Etso Ugbodaga-Ngu

Biography

She taught children in the missionary schools of Kano and Zaria in the late 1940s, and they belonged to eight different peoples. They had no common language.

Etso Clara Ugbodaga was born in 1921 in Kano, to parents from Edo. She was educated at missionary schools in Kano and Zaria, and from 1945 to 1950 she taught in those same schools. Explaining a lesson in words was almost impossible, and she began to use drawing as a way of teaching and communicating. In 1950 the colonial administration of Nigeria awarded her a scholarship to study at the Chelsea School of Art in London. In 1954 she graduated with a diploma in design and painting, and in 1955 she received a teaching diploma from the University of London. After returning to Nigeria she took up a teaching post at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology in Zaria (later Ahmadu Bello University). She worked there from 1955 to 1964 and became the first Nigerian and the first woman to hold the rank of professor at the college. Among her white British colleagues she met with opposition. Her students included Solomon Wangboje, Uche Okeke, Simon Okeke and Bruce Onobrakpeya. Her students founded the Zaria Art Society, from which came many of the leading contemporary Nigerian artists. She said later that most of her male students had become the country’s main source of manpower in institutions of higher learning, museums, industry and the private sector.

In 1958 her solo exhibition was held at the Commonwealth Institute Art Gallery in London, the first in London by a Nigerian woman artist. Group shows and other exhibitions followed: the Independence Exhibition at the British Council in Lagos (1960), a solo exhibition at the Radcliffe Graduate Center in Boston (May 1963), a group exhibition of contemporary Nigerian art at the Commonwealth Institute (1968), FESTAC ’77 in Lagos, the festival of Black and African arts, where only seven of the sixty-three artists were women, a national art exhibition at the National Theatre in Lagos (1980), and an exhibition of contemporary Nigerian art in Dakar (1980). In 1975 she served as a state adviser in connection with FESTAC, and later she taught at the University of Benin.

Her geometric style, bright colour and subjects of strength and purpose are linked with her early works, such as “Market Women” (1961). To my mind, the titles alone show what she was looking at: “Dancers”, “The Labourer’s Song” (1963), “Elemu”, Yoruba Palm Wine Seller (c. 1963). “Abstract” (c. 1960) is held at the University of Birmingham, in the Danford Collection of West African Art and Artefacts. “Elemu” is in the Hampton University Museum in Virginia.

Her work has been shown in the exhibitions “African Modernism in America, 1947–67” (2024) and “Nigeria Modernism” at Tate Modern (October 2025 – May 2026).

From 1960 she was married to the Cameroonian surgeon Victor Anomah Ngu, whom she had met in London, and she added his surname to her own. In September 1962 the family moved to Boston for a year. Ugbodaga-Ngu died in Cameroon in 1996.