A generation of contemporary artists are turning to the past—not out of nostalgia, but as a way to reshape the present. In this article, I follow four powerful voices from West and Central Africa—Romuald Hazoumè (Benin), Tidiane Ndongo (Mali), Alexandre Kyungu Mwilambwe (Democratic Republic of Congo), and Roméo Mivekannin (Benin/Côte d’Ivoire)—whose practices reimagine the archive through material gestures. Working with materials marked by violence, migration, and resilience, their art revives cultural memory while confronting global inequalities. From discarded jerrycans to mud-dyed cloth, rubber, and colonial-era portraits, these artists draw from local histories and craft traditions to question the boundaries of identity, territory, and representation. Whether transforming oil containers into masks, inscribing ancestral memory onto rubber and cloth, or reappropriating classical European imagery onto stained bedsheets, these artists operate at the intersection of historical memory, political resistance, and spiritual reflection. What emerges is not only a geography of trauma, but also one of reinvention—a cartography in which African artists reclaim the right to name, map, and narrate their own histories.

Reconquering Colonial Spaces

In Saint-Louis, northern Senegal—known for its pastel facades and delicate balconies—history whispers through every building. A UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2000, this former French colonial capital once thrived as a centre of the transatlantic slave trade.

Modou Dieng Yacine, (b.1970) who grew up among these elegant streets, remembers a peaceful childhood. But a later trip to France’s Mediterranean coast shattered that serenity. ‘Growing up, I realized it wasn’t built for me—it was for someone else’, he told DakArtNews.

Saint-Louis was designed for the French to run Africa. When I visited France’s Mediterranean coast, it looked just like Saint-Louis. I realized the city’s infrastructure was imported. That postcolonial trauma is part of me, and I claim it as my identity. I’m not trying to erase it. The question is, how do I digest it and make it beautiful, interesting, and rewarding? How do I move from trauma to therapy? That’s why most of my colours are colonial colours that I appropriate, infusing them with more energy and my Africanness—essentially recolonizing a colonial city.¹

Now based in Chicago, Dieng Yacine, a graduate of École Nationale des Arts et Métiers de la Culture (ENAMC, also known as School of Fine Arts of Dakar), and the San Francisco Art Institute (SFAI), transforms this realisation into a decolonial art practice.  Through series like Black Venice (2024), Seeing Lumumba (2024), or Tirailleurs sénégalais (2023), he brings erased Black figures back into the narrative. His works layer painting, collage, and photography on denim or burlap, subverting colonial colouration and aesthetics, infusing them with his vivid 'Africanness'.² His work reclaims the right to occupy and reimagine space, both physical and historical. Memory becomes a tool for reappropriating place and identity. Centred on space and habitat, his research represents a form of re-colonisation from an African perspective.

Uncovering Benin’s Silenced Histories

A similar gesture of reappropriation unfolds further east, in Benin, West Africa. Along the Beninese border with Nigeria—one of Africa’s top oil producers—this critical dimension takes shape in a striking way. Here, thousands of used plastic jerrycans circulate through fuel smuggling networks. The containers are used by smugglers at great personal risk and have become powerful symbols of the country’s economic imbalances. Building on this symbolism, Romuald Hazoumè (b. 1962) collects these objects and transforms them into masks. His work weaves a powerful connection between colonial legacy, environmental concerns, and social critique. This act—both ironic and political—raises questions about migration, the failure of public policies, and the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade. This historical resonance is especially poignant given that Benin is home to the former slave port of Ouidah. By turning modern waste into memory-laden artifacts, the artist, one of the leading figures of contemporary African art, links past and present, colonisation and current inequalities.

This reflection reaches a powerful culmination in his major work La Bouche du Roi (1997-2005), which echoes the diagram of the slave ship Brooks, an iconic eighteenth-century image used by British abolitionists to expose the horrors of the slave trade. Made up of over 300 jerrycan masks and accompanied by sounds evoking the cries of the enslaved, the installation pays tribute to victims of slavery while denouncing contemporary precarity. Moreover, by reusing waste often dumped in Africa by Europeans, Hazoumè enacts a symbolic return of these discarded materials to their source.³ In a context where regulations remain weak in West Africa, European companies have been accused of exporting fuels with high sulphur content, which led five West African countries, including Benin, to ban the import of 'dirty fuels' in 2016. In this way, his contemporary masks, far from their sacred origins, become powerful political statements.

Hazoumè critiques the commodification of African art, especially in a context where African masks lose their spiritual meaning once displayed as decorative objects in Western museums, as is the case with the Gelede. Gelede is a Yorùbá masquerade festival celebrating women’s leadership. This critique was further amplified at Everything Precious is Fragile, the Republic of Benin’s first national pavilion for Esposizione Internazionale d’Arte Venezia curated by Azu Nwagbogu. Taking inspiration from the meaning of the word Gelede, ‘the thing that is precious is fragile’, Nwagbogu’s pavilion restores African women to their ‘traditional role of equality and power in society’.⁴ Hazoumè’s installation harnesses the traditional impact of the Gelede, blending Beninese chants with jerrycan masks to condemn both global consumerism and environmental neglect. Through this body of work, the mask is no longer a static object, but a weapon of memory, resistance, and protest.

Challenging the Colonial Gaze

Echoing this resistance, fellow Beninese artist Roméo Mivekannin (b. 1986) and a descendant of King Béhanzin—who was exiled to the Caribbean in the late nineteenth century by French colonial forces—uses mixed media to reclaim and reinterpret colonial imagery. Working on recycled bedsheets treated with elixirs inspired by Vodun rituals—and sometimes buried at colonial sites—Mivekannin’s artworks act as vessels of memory.

Mivekannin recreates canonical artworks like Géricault’s Raft of the Medusa (1818-1819) and Manet’s Olympia (1863), inserting his own face into historically dehumanised figures. This visual strategy, which he calls ‘irritation’,⁵ confronts the objectification of Black bodies. His series Le Modèle noir and Barnum seeks to uncover the violence behind ethnographic images and colonial exhibitions. Exhibited internationally and at the fourteenth Dak’Art, the Biennale of Contemporary African art (19 May-21 June 2022), Mivekannin's work shakes the foundations of the Western art canon, tying personal history to collective memory as an ongoing call for restitution.

Transformative Hybridity

Art critic Hafida Jemni di Folco, director of the department of Contemporary Art from Africa and the Diaspora at IESA Paris, explains:

Hybridity draws from memory, but it is not a fiction — it is a form of translation. This act of translation generates new imaginaries. As with translating a language, emotion and memory play a role: some elements are preserved, while others are inevitably lost or transformed.⁶

Artists such as Dieng Yacine, Hazoumè, Mivekannin and many others engage with memory as a layered, hybrid process. Though they did not experience colonial rule firsthand—their countries gained independence in 1960—its lingering presence continues to shape and inform their work. Their engagements are therefore not nostalgic but transformative. They combine archives, oral histories, and inherited forms to create new artistic languages.

di Folco adds:

The process resembles an inverted pyramid. The artist begins with a vision, an anchoring in place or story, then embarks on a journey of research that leads to a final work enriched by their own narrative.

A process that is not fixed—it evolves, blending personal resonance with collective heritage, opening a path toward reinterpretation and healing.

Reviving Ancestral Voices

The translation of memory shines in Mali, West Africa, where self-taught artist Tidiane Ndongo (b. 1970) draws on Bamana culture to breathe new life into bogolan (Bamana: mudcloth) a traditional textile practice rooted in women’s craft shared across several ethnic groups in Mali. Using plant-based dyes and earth-based clay, bogolan expresses cultural codes through symbols: footprints, animal tracks, abstract signs. Far from decorative, these motifs function as ideograms that carry myth, history, and moral values.

In the face of imported textiles threatening traditional crafts, Ndongo reasserts bogolan as both resistance and reinvention. For over 30 years, he has developed intricate, interlaced designs in clay, creating visual rhythms that address modern themes like gender roles, migration, and societal tensions. With his unique Dogodogoni (Bamana: labyrinth) style, Ndongo reimagines this tradition as a space for reflection, and transformation. Recently, this has led to Mali submitting a proposal for bogolan to be included in UNESCO’s list of intangible cultural heritage. As the representative of the bogolan-producing communities, Ndongo is leading the campaign for this recognition.

Redrawing Africa from the Centre

Over 4,000 kilometres away, in the heart of Central Africa, Congolese artist Alexandre Kyungu Mwilambwe also delves into memory—this time through materials steeped in history. The Democratic Republic of Congo—spanning over 2.3 million square kilometres—was ravaged by Belgian colonial rubber exploitation. During that period, rubber emerged not only as a major export but also as a symbol of the forced labour system and the brutal treatment imposed on the Congolese population.

In response to this legacy, Kyungu works with discarded rubber inner tubes, carving them as if performing scarification—an ancient practice of marking skin to signify identity, belonging, or memory in many African cultures. These marks recall ancestral identity, passed down from his grandparents, while also referencing geographic borders imposed by colonizers. As the artist notes, ‘Rubber crosses borders more easily than people.’⁷ Through this metaphor, his sculpted surfaces propose a reimagined Africa—one that transcends artificial divisions and revives indigenous mappings. Ultimately, each cut in the rubber evokes both a wound and a possibility.

In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1978), Milan Kundera wrote:

The first step in liquidating a people … is to erase its memory. Destroy its books, its culture, its history. Then have somebody write new books, manufacture a new culture, invent a new history. Before long that nation will begin to forget what it is and what it was. The world around it will forget even faster.⁸

African artists today answer this threat with force. Through objects, voices, and spaces, they transform trauma into living narratives. In doing so, they open space for a new generation to reshape shared history through art—boldly, defiantly, and with memory as their guide.