THROUGH THE PINHOLE OF HISTORY:
A Survey of
the Works of Uche Okeke
The works of Uche Okeke, spanning about five
decades, merit historical periodisation if they are to be appreciated as
possible data for his own personal development and that of the general art
tradition in Nigeria. Five major periods may be discerned in examining
Okeke’s works: the preZaria period, the Zaria period, the postZaria period,
the Nsukka period, and postNsukka periods. These may not come out as rigid
or water-tight compartments, but they are used here to throw light on his
studio project in an attempt to relate his works to time and geography where
necessary.
It is obvious that Okeke did not produce
his first art in Zaria. Zaria, with the presence of obvious peers (Grillo,
Onobrakpeya, Osadebe, Nwoko, Nwagbara, Odita, Akolo, etc.), must have been a
boon and a catalyst to Uche Okeke’s creative sensibilities, but it was not
the genesis. As a secondary school pupil in 1951, he had written two poems.
His removal from his immediate culture at that time (as he went to school in
the north of Nigeria) drove him to regularly inquire into some fundamental
aspects of Igbo tradition. At this point, his versatile mind was attracted
to all sorts of creative adventures, mainly taxidermy, drawing, and writing.
Little wonder he joined the Nigerian Field Society in 1955 and helped in
preparing an exhibition put together by Bernard Fagg and Dennis Duerden at
the museum in Jos.This, he claims, enabled him to see Enwonwu and Murray’s
works. Almost at the same time, he held his first solo exhibit in Jos Town
Council Hall, with the title Life in
Northern Nigeria.
When the show was repeated in Kaduna subsequently, Sir Ahmadu Bello, Premier
of Northern Nigeria, was one of the distinguished guests. As a young artist
who just left secondary school the previous year (1954), these exhibitions
must have left a deep impression on him. Of course, artists react
differently to their first real encounter with the art of exhibition, but
for the would-be committed ones, such an encounter would help to unlock the
soul and free the inner-most spirit on whose wings sustainable creativity
would ride. It is, perhaps, for this reason that Okeke, like the legendary
Asele, has continued to trudge in calculated steps, since 1957, along the
rocky art terrain in Nigeria.
Built around the intricacy
and unending possibilities in the line as a creative element, Okeke’s, art,
since his earliest period, has continued to interrogate the uli idiom
from diverse but complimentary standpoints. The introductory “lessons” he
received from his mother on the essence and significance of uli as
well as his own inquiry into Igbo, Nigerian, and African cultures have been
the resource base to which he has had to return now and again for
inspiration and spiritual renewal. Perhaps, one can say that this essence is
concealed in those sinuous lines that people his drawings and paintings as
well as in the mythopoeic imageries that enliven his poetry. Okeke’s works
in the preZaria period are marked by a palpable effort to adhere to the
creative principles of the academy. His subjects include flowers, landscape
(plate), rocks, human figures, and other mundane things which could
have caught the fancy of any other artist. If, as he claims, his mother had
taught him uli drawing by this time, the influence was still absent
in his work. Although works in this period foreshadow the liberal spirit
that was to become the hallmark of Uche Okeke’s works in the ensuing years,
in his Jos-Laminga Road I and II, and Way to Kagoma, one is
confronted by the brilliant essay by a young artist in the delineation of
form and perspective.
But the Zaria years were
to be a bit different. By now Okeke had done more reading; he had been
around a bit. Nationalism and the question of identity meant much more to
him than mere political issues. The attainment of independence was not just
a political matter but an imperative that should cut across every sphere of
the Nigerian world, including art and culture. Onabolu may have excelled in
European realism, but was it not necessary that African art should be fired
primarily by the African Weltanschauung and addressed to the African
world rather than engage in the frivolous attempt to out-do the European in
his own game? Some of these issues informed the centralising philosophy of
the Art Society, the informal group founded by Okeke and his peers while
studying at Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology, Zaria between
1957 and 1961.1 Members of the Art Society, by challenging of the
art curricula and status quo through their works and a common
Afrocentric ideology, were to become the vanguard of Nigerian modernism. But
it must be emphasised that the Zaria spirit was not altogether new in
itself. It was considerably a rekindled echo of earlier efforts by K. C.
Murray and his students, including Ben Enwonwu, to dip art in the brew of
local culture and philosophy. The significant difference between the Murray
group and the Zaria group, however, may only be located in the latter’s
positive radicalism.
Zaria, as it were,
did not necessarily change Uche Okeke’s thematic vision or his subject
matters. His work in this period, still centred on mundane scenes, though
more maturely executed. His three “northern landscapes” including the
City Gate, Kano
(plate ) Groundnut Pyramids,
Kano
(plate ) and the other two, and Life drawing
(plate ) are good examples.
However, 1959 and,
perhaps, 1960, were years of intense experimentation as evidenced in his
drawings (Profile of an Infant,
Zaria Hero, Man and Nature,
and Dandoka) where there is
noticeable effort by the artist to depart from the conventional. No doubt,
some of the works of 1959 show that he had already departed, but still the
drawings are attended by a certain rigidity and meticulousness which were to
disappear by 1961. In this regard a critical comparison of such 1958-59
works as Wrestling Beasts (plate ), Osa (plate ),
Mkpulumkpulu (plate ), Nwannenemelu (plate ) and 1962 works
Animal Head with Horns (plate ), Conversation (plate ),
and Head of a Prophet (plate ) betrays a movement away from
rigidity towards fluidity. In the latter works, spaces are no longer
carefully enclosed. Rather, positive and negative spaces co-mingle to evoke
imageries.
His graphic work apart,
the end of his Zaria Period and immediate postZaria Period were a very
hectic time for Uche Okeke. In 1960, he held a joint exhibition with Demas
Nwoko at British Council Centre, Ibadan. In October of the same year, he
co-organised with Bruce Onobrakpeya and Demas Nwoko, the Nigerian
Independence Exhibition at Victoria Island, Lagos. Not long after graduating
from Zaria in 1961, he painted a mural at the Mbari Centre, Ibadan where
Ulli Beier was presiding. For sometime in 1961 he worked briefly with
Cyprian Ekwensi who was then the Director of Information Service in Lagos.
Later the same year, Ulli Beier presented his (Okeke’s) works along with
those of Demas Nwoko at the Mbari Gallery, Ibadan and subsequently at the
Exhibition Centre, Marina, Lagos where Michael Crowther was then Director.
1961 ended for Okeke with a presentation of his works at the Biennale in Sao
Paulo, Brazil.
In 1962 he ran a studio
practice at his Cultural Centre in Kafanchan until the last quarter when he
travelled to Germany where he remained till late 1963. While in Germany, he
visited many galleries and museums and produced some important sets of works
on diverse themes. Besides the mosaic pieces he produced in the firm of
Franz Mayer, Munich, where he was studying stained glass and mosaic
techniques, he also made drawings, some of which were shown at Rott am Inn,
near Wasserburg. By 1964 after he had returned to Nigeria, his works
included illustrations for Achebe’s Things Fall Apart and works for
the exhibition he held with Ibrahim El Salahi (of Sudan) and Valente
Malangatana (of Mozambique) organised by the Committee for Cultural Freedom
in India and Pakinstan.2 His other exhibits in that year in Port
Harcourt and Enugu as well as the more prestigious group exhibit (African
Arts of Our Time) organised by Harmon Foundation in Philadelphia, USA
were all necessary ingredients in Uche Okeke’s maturity after he left Zaria.
But the pertinent question here, perhaps, would be, what kind of works did
he produce at this time? What kind of themes did he address, against the
background of all this exposure?
Most of his works at this
time addressed folkloric subjects. There are not many known works from 1961,
at least, not at this moment. But his oeuvre in 1962 betrays his dogged
search for clarity and essence. Besides his folkloric themes and mundane
subjects such as in plate , , and .one also notices an interest
in religion. Three Wise Men, Mother of Christ, Christ on the Cross,
Seated Christ, The Holy Family, all belong to the same period. Perhaps,
his Head of Christ (fig. ) and Christ on the Cross (fig. ),
two undated works in the U.S. National Archives (Harmon Foundation records)
were also produced around this time. Interestingly, they share the same
characteristics with his Madonna and the famous Stations of the
Cross, first produced in Germany in 1963 in mosaic and later repeated in
graphite in 1976 at Nsukka (see figs to and plates to ). Uche
Okeke’s interest in religion at this time and at other times in his career
is neither surprising nor special, given his family background. In his
article “The Christian Element in Uche Okeke’s Art,” Simon Ottenberg tries
to locate Okeke’s Christian thematic interests in the artist’s early
history:
His mother was a staunch Catholic, and at
Kafanchan, where Uche’s family lived when he was a young boy, she was a
churchgoer and an active member of a Catholic women’s organization. As a
boy, Uche attended church there. His father was an early Christain convert
at his family home in Nimo, a stronglhold of Catholicism, where Uche has
mostly lived since he left off teaching in 1986 at the University of
Nigeria, Nsukka. His father taught him how to serve at mass, and as a
child he attended several catholic schools. Both his father and mother had
Catholic funerals.
As early as 1953 he had made a sketch of
Christ. While training in art at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and
Technology at Zaria from 1957 to 1961, Uche created Christian themes, such
as “Madonna” (charcoal, 1960), and “Madonna and Child” (oil, 1961). He
also produced a large oil “Funeral Procession,” (1961), based on his
father’s funeral, in which the boy Uche, wears black clothes as a sign of
mourning, carries a cross, and is surrounded by his mother, family members
and their friends. Perhaps some of his few Christian works when at college
were influenced by his British teachers, to whom Christian images were
surely known … Uche’s involvement in Catholicism draws from a mainline
church of missionary origin in southeastern Nigeria in the 19th
Century. His attachment is to a well-established church, in the face of
the current boom in the country in fundamentalist, charismatic and “born
again” religions, which some younger southeastern Nigerian artists such as
Anthony Nwachukwu, the late Boniface Okafor and Nsikak Essien have been
interested in.3
Although Ottenberg tries to provide a
background here for Okeke’s Christian-focused works, his argument does not
suggest that Okeke was a deeply religious person. We may establish elements
of conservatism in his work vis-a-vis his religious disposition, but his
equally well-known interest in Igbo (traditional) religion and culture
probably suggests that he may be a less-than-staunch Catholic unlike his
late parents. Certainly, most of his works exploring folklore such as
Onwa Ikenga (plate ) and Nwannenemelu (plate ) when juxtaposed
with his Christian themes only evoke a dynamic persona and liberalised
psychology.
A painting (Landscape,
plate) and some prints from 1966 – 67 (see Figs and) demonstrate the
continuous distillation of content that attended Okeke’s works. All but one
have Christian undertone, but this has been dexterously concealed in the
masterly economy of means. Although they are all simplistic subjects,
paradoxically the simplicity of form and technique lifts the works up and
above the commonplace. They all approximate poetry of a special, graphic
kind. In looking at the Savannah Landscape (although it is not
religious), the imagery in Psalm 114:4 reverberates: “The Mountain skipped
like rams/the hills like lambs.” Not only that. The horizon, punctuated with
vegetation, undulates in joyful cadence.
This character might
have remained in Okeke’s works in subsequent years, but as an Igbo in
war-time Nigeria, 1967 to 1970 must have been a gloomy time for Okeke. He
shared his time and energy between creating drawings and paintings, writing
poetry, and working for his new country, Biafra. He served in various
committees of the embattled country and developed a number of projects
towards the amelioration of the prevailing harsh sociology resulting from
the war. Such programmes included exhibitions, dance, and drama. But it is
not these that concern this study; it is his graphic works of this period
that are of interest . His drawing of refugees, Osondu, is a
totalising comment on the trauma of war with the implications of
psychological and physical displacement. It is a portrait of Biafra – his
people – hounded by fate and fleeing from an accident of history and
politics. It is to these hapless people that much of Okeke’s work and energy
was to be devoted in the gory three years of the war. Some three surviving
posters (figs., and) done in serigraphy, are an earnest of his commitment
to his people. They mirror the ugly side of the war, albeit from a Biafran
viewpoint. The final part of the war years (1969 – 1970) was spent by Okeke
in Germany where he held exhibitions, gave some lectures and completed
manuscripts for two dramas Ekeama, an ogbanje Drama and Uno Aja
which he had begun the previous year. He also wrote a radio play (A Long
Night) for the voice of Germany in Cologne. Perhaps, his most important
show at this time was Kunst and Kunsthandwerk aus
Biafra (Arts and Craft from Biafra)
which toured cologne, Essen, Dortmund, Dusseldorf, Trier, and Munich. Beside
this must be placed the Gedichte aus
Biafra (Poems from Biafra)
published in Berlin, for more composite appreciation of his
war time project.
The cessation of the war
in 1970 certainly ushered in a new era in Okeke’s career. Leaving Germany,
it is at Nsukka that he re-emerged in 1971 to head the Department of Fine
and Applied Arts at University of Nigeria. By the time he came, Chike
Aniakor and Obiora Udechukwu were already there as teacher and student
respectively. Like him, they had a Zaria background. Aniakor was a Zaria
graduate. Udechukwu had spent two years as a student in Zaria before the
civil war started. He had scampered to the east, like most Igbo, during the
war and transferred to University of Nigeria, Nsukka in 1970. As I have said
elsewhere,
It must be noted that what happened at Nsukka in those days
between Okeke, Aniakor, and Udechukwu was not a meeting of a god and two
acolytes. It was rather a coming together of creative minds, all committed
to creating new vistas in the thinking of artistic thought and in the
history art in Nsukka and beyond. 4
The three artists and a
few others who happened to be at Nsukka in the 1970s became the nucleus of
what was to blossom into the Nsukka “school” in subsequent years. Not only
did these artists help to turn art and aesthetic theory in new directions,
their approach to art was no less a boon to Nigerian modernism than was the
precocious manifestations at Zaria in the 1950s. The 1997 exhibition of
works of “Nsukka artists” organised by Simon Ottenberg at the Smithsonian
Institution in Washington in 1977 testifies to the magnitude and depth of
the philosophy of ‘Nsukka artists’ and the triumph of that philosophy in the
history of Nigerian art.
What the above recitals
suggest is that the story of modern uli for which Nsukka has been
known is not the story of Uche Okeke’s life. Yet his centrality in the story
may not be denied. This is certainly a logical consequence of his precedence
over the other artists in terms of age and art training and his earlier
encounter with uli. Not only that. Being the head of the Art
Department at Nsukka, he must have had the opportunity to weave his “natural
synthesis” philosophy into the departmental curriculum. His other positions
as Dean of faculty and Director of the Institute of African Studies could
have also enhanced some of his activities at Nsukka. But to write a history
of uli without the important contributions of such artists as Obiora
Udechukwu, Chike Aniakor, Chuka Amaefuna, and a few others would amount to a
miscarriage of history.
Uli
in the Nsukka Period was not
new to Okeke. The environment, with its postwar enthusiasm and the attendant
creative intensity, must have encouraged the artist to cultivate a fresh
insight in his work. It would be wrong, therefore, to call this period and
the subsequent one “Uli Period” or Nimo Period as Uche Okeke himself has
curiously done, since the uli element had been central in his works
since the Zaria years. His major works in the early Nsukka Period include a
number of commissions (among which is the Archbishop’s throne for the Holy
Trinity Cathedral, Onitsha), book illustrations and some paintings. For
classic examples we may turn to Tales of Land of Death, his book of
Igbo folktales with which he won “Illustrator of the Year Award” of the
National Commission for UNESCO in 1971. Illustrations in this book (plates)
also underline his refreshed vision of uli as could be seen in his
sparse deployment of colour and other elements. This attitude can also be
discerned in another set of four paintings done in 1976. His 1975/76
sketches for the (second) Stations of the Cross commissioned by then
Monsignor S. Ezeanya (now Archbishop of Onitsha) for St. Peter’s Chaplainry,
University of Nigeria, also offer a glimpse into the dynamics of his project
at this time. The major character is the noticeable reinvention of form in a
concrete but stylised approach. The hope and aspiration of this era, not
only for himself, but also for the environment, are perhaps personified in
the colour orchestration of the four folkloric paintings already cited which
evoke and epitomise the simplicity of uli (traditional) wall
painting.
It is very difficult to
delineate Okeke’s works in this period and the postNsukka Period along
thematic lines. In fact, besides the war years when he focused on the pain
and anguish of war, Okeke can be said to have been encircled by the spirit
of Asele, that mythical uli designer whose skill and prowess
defied mortality. It is in this mould that Okeke’s penchant for folklore and
tradition could be located. In fact, a simplistic study of Okeke’s portfolio
may consist in the division of his oeuvre into Christian and
traditional-folkloric themes, that is, discounting the war years. When we
talk about Nsukka artists as social critics/commentators, it is not in the
stable of Uche Okeke that we should look, but in the projects of his
liveliest colleagues such as Udechukwu and Aniakor and their teaming
students and followers in the 1980s and 1990s.
Okeke’s postNsukka Period
appears to be less active than the others, as far as studio work is
concerned. On retreating to Nimo after his fifteen-year academic sojourn at
Nsukka, he has devoted much of his time to the development of Asele
Institute (which he started in Kafanchan as a student in 1958 and later
relocated to Enugu and, finally, Nimo). It is here that he has been
exercising the architect in him, a Renaissance-artist quality that he
commonly shares with Demas Nwoko. From the 1980s until the present, apart
from major international and other shows in which his works have been
featured, there are no solo exhibits by Okeke which could have enabled
scholars and critics to engage him more critically and properly feel the
pulse of the postNsukka period.
But he has continued to
remain relevant, largely for the pioneering role played by him and his
peers, and the many gaps they filled in the early history of art in Nigeria.
To this extent, any objective appreciation of Okeke’s import in the modern
art arena in Nigeria must not be divorced from the realities of his age with
all its possibilities and limitations. There is no doubt that much of his
postulations and those of his colleagues deserve to be critically
re-engaged, but I refuse to agree fully with the assertion that “it is time
to displace (natural) synthesis as a theoretical and critical concept in
analysis of modern Nigerian art since it is based on an erroneous notion of
autonomous spheres of influence in terms of cultures and societies”5.
You do not throw away the baby with the bath water, nor can you claim a new
birth by re-christening an old child. While we seek for “alternative
theoretical bases for evaluating contemporary Nigerian art,” we must also
engage Okeke’s generation of artists more intimately, so that in trying to
become bona fide citizens of the global village we do not raze and trample
on the homestead. Perhaps Okeke’s personality and work may be best
appreciated and understood in the context of his essay, “Natural Synthesis”,
written in Zaria in October 1960, about a year before his graduation, where
he declares inter alia:
The artist is essentially an individual
working within a particular social background and guided by the philosophy
of life of his society. I do not agree with those who advocate
international art philosophy; I disagree with those who live in Africa
and ape European artists. Future generations of Africans will scorn their
efforts. Our new society calls for a synthesis of old and new… One can
only be oneself, I think through deeper understanding of one’s local
traditions. 6
Okeke was not preaching
isolationism. His fifty-year practice so far does not demonstrate
isolationism, as his wide exposure has not beclouded his inner indigenous
vision but only invigorated it. In calling for the fusion of “old and new”
as a guiding principle for the Nigerian artist of his time, he was not
saying anything that was never said before. He was merely enunciating the
germs of great societies. For no dynamic society separates its desire
entirely from its memory, no society attains greatness by sterilising itself
and adorning itself completely in borrowed robes. For all progressive
societies, the past and present still remain the stepping-stone to a
promising future.
Thus the present
exhibit of Okeke’s works seeks neither to reaffirm synthesis nor to
“displace” it. The exhibition and all the commemorative events, do not aim
to show how good a draughtsman or painter or otherwise Uche Okeke is or has
been. The centralising purpose is to celebrate five decades of pioneering
work and, by so doing, to foreground his invaluable contributions to the
history and development of art in these parts, and, perhaps, rekindle a new
and more professionalised enthusiasm in an art scene that is, in recent
years, dangerously inclined to the pedestrian, the banal, and the
mediocre.
Notes
1
The Art Society at N.C.A.S.T, Zaria was not a formal association as such. It
was a fraternity of like minds and may not have operated along the terms and
image in which contemporary scholars and writers would generally represent
it. Little wonder it did not survive Okeke and his group in Zaria nor
transcend the walls of Zaria after 1961, with the graduation of its
founders/members.
2
Uche Okeke’s encounter with Salahi is very important because
the latter was also interested in the line and in Islamic calligraphy as
creative idioms. It is also important to mention that Salahi had exhibited
at Mbari in Ibandan in November 1961, and there is no doubt that Okeke saw
the exhibition. It is possible that these encounters might have strengthened
Okeke’s spirit in his own romance with uli which had started way back
in 1956. Salahi is not a direct influence on him. But it is natural that
both artists should benefit from each other in the 1964 encounter. See
Ikwuemesi, C.C. Uli as a creative Idiom: A Study of Udechukwu, Aniakor,
and Obeta (unpublished B.A. Thesis, Department of Fine and Applied Arts,
University of Nigeria, Nsukka) p.92.
3
Simon Ottenberg, 2003. “The Christian Element in Uche Okeke’s
Art,” in C.Krydz Ikwuemesi (ed), The Triumph of Asele: an Anthology on
Uche Okeke and Modern Art in
Nigeria.
Lagos: Pendulum Art Gallery. But I do not believe that the late Boniface
Okafor was necessarily interested in “fundamentalist, charismatic and
“born-again” religions” as Ottenberg avers. Being a Ruscicrucian, Okafor in
most of his paintings, essentially aspired to the ideas of mysticism and
metaphysics.
4
C. Krydz Ikwuemesi, (forthcoming.) The Rediscovery of
Tradition. Enugu: Citadel Publishing
5
Sylvester Okwunodu Ogbechie, 2003. “Textiles, Textualities
and Wood in Ndidi Dike’s Sculpture,” in Ndidi Dike, Totems and Signposts
(Exhibition Catalogue), p.15
6
Uche Okeke, 1982. Art in Development – A Nigerian Perspective. Nimo
and Minneapolis: Asele Institute and AfricanAmerican Cultural Centre, pp.2 –
3.
C. Krydz Ikwuemesi
teaches painting and draughtsmanship at University of Nigeria. He is a
member of the Administrative Council of the Congress for Cultural Action in
West Africa (CCAWA) and was recently appointed President of The Art
republic, an art organisation committed to social re-engineering
through art, especially the work of children and young artists.
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