Issues of security and insecurity in boko haram era: a contextualization of Moyo Okediji’s explosive images

Abstract

The process of “deafricanizing” the Africans by the West and the Arab and their agents through their missionary activities and the institutionalization of their educational and political systems have caused “things to fall apart.” In other words, the cantankerous and insecure state of the postcolonial African nation-states is traceable to the Westernization and Arabization of Africans. The accounts of how various indigenous cultures resisted the incursion of the Western culture abound and the current resistance to Western education by the Islamic fundamentalist sect, Boko Haram which loosely translates to “Western education is forbidden or evil” is a modern version on a long resistance. Unlike the traditional Africans whose custom it is not to fight for their gods, these proselytizing foreign religions - Christianity and Islam - have a long history of religious wars and intolerance which their adherents have continued in modern times subtly and grossly. These alien faith traditions implanted religious intolerance and violence in Africa and the terrorist activities of Boko Haram like the 1998 bombing of the American Embassy in Kenya by an Islamic terrorist group are all markers of acculturation and bigotry. The “explosive” artworks of Moyo Okediji explore the ambiguity of security and insecurity in Nigeria in an era I term, “The Boko Haram era”: 2009 to date. Unlike Boko Haram that has explored the soda aluminum cans for making explosives and bombs, Okediji has engaged the same aluminum cans in creating “explosive” and interrogative contemporary artworks that celebrate the principle of “trash to treasure” as against Boko Haram‟s “trash to terror.” A very brief narrative on recent contemporary art practice in Nigeria shows how artists have been proactive and reactive in material use and thematic interrogation.