Nigeria Content Online

Ngugi wa
Thiong’o’s childhood memoir, ‘Dreams in a Time of War’ is quite simply
enchanting. Every thinking human being should have a copy of this
wondrous memoir. Ngugi returns with full force to the playground of
ideas and shames those who suspect he is a spent force. He puts
together many ingredients of a lived experience and serves the world a
delightful stew of recollections. It is impossible to put this book
down. The man can tell a story.

‘Dreams in a Time
of War’ is a graceful, moving ode to the relentless pursuit of
enlightenment by a child born into the war that passes for life in
sub-Saharan Africa. The writers Barack Hussein Obama, Chinua Achebe,
Toyin Falola and Wole Soyinka have explored the same theme with
uncommon eloquence and pathos. Ngugi simply adds a stunning, powerful
salvo to that repertoire of musings.

This is a memoir
narrated simply, prose shorn of gimmickry and most importantly,
bitterness. Ngugi has mellowed and this attitude provides graceful
wings to a soaring delivery. He also performs the very sly trick of
making the reader bear the burden of becoming really angry about all of
the unnecessary roughness that Africans of his generation had to bear
just to live through the day. Brilliant. Even the title says a lot
about Ngugi’s generosity of spirit. Upon reading the memoir, a mere
mortal would be forgiven for calling it ‘Nightmares in a Time of War’.

Born in 1938 in
pre-colonial Kenya, there were so many anxieties hovering around the
writer as a child: The descent of his father into despair and
decrepitude, marital abuse, separation and the rejection of Ngugi and
his siblings on his mother’s side; the brothers’ struggles for survival
during World War II and the Mau Mau uprising; and the challenge of
holding on to family bonds as he and his mother coped with trauma and
tragedy. These stresses shaped Ngugi’s childhood and his worldview. Yet
by all accounts he proved to be a star student.

This is a highly
disciplined documentary of Ngugi’s early childhood. We see a precocious
child weaving tales of his childhood experiences and the tortured
history of his clan with tales from the Bible. The sense of wonder his
ancestors must have felt upon stumbling into a modern city like Nairobi
makes the reader gasp with the same emotion. “Before their eyes were
stone buildings of various heights, paths crowded with carriages of
different shapes and people of various colours from black to white.
Some of the people sat in carriages pulled and pushed by black men.
These must be the white spirits, the mizungu, and this, the Nairobi
they had heard about as having sprung from the bowels of the earth. But
nothing had prepared them for the railway lines and the terrifying
monster that vomited fire and occasionally made a blood curdling cry.”

Ngugi fashions a
gorgeous tapestry of stories that pulls together all the racial and
ethnic relationships and tensions in pre-colonial Kenya, the result is
a carefully scripte oral history fused with the written. Clear-eyed
observations of the human condition politely but insistently hammer
home crystal clear conclusions. This is not only about Kenya; it
connects the dots of our shared humanity everywhere in the globe. There
are few books that I have read in my lifetime that radiated from a
single locus and connected all these dots everywhere without losing
their focus.

The author’s
relationship with his mother Wanjiku wa Ngugi is exceedingly moving. It
compares to Obama’s narrative about his mother Stanley Ann Dunham
Soetero (Dreams From My Father). They shared the same traits: that
gentle push for excellence and a fierce nurturing spirit. Throughout
the book, Ngugi’s mother is the guiding spiritual force holding the
book together. This is motherhood at its best peeping fiercely through
the mean legs of patriarchy. In return, Ngugi doted on his mother and
lived to please her. We also see strong similarities in temperament
between Ngugi’s father and Obama’s Kenyan father.

The book’s editing
is a delight, kudos to the publishers, Pantheon Books of New York.
There are minor quibbles: the chapters are strangely not numbered and
it was tough keeping up with the cast of characters in Ngugi’s clan. A
genealogical chart would have been helpful. Regardless, this is an
important book, full of authentic history. It reminds us that we should
not take for granted the valiant struggles of our warriors of old. They
fought the good fight, for us and the land. They were not perfect
people, but they had heart. May this book inspire us to pursue anew the
dream that our ancestors fought and died for.

My marriage therapist has been married seven times to absolute
jerks (her bitter emphasis) and she has divorced their sorry behinds (her
bitter emphasis) each time. It never fails, just before we start my therapy
session, she assures me that men are beasts and then she starts to cry
inconsolably. Why do I have a marriage therapist?

I don’t know, it came with my health care package, well, until
my brother Bwana Obama came to ruin it with “health care reform!” Every married
person in America should have a therapist, especially the men. Marriage in
America is hard. Here, men actually have to do things around the house, nothing
is taboo, nothing! I know this Ndigbo-American who has an Ozo Chieftaincy
title, his wife is always asking him to stop at the store and buy her sanitary
pads (gulp!).

It is true. This one day, I was riding around with Chief Ozo
(not his real name) doing manly things like looking for a cheap bottle of
Chilean Malbec when Chief suddenly said, “nna men, abeg mek we go store, I wan
buy pad!” I was surprised, but you know this is America, anything can happen.
Tufiakwa! So I asked suspiciously, “Ehn, chief, why you want pad? Abi your
period don come?”

He explained that it was for his wife, she was fond of making
him buy un-Chiefly things like pads and lip gloss. So we dashed into the store,
quickly grabbed one box and raced to the aisle to buy it quickly before anybody
would notice. The sales lady at the counter could not find the price on the
sanitary pad, so, what does she do, this wicked lady? She gets on the store’s
loudspeaker and loudly yells for help while waving the brightly coloured box of
pads over our heads: “SANITARY PADS! PRICE CHECK ON SANITARY PADS!” We were
mortified but it is the law in America, you can’t buy something without the
price! Chief Ozo is no longer my friend.

My dad Papalolo is a great marriage counselor. I have fond
memories of him laying the charm thickly on my mother Mamalolo (and come to
think of it, on every woman that met his roving eyes). He knew what to say and
he was generous with sweet nothings. Women liked that. He would say absolute
nonsense like, “ah my princess I am going to make you omelette today, with
sausage on the side, this your mouth is so pretty, it is not for eating eba!” I
swear I am not making this up; he would pluck things from the bush he called
“flowers” and bring them into the house, present it to Mamalolo and say, “here,
for you, my dear!” I think he had been watching too many oyinbo and Nollywood
romance movies.

My father observed that I was a bookworm who seemed interested
only in the company of fellow men, reading things that didn’t have pictures of
naked women in them. So this one day he asked me, “enh, my son, you are always
with other men, reading books, don’t you like women? Tufiakwa! Olorun ma je!”
My father always lapses into Igbo and Yoruba epithets under stress. I told him
that I love women but I am tongue tied in their presence. He said, “Ah, my son,
it is easy, tell them nice things! If they are pretty, tell them, they like
that! They will smile at you and once a woman smiles at you enh, you are half
way there. Even if she is not pretty, tell her she is pretty! She will smile
and then she will be pretty! All women are pretty. Here is a bottle of Gulder
beer. Drink it, it will loosen your tongue and you won’t be too shy to talk to
women!” I drank it. He was right. Gulder loosens tongues.

Papalolo also taught me never to appreciate the beauty of another woman in
my wife’s presence. He would say, “My son, never, ever, tell your wife that
another woman is beautiful. You might as well just shoot yourself. If you are
driving and madam is by your side and you see a beauty, don’t let your jaw drop
like a fool. Immediately start saying things that are the opposite of what is
going through your head, “Enh, Mamalolo look at that ugly woman, look at her
fat head! Look at her big stomach like Obasanjo! Look at her legs like
toothpicks, Mamalolo, there is no woman as pretty as you, Allah!” I am not sure
Mamalolo was fooled though. One day we were in the car in a go-slow in Benin
City when this gorgeous Naija man looking like Denzel Washington sauntered by
flexing his fine muscles. Mamalolo got excited, hit Papalolo in the arm
severally and cackled: “Enh, Papalolo! Look at that ugly man, look at his fat
head! Look at his big stomach like Obasanjo! Look at his legs like toothpicks!
Papalolo, there is no man as handsome as you, Allah!” Papalolo did not smile.

Bruce Onobrakpeya shows us round the Niger Delta Cultural
Centre, venue of the annual Harmattan Workshop he started in Agbarha Otor,
Delta State, in 1998. The workshop is now in its 12th year (“we missed a year,
in 2001,” he tells us).

“Oladapo Afolayan introduced stonework in 1998,” Onobrakpeya
informs as he leads a tour of designated workshop spaces for the various visual
art disciplines. In a couple of weeks at the centre, an artist can produce up
to six pieces; one is donated to the Bruce Onobrakpeya Foundation (BOF), which
organises the workshops. Stone pieces from previous years are on display, but
the stonework is now done in the open air outside, as it generates a lot of
dust. We are shown the Printmaking section, which is large, because “we need
water, we need space to move around.”

The Onobrak Etching Press, proudly Nigerian in manufacture,
stands to one side. University of Benin MFA students were standard participants
in previous years, but not now, as there’s no one taking Printmaking at UNIBEN.
Touching a kiln used for firing ceramics, Onobrakpeya says, “We’ve toyed with
ceramics in the past.”

How Harmattan started

The Harmattan Workshop is “a retreat where artists can meet,
think and share ideas. If you can get good ideas, those ideas can go into the
art.” Onobrakpeya was inspired to start the programme after his own “positive
experience” in workshops of the past. As a student at the Zaria School of Art
in the 50s, he bowed to “peer pressure” and studied Painting, which was the
“respectable” thing to do.

Things changed when University of Ibadan Extra Mural Lecturer
Ulli Beier and Michael Crowder (then Minister of Information, also in charge of
the Exhibition Centre, Marina, Lagos) made contact with the Zaria Group.
Onobrakpeya later attended art workshops organised by Beier in Osogbo, Ife and
Ibadan in the 60s. A nine-day printmaking workshop in Osogbo had a profound
effect on the young artist. “My eyes were opened,” he says. “It changed my
direction. Similarly, an artist’s direction can be changed [at the Harmattan
Workshop]. And if you have not found your direction, you can find it in a place
like this.”

Looking back, Onobrakpeya reflects that, “Beier and the
influence of the late [Susanne] Wenger were very important in my development as
an artist.” In 1975, he attended the Haystack Mountain School of Art and Craft
in Maine, US. “I realised that people, whether they’ve gone to a normal art
school or not, can still benefit from the workshop environment.” Haystack was
the inspiration for the layout of the Niger Delta Cultural Centre, right down
to the accommodation chalets constructed from wood. “The scenario is that we
wait for ‘Oyinbos’, but I thought, why don’t we do it ourselves?”

Keeping BOF going

BOF’s workshops are extremely popular, not just with artists but
with local women who come in droves to learn jewellery making. “We remove
poverty from people’s lives. Those who learn jewellery and textiles, they go
and eat with [the skills]. We employ local people. When the place is buzzing
with activity, the locals see, they see the calibre of people. There was a time
Agbarha Otor was fighting for a local government. They stood up proudly and
said: ‘we have this, we have that, and above all, we have a museum.'”

BOF is a non-profit organisation that relies on funding and
donations. Ford Foundation, once a mainstay of funding, has not supported BOF
in the last two years, the policy focus having changed to museums. Some support
comes from art organisations like Arthouse Contemporary, Terra Kulture and
OYASAF, while galleries like Signature and Mydrim sell BOF artworks. Proceeds
from the sale of Onobrakpeya’s art also go into the running of the centre, but
more funding is needed to keep the centre going. “This place will only continue
to go on if the alumni will contribute to help it grow,” he says. Artists Kunle
Adeyemi and Adeola Balogun are among the alumni helping to facilitate workshop
sections in 2010.

The present and the past

There are three sessions this year, as well as two weeks in
August when artists can work unsupervised. BOF plans to seek UNESCO sponsorship
for artist residencies from all over the world. Onobrakpeya urges for an
exhibition to showcase the fact that Nigerians have been creating art for 50
years, noting that it was the Trade Fair Exhibition that brought a crop of artists
including himself to prominence during independence.

The 2010 Harmattan Workshop was billed as a platform for
discussing the gains and failures of art production since 1960. There are
reminisces about art patronage in the 60s, especially the Thursday-Thursday
Show on McEwen in Ikoyi, Lagos, where Jean Kennedy Wolford opened up her home
to showcase artists, free of charge. “On Thursdays, I would go and they would
put lots of money in my hands and I thought: my God, I could live on art! £35
was a lot of money then,” Onobrakpeya recalls.

A gallery for
contemporary art

The Niger Delta Cultural Centre – set in scenic countryside with
an outlay of chalets for participants and guests – is only Phase 1 of BOF’s
plans. An adjoining seven-acre land has been acquired for the construction of
proper workshop sections, as well as exhibition and conference facilities.

The four-level building that serves as the main set-piece on the
site, was designed by Demas Nwoko in his beloved impluvium style; and was built
from 1989 to 1998. “The advantage of this is light and air,” Onobrakpeya says.
Everywhere one looks, there are artworks in every medium, made by former alumni
of the Harmattan Workshop; prominent artists (Uche Okeke, Olu Amoda et al)
along with a sizeable collection by the master printmaker himself.

“We don’t just limit ourselves to what is locally available
alone; we get the best from elsewhere as well,” he explains. Where original
artworks are not available, their prints are shown. The Niger Delta Cultural
Centre displays prints of Susanne Wenger’s Osun Grove sculpture, Yeye Mopo:
“This is our lady who just died – fantastic!” he says of the work. A wall
section has photographic reproductions of German printmaking, Cezanne and Henry
Moore: “To get the pieces is expensive, but the photography of them is an art
in itself.” Perkins Foss’ exhibition of Urhobo art, ‘Where Gods and Mortals
Meet’ is also given a poster display. When we come to a 1972 picture of The
Ovie of Orughworun, we see the connection between the many adornments worn by
the subject and Onobrakpeya’s installations. The artist readily concedes the
connection, saying, “I love this [image]. Some of this has reechoed in my work.
This is installation in itself; different things put together can become art.”

Aside from hosting workshops, “The aim [of the Niger Delta
Cultural Centre] is to create a gallery for contemporary art. You don’t have to
go to a museum in Lagos or Abuja to see these things,” he insists. Also
displayed are objects that are fast becoming relics, including: instruments and
utensils from bygone eras, finials for staffs used by the Ogboni cult and other
totems. “We are losing so much of our material culture. We collect these things
not just for fun, but as a record, to remind people.”

The perennial artist

Art historian Dele Jegede has said of Bruce Onobrakpeya, “He was
the curious wanderer, the quiet but discerning inquirer who participated in Ru
Van Rossem’s printmaking workshop in Ibadan in 1963 and latched upon a medium
that suited his spirit.” The experimental artist incorporates car and computer
parts in his work. He explains, “From childhood, I’ve been fascinated with the
inside of an engine. People don’t see the engine, it’s covered up. But the
inside of an engine is beautiful.”

When someone observes that ‘Skyscraper’, made from engine parts,
is futuristic, Onobrakpeya replies that such works are only futuristic in the
sense that, “In our environment, people don’t appreciate these things.” He is
attached to them all the same. ‘Akporode Shrine’, his plastographs first
exhibited in 1995, take their inspiration from traditional shrines. Onobrakpeya
says, “In Yorubaland and Edo, the art of making a shrine is aesthetic. The
priest derives pleasure in putting these things together.” In performance mode,
he picks up a ‘fly-whisk’ art-piece from the Akporode Shrine installation and
swishes it about. Seeing a camera, he puts down the whisk, joking that, “They
will call me Baba Olorisa!”

We pass the ‘Jewels of Nomadic Images’ installation inspired by
Fulani herdsmen and the Opon Ifa (divination board), and proceed upwards to the
topmost floor which contains massive paintings by Onobrakpeya. The print-works
echo strongly. “The paintings come out of the prints,” he explains. “The prints
become studies and the paintings come out of them.” But even a master
printmaker has his limitations; most of the paintings here have never been
exhibited. “They don’t’ see me as a painter,” he says.

Into the future

Asked about the preservation of art in the non air-conditioned
rustic atmosphere of the centre, Onobrakpeya replies, “They preserve as well as
anything preserves in this environment, humans, trees… We have a problem with
white ants; we are always working to drive them away. We have a problem with
the weather. But it is all part of the process. White ants, weather; they
create patina.”

At the end of each workshop, Onobrakpeya and his helpers ask
themselves if they should go on or fold up. “The answer is: continue, because
we are doing a good job. Since we started, we now have about three people who
have [initiated] foundations that run workshops,” he said, citing Peju
Layiwola, copper repousse artist Bola Oyetunji and leather man Obi Leda (Obiora
Onuoye). Proof that BOF’s work is relevant, Onobrakpeya argues. “People have
participated, they’ve gone from being just small artists to being recognised
artists. The local people [and those] elsewhere now accord some respect to art,
because of this place.”

As Bruce Onobrakpeya, 77, heads downstairs in his labyrinthine centre built
for art, the questions inevitably turn to what will happen to this place when
he is no longer around. The master printmaker says those who come after him can
do as they please. He spreads out his hands as if to encompass all the artworks
and declares, “I have lived my life with them, gone through the process and I
have found it meaningful. If future generations don’t think so, I don’t care.”