tartu, Estonia. The
Africa Institute had sections dedicated to the study of ancient and

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modern African culture, and the historical connectivity between
these two occupied Mirimanov’s own research. Only by bringing
together “exceptionally vast and disconnected material embrac-
ing the oldest and longest period in the history of African art,”
Mirimanov argued, could a sense of “the evolution … [of] specific
forms in African art” be gauged (Mirimanov 1967: 5). Such study
was needed, he emphasized, for “us to carry out the most import-
ant task now facing every student of African culture, to write the
entire history of fine arts in Africa” (Mirimanov 1967: 5–6).

Mirimanov briefly outlined how his own formal observations

8 Detail of Figure 5, the central window of
Afewerk Tekle’s The Total Liberation of Africa (1963).
Photo: Goodwin Ogbuehi

of petroglyphs demonstrated evolution from naturalism through
a period of “sketchiness” to a transition to realism. Such an evo-
lution was important to document, he argued, because it coun-
tered the presumption that African arts were “alien to realism”
(Mirimanov 1967: 7). Antubam had addressed similar presump-
tions when he reported that European colonial art teachers had
insisted that the use of perspective, three-dimensionality, and

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naturalistic portraiture were “completely un-African” (1963: 130)
and should (along with painting, in general) be discouraged on
the continent. While Antubam would argue that, though painting
was a “borrowed medium” (1963: 131), Ghanaian artists were ca-
pable of innovating with it, Mirimanov stressed that the presump-
tion that the continent lacked a history of realism was fallacious.
Mirimanov’s interest, opposing what Senghor had dismissed as
“atomized” research, was in recovering such histories and recon-
structing knowledge about “separate periods” into a story of “suc-
cessive phases of a single process” (Mirimanov 1967: 8).

Mirimanov fully developed this idea in his magnum opus,
Iskusstvo Tropičeskoj Afriki; Tipologija, Sistematika, Ėvoljucija
(The Art of Tropical Africa: Typology, System, Evolution), in which
the history of art in Africa is described as a progressive “poly-
centric supersystem” (1986: 288; see also Cowcher 2019: 154–55).
In Dakar, he laid the foundations for this later endeavor, arguing
that among the “problems” to be addressed by scholars was the
multitude of intentions and material conditions of art’s produc-
tion. Benin court art, he argued, revealed the power structures
under which an artist labored (Mirimanov 1967: 9–10), rather
than the individual intention of the artist, while “cult and applied
art” (masquerade, religious statuary, etc.) were complex embod-
ied communications, their form ultimately determined by a “util-
itarian function” (Mirimanov 1967: 10). Mirimanov’s paper built
upon work conducted in Moscow and Leningrad in the preceding
years, including Isskustvo Afriki/African Art (1964), coauthored
with Chernova, and the edited volume Essays on African Culture
(1966), written both for Soviet readers and for distribution in
Africa’s decolonizing nations. His particular research interests
were Africa’s ancient and medieval arts but, guided in part by the
grand aspirations of the “complex approach,” as well as a desire
to disavow the West’s “bourgeois” ahistorical ethnographies, he
sought to make such periods keystones in an all-encompassing
narrative of continental progress. This approach meshed with
Senghor’s ambitions, but it also had no interest in Négritude’s ro-
mantic inclinations. Per the expectations of scientific socialism,
this was a project uninterested in constructing discrete histories
circumscribed by race and more concerned with documenting a
singular, interconnected, progressive human history from which
Africa’s specific contributions had long been excluded.

While Mirimanov emphasized progressive, historical recon-
struction efforts, his colleague Chernova (1967) surveyed the
continent’s contemporary art scene. This topic was divisive in the
1960s when Western scholars, notably William Fagg, agonized
over the “death” of “traditional” African art and the corrupting
influence of European modernist modes (Beier 1968: 3). Antubam
had wryly inferred that such anxieties derived from the fact
that Europeans “fear … future competition” (1963: 131). Soviet
Africanists had no such anxieties; Africa’s diverse contemporary
arts were a manifestation of the continent’s social and political
realities. Chernova had attended the 1966 First World Festival of
Negro Arts, which, she noted, was the first continent-wide exhi-
bition of contemporary art. Her enthusiasm for its diversity and
innovation was palpable. She reported on consternation at the
festival regarding the impact of cheap foreign imports on tradi-
tional craft industries. Unlike “foreign scholars,” however, who
had opposed a resolution put forward by African artists and
writers, including Bernard Dadié, in favor of encouraging “serial

production” in the applied arts (as a counter to foreign imports),
Soviet scholars had given their “full support” (Chernova 1967: 9).
Where their Western colleagues feared conflating art and manu-
facturing, Chernova and her colleagues stood in solidarity with
what they saw as a pragmatic decision to develop the continent’s
art industries in response to current realities.

Chernova listed artists and their contributions to what she
considered a rich if uneven contemporary art scene.8 She praised
the “beauty” and “dignity” of works by artists such as the South
African Gerard Sekoto and the Nigerian Demas Nwoko. She
was enthusiastic about artists such as Boubacar Keita from Mali
who chronicled social themes such as “Peasants at Work in the
Fields,” and she noted important civic art such as Afewerk Tekle’s
great stained glass depicting Africa’s past, present, and future
in Africa Hall, Addis Ababa (Fig. 5). While reserving particular
praise for social realism in painting and public art, Chernova
also celebrated artists working in abstract modes and new media.
This included the work of Senegalese artist Ibou Diouf (Fig. 6),
whose work she praised for “[embodying] the joy of liberation,”
Iba N’Diaye’s powerful evocation of the Tabaski ritual, Ivorian
sculptor Christian Lattier’s string and metal armature works, and
Ethiopian Gebre Kristos Desta’s blood-splattered representation
of the Crucifixion in Golgotha (1963, Fig. 7), which was notable
for its universally relatable representation of “torment” (Chernova
1967: 14). What brought these diverse artists together, Chernova
argued, was a shared “unity of purpose … a common struggle for
liberation” (1967: 4).

Chernova’s voracious appetite for such a diverse array of African
modernist work challenges any notion that the Soviets were solely
interested in socialist realism, which since the 1930s had been the
dominant mode in Soviet art schools. Though African students
who studied in Soviet schools in the 1960s and 1970s were given
a thorough training in realist modes (Cowcher 2019: 155–56) and
though some localized versions of socialist realism (with pre-
scribed subjects and an emphasis on sunny realism) were insti-
tuted in art schools under African Marxist military regimes in
the 1970s (e.g., in Ethiopia), Chernova’s appraisal of the Dakar
exhibition made clear that, to her, the value of an artwork hinged
less on form than on content and intent. Indeed, works in a
range of formal languages, from Gebre Kristos’s expressive paint
strokes to Sekoto’s stylized renderings of Black Parisian life, were
all acceptable, provided they were motivated by a common cause.
Ethiopia had not been colonized by Europeans, but the inclusion
of Gebre Kristos and Afewerk under Chernova’s progressive um-
brella spoke to her evaluation of their work as a contribution to
the continent’s collective struggle.

Emphasis fell, again, upon the importance of art’s utility in ex-
pressing and shaping contemporary realities, in not obsessing over
historic arts in order that they might live silently in a museum, but
in finding the useful among the historic. Chernova’s celebration
of abstract or religious-themed works such as N’Diaye’s Tabaski,
sacrifice du mouton (1963)—strikingly enigmatic in form, with
figure and ground dissolving into each other in a muddy, mottled
figurative abstraction—derived from the fact that they were not
seen as “bourgeois” or “art-for-arts-sake.” Rather, they deployed
expressive or abstracted modes to materialize a “profound philo-
sophical problem” (Chernova 1967: 13)—in the case of the Islamic
Tabaski festival, the sacrifice of a sheep as tribute to the Prophet
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realities visible. By the time of the next international congress,
these latter two issues were urgent discussion topics in the bars
and cafes of the city in which it took place: Addis Ababa.

ADDIS ABABA, 1973
Haile Selassie I University hosted the third congress, though
all presentations took place at Africa Hall, the seat of the United
Nations Economic Commission for Africa (“Third International
Congress” 1973: 38). Here delegates could not miss Afewerk
Tekle’s great window, praised by Chernova, in which Ethiopia
was configured as the continent’s torchbearer (Fig. 8). If, in Dakar,
the Soviet delegates had showcased their support for progressive
Africanist scholarship, a different constituency asserted solidar-
ity with their African colleagues in Addis Ababa: Black American
scholars. Ethiopia’s emperor, Haile Selassie, like Nkrumah and
Senghor before him, opened the proceedings with an address
that underscored the congress’s continental significance while
also noting the increased participation of African scholars. This
participation, he stated, “can no doubt help to redirect Africanist
research into areas of greater relevance to Africa’s needs and in-
terests” (Clarke 2004: 231). The increased African presence was
matched by that of Black American scholars, who were repre-
sented at both Accra and Dakar but not as a discrete delegation.
Sixteen scholars traveled to Addis Ababa as part of the Black
American delegation, many of them historians working in rela-
tively new Africana studies programs. They included the Marxist
Guyanese historian Walter Rodney, whose landmark book How
Europe Underdeveloped Africa (1972) had just been published,
and John Henrik Clarke, who had recently finished serving as
president of the African Heritage Studies Association (AHSA).

The formation of the AHSA had fueled the determination of
Black American scholars to seek greater representation at the
congress. The AHSA had formed as a breakaway group from the
African Studies Association (ASA) during a stormy conference
in Montreal in 1969 (Clarke 1976: 5–11). During that conference
a “Black caucus” of students and academics had called for equal
representation in the predominantly White American profes-
sional body. When such representation was not forthcoming, the
AHSA was founded, and the ASA, the organization once led by
Herskovits, was accused of a “neocolonialist” approach to the
study of Africa. Confrontation between the ASA and AHSA was
avoided in Addis Ababa because the American delegation was
equally divided between the two groups.

The Soviets had long seen themselves in solidarity with Black
Americans. The relationship dated to the aftermath of the
Bolshevik revolution, when luminaries such as Claude McKay
and Langston Hughes had traveled to the young USSR, which
presented itself as progressive and inclusive, in contrast to seg-
regated America (Moore 1996; Matusevich 2008a; Wilson 2018).
In the Khrushchev era, as Soviet African studies burgeoned, the
emphasis on the notion of the “friendship of peoples” drove a
policy that invited students from across the nonaligned world,
including many African countries, to live and study in Soviet in-
stitutions. As Maxim Matusevich (2008b), Julie Hessler (2006),
and others have shown, the Soviet veneer of racial utopia masked
paternalism and resentment, which led to both racist violence
against Black students and, particularly in the perestroika period,

9 Gebre Kristos Desta
People Disguised (1973)
Oil on hardboard; 91 cm x 70 cm
Collection of Carol Boram-Hays and Michael B. Hays
Photo: reproduced with permission, courtesy Carol Boram
Hays and Michael B. Hays

Ibrahim, who was willing to kill his son, Ismael, at God’s com-
mand but, at the last minute, was given a ram to sacrifice instead.
N’Diaye’s murky rendering was, in Chernova’s estimation, valu-
able for its earnest wrestling with the “stern laws of life and death
on earth” (1967: 13). At the same time, the recurrence of Christian
themes was tolerated and even praised by Chernova because they
revealed a collective concern for “equality and mercy” and for
“good and evil” (1967: 14). Chernova praised Gebre Kristos’s ren-
dition of Christ’s bloody presence on the cross, for example, as a
profoundly empathetic work, its visceral red daubs suggestive of
“all the torments that some people have had to endure” (1967: 14).
In Chernova’s mind, these were works of abstraction with pro-
gressive, humanist intent.

Chernova ended her presentation by citing Potekhin, “a sincere
friend of the African peoples,” who in his last article wrote, “The
manners and customs of peoples have been scrupulously observed
and described, but never … was any evaluation of those manners
and customs attempted from the standpoint of the interests of
progress” (Chernova 1967: 15). Both Mirimanov and Chernova
envisaged their contributions to the International Congress of
Africanists as hailing from this standpoint. Their positions were,
at once, in solidarity with the leading African intellectuals with
whom they shared the stage and in step with both a Marxist con-
ception of history and the use of art as a means of making social

24 | african arts AUTUMN 2021 VOL. 54, NO. 3

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a nativist rejection of Blacks in Soviet spaces. Nonetheless, in the
Africanist field, Potekhin in particular enthusiastically supported
Black American Africanist projects. He maintained a friendly
correspondence with Du Bois in the latter stages of both of their
lives, the two having met in Moscow during Du Bois’s tour in the
late 1950s.9 With Potekhin’s support, Du Bois organized a con-
ference on his “Africana Encyclopedia” project following the first
Africanist congress in Accra. With the passing of both Du Bois
and Potekhin, the rapport between Soviet and Black American
intellectuals waned. In Addis Ababa the Black American dele-
gation was keener to assert solidarity with artists and intellectu-
als on the continent.

Following the 1973 congress, Clarke (2004) wrote a report on
the historic participation of Black American scholars. He was a
proponent of an expansive pan-Africanism, which he understood
as not only continental solidarity but as encompassing all people
of African descent. Clarke agreed with Haile Selassie’s comment
that “the time [seems] to have come when Africans [can] abandon
the role of subservience [in Africanist study] and embrace that of
full and equal participation” (2004: 231). Clarke bristled at cer-
tain papers presented during the congress, particularly those on
economic and political matters, for continuing to treat “African
problems in the abstract” (2004: 231). Apartheid, racism, oppres-
sion, and the ongoing fight against Portuguese colonialism were,
he and fellow Black American delegates highlighted, not just aca-
demic concerns but violent, lived realities.

Clarke felt that the panels on social and cultural development,
in which African scholars were notably active, were the stron-
gest. He was particularly impressed by artists such as Ethiopian
playwright Tsegaye Gebre-Medhin, who presented on “Africa as
the Origin of Early Greek Theatre Culture.” Tsegaye had been a
prominent figure in the 1960s effervescent art scene, known as
the “Addis Spring,” during which he had debuted works that dealt
with both social inequality in Ethiopia and the predicament of
the educated Ethiopian (Azeze 1985: 37–38). In 1970 Tsegaye
traveled to Senegal to study Négritude (Plastow 1996: 101), and
his contribution to the 1973 congress was clearly informed by
pan-Africanist concerns. Clarke was receptive to his framing. As
was clear from both his postcongress report and his later writ-
ings in journals such as Présence Africaine, Clarke shared Diop’s
idea, articulated a decade earlier in Accra, that the revolution in
Africa must not only be one of political consciousness but of cul-
tural consciousness too.

Revolution was, in fact, brewing in Addis Ababa in 1973.
Alongside Tsegaye, another Ethiopian scholar, Girma Amare,
presented an ominous-sounding paper, “Considerations of Some
Ideological Problems in Ethiopia Today.” The contents were not
published, but the “problems” implied by the title are not hard to
imagine. Girma, an Ethiopian historian who by the mid-1980s was
at the University of Lagos, would later write (Amare 1984) about
the tensions in his country regarding historic imperial governance
and the failure to enact substantive social and political moderniz-
ing reforms. Since the mid-1960s, Haile Selassie had been accused
of failing to deliver land reform and of presiding over a “feudal”
system of rank social inequality. Ethiopia’s students rallied under
the slogan “Land to the Tiller” and called for a radical redistribu-
tion of land ownership. In the spring before the international con-
gress in December 1973, Haile Selassie I University had been the

site of student protests following an exhibition of photographs,
taken by faculty and students, of an unfolding famine in Wollo
Province (Redda 1996: 20). Clarke’s report makes no reference
to domestic turmoil, instead speaking warmly of the congress’s
hosts. Yet, as delegates mingled, the famine continued to unfold
outside Addis Ababa, a reality that made Haile Selassie’s opening
speech about the relevance of Africanist research to “the struggle
that our continent is … waging against poverty, ignorance and
disease” (Clarke 2004: 231) retrospectively jarring.

Ethiopia’s revolution unfolded less than a year later when the
emperor was deposed by a military committee, which proclaimed
a commitment to Marxist-Leninism but soon turned dictatorial.
Art played a key role in the revolution, which hinged upon making
visible unseen social classes and, specifically, the suffering of the
rural population. In the same year as the congress and the in-
flammatory exhibition at the university, Gebre Kristos Desta, the
artist whom Chernova had praised for the universal relevance of
his Golgotha (1963), painted a work rooted in the specific visual
politics of Ethiopia’s prerevolutionary moment. People Disguised
(1973; Fig. 9) combines Gebre Kristos’s characteristic biomor-
phic abstractions—circles, bubbles, and blood-like smears—with
the suggested presence of three bodies: a figure on the left, indi-
cated by a red oval face and two eye-like circles; a figure on the
right, implied by a silhouetted head in profile; and a figure in the
middle, whose circular torso, top center of the canvas, reveals a
clear skeletal core. Gebre Kristos had used skeletal forms in other
works not to infer starvation but to invoke such concepts as in-
ternal strength. In 1973, however, any suggestion of a rib cage in
a work entitled People Disguised had provocative connotations.10

Whether the painting was intended as an overt critique or not,
the presence and absence of the figures in Gebre Kristos’s work
resonated with the growing accusations that Haile Selassie’s gov-
ernment was actively concealing the physical suffering of starv-
ing people. One starkly realist element in the canvas is an eye,
in the top right, its pupil clearly dilated. It looks not at the indis-
tinct figures but at the viewer of the canvas; its presence unset-
tling, it seems to both accuse and call to action. A few months
after Gebre Kristos painted People Disguised, his student Eshetu
Tiruneh took a more direct approach when he painted a mural—
depicting starving but defiant Ethiopians on a confrontational
march from the barren countryside—on a wall of the Fine Arts
School in Addis Ababa.11 Eshetu painted in a more clearly real-
ist mode than his teacher. Eshetu’s mural, which became an icon
of the early revolutionary years, anticipated an uncompromising
schism that followed the emperor’s downfall, one in which ab-
straction was quickly characterized as “bourgeois” and realism
established as the only appropriate mode for a socialist revolution,
a schism that contrasted with Chernova’s inclusive appraisals in
the previous decade.

The role of socialist ideas in postrevolutionary Ethiopian art
is a subject for another study. Suffice it to say that, by the time
of the third congress, debates around socialism’s relationship
to Africa’s art and culture had moved far from the general con-
cerns regarding the recuperation of historic arts for continental
solidarity that had been at the forefront in Accra. In the 1970s
in Ethiopia, Mozambique, and Angola, art and visual culture
would be put directly in the service of Marxist revolutions and
civil wars that called for depictions of and assistance for African
VOL. 54, NO. 3 AUTUMN 2021 african arts | 25

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proletarian struggles. The representation of class-based struggle
was a marked departure from the diverse, utopic imaginary of
1960s African socialism. In Ethiopia, in particular, the exposé
of inequality within the imperial system troubled the country’s
status as a pan-African beacon, a status that delegates to the third
congress were overtly reminded of via Afewerk Tekle’s stained
glass. If the third congress marked a moment of solidarity be-
tween Black American scholars and their African colleagues,
the events of the Ethiopian revolution would have serious rami-
fications for the country’s pan-Africanist reputation, particularly
among Black Americans (see Wondwosen 2016).

The gathering in Addis Ababa marked a turning point, not
only within Ethiopia but for the congress as a whole. Its next it-
eration was in Kinshasa in 1978 but under a changed name: the
International Congress of African Studies. Despite efforts to
wrest the term Africanist away from its associations with Western
scholarship (notably Senghor’s attempt to conflate Africanism
with Négritude), the term was dropped in favor of the more neu-
tral African studies. Anthropologist Barbara Harrell-Bond (1979)
reported after the conference that Kinshasa was notable for the
dominance of African scholars. She claimed that the waning of
once “lavish” state support for African studies outside the conti-
nent—a hallmark of Cold War academic priorities—meant that
many non-African scholars lacked the resources to attend (1979:
1). Whether that or a shift in priorities was the cause, non-African
“Africanists” did not, after the tensions in Addis Ababa, see the
congress as the critical “international” gathering it had been in the

1960s and early 1970s. The age of signaling solidarity was waning.
The first three International Congresses of Africanists took
place against a Cold War backdrop in the first decade of African
independence. Their histories and contexts allow us to locate the
specific occasions at which certain ideas were presented and con-
tested. Identifying these is important for documenting key shifts
in the attitudes and approaches to the historic and contempo-
rary arts of the continent as they evolved through the 1960s and
1970s. These were, of course, not the only places at which these
ideas were discussed. Mirimanov (1969), for example, devel-
oped his ideas further when he spoke at the subsequent Algiers
Symposium on African Culture. The International Congress of
Africanists, however, represented a concerted effort on the part
of African intellectuals to take control of the academic study of
the African continent. Socialist concerns were prominent at all
three congresses, though their specific manifestations shifted
from the open-ended, collective aspirations of African social-
ism, abundant in Accra, to the grand narratives and materialist
frameworks presented in Dakar, to the class-based tensions that
bubbled overtly and covertly in Addis Ababa. From Ghana to
Ethiopia, art, broadly defined, was repeatedly cited as a radical
means of shifting perspectives about the continent, as a tool in
ongoing decolonizing processes, and as a bulwark against neoco-
lonialist incursions. Though the meeting in Addis Ababa revealed
a lingering cleavage between academic debates and political reali-
ties, the importance of these congresses as spaces of exchange and
solidarity should not be forgotten.

Notes
This essay began as a paper for the panel “Cultures of
Solidarity, or Towards a Bright New Future: Transna-
tional Exchange in African Liberation Networks” at the
European Conference on African Studies, University of
Edinburgh, June 12, 2019. I thank the panel conve-
nors, Dr. Nadine Siegert and Dr. Polly Savage, for their
feedback on an earlier draft. I am grateful to Janet
Stanley at the Warren M. Robbins Library at the National
Museum of African Art for her assistance to accessing
texts by Chernova and Mirimanov. Finally, I thank Bruce
Onobrakpeya for sharing his memories of the design he
made for the first congress, and Dr. Carol Boram-Hays
for introducing me to Gebre Kristos’s People Disguised
(1973) in Columbus, OH, in summer 2018.
1 The final chapter of Achebe’s Things Fall Apart
(1958), for example, amplifies the tragedy of the
narrative by revealing the callous and ignorant manner
in which the British district commissioner intended to
record events in his proposed book, “The Pacification of
the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.”
2 The varieties of African socialism (from Tom Mboya
to Julius Nyerere) and the Soviet response to them were
closely tracked by American scholars, most notably the
historian Arthur Jay Klinghoffer, who authored an article
(1968) and a book (1969) on the subject.
3 Nonalignment refers to the Non-Aligned Move-
ment, established 1961, following principles laid out at
the landmark 1955 conference in Bandung. The move-
ment expressed commitment to peaceful coexistence,
mutual nonaggression and noninterference. As the
discussions around the founding of the International
Congress make clear, countries such as Ghana who
were adherents to it did not refuse to engage Cold War
politics, but rather insisted that mutual respect and
cooperation was critical.
4 The International Congress of Orientalists had
existed since the 1870s, the era in which Orientalist study
underwent a process of “professionalization.” Though
the colonialist underpinnings of European Orientalism,
broadly defined, would be laid bare by Edward Said in
1978, in the 1960s Orientalist study remained an interdis-
ciplinary, international field, one that, though historically
dominated by European voices, increasingly encom-
passed the work of academics in Asia, the Middle East,

26 | african arts AUTUMN 2021 VOL. 54, NO. 3

North Africa, and, somewhat later, sub-Saharan Africa.
5 The date of this letter, May 10, 1960, must be incor-
rect, as it refers to the International Congress of Oriental-
ists, which took place in December 1960. This was likely a
typographical error, and Potekhin meant 1961.
6 Bruce Onobrakpeya, personal communication,
February 11, 2021.
7 Antubam’s publication and its East German patronage
are discussed by Monica Blackmun Visonà in her paper
“Connecting Two Akan Scholars to French and British Pa-
tronage,” presented at the European Conference on African
Studies, University of Edinburgh, June 13, 2019.
8 Chernova argued that the ongoing fight for inde-
pendence in the Portuguese colonies impacted the abil-
ities of certain African countries to develop modernist
modes, while also highlighting other countries (includ-
ing Rwanda, Burundi, Gambia, and Sierra Leone) that,
“for a number of reasons,” had yet to develop modern
painting and sculpture. Modern art, therefore, was
“uneven” on the continent (Chernova 1967: 7).
9
to 1963 can be found in the W.E.B. Du Bois Papers
at UMass Amherst. They have been digitized and are
available online at https://credo.library.umass.edu/view/
collection/mums312.
10 The title is written on the back of the canvas.
11 A small, later version of this mural is viewable today
in the National Museum of Ethiopia in Addis Ababa.

Letters between Potekhin and Du Bois from 1960

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