Originally featured on The Art Hub

In The Harbinger (Crimson Fusion, Lagos; 2025), Oriiz U. Onuwaje challenges the long-standing notion that African artistic genius is accidental or fragmented. Instead, the book argues for African art as the product of a continuous and deliberate intellectual tradition stretching across millennia.

Drawing on examples such as the Benin bronzes, Nok terracottas, Ifẹ portraiture, Igbo-Ukwu metalwork, masks of the Niger Delta, and the 8,000-year-old Dufuna canoe, Onuwaje critiques how Western institutions have isolated these works from their cultural lineage. Displayed as disconnected marvels, they are admired but stripped of memory and context.

The Harbinger seeks to restore that lost continuity. Positioned as the first volume leading to the forthcoming A Window into the Soul of a People: 8000 Years of Art in Nigeria, the book reframes African art history as an unbroken intellectual and cultural rhythm rather than a series of coincidences.

This work stands as both a corrective to inherited narratives and a call for Africans to reclaim authorship of their own cultural memory.