DIGITAL IDENTITIES AND REAL SELVES An essay on the dissemination of contemporary and digital African mobilities

(Above) IB KAMARA and KRISTIN-LEE MOOLMAN. (Opposite) AKINOLA DAVIES JR for CYNDIA HARVEY, This Hair of Mine.

A look at the dissemination of contemporary and virtual African mobilities in the work of Ib Kamara, Stephen Tayo, Alun [Be], Akinola Davies Jr and Saul Nash

DIGITAL IDENTITIES AND REAL SELVES

Words EMMANUEL ANU-OLU BALOGUN

As Congolese philosopher VY Mudimbe states in a 2004 essay for the journal Public Culture, “Africa as a name, as an idea, and as an object of academic discourse has been and remains fraught.” We know Africa as the contrast between “what it is and what it could be”.

The distant possibility of socioeconomic development for Africa has been widely discussed and imagined by both Africans and non-Africans living in the hinterlands of African life-worlds. What will define the future of Africa? This is a question I reckon with at the wake of day and the dark of night, and each time the answer is the same: liberation!

Africa’s panacea for historic economic challenges is often technology. As digital communication tools such as mobile phones and ICT are becoming increasingly common in both rural and urban communities across the continent, new patterns of social exchange have been further enabled. Africa’s growing youth population, burgeoning middle class and flourishing consumer story are a few of the factors that frequently drop the region at the top of the international development agenda: the continent is surely rising. African populations in myriad forms have found themselves in a new age, where social media platforms and communication applications are the dominant channels for disseminating information about Africa — and, it could be argued, to unbounded heights. While news charting elections and trends in political life are exchanged via commentary and videos shared on numerous online platforms, it is the visually focused platforms such as Instagram and Tumblr that are the cyberspaces where Africans and non-Africans alike choose to exhibit the idea of Africa that they wish to see, but that rarely exists for real.

In allegiance to racial, cultural and social solidarity, transnational communities disjointed by scattered histories are uniting and thriving. People in Africa, Black America and diaspora communities across the world are coming together in online worlds with the aim of digitising — and affirming — their contemporary African existences.

Through this exchange and flow of images depicting diverse forms of Africa, not to mention fantasies of blackness, new identities are being formed. Many of these identities are born from a need to see the continent and its affiliations through filters of triumph and glory; scenes involving black bodies create fresh notions of Africa in realms that are both real and imagined. While historically, prevalent narratives defining the continent as a single site of underdevelopment, corruption and famine were rife, they are diminishing in lieu of constructive depictions declaring a new order — a new time.

The continent’s exponential growth and promises of yields on private investment are affecting the way various media has taken to branding Africa. This is evidenced by the work of a contemporary creative set from the continent and the diaspora — namely Ib Kamara, Stephen Tayo,

Alun [Be], Akinola Davies Jr and Saul

Nash. Through conversations with these makers, as well as examinations of cult, popular and consumer-driven, image-based culture, we can start to dissect how the contemporary images of

Africa and Africa-in-the-world came to be.

(Above and below) IB KAMARA and KRISTIN-LEE MOOLMAN.

‘NEW AFRICA’ OR FANTASIES

OF BLACKNESS? Born in Ekiti state but now based in Lagos, Nigerian photographer Stephen Tayo is fascinated with framing the relatable and the mundane as a way to write a history for fellow Africans. As living creatures, we recount half-truths through subjective memories, and endure feelings cast by spells from yesteryears — our past lives remain alive through truth in sight:

by photographs. By the vivid framing of community elders, brothers, sisters, children, women and men in passing — very often people unknown to him — Tayo works his way out of the void of remembrance to offer his subjects a photographic rite of truth.

Photographing them outside their homes or in the backstreets of cities such as Lagos or Kano, Tayo captures his subjects’ vulnerability and disdain. His work urges the spectator to engage with the sentiments of local and ordinary people, shown in their day-to-day environments. He focuses his gaze on all types of people, regardless of their creed. Shining a light on the characterful hands and faces of elders, he presents old age as something to be revered. Framing matriarchs in his community, Tayo captures the resilience of their seniority. Elsewhere he has captured the innocence of young children playing, wearing smiles under the sun. The photographer is discursive in his choice to capture both consenting models and unknowing street-hawkers busying themselves in the city’s grind, and he perceives his depiction of the continent as both a personal and profound obligation. He is committed to building a body of work that is not time-bound but true in its duty to share his country and reaffirm Africa’s place in the world. “It’s the way I see Africa,” he says. “We wait for the West to say nice things about Africa, it gets to me a lot.” As institutions, commercial brands and agents urge further enquiry into the processes that breed new representations of Africa, there is an understandable concern about whether depicting and branding Africa through international publishing efforts and products-sold is fuelling the fire that keeps age-old fantasies of blackness, fetishism or wanderlust alive.

On a similar mission to Tayo, the illustrious Sierra Leonean creative, modern dandy and i-D fashion editorat-large Ib Kamara has set out to probe these questions by positioning overlooked or denigrated communities in scenes of glory.

Hell-bent on creating and circulating nonconformist African identities, Kamara’s rampant imagination is catapulting African individualism to a new point of promise. The photos series 2026, which he styled and was shot by his close and long-term collaborator, Kristin-Lee Moolman, envisions an Africa of the future by capturing a young man, Fakamatah, adorned with vividly coloured clothing, fine jewels and finger gloves, and presented in the rugged foreground of a derelict street in Johannesburg.

Often capturing young black men posing in urban sprawls in Freetown, Lagos and Kinshasa, among other African epicentres, Kamara disrupts the codes of still-life photography, costume design and fashion to upend stereotypical notions of gender, sexuality and functional dress. “It takes a lot of nerve to stand out visually or to be brave in Africa”, he says, referring in part to the opposition that queer citizens living on the continent must contend with, including the

religious, ethnic and national forces that invalidate queer life in Africa — which is predominately still taboo.

Using the power of dress to amplify muted voices, Kamara’s work strengthens identities that are regularly policed or demonised as deviant. He repositions alternative communities into moments of marvel, gaining followers and fans in the digital sphere. The imagery he creates provides a means of freeing unresolved desires, which no doubt resonate with others who are experiencing the same alienated fate. “It is an extension of me, what I pass on, the work I do,” he says. “It is what I think I want to be, but I’m fearful or afraid to be because I’m a little more reserved, or my African background doesn’t let me project that 24/7.”

Whether we create, trade or offer images of ourselves in real life or in staged situations for editorial or social media consumption, the making of something other than ourselves relieves us of the grief of hiding our truest selves. Speaking about life in Lagos and Nigeria, Tayo thinks “we are built to hide ourselves, even from our loved ones”. Day in, day out, we conform to survive.

Kamara’s work and growing success are signs that the digital offers a new dimension for being. “I create a character so I can live through that character for an hour or two or a day,” he says. “It gives me a good feeling; I think a lot of people like me growing up in Africa, or in the West, want to be somebody else, sometimes. We are all working towards being successful, or trying to achieve something.”

In a different vein, Kamara has made use of digital realms to tell the tales of risky situations. In an unpublished series he depicts sex websites featuring migrant African male communities. Unpacking the sobering reality that is the business of survival, the series reveals cyber worlds that are a market for sex work among young black men who have no other means of subsistence. Within this series Kamara highlights an underworld experienced by both heterosexual and queer subcultures, where scantily clad black males and pubescent African bodies are sold to desiring clientele.

Historically, black bodies have been subject to systems of control through violence and indentured labour. We must question whether the digital is yet another site that holds black bodies in similar systems of subordination, or whether it can be a tool for empowerment. Is it possible that we have come to a point

(Below) AKINOLA DAVIES JR for CYNDIA HARVEY, This Hair of Mine.

where the black individual can seek to gain from the marketing or branding of their physical assets and identities?

As images of Africans circulate the digital sphere, audiences and imagemakers must interrogate why some depictions of Africa are considered the most relevant, or are the most remembered. More often than not black bodies are exposed and stylised to shock and seduce consumers; revellers are lured by fantasies of race and power. We must continue to question who is set to gain.

THE DIGITAL

PROPAGATION

OF AFRICAN INSIDERS

AND OUTSIDERS Speaking about inequity, access and the privilege afforded to self-elected elites in African locales, Londonbased Nigerian photographer and moving-image artist Akinola Davies Jr reflects on the double-edged sword that slices African outsiders. Black individuals living in London are in part defined by the double-barrel status of being British via a place or nation beyond the United Kingdom’s borders. A similar claim has been made about the status of African Americans. Davies Jr believes that “the black African and the black man are inhibited and often policed”.

Speaking beyond realities such as racism and prejudice, and the socioeconomic and structural violence endured by black — and other ethnic — communities in the UK, the US and elsewhere, Davies Jr hints that returning to Africa as a creative is not always an easy move. As a new wave of creative practitioners shuffle between established cultural centres in the West and thriving epicentres on the up such as Accra, Lagos, Johannesburg and Nairobi, returnees are met by a stark truth: they can be foreigners, and thus outsiders, in their ancestral homes in Africa, too.

As African creatives such as Kamara and Davies Jr reside outside the continent, their works are often informed by the desire, love and lust for going home. Looking to keep his cultural ties to Africa alive, Davies Jr’s work interrogates the patriarchal gaze. “The stiff narrative of what it means to be a man was never questioned when I was growing up,” he says. “I am seeking to open up space for other people; I see other worlds in gender. Certain acts are more permissible in European spaces than they are in African spaces. I am concerned with why we aren’t having certain conversations about the homogenous nature of men in Nigeria, for example.” In 2018 Davies Jr participated in group shows in Accra, Cape Town and Lausanne. Moving on to display his work in solo exhibitions in Basel and Washington DC, while also collaborating on videos with vanguard musicians such as Blood Orange, Klein, Larry B and Farai, Davies Jr is steadily succeeding as a creative conduit for his community. A running theme in his work is the epic moment of celebration, crystallised by material culture. For example his music video for British-Nigerian musician Klein’s ‘Marks of Worship’ is an examination of the ritualistic redemption enforced on African communities by religious sects. This is bolstered by the ironic presentation of a party scene where young Africans swathed in traditional Nigerian wear are carelessly throwing money into the air. They are held by their own merriment, shooting champagne corks and foam everywhere — a scene mimicked in a music video that Davies Jr directed for emerging artist Larry B. This mirrors the images of African people in states of merriment, success, wealth and glamour that permeate online realms. As creatives in the African diaspora continue to tell stories of their own lives, the future looks bright for collaboration between artists on the continent and artists from or living elsewhere. To Senegalese photographer and architect Alun [Be], we are at a juncture where “for the first time in history, we have visual narratives that are

(Above) AKINOLA DAVIES JR for CYNDIA HARVEY, This Hair of Mine. (Below) SAUL NASH.

being told by Africans, and not for Africans”. Maintaining a working relationship between Senegal and Europe, his catapulting across continents has informed his belief that an artist’s locality needn’t be the definitive measure of the nature or quality of their work. “Your potential won’t come out of your surroundings, it will come from within you,” he says.

Alun [B]’s photography is less consciously stylised than the works of Kamara and Davies Jr — as they race through the grids of fashion and artistic realms. He is fixed instead on debunking prevalent notions of the continent, not only through the presentation of changing consumer trends and material culture, but also by positioning technology as a mirror, revealing the potency of its potentiality.

In his photographic series Edification, the artist explores the impact of technology on societies in Africa. Inviting an open discourse on the fate of humankind, Alun [Be] urges a confrontation with the imposing nature of modern technology; the effects of which are often more intensely felt in less technologically progressive parts of the world. In this series young children in nondescript locations in Africa are seen wearing Virtual Reality headsets. This form of wearable technology can simulate a place from the viewer’s existence — far from their truth. For Alun [Be] the VR mask is the contemporary version of the traditional decorative or ceremonial mask, worn in Africa in numerous variations. “The mask is a spirit that deals with the idea of the invisible world,” he says. “It reveals the tension between who we are and how we are being portrayed.”

“Africans are now viewing themselves differently,” he continues. “They are mirrors. This is a necessary step to make them more aware of what they have.” Building on the need for communities in Africa and elsewhere to find a space for self-expression is Saul Nash, the young dancer and designer whose work is helping to overhaul prevalent approaches to fashion design — and the Londonborn creative is one the city’s most sensational talents. Having taken a more lateral route to fashion design, Nash did an MA in Menswear at the Royal College of Art after completing a Bachelor’s degree in Performance Design at Central Saint Martins. Pushing the potentialities of utilitarian dress and performance as lines of communication, his work proves that functionality and ergonomic design can be more impactful than standard seductive brand communications featuring sexually charged imagery. Although Nash says that his mixed Mauritian, English, Bajan and Guyanese heritage is not his central focus, he firmly believes that “your culture, your journey or your infl uences inherently influence the way that you perceive the world or your work in particular”. Urging the importance of expressing a diversity of backgrounds, he is now focused on researching the performance of identity online. “I wanted to show men on Instagram in their true expression; presenting these identities that are dependent on the place they’re in… the real and tangible is key for me, it enables people to connect and feel something.”

The work of these four makers shows that there is a need to be conscious of who is leading the discourses about certain communities, and to ascertain what their intentions might be. Whether these are thought leaders or locals on the ground in Africa, onlookers or commentators in the diaspora who have African ancestral ties, one must not assume each purveyor’s goal is to positively contribute to the cultures they seek to document. This consideration should not be one for Africa alone.

The digital sphere is a fast-paced common ground, allowing for unity among Africans and diaspora communities, while the blurred lines

(Above) SAUL NASH.

that merge racial discourses about black communities with those about Africa is a justified concern. Black communities in the UK, the US and elsewhere have certainly experienced similar adversities to the ones that often define African communities, and this highlights the need for African studies to move beyond the confines of area studies. As we continue to see a rise in black imagery across the arts, television, social media and other forms of popular culture, these new spaces present both opportunities and pitfalls for discussions about black and African communities.

The promise of global reach only heightens the potential for conversation and controversy, while representations continue proliferate and influence the public consciousness. There is a strong need to move away from stating in digital and non-digital spaces what African communities in the diaspora and on the continent should be; the imperative is to declare what Africa is.

(Above) POTENTIALITY from EDIFICATION series. © ALUN BE. (Below) CULTIVATION from EDIFICATION series. © ALUN BE.