Protest flashes its colours at Nubuke art show

It’s a lonely midnight on a balcony in Kanda Estates in Accra, right at the intersection of the buzzing nightlife behind the Hilla Limann Highway and the violent peace and silence of the residential houses in the estate. I am enjoying the serenity of the sleeping street while curious for a little communal chaos as the voices from behind the highway grow wilder.

I’m like the average Ghanaian, who is scared to stand up for anything because he knows that protests and marches are usually characterised by violence initiated by agents of state security, yet goes online to exalt the names of the same state security agencies in the event of any call for Ghana to adopt a better system. This is what Stations of Protest, commissioned by the Nubuke Foundation, presents to us.

Nonchalant hypocrisy

The exhibition has been curated to bring all forms of both art and protest to patrons – the passion, the nonchalance, the hypocrisy, the diplomatic talk unbacked with action.

Protests are a good way to create social consciousness and they play a part in reviving the interest of young people in political discourse. Art in itself is a tool for inventing the kind of world we are comfortable in. Most of the activists featuring in the exhibition portray a different world to us, helping us to imagine it through print, photography, objects, audiovisual experiment, painting, writing and performance.

From the live installation by Sel Kofiga (aka Robert Selinam-Gbemu) to a film of body interactions, a collection of pages from a personal diary on the wall, and a whiteboard essay of a reflection on a recent protest, it was an opening of all forms of art through which protests live. Stations of Protest convened 14 artists working across various disciplines to explore the theme. If you happen to walk through the plush gallery hall of the Nubuke Foundation, you might experience protests like you have never done before.

Against police brutality

The year 2020 was characterised by protests across the board. All over the world, people of African descent stood in solidarity with African Americans and against the police brutality being meted out to them in the United States. There was an awakening that resulted in a global uprising, even in the face of a pandemic. The use of a face mask became not only a health and safety option, but also a personal security tool, ensuring anonymity.

The Americans’ protests had not died out when Nigerians started crying about police brutality in their own country. Officials of a specialist unit within the Nigerian Police Force, the Special Anti-Robbery Squad (SARS), had become the robbers, kidnappers and extortionists they were supposed to be arresting. There were long threads on social media and many stories on podcasts about these fraudsters who had a police mandate, even as the mainstream media remained silent.

SARS started off by profiling people with dreadlocks or coloured hair, tattoos and expensive electronic gadgets in their cars. This sums up the “yahoo boy” narrative, and so many ordinary Nigerians looked on, unconcerned, as innocent young men had their privacy invaded and their phones and cars searched on the basis of no prior intelligence. This continued until they were satisfied that the average Nigerian would not lend his voice to condemning profiling if he thought a target was presenting differently – but then SARS started profiling everyone.

“I’ve wasted your son and you can’t do anything!”

The SARS forces accused well-dressed young men of money laundering and well-dressed young women of engaging in prostitution and could round up a group of young people at random for standing on a street corner at night.

There was a Twitter thread showing footage of a young man who was arrested for being on the streets at night because, according to the SARS troops, he was on his way to a robbery. They waited for his friend whom he had been expecting and then both young men were detained and extorted.

Such action had been standard policing procedure for so long that people recruited into the SARS band believed that behaviour of this kind was their job description. There was no protection from them to be had and people kept dying at their hands. During the protest vigils there were stories replete with details of agonising experiences with these criminals in police departments.

The story of Chijioke Iloanya, who disappeared eight years ago, is still fresh and raw in many young Nigerians’ minds. In November 2012, aged 20, Chijioke was attending a naming ceremony when he was arrested with six other people, including the mother and the baby going through the naming ceremony. He was taken to Awkuzu SARS, described by Amnesty International as Nigeria’s headquarters of human rights violations, including executions. They arrested young people, citing no reasons, or offering made-up criminal allegations.

James Nwafor, the officer in charge of Awkuzu SARS, boldly told the lawyer for Chijioke and his parents that he had killed the young man. “I’ve wasted your son,” he said, “and you can’t do anything.” Emmanuel, Chijioke’s father, had to swim through a river of dead bodies, turning each one face upwards with a stick – but still he did not find his son.

Where our dreams lie is also our stations to protest poverty

“The promise was so beautiful,” Hamza Moshood writes – the title to his whiteboard essay for the Nubuke exhibition, which borrows a line from Ayi Kwei Armah’s bestselling 1968 novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. In his personal experience essay, Moshood, one of Africa’s brightest emerging writers, recounts the events of 21 October 2020 as they occurred at the Nigerian high commission in Accra.

Beyond the violent dispersion of peaceful protesters by heavily armed men of the Ghana Police Service, Moshood established a new angle for his storytelling in photography, to which he is still new and anxious. He laments how certain elements are easily underrepresented in photo documentary on marches and protests. This is why the generic fists in the air, screaming faces with angry expressions and raised placards didn’t quite work for him.

This exhibition demanded the images of a bofrot seller who had a CLOSED placard on her wooden box to signify that she had run out of stock. And the pharmacy signpost that read “Drugs Are Sold Here” on a wooden placard supported on a yellow Kufuor gallon. Food and drugs form a crucial part of what it takes to protest on the streets and demand the beautiful promises sold.

There were other photographs, of a basic school girl in class, of busy Okaishie, of a Bubra stand operator filling a jug with beer and graduates throwing their caps in the air. Though not directly linked to protests, these images seemed to represent where our dreams lie: in education, commerce and entrepreneurship.

When our leaders do not sit up and work in our favour, all aspects of our lives become crippled. One must also draw the correlation that these three points where our dreams lie are also our stations to protest poverty.

What Moshood has to say

In conversation with Hamza Moshood via Instagram direct message, he answered my questions about what contributed to his decision to showcase old photographs that originally did not have protest undertones and his choice of a handwritten essay.

He said, “The essay was written upon invitation from the curator to make a textual contribution on the idea of protest. She sent me a prompt which, I guess, captured the spirit of the exhibition. Two of the main ideas I got from reading this text were what I attempt to bring up in the resulting piece. One, the question of what exactly it is that keeps people protesting in spite of the fact that the things that they protest about/against appear to not ever be fundamentally dealt with – what sustains protests, so to speak, in the face of unyielding addressees? Second was this idea of perceiving protests differently beyond the typical, or more popular conception of it. This was particularly pertinent to me because it was something I was thinking about with regard to my photography.”

“They yield similar imagery”

A walk through the exhibition exposes an objective choice not to separate the art or mark the artworks by artist. All the photographs are grouped together, digital and hand-painted art summed up as one, and audiovisual experimentation stationed in one room.

One would have to be used to the illustrative storytelling of Bright Akweah and the unique employment of lines and shapes by ArtsoulKojo to tell their art apart. Photography becomes the most difficult because almost all of the artists are invited to consider a theme of protest and they yield similar imagery on the subject.

Selkofiga’s performance was the crowning glory of the whole show. He appears in a smoke-filled glass case and makes expressions of the body which tell tales of struggle and unease. As an expressive artist, he captures the essence of why we protest.

A fan favourite in the Nubuke show is the mirrors. There are about six of them in total, hanging and sitting among the exhibits. If you do go to see the show (ends 15 February 2021), take as many photos as you can but for personal use only.

Looking out for “Aburi Street”

Now back to the neighbourhood. It was the first time that I’d paid any attention to street names in Kanda beyond Tumu Street, and I must tell you that I was beside myself with unexplained joy at how the streets were named after towns in Ghana.

There’s Wenchi, Wa, Mole, Sunyani, Kade, Techiman, and others such as Konongo Close, Oda Close, Prampram Close, Osu Close and so many more. Accra has been celebrated for how it has harnessed tribute through street-naming – the African states and cities, African personalities, traditional leaders and memorable statesmen – but this was such a geography lesson on my first night walk in Kanda Estates. So, for the next couple of days, I’ll be on the lookout for Aburi Street or Avenue or Crescent or Close. If this is not available, then my station of protest has been located and you’ll see me protesting against the Accra metropolitan authorities until a street with considerably too many trees is named after my home town and I can relocate to it and feel homely.

Kelvin Amartey

“Stations of Protest” is at the Nubuke Foundation, Lomé Close, East Legon, Accra. For more information visit: https://nubukefoundation.viewingrooms.com/

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