On the shoreline of the Ouakam neighborhood of Dakar, two volcanic hills referred to as les Mamelles (the breasts) rise above the flat expanse of the town. One mamelle options an iconic lighthouse in-built 1864; the opposite serves because the platform for the African Renaissance Monument(ARM), constructed in 2009 and devoted in 2010. Billed as the very best (to not be confused with the tallest) sculpture on the planet, the
164 ft of metal body and bronze our bodies atop the 300-foot-high hill creates a towering ensemble that’s seen from most components of the town.
The work depicts three figures—a person, lady, and youngster—rising triumphantly from the inside of a craggy metallic volcano that’s itself an extension of the mamelle. The male determine, at middle, appears to be like out over the Atlantic Ocean. He’s clothed solely in a kufi-style hat with a wrap round his waist, revealing his swollen chest and superhuman musculature. With one arm, he embraces the feminine determine, who stands on the balls of her ft, throwing her proper arm behind her. Her hair blows within the breeze, and her sheer windswept wrap leaves a lot of her physique uncovered. Seated on the person’s left arm is a toddler whose gesture guides the viewer’s gaze towards the water.
On the monument’s dedication ceremony, Senegal’s then president, Abdoulaye Wade, who held the workplace from 2000 to 2012, referred to as it a memorial for the previous, a celebration of the current, and a beacon for the long run, symbolizing the “triumph of African liberation from 5 centuries of ignorance, intolerance, and racism” as Africa “emerges from the bowels of the earth to depart darkness behind and transfer towards the sunshine.” In line with Wade, who commissioned, and ostensibly designed, the monument, the sculpture’s orientation overlooking the Atlantic is supposed to attach Black populations in continental Africa to these within the Diaspora, particularly within the Americas.
Whereas the dedication of the ARM was scheduled to coincide with the fiftieth anniversary of Senegal’s independence, the occasion additionally included symposia, performances, and speeches centered round america of Africa, a hypothetical federation of African nations that Wade has championed. He wished the ARM to rival landmarks just like the Statue of Liberty and the Eiffel Tower, however as an emblem of Pan-African relatively than nationwide satisfaction.
Certainly, the monument itself is rooted within the “African Renaissance” political philosophy, a Pan-African idea initially developed in a collection of essays by Senegalese historian Cheikh Anta Diop, written between 1946 and 1960 whereas he was finding out in Paris, and revived within the mid-Nineties by South African president Thabo Mbeki. On the core of this loosely outlined philosophy is the “rebirth” of tradition and improvement. Many proponents emphasize the necessity to discover Afro-centric options to problems with poverty, schooling, and self-governance relatively than counting on exterior assist. The African Union, a coalition of 55 member states on the continent established in 2001, wherein each Wade and Mbeki have been actively concerned, employs the African Renaissance as its guiding philosophy.
Dereje Belachew by way of Getty Photos
In a 2010 essay revealed within the journal Politique Africaine, cultural historians Ferdinand de Jong and Vincent Foucher astutely noticed that the ARM is a technique for Wade’s Senegal to take the position of porte-parole talking on behalf of the African Renaissance motion and, by extension, Africa typically. On the monument’s dedication ceremony, Wade led a gaggle of dignitaries, together with 19 African heads of state, Reverend Jesse Jackson, North Korea’s then President of the Presidium Kim Yong Nam, Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, rapper Akon, and a coalition from the NAACP, in singing the “African Renaissance Anthem”—which Wade additionally wrote.
Whereas the ARM renewed curiosity in Pan-Africanism as a method of championing unity and modernism as
instruments for progress, many main African cultural theorists expressed warning. In a 2012 article on the monument in frieze, artwork critic Sean O’Toole quotes curator Simon Njami lamenting that “we’re trying backwards once more” by leaning on the outdated ideology of the African Renaissance. “We’re sick of all these previous folks pondering previous issues in previous phrases,” Njami mentioned. As political scientist Patricia Agupusi argues in her 2021 article “The African Union and the Path to an African Renaissance,” the philosophy includes platitudes about unity from males who got here of age within the independence period, and whose political packages are little greater than “a repackaged neoliberal post-Washington thought infused with possession,” regardless of its ostensible emphasis on the “relationship between the state, the personal sector, and civil society in Africa.”
The controversy surrounding the ARM additionally extends past debates over political ideology: it has grow to be a lightning rod because of issues over its muddled authorship, unconventional financing, and complicated stylistic decisions. Wade claims to have designed the monument many years in the past.Upon assuming the presidency, he labored with a variety of artists to attract up preliminary sketches. The fee for casting the colossal statue in bronze went to the Mansudae Artwork Studio of North Korea, with Senegalese architect Pierre Goudiaby Atepa appointed to oversee the challenge.
However as plans for the monument and its set up have been launched, questions and critiques from native stakeholders rapidly emerged: Why was the figures’ physiognomy so squat and caricatured? Why, in a predominantly Muslim society, have been they depicted principally nude? Why was such a landmark public challenge outsourced to the Mansudae Artwork Studio, which has little involvement with African artists? And, given the bigger societal ills and quick wants of the Senegalese folks—amongst them the shortage of electrical energy within the Ouakam neighborhood and the hovering value of meals throughout the nation—who accredited a public sculpture with a $27 million price ticket?
Whereas these issues will not be unfounded, common media retailers—staffed primarily by American, European, and Senegalese reporters—have oversimplified the problems and sensationalized the monument: Wade didn’t pull the funds straight from the treasury, however as an alternative gave 67 acres of land to Mansudae, which the studio then offered to recoup fee. Moreover, the ARM was constructed simply as Senegal was named a beneficiary of the Millennium Problem Company, a government-funded United States international assist company that combats poverty by farming, building, and well being initiatives, all points that have been addressed on the symposia in the course of the monument’s dedication weekend. The five-year award totaled $540 million, considerably exceeding the sculpture’s value.
Those that sensationalize the ARM overlook two essential unresolved questions: Who’s the actual artist behind the monument? And what does its contested authorship inform us in regards to the thought of an “African Renaissance” within the twenty first century?
Senegal has an outsize cultural footprint relative to different African nations. Since 1960, when the nation gained independence from France, Dakar has served as each a hub and a launching pad for African artists concerned in a wide range of cultural actions, from the First World Pageant of Negro Arts (1966) to “Artwork Contemporain du Sénégal,” which traveled to 24 venues in a dozen nations between 1974 and 1984, to Dak’Artwork, based in 1989, the longest-running and most vital biennial exhibition on the African continent. With the President’s title and constitutional obligation together with “Protector of the Arts,” each chief has left an affect on Dakar’s cultural panorama, although few initiatives have been as hyper seen as Wade’s ARM.
The monument’s authorship grew to become a key level of debate when Wade claimed a portion of the income it generated in perpetuity, calling the design his mental property and the product of his personal artistry—a daring “Stalinian gesture in a neoliberal epoch,” in response to de Jong and Foucher. Whereas it could be tempting to deal with the ARM challenge because the megalomania of an incompetent or wasteful chief, a extra compelling line of inquiry is how the contested authorship unmasks an interconnected net of competing pursuits and influences.
Wade describes his conception of the monument in his 1989 ebook Un destin pour l’Afrique. He recounts the psychological technique of deciding on a trio of figures representing Europe, america, and Africa. The thought, he writes, had been germinating in his head since he was a minister of state within the Nineteen Eighties. In a subsequent version, revealed in 2005, he provides that in 1996 he approached an artist—later recognized because the celebrated Senegalese sculptor Ousmane Sow—to assist him design a maquette. In the long run, Wade gave the fee for the monument to the Mansudae Artwork Studio due to their aggressive charges, telling the Wall Road Journal, “I had no cash… solely the North Koreans may construct my statue.” Although Atepa, the challenge supervisor, would keep that the monument is solely Wade’s design, a variety of native and international actors all helped form its closing type.
In a report on the monument revealed within the French newspaper Libération in 2009, journalist Sabine Cessou found that Ousmane Sow, who died in 2016, had a distinct account of his involvement within the challenge, claiming that Wade approached him about making a monument and that the design idea resulted from casual conversations between them. Sow mentioned he got here up with the concept of a person, lady, and youngster, alluding to the return of slaves to Africa. He additionally allegedly urged two statues, one pointing from Dakar towards the Americas and one other in america returning the gesture to represent the presence of Senegalese within the Diaspora.
Because of pressure with Wade, Sow deserted the challenge, and though his preliminary maquette has by no means been made public, ARM clearly echoes Sow’s many hypermasculine sculptural figures—warriors, wrestlers, and horsemen in motion poses. As an illustration, the heroic proportions of the monument figures repeat these within the broad chest and outlined torso of Sow’s larger-than-life Scène de scalp (1999), made throughout the identical interval because the maquette..
Gamma-Rapho by way of Getty Photos
Although a ceremonial “groundbreaking” for the monument happened in 2002, there is no such thing as a proof of design till 2008, when Wade secured a patent in a number of nations for easy sketches supposedly drawn by his personal hand. It later got here to mild these have been based mostly on a 2003 design by Romanian-French artist Virgil Magherusan, referred to as Virgil. All through his prolific, although poorly documented profession, Virgil has centered on monumental sculptural kinds selling nationalism. He made heraldic monuments for Nicolae Ceaușescu’s Communist authorities in his native Romania, the place he labored earlier than settling in France in 1997. He was named a Peintre Officiel de l’Armée Française in 2007 for monumental sculptures of impassioned human figures and horses that honor the French armed forces.
Wade commissioned Virgil in 2001 to create a maquette of the ARM depicting a pair and their youngster, and the artist traveled to Dakar for a website go to. Nonetheless, after submitting the 20-inch-high research and an bill in 2003, Virgil supposedly obtained no additional communication, nor remuneration, from Senegal. It was not till 2010 that he noticed the almost-completed statue within the information and realized that the challenge had gone ahead with out him.
In a 2011 interview with Le Temps, Virgil critiqued the ultimate type of the monument, railing in opposition to its disfigured proportions improperly scaled from his authentic maquette, and the “orientalization” of the figures. “For me, African man is a tiger and the lady is a gazelle. I revered the anthropological kinds in my sculpture,” Virgil mentioned. “However the Koreans drew up these shortened legs, the proportion of a primate and these slanting eyes. At the moment I’ve put this complete story out of my thoughts. But it surely stays a sore spot.” Regardless of the offensive comparability between African our bodies and safari animals and racist characterization of Asian physiognomy, Virgil’s remark confirms that the work continued to alter as authorship handed from hand at hand.
The Abroad Tasks division of the Mansudae Artwork Studio, crucial official artwork studio in North Korea, finally executed the monument. The studio was based in 1959 for the glorification of the North Korean authorities and the ruling household. 4 thousand employees, 1 / 4 of whom are high-quality arts graduates from Pyongyang College and the nation’s high artwork academies, create public monuments in a conventional or Socialist Realist type. The studio usually caters to socialist nations, and there are information of items to African nations relationship again to the Nineteen Eighties, similar to Ethiopia’s Tiglachin (or Derg) Monument, a towering building devoted to Communist fighters from Cuba and Ethiopia, decked out with a hammer and sickle crest and a pink star. Mansudae has since constructed monuments, buildings, and bridges in 18 African nations.
At the very least one report signifies Mansudae had a major position within the design course of, and never merely in fabricating a preexisting mannequin. In a 2010 interview with the Wall Road Journal, Wade mentions that he had demanded adjustments to Mansudae’s preliminary design, saying that “it needed to have African heads, not Asian!”—echoing a criticism a few earlier Mansudae challenge in Mali. There are likewise clear similarities between the ARM and different Mansudae works in Africa, similar to Heroes Acre (1981) in Harare, Zimbabwe, within the dealing with of type and floor remedy.
As for Atepa’s position within the affair, the eminent architect informed the publication Arte that he merely enacted Wade’s imaginative and prescient and had no direct affect on the sculpture’s visible scheme, regardless of the title challenge supervisory designer. In the end, the interview serves as a protection of the monument’s value, echoing Wade’s declaration of a have to spend money on future generations, suggesting that Atepa was merely tacked on as a notable Senegalese persona in hopes of tempering political objections about outsourcing to international brokers. At one level throughout building, Atepa advocated protecting the feminine determine’s legs in response to backlash from the Muslim group. No such modification having been made, Atepa was evidently impotent within the space of design.
SEYLLOU/AFP by way of Getty Photos
It’s clear that Wade’s assertion of singular authorship of the ARM is troublesome: the completed work appears to mirror a mixture of Wade’s idea, Sow’s affect on the kinds, Virgil’s nationalist verve, and Mansudae’s monumental aesthetic. Extra problematic is Wade’s declare to 35 % of the income from the monument. Though his whole share supposedly goes to a basis dedicated to assuaging housing insecurity, pink flags naturally seem when a president exchanges public land for a nationwide challenge that leads to private achieve. The monument—which Wade “authored” like a medieval sculptor, delegating a lot of the labor to workshop assistants—generated discourse on the standing of up to date African artwork inside each social stratum of Senegal, from scandalized (and scandalizing) reporters to authorities staff to artwork world denizens to the taxi drivers who zip previous the monument every day. Who makes African artwork, and for whom?
No matter his challenge’s public reception, Wade did reach following the precedents of earlier Senegalese leaders: he impacted the continental artwork scene, acted as a patron for the humanities, and used the event as a springboard for bigger, intra-African aspirations, like america of Africa. As an alternative of a pageant or biennial, Wade pushed for a monument. And as an alternative of dedicating a civic challenge like a brand new bridge or skyscraper in honor of his guiding philosophy—his imaginative and prescient of an “African Renaissance” for the whole continent—he selected a superhuman sculpture to champion this ideology.
Although there was no discernable signal of a “rebirth” of Pan-African politics since Wade exited the presidency in 2012, the ARM has served as the point of interest for salient dialog. Just like the monument’s contested authorship, the motivations for this “Renaissance” are tangled. Is the concept a throwback to an old-guard philosophy that the sculpture’s outmoded Socialist Realist type visually echoes? Was the challenge impelled by the exterior market—Western, Diasporic, or continental—in search of out new websites for African tourism? Does it mirror shifting political relationships between Africa and East Asia that aren’t mediated by Euro-American supervision?
Regardless of the outraged headlines the statue impressed, the Senegalese public was not essentially in opposition to the creation of such a monument. Although there have been protests all through building, at the very least some members of the group supported the idea, believing that Africans would profit from seeing themselves represented en grande and that the monument would ultimately grow to be a nationwide image. Within the twelve years since its completion, there was a common acceptance of it, and discuss of dismantling it has dissipated.
Actually, for a lot of locals, the ARM has grow to be a landmark, even a degree of satisfaction. As is typical with public monuments—together with the now beloved State of Liberty and Eiffel Tower—the unique disdain for the ARM has morphed into fascination and self-identification. Arguably, the statue serves as an embodiment of our time greater than a personification of the African Renaissance philosophy; it’s a challenge motivated by particular person ego, with an appropriated design and a solid of collaborators pulled from each nook of the globe. The best irony is {that a} monument devoted to the African Renaissance, with its beliefs of intra-African relationships and financial improvement, was outsourced to a international agency, turning Africa’s regard from West to East.
