Quite some time ago, I watched a B-movie on television in which a mask bought in innocence as a tourist souvenir in Columbia, literarily made life hell for its new owner who lived in a small town in middle-America. At midnight, the mask on the wall got possessed by an evil spirit which transformed it into an animal-shaped monster that went on the rampage in the neighbourhood, committing multiple murders. Then, at the first light of dawn, the monster returned ‘home' to become the quaint, artistic multi-coloured mask on the wall that had initially attracted the owner in Latin America.
Predictably, as the horror drama unfolded, the beautiful decorative mask on the wall did not come into the focus or reckoning of the investigating police officers. But by some quirk of coincidence, a clever unexpected twist in the film plot, the owner was accidentally present in the room when to his amazement and horror the mask was ‘involuntarily' transformed and escaped to perform its programmed evil deeds outdoors. This frightening scene immediately attracted suspicion to the hitherto seemingly harmless mask. Of course, the murder riddle was eventually solved as the mask was virtually caught-in-the-act and ‘sentenced' to death by burning!
On narrating the weird happenings in the film to a friend, a borderline case between atheist and traditional religion advocate, he waxed lyrical about the astral nocturnal powers that enabled objects and humans to fly. Dabbling into the realm of voodoo and witchcraft, he observed that in many parts of Africa, Nigeria included, witches "left their bodies and had the power to fly on broomsticks to attend meetings held on designated trees at dead of night to plan spiritual attacks on unprotected human beings."
For another acquaintance, a dedicated ‘born-again' Pentecostal churchman, the antics of the mask was emphatic proof that it and many like pieces of traditional art were demon-possessed, should be avoided by all means and at best destroyed and put out of circulation.
It is this view towards traditional art, a crusade driven by the self-imposed righteousness of the new religions, particularly the Pentecostal faith, that is currently posing a big danger to the art scene in Nigeria and the survival of traditional and contemporary art, especially sculptural pieces.
Bordering on the ridiculous
Sometimes the righteous attitudes of ardent followers of the ‘new religion' border on the ridiculous. Take the case of artist Tony Akinbola who is doing a wonderful job of creatively rebranding Calabar through indigenous-related monumental art. When he put up his work of huge Ikom monoliths as a monumental tribute to artists who about a century ago demonstrated that they could portray vivid human facial expressions on stone carvings, ironically, members of the same Pentecostal faith he belongs to, saw the huge monoliths as an affront celebrating devil-worship. Soon after the monumental monoliths were put up at a strategic roundabout in Calabar, members of his faith held a prayer session around the monumental art piece "casting and binding the demons" supposedly inhabiting the monoliths.
Like it or not, our new religious faiths and the older churches are all borrowed and adapted from European concepts of religion. What is puzzling and quite worrying about the over zealous righteousness of the preachers and followers of the relatively new Pentecostal faiths in Nigeria is their distorted interpretation of the tenets of the original religion from which they have grown.
Demonising Onobrakpeya
From medieval days in Europe, the Church; particularly the Catholic Church was a huge patron of the arts, commissioning the great artists of the day to do paintings and sculptures to decorate churches across Europe. In fact, the Church and later the noble men and elite were the biggest sponsors of the arts, ensuring their growth and mass acceptance over centuries.
It was therefore not surprising that the Roman Catholic Church in Nigeria commissioned Bruce Onobrakpeya to do artistic works of decoration in a church in Lagos. Predictably, Bruce Onobrakpeya dug into his Urhobo cultural roots and produced works that incorporated traditional Urhobo religious symbols, That the Catholic Church did not regard the religious symbolism in Onobrakpeya's work as pagan or fetish representations says a lot for their artistic and cultural maturity as well as their liberalism. It is the rigidity of the ‘new religion' in Nigeria born out of cultural ignorance and the lack of cultural history that is most disturbing.
According to Bruce Onobrakpeya, the way religious objects are placed in a traditional shrine attest to the artistic inclination of shrine's priest. It is argued in certain artistic circles that the very idea of installations - a phenomenon viewed as avantgarde in western art circles - originated from a study of the placement of objects in traditional African shrines.
It was with a tinge of sadness that Bruce Onobrakpeya narrated some of new experiences he has had with regard to some of his now world-acclaimed artworks. "Once in a while" he told me, "young people return my artworks they have inherited from their parents on the grounds that when their pastor visited their homes and saw the artworks he condemned them as demonic!"
Depressing tale
Strange as it may seem, Onobrakpeya is lucky. Aino Oni-Okpaku - member of the Board of Trustees of the Ben Enwonwu Foundation and a Swedish-born Nigerian art-lover and owner of the Quintessence outfit in Falomo Ikoyi - has depressing stories of how the ‘new religion' has literarily poisoned the minds of Nigerians towards their traditional and contemporary arts. She tells of a collector who had bought an artwork from an exhibition at the Quintessence Gallery and had gone on to prominently display the artwork in his office for pleasure and inspiration. His wife visited his office, saw the artwork, took it away in anger and burnt it because it was demonic,
Recently, Quintessence staged an exhibition of sacred traditional religious art in honour of the late Susanne Wenger. To Aino Oni-Okpaku's amazement, quite a number of people, including some of her workers refused to enter the room where these works were being exhibited on the excuse that they were fetish and demonic.
The new religion in Nigeria in desperation to win more converts has chosen traditional and contemporary Nigerian art as manifestations of devil worship. In truth, their campaign against the arts only exposes their understanding of the reality that creativity is a spiritual manifestation of the Almighty God Himself!
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