Chike C. Aniakor: The Community and a Congregation of Figural Elements

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all photos by Chike Aniakor, except where otherwise noted

Chike C. Aniakor (b. 1934) is one of the greatest artists and scholars to emerge from the Art Department of the University of Nigeria, Nsukka otherwise known as the Nsukka School. Educated at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science, and Technology (NCAST) later named Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria from 1960–1964 and at Indiana State University from 1973 to 1978, Aniakor sojourned in the United States as an art historian and artist in different institutions, including Southern University in New Orleans, where he taught art from 1979 to 1980; at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he was a research associate and a student of Roy Sieber in 1984; and the Metropolitan Museum in New York, where he served as a senior fellow from 1994 to 1995. His eventual return to the University of Nigeria at various periods in the 1970s, 1980s, and from 1995 till his retirement in 2005 contributed to the conscious search and eventual founding of a compelling artistic ideology of the Nsukka Art School launched through the creative idiom of uli experiments in the 1970s and 1980s.

Along with Chuka Amaefuna, Uche Okeke, Obiora Udechukwu, Ola Oloidi, El Anatsui, and others, Aniakor pushed for a particular intellectual orientation focused on analysis of indigenous Igbo/African art and incorporation of motifs from these as a basis for contemporary practice that would eventually influence generations of artists of the Nsukka Art School. It is unfortunate that no text has articulated Aniakor’s efforts at crystallizing this intellectual turn despite the fact that Aniakor taught some of the most vibrant intellectuals of the Nsukka School such as Obiora Udechukwu, Olu Oguibe, Sylvester Ogbechie, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Krydz Ikwuemesi, this author, Nnenna Okore, and Ugochukwu Smooth Nzewi, among others. No studies have been able to critically discuss or argue Aniakor’s huge scholarly contributions with convincing endorsement or counter criticisms, or engaged, in precise intellectual terms, the debates Aniakor has raised in his writings, or even reviewed the general formal and textual characteristics of his huge creative oeuvre. Overall, this is a disservice to one of the great intellectuals, artists, and art historians of Nigerian and African art.

In this paper, I take a holistic view of Aniakor’s artistic and scholarly engagements for the obvious modernistic persuasions they hold in Nigerian and African art scholarship. I evaluate his works for their thematic interests and stylistic renditions, which remain relevant to contemporary Nigerian society and Igbo notions of art and community in particular. His seminal book Igbo Arts: Community and Cosmos, coauthored with Herbert Cole, is still the only significant overview of Igbo art to date (Cole and Aniakor 1984). His works offer an artistic style and an overarching intellectual reach that has remained foundational in Igbo studies. The paintings and drawings offer a traditional approach rather than the hyperconceptual and there is a tendency to populate the surface of his picture plane with numerous figures suggestive of his belief in the congregational, communitarian existence of humanity, especially in his Igbo region of Nigeria. Again, this approach suggests a unified, collective struggle against societal forces and draconian laws imposed by a common enemy, defined in this instance as either a political gladiator or dictator against the masses. Aniakor’s figural enemy can also be interpreted in terms of cultural enemies drawn from ethnic interpretations by communities or cultural groups in Nigeria and elsewhere (For how Nsukka artists tackled ethnicity, see Ogbechie 2016).

CHIKE ANIAKOR: EARLY LIFE

Aniakor was born in Abatete, Anambra State in Eastern Nigeria on August 21, 1939. World War II broke out in 1939 while Nigeria was still under British colonization. Despite the war’s overarching effect on the African continent, Nigeria witnessed rapid urbanization significant enough to alter her economic as well as political history. By 1945, when the war ended, Aniakor was just six years old. However, his mother did not find her career as an uli artist an impediment to nurturing the infant Aniakor through the war period until he entered primary school in the...