A diehard stereotype expects the sweeping African landscapes to be unspoiled, with every line and ripple on the surface of the world’s second most populated continent created by nature. In some cases, however, that which at first sight may seem calm lakes or lush green hills are in fact scars, signs left by human hands driven by greed. In 2009, the Nigerian artist Abraham Oghobase (Lagos, 1979) visited the Jos Plateau in the centre of the country for the first time, and was so bowled over by its huge green spaces dotted by granite formations and artificial lakes that he wanted to investigate their history. He discovered that the region owes its rugged landscape to tin mining, started by the British colonial government in 1904 and continuing until the early 1960s, when the mining companies were nationalised and a series of other factors led to the industry’s rapid decline. Since then, the exploitation of the African subsoil and the inheritance left by colonialism have been the focus of his thoughts.
In the last few years, Oghobase, who today lives and works in Canada, has explored these topics in a series of works based on the stratification of photographic images and paintings, from Anatomy of Landscape – Jos (2018) to Rock Study (2018) and Metallurgical Practice: Landscape and Miners (2019). In Life of Mine, an open and continuously evolving series that, starting from the title plays on the polysemy of “mine” in English, the artist overlays illustrations taken from a metal mining manual published in 1912 and found in a used book store in Johannesburg with images of parts of his own body. In Colonial Self-Portrait, he seeks to rewrite the history of Nigeria by putting his own face – undoubtedly local, due to its features and skin colour – in place of those of the British colonial administrators portrayed in a series of old photographs. “These works, displayed last year alongside each other at the Nigeria pavilion of the Venice Art Biennale as part of the exhibition “Nigeria Imaginary”, overlaps both physically and conceptually, telling of the country’s colonial past: mining and the exploitation of natural resources, of course, but also the distorted manner in which black bodies have always been represented” Abraham Oghobase explains.
For him, today’s mining activities, from oil to diamonds and rare earths like coltan (short for columbite–tantalite) or cobalt, which the African subsoil is rich in, leave the continent to be processed elsewhere, enriching foreign investment funds, are just a new chapter in the same story. “As I see it, this is a neo-colonial dynamic. Foreign powers, China first and foremost at the moment, continue to mine raw materials to fuel their economies, while Africa and its people are once again the losers in this equation” the artist comments bitterly. “There should be a collective effort and a shared responsibility in order to treat the environment with care and respect. The earth belongs to us all, and we have a moral obligation to develop a critical thought towards its consumption.”
