[ Edited] The Literature and Arts of the Niger Delta, Edited by Tanure Ojaide and Enajite Eseoghene Ojaruega : A Panoramic and Yet Detailed Exploration of Beauty, Power and Challenge
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
The Literature and Arts of the Niger Delta
Edited by Tanure
Ojaide and Enajite Eseoghene Ojaruega
A Panoramic and Yet Detailed Exploration of Beauty, Power and Challenge
The Glory that is the Niger Delta
''A large village sits along the [ rivers and dense vegetation of ] the Niger Delta...
October 12, 2004 near Port Harcourt, Nigeria''
Image by Jacob Silberbeg
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
Comparative Cognitive Processes and Systems
"Exploring Every Corner of the Cosmos in Search of Knowledge"
Great thanks to the publishers for
sending me an e-copy of The Literature and Arts of the Niger Delta, 2021,granting my
request to review the ambitious achievement represented by this
book, an effort I am looking forward to. Surveys, in one volume, of the
literature and arts of any culture, African, Asian, the West and
beyond,
are not common. This essay is a preliminary review, a basic survey of the text and its significance. A more detailed analysis will come later.
The publisher's link above and the book's Amazon link enables one read part of the book. One can also read the entire book online at Perlego , where for $5 a month for a monthly subscription or between 3 and $4 a month for a yearly subscription billed at once at $40, as I understand it, both preceded by a 14 day free trial, one can read a large range of scholarly books and fictional works.
A Comparative Example from Yoruba Culture
A
magnificent volume on the art of another region of Nigeria, Yoruba:Nine Centuries
of African Art and Thought,1990, by Henry John Drewal, Rowland
Abiodun and John Pemberton III, dealt with the classical art and
philosophy of the Yoruba and did not address it's continuity to the present nor
did it discuss Yoruba literature, efforts that could have integrated such
luminaries as Osi Audu's remarkably innovative visualizations of Yoruba
theories of the self and of vision, ori inu and oju inu, and Wole
Soyinka's awesome verbal rethinking of this philosophy, eventually erupting into a
pure space in which mythic images have been distilled into limpid
thought, where they exist as invisible fires.
Novelists D.O.Fagunwa and Amos Tutuola, the filmmaker Tunde Kelani, the scholars Oladipo Yai and Akinwumi Ogundiran could all illuminate such a text, but how does one map such a vast scope of productivity, stretching across Anglophone and Francophone Africa and the Americas, crossing the arts, social sciences and sciences? Such tasks, however, need to be carried out in order to map a people's achievement in shaping their own place in creative history.
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A Land of Magnificent Visual Power
Picture by Ayo Adewunmi Esther on Flickr
Landmarks in the Study of Niger Delta Arts
''The Niger Delta is the delta [ an area of low, flat land, that occurs near where a river divides into several smaller rivers before flowing into the sea [ marked by ] highly fertile soil and dense, diverse vegetation-ThoughtCo. and Cambridge English Dictionary] of the Niger River sitting directly on the Gulf of Guinea on the Atlantic Ocean in Nigeria'' states the Wikipedia article on the region, an article rich in expositions of the zone's political economy.
Landmarks in the study of Niger
Delta arts include the Vol. 18. No.1, 1984 special issue
of African Arts dedicated to the correlative
disciplinary formulation Cross River Studies, as named by the
editor Keith Nicklin.
Martha Anderson and Philip Peek's Ways of the Rivers: Arts and Environment of the Niger Delta, 2002, is a rich offering directly related to the subject of The Literature and Arts of the Niger Delta. The new book includes the focus of Ways of the Rivers on older forms of the visual and performative arts. It also adds explorations of literature and other, newer artistic expressions, such as stand up comedy, modern music, film and Pidgin English arts.
Joseph Nevadomkys majestic review sums up Ways of the Rivers as "Sumptuously illustrated [succeeding] as a comprehensive survey into the art and dynamics of a region where the watery environment is synonymous with cultural identity and spiritual sustenance'' ( African Arts, 2003, Vol. 36, No. 3, pp. 10-11+90-91. 91).
Jean Borgatti's review describes Ways of the Rivers as representing ''the collective scholarship of many of the specialists in art history, history, and anthropology associated with Niger Delta studies over the last thirty years and is the first publication dedicated to this complex cultural matrix.... [It is] culturally inclusive and addresses art forms that range from the twelfth century to the contemporary period [setting ] the table for the next generation of scholars by bringing together [the] wealth of the Niger Delta, its peoples, and their complex of shared visual traditions'' ( The International Journal of African Historical Studies, Vol. 35, No. 2/3, 2002, pp.524-526.521,526).
Where Gods and Mortals Meet: Continuity and Renewal in Urhobo Art, 2004, is a study of the art of one of the peoples of the Niger Delta. The site of the exhibition that gave birth to the book is most revealing in terms of its rich content.
Tanure Ojaide and Joyce Ashuntantang's edited Routledge Handbook of Minority Discourses in African Literature, 2020, has a chapter on the ''Niger Delta and its minority condition in Nigerian writing'' by Obari Gomba.The Literature and Arts of the Niger Delta takes forward and expands that earlier effort.
Ekpe Society Members in Procession Adorned with Nsibidi on Bare Bodies and on Ukara Cloth Worn at the Waist
Arochukwu region, Nigeria, 1989. Photograph by Eli Bentor, 1989.
Nsibidi is one of the most symbolically powerful of Niger Delta arts.
Image source: Site of Smithsonian exhibition Inscribing Meaning: Writing and Graphic Systems in African Art
Unifying Niger Delta Verbal, Visual and Performative Arts
The achievement of Tanure
Ojaide and his co-editor Enajite Eseoghene Ojaruega in The
Literature and Arts of the Niger Delta is a development building upon
the remarkable accomplishments of those earlier efforts and
going beyond their range of cultural expressions, but without replacing the visual scope of those of the earlier works which were books dedicated to art. In bringing together a discussion of Niger Delta arts
and literature in one volume, Ojaide and Ojaregua have given us a
landmark work that complements those other texts.
The Niger Delta boasts such supreme masters as the novelist Ben Okri of the inimitable The Famished Road and the glorious Bruce Onobrakpeya, one of the greatest visual artists in history, a declaration I make from within the scope of my exposure to some of the greatest art, across the centuries, of the African, Western and Asian traditions, a master tirelessly and restlessly innovative across more than 60 years of constantly reinventing his art and still going strong in his 80s, one of the creators of modern African art, a maestro around whom should develop an industry of scholarship responding to the ultimacy of his fecundity. I am pleased to see a chapter each on Okri and Onobrakpeya in this book.
The book is broadly ambitious and yet detailed in coverage. It covers the conventionally studied visual and performative arts of sculpture and festivals and also stand up comedy, films, Pidgin English poetry as well as Standard English poetry and the novel, from Festus Iyayi to Ben Okri to Ken Saro Wiwa and more.
The Niger Delta, in particular, complemented by it's Edo neighbours, is the creative home of Nigerian Pidgin English, as iconised by the inimitable pidgin of immediate past First Lady Patience Jonathan, represented particularly by her anguished cry at painful paradoxes in the Chibok schoolgirl kidnap saga, "Prispa, na onli you waka come?!" representing a deployment of Pidgin English by such a nationally high ranking personage in public space that is rich at various levels of meaning and deserving of serious study. This book responds to the art of Nigerian Pidgin English as inimitably developed in the Niger Delta.
I see a discussion of Ibibio culture and the Ekpe esoteric school in relation to festival displays but I am not seeing a chapter on Victor Ekpuk, the internationally renowned master of the visual artistic transposition of the Ibibio and Ejagham Ekpe/Mgbe centred Nsibidi symbol system, dramatizing it's esoteric lucidity, enigmatic yet potent in it's beautiful mystery.
I also am not seeing a chapter on Nimi Wariboko, which is not surprising, since Wariboko is known as a philosopher and theologian, a majestic thinker on Kalabari thought in relation to Continental and Pentecostal philosophies, not a verbal artist, a limitation of perception I hope to contribute to correcting through my ongoing work on Wariboko, archived at my Exploring Nimi Wariboko blog, my Facebook page on the same subject, my academia.edu essays on Wariboko, along with my essays in The Philosophy of Nimi Wariboko, 2020, edited by Toyin Falola and the forthcoming collection of papers from the conference on the book.
The Literature and Arts of the Niger Delta ambitiously integrates Benin within it's scope, with two chapters on Benin art, one being a discussion by Ndibisi Ezeluomba who has done fine work on the metaphysical symbolism of Benin mud art, here discussing changes in Benin art through time and space, an ambitious and likely novel project. Benin art beyond particular aspects of its relationship to the monarchy is in great need of study, and an effort giving a developmental overview across space and time may be seen as one laying strategic foundations for future research.
Musicians Rex Lawson, Victor Uwaifo and Burna Boy are discussed, thereby ranging across decades and generations, from those musicians famous within Nigeria from the 60s to the 80s and 90s to Burna Boy whose international visibility was recently sealed by winning the prize for Best World Music Album at the 63rd Annual Grammy Awards.
The remarkable J.P. Clark, poet and dramatist of the rivers and beliefs of the classical culture of the Niger Delta, renderer into English of the Niger Delta epic The Ozidi Saga is here, along with feminine figures seeking feminine intelligence through literature, Zulu Sofola, Buchi Emecheta and Tess Onwueme.
Bruce Onobrakpeya's Shrine Set
One of Onobrakpeya's richest achievements is his transposition of the aesthetics of classical Nigerian spiritualities, as in his creation of shrines, evident in the image above.
At times he amplifies the visual through the combination of different expressive forms and various kinds of artifacts. These include his creation of a distinctive language Ibiebe, as in the example on the screen above, and the use of computer components.
Text adapted from ''Shrines'' photo album in Studying Bruce Onobrakpeya Facebook page by Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju.
Mapping Intersections of Environment, Economics, Politics and the Arts in the Niger Delta
Permeating the various sections of The Literature and Arts of the Niger Delta is a sensitivity to the intersection of aesthetic power and economic potency that is the unique blessing and challenge of the Delta, rich in rivers and oil, but it's landscape polluted by inhumane forms of oil exploration. Its vast wealth feeds a nation largely dependent for it's earnings on the remains of countless prehistoric creatures transformed into a form of the world's most often used energy source lying beneath the lands and rivers of the Delta.
This wealth, however, is a paradoxical blessing attracting greed from within and beyond the Delta such that both the region and the country struggle with the negativities and empowerments of this wealth. The ecological, social, economic, cultural and political implications of this environmental legacy and it's ramifications in various arts are discussed. Responding to the political imperatives ignited by the realities of the Niger Delta, the book is dedicated to two martyrs of the struggle for Niger Delta self determination, Isaac Adaka Boro and Ken Saro-Wiwa.
''A young woman named Akpomene, coated in oil stains as she sits in a canoe near river Nun in Bayelsa State, Nigeria,
on November 27, 2012. Akpomene fishes in the creek and sells the fish to help her family. She washes after fishing but
still has sticky rashes on her body.''
Image by Akintunde Akinyele
Image and text source: ''Nigeria's Illegal Oil Refineries," Allan Taylor, The Atlantic, January 15, 2013.
I look forward to detailed engagement with a visually powerful book, potent in revelation of verbal beauties in various forms of English and perhaps even an entry into Niger Delta non-English languages. It would be great for Routledge, the publishers, to have a partnership with a Nigerian publisher to produce this book for exclusive sale in Nigeria in a manner that makes it more readily accessible within the country.
Great congrats on the collaboration
between a Diaspora scholar, the literary and scholarly luminary Tanure Ojaide and the more
recent generation, represented by the Nigeria based scholar
Enajite Eseoghene, evoking the partnership between Herbert Cole and Chike
Aniakor that produced Igbo Arts: Community and Cosmos in 1984. Such collaborations
are a vital future of scholarship on Africa.
Looking Forward to Enquiries into and Constructions of Convergences of Aesthetics and Philosophy-Ecological, Political and More-in Niger Delta Studies
Philosophical Unifications of Niger Delta Arts
What other possibilities may be suggested by the book's achievement, indicators of future growth beyond the scholarly framework it generates? This pioneering single volume discussion of the scope of Niger Delta visual, verbal and performative arts may suggest the question of philosophies of expression from the Niger Delta or which may be constructed from classical Niger Delta thought.
These philosophies could suggest how these arts may be unified as demonstrations of the human effort to make meaning of existence in various domains and communicate such understandings in diverse contexts, all human activity being perceptible as an exercise in interpretation of reality and the communication of this interpretation.
What may be learnt from the unifying
logic, for example, of Nsibidi symbolism centred in human gesture and
motion, visual art, object organization and verbal expression? Could it yield
something like the oriki theory of discourse developed from endogenous Yoruba
thought by Rowland Abiodun in Yoruba Art and Language, illuminating Yoruba
expressive forms as evocators of the essence and expression of human and non-human
entities?
What new developments, grounded in the classical tradition or derived from
other sources, may be observed in aesthetic ideas from the Niger Delta? May
Wariboko's explorations of Kalabari theories of perception in relation to
imagination, as these orientations relate to the fulfillment of human potential,
suggest how Niger Delta aesthetics may be constructed in contemporary terms?
Such explorations would go beyond the foundations created by such scholars as Robin
Horton to dramatize the timeless dynamism of these ideas, as they are
rethought and applied by Wariboko at the intersection of Continental and
Pentecostal thought, possibilities dramatized in works focused on
Kalabari thought, such as Ethics and Time:
Ethos of Temporal Orientation in Politics and Religion of the Niger
Delta, and others where it is integrated with other orientations, as in Nigerian Pentecostalism.
What philosophical value may be developed from Niger Delta arts, approaches to exploring foundational and ultimate meaning, being and becoming, in various spheres of human life? Ekpuk's transpositions of Nsibidi symbols in terms of images of the tension between the knowable and the unknowable, between decipherable art and tantalizingly intriguing but unreadable art, may such visual dynamics be used as means of exploring the contours of knowledge in general?
Beautiful but mysterious, tantalizing but unresolvable, the familiar and the unfamiliar in concert, the fecundity of an egg yolk and the dynamic complexity of the brain, possibilities suggested to me by Victor Ekpuk's Children of the Full Moon, above, a dramatization of his reworking of the inspiration of Nsibidi aesthetics, conjoining Nsibidi symbols and his own self created forms in generating his own esoteric language, visible to all as Nsibidi is publicly visible, but its relationship to meaning as conventionally understood, remaining obscure, as Nsibidi's depth of meaning is accessible to only a select few.
Mapping Niger Delta Scholarship
What insights may emerge from efforts to map scholarship relating to the Niger Delta across disciplines, what orientations of thought may be discerned, from Kenneth Dike's pioneering deployment of oral and written sources in the study of African history in terms of the centrality of African agency in his Trade and Politics in the Niger Delta 1830-1885: An Introduction to the Economic and Political History of Nigeria to Robin Horton's abstractions from his Kalabari and other African studies in exploring relationships between traditional African thought and Western science, to J.P. Clark's pioneering work on African epic represented by his translation of the Ozidi Saga, the complementation of this by the work of Niger Delta origin novelist and scholar Isidore Okpewho on the African epic and on African oral and written literatures, whose work as scholar and writer, according to Chiji Akọma, was shaped by his sensitivity to anti-hegemonic possibilities enabled by minority perspectives, perspectives which one may see as influenced by his own natal cultures ("Isidore Okpewho:1941-2016", Tydskrif vir Letterkunde 54(1):247) or Wariboko's journeys across convergences between Kalabari and Christian and Western thought in fashioning a comprehensive vision of existence?
This configuration of achievement suggests that scholarship on the Niger Delta has been at the cutting edge of thought on African creativity, in the exploration of African dramatization of the ''creative [and reconfigurative] power of the human mind [expressed] in varying degrees of intensity,'' adapting Isidore Okpewho on myth ( ''Rethinking Myth,'' African Literature Today, No.11:Myth and History, 5-23.19.)
''In the beginning, there was a river. The river became a road and the road branched out to the whole world.''
Ben Okri. First sentence of The Famished Road.
From Homegrown Refineries to Homegrown Thought
May such cognitive transformations be metaphorically related to the boiling fires of the Niger Delta's home made refineries, crude and dangerous, alternatives to the much more sophisticated technologies represented by the imported construct that is the traditional refinery. The traditional refineries, however, have not been able to adequately serve Nigeria's needs.
May the development of these indigenous technologies be a way forward? Is there a lesson to be learnt at the synergy between technology, art and thought about building from local ingenuity to serve local needs rather than relying on thought systems, expressive forms and technologies that the endogenous people are not able to adapt significantly to their own needs and therefore take full ownership of? In sum, may more fundamental gains beyond oil be awaiting Nigeria and the world from the Niger Delta?
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A Man at Work on a Locally Made Refinery in the Niger Delta
''Ebiowei, 48, carries refined oil in buckets near the river Nun in Bayelsa State, on November 27, 2012.''
Image by Akintunde Akinyele
Source of image and text in quotation marks: ''Nigeria's Illegal Oil Refineries," Allan Taylor, The Atlantic, January 15, 2013.
Photography on the Niger Delta
It would be wonderful to enrich texts on the arts of the Niger Delta with an abundance of images that body forth the environmental glories, environmental challenges and artistic achievements of the Delta. The environmental realities of the Niger Delta, both positive and negative, its glorious landscapes and waterways in their beauty as well as the despoilation of those spaces by insensitive forms of oil exploration is a surreal universe that needs to be physically encountered or at least visually engaged with through images for it to hit home beyond the more intellectual and abstract communication of written text.
Along those lines, the category of Niger Delta photography, photography of the Niger Delta, is a very rich field of its own. In a new world of expansions of models of book construction, the costs of such books could be reduced by making online versions of them, with images accessed through open access to other sites, facilitating access of the text to Nigerians for whose economy the pricing methods of Western academic publishers were not designed.
I shall continue with this review through commentary on each chapter of The Literature and Arts of the Niger Delta.
The Crucible of Wealth that is the Niger Delta
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Celestial, terrestrial and abstract configuration suggesting a cosmological imagination.
Nsibidi symbols from the Flickr site of the exhibition Negotiation of the Secret Society Cloth: An Exploration of Ukara
at the Hutchins Centre for the Visual arts
showcasing the Nsibidi art collected by Eli Bentor