Rethinking Mbari Mbayo: Osogbo Workshops in the 1960S, Nigeria

CHAPTER!"!

Rethinking Mbari Mbayo: Osogbo Workshops in the 1960s, Nigeria

Chika Okeke-Agulu

On the contrary, no experience that is interpreted or reﬂected on can be characterized as immediate, just as no critic or interpreter can be entirely believed if he or she claims to have achieved an Archimedean perspective that is subject neither to history nor to a social setting. EDWARD W. SAID (1993:32)

The Osogbo group of artists, particularly those identified with the Mbari Mbayo Club and summer schools and art workshops between 1962 and 1966, has been compared with other contemporary workshop-trained artists elsewhere in Africa. Often their work has been treated as direct products of the colonial or romantic imaginations of European teachers. However, critics have questioned the cultural authenticity of such work—produced, as it was, under the influence of primitivist European teachers. These positions presuppose the gullibility, even naïveté, of the workshop-trained artists; the cunning, impe- rialist ideas of their European teachers; and a skewed, unequal power relationship between the semiliterate African student and the European teacher.1 Put simply, they raise questions about the authenticity of the work produced by these artists and, related to this, the pedagogical and thus power relationship between the European workshop masters and their African students. I am equally interested in these issues, but not along the same lines as previ- ous commentators on the work Osogbo artists. Whereas most observers see another familiar story echoed in other workshops elsewhere on the continent, I argue that Osogbo was a trans-genre phenomenon in which the person and creative vision of Duro Ladipo loomed large in previously unacknowledged ways. Ladipo’s contribution to the making of Mbari Mbayo was not only fundamental but also significantly placed it outside the horizon of one single dis- ciplinary domain. In other words, Osogbo’s uniqueness, it seems to me, lies in

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Mbari Mbayo, Osogbo

Jean Kennedy, an American art historian resident in Nigeria, published an account of an Mbari Mbayo festival she most likely witnessed in 1967 (Kennedy 1968). Her story is worth revisiting, for it captures some of the essential grounds for the argument I make in this chapter. The festival of arts—echoing the annual ritual of renewal during which priests and priestesses of Osun, the tutelary deity of the Osun River and Osogbo town—was convened by artists associated with Mbari Mbayo Club, whose central space was located on the town’s main street. Spanning several days, the event was marked by outdoor performances by local

and visiting dance troupes; an art exhibition including work by artists associated Copyright © 2013. Indiana University Press. All rights reserved. rights All Press. University Indiana 2013. © Copyright

RETHINKING!MBARI!MBAYO 155

Kasfir, Sidney Littlefield, and Till Förster. African Art and Agency in the Workshop, Indiana University Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bergen-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1144290. Created from bergen-ebooks on 2018-05-23 13:37:46. with the Mbari art workshops as well as other forms of contemporary Nigerian “popular” art; the performance of one of Duro Ladipo’s major operas, Moremi; a drama, The Fall, produced by Theatre Express, a Lagos-based group; and sketches that included a rousing performance by the artist Twins Seven-Seven. In between were visits to important shrines in the town, displays in the market square of carved, painted and beaded figures from the Osun shrine, and a large procession to the palace of the Otaoja of Osogbo—with shrine sculptures on loan from the Timi of Ede—directed by Ladipo. In one photograph accompany- ing Kennedy’s story, Ladipo is seen helping a young participant heave a shrine sculpture onto his head for the procession; in another he leads a group from a neighboring town in a drumming session. These two images, I think, point to the centrality of Ladipo’s presence in Mbari Mbayo, and also to his role in developing a visual practice in which art and theater were organically and seamlessly interwoven in ways that are unprecedented in the annals of modern and contemporary African art. Mbari Mbayo began in 1962 as an offshoot of the Mbari Writers and Artists Club established in Ibadan in summer 1961 by several Nigerian and African writers and artists with Ulli Beier, the German-born critic, writer, and teacher who in 1957 co-founded the literary magazine Black Orpheus. Conceived of as a laboratory of new ideas, practices, and activities spanning theater, fine arts, and literature by an emergent postcolonial generation, the inaugural programs at Ibadan included an art exhibition by Uche Okeke and Demas Nwoko, and the summer course for artists and art teachers conducted by two architects, the South African Julian Beinart and Pancho Guedes, a Portuguese based in Mozambique. The Osogbo Club specifically grew out of two converging circumstances, Duro Ladipo’s need to establish an independent theatrical space for his increasingly successful plays and choral productions; and Beier’s decision, at the completion of the 1961 inaugural Ibadan workshop, to initiate a similar program for young artists unencumbered by what he thought were strictures of formal art training.2 Commissioned by the Ataoja of Osogbo on May 17, 1962 (Duro-Ladipo and Kolawole 1997:104), with the premiere of the first of Ladipo’s trilogy, Oba Moro, the Mbari Mbayo gallery hosted an exhibition of Susanne Wenger’s work followed in August by the first of the summer art workshops conducted by Guyanese artist and scholar Denis Williams, weeks after he and Beinart ran the second workshop at Ibadan.3 The story of the emergence of the first Mbari Mbayo artists from the summer workshops is well chronicled in the literature: Jacob Afolabi and Rufus Ogundele emerged from Williams’s 1962 and 1963 workshops, respectively; Twins Seven-Seven, Muraina Oyelami, Adebisi Fabunmi, Jimoh Buraimoh,

156 CHIKA!OKEKE-AGULU

Kasfir, Sidney Littlefield, and Till Förster. African Art and Agency in the Workshop, Indiana University Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bergen-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1144290. Created from bergen-ebooks on 2018-05-23 13:37:46. Beier, who had relocated to Osogbo from Zaria in northern Nigeria sometime in 1963.4 The pedagogical conditions and axes of creative flow and exchange within the workshops have been a matter of longstanding controversy, with the apologists often claiming that no structured teaching took place; instead the young artists, motivated primarily by the force of their latent individual visions and creativity, matured rapidly with little guidance (Beier 1968:109). Critics have instead argued that the pedagogical environment in which the artists developed had all the marks of normative art instruction, with teachers and students performing their expected roles (jegede 1983; see also Naifeh 1981). Neither argument sufficiently explains or accounts for the impact of con- fluent vectors that have left their marks on the artistic productions of the Mbari Mbayo workshops. For it is clear that the political climate of newly independent Nigeria; the rapidly evolving artistic, intellectual, and social landscape; and the interflow of congruent and conflicting agendas of individuals associated with the workshops created an unprecedented context for developing new forms and ideas. I seek to remap Mbari Mbayo by way of properly situating the effect of Duro Ladipo’s personality and work on the creative outlook of the painters and printmakers associated with the workshops, to rethink the role of Georgina Beier as a teacher at the workshops, and to propose that Mbari Mbayo defies standard conditions of the modern art workshop specifically; unlike many of the workshops with which Mbari Mbayo has been compared, there was no singular driving force or master artist in charge of the work—rather the multi- genre work of the group resulted in scenarios in which the leading lights of the club were also learning and borrowing from the resources provided by other members. As it happened, most of the Mbari Mbayo artists, in coming to terms with their postcolonial condition, simultaneously drew from indigenous notions of being and creativity, and a modernistic imaginary of the artist persona as an individual creator and mythmaker. In this sense, Mbari Mbayo presents a complex scenario of collapsed boundaries, a nonlinear flow of artistic influences, and a compelling manifestation of an aspect of modernist experience in which émigré Europeans, black diaspora, and postcolonial Nigerian artists created a laboratory where local and appropriated forms from diverse artistic genres and disciplines coalesced to produce a thriving, contemporary visual culture.

Art and Theater of Duro Ladipo

Duro was the catalyst for a whole artistic movement in Oshogbo and even those who did not come directly within his orbit, beneﬁted from the prestige he lent to the arts and from the bold, creative life

RETHINKING!MBARI!MBAYO 157

Kasfir, Sidney Littlefield, and Till Förster. African Art and Agency in the Workshop, Indiana University Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bergen-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1144290. Created from bergen-ebooks on 2018-05-23 13:37:46. The career of the playwright and dramatist Duro Ladipo is inseparable from the story of the Mbari Mbayo Club and the art workshops, not so much because it was his idea to set up the club in the first place as because of the centrality of his theatrical work in the artistic life of the individuals closely associated with the club. According to Ulli Beier, it was Ladipo who came up with the idea of establishing at Osogbo a space similar to the one at Mbari Ibadan, where he had successfully performed his Christmas cantata in December 1961 (Beier 1994:14). In his 1968 book, Contemporary Art in Africa, Beier also notes that the motivation for the Osogbo summer art workshops for so-called semiliterate young locals, stemmed from his dissatisfaction with the rigidity of work produced in the first Ibadan workshop by the college-trained participating artists. However, given his initial opposition to Ladipo’s desire for an Mbari Club in Osogbo, it seems quite likely that the first summer workshop at Osogbo in 1962 might not have been conceivable without the availability of the club Ladipo established by converting his Popular Bar into a multipurpose space. This transformation of the bar from a thriving commercial business, specifically a beer parlor, into an avant-garde laboratory, a new space for contemporary art and theater testifies to the power of Ladipo’s conviction of the need to elevate his practice, after the encounter at Mbari Ibadan, from a producer of popular Christian drama to an exponent of modern Yoruba epic theater. Yet it is impossible to overstate Beier’s role in the evolution of Ladipo’s work, for he provided much-needed start-up funding—procured through Ezekiel Mphahlele, a former member of Mbari Ibadan who became the head of the African desk at the Congress for Cultural Freedom in Paris—and important contacts with Segun Olusola, an Mbari Ibadan member and producer at the Western Nigerian Television, which commissioned made-for-TV theatrical productions from Ladipo’s theater. Moreover, Beier also helped Ladipo make the crucial move to epic theater based on the histories of Yoruba peoples on which his later fame and critical success rested, and contributed scripts and translations for some of Ladipo’s plays.5 Duro Ladipo and Ulli Beier constituted the power nodes within the Mbari Osogbo. Yet their mutual attraction and collaborative work, it seems to me, speaks to the conjunction of (and as I would argue, divergences in) their visions of what constituted authentic artistic practice in newly independent Nigeria, and this fed on Ladipo’s magnetic, forceful, culturally composite personality. Ladipo, born in 1931 to a family of Christians in Osogbo, had a childhood marked by sympathy with and secret participation in the masquerades of the Egungun societies, despite his father’s vehement disapproval. Yet despite his family’s Christian affiliation, their belief in indigenous Yoruba

158 CHIKA!OKEKE-AGULU

Kasfir, Sidney Littlefield, and Till Förster. African Art and Agency in the Workshop, Indiana University Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bergen-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1144290. Created from bergen-ebooks on 2018-05-23 13:37:46. who torment their mothers through multiple premature deaths and reincar- nations—remained strong, for Ladipo’s first name, Durodola (“Stay to enjoy honor”), is given specifically to abiku children. And he was subjected to the ceremony of ritual binding, by an ifa priest who apparently ensured his sur- vival beyond childhood.6 As an incarnate abiku born into a Christian family surrounded by still strong manifestation of Yoruba ritual processes and cultural practices, Ladipo seems naturally disposed to his active self-fashioning as a modern playwright and dramatist, an interpreter and arbiter—through his theatrical works—of Yoruba culture and history, and an apologist for modern Nigerian drama rooted in indigenous musical and theatrical traditions. Thus, his early immersion in Egungun masking was more or less not intended to rupture the veneer of Christianity with which he ostensibly identified, but his theatrical work emerged out of his open rebellion against the church—during the 1960 Easter cantata scandal occasioned by his decision to introduce the Yoruba dundun drum, considered by church elite as an attempt to introduce paganism into Christian rites—and the subsequent redirection of his work toward the recuperation and reimagination of Yoruba ritual text and musical performances for modern drama (Duro-Ladipo and Kolawole 1997:103). The rejection of his experimental performance by the church soon led to a complete break with the popular cantata tradition but also opened for him a new horizon of untapped indigenous resources. His work in the early 1960s can thus be described as modern dramatic and operatic form heavily infused with evocations of Yoruba ritual, poetry, dance, theater, and art. Unlike any Nigerian dramatist before him, he seemed thor- oughly convinced of the necessity of reconstructing and celebrating through drama important episodes of Yoruba history and mythology, as if the making of a postcolonial subjectivity could not be complete without a firm assertion and reclamation of aspects of cultures threatened by Christianity, Islam, and forces of imperial modernity. The systematic excavation of Yoruba mythic and historical memory, in Oba Koso (1963) for instance, the attention to and appropriation of ifa divination chants, mesmerizing bata and dundun drumming, as well as the use of ritual objects and sculpture as stage props, firmly placed Ladipo’s theater—experimental as it was—within the ambit of Yoruba performance traditions. Yet the development of modern Nigerian theater from European operatic forms (manifested as church drama), coupled with pres- sures from what one might call the Christian modernity of the new urban class, meant that Ladipo’s work simultaneous engaged with European, Christian, and Yoruba form and subject matter. His theater, and concomitantly his artistic subjectivity, thus emerged simultaneously from his articulation of the dia-

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Kasfir, Sidney Littlefield, and Till Förster. African Art and Agency in the Workshop, Indiana University Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bergen-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1144290. Created from bergen-ebooks on 2018-05-23 13:37:46. positioned his theater within the discursive horizon of emergent postcolonial work. By zealously borrowing from diverse sources—Christian and European literary sources, Yoruba musical forms, oral and written historical accounts, modern theatrical techniques, and local popular dramatic methods—he not only affirmed his own idea of a contemporary theater, but also quite significantly placed this theater within the discursive framework of nationalist, postcolonial politics.7 Further, the preponderance of Christian moral tales (into which he often interpolated Yoruba mythological themes) might suppose an apolitical stance, yet his commitment to the defense and promotion of Yoruba culture through his art—for which some of his local audiences associated him with idolatry8—is reminiscent of the normative ideological tactic employed by progressive, anti-Western nationalists in the age of empire and after.9 The constitution of Ladipo’s theater company is noteworthy, for it dem- onstrates both his connection to traditional Yoruba performance, particularly the alarinjo traveling theater first explored by Hubert Ogunde (1916–90), arguably Nigeria’s pioneer popular dramatist;10 it also points to the impossibility of imagining the later art workshops outside the theater company, the focal point of Mbari Mbayo. The company from all indications grew quite organically, with its key members joining under varying circumstances between 1962, when the Mbari Mbayo was established, and 1963, when Ladipo began work on his most ambitious and best-known work, Oba Koso. Two key actors, Tijani Mayakiri (1937–92), famed for his dancing prowess, and Ademola Onibonokuta (b. 1943), a master of the dundun drum and adept of ifa ritual text and poetry for instance, were recruited from locally advertised auditions, and Bisi Fabunmi (b. 1945) who had worked as a signboard artist for Ladipo’s Ajax Cinema, was drafted as an actor when Ladipo failed to find enough good actors for the first Mbari Mbayo drama, Oba Moro (Fabunmi 1991:32). Muraina Oyelami (b. 1940), a gas station attendant and frequent Mbari Mbayo visitor, was invited to join the company by Ladipo without any prior record of acting or participation in the auditions; and Abiodun, who wanted to be hired as a singer, was convinced by Ladipo to take to drama, and as Oya, the wife of Sango in Oba Koso, she established herself as the company’s leading actress. What becomes apparent is that Ladipo built his theater group mostly from individuals with as-yet unexplored and unexpressed thespian talents; their transformation into accomplished performers no doubt speaks to Ladipo’s influence as director and producer, but it also arguably leaves open the possibility that many of them were attracted to Mbari Mbayo precisely because they, too, were in search of the right conditions in which their suppressed, inchoate creativity could find expression and flower—first in theater and then, for many, in visual

art. In this sense, then, Ladipo did not so much provide them a space for training Copyright © 2013. Indiana University Press. All rights reserved. rights All Press. University Indiana 2013. © Copyright

160 CHIKA!OKEKE-AGULU

Kasfir, Sidney Littlefield, and Till Förster. African Art and Agency in the Workshop, Indiana University Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bergen-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1144290. Created from bergen-ebooks on 2018-05-23 13:37:46. as performers, as enable the creative milieu—a workshop or laboratory—for the individuals to find their voices within, and contribute to the making of, the folk drama or opera. Moreover, although Ladipo conceived the basic dramaturgy of his plays, and selected the role players, each actor was responsible, as Muraina Oyelami has noted, for creating his own part, and this sometimes meant introduction of new text—as Ademola Onibonokuta did in his role as Gbonka in Oba Koso—into the evolving drama script (1994:82). Georgina Beier confirms this: “Duro Ladipo’s plays were not monolithic creations that were performed year after year according to a set formula. They evolved gradually, with many of the lead actors and dancers having a major input. They contributed songs, rhythms, incantations, poetic images and dances” (Tröger 2001:15).11 Members of Ladipo theater group consistently speak of his role in helping them develop heightened awareness of and respect for Yoruba culture at a time when such disposition had become increasingly unfashionable and even derided by their communities. He and his group were utterly cognizant of the impact of modernization and new forms of sociality on Yoruba culture, and their recuperative gestures, their excavation of past and passing cultural traditions of the Yoruba, was both a form of resistance to the effects of colonization and an assertion of their right to forge a modern identity—through art—that simultaneously recognized the validity of both indigenous and foreign cultures that had per force become constituent elements of their heritage. Thus the insistent evocation of indigenous Yoruba performance, ritual, and history was as much about laying claim to the right to renarrate the past on his own terms, with a newly acquired form of (theatrical) utterance, and developing the capacity to determine the very conditions of this language. Moreover, whether as folk opera his work differs from the modern drama of his formally trained contemporaries (such as Wole Soyinka), it is no less concerned with the modalities through which the postcolonial subject discursively engaged with the dialectics of past and present, self and other, indigenous and Western, individual and collective, and authentic and inauthentic. His work thus testifies to the breakdown of what Mudimbe describes as the “new reality of an ‘African author,’” framed in earlier Western discourse on Africa around “the so-called break existing between the anonymous wisdom of traditional Bantus and the moral corruption of evolués, those bad copies of European individual- ism” (Mudimbe 1994:180). At any rate, it seems to me that the mutual attraction between Ladipo and Ulli Beier, which resulted in the establishment of Mbari Mbayo and several artistic collaborations, rested on Beier’s appreciation of what he saw as Ladipo’s simultaneous appropriation of and distancing himself from indig-

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Georgina Beier and Mbari Mbayo Art Workshops

Much of the criticism and commentary on the work of the Osogbo artists suggest that the Beiers were responsible for the more or less unitary formal style of the Osogbo School. This argument hints at the remarkable success of Ulli Beier’s “academic degeneracy theory,” underscored in his criticism of the result of the inaugural Mbari Ibadan workshop (jegede 1983:78). It also supposes the foundational role played by Georgina Beier and Susanne Wenger who, as Steven W. Naifeh (1981) has argued, must have instilled principles of modern European painting into their students at Mbari Mbayo. My concern for the moment is not so much the first as it is the second argument, for I find more compelling the claim that Georgina Beier as teacher especially (since she ran one of the summer schools, and a steady workshop between 1964 and 1966), must have been responsible, as happens in the usual workshop, for the stylistic development of her students’ work. The credibility of this argument, however, must depend on the additional assumption that Georgina Beier was, at that time, a self-assured artist with a clear artistic program or philosophy that was not only sympathetic with Ulli Beier’s criticism but also efficiently transmissible to a motley group of receptive youths. Neither of these two conditions, as it turned out, was the case. In 1963 when Georgina Beier, who was twenty-five at the time, relocated to Osogbo, she had from all indications reached a crisis point in her own evolving work, needing a new direction. With only a year of training in art school, Georgina Beier was largely self taught as a fashion designer and artist in early 1950s London.12 Arriving in Nigeria in 1959 with her artist-husband Malcolm Betts, who was a teacher in the art department of the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology, Zaria, she gave private lessons to neighborhood children and extramural art classes to cadets at the Military School, Zaria. Although she was quite productive—working mostly on drawings, prints, and outdoor sculptures in cement—this period was, as she described it years later, “a time of searching” with very unsatisfactory results. Thus, before she relocated to Osogbo in 1963, she destroyed all her works (Tröger 2001:12). Six linocut prints published in Black Orpheus in 1961 and another photograph in her archive of cement sculptures in Zaria are among the few existing testimonies to her pre-Osogbo work.

162 CHIKA!OKEKE-AGULU

Kasfir, Sidney Littlefield, and Till Förster. African Art and Agency in the Workshop, Indiana University Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bergen-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1144290. Created from bergen-ebooks on 2018-05-23 13:37:46. planes, the borders of which are delineated by what might be painted white lines. These same bold lines sometimes outline some basic anatomical details.13 In the prints, a long-beaked, large-eyed, somewhat anthropomorphized bird is a dominant subject or motif, sometimes shown with human and other animal forms. The picture plane is composed of bold zoomorphic forms filling up her compositional space, which in turn is energized by bold, quirky white lines. In the resulting pictorial tension between the expansive, barely marked black surfaces of her subjects, and the dramatic negative spaces surround- ing the images, the prints are stylistically redolent of German Expressionist work. Furthermore, the birds’ prominent talons, bulging eyes, and menacing beaks—combined with human figures with screaming, highly abstracted facial anatomies, and body shapes indicating states of malnutrition and disfigure- ment—create a picture of existential distress that in some ways also suggests a fascination, on the part of the artist, with what one might call animistic fantasy. This latter reading is prompted by an important event in the development of Georgina Beier’s aesthetic, which is her winter 1958 encounter with Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard and My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, two seminal literary works that would be pivotal to the thematic preoccupation of many Mbari Mbayo artists. As she recalled later, “Tutuola’s stories were full of fantastic creatures: hybrid animals, gods, ghosts and men inhabited prolific for- ests. His was a holistic world that knew no boundaries between fact and fiction, religion and science, reality and dreams. . . . At the time I know nothing about Nigeria, but one is tempted to believe in fate, as if the encounter with Tutuola was my introduction to life among the Yoruba people” (Tröger 2001:11). I suggest, then, that her Zaria works must have been the result of an exer- cise in developing a formal language and non-narrative visual symbolism that would approximate the preternatural world of Tutuola’s fictive imagination. And if she was dissatisfied with her efforts, it might have been because she was unable to unfetter herself from the familiar, if powerful, formal tactics of the Expressionists: a visual language that was too reliant on reasonable human figu- ration to be sufficiently accommodative of the imagistic possibilities Tutuola’s stories called forth. Osogbo, as a center of Yoruba culture and religion, offered her the possibility of fuller immersion in the world that inspired Tutuola’s prodigious imagination, but also—as she found out—a creative milieu activated as much by a network of experimental artists as by the impossibly rich local visual and performance culture. Osogbo promised, more than any prior experience, a space for her to retool and to reimagine and furnish herself with a new visual language—and, more importantly, a new way of working that depended as much on her personal artistic journey as on the intersubjective transactions

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Kasfir, Sidney Littlefield, and Till Förster. African Art and Agency in the Workshop, Indiana University Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bergen-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1144290. Created from bergen-ebooks on 2018-05-23 13:37:46. creative environment was Duro Ladipo’s theater and the Mbari Mbayo Club. Her immersion in the theater company life and other club events was so total that one must imagine the extent of her desire for the new possibilities Osogbo offered her art and life: “We resembled a rather eccentric extended family with Duro and Ulli as the head of the household. We lived for art, music and acting” (Tröger 2001:15). In August 1964, Georgina Beier conducted the third Mbari Mbayo summer art school. Earlier, in 1962, Denis Williams led the first school and in 1963, he and the African American artist Jacob Lawrence organized the second, which coincided with the opening of the exhibition of sculptures by the Ghanaian artist Vincent Akweti Kofi (1923–74). Williams had assisted Julian Beinart during the first workshop at Mbari Ibadan in 1961 and, rather than adopt what Ulli Beier calls the “blitzkrieg techniques” Beinart first developed for summer schools there and in other parts of the continent, at Osogbo Williams was more methodical and deliberate (Beier 1968:106). By incorporating post-production critiques, he hoped to develop the students’ critical sensibilities, and thus their discriminative approaches to the creative process (Beier 1968:107–108). Although Georgina Beier did not participate in the 1963 summer school, her own approach when she conducted the third school, which lasted five days, was similar to Williams’s (Mount 1973:148). But the task she set for herself was to direct the students toward media and techniques she considered more suit- able to their artistic temperaments and sensibilities. Reflecting on her teaching method years later, she notes that it was “like hunting for the original element, trapping it and making it safe, before it gets confused with so many other, alien elements” (G. Beier 1991:68). Whereas the emerging Mbari Mbayo artists had only brief encounters with Beinart and Williams, Georgina Beier provided a stable studio space—until 1966, when she and Ulli left Nigeria—for the artists. Work in her studio was, from all indications, part instruction—often on tech- nical aspects of image production—and part collaboration on mural projects and commissions; and these were in tandem with her active involvement, with Jacob Afolabi, Rufus Ogundele, and Bisi Fabunmi, in designing stage sets, back- drops and costumes for Duro Ladipo’s theatrical productions (Tröger 2001:15). While it is easy to imagine an unequal power relations between Georgina Beier—a European workshop leader and wife of one of the “parents” of the Mbari Mbayo family—and the artists, many of whom in any case were not much younger than she was, a close reading of the emerging work from the Mbari Mbayo, as I suggested at the beginning of this essay, presents a more complicated scenario. The summer schools led by Beinart and Williams, Williams and Lawrence,

164 CHIKA!OKEKE-AGULU

Kasfir, Sidney Littlefield, and Till Förster. African Art and Agency in the Workshop, Indiana University Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bergen-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1144290. Created from bergen-ebooks on 2018-05-23 13:37:46. printmaker Ru van Rossem, and the later workshop-studio set up by Beier— coincided with an active exhibition program that included the inaugural show by Susanne Wenger, others by Vincent Kofi and Georgina Beier, the prints of German Expressionist Karl Schmidt-Rottluff, and the Nigerian printmaker Bruce Onobrakpeya. And these art programs conjoined with Mbari Mbayo drumming workshops, theatrical and dance performances, masquerades, and the annual festival of images from the royal shrines—all of which were set against the milieu of still-robust manifestations of colorful religious rites and ceremonies and contemporary urban life, and presented a picture of an intense, lively, visual culture. It is too reductive to suppose an overwhelming influence of Georgina Beier’s pedagogy, when, for instance, Jacob Afolabi “emerged” as an artist from Beinart’s summer school before Georgina arrived at Osogbo; or to assume that Ulli Beier’s philosophy and vision of Nigerian contemporary art, which Mbari Mbayo was supposed to embody and fulfill, could have determined the artistic, that is to say stylistic, horizons of the emergent work—when the artists had in addition to their individual visions, however unarticulated, a wide range of unpredictable sources that informed their formal and conceptual choices. Before returning to Georgina’s work, let me examine briefly Ulli Beier’s aesthetic politics in relation to Mbari Mbayo. Arguably, no one writing about contemporary art in Nigeria during the late 1950s and early 1960s came close to matching Ulli Beier’s critical authority and presence in the Nigerian media and scholarly circles. He played key roles in founding the magazines Odu, Ibadan, and Black Orpheus, and was editor of several publications on culture, literature, and art under the imprint of Mbari; his influence in shaping emerging discourses in these fields was considerable (Bearden and Holty 1972:177). Writing under four pseudonyms, he penned art reviews and commentaries on the exhibitions at Ibadan, Osogbo, and Lagos; he also wrote on the work of foreign artists he encountered during his travels.14 His writing, in all its diversity, is striking because of the consistency of his ideas about what constituted progressive work in the field of contemporary art. This can be reduced on the one hand to his firm conviction about the fatal relationship between academic or formal art training and artistic originality, and on the other hand to his belief in art derived from a synthesis of European modernist sensibility and African indigenous form and subject matter (Akanji 1958). Quite crucially, the more successful work, according to Beier’s modernist aesthetics, ought to be sufficiently distanced from its constituent cultural sources—European modernist abstraction or expressionism and African design, for instance—by the sheer force of the individual artist’s originality. These qualities, he argued, were best demonstrated in the batik paintings of

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Kasfir, Sidney Littlefield, and Till Förster. African Art and Agency in the Workshop, Indiana University Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bergen-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1144290. Created from bergen-ebooks on 2018-05-23 13:37:46. at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology, Zaria; and the drawings of the London-based Indian modernist Francis Newton Souza and of the Sudanese Ibrahim El Salahi (Akanji 1958; Aragbabalu 1960; Beier 1960). Despite the academic backgrounds of these artists, their successful arrival at original work was a consequence of a process of unlearning the lessons of the acad- emy on the part of Wenger and El Salahi, the radical synthesis of Indian and European influences by Souza, and resistance to academic realism and what he calls “sentimental storytelling” in the case of Nwoko (Beier 1960–61:10–11). In other words, although it is possible for the most prodigious talents to still arrive at artistic originality, for the vast majority of artists the only option was to avoid the drag of academic training in favor of alternative, informal training processes such as those made possible by short-term summer schools and workshops. However, given the drastically different formal conditions of Wenger’s, Nwoko’s, El Salahi’s, and Souza’s works, we must suppose that Beier’s criticism did not necessarily anticipate or promote any specific style. Rather, it was marshaled in support of assertive originality manifested through what one might call the attenuated presence-absence of the diverse cultural sources appropriated by the artists. Authenticity, for Beier, is not so much legible in the (Nigerian) artist’s ability to announce through his work a direct formal connection to an indigenous artistic tradition, as in his demonstration of his individuality, both as an artist and historical subject not too fixated with given, a priori constituted identities (U. Beier 1991:6). Ulli Beier’s support of Ladipo’s decision to establish the Mbari Club, Osogbo, and the art workshops and schools must have been informed as much by a desire to encourage Ladipo’s emerging talent as a dramatist as by the opportunity to put into practice his ideas about contemporary art in the postcolonial context. However, given the range of his work—which spanned documentation and analysis of Yoruba and Nigerian visual cultures, critical interest in modern expressionist art and the practices of political and cultural decolonization, and also the simultaneous promotion of popular cultures and a new cadre of literary and artistic elite—it is impossible to imagine how these could, even with the most doctrinaire alternative pedagogy, result in a singu- larly legible formal style. Beier, it seems, was content to rupture what he considered as the colonial heritage of unreflexive appropriation of Victorian culture, academic and premodern realism, and indigenous art forms and processes by contemporary Nigerian artists. By judiciously digesting the various strands of Western and indigenous sources, made available through the wide-ranging programs at Mbari Mbayo and the visual culture at large, one must assume that Beier expected each artist (whose imagination was spared the atrophy

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Kasfir, Sidney Littlefield, and Till Förster. African Art and Agency in the Workshop, Indiana University Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bergen-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1144290. Created from bergen-ebooks on 2018-05-23 13:37:46. literature and theater relevant to her postcolonial context. Let me, then, return to the work of Georgina Beier and her Mbari Mbayo students. Of all the commentators on the debate about the artistic merit of the work of the Mbari Mbayo artists, and the role of Georgina and Ulli Beier in the development of this work, Jean Kennedy makes, in every sense, the most per- ceptive attempt to look closely at the formal evidence presented by the artists’ work (Kennedy 1981). Whereas critics of the Osogbo artists routinely argue that the Beiers imposed a stylistic uniformity on the artists,15 Kennedy convinc- ingly, if too brieﬂy, demonstrated what she rightly referred to as the “dramatic differences” in the formal style and media associated with Asiru Olatunde, Adebisi Akanji, Muraina Oyelami, Twins Seven-Seven, Adebisi Fabunmi, and Jimoh Buraimoh. My intention is not to go over this terrain, despite the temp- tation to probe further into the lead provided by Kennedy. My task at the moment is rather to focus on an aspect of Mbari Mbayo work that clearly shows what I claim to be nonlinear vectors of inﬂuences among Georgina Beier as teacher and some of her Osogbo students. What, one might ask, was the effect of her art work on her students? Is it possible to trace some of the formal and stylistic choices made by the artists who emerged from her 1964 workshop—Muraina Oyelami, Twins Seven-Seven, Jimoh Buraimoh, Tijani Mayakiri, and Bisi Fabunmi—to her teaching? What about Jacob Afolabi and Rufus Ogundele, who started painting before Georgina Beier’s summer school and workshop? Even more pertinently, what are the full implications of her statement, referring to the workshop, “We all motivated each other’s energy! We worked furiously in those heady days; we slept little and we lived for the daily surprises that we discovered in each others [sic] work” (G. Beier 1991:70)? The brevity of the third summer school led by Georgina Beier made it impossible to work out a systematic modus operandi; rather it was more like a quick journey through the landscapes of the different participants’ artistic imagination. “Ideas,” Beier recalls, “grew in different directions at breakneck speed.” (G. Beier 1991:68). Yet, by the end of the course, “several distinct artistic personalities” manifested, and having grown close in this new context of art making, she established two workshops, one in her residence, and the other at the palace of the Ataoja of Osogbo, one of Mbari Mbayo’s biggest patrons (G. Beier 1991:68). These workshops offered her the opportunity to follow and nurture the emerging “artistic personalities,” but also the chance to participate in the lively creative environment in which her own artistic imagination could derive sustenance. In his autobiography, Twins Seven-Seven describes in some detail the tenor of those workshops, particularly Beier’s infectious energy and the mutual critiques, and maddening pace of work (Twins Seven-Seven and

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Kasfir, Sidney Littlefield, and Till Förster. African Art and Agency in the Workshop, Indiana University Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bergen-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1144290. Created from bergen-ebooks on 2018-05-23 13:37:46. consisting of intensely linear drawings of monsters, ghosts, mythic beings, humans, and animals—each defined by a profusion of repeat and singular patterns, abstract notations, and recognizable signs and motifs. His lines are insis- tently wispy, and in their intricate density overwhelm his sparse, lightly applied paint on brown paper. Two works, titled Devil’s Dog I and Devil’s Dog II (1964), produced during or shortly after Beier’s summer school already show all the basic properties that would characterize his work: allusions to Yoruba religion and cosmogony (filtered through the fantastic imaginaries of Amos Tutuola’s neo-traditional fiction), as well as mythical figures with prolific forms depicted in spatial contexts where the real and the metaphysical collide seamlessly.16 It is not certain which of the two versions of Devil’s Dog came first, although the serial numbering suggests that the etched version came before the drawing.17 There are two reasons for this confusion. First, there is evidence that brown paper and paint was the medium of choice for the summer schools, and that Georgina Beier, having noticed the peculiarity of Twins Seven-Seven’s works, that is their linearity, later introduced him to the etching technique, which she learned from the Ru van Rossem 1963 workshop. Second, looking com- paratively at the quality of the two works, one sees that the forms in the etching are tentative, but there is an assertiveness in the decorative program and composition of the drawing; this may well be a result of the artist’s inability to master the more difficult etching technique enough to translate the surplus, intricate imagery conjured by his imagination into this printmaking medium. Indeed, apart from providing him with an additional expressive medium and technique, his introduction to printmaking by Georgina Beier does not seem to have helped advance his work technically or conceptually. Although Georgina Beier taught Twins Seven-Seven printmaking techniques as a way to help him explore his penchant for intricate forms rendered with a stylus, Ulli Beier, seeking to enhance the range of his subject matter, introduced him to Tutuola’s My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, one of the two books that had captured Georgina’s imagination before she came to Nigeria.18 This novel became a more or less permanent source of ideas for the artist’s titles and subject matter, and although there are evident allusions to Tutuola’s characters and scenes in Twins Seven-Seven’s work, the narratives the artist invented in his pictures are often inconsistent with those of the novel. Stylistically, Twins Seven-Seven’s work could not be more different from Georgina Beier’s contemporaneous work, much of which dissatisfied her and was, thus, destroyed. The surface of Beier’s oil painting Sun Birds (1965) is built up through several layers of thick and thin scumbled and dry-brushed paint, and the result is densely colorful and luminous (plate 6). There is a tense struggle

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The characteristics of Afolabi’s style are bold, striking forms and strong colors that are juxtaposed in large areas. It is a technique that could easily be reduced to mere poster art. Yet Afolabi’s painting—for all its coolness—is sensitive and expressive. His black outline, which encloses his colour areas, is always lively and vibrating. It can be bold or nervous, swinging or subtle. Afolabi’s colour is striking, never haphazard, and always extremely carefully balanced. Nothing in his work is accident, everything is very consciously planned and designed. For one, who has taken up painting so recently, his control over his medium is truly astonishing.19

Beier goes on to compare Afolabi’s work with that of Joan Miró, the Spanish modernist and concludes that although there is no reason to suppose Miró inﬂuenced the young artist, their works reﬂect an interest in achieving the effect of “playful freshness, that comes naturally to Afolabi.” It is very unlikely that Afolabi knew of the Spanish painter’s work, but he saw exhibitions of works by Malangatana Ngwenya and Ibrahim El Salahi; and also the works of Uche Okeke, Susanne Wenger, Demas Nwoko, and Collette Omogbai—all of which were part of the collection Beier had formed for the Mbari Mbayo Gallery.20 Even so, the formal styles of these artists’ work do not, in any mean-

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Kasfir, Sidney Littlefield, and Till Förster. African Art and Agency in the Workshop, Indiana University Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bergen-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1144290. Created from bergen-ebooks on 2018-05-23 13:37:46. made in his painting and printmaking. Apart from having developed a unique style as early as 1963, he was already as an avid reader of D. O. Fagunwa—the pioneer, popular Yoruba-language novelist known for his metaphysical tales steeped in folklore and myths—and Amos Tutuola. This encounter with the worlds of the writers’ novels and his own mastery of Yoruba folklore became a source for the subject matter of his paintings and prints. Afolabi had considerable influence on the early work of Rufus Ogundele, who took to painting during the second course, led by Williams and Lawrence, in 1963. Like Afolabi, Ogundele worked with flat areas of color bounded by thick lines; his figural forms were reminiscent, if lacking in confidence, of the jocular formlessness of the older artist’s. Perhaps more striking is the unique formalism of Afolabi’s linocut prints. Whereas Georgina Beier’s Black Orpheus prints revealed her understanding of modernist expressionism through the differential treatment of clearly defined positive and negative space (flat black forms set against rough-cut white backgrounds), in Afolabi’s prints, foreground and background and negative and positive spaces are conflated seamlessly (fig. 6.1). Combined with highly stylized, free-flowing, and playful forms that sometimes sprout impossible anatomical parts, the collapsed and illogical pictorial space conjures—more effectively than the anything Wenger or Beier devised— formal equivalences of the metamorphic fantasy of his subject matter. It seems to me, then, that Afolabi’s formal inventions not only influenced the work of Ogundele and other younger Mbari Mbayo artists—as Ulli Beier noted in 1963— but more significantly, they might have provided Georgina Beier new possibilities for resolving the problems she confronted in her own work (fig. 6.2). Murals were central to the artistic productions of both the Williams and Lawrence and Georgina Beier summer courses, and even more so in the later workshops. Although individuals continued to produce their own canvases and prints, many of the murals—at the nearby Esso station, at Mbari Mbayo, and at the palace of Otan Ayegbaju—were conceived and executed collaboratively.21 The 1965 Esso station mural credited to Afolabi by Ulli Beier is significant not so much because it was the result of a collaboration between Georgina Beier, Oyelami, Ogundele, and Afolabi, as it is for what it reveals about the important role of Afolabi in the group’s artistic production (Beier 1968:126). Two photographs in the Beiers’ Archives in Sydney, Australia, show the artists at work on the mural. In one Afolabi is alone filling in large areas following the mural’s roughly drawn, basic compositional outlines. In the other he continues the same work, while Beier, Oyelami, and Ogundele work in the details of the picture. The completed mural, although more abstract than most of Afolabi’s canvases or prints, has all the formal characteristics of his pictorial style: free-

170 CHIKA!OKEKE-AGULU

Discrepant Experiences

I began this essay with an epigraph from Edward Said’s text, “Discrepant Experiences,” in part because the argument he makes in both the excerpt and in the essay is crucial to my task here (1993:31–43). Said was concerned about the flurry of critiques of his influential work Orientalism (Said 1979)—particularly the perception that it outlined a discursive framework marked by Manichaean opposition between ideological East and West without acknowledging the interstitial movements between the two polarities, important shifts that in turn helped define the philosophical and intellectual conditions as well as political and operative bases of the two primary domains. Developing the notion of “discrepant experiences,” Said set out to demonstrate the different ways colonizer and colonized societies experienced and narrated the same colonial experiences in the hope that by juxtaposing them, he would make apparent the rather complex, and sometimes antagonistic, mutually exclusive patterns of memory and knowledge formation in a world of interpenetrating histories and cultures. This notion of discrepancy in agendas, ideologies and ways of know-

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Kasfir, Sidney Littlefield, and Till Förster. African Art and Agency in the Workshop, Indiana University Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bergen-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1144290. Created from bergen-ebooks on 2018-05-23 13:37:46. to my aim in this chapter, which is to reexamine the Mbari Mbayo to show how it resists the prevailing critical paradigm of the mid-twentieth-century European-established workshops in Africa—specifically that assumption that these workshops testified to an irrefutably asymmetrical relationship between powerful, self-conscious European teachers and facilitators and young, naïve Yoruba artists who became mere conduits for the manifestation of the late European colonial desire and imagination. In his important critique of post–World War II workshops established by Pierre Romain-Desfossés in Lubumbashi, Pierre Lods and Rolf Italiander in Brazzaville, Frank McEwen in Harare, Margaret Trowell in Makerere, and Tom Blomfield at Tengenenge—among others—V. Y. Mudimbe outlines the consistency with which these mid-twentieth-century Europeans teachers and promoters, compelled by the desire to find in the works of their native students an expression of the Jungian “archetypical image,” a visualized collective unconscious unspoiled, and therefore radically different, from the depredations of the European civilized mind (Mudimbe 1994:156–69). But quite tellingly, he does not include Osogbo in his list of what one might call atavistic workshops, and I doubt that this omission is a consequence of his ignorance about the work of the Beiers at Mbari Mbayo. Rather, to him Osogbo was a different order of workshop, precisely because rather than disavow the presence and impact of European and Western culture on the formation of postcolonial artistic imagination, Ulli Beier hoped that Mbari Mbayo would produce artists and art that accepts “the challenge of Europe,” and responds to the “social and political upheavals” of the era of imperialism and decolonization (Beier 1968:14, quoted in Mudimbe 1994:160). In other words, whereas other African workshops sought to reinvent an imaginary pre-contact African artistic unconscious, Beier had the task of encouraging the emergence of postcolonial artists who are able to negotiate the terms of their relationship and engagement with postimperial modernity and indigenous traditions. Although Mudimbe’s mission quite clearly, and regrettably, was not to subject Beier’s rhetoric to serious analysis, or to examine the workings of Mbari Mbayo, he rightly located Beier’s ideas and his work at Osogbo within the historical moment and intellectual context in which the debate about models of African postcolonial artistic subjectivity was being hashed out. Most of the ardent critics of Mbari Mbayo failed to recognize this. In any case, I have tried to show the rather complex scenario of the club, particularly the central role Duro Ladipo played in establishing Mbari Mbayo and constituting its commu- nity of artists, some of whom later branched out beyond theater and performance to the visual arts once they took advantage of the resources provided

172 CHIKA!OKEKE-AGULU

Kasfir, Sidney Littlefield, and Till Förster. African Art and Agency in the Workshop, Indiana University Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bergen-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1144290. Created from bergen-ebooks on 2018-05-23 13:37:46. Beier. This is not to say that Ulli Beier’s agenda of using Osogbo to prove his argument about the problem of formal art education is not important to the reality of Mbari Mbayo. Although it is not always clear that he actually was certain about the raison d’être of the art workshops,24 there is enough reiteration of the anti–formal art training convictions in Beier’s writing to take this to be his fundamental position in relation to the Mbari Mbayo. But even if we accept that Beier’s rejection of formal art training constituted a definite agenda, there is no reason to suppose that it determined the formal and conceptual conditions of the work made by the artists. This is not simply because the artists’ interests and agenda may have been different from Beier’s, but also because the teachers—who, if anything, had the potential to influence the artistic tactics of the students—had diverse reasons for participating in these workshops, dis- similar training methods, and arguably divergent views about art and creative subjectivity.25 There is yet another important layer to this. There is the question of the Mbari Mbayo as a site where the artists nego- tiated their postcolonial subjectivity through participation in the theater of Ladipo and production of visual art. But does this, then, imply that their political and ideological practices were in consonance with those of Ulli Beier— particularly his disquisition on the phenomenon of European-African culture contact? I do not believe this to be the case. One of Beier’s forceful claims is that the artists who emerged at Mbari Mbayo represented, in the social sphere, a new kind of postcolonial subject alienated from rich, powerful, and longstanding indigenous cultures—and also insufficiently equipped to fully convert to the opposing world of postimperial modernity. Yet, because of this, they are better disposed than their so-called educated counterparts to fashion a fresh, modern subjectivity unencumbered by the weight of tradition or the draw of modernity (Beier 1968:109). In other words, he disavows the possibility that these individuals might in fact have seen in Mbari Mbayo a real opportunity to strengthen their already deep, unsevered ties with their ancestral cultures while simultaneously proclaiming their modern subjectivity. A few examples will suffice. Duro Ladipo was no doubt aware of the cultural politics of colonization, particularly the systematic and sustained extirpation of indigenous performa- tive traditions from colonial-era ecclesiastical and popular music and drama. And despite participating in the development of church dramas following sim- plified modes of Western operatic form, it was clear that he also was firmly convinced of the crucial place of Yoruba performance and orature in the invention of modern Nigerian theater. Quite clearly, then, he must have under- stood his work to be critique of a modern artistic practice based solely on a

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174 CHIKA!OKEKE-AGULU

ground. Reprinted with permission from Contemporary Art in Africa by Ulli Beier, 1968. Copyright © 2013. Indiana University Press. All rights reserved. rights All Press. University Indiana 2013. © Copyright

FIGURE*+﹒.﹒ Georgina Beier’s untitled mural on the compound wall of the Mbari Mbayo Club, Lagos, painted in 1965. Photograph courtesy of the artist. 175

1. Jegede is exemplary of this perspective on what he called “art workshops in non-Western situations” (1983:65). 2. Jean Kennedy reports that it was Ladipo, who—impressed by the activities at the Mbari Club, Ibadan—said to Beier: “But we must have one in Osogbo,” and then proceeded to refurbish and redesign his Popular Bar, with funds secured by Beier, and architectural screen sculpture by Susanne Wenger, into the multi-purpose—theater, workshop, and gallery—space that would be the center of Mbari Mbayo (1968:11). 3. Mbari Mbayo was coined by participants in the Osogbo Club from the Igbo Mbari, after which the Ibadan Club was named. Meaning “When I see I will be happy,” in Yoruba, it effectively domesticated the so-called foreign Igbo name (the meaning of which is uncertain, but it refers to a grand festival marked by construction of a structure ﬁlled with sculptures and murals, and dedicated to Ala, the earth goddess, and other prin- cipal deities of the Owerri Igbo), and thus marked the Osogbo Club as a more localized version of the pan-African space at Ibadan. Williams was assisted by African American artist Jacob Lawrence. 4. See, for example, Beier (1968:101–11) and Kennedy (1992) for accounts of these workshops. 5. Beier introduced Ladipo to Johnson’s book, History of the Yoruba, from which Ladipo developed his epic operas, including his three best-known works: Oba Moro, Oba Koso, and Moremi. See Beier (1994:17). Ladipo’s Eda (1965) was an adaptation of Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s morality play; Ulli Beier adapted the work under one of his pseudonyms. In Eda, as Beier notes, “Christian morality was replaced by Yoruba philosophy to suit its local and cultural setting” (1994:40). Beier also wrote other plays for Ladipo, including Woyengi (in English, based on Ijaw creation myth), which Ladipo translated into Yoruba and produced as Oluweri (1972), Imprisonment of Obatala, and Born with the Fire on His Head. 6. Duro-Ladipo and Kolawole (1997) point to the auspiciousness of the babalawo’s death in 1977 and Duro Ladipo’s the following year, and suggest the possibility of a causal link between the death of the two men. 7. Ladipo named his group Nigerian Folk Opera Company. 8. See statements by Ademola Onibonokuta (1994:93) about public perception of Mbari Mbayo and Ladipo’s work; and by Jimoh Buraimoh, whose father—upon discovering that his son had joined Ladipo’s company—forbade him from associating with “pagans” (1994:107). 9. Here I refer, for instance, to the defense of certain indigenous practices that were vehemently opposed by Christian missionaries, such as polygamy, and the adoption of native names and sartorial practices as oppositional, anti-Western gestures by nationalists such as Edward Blyden, J. E. Casely Hayford, Herbert Macauley, Mojola Agbebi, Kwame Nkrumah, and Mbonu Ojik. See Olusanya (1987) for a discussion of Macaulay’s radical cultural politics in the early decades of the twentieth century. 10. For a good study of Ogunde’s work, see Clark (1980). 11. Ladipo’s plays, according to Oyelami (Beier 1994:82), were not usually written down. But given that Ulli Beier published Ladipo’s Oba Moro, Oba Koso, and Oba Waja as Three Yoruba Plays (Ladipo 1964), it must mean that Ladipo produced manuscripts

of his plays not long after their initial public performances. Moreover, even after the Copyright © 2013. Indiana University Press. All rights reserved. rights All Press. University Indiana 2013. © Copyright

176 CHIKA!OKEKE-AGULU

Kasfir, Sidney Littlefield, and Till Förster. African Art and Agency in the Workshop, Indiana University Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bergen-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1144290. Created from bergen-ebooks on 2018-05-23 13:37:46. publication of the plays, the performances took liberties with the texts—either because of role players’ improvisation (to settle a score with Ladipo, Tijani Mayakiri in his 1964 Berlin performance in Oba Koso, in which he introduced insulting lyrics to his song) or as a result of Ladipo’s penchant for, depending on his audience, editing parts of the plays during performance (Duro-Ladipo and Kolawole 1997:112). 12. She enrolled at Kingston Art School, London, after she won a competition organized by a department store in Kingston-on-Thames. But, unable to afford the tuition and dissatisfied with the art program, she left the school and later set up a mural con- tracting business (see Tröger 2001:10–11). 13. The image published in Georgina Beier’s book is in gray tone, thus making it impossible to determine the color of the paints on sculptures (Tröger 2001:11). 14. He published criticisms as Ulli Beier, Akanji, Omidiji Aragbabalu, and Sangodare Gbadegesin, and creative writing as Obotunde Ijimere. 15. Steven W. Naifeh, for instance, argues that “all the [Osogbo] students developed the same basic imagery. Every graduate of Oshogbo paints evil spirits with exagger- ated feathers: eyes too large, fingers too long, mouths too wide. Often, animals take on human features while humans take on animal ones” (1981:27). Although Naifeh’s descriptions might reasonably fit the work of Twins Seven-Seven, they cannot be applied to the work of Muraina Oyelami (who hardly painted animals, much less therianthropic forms), or the bead paintings of Jimoh Buraimoh. William Wyckom, Jr., describes the “curious sameness of these [Osogbo] artists’ work” and hoped for a future in which “the European teachers’ influence has had a chance to abate” (1975:7). 16. Tutuola, the first Nigerian novelist to achieve international fame, is known for his fantastic tales in which the world of spirits, humans, and animals seamlessly mix. Inspired for the most part by Yoruba folk tales, and rendered in a uniquely unorthodox English, his work operates, according to the literary scholar Emmanuel Obiechina, “in the context of a transition between the oral tradition and the literary tradition” (1967:147). For a good overview of Tutuola’s literary sources and style, see Lindfors (1970). 17. Ulli Beier (1968:114) states that Devil’s Dog was Twins Seven-Seven’s first painting at the third workshop, which contradicts the (perhaps later) numbering of the drawing/ painting and print versions. 18. According to Twins Seven-Seven, Ulli Beier provided him Tutuola’s novel, having noticed similarities between Twins Seven-Seven’s titles and the novel’s mythological and metaphysical narrative (Twins Seven-Seven and Beier 1999:19). 19. This brochure (published on the occasion of three exhibitions in November 1963 by Osogbo artists at Exhibition Centre, Marina, Lagos) does not indicate the author or editor of the texts, and it is unpaginated. But since almost all published texts on the Mbari Mbayo and all the early shows were by Ulli Beier, one must assume he is the author of the critical biographies in the brochure. Moreover, the language and style of the text is redolent of Beier’s critical writing. 20. The bulk of this collection eventually became part of the permanent collection of the Iwalewa-Haus, University of Bayreuth, Germany. 21. None of the murals from this period survive. Images of them exist in various publications by Ulli Beier (1968:126; 1991:66–67) and in the Mbari Mbayo Albums at the Ulli and Georgina Beier Archives, Sydney, Australia. 22. A photograph by Ulli Beier, dated 1966, shows Fabunmi and Georgina Beier at

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REFERENCES Akanji [Ulli Beier]. 1958. Wenger: An Example of Afro-European Culture Contact. Black Orpheus 2:29–31. Aragbabalu, Omidiji [Ulli Beier]. 1960. Souza. Black Orpheus 7:16–21, 49–52. Bearden, Romare, and Carl Holty. 1972. Review of Beier, Ulli: Contemporary Art in Africa. Leonardo 5(2):176–77. Beier, Georgina. 1991. To Organize Is to Destroy. In Thirty Years of Oshogbo Art. Ulli Beier, ed. Pp. 67–70. Bayreuth, Germany: Iwalewa-Haus. Beier, Ulli. 1968. Contemporary Art in Africa. New York: Praeger. ———. 1960. Three Zaria Artists. West African Review 31(395):37–41. ———. [1960–61]. Demas Nwoko: A Young Nigerian Artist. Black Orpheus 8:10–11. Beier, Ulli, ed. 1991. Thirty Years of Oshogbo Art. Bayreuth, Germany: Iwalewa-Haus. ———. 1994. The Return of Shango: The Theatre of Duro Ladipo. Bayreuth, Germany: Iwalewa-Haus. Buraimoh, Jimoh. 1994. Lighting Up the Theatre. In The Return of Shango: The Theatre of Duro Ladipo. Ulli Beier, ed. Pp. 107–11. Bayreuth, Germany: Iwalewa-Haus. Clark, Ebun. 1980. Hubert Ogunde: The Making of Nigerian Theatre. Oxford: Oxford Copyright © 2013. Indiana University Press. All rights reserved. rights All Press. University Indiana 2013. © Copyright University Press.

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Kasfir, Sidney Littlefield, and Till Förster. African Art and Agency in the Workshop, Indiana University Press, 2013. ProQuest Ebook Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/bergen-ebooks/detail.action?docID=1144290. Created from bergen-ebooks on 2018-05-23 13:37:46. Duro-Ladipo, Abiodun, and Gboyega Kolawole. 1997. Opera in Nigeria: The Case of Duro Ladipo’s Oba Koso. Black Music Research Journal 17(1):101–29. Fabunmi, Bisi. 1991. I Will Be Doing This Till I Die. In Thirty Years of Oshogbo Art. Ulli Beier, ed. Pp. 31–36. Bayreuth, Germany: Iwalewa-Haus. jegede, dele. 1983. Trends in Contemporary Nigerian Art: A Historical Analysis. PhD dissertation, Indiana University. Kennedy, Jean. 1968. I Saw and I Was Happy: Festival at Oshogbo. African Arts 1(2): 8–16, 85. ———. 1981. Speaking of Myths. African Arts 14(4):78–80. ———. 1992. New Currents, Ancient Rivers: Contemporary African Artists in a Generation of Change. Washington DC: Smithsonian Institution Press. Ladipo, Duro. 1964. Three Yoruba Plays: Oba koso, Oba moro, Oba waja. Ulli Beier, ed. Ibadan, Nigeria: Mbari. Lindfors, Bernth. 1970. Amos Tutuola: Debts and Assets. Cahiers d’études africaines 10:38, 306–34. Mount, Marshall Ward. 1973. African Art: The Years Since 1920. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Mudimbe, V. Y. 1994. The Idea of Africa. Bloomington: Indiana University Press; London: James Currey. Naifeh, Steven V. 1981. The Myth of Oshogbo. African Arts 14(2):25–27, 85–87, 88. Nesbett, Peter T., and Michelle DuBois, eds. 2000. Over the Line: The Art and Life of Jacob Lawrence. Seattle: University of Washington Press. Obiechina, Emmanuel. 1967. Transition from Oral to Literary Tradition. Présence africaine 63:140–61. Onibonokuta, Ademola. 1994. The Works of Duro Ladipo. In The Return of Shango: The Theatre of Duro Ladipo. Ulli Beier, ed. Pp. 93–97. Bayreuth, Germany: Iwalewa-Haus. Olusanya, G. O. 1987. Henry Carr and Herbert Macaulay: A Study in Conﬂict of Principles and Personalities. In History of the Peoples of Lagos State. Ade Adefuye, Babatunde Agiri, and Jide Osuntokun, eds. Pp. 279–89. Lagos: Lantern Books. Oyelami, Muraina. 1982. Mbari Mbayo and the Oshogbo Artists. African Arts 15(2):85–87. ———. 1994. My Life in the Duro Ladipo Theatre. In The Return of Shango: The Theatre of Duro Ladipo. Ulli Beier, ed. Pp. 81–91. Bayreuth, Germany: Iwalewa-Haus. Said, Edward. 1979[1978]. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. ———. 1993. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage Books. Twins Seven-Seven and Ulli Beier. 1999. A Dreaming Life: An Autobiography of Twins Seven-Seven. Bayreuth African Studies Series 52. Bayreuth, Germany: Bayreuth University. Tröger, Adele, ed. 2001. Georgina Beier. Nuremberg: Verlag fur modern Kunst Nurnberg.

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PLATE&'﹒ Job Kekana, altar front in St. Michaels and All Angels, Schauderville, South Africa, 1947, wood. Priest in charge, Revd. Zola Nanana. Job Kekana and Ernest Mancoba were Grace Dieu’s master carv- ers, both showing remarkable sensitivity in terms of handing of sculptural detail and attention to woodgrain. Photograph by Nkosinathi Sotshangane. PLATE&)﹒ Wandjel, smiling at the camera, carving a monsok—a human ﬁgure placed in a dedicated shrine at the site of a theft, crime, or witchcraft attack in order to harm

PLATE&/﹒ An early example of Nzante Spee’s “Melting Age” style is still vis- ible on the old Volkswagen Beetle that he had put next the street to attract custom- ers (Bamenda 2006). Photograph by Till Förster.