There\u2019s a fissure in the narrative. The conclusion, in the text-books, is always this: Africa loses. The conclusion is always destruction, poverty, anomie, disease, lethargy,Death<\/em>. In the end, the nation always turns up on the bottom, trampled by the winning interlopers. But the narrative is only tidy because it\u2019s incomplete: the British aren\u2019t immune to losing. In the first Anglo-Ashanti War, for example, the British military governor Sir Charles MacCarthy ambled into Asanteman with his chest puffed, anticipating victory; he watched his army get totally wiped out, and was eventually vanquished himself, his skull repurposed into a gold-trimmed drinking cup. Imagine that: the British lose.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Ghanaian-Canadian artist Ekow Nimako can<\/em> imagine that, and does. When considered as an orchestra, his sculptures play a continuous parafictional narrative, a symphony exploiting the fissure, in which<\/em>all approaching invaders of Africa are vanquished. It\u2019s a surrealist vision of a Black future unmarred by colonial violence. Implicit in these pieces, made entirely of obsidian black LEGO, is a call for viewers to flex an atrophied muscle: to stretch the imagination by confronting what we know, or think we know, about the nation and its potential. Africa exists in the Western consciousness in a perpetual state of mythology. Nimako riffs on these lores and dramatizes them, writing his own fictional narratives of war, liberation, survival, ancestry, heroism, and homecoming.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The work is distinctly Afrofuturist, but Nimako has no use for space travel as metaphor; he wants those freedoms on earth. Kumbi Saleh 3020 CE<\/em> (2020) cribs its name from a ruined medieval trading capital in Mauritania, but situates it a millennium from the present, in tip-top shape. Cavalier Noir<\/em>(2018) is an intervention on the public war monument, a critique of the fetishization of racist state violence; a small Black child with braids is imbued with a heroic status. Many of the sculptures portray kids in such folkloric circumstances, and the LEGO further invests them with playfulness. Any suggestion of innocence in an age so marked by barbarism inevitably invokes a nearing violation. But what if Eden was forever? What if we were never disabused of our dreams? Nimako\u2019s futuristic civilization, firmly grounded in the past, is indeed a tempting eidolon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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