The Mbari movement: Postcolonial modernity and cultural nationalism from Harlem to Ibadan

Developments in world politics and culture in the inter war and post war years, especially the rise of the anti-colonial nationalist movements in Africa, provide an important background to the rise of African cultural modernity and the emergence of modern African literature. Modern African cultural nationalism---in particular, that of Nigeria---reflects that spectacular effervescence of activity in the arts in the intervening years between rapid decolonization and the first years of postcoloniality. African postcolonial modernity indeed is at the roots of the transformations in historical relations between the colonizer and the colonized, in the notions of the self, and the rapid epistemic autonomy of the African imagination in the twentieth century. One of the most important of these developments occurred in Nigeria with the rise of the Mbari movement---a collective of writers and artists whose activities between 1957 and 1967 in Ibadan marked one of the most significant phases in postcolonial modernity. However, interpretations of African cultural modernity have tended to emphasize the Negritude movement and the preeminent roles played by the Senegalese poet Leopold Sedar Senghor and the Martiniqian poet Aime Cesaire. Both writers defined a black aesthetic to mean a return to transcendental or universal blackhood, especially with its links to trans-Atlantic developments in the Harlem Renaissance. Far less attention has been paid to the emergence of the Mbari movement, even though some of its key figures like Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and Christopher Okigbo have become canonical presences in postcolonial literature, especially among Anglophone African writers. In this project, I argue that Black modernist cultural nationalism in the twentieth century follows a triadic development, from the Harlem Renaissance in New York in the 1920s, and the Negritude movement in Paris in the 1930s, to the Mbari movement in Ibadan in the 1960s. Yet, in spite of its linkages to earlier developments in black culture, the Mbari movement stands at a unique intersection of history, as a reflection of the ways that new African writers, intellectuals and artists began to grapple with, reconstruct, and reshape the black nationalist project within a specifically African context.