Engaging Decolonial narratives from Switzerland to Nigeria

Before I arrived in Switzerland for my research trip, I had participated in a retinue of back-to-back artistic engagements in Nigeria. During the week of my trip, I was in Lagos at the Yemisi Shyllon Museum of Art for the opening of the ‘Arewa’ exhibition. Arewa – meaning northern Nigeria, was a deep and nuanced look at the cultures of the northern region of Nigeria. From Lagos, I moved to Kaduna, where I lead the programming at Open Arts, an arts collective that promotes arts and literature using culture to influence and shape reality of life in northern Nigeria, and where I curate the annual Hausa International Book and Arts Festival (HIBAF). From Kaduna, I moved to Kano to participate as a guest for the inaugural Kano International Poetry Festival (KAPFEST). It was within these immersive experiences of arts and culture from northern Nigeria that I arrived at Kulturhaus Villa Sträuli in Winterthur to survey decolonial discourses in the programming of literary events in Switzerland. My research question bordered on what happens when Global South sensibilities migrate to specific institutionally sanctioned and delimited spaces in the West.

My first encounter with my topic of research was at Strauhof in Zurich. The ‘litafrika’ exhibition by Litar transported the sensibilities of Abidjan and Accra to Zurich. The exhibition focused on the literary scenes of the two neighbouring metropolises in West Africa. Literature was decolonised in the making of the exhibition into multiple diverse forms: slam, dance, comics, storytelling. Language was also not limited to European languages spoken on the continent, but evoked African languages from the two countries.

Another research stop I had was with Jurriaan Cooiman of Culturescapes, a multidisciplinary biennial art festival in Basel that promotes cross-border dialogue and learning between cultures. For 2023 and 2025, the focus of Culturescapes was the Sahara, looking at borders of the desert and post-colonial borders of the African continent.

In the process of all of these knowledge exchanges, what was already apparent was that artistic encounters from the African continent tended to zoom towards representative cities and locales. Lagos for instance becomes a representative of all of Nigeria’s art and cultural scene, which led to me another question: the localisation of understanding of post-colonial cultural products of Africa in European spaces.

As a curator and researcher from northern Nigeria, I am more connected to the arts and literary scene of parts of Niger Republic, Cameroon, and other regions in the northern axis of West Africa than I am plugged to the scene in Lagos. But as a Nigerian, my artistic expectation is shaped by the Western understanding of Nigerian art and literature through the designated echo chamber of Lagos.

Nigerian literature for instance is defined and known even in its postcolonial deconstruction mostly as literature written in the English language. In my work curating the Hausa International Book and Arts Festival (HIBAF), which reflects the other angle of my research trip, I try to shed a light on this postcolonial ‘othering’. With HIBAF, my work tilts towards celebrating and focusing on writers working in Hausa language, the most common African language spoken across West Africa.

Prose writing in Hausa language dates back to the 1930s. Five novellas that engaged the colonial context and Hausa society through the authors’ imaginations were released throughout that decade. In contrast, the post-colonial engagement of Nigerian literature touts the first generation of Nigerian authors as those writing in English between the 1950s and the 1970s, heralded with the publication of Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart in 1958 not putting into cognizance any works produced in an African language. Hausa novel writing continued to boom in the 1990s with the release of a whole range of Hausa novels into the thriving Kano commercial market. Women made up the majority of the writers and readers of these novels.

As such during my conversations, travels and knowledge exchange in Switzerland, I realised the presence of decolonial narratives needed to expand beyond a single representative African city to include the peripheries. Just as I had found the plurality of Switzerland and its engagement of the multiplicities of languages and cultures, there is a need for a continuous engagement of Nigerian literary and arts scenes beyond outputs from Lagos, and beyond works in English language only, towards one that is inclusive of the artistic milieu of Nigeria in all its diversity and plurality.