The Storyteller extract - an African Jesus

An African Jesus
and other epiphanies
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Art in Africa in the early days was more a religious, than an
aesthetic activity. In many places the main role of the artist was to
create objects of worship. The artists created the artwork and the
priest transformed it to an object of worship. Even in places like
Benin, which developed a more aesthetic idea of art, there was
still a strong tendency to create art as objects of religious worship.
‘Fetish’ is the most common epithet used to describe these
figurines from our pagan past. This word brings to mind something
crude, nefarious and sinister. There’s also discomfort and some
fear, a lingering suspicion that these figures still carry some evil
powers. It’s difficult to detach the religion from the objects of
worship that were attached to that religion.
Onobrakpeya has always advocated sanctification. For him, these
objects are beautiful objects; created by really good craftsmen.
Sanctification is ridding these objects of their pagan connotations
and appreciating them simply as interesting artworks. The church
has always been good at sanctification, sequestering pagan
events when necessary and incorporating them into mainstream
church activities.
Today, art is more intellectual and cultural than religious. Yet, on
some level, it is still connected to the religious. It is at its core, after
all, a spiritual, intuitive process. This might explain Onobrakpeya’s
fascination with the religious. In his art, he doesn’t deal with religion
as a believer. That’s not to say he is not religious. He is Christian.
As an artist, however, he is more of an observer of religion than
a participant in it, being interested in the way spirituality defines
people and vice-versa. In his art, he is attuned to the great powers
of the spiritual and appreciates the visual beauty of things to do
with religion.
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This means that whether he’s dealing with his Christian faith or the
pagan beliefs of old Urhoboland, he is conscious of man’s need
to understand creation and the complex ways this need manifests
itself. This requires some detachment from the rights and wrongs
of religious practice and a greater focus on the aesthetic and
spiritual drivers of religion.
In his studies of the shrines of a few decades ago, Onobrakpeya
observed the spiritual, cultural and aesthetic life of that era. In those
shrines, he didn’t see a misdirected past. He saw a way of life with
its ills and beauty. He saw the beauty of the vessels of worship
created by his people. He saw the intricate installations that were
the shrines of his people. He saw the culture of his people, devoid
of all the religious noise attached to it. Religion is, after all, partly
cultural. It might be the past, and a discredited past at that. Still
it was our past: not to be discarded or viewed with loathing, but
understood and appreciated, even in its folly – if that’s what it was.
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192
Ore Ri Canaan II, (Blue Base), Deep Etching, 1982

‘Ore Ri Canaan’
Many of his Christian artworks deal with the themes of the Bible from
an African perspective. In ‘Ore Ri Canaan’, he explores the turning
of water into wine. This scene is a well-known story. Jesus and his
mother are at a ceremony in Canaan. The hosts run out of wine.
We are not told if the guests were avid drinkers or the hosts, poor
planners. All we know is that there was an embarrassing shortage
of wine. The hosts are desperate. After all, what’s a party without
something nice to drink – then and now? Mary implores her son,
Jesus, to come to the aid of the hosts. He agrees, as sons tend to
do with their mothers, and turns water into wine. The party resumes.
Onobrakpeya captures the festivities with Jesus, Mary and some
other guest seated in the front row, as Mary implores her son to
save the day. There is a swirl of activity – people and patterns – all
around them. It is possible to pick out a few people with palm wine
kegs – presumably family members pondering the calamity of the
fast disappearing wine supply. Yet the central theme is clear: that
connection between Jesus and Mary. It’s a work about the humanity
of Jesus in coming to the aid of people. But it’s also a ‘mother and
child’ artwork showing the eternal connection between a mother
and a child.
The work may be straight out of the Bible, exploring a well-known
part of the New Testament. Yet the execution is not literally biblical.
This isn’t a Jewish scene, showing Jesus and Mary at a Jewish
feast. This is an African scene, showing an African Jesus and an
African Mary at what could well have been an owambe (big party).
The people, the costumes and the landscape are African. This
treatment of religious themes may be commonplace now, but at
the time Onobrakpeya began these works, they were unusual and
unsettling for many.
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194
St. Paul, Deep Etching, 1979

The idea of changing the Bible from its Jewish origin to a more
African setting seemed almost heretical. There had to be something
wrong if Mary looked like any Nigerian woman, when we all knew
she had been Jewish. That was tampering with the essence of
the Bible. Sinful, some thought. Yet Onobrakpeya, looking in from
the outside in his position as an artist, rather than as a believer,
could see something different. Religion is a living organism meant
to unite people. It isn’t about race, or time. It is fluid and timeless.
‘Ore Ri Cannan’ is a simple, elegant African story. Yes, it’s the
Bible. Yes, it’s Jesus. But it could well be a feast anywhere in the
south of Nigeria. The faces are African, the attires are Nigerian.
The central figures could well be a Nigerian mother speaking with
her son.
Sometimes it’s hard to differentiate Onobrakpeya’s Bible scenes
from his other everyday scenes. Partly, I suspect, because he
treats Bible stories as everyday stories, imbuing them with the
same simplicity and cultural relevance as his other stories. It might
be the great Bible story of Jesus turning water to wine, but it’s also
the story of a village wedding celebration, as well as the story
about that strange bond between mothers and their sons.
He explored the Christian religion as if it belonged to us. It had to
belong to us if we were going to believe it. It had to resonate with
the man in the farm, as well as the man in the office. They had to
feel that this was their Jesus, rather than a colonial Jesus.
This was still synthesis. Our religion had to be part of our past,
our present and our future. If we had won our administrative
independence from the colonialists, we also needed to win our
religious independence.
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196
St. Paul, Plastograph, 1979