But Can It Change Anything? What Artists and Social Movements Can Learn From Each Other

We marched, that day, towards the Houses of Parliament, leaving the square outside the Tate Britain and forming a procession along the Thames. Someone had brought branches to the protest, green and freshly coppiced from a managed wood, and we held them aloft like we were extras from Macbeth, converging on Dunsinane. As a line of figures dressed in red moved past, we stopped, marking their slow, silent choreography. Smoke bombs exploded outside the Department of Transport. I looked upwards as purple and pink clouds swelled in the sky above us.

Rage pounded in my heart, rage and exhilaration. The emotional score of the protest, and soaring above it all, sweet as a lark—joy. No one tells you before you take to the street for the first time how much joy there is in protest. But you feel it, the moment you slip into the crowd and shove the sign you made from an old bit of cereal box in the air above your head. Artist and activist Fehinti Balogun once likened a protest to being at a gig by your favorite band. Standing shoulder to shoulder with those who share what you’re passionate about, raising your voice to join the chant everyone else is singing. I wonder, too, if—like the crowd in an auditorium—our heartbeats began to synchronize. As if we were no longer a group of individuals but a single, vast body.

When you think of art, you might not imagine a scene like this. You might instead think of a gallery’s flawless white walls. In a library, a ‘silence please’ notice hanging from the door. The red velvet curtain in a theatre that marks the drama’s edge. You might think of art that is—and it so often is—roped off from the everyday, kept behind plate glass in halls at once astonishing and fearful in their grandeur. To become an artist so often, it seems, is to join a rarefied sphere, removed from the terrain where the political battles of the day play out, and although so many artists have professed their desire to make change, the mystery of how art moves us might infuriate those driven to direct action, feeling history slip through their fingers as artists talk smoothly over glasses of champagne at press nights and private views.

But there is an edgeland where art and activism meet, sharing the hope that to articulate human circumstances is a means of improving them. Art, in its truest sense, is not something neatly circumscribed, cut off from the rough and tumble of politics, but intimately woven into the ways we negotiate the society we wish to live in. Throughout history, artist-activists have slipped between both spheres, as if art and activism were on the same continuum—their art not distinct from their direct action but integral to it. In the most direct examples, artists become activists by joining protest movements, bringing their creativity to give shape and form to the political demands they make. If we seek out the march, we will find them there, amid the placards, the steel drums and the figures dressed in red.

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By evening, it had begun to rain. We occupied a street in Westminster, the tarmac we sat on turning slick and luminous with the city lights. A samba band played, and at either end of the street, two bamboo tripods stood, protesters perched at their apex, ten feet overhead. No traffic could pass. Police officers lined the railings, faces inscrutable.

Writers Rebel, a group of authors, poets and playwrights operating within the Extinction Rebellion Movement, had organized this action outside 55 Tufton Street—the offices of climate-sceptic ‘think tank,’ the Global Warming Policy Foundation. Campaigner Esther Stanford-Xosei took to the makeshift stage we’d set up and began to speak. “We all stand before history,” she said. “Some have already cast themselves in the role of villains, some are tragic victims, some still have a chance to redeem themselves. The choice is for each individual.” The words she spoke were not her own. They belonged to the Nigerian writer and activist Ken Saro-Wiwa—more specifically, to his execution speech.

Saro-Wiwa. That was the first time I had heard of him. I think he would have appreciated the setting. Before Saro-Wiwa became involved with activism, he wrote: novels, short stories, poetry and drama, as well as being a TV producer. His art resounded with his deep political convictions. In 1986, he published the novel Sozaboy: A Novel in Rotten English, a bold experiment in writing in Nigerian pidgin English that was the first of its kind; his short story collection, A Forest of Flowers, which received the Commonwealth Prize, gave voice to female narrators in a way that was uncommon in Nigerian literature of the time. Basi and Company, a low-budget soap opera shot in lurid hues, was the most popular in Nigerian history—following the capers of a luckless anti-hero, Basi, the show was shot through with Saro-Wiwa’s belief in the need to overcome tribalism in the country, portraying troubles that united all working-class people in Nigeria, regardless of their tribe or ethnicity.

Unbounded by literary form, Saro-Wiwa let his pen follow his message, finding the medium that best suited it, flitting between literary and populist forms with a dexterity that few writers possess. His activism was no different—another form in which his words could meet their audience, and it was his understanding of how an idea travels, honed through his literary work, that equipped him as a brilliant political organizer.

As the leader of the Movement for the Survival of the Ogoni People (MOSOP), a non-violent action group against the exploitation of the Niger Delta by Shell, he was no stranger to protests. Oil was discovered in Nigeria in 1958. Saro-Wiwa, born in 1941, grew up a witness to the callous destruction of his homeland in pursuit of this ‘black gold.’ With apparent impunity, Shell transformed a lush and ecologically diverse land of verdant mangroves and vital waterways into one of the most polluted places on earth. By 1990, when MOSOP was founded, thousands of oil spills had turned large swathes of it into a hellscape of lifeless brown waterways and towering flares that left the air redolent with the smell of crude, the land unfarmable and the water, slick with the rainbow tarnish of oil, undrinkable. Human bodies were left as broken as the land, as the spills were linked to high levels of malnutrition, infertility and cancer.

Saro-Wiwa called it a genocide. His use of the term was deliberate. He understood the power of that word, and by associating it for the first time with the actions of a private corporation, he grabbed international attention and changed the frame of reference for what was happening in the Niger Delta.

In 1993, he led 300,000 people in a peaceful march against a new Shell pipeline, the largest protest against an oil company in history. At the protest, police clashes left several protesters shot and injured; one man was killed. In the months that followed, conflicts between the Ogoni and other tribal groups flared up, apparently stoked by the government and Shell. In November 1995, Saro-Wiwa and eight other activists—the Ogoni Nine—were hanged after being found guilty of the incitement to murder of four conservative Ogoni leaders whom a mob had brutally killed in May 1994.

Though the four were at odds with MOSOP over their campaign against the oil companies, the case against the Ogoni Nine is widely regarded by humanitarian organizations as a stitch-up. Shell was accused of colluding with the Nigerian government in the unjust execution of the Ogoni Nine—in 2009, on the eve of a legal action over the claims, the company agreed to a $15.5 million out-of-court settlement over the claims. (Shell director Malcolm Brinded stated at the time: “While we were prepared to go to court to clear our name, we believe the right way forward is to focus on the future for Ogoni people.”)

The message, always, was the thing, the atom at the heart of all Saro-Wiwa did. His biographer has written of his “unique literary voice that enabled him to bring his ideas to a mass global (and local) audience.” Saro-Wiwa wasn’t allowed to read his execution speech at his death. But just before they killed him—finally, after several attempts at his execution had failed—witnesses reported that he shouted: “You can kill the messenger but not the message.”

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Can art really change anything? Or are those who write poems, novels or plays wasting the time they could be lobbying politicians, starting petitions and marching on government? The debate seems academic when confronted with the messy reality of how political change happens. Saro-Wiwa wasn’t an artist, or an activist. He was both, and those personas fed each other—he was able to lead the resistance to the crimes being committed against his people because he understood how words and images work to capture the imagination and inspire action. And his politics gave his creativity purpose and direction. They were parts of the whole; indeed, I wonder if he could have become the activist he was if he hadn’t first given form on the page to the injustices he saw around him.

The most successful social movements have always had a keen understanding that protest is, ultimately, a form of creative expression, just as Saro-Wiwa did. When I think of the great moments of resistance from the past, it is often single, vivid snapshots, compact as a Polaroid, that travel to me through time. Rosa Parks taking her seat on a Montgomery bus and refusing to move. Emily Davison on the ground beneath the King’s horse at Epsom Downs. Mahatma Gandhi, standing in his white robes at the shoreline, grasping a fistful of salt. In all of these examples, the genius of activism compares to that of a great work of art: offering a symbol for a much bigger idea that the viewer feels in her bones to be true but has never seen expressed quite so accurately before.

Art has, even more literally, been at the heart of some of the most significant protest movements of the last century. Take, for instance, the poetic, playful graffiti that appeared in the streets of France in May 1968, as a widespread uprising took hold across the nation. Under the paving stones, the beach! Be realistic, demand the impossible! All power to the imagination! Coined by Situationist International, a revolutionary movement of artists, intellectuals and their followers, these slogans captured their politics: fed up with capitalism, they called on citizens to reimagine social relations, fostering more authentic human connection. These ideas gained traction within the student bodies of universities in France, who began to stage protests and were soon joined by trade unions, with more than 10 million people taking part in a general strike, bringing the country to its knees for seven weeks, and forcing the government to the cusp of total collapse.

Those slogans were original, intriguing, funny and subversive—they made joining the resistance seem cool and, more importantly, they provoked vibrant dialogue across different sections of society. “For the first time in this rigid, formal, nineteenth-century society, everyone was talking to everyone,” writes historian Mark Kurlansky in 1968: The Year That Rocked the World. In so doing, they were following the imperative of SI: Talk to your neighbour! read the graffiti on the walls. While the protests ultimately dissipated without bringing about the radical transformation of society the revolutionaries envisaged, SI’s legacy is still influential today, and the story of what happened is inseparable from the poetry that, for those weeks, ruled the streets.

In my lifetime, one of the most significant protest movements has been the Arab Spring, a series of uprisings in the early 2010s that changed the political landscape of the Arabic world. In Tunisia, where the first revolution took hold in December 2010, protesters took to the streets singing the words of a song by a little-known rapper. El General had recorded his song “Rais Lebled” and uploaded it to YouTube just a couple of weeks previously; it instantly went viral. It’s bold and irresistible, an insistent thump of rage against the country’s leadership.

When, following the tragic self-immolation of street vendor Mohamed Bouazizi in reaction to his harassment by the authorities, protesters took to the streets to demand that President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali step down, it was the words of El General’s song they chanted: Mr President, your people are dying/People are eating rubbish/Look at what is happening/Miseries everywhere Mr President. Ben Ali was ousted the following month, leading to the country’s first free, democratic elections. A victory belonging to all who took to the streets, “Rais Lebled” is widely hailed as the anthem of the revolution. Press have called El General “The rapper who helped bring down Ben Ali”; in 2011, he appeared on the cover of Time, and was listed as one of “the 100 most influential people in the world.”

When politicians fail to hear us, to represent us, as they so often do—and as they did in France and Tunisia—it falls to artists to find ways to break through, to find new ways of disrupting the status quo. James Baldwin, the great American writer and civil rights activist, once wrote that “the artist cannot and must not take anything for granted, but must drive to the heart of every answer and expose the question the answer hides.” That might be a perfect definition of art as a means of resistance, for me—a refusal of easy certitudes, to accept, simply, the status quo. Instead, the art of resistance asks—what does it really mean to be alive right now? Where are the contradictions in how we are living? What does a truly just world look like? What’s stopping it from becoming a reality?

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From Acts of Resistance: The Power of Art to Create a Better World by Amber Massie-Blomfield. Copyright © 2024. Available from W.W. Norton & Company.