Situated within the discursive tensions between the optimism of “Africa renaissance” and the disillusionments of “Afro-pessimism”, the photographers assembled in Testaments to the Beautyful Ones pay tribute to the unflinching insistences on life on the African continent, despite the disappointments of post-independent nation-states and the failures of the neocolonial world order. The strikingly articulate visual works in this exhibition thus register the “deeper meaning[s] than the flat word ‘beautiful’” that Ghanaian writer Ayi Kwei Armah discerns in the misspelling in the slogan “The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born”, which he saw painted on a minibus taxi in Accra[1]. In explaining the title of his iconic 1968 novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, Armah observes that the phrase “the Beautiful One”, closely associated with the god Osiris in ancient Egyptian culture, is

a sorrowful reminder of our human vulnerability to division, fragmentation and degeneration, and at the same time a symbol of our equally human capacity for unity, cooperative action, and creative regeneration. [… T]hough the concept of “the Beautiful One” began life as the singular epithet of an extraordinary being, in the course of centuries, through the workings of popular identification with an admired spirit, it was adopted as the appellation of like-minded groups of relatively ordinary human beings interested in the improvement of social life.[2]

Drawing inspiration from Nigeria-born visual artist Njideka Akunyili Crosby’s series of photo transfer-based paintings which foreground a conviction in the potential for social regeneration in the face of inherited dispossessions, Testaments to the Beautyful Ones stages a conversation between the work of eight contemporary African photographers – Zimbabwe-born Tatenda Chidora, Mali-born Fatoumata Diabaté, Nigeria-born Yagazie Emezi, South Africa-born Zana Masombuka, Ghana-born Sackitey Tesa Mate-Kodjo, Sudan-born Hashim Nasr, Côte d’Ivoire-born Jean-Louis N’cho, and Uganda-born Sarah Waiswa – to consider the different manifestations of the “beautyful ones” today and the creative ways they make space for themselves, particularly on social media.

The six commissioned writers – Gambia-born Kweku Abimbola, Nigeria-born TJ Benson, US-born Safia Elhillo, Zimbabwe-born Tsitsi Jaji, Somalia-born Ladan Osman, Zambia-born Cheswayo Mphanza – further testify ekphrastically to the ways in which these different iterations of the “beautyful ones” portrayed by the photographers carve out unruly spaces of quiet possibilities for themselves within the constraints of everyday living. This exhibition thus also posits ekphrasis, which literary scholar David Mikics explains is “the word for th[e] verbal evocation of the visual: for literature’s conversation with a silent counterpart”[3], as one of the alternative modalities that is able to attend to what scholar of visual culture Tina M. Campt calls the “lower range of intensities generated by images assumed to be mute”[4]. Taken together then, the visual and written works in Testaments to the Beautyful Ones index the reverberations of social life and living on the African continent today.

[1] Ayi Kwei Armah, Remembering the Dismembered Continent: Essays. Per Ankh, 2010: p. 272.
[2] Armah, op. cit.: p. 267, 269.
[3] David Mikics, A New Handbook of Literary Terms. Yale UP, 2007: 98.
[4] Tina M. Campt, Listening to Images. Duke UP, 2017: 6.