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Yoruba Heritage As Project Reauthenticating the Osun Grove in Osogbo, Nigeria

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Yoruba Heritage As Project Reauthenticating the Osun Grove in Osogbo, Nigeria hybrid heritage Yoruba Heritage as Project Reauthenticating the Osun Grove in Osogbo, Nigeria Peter Probst n July 2008 I attended the birthday party of the Aus- trian artist Susanne Wenger in Osogbo, Nigeria. It all photos by the author except where was Wenger’s ninety-third birthday and, as it turned otherwise indicated out, her last. In January 2009 she passed away (Probst 2009). It was a private family event. Practically all the guests were either adopted children or members of Wenger’s New Sacred Art Group. Before the cutting of the birth- Iday cake each one of the guests stood up and gave a short speech praising the jubilee and her achievements. The style and topics of the speeches varied. While some eulogized the importance of Wenger’s deeds for their own personal life, others acclaimed her active participation in Osogbo’s ritual life and her relentless efforts to preserve the grove of Osogbo’s guardian deity Osun through the erection of new images. Still others took a more statesmanlike stance and stressed Wenger’s contribution to the reputation of Osogbo as Nigeria’s center of art and heritage. As I listened to these speeches I found myself recalling the time I first visited Osogbo, in 2000. I had come to Nigeria to look into the question of what ever happened to the “Osogbo art school.” In the 1960s the label stood for an exciting though also contested center of modern—then still contemporary—African art. In the 1970s and 1980s Osogbo’s fame faded. The name grad- ually disappeared in the art historical references. By the end of the 1990s the literature suggested the name Osogbo had shrunk to a historical footnote. Encountering the reality thus came as a surprise. During my first visit in 2000 I quickly realized that the city and its artists had embarked on a “second career.” After a first career in the global art world, the city had successfully reinvented itself as an important destination in today’s roots and heritage tourism, with the Osun grove and annual Osun festival being the city’s main attractions (Fig. 1). The Nigerian state was obviously supporting this development. Not only was the Osogbo museum—a branch of the National Commission of Museums and Monuments—involved in the organization of the Osun festival which climaxes in the Osun grove, but rumor also had it that the Nigerian state intended to nominate the Osun grove to be added to the UNESCO list of World Heritage sites. I asked around to get more information on the nomination plan but failed. The more I talked to people, the (opposite) more I realized that I was obviously the only one who found the 1 Osogbo Youth, Osun Festival 2002. The fish is story stunning. What I conceived as a particularly striking case both a depiction of Osun’s messenger as well as an of postcolonial hybridity, (most) people in Osogbo found per- emblem of royal authority and power. 24 | african arts WINTER 2009 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/afar.2009.42.4.24 by guest on 27 September 2021 ar_24-37.indd 24 8/6/2009 7:08:26 PM fectly normal—by now. The long-standing reservations against bine UNESCO’s seemingly conservative nomination criteria Wenger and her work in the Osun grove, once articulated both (“authenticity,” “integrity,” or “masterwork of human creative inside and outside Nigeria, seemed to have been forgotten: her genius,” etc.) with the celebration of newness and hybridity the intrusion into the Yoruba iconoscape, the effects her structures reshaped Osun grove seemed to represent? And yet, when in had on the atmosphere of the grove, and the way it had led to July 2005 members of the World Heritage Committee decided a touristification of Yoruba art and culture, resulting in a kind to approve the Nigerian nomination and consequently declared of “Yoruba light” which had nothing to do with “real” Yoruba the Osun Osogbo grove a UNESCO World Heritage site, that is anymore. In the 1970s and ‘80s the reservation tied in with the exactly what happened (Fig. 2). debate on the foreignness of the grove’s images on the one hand Depending on one’s perspective, one can see the decision either and the debate on the foreignness of Wenger as the artist who as a domestication or a celebration of hybridity. Whatever one created and prompted these works on the other. Both debates opts for, the approach and analytical concepts to substantiate went together, doubling the feature of difference and thus creat- one’s argument will differ. After all, it is one thing to historicize ing a double hybridity, as it were. And as if this is not enough, the hybridity of objects (domestication); it is another to study the there was—and still is—also the hybridity of the site as such, hybridity of subjects producing such objects (celebration). What simultaneously an active Yoruba ritual site and a Western sculp- is necessary to understand what has happened in Osogbo is a ture garden where Nigerian school children and American and combination of both perspectives. In other words, an approach is European tourists alike get guided tours, during which they needed which allows one to study the appropriation and authen- learn about traditional Yoruba ritual and religion. Given these tication of both subjects and objects. The organization of the pres- circumstances I found it difficult to envision that the plan of the ent essay into four parts results from this task. In the first part I Nigerian government to add the Osun grove to the UNESCO will give a brief outline of the history and social importance of the list of world heritage list would come to fruition. How to com- Osun grove as an expression of locality and collective identity. The WINTER 2009 african arts | 25 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/afar.2009.42.4.24 by guest on 27 September 2021 ar_24-37.indd 25 8/6/2009 7:08:31 PM second part deals with the advent of Wenger and her modern- the grove is the “Citadel of Osogbo History” (Fig. 3). As such it ist agenda which drove the reshaping of the grove. The third part is full of “historical monuments, sculptures, and structures,” all looks at how the new was turned into heritage while the fourth created by members of the New Sacred Art Group founded by and last part investigates the effects of this development. As I will Wenger in the early 1960s. Scattered throughout the forest, the show, each part represents a certain stage in the evolution of dif- works vary in size, form, and material. A coherent style does not ferent “regimes of value” (Myers 2001). To elicit the changing role exist. Buraimoh Gbadamosi’s stocky and compact stone sculp- of the Osun grove in the unfolding of these regimes I argue that tures differ strongly from Kasali Akangbe’s dynamic, elongated it is useful to study Osogbo heritage politics along the lines of the wooden carvings and Adeyemi Oseni’s stylized cement figures “cultural script” (Kasfir 2007) and the dialectics of “flow and clo- (Figs. 4–5). While the latter show a restrained grace, Wenger’s sure” (Meyer and Geschiere 1999, Geschiere 2009) which struc- cement architectures and plastics are excessive in their feverish ture sociohistorical processes of accelerated change. Since heritage celebration of expression. Yet different as the works in the Osun is a result of these acceleration processes and as such subject to grove are, as gestures of respect to Yoruba religion they are all their peculiar dialectics (Probst 2008) we need to understand both visible reminders of what constitutes Osogbo’s historical identity. the concept and its expressions not as something fixed but as an To the Nigerian public the Yoruba deity Osun and the Yoruba open, ongoing project which can encompass and appreciate also a city Osogbo go together. People in Osogbo venerate Osun as “hybrid heritage” such as the Osun grove. Having said that, let us their guardian deity and conduct an annual festival to honor and look how this particular project evolved. revive the relationship with her. In the numerous praise songs Osun is depicted as a big, massive woman wearing brass ban- A CITADEL OF HISTORY gles, a brass fan, and a beaded comb. Her origin lies in Ekitiland The sacred Osun grove today is a 75 hectare (185 acre) patch of west of Osogbo, the area where the Osun river originates. The primary forest alongside the Osun river in Osogbo, a Yoruba city- river is in fact Osun’s epiphany, her liquid body as it were. Con- kingdom and capital of Osun state in Southwest Nigeria. As the sequently Osun is first and foremost a water or fertility deity, but signboard erected at the entrance to the main river shrine states, the notions associated with Osun are much wider, embracing 26 | african arts WINTER 2009 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/afar.2009.42.4.24 by guest on 27 September 2021 ar_24-37.indd 26 8/6/2009 7:08:36 PM imageries of healing, femininity, motherhood, sexuality, wealth, of Ilesa. With the collapse of Oyo and the subsequent struggle wisdom, knowledge, beauty, art, and power. In fact, as Rowland to fill the resulting power vacuum, this began to change. Osogbo Abiodun (2001) has pointed out, Osun has different identities, became the frontline of two new regional powers: the Fulani depending on the various conditions under which people have coming from the north, advancing southwards, and the Ibadan lent meaning to her, a strategy which fits well Osun’s changing marching northwards, determined to stem Fulani aggression.
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