On Mambilla Plateau and Lagos cosmopolitanism

Olusegun Obasanjo owns a large villa right at the top of the Mambilla Plateau in Taraba State, near Nigeria's eastern border with Cameroon. Many of the nation's other so-called ‘big men' - including football superstars Nwankwo Kanu and Austin Okocha - come to the beautiful plateau for their holidays, staying in massive homes and in some cases attending to lucrative tea plantations. As it was during colonial times, when sweating Oyibo would head for Mambila when they could bear no more of the hot sun and irreverent mosquitoes, the plateau - a lush and foggy idyll of great natural beauty - remains virtually closed off to the great majority of Nigerians.

Ask most city-dwellers about the Mambila Plateau and they will look at you blankly. The place is remote and obscure. Dirt roads turn to squelching, impassable mires as the rains come and go several times a day. It's hard enough to get to and harder still to travel around once you're there. And the handful of cashed-up ogas who have made Mambila their personal playground have no problem at all with keeping it that way.

Photomapping the country

Oguntimehin Ariyo, a painter and photographer, recently travelled to the plateau with his camera and took 950 photographs over a two-week sojourn in the area. But soldiers from the Nigerian army - he says there were seven or more at Obasanjo's gate - told him he was not allowed to take a picture of their boss's house, except from a detail-crushing distance away. In the photograph Ariyo showed an audience of senior figures from the Nigerian art-world in Lagos on Friday, July 29, Obasanjo's compound sprawls on the horizon, visibly large in comparison to the village nestled in the foreground. It was hard to make out too much more, but still, there it was.

Ariyo's visit to Mambilla was the very first part of an ambitious vision, conceived by prolific art collector and patron Prince Yemisi Shyllon, to ‘photomap' the country, and it seemed like as good a place as any to have started - the highest point above sea level anywhere in the country, and a place relatively few Nigerians have ever seen. Ariyo will spend a year on more photomapping assignments as part of the Omooba Yemisi Adedoyin Shyllon Art Foundation (OYASAF) Prize for Photography that he won in 2009, and by the end he should have built up quite a portfolio.

He has a maturing style as a photographer, with his strongest work in the Mambilla series coming when he got close-up and down low. He managed a few strong compositions in this way, and tended to be more successful when shooting people, face-on, rather than landscapes, where he shied away from close shots and relied too often on general views of the countryside. There was a good sequence depicting passengers, including one on an okada, being ferried across a muddy river in a small canoe. It made a Lagos go-slow look quite easy going.

Ariyo's next assignment will be to capture the annual arrival of large numbers of migratory birds at Ungu, and having made it through Mambilla, he should approach it with confidence.

His presentation was part of a double-headed event at the plush OYASAF Conference Centre, set amid the poised bronzes, strutting peacocks and wandering tortoises of Prince Yemisi Shyllon's spectacular Maryland home.

Agyeman's Lagosian thesis

The other speaker was Erica Agyeman, a masters candidate at Columbia University, New York, and the second OYASAF fellow, who has just finished a three-week research visit to Lagos in which she has visited 18 local artists in their studios and numerous galleries. She is working up a thesis on Lagosian art and the theme of cosmopolitanism, drawing on thinkers such as Kwame Anthony Appiah and Odia Ofeimun.

While her thesis is still at a relatively early stage, she has clearly been impressed by what she has seen and commented particularly favourably on the work of Jelili Atiku, whose ‘Agbo Rago' performance saw him crawling on all fours through a ram-market as a suya chef plucked and cooked strips of meat that had been fastened to his body; as well as on Olu Amoda's elegant Soyinka-inspired sculpture, ‘Wuraola'.

The distinguished crowd of artists and critics who had assembled at OYASAF - where ‘Wuraola' and countless other brilliant artworks are housed - were mainly eager to hear how Agyeman viewed their scene as an informed outsider.

Lament for Sculpture

‘What is the state of contemporary Nigerian art?' The question was repeated until at last the American relented. "I just love it," said Agyeman, beaming. She said she'd been especially struck by the layered use of signs and symbols, with materials frequently applied in five or six different ways to create distinctive visual languages of great complexity. The audience was finally satisfied, though they made no secret of their own, rather more qualified, views.

Shyllon, whose vast collection is particularly well-stocked with Nigerian sculptures, lamented what he saw as an ongoing vogue for Photography and Painting among young artists, who he said were put off sculpture by its relative technical difficulty. A spirited discussion ensued - so spirited, in fact, that a separate forum will be convened in the near future at which the paucity of young Nigerian sculptors will be debated in depth by local artists and professors.

The real fruits of Agyeman's visit - for herself and other Nigerian art enthusiasts - may yet come from future exhibitions. Agyeman has worked as a curator at the Museum of the African Diaspora, San Francisco; and noted that too often work by Nigerian artists - and Africans more broadly - tends to be exhibited in the West within a Pan-African rubric or as single-artist shows. Either way, this kind of curatorial practice lacks the kind of coherent thematic or theoretical thrust which can help foster a clear sense of how distinct artistic movements are emerging and ideas are being contested among contemporaries.

Over lunch at OYASAF, she told me that her main hope is eventually to put together an exhibition drawing on what she has seen in Lagos in the past month, and if she pursues this, then it could represent the sort of international stage for Lagosian artists that is probably well overdue.