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What does
“Olokoto: Songs of Chima” mean?
'Olokoto'
means plentitude, abundance and fullness. In addition to these primary
meanings, the word represents ideas that suggest luxuriance and
bounteousness. 'Olokoto' connotes abundance of riches, wealth, and rich
harvest. To describe any year as olokoto is to inform a listener or a reader
that it was a year of bountiful harvest. The idea of abundance describes not
only agricultural produce, but the wealth generated by people as well. As
this exhibition makes clear, this wealth could include works of art some of
which are on display as well as the artists who produced them, and who are
part of the community's highly trained human capital. The expression “songs
of Chima” directs our attention both to the nature of the art object under
consideration and to the specific people and community that olokoto is used
to characterize. “Songs” metaphorically stand for creative products, works
of imagination, and individualized artistic expressions that are perceived
as harmonious. “Chima” refers to indigenes of Onitsha who trace the founding
of their city to Eze Chima.
The
exhibition, Olokoto Songs of Chima, is a celebration of the abundance and
luxuriant riches that belongs to Onitsha. In a certain sense, it is a
clarion call to both friends and foes to take stock of all that the city has
achieved both in the arts and in its human resources. Reflection on the
riches of the city is necessary given the contemporary condition of Onitsha,
today. The city is marked by a catalogue of ills: garbage-strewn streets,
unsanitary clogged and overflowing drains, squalid high rises, filthy
premises, violent crimes, armed robberies and killings, inhospitable living
conditions, lack of city planning, lack of solid waste management,
impassable roads, and most important of all total breakdown of law and
order.
Transforming and gentrifying the city of Onitsha would require enormous
effort. Seeing the city as a place with impressive human and material wealth
is crucial since such a perspective provides the critical lens from which to
envision plans for transformation. Thus, while this art exhibition purports
to be about beauty, aesthetics and art appreciation, it also has a very
powerful underlying message. It speaks simultaneously about the plentitude
of artistic resources in Onitsha, and it calls on indigenes and residents to
renew their pride in this city and to spearhead its physical and moral
transformation. In short, in calling for the renaissance of Onitsha, Olokoto
Songs of Chima is issuing a call for the urban renewal of the city.
Historical Excursions
What hope
is there that rejuvenation can occur in Onitsha in a manner that propels it
to attain its former glory? Perhaps, we a witnessing the final decline of
the city as indigenes once understood it to be? Perhaps, Onitsha would
eventually loose its commercial status as its neighbors have been plotting
for decades, and would subsequently decline to become a tenth rate urban
space?
Reviewing
the history of Onitsha might ser ve to restore people's faith that the
present malaise permeating the city is transient, and like others before it,
it too would be overcome.
Like all
major commercial cities the world over the fortunes of Onitsha has waxed and
waned over time. Cities that were able to pull themselves from the brink of
poverty and decay did so by rethinking, and in cases reinventing themselves
in new unforeseen ways. Amsterdam (Netherlands), Berlin (Germany), Prague
(Czechoslovakia) come to mind. A contemporary Third World example is
Bangalore in India, which imagined itself as a Silicon Valley tenaciously
worked to reinvent itself into a booming hi-tech region.
Historical records show that the fortune of Onitsha had waxed and waned
depending on the nation, or group that had a dominant presence on the River
Niger - Igala army under Onojo Oboni, Aboh, the trading factors and
missionaries, Sir George Goldie of the Royal Niger Company, and from 1914
the British colonial administration upon the amalgamation of southern and
northern Nigeria.
The
second half of the nineteenth century was the Age of Anxiety for Niger Ibos
(Elizabeth Isichei 1973, 101) similar in many ways to the uncertainties that
exist in these current times. Prior to the beginning of oil palm trade, it
was the final decades of the slave trade in which regional peace and
security and the normalcy of people's lives were radically disrupted. By
1857, the coming of the Christian Missionary Society (CMS), Onitsha was in a
vulnerable position under the reign of Obi Akazua. It was surrounded by
enemies Ogidi,
1
Obosi and Aboh.” When
Bishop Ajayi Crowder visited Onitsha in 1857, he reported that the town was
in a war with
2
Ogidi. According to
Kenneth Onwuka Dike, Crowther's description portrayed Onitsha as a
prosperous town according to the standards of the day. There were extensive
corn and yam plantations, cotton was extensively cultivated, and the people
of Onitsha manufactured their own clothes
3
(Kenneth Onwuka Dike 11).
By 1868,
however, internal misfortunes and the pressure of external threats resulted
in the contraction of Onitsha as the residents of the southeastern suburb (Odoje
village cluster) deserted their homes and moved into Onitsha core (Crowther
1868:81 cited in Henderson 1972, 101).
In spite
of all these negative developments, Onitsha was able to pull itself from the
brink of decline by making important strategic decisions that placed it on
the path of prosperity. In 1857, it welcomed CMS missionaries into the town
and signed treaties with European trading missions. By virtue of this
decision, it laid the foundation of its future prosperity and ascendancy
over all challengers to its status. The decision allowed Onitsha to obtain a
steady supply of arms with which to defend itself, and thereby escape its
formerly dangerous diplomatic isolation. In addition, the educational head
start its inhabitants received, proved invaluable to its rising fortunes.
Onitsha's rapid rise to affluence in a few years justified the wisdom of the
community in doing business with the Europeans.
Just as
prosperity settled in, and the people began to speak of the enu Oyibo (the
era of the Europeans) and the Age of Olokoto (prosperity), Onitsha faced
another monumental challenge that threatened its very sur vival. The new
relationship with Europeans was proving difficult as Onitsha people realized
that the terms of trade with the factories treated them unfairly.
Relationship deteriorated and in response to European traders' request in
1879, Acting Consul Easton, bombarded Onitsha from a gunboat razing the
waterside and sacking the Inland Town (Isichei 1973, 110). The object of the
attack was to coerce the nation of Onitsha, and through it teach a lesson to
other malcontents (Isichei 1973, 109). The state of siege begun by Easton
was maintained by the United African Company (UAC), which manned the
blockade and continued making unofficial attacks until the end of the reign
of the Royal Niger Company (Isichei 1973, 110).
Onitsha
survived this period of occupation “to have a great future as a market
center” (Ibid). It is a credit to the resilience of the city that unlike
other Nigerian towns and cities that endured a similar fate, it came back
from extinction to become again a formidable powerhouse in shaping the
fortune and destiny of Eastern Nigeria. The point here is that the city
survived numerous trials and tribulations, and still came back to prominence
when many had written it off. There is hope it could accomplish the same
feat today.
Seasons of Decay:
Twenty-three years after the sack of Onitsha, E. A. Warner described it in
1895: as “a particularly pretty town [with] beautiful trees far larger than
one sees in England and often covered with luxuriant creepers. Bamboos,
plantains, bananas, and palms of various kinds abound. …The whole town is
very clean, the open sandy spaces are kept well swept and the red mud floors
of the houses are frequently
4
polished” (E. A. Warner, 1895, 15-16). The unintended benefit of Warner's
account is that it offers a powerful argument of the speed in which
homegrown rebuilding and transformations can occur. However, his description
raises the following questions: how did we get from his account of a clean
1895 Onitsha to the filthy, garbagestrewn city that Onitsha has become? How
can the city be so rich in human capital yet so mismanaged and impoverished?
How can it have a wealth of intellectuals, people in top managerial
positions in multinational corporations and yet be a rubbish heap? Pertinent
as these questions are, they may be slightly misplaced in that they divert
attention from the crucial point at stake. Emphasis should be on what we can
learn from history to address our present predicament, not in underscoring
our impotence and of how we failed.
From the
end of the Biafran War in 1970, phenomenal transformations have occurred in
Onitsha both at the level of infrastructure (roads, industries, and
buildings) and in the building of the city's social capital (the development
of people's potential). The rapid pace of growth has brought about a
lowering of people's moral scheme as the old moral order and its related
political structures gave way to new political structures and new moral
schemes. Crime, corruption, mismanagement of public funds, robbery and
cheating have become the part of the normative order of post-Biafran life.
The nature of societal that occurred in this period change has been
exacerbated at the local level by the grand economic restructuring ongoing
at the global level. At the intermediate level of nation states, these
economic changes have unleashed a season of poverty and decay on Nigeria and
numerous other African countries.
The
conditionalities these countries accepted in negotiations with the
International Monetary Fund (IMF) have proved destructive. The situation in
Nigeria is particularly irksome because those at the helm of power continue
to use their leadership positions to derail the country's prospects of
economic growth. They did this by turning the nation's Central Bank into
their piggy banks and by expropriating the country's wealth.
In the
last four years, in particular, the attack on Onitsha and the well being of
the community has come from the Anambra State House in Awka. With the
breakdown of the rule of law and of law and order, the moral restraints on
people correspondingly broke down as a segments of Onitsha residents and
indigenes engaged in all kinds of nefarious practices - armed robbery,
killings, swindling that eroded the moral fiber of the community.
The
question we now face is, how do we regain our moral compass and undertake
the rebuilding of they city?.
As
history reveals, possibilities for change exist. The sur vival of Onitsha
depends on the strategic decisions that we make now for the development and
growth of the city. These decisions must come from imagining and
subsequently reinventing the city into the clean bustling city it once was.
But men alone must not do this planning as has been the case in the past
seven decades, when men arrogated to themselves the exclusive right to make
decisions for the community. In those decades, a male dominant way of doing
things was fallaciously justified on the basis of tradition. Yet, historical
evidence does show that as far back as 1857 and 1872 the Omu and Ikporo
Onitsha were critical participants in the determination of matters of
national
5
importance. It was only with the advent of colonialism and its
male-privileging ideology, that Onitsha men gained educational advantage.
Since then, they have used their advantage in gender discriminatory ways to
advance their own cross-cutting interests. This state of affairs has exacted
a heavy toll on welfare of Onitsha women. It has shut them out from spaces
in which the definitions of the future of Onitsha take place. We should note
that this male-privileging way of doing business has allowed deep-seated rot
to enter into the psyche of the community. There is no question that Onitsha
has become reactionary, oppressive male privileging society that is intent
on eradicating all vestiges of its female principle and matrifocal
consciousness that once provided the strength of the community.
Against
this background of male-privileging ideology, it is not surprising that only
one woman artist is participating in this exhibition even though numerous
Onitsha women are trained artists. The issue should not be “But there are no
women artists?” The question should be, what is militating against their
practicing of their craft? Future deliberations about the new model of
Onitsha must replace retrograde sexist ideas and questions with a generative
view of life that affirms Onitsha women.
The Power of Art
It makes
sense to ask, why is it that artists rather than economic planners or
development theorists are initiating this dialogue?
The
simple answer is that artists are visionaries. The late internationally
renowned artist Ben Enwonwu contends that it is “[t]hrough his or her work
the artist warns against what can
6
disturb or destroy the interest of the community and society.”
Evidently, the day-to-day matters of earning a living tend to distract
people who then become afflicted by existential blindness. Artists provide
the way out of this blindness because the artistic process is a process of
apprehension and metamorphosis. It is a process of grasping and translating
forms of thought and awareness into reality, forcing audiences to think
about and contend with new issues. Enwonwu provides a model of this during
his Negritude phase when “art is tied up with…political
motivations...phrased in political terms.
He states
that to free [one] self from the ties of foreign domination. . . . Negritude
meant...the revitalization of African force, both in art and in all forms of
creativity.” He demonstrates negritude by “painting with definite aims in
mind and…visions [that] were…characteristic of Black expression” (personal
7
communication 1989).
Although
publicly Enwonwu appears “wedded” to the Western view of art, one needs to
pierce the facade to get at the meaning of his cryptic comments about art,
and to see that his works are about things he hardly discusses. Installed on
the façade of the Nigerian Museum, Anyanwu has incorrectly been translated
as The Awakening, created as it was just before the independence of Ghana
and Nigeria. Many interpreters have correctly hypothesized that it is a
prophetic prognostication of the impeding wave of independence that swept
the continent in the decade of the 1960s. However, there is a missing
metaphysical dimension that explains the relationship of the
8
sculpture, Anyanwu, to the divine force, Anyanwu.
In
everyday colloquial terms the word 'anyanwu' refers to the sun. In standard
lexicon, the word is made up of two conjuncts 'anya' (eye) and 'anwu' light.
This literal translation “the eye of light” construes the sun as the eye of
light. The questions this raises are, Whose eye is the sun? And to whom does
it belong?
The
logical direction of these questions alerts us a) that more is being asked
than can be answered by our everyday framework; and b) that the meaning of
the standard lexicon must derive its intelligibility from elsewhere.
In After
God is Dibia, John Anenechukwu Umeh discusses how the everyday meaning of 'anyanwu'
(the sun) is parasitic on the
9
underlying esoteric framework of Igbo metaphysics (1997). On this framework,
'anya Anwu' is the “Eye of the Lord or Divinity of Light,” which is also the
Supreme Force or Chu Ukwu (the great Being/God) of anwu or light. Umeh
describes Anwu (Light) as another name for Agwu, the Holy Spirit that is a
part of Chi Ukwu. According to him, “[a]s Ose Obala, Agwu is God of Light (Anwu)
whose Eye is the Sun (Anyanwu). At times Agwu is also regarded as Anyanwu,
the Sun God” (114). On this metaphysical scheme Agwu, the Holy Spirit, is a
female force “Nne Nwanyi (the Old Lady of God, i.e., the Divine Lady Mother
Spirit.)” (111) as well as the Supreme Force of eternity and the ruler of
everlastingness (ibid).
When this
information is brought to bear on Enwonwu's sculpture, Anyanwu, we find the
artist speaking in two modes: at the superficial level for the public and at
the deeper esoteric level, for those who understand the symbolism and forms
of esoteric language. While the public level dwells on history and political
transformation, the esoteric level addresses some truths about the structure
of reality. The series of paintings and sculptures on this theme function as
divine truths. The sculpture, Anyanwu, correctly identifies as female the
divinity Anyanwu, the “Spirit of Light and of the Rising Sun,” who is both
Agwu and the Divine Old Lady of God.
Enwonwu's
is clear about the esoteric meaning of his work as his following comment
reveals. He described his sculpture, Anyanwu, as the “genetic forces
embodied in womanhood…flowering into the fullest stature of a nation, a
10
people.” This
description both recognizes the female character of his work, and of Anyanwu
the Divinity. Through his work, Enwonwu is telling us that emanation of the
God of Light are embodied in women. The sculpture, Anyanwu, not only marks
the “compelling idea of the spirit to be found in
11
Africa” it proclaims the centrality of women in the regeneration of the
future Africa. He seems to be suggesting that the dynamism of life, of
wisdom and of truth do not totally reside in men, as most nationalist male
activists and postcolonial African males assume. For him, a significant
dimension of the future of Africa rests on women because of the presence of
this God of Light residing in women folk.
In a
compelling way, Enwonwu's sculpture resists and undercuts the current
fashionable attempt to reconstruct societies in Africa as traditionally male
dominant and patriarchal. It is for this reason that his work asserts that
there is little historical validity to this masculinist view as well as to
the constructed histories being peddled by those with limited knowledge of
Igbo conceptual scheme. Anyanwu asserts in deep metaphysical language that
bringing women into the political process augurs well for the future of the
continent. Recognition of the mystical basis of his forms and of the
visionary character of his creativity establishes Enwonwu's linkage to an
older artistic universe in which the search for deeper spiritual fulfillment
is of paramount concern.
For him,
the concept of art for art's sake is hardly an intelligible option for
political actors, which is what every social being in a society is. In fact,
for him to opt for a nonpolitical position is really to make a political
choice, one that is steeped in irresponsibility, because it amounts to an
abdication of one's social and political rights.
Parting Words:
It is
fitting to end this essay with Enwonwu's evaluation of the works of younger
artists, if only to raise the metric bar and critically engage the artists
who are participating in this exhibition. Reflecting on the state of art two
years before he died, Enwonwu stated: Recent contemporary Nigerian art of
today is largely experimental. My general impression is that it is based
more on techniques than true lasting values. It will survive only if it
expresses the aspirations of African people, which in essence is their
yearnings for a better way of life. It must represent the intrinsic value
and the significance of life that is at the core of our political and social
being.
The
younger generation of artists are wonderful, wonderful explorers. Their use
of techniques is superb. They are not copying traditional forms which is a
very good thing. But they have not established a period, a definite period
of artistic evolution. They have not, as we did in our time, come up with
something very definite to say. Most of [the woks] do not have inspiration
even though they are technically strong. Unlike our art, which was born in
trying times, from the experiences of colonialism, the nature of the
experiences drove us to use art as an instrument of power and freedom. The
tragedy is that young Nigerian artists are enjoying the fruits of Western
techniques without saying something strong in their art. And it is not true
that there is nothing for them to say. Yes, in our time, we talked about
independence and African personality and dignity. But in these contemporary
times, there is a lot happening to Africa and Africans that should
appropriately be the subject of their works.
But they
are not saying anything about them. Some of them are, but not as many as one
would hope.
There is
a vacuum. There are techniques, but it is not sufficiently anchored to the
aspirations of people in Africa. If African art is to evolve these issues
must be addressed. The younger generation of artists must realize the power
of images, and what it can achieve within a political context. (Interview
with the author in 1992) In concluding, Olokoto: Songs of Chima is much more
than a mindless displaying of objects and colored canvases. At a serious
level, it calls on Onitsha Ado indigenes and residents to reflect on the
material, intellectual, and spiritual richness of their community. Although,
very much unacknowledged, these riches are the vital resources that must
become the engine of social transformation. As citizens, we must imagine a
better future for Onitsha and deploy enabling myths to pull us out of the
morass of decay.
Notes and References
-
Elizabeth Isichei,
The Ibo People and the
Europeans (New York: St.
Martin's Press, 1973), 101. Note that the Onitsha/Ogidi war was in 1857.
-
According to Crowther and Taylor,
“a good many houses were deserted at the east end of the town, where a
constant look-out was kept for the approach of the enemies, and the
inhabitants have removed to the west parts, which are safer (1859: 32
cited in Richard Henderson 1972, 101).” Richard Henderson
The King in Every Man
(New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1972).
-
Kenneth Onwuka Dike,
Origins of the Niger
Mission 1814-1891
(Ibadan: Ibadan University Press, 1962).
-
Reproduced in Elizabeth Isichei,
Igbo Worlds: An
Anthology of Oral Histories and Historical Descriptions
(Philadelphia: Institute for the
Study of Human Issues, 1978), 263.
-
See the account of John Witford “An
Audience with Obi Akazua (d.1872). Reproduced in The Onitsha Kingdom in
the Elizabeth Isichei,
Igbo Worlds: An Anthology
of Oral Histories and Historical Descriptions
(Philadelphia: Institute for the
Study of Human Issues, 1978), 256-259.
-
Ben Ewonwu “Problems of the African
Artist Today,”Présence
Africaine, vol. 8-10
(June-November 1956): 177-78.
-
For an extended treatment of this
issue see Nkiru Nzegwu, “Representational Axis: Cultural Realignment of
Enwonwu,”
Contemporary Textures: Multidimensionality in Nigerian Art
(Binghamton: ISSA, 1999), 139-185.
-
This analysis is fully developed in
“Contemporizing Nka: Mind, Medium and Spirit in the Creative Process,” a
chapter devoted to Enwonwu in a book length manuscript in progress on
Nigeria's modernity in the arts.
-
John Anenechukwu Umeh,
After God is Dibia,
vol 1 (London: Karnak House, 1997). The insight for most of this section
on shrines, spiritual energy, and
ndi dibia
have come from years of marriage
and association with those who are either knowledgeable in this area, or
are dibia.
-
West African Review
(London), no. 28, (352) 1957,
p.6.
-
Drum
(East Africa), May 1958, p. 37.
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