From the Editor

F R OM T HE EDIT OR Sa la h Ha ssa n T wo pillars of African modern art - the South African artist Ernest Mancoba and the Ethiopian artist Skunder Boghossian - passed away as we were preparing for this issue of Nka. We are proud to include in this issue a moving tribute to Mancoba by Elza Miles, the South African scholar and art critic. We are also extremely fortunate to have obtained an intellectually stimulating interview by Hans Ulrich Obrist, submitted to Nka a few months before the death of Mancoba. In the past, we have featured a seminal essay on Skunder, written by his compatriot and friend, the poet Solomon Oeressa, in Nka (No. 11/ 12, Fall/ Winter 2000). Each artist, in his own way, will be remembered for a remarkable life of creativity and intellectual vigor, a prolific body of work, and an innovative visual vocabulary and style that has come to shape our understanding of African modernism. In a parallel manner, both Mancoba and Skunder shared a life charted in exile, far from their homelands. In the case of Mancoba, the viciousness of the Apartheid system, which plagued his beloved South Africa for more than 50 years, had forced him into exile, since the late 1930s, in Paris and an itinerant life in other European cities. In Europe, he was ironically interned by the Nazis, and then barred from returning home by the end of WWII. Skunder, on the other hand, lived a life of self-imposed exile from a homeland that was first ravaged by decades of the feudal reign of Emperor Haile Selassie, and later decimated by natural disasters, compounded by three decades of civil wars perpetrated by the military junta of Colonel Mengistu Haile Mariam. Skunder and Mancoba had been influential teachers to generations of younger African artists. Indeed, they were the counterparts in the visual art of such African literary giants as Wole Soyinka, Najib Mahfouz, Chinua Achebe, and El Tayeb Salih, among others. Both artists are truly revolutionary figures, whose works intervene decisively in the modern African art movement, and whose works have exerted a powerful influence on younger African artists looking for new tropes of self-expression. Both were committed intellectuals who remained morally conscientious, socially concerned, and uncompromising in their artistic integrity, despite all odds. As it is the case generally with non-western artists based in the west, however, Mancoba and Skunder's achievements have not received the recognition they deserve, and they remain sidelined in art historical texts on twentieth century art. As we know very well, the official history of western modernism leaves out the massive infusions of non-western artists and cultures into the metropolitan heartland throughout the twentieth century. Such an omission renders invisible the important influence they have had on western modernist art practice, and on the very fabric of the society they adopted as their new home. This willed blindness is not surprising, considering the exclusionary mechanisms built into the very definition of the dominant narratives of modernism. As Edward Said argued in Culture and Imperialism, an exploration of the twentieth century history and sociology of the Western metropolis reveals the strong presence of students, writers , and artists from previously colonized territories, including Africa, in Paris, London, Rome, and other European capitals. As Said also pointed out, their intellectual production is essential to any reconsideration of what constitutes global modernity as it overlaps with their contemporary European counterparts, and their intellectual and cultural production can in no way be analyzed as mereLy reactive assertions of separate native or colonized subjectivity. The life stories of Skunder and Mancoba are a case in point. They were key part of the story of those African and non-western immigrants in the western metropolises who attempted to challenge the narrative of western modernism and to reconstruct the idea of modern art in a more plural manner. Their stories, however, remain largely untold, and are part of those waiting to be fully studied and documented in books, retrospective exhibitions, and doctoral dissertations. The urgency as well as significance of such a task becomes more evident when we realize that the art works and contributions of this...