DREGS OF A TRAUMATIC HISTORY

Distant painful memories of a best forgotten past incarnate in Tobenna Okwuosa’s most recent body of works, which were featured last year at the inaugural African Culture and Design Festival in Lagos. Okechukwu Uwaezuoke reports

VISUAL ARTS

Disturbingly evocative, the works proclaim the artist’s real intent without much frills. Yet, somewhere in the midst of the clutter of photorealistic images, words and motifs, an idea swirls up and hurls itself at the flustered viewer. Tobenna Okwuosa’s works have actually always seethed with arcane expressions. But they have in the past concerned themselves more with inscrutable motifs than they have with photorealistic images, which are more easily grasped by viewers.

“Before, You Mother Idoto Naked I Stand...”, proclaims the title of one of the works, a 2015 acrylic and marker on canvas offering. Borrowed from an iconic poem by Christopher Okigbo, this title corroborates the depiction of a naked, well-sculpted, muscular man backing the viewer with both arms stretched out. His form, which evokes a cross (is this a veiled allusion to the Christian crucifix?), is embossed in a triangle, whose tip points downwards and which is superimposed on a patterned backdrop featuring clusters of three circles. The tip of the triangle seems to point to a thumbnail replica of the naked man placed above more lines from this poem.

“Land of the Rising Sun”, another work, depicts a crouching Biafran soldier, clutching a rifle in his left arm and pointing towards a direction with his right hand. A Biafran two-penny postage stamp floats behind his head while the words, MILITARY ZONE, KEEP OFF, flare menacingly before him. Below it, the lyrics of the Biafran anthem beside a miniature photograph of Biafran soldiers in a war front, among other things, form horizontal strips. It is an oil, acrylic, photographs and marker on canvas work, which was produced in 2016.

The odd work among the lot, “The Coming and Going that Goes on Forever...”, is an apparent interpolation in both form and content. 2013-17. The mixed media on canvas four-panel, more conceptual and inscrutable in its presentation than the others, is an obvious allusion to the reality of reincarnation. Hence, its relation to the other works is not immediately obvious. But further reflection lifts the veil on not just on man’s repeated earth-lives, but also on the cycle of errors.

Still, Okwuosa’s From Historical Facts to Poetic Truths seethes with an obvious political message. And beneath this message, lurks secrets of a distant past... Detritus of this past, dredged up in the collective consciousness, unfurls the ghosts of Nigeria’s fratricidal war, which haunt it now and then with painful memories. Hence, Vice President Yemi Osinbajo had immediately observed: “This is political.”

This was at the artist’s stand during the inaugural edition of the African Culture and Design Festival (ACDF) held last year from November 9 to 12 at the Federal Palace Hotel in Victoria Island, Lagos.

“I responded in the affirmative, and further said that I was more interested in it as a historical subject,” Okwuosa recalls. “I said to him that I am not in support of the call for secession. I emphasised that our diversity is a great advantage that we have not explored sufficiently.”

Nigeria’s civil war, in his opinion, is an issue that should not be swept under the carpet. Thus, grappling with it, unsavoury though it may be, becomes imperative. For this reason, he remains grateful to Bisi Silva (the curator of the Modern and Contemporary African Arts Pavilion of the festival) for her invitation, which gave him the opportunity to show this body of works, he titled From Historical Facts to Poetic Truths. “The war incidences are the historical facts, while the poetic truths are works based on Christopher Okigbo’s poems,” he explains in his Artist Statement.

To produce this body of works, the Niger Delta University lecturer referenced Wole Soyinka’s civil war memoir, The Man Died, Chinua Achebe’s There Was a Country: A Personal History of Biafra, and Christopher Okigbo’s Labyrinths. By embarking on this project, he had hoped to generate “critical and honest discourses on the war”.

As, he puts it: “I am aware that those who fail to know and remember their history, will not be able to deal with their present challenges, and will certainly have a more chaotic future. It is sad that we know a lot about Western history, but very little about ours. Our history must be taught in schools!”

Okwuosa’s offering at the ACDF was just one, among many efforts, to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the declaration of Biafra, which was marked with public lectures, talks, and exhibition projects, in different parts of the world.

Perhaps, the most vociferous and significant among these commemorative activities was Olu Oguibe’s “Biafra Time Capsule”, an installation of books, magazines, documents and materials related to the Biafra Civil War, at the EMST–National Museum of Contemporary Art, Athens as part of the build-up to Documenta XIV in Kassel, Germany. Oguibe was also the convener of “Biafra’s Children: A Survivors’ Gathering”, which brought together the likes of Faith Adiele, Phillip U. Effion, Okey Ndibe, Vivian Ogbonna and E.C. Osondu, among others, to share their stories of the war, which claimed three million lives.

There were also two other commemorative events – one in Toronto, Canada and the other in Abuja. The Toronto event, titled “50th anniversary of the Biafra Genocide”, held on June 9, 2017 and had Dr. Arua Oko Omaka as its keynote speaker. The Abuja conference, held about two weeks earlier on May May 25, was titled “Memory and Nation Building, Biafra: 50 Years After”. Speakers at that event included the former President Olusegun Obasanjo and Professor Yemi Osibanjo (who, at that time, was Acting President).

So, besides Oguibe’s art installation at the Documenta XIV, Okwuosa’s offering at the ACDF was the only visual arts project that thematised the Nigeria-Biafra Civil War in commemoration to its 50th anniversary. The multiple award-winning artist attributes this to a general lack of interest in political and historical issues among his colleagues in the contemporary Nigerian art scene. He alludes to a similar observation made by the British-born artist and curator of Caribbean descent, Eddie Chambers.

Chambers was in Lagos in 2000 as a guest speaker of one of the Institute of Visual Arts and Culture (IVAC) lecture series. Bisi Silva, the IVAC lectures convener, documented Chambers’s opinion in a newspaper article, titled “The ‘New’ Face of Contemporary Nigerian Painting?”, which was published in the September 20, 2009 edition of Next on Sunday. “Eddie Chambers... had the opportunity to visit local galleries and interact with some artists,” she wrote. “While he found the level of activity within the art sector considerably dynamic, he was nonetheless dismayed by the stasis of artistic output, considering it ‘apolitical‘ and ‘ahistorical’, existing largely in a contextual and temporal vacuum.”

Still on the Biafran anniversary issues, Okwuosa argues:“We need to talk about them in a very open and honest way, in order to at least, heal the psychological wounds of the victims of the civil war. Although the Nigerian federal government said at the end of the war that there was ‘no victor, and no vanquished’; yet the side that surrendered believe that they have been treated in ways that show that they are the ‘vanquished’.”

Curiously, so much blame has been heaped on what the artist called “unaddressed injustices and pogroms” that preceded and trailed that war. They may indeed have inspired such recent secessionist groups as Ralph Uwazurike’s the Movement for the Actualization of Biafra (MASSOB) and its less pacifist alternative: Nnamdi Kanu’s the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB), among others. But they do not explain the incessant restiveness in the polity, which a school of thought curiously blames on the forced cobbling together of divergent ethnic nationalities by the British colonialists. Nor do they explain myriads of other problems plaguing the country.