A World at War: Art and Propaganda from Colonial Nigeria, 1941-1945

African artists and colonial officers interacted within the same historical sphere. One major event, World War II, irrevocably altered the power balance among these colonial-era relationships. It forced colonial subjects to confront their expected investment in a war that was not their own and introduced the language of universal self-determination into the lexicon of African nationalist movements. This paper examines the British government’s war-time collection of art from the colonies through the War Artists Advisory Committee (WAAC). Art historian and National Gallery Director Kenneth Clark founded the WAAC in 1939 to record the war and promote Britain’s image abroad. Artists from British colonies sent paintings to London under WAAC’s colonial artists scheme. These works were displayed in the National Gallery, whose collections were evacuated during the Blitz. In 1942, Akinọla Laṣekan, a Lagos, Nigeria-based artist sent two watercolors to London that documented the local effects of war on Nigeria. These paintings demonstrate the artistic principles outlined in his 1942 art manual Drawing Made Easy. At the end of the war, Laṣekan translated these same principles into political cartoons published in his book Nigeria in 1945, which examined the universal hardship endured by Nigerians in the wake of WWII and served as a rallying cry for Nigerian nationalism. During the colonial period, artists like Laṣekan developed new visual languages to articulate modern subjectivities to both colonial patrons and national compatriots. Viewing Laṣekan’s two bodies of WWII-era work side by side illuminates the necessary complexity, complicity and contradiction of artmaking under colonialism.