Commemoration, memory and ownership: Some social contexts of contemporary photography in Benin City, Nigeria

Abstract

The paper focuses on the ways in which photography as a medium is situated in different social contexts in Benin City, in southern Nigeria. It suggests that photography is constituted in relation to local discourses of ownership, identity and significance but also articulates with the infrastructures of the nation‐state as these intersect with localized discourses. Photographic images (and their mass reproduction) are appropriated within local discourses of memory and the past in underpinning the hegemony of the Oba of Benin as a traditional ruler within the Nigerian state, but one whose legitimacy is rooted in the precolonial traditions of the Edo kingdom. This use of memory and the commemoration of the past participate in the ongoing formation of an Edo‐speaking ethnic identity in relation to the Nigerian postcolonial nation‐state. Photography features prominently in the commemoration of the dead, both in funerary procedures and in later remembrance. Moreover its use parallels Western theoretical analysis on the indexical nature of the photographic image, although extended to local contexts of ritual ideas and practices. Photography is used in everyday life in the presentation of the self and identity, in relation to family, community and as citizen of the state. The conventions utilized in these forms of photography are dispersed over a wide region to define a collective locality as constituted through and by the routinizations of the nation‐state. The siting of photography in both long‐standing and recent invented traditions in Benin City argues for different constructions of modernity and its representations in West Africa, in comparison with Euro‐American conceptualizations and narratives of modernity (that presuppose an absolute rupture or break with the past) and in which there is an engagement by the African nation‐state with the legitimacy of a precolonial past, real or invented, to which it lays claim.