Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945-1994, The

Okwui Enwezor, ed. The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa, 1945-1994. Munich: Prestel, 2001. 496 pp. Plates. Chronology. Biographies. List of Works. Index. $75.00. Cloth.

When Okwui Enwezor titles this fabulous book "The Short Century" and subtitles it "Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa: 1945-1994," he is being provocative. He is causing intellectual trouble, or, more specifically, conceptual trouble. Was the twentieth century "shorter" for Africa than, say, for the West? Is he proposing an African version of twentieth-century time? Or is he saying that Africans crammed the work of a century into the years 1945 to 1994? In fact, what Enwezor is arguing is that in the production of politics and culture, Africans made a century out of roughly fifty years. He is aware that 1945 and 1994 do not carry the same positive value. The year 1945 was a promising one for Africa: The Second World War ended, the Fifth Pan-African Conference was held in Manchester, and the first professional Nigerian theater company was formed. But 1994 was a more mixed moment. Simultaneously promising and painful, it saw both South Africa's first multiracial elections and the Rwandan genocide.

Still, Enwezor sees 1945-1994 as fecund years, in which African politics and culture created a new vision for the continent, and he believes that this period needs rethinking. In particular, he wants us to reappreciate its cultural vitality. But he is no mere celebrant; he and his collaborators are probing cultural critics: "Throughout this text, I have argued that the processes of African independence and liberation that began in the period after World War II produced an epistemological change in the Western conception of the universal subject.... The critical emergence of new African nations from colonial vassalage and into nationhood ushered in a fresh context, the narrative of which is inscribed in a new kind of historical text" (15). Without ignoring Africa's calamities, The Short Century powerfully evokes this "fresh context."

Okwui Enwezor is a cultural connoisseur and impresario. he founded jVKA, an African arts journal, in 1994. Two years later he organized an exhibition of African photographers at the Guggenheim Museum in New York, and a year later he organized the Johannesburg Biennale, a major show of contemporary African art. This book is actually the catalog for an exhibition of the same name which opened in 2001 in Germany and then traveled to the U. S. Most recently he curated Germany's Documenta 11, one of the art world's most important-and controversial-events.

The Short Century contains three types of materials. First, there is a truly amazing array of visual materials (contemporary art, posters, scenes from film and theater, architectural and urban space photos, photos of political events and personages). For example, the photos on pages 180-216 are stunning, some rarely seen. Probably the most wrenching are those of Patrice Lumumba. On page 186, a clearly anxious Lumumba is shown at Congo's independence, standing next to grinning Belgian colonial grandees. Later, on page 356, he is shown wearing a small schoolmaster's bow tie and holding a finger in the air to make a point. Mobutu, at his side, can barely conceal his boredom. Both photos hint at the evil future. Second, a series of solid essays focuses on contemporary art, commemorative textiles, photography, architecture, music, theater/literature, and film. The third type of material consists of an anthology of cultural and political manifestos from 1945 to 1994 and a long innovative chronology, which close out the volume.

The essays take up different cultural sectors, and each group is then documented by visuals. For example, essays by Chika Okeke, Marilyn Martin, and Ulli Beier are complemented by over a hundred pages of painting, sculpture, and photographs illustrating the pioneering work of contemporary African artists. They underscore the extent to which these artists have inserted their materials and themes into modernist and postmodernist art movements. Wolfgang Bender's excellent essay argues a similar point for nationalism and music, supporting it by numerous performance photos and album covers. Chinewezu makes a fine case-a necessary rehabilitation-for the impact of négritude. Perhaps the most innovative essays, however, are those by Rory Bester, Gwendolyn Wright, and Nnamdi Elleh on colonial and nationalist architecture (with good North African materials); they are forays into a new area.

The Short Century is a sumptuous book for our enjoyment and education. It fully justifies the claim made by Jo-Anne Birnie Danzker, the volume's coproducer, in the preface: "At the dawn of the twenty-first century Okwui Enwezor brings these [African] voices and stances out of their imposed exile in the margins of Western discourses and places them squarely at the center of twentieth-century Modernism." Dazzled by the book's visual richness, we should not overlook its instruction. Enwezor makes us understand that "the short century" is fast becoming a field of scholarly study. he also makes the case for the cultural, not merely as an add-on to the political history of these years, but as integral to analyzing, enhancing, and clarifying politics. He teaches us that no full discussion of these fertile years can occur without a parallel visual history. It is safe to say that we will never look at these years in the same way after seeing this volume. There is nothing quite like it.