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The onslaught on our African past
By Achukata Isiugo
It's other half, equally meriting psychoanalysis, is the fervour with which
Africans are destroying their own cultural objects and other evidence of how
their ancestors lived, perceived and celebrated their existence. With our
governments busy with the plunder of our national treasuries, indifferent to
the meaning of our past, various Christian denominations of the pentecostal
bent have been on a spree of destruction cloaked as evangelism, burning
up and smashing up artefacts of African material culture not stolen and sold
to Western buyers or were spared the looting represented by the colonial
phase of European passage through Africa.
As often happens with things African, Nigeria presents some of the worst
examples of the ongoing despoliation.
Some two years ago, the authorities in in Lagos state suddenly decided that
art traders selling modern copies of ancient African sculptures that are often
mixed with originals plundered and trafficked by thieves from the interior,
constituted squatters that needed to be removed in order to go on with the
usual land rackets for which the Lekki Peninsula corridor was in famous.
What did they do? They mobilized bulldozers to the scene while the art
dealers were away, smashed up their shops and crushed the items on sale
with the chain wheels and the metal excavators of the bulldozers. They
couldn't be bothered whatever the historical significance of the works or
even their commercial value to those who trade in them. Items damaged
included artworks that had travelled from different parts of Africa through
traders to come and meet their mostly Western buyers by the Lekki beach
in Lagos, like slaves of old, enroute to Europe and the Americas.
A few years ago the Christian envangelist pastor Uma Ukpai boasted that he
and his followers over a few weeks of anti-self rage in one December were
able to destroy scores of shrines across Igboland in southeast Nigeria.
What did these places of traditional worship consist of? Usually made of
mud houses, with walls decorated by Uli writings and paintings, they often
contained naturalist carvings of African figures, featuring the cubist styles
that became the inspiration of Pablo Picasso and modern Western art.
These shrines, which exuded the deep, close, communing relationship
between the African of old and his environment, that saw the unity of all
things whether plant, animal or inanimate, were destroyed by triumphal
philistines of African extraction in the name of evangelism.
This particularly corrosive form of evangelism has bred individual variants of
the "prayer-warrior" - note the belligerent tone of the name - who wouldn't
brook any sight of any of the items that formed part of the spirituality of his
ancestors, whether personal or communal. Among the Igbos of
southeastern Nigeria, where a thwarted variety of Christianity harking back
to puritan inquisition has taken hold, individual prayer-warriors regularly
invite pastors of similar ilk to make bonfires of cultural and spiritual artefacts
they inherited from their forebears. Frequently they also form savage bands
that steal out in the middle of the night, especially during the Christmas
season, to burn and destroy communally owned artefacts.
One instance of this madness was played out in the town of Achina in
Anambra State in December 2008. One morning the town woke up to find
that the ikoro had been destroyed, butchered and burnt by a group of
prayer-warriors. The ikoro was a giant wooden gong, reputed to be at least
400 years old, which sat in its own house at the edge of the Oye, the town's
market. It was an instrument of mass communication for which a specialist
player was appointed by the town in the olden days. It's sounds could be
decoded by most people in the village. And whenever there was an
emergency, the job of the ikoro player was to mount it and beat out
messages which could be heard and intepreted by town people whereever
they may be in distant farms or streams. It was a means of communication
and mobilization and wasn't even as a religious object, apart from the fact
that in the traditional concept of the people every aspect of life was infused
with some spirituality.
Anyway, the ikoro of Achina was destroyed. It had survived previous murder
attempts, when the prayer-warriors had attacked before and fortunately
were seen by other citizens who resisted and stopped them. After one
unsuccessful attempt, one of the age-grades in the town had contributed
money to build a fence around the ikoro and put a lock on the gate into
where it was housed. Then the prayer-warriors adopted stealth and came
like a thief in the night to destroy the ikoro.
With an indifferent government concerned only with the plunder of national
resources and doing the bidding of their masters in Western capitals, it's no
wonder that the common good has gone to the dogs. Even officially
designated government museums, where artefacts are supposed to be
preserved for posterity, over the years became conduits for wholesale
plunder of Nigerian art and cultural objects. The result is that there is a
triple onslaught by state officials, art thieves and evangelists against articles
of Africa's past material culture that show who we are, what we were and
where we're coming from. And as the reggae singer Ziggy Marley asked:
"Tomorrow people, where is your past? ...If you don't know your past, you
don't know your future."
One of the biggest ironies of our
time is that the very Europeans
who denigrated Africa as the very
heart of darkness, without a past
and a future, also find possession
of African art objects as evidence
of high-minded civilization. In
Western European homes, offices
and establishments, having an
African art object on display,
especially an original dating
hundreds and thousands of years
back, is the height of cultural
sophistication. It is a form of
schizophrenia that I think hasn't
been paid enough attention in
current psychiatric scholarship.
time is that the very Europeans
who denigrated Africa as the very
heart of darkness, without a past
and a future, also find possession
of African art objects as evidence
of high-minded civilization. In
Western European homes, offices
and establishments, having an
African art object on display,
especially an original dating
hundreds and thousands of years
back, is the height of cultural
sophistication. It is a form of
schizophrenia that I think hasn't
been paid enough attention in
current psychiatric scholarship.
Vase from Igbo Ukwu dating to
the 9th century.
the 9th century.
A trader ponders his fate after bulldozers rolled
through his shop at the Lekki art market, Lagos.
through his shop at the Lekki art market, Lagos.
The ikoro in Achina before it was destroyed.