NO SUITS REQUIRED
The story of Africa rising has become pop culture chewing gum. Thanks to movies like Black Panther and countless think pieces, the image of the “Dark Continent” is being rehabilitated to more accurately showcase Africa’s rich cultures, heritage and business potential.
All this Afro-optimism is wonderful, but Belgian-Beninese engineer-turned-modelturned-artist Fabrice Monteiro has spotted a flaw and a crack in the façade and its name is capitalism.
Encapsulated in a single phrase during an interview with Al-Jazeera last year, he said: “We’re already living in a dystopian world.”
His rationale is that capitalism, in its relentless pursuit of more at all costs, has led to devastating environmental degradation, an overall climate of fear in which right-wing sentiment and anti-immigration alarmism are flourishing, and warped African self-image.
His work reflects this. In a series entitled Prophecy, one of the works shows a woman drenched in tar walking along a blackened rocky shore. In one hand she is clutching a dead seabird. The other hand has turned into a kind of multi-pronged tentacle. Behind her a ship has foundered on the rocks. The piece is meant to be a reflection of the state of environment on the coast of West Africa.
The molestation of our planet is not the only thing Monteiro is interested in. In another series titled 8 Mile Wall he explores some of the stereotypical ways in which Africans were, and in some places continue to be, displayed. The series was inspired by a conversation he had with his father as a boy when he realised that, as a black man, the only way to be treated with consideration in Europe at the time was to wear a three-piece suit.
He told The Sunday Times: “As Africans we still carry the weight of all of the things that have been done to us and all of the things that the media have put into people’s minds.”
Despite the rising brightness regarding Africa’s prospects Monteiro believes that, in a way, we are still trying to wear three-piece suits.
“I feel like we still don’t have the confidence that we should have to do things our own way. This mindset started from slavery and has persisted through to colonialism and even post-colonialism,” he says.
“In Africa we’re still looking for a model, based on capitalism and over consumption, that is already dead.”
Though people might be tempted to think of Monteiro as something of an African renaissance 2.0 sceptic the opposite is true. If anything, Monteiro is an African renaissance extremist. His dream for the continent is one forged for Africans, by Africans with African prosperity in mind.
Adam Smith’s dream of a market-driven capitalist utopia is coming apart at the seams (see Brexit, Trump, right-wing Europe, climate change etc.) and Monteiro sees this moment as the perfect time to get rid of our metaphorical three-piece suits and fully embrace our own path, whatever that might be.