Initiation into Sacred Woodcarving in Oghara: A Biography of Bruce Onobrakpeya 1

[Oluwatoyin Adepoju]

    Initiation into Sacred Woodcarving in 

                          Oghara

    A Biography of Bruce Onobrakpeya 

                                 1 

         Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju 

Bruce Onobrakpeya with a couple of examples of his art  at his house in Mushin, Lagos. 2023. 

The piece on the wall at his immediate right is one of his Oracles series of multimedia works.

Picture by myself.

He watched the slow, patient advance of the chisel as it cut into the wood, flakes falling to the ground. 

His father's meticulous progress in transforming inert forms into something that spoke a language of its own never ceased to amaze him.

Between the mysterious density of the forest where the wood came from and his father's workshop, something wondrous emerged.

The forest,  a balance of the darkness of  closely clustered trees and light from the sky, receding into total darkness as day withdrew, was a place of wonder but also of fear, compelling in its mysterious beauty but also distant from the human world, hence the sense of isolation from everything familiar whenever he entered there, isolation and fear, as if he was trespassing into another person's world,  yet the forest was only a few minutes walk from his father's house.

Obomeyoma's father, Onobrakpeya,  was a priest and carver of ritual and general implements in Oghara, in what would eventually be known as the Niger Delta, a tributary where the river Niger empties into the Atlantic Ocean, generating lush vegetation amidst stunning views of water and land.

The aquatic presence and vegetative bounty inspired a rich complex of religious beliefs, even richer for also being fed by the faiths and spiritual arts of the Edo and Yoruba neighbours to the East and South.

Oghara was part of the Agbarha community,  a complex of twenty six settlements, with neighbouring Ughelli a relatively short distance away, Warri and Sapele farther still.

Along with Agbarha,  these were all part of the constellation of Urhobo whose numbers were dominant in this part of the Niger Delta, surrounded by the Itsekiri and other close ethnicities.

Agbarha is deep within forested regions, sustaining itself through cultural  inclusivity, protecting itself  against incursions from the outside world.

Even decades into the future, when  Obomeyoma would be in his nineties, this inclusivity would remain, changed only by slow progress in opening to the outside world.

 

Obomeyoma's parents were ambitious for him. They wanted him to soar beyond the confines of the village and even the entire Agbarha community.  Beyond even the entire Urhobo axis. Schooling provided an avenue to that, the new educational culture created by the English colonialists. 

Could they have known, however,  that the inspiration the child gained in that humble village would be the core of his life, carrying the family's name across the world and deep into history?

The chisel kept working,  forceful and rhythmic, Onobrakpeya's mental and physical focus driving its lyrical motion.

Obomeyoma's concentration as he watched his father was total. Gazing at his father working  was even more exciting than playing with other children.

His father's shaping of wood seemed to call to something deep inside him, something he did not understand, something for which he had no name, something deeply fulfilling and yet hungry, a ravenous power that wanted to vanish into the forest and return with wood to carve the wonders he had experienced there.

Obomeyoma, later known by his father's name "Onobrakpeya", would eventually be identified by art of impossible struggle,  struggling to bring to life that haunting force experienced between his father at work, the forest and his own inward hunger. 

Integrating such forces was his father's shrine to Osonobrughwe, the creator of the universe,  Onobrakpeya' s ancestors and other deities, such as Aziza, a being described as experienced through the whirlwind which transported people into remote regions or other dimensions to educate them in arcane knowledge and the understanding of herbs and roots for healing and other purposes.

The shrine had a strange sense of presence, but Obomeyoma was drawn to its unusual atmosphere. 

The balance between the various shrine figures his father carved and between them and the surrounding shrine spaces where they were  installed intrigued the child.

He wished to be both part of the assemblage of forms making up the shrine as well as a  viewer of the shrine.

Was he entering the imaginative and spiritual world the shrine represented?

An orientation that would permanently shape his life?

He would later become a great shrine artist, visualising the mysterious force of sacred spaces through magical constructions of form, bridging the visible and the invisible. 

His father, and his mother Emetore also encouraged Obomeyoma to take part in Christian life.

Christianity was the new currency of social mobility and modernity and his parents  understood that the new world introduced by the British colonisers was complemented by their religion, Christianity,  making participation in that religion very helpful. 

Their child was captivated  by the rhythms of Christian life,  particularly by the liturgical majesty of the Catholic Mass.

The sonorous vocalisations in Latin and Urhobo, the motion of incense from swinging censers, the slow deliberate movements of the priest and his assistants, giving shape to the Christian doctrines

the boy learnt in Sunday school, attuned him to the elevated force of this spirituality,  a pulsation shining through thought and action.

Notes

The piece above is a foundation for my ongoing biography of the Nigerian artist Bruce Onobrakpeya, projected to be the first extensive exploration of his life and its relationship to his work, taking forward the brief biographies currently constituting the only records of the life of the ninety three year old artist in a publicly visible creative life spanning more than fifty years.

What is written above is a combination of historical fact and imaginative projection, trying to bring alive what is known about Onobrakpeya and its art in terms of roots in the earliest stages of his life. 

After further research I shall revisit the draft to address its complete accuracy.