The Meeting with the Old Man in the Forest: Tales of Akporode, the Awesome and Mysterious Universe

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

The Meeting with the Old Man in the Forest

                 Tales of Akporode 

  The Awesome and Mysterious Universe

In my myriad journeys in search of knowledge, I learnt of an old man in the forests between Ughelli and Warri in the Niger Delta who had retired there in search of uncommon knowledge. I resolved to seek him out. 

It was a long journey.  No one knew exactly where he lived,  only the section of wild landscape from which he seemed to emerge from time to time to the bafflement of onlookers.

Eventually, having penetrated deep into that section of the wilderness without success in weeks of search, my guides had to leave me to return to their village for supplies in the hope of returning to continue the quest.

That night, I slept in a hammock they had made for me at the higher levels of a tree. 

I woke up in the morning to see someone beckoning to me from the base of the elevation where I was resting.

I was puzzled. Could my guides have returned so fast? It was barely daybreak.

Looking closely,  I saw it was not any of those who had led me there but a stockily built old man, vigorous  in shorts and shirt. 

Could this be the person I had been searching for?

I climbed down.

Once my feet touched the ground, he stated walking away. Puzzled but curious, I followed.

He kept walking towards what looked like an impenetrable section of forest, but which he parted to reveal a path.

As we proceeded, I noticed that the atmosphere began to change. A strange silence steadily grew, underlying the usual sounds of the forest, until the silence became a presence of its own,  a unique identity, a sensation so unsettling I would have fled in terror had I been alone.

I saw it from a distance.  A tree of mountainous presence dominating the landscape. The awesome silence carrying a strange energy,  more eloquent than speech, but beyond human perception, seemed to be coming from it.

Was this why this mysterious man- I assumed he was the one I had been seeking- lived in the forest, immersing himself in this frighteningly awesome experience?

After a walk of about half a day, as the sun of afternoon was stationed in the sky, we reached the tree.

The old man sat on the ground at the base, miniscule against the behemoth. He gestured me to do the same. I sat. The shade from the massive branches covered us both.

He  faced me, doing nothing except sitting and gazing forward.

"What could this mean?" I puzzled.The various questions that brought me into the forest blazed in my mind. Parts of my body itched with impatience.

Underneath all this, however, was the immense silence, broken or even orchestrated with the sounds of moving monkeys in the branches above.

The intimidating intensity of that silence was made manageable only by the fact that I was not alone.

Gradually my questions and even myself were swallowed up in that silence.

In my mind's eye I disappeared like a piece of ice inside a raging fire, only this fire was silence.

The old man never spoke but the understanding that reached me may be presented as a conversation.

"You have found me or I have allowed you to find me", he may be visualized as stating. " What do you want?"

I can be imagined as quickly composing myself and responding. " I have seen works of art attributed to you. I found them marvellous", I would have begun. " I needed to see the creator of such wonders and learn how he was able to do such work" I would conclude.

"Are you an artist?" he could have asked.

"Yes", I responded. " But not an artist in wood, like yourself. I'm a writer".

"Every artist needs to look inward to depths within and outward to depths without.

"That's why I'm here. To better listen to myself and to the universe" he stated.

I was amazed.

A person retreating from society to live among trees and animals, rivers and insects, just beceause he wanted to be a great artist?

"The life of the artist goes beyond creating things that strike people" he may be seen as responding, as if reading my thoughts.

"The artist ideally aspires to seeing truly, hearing truly, feeling truly and acting truly", he concluded.

Really? I thought. Is this like what Duke Asidere used to reference when he described himself as listening to an inward voice when painting and Pablo Picasso did in describing a presence as standing beside him when he was at work?

But Asidere paints in his studio in the upscale Victoria Island environment of metropolitan Lagos and Picasso was the most lionized  Western artist of his time, a celebrity in Paris, then art capital of the West, an artist known for amorous relationships with successive women, but this artist has chosen to withdraw from humanity.

"To each his own" the old artist could affirm, again seeming to read my mind. "The silence of the forest is vital for me to feel the depths of my soul and see the face I had before I was born".

Wow. I exclaimed inwardly. Does an artist need to be so philosophical or mysterious, I wondered.

The silence descended. My questions began to answer themselves.

This artist was moving beyond art as the creation of objects. He was entering into the unity of art as construction of forms and art as the composition of a life. He was seeking the artless art.

We sat within that immensity throughout the night and into the next day, the most consequential hours of my life.

What better zone to measure human potential against the human condition, to see what one may be against the context of the great immensity than in a place like this?

I learnt much that continues to unfurl over the years.

From time to time I return in imagination to the old man under the tree and  experience my smallness within the splendour of the world, the glory of my existence as a testifier to the wonder of cosmos.

Notes

Bruce Onobrakpeya, the Nigerian artist who became 93 in August 2025, returns in this story after his first characterization by myself in the fictional narrative " The Old Man Seeking Knowledge and Wisdom".

This story is based on my picture of Onobrakpeya, above, taken at his home on an earlier birthday as well as on the second picture, of a massive tree in the forests of Nigeria's Edo State, from "The Okomu Elephant Landscape " by the ANI Foundation( https://www.africanatureinvestors.org/okomu) on the Okomu Forest Reserve in Nigeria's Edo State. 

Both inspirations have been fused with ideas from various sources in actualizing a version of the archetypal images of an old wise man and an inspirational tree within a mysteriously inspiring yet awesome landscape, images drawing from the intersection of my first hand experiences and my reading. 

Why Onobrakpeya and why the tree motif?

Onobrakpeya is a superlative artist in dramatizing the numinous power, the mysterious potencies, of classical African visual sacred forms.

His advanced age lends itself to going beyond a focus on his art to a concentration on his person as distilling wisdom from decades of quest for knowledge within the wilderness of creativity. 

Trees, groves and forests are my primary inspirational force in nature. The experience of awesome, uplifting silence is strategic to my encounter with such natural spaces.

Onobrakpeya's majestic installation, Akporode, defined by glorious pillars suggesting trees and evoking the Urhobo pillar motif for aspiration to Oghene, the creator of the universe, conjoins for me the elevated ambience of nature, the grandeur of cosmos and the soaring creativity of the human being in responding to the glory of the universe, values suggested by the complex beauty of the installation.

"Every artist needs to look inward to depths within and outward to depths without" declared by the old man, is the beginning of my narrative development of n aesthetic mystical philosophy.

This philosophy organizes my own experience in terms of a philosophy of penetration to the essence of existence through sensitivity to inward and outward beauty.

This  philosophy demonstrates a confluence of Western and Asian thought.

It is  structured by the Yoruba concept, "oju inu", the inward eye or "oju okan", the inward mind, as mapped by Babatunde Lawal in "Aworan: Representing the Self and its Metaphysical Other in Yoruba Art" and further developed by Rowland Abiodun in Yoruba Art and Language: Seeking the African in African Art.

It is complemented by the Igbo concept "ose naabo", the eye with which one sees the physical and the spiritual worlds, as depicted by Anenechukwu Umeh, After God is Dibia: Igbo Spirituality and Sacred Science in Nigeria.

I have explored these ideas in various essays.

"The awesome and mysterious universe" in the story's title is one interpretation of the Urhobo term " Akporode ", according to Philomena Ofuafo's "Envisaging the Concept of Akpo in Urhobo Mythology in Visual Form: A Study of Bruce Onobrakpeya's Art" ( International Journal for Research in Arts and Sciences. Vol.9.No.2. https://academicexcellencesociety.com/envisaging_the_concept_of_akpo.pdf) 

 

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

It is complemented by the Igbo concept "ose ora", the eye with which one sees the physical and the spiritual worlds, as depicted by Anenechukwu Umeh, After God is Dibia: Igbo Spirituality and Sacred Science in Nigeria.