Urban Transformations: Landscape and the Sacred in Benin-City: The Glory and Destruction of the Ogba Forest: An Ecological Tragedy and Human Flourishing in an Autobiographical Context
Oluwatoyin Adepoju
Urban Transformations
Landscape and the Sacred in Benin-City
The Glory and Destruction of the Ogba Forest
An Ecological Tragedy and Human Flourishing in an Autobiographical Context
Elegant lone tree gloriously silhouetted against the sky, overlooking an urban community that has emerged in what used to be the Ogba Forest in Benin-City.
Picture by myself
Camera: iPhone 6s
Edited on an HP laptop
Oluwatoyin Vincent Adepoju
This essay maps an emerging interpretive framework in my ongoing exploration of the philosophical and spiritual significance of Nigeria's vegetative spaces, particularly trees, a framework emerging into clarity through my return to Benin-City, the origin and inspirational centre of my relationship with space, particularly with conjunctions between nature and human habitation.
I describe the implications of encountering the echoes of a now lost premier sacred vegetative space in Benin and my aspirations in engaging with those still surviving, a return to an inspirational beginning and continuing inspiration in the context of my cognitive and
entrepreneurial history across two countries.
Contents
In Search of an Old Love
A Sacred Presence
A Traveller Lost in Time
Scholarly and Contemplative Systems and Nature Spaces
Expanding Possibilities
Taking Forward the Inspiration of the Sacred Place
The Cathedral of Memory
What Next?
In Search of an Old Love
Leaving Ife on the 21st of October 2022, in my ongoing exploration of the spiritual and philosophical significance of Nigeria's vegetative spaces, particularly trees, I headed for Benin-City, a centre of nature spirituality, particularly tree spirituality, as I knew it when I left there 20 years ago, never having returned since.
On arriving in Benin, the first place I went looking for was a forest I had in mind all those years as the most inspiring place I have ever known, a wonder of nature.
I got to the location on Ekehuan Road to find the vegetative glory, the forest as I knew it, does not exist anymore. A good part of it has become a well built residential suburb, part of an expansive community busy with vehicular traffic, petrol stations, churches and other markers of vibrant urban life, now known as Upper Ekehuan, in recognition of its sprawling urbanization.
Parts of what may have been the forest are still visible, though, as heavily denuded wooded landscape, further inward from the road and the houses built some distance from it, the arboreal space marred in some places by refuse dumping, as cows graze among the grass, leaving trails of dung. A woodmill is active in a section, the trees thinned out, the carcasses of those trees that have been butchered processed as wood for use by humans.
I had been hoping against hope that the Benin tradition of leaving inviolate because of their sacredness the areas around the emergence of a river from earth because a spirit is believed to dwell there would apply to this wonderful place.
A Sacred Presence
There used to be an angelic presence there which could be sensed by anyone, whatever they thought about such beliefs. That presence is summed up for me by an edition of Webster's Dictionary on the concept of the numinous as developed by Rudolf Otto in The Idea of the Holy, "an invisible but majestic presence that inspires both dread and fascination, and constitutes the non-rational element of vital religion.''
Dread, inspired by a sense of otherness, of ontological remoteness from the human and from reality as conventionally understood by humanity, yet fascinating, in suggesting an expansion and elevation of existence that may be sensed or experienced by the human being. Compelled by this paradoxical balance of qualities, I would gaze at the entrance to the forest, week after week, yet at first found myself unable to enter it, even though others were going there to fetch water and bathe, so acute was my sensitivity to the presence there of what Otto's evocative Latin expression terms ''mysterium tremendum et fascinans,'' a tremendous and fascinating mystery.
The presence at the Ogba forest, as I called the place, after what I was told was the name of the river that came to the surface there after a long underground journey, was so fantastically lofty in character, in harmony with the cathedral majesty of the trees that stood gloriously in that place, within sublime vegetative density, both visible and suggestive of concealing a potent secret, it took my mind to the Biblical expression attributed to God, " my ways are above your ways, as the heavens are above the Earth."
"I thought angels are supposed to be in heaven, how come I seem to sense an angelic presence here?," I used to wonder in my early encounters with that location.
Western
nature spirituality, however, as in Vera Stanley Alder's The Initiation of the World, the books of Dr. Douglas Baker, Geoffrey Hodson's The Kingdom of the Gods, and the work and texts related to the Findhorn community, demonstrates the conviction that angels also exist in
nature, being highly spiritually
developed entities known as devas.
J.R. Tolkien's novel The Lord of the Rings distills and develops, in his own unique way, streams of sensitivity to the numinous in nature, in its enchanting and almost surreal character, as developed in the Western literary, folkloristic and spiritual traditions, Tolkien's nature orientations becoming strategic to my own quest for such awesome spaces, eventually finding their most concentrated expression in the Ogba forest:
To the left stood a great mound, covered with a sward of grass as green as Springtime in the Elder Days. Upon it, as a double crown, grew two circles of trees: the outer had bark of snowy white, and were leafless but beautiful in their shapely nakedness; the inner were mallorn-trees of great height, still arrayed in pale gold. High amid the branches of a towering tree that stood in the centre of all there gleamed a white flet. At the feet of the trees, and all about the green hillsides the grass was studded with small golden flowers shaped like stars. Among them, nodding on slender stalks, were other flowers, white and palest green: they glimmered as a mist amid the rich hue of the grass. Over all the sky was blue, and the sun of afternoon glowed upon the hill and cast long green shadows beneath the trees.
…
The others cast themselves down upon the fragrant grass, but Frodo stood awhile still lost in wonder. It seemed to him that he had stepped through a high window that looked on a vanished world. A light was upon it for which his language had no name. All that he saw was shapely, but the shapes seemed at once clear cut, as if they had been first conceived and drawn at the uncovering of his eyes, and ancient as if they had endured for ever. He saw no colour but those he knew, gold and white and blue and green, but they were fresh and poignant, as if he had at that moment first perceived them and made for them names new and wonderful.
…
‘’I feel as if I was inside a song…’’ Though he walked and breathed, and about him living leaves and flowers were stirred by the same cool wind as fanned his face, Frodo felt that he was in a timeless land that did not fade or change or fall into forgetfulness. When he had gone and passed again into the outer world, still Frodo the wanderer from the Shire would walk there, upon the grass among elanor and niphredil [flowers] in fair Lothlorien.
… the South Wind blew upon Cerin Amroth and sighed among the branches. Frodo stood still, hearing far off great seas upon beaches that had long ago been washed away, and sea-birds crying whose race had perished from the earth. As Frodo prepared to [climb], he laid his hand upon the tree …: never before had he been so suddenly and so keenly aware of the feel and texture of a tree’s skin and of the life within it. He felt a delight in wood and the touch of it, neither as forester nor as carpenter; it was the delight of the living tree itself.
…
Frodo looked and saw, still at some distance, a hill of many mighty trees, or a city of green towers: which it was he could not tell. Out of it, it seemed to him that the power and light came that held all the land in sway. He longed suddenly to fly like a bird to rest in the green city.
Walking in the highly denuded wooded zone in the area that is left of the original character of the Ogba forest, I briefly sensed something of the old serenity, but without the eldritch power, the uncannily lofty intensity, I used to know.
What could have happened to the glorious presence I used to sense amidst the trees and the flowing water, believed in those days to be the expression of the goddess of the river, her presence unquestionably accepted by people who used to come there to fetch water and swim in the liquid expanse?
I was deeply captivated by this intangible but unmistakable identity, invisible but palpable, condensing in intensity as one went deeper into the section of the forest from which the river emerged.
It radiated to my eyes well beyond the constellation of trees within which it was concentrated. It was visible to me as a sense of something inviolate, of the utmost purity, the radiance of which could be perceived from a distance.
This radiance led to my discovery of the forest in the first place, as I went there to find out where this light was coming from, a numinosity described by an old man I was fortunate to meet there as the presence of the goddess expressed as a screen to protect the place from violation, as an adult screens a bed freshly made with spotlessly clean sheets from being soiled by children
Did that presence migrate as her home was destroyed over the years?
Was she inseparable from the space, being a construct of the natural environment, the complexity of vegetative forms generating a form of collective consciousness, focused in a single identity over aeons of time, the destruction of the forest implying the dissipation of that identity, the dismemberment of her constitutive forms scattering her being, as the destruction of the human body puts an end to the life animating that form and the consciousness enabled by that life?
Who was that woman I encountered in a vision as I reflected on the forest when I was a regular visitor there before I left the country in 2002?
Could it be a perception of her in a manner my mind could accommodate?
Could the terrible dream I had in England of a woman being violated, crying furiously, frantically seeking help and finding non, a shocking dream waking me from sleep in a perplexity I am yet to unravel, be related to the destruction of that forest?
I recurrently returned to the now denuded landscape, seeking traces of what I remembered, like a person searching for signs of a missing loved one where they were last seen.
The place could have become a glorious park, which people could visit from all over the world to encounter the sacred in its primal form, free of binding by any belief systems, simply but unmistakably projecting a sense of the holiness of existence that one may interpret in whatever way one wishes.
''...there hath past away a glory from the earth.
Whither is fled the visionary gleam?
Where is it now, the glory and the dream?''
Compiled from William Wordsworth, ''Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood.''
A Traveller Lost in Time
''Where we stand now used to be the forest,'' a girl I bought a drink from as I sat at her family's shop to refresh myself after my long walk and get my bearings among the maze of houses told me. ''How could you know?'' I asked. ''You are not likely to have been born at the time, '' I wondered aloud. ''My mother told me,'' she replied. ''The place was opened up'' she continued. ''The land was sold'' she said, and communities have emerged in the place.
Standing among ruddily youthful faces as the girl explained to me how what I understood as one of the greatest treasures in the world had been destroyed to make way for human habitation, I felt like an ancestor, projected into the future from his own time, his descendants helping him acclimatize to the new, bewildering realities he is confronted with, a Rip Van Winkle figure, as in the story by US author Washington Irvine, who wakes up from sleep to find the world has changed dramatically around him, as he had been asleep for a hundred years, that length of time being my own addition to the story to indicate the depth of shock my own experience inspired in me.
Scholarly and Contemplative Systems and Nature Spaces
"What have I lost and what have I gained from leaving Benin?'' I was compelled to ask myself. It was in that very forest I got the inspiration for the initiative that eventually took me to various universities and university cities in England.
''Set up a research centre and public library in the ground floor of your family house, the section you have been mandated to get a tenant for,'' was the idea that came to mind as I took a walk one day in the forest. I did not think of the suggestion again, until it came to me again in the forest, a week later.
I did so, using my books as the library, and,
when computers were still new to Nigeria, installed a computer, and,
from my salary as an
academic at the University of Benin, hired a secretary to operate it, as well as a library assistant, going on research trips outside Benin as the secretary typed up the findings of
my work, while students from the university used the library.
Expanding Possibilities
In the context of this
initiative, I eventually got full funding to study in various universities in
England, and as it eventually turned out, to do anything I liked with myself
there, for as long as I liked, in the course of self education.
In the scope of exposure to scholarship and the concentration on learning facilitated by that opportunity, I was able to develop a cohesive understanding of my spiritual and philosophical quest, in which my experience with the Ogba forest was one of the pivotal points in my understanding of the universe. Returning to Benin and writing this assessment in the place where my philosophical and spiritual development reached maturity, my understanding of my journey so far reaches consummation.
My memory of the forest has become for me an axis mundi, a centre of the cosmos in a metaphorical sense, a demonstration of the unity of spirit and matter constituting the universe, revealed through the unique power of that place, its intimately secluded beauty evocative of the womb of cosmos, the water emerging to the surface of the earth from an underground flow becoming for me like the ceaseless creation of existence from the cosmic matrix.
The various concepts of classical Yoruba philosophy and spirituality, my central interest in African philosophies and spiritualities, in their convergence with other bodies of knowledge from across the world, acquired personal meaning and depth of significance in relation to my encounters with Benin nature spirituality, at the centre of which I now understand may be seen my relationship with the forest, leading me to develop my own philosophical theories and spiritual practices, taking them further under the stimulus of my current return to where it all began.
This summative flowering is demonstrated in an appreciation of the universe as an exoteric and esoteric unity, its esoteric depths inaccessible until penetrated by the development of residual human perceptual powers, from the range of the senses beyond immediate sense perception to aspects of the material world not ordinarily accessible to the senses, to contemplative resonance with the rhythms between the human person and cosmic possibilities.
All these I came to see as resonating in the complex of ideas represented by the Yoruba terms ori inu, oju inu, ase and oro, roughly correlative with the Hindu concepts atman, Shakti and the Hindu system Tantra, within which are my favourite Tantric systems Sri Vidya and Trika, ideas and practices converging with Anenechukwu Umeh's remarkable depiction of Igbo Afa thought and practice in After God is Dibia: Igbo Cosmology, Divination and Sacred Science in Nigeria.
These ideations and their place within expanding conceptual and expressive possibilities in African, Asian, Western and other thought have been constellated for me by my encounters with Benin nature spirituality, in the context of Benin booksellers, in my relationships with institutions arriving in Benin from various parts of the world, and my university training in Benin, an educational journey beginning with the transformative impact on me of our family library, educational opportunities generating foundational encounters with ideas shaping my life. My relationship with the forest is luminous in my memory as the synthesis of the various realizations enabled by this urban space, in its relationships between secular and sacred geography.
Taking Forward the Inspiration of the Sacred Place
How wonderful it would be, I would dream, over the years of distance from that inspiring location, to bring my unfolding writing and publishing skills, my growing exposure to the study of landscape, to animistic philosophies, to human cognitive powers in relation to the stimulating potencies of nature, to bear on my fascination with the intersection of Benin sacred and secular landscapes, an urban geography marked by the strategic distribution of humanly built shrines as well as trees and groves in use as shrines, and other vegetative spaces recognized for their sacred quality but not enjoying formal religious status, as the Ogba forest was.
That sublime forest would be my inspirational centre, I used to project. A place for meditation and inspiring recreation, as one came and went from the research and retreat centre I could build there. Something like the Academy of the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, the first higher education institution in the Western tradition, built in a sacred grove, akin to the culture of the Indian forest philosophers whose reflections are recorded in the Upanishads, all these people perhaps deriving inspiration from the wordless wisdom of trees, an inspirational force reverberating across history but inadequately acknowledged.
The Buddha himself gained the insights that led to the civilisation shaping power of the religion he founded, Buddhism, while seated under a tree, yet when the Buddha's illumination is discussed, his strength of purpose and inward focused contemplative disciplines are referenced, with no agency or influence attributed to the bodhi tree under which he sat, as the famous account of the bodhi tree illumination may be re-examined, employing Judith Hoch's reflections on the inspirational force of trees, "The Sacred Forest.'' ( Church of the Lukumi; USA Africa Dialogues Series).
Nature is a primary teacher of humanity, but having midwifed humanity's own creations, the awareness expanding power of nature, enabling those human creativities but going beyond them, may be neglected when stories of those triumphs are told, except in accounts by nature venerators and nature mystics, such as the English poet William Wordsworth and the US philosopher Henry David Thoreau.
''What ought I to have done to help protect the peerless glory that was that forest?'' is a thought that has haunted me since. Could I have mustered and sustained the years-long advocacy required?
Buying it outright, as I once aspired to, anticipating the encroachment and destruction that has eventually occurred, walling it round and opening it as a public park managed by a multinational body protecting it from appropriation by any other interests, could have been ideal, but how would I have found that kind of money?
Could the Oba of Benin and the Edo State government have been persuaded to come together to protect the place, in the light of its ecological significance, its tourist potential and its cultural essence as a matchless expression of the values of Benin nature spirituality?
Could I have got help from around the world?
Susan Wenger and her associates successfully mobilised protection for the Oshun forest in Oshogbo, a much bigger space than the Ogba forest. Ironically, though, I saw the Ogba forest, as I knew it, a place unknown to people outside its locality, to be perhaps even more remarkable than the Oshun forest, the latter the centre of an annual pilgrimage of people from around the world celebrating the Oshun festival, perhaps the most famous event in the globally dispersed Yoruba origin Orisa spirituality.
On account of the level of human incursion into the Oshun forest, though, it was less marked than the Ogba forest as I knew it in terms of a sense of the numinous, according to my experience of the Oshun forest years ago. Are such spiritually potent sections in the Oshun forest, however, less easily accessible to the public on account of the careful curation of the forest?
Wenger came from Europe and helped preserve a great African heritage, in its eventual global prominence, the Oshun forest becoming a UNESCO World Heritage Site. I went to Europe, and kept away for so long from even visiting this place of central value to me, thereby losing the chance to at least attempt to do something similar for the Ogba forest in Benin-City as Wenger and her colleagues did for the Oshun forest.
I used various tactics in securing funding for the Compcros Research and Retreat Centre at Histon, near Cambridge UK, which I set up on a framework inspired by my dreams of the Ogba forest, eventually discontinuing the project when the financing became unsustainable.
"What is the need for such a centre so near to the globally strategic libraries and research centres of the University of Cambridge?," I seem to recall someone asking. I would have referenced particularly significant books I had which the University of Cambridge libraries did not possess as well as the naturalistic setting of my own centre, enabling recreation within nature in the midst of mental work, a more intimate access, as I might have seen it, than that enabled by the admittedly careful cultivation of natural and built space at the university.
Would such an initiative have made more sense in Benin? I used to wonder how I would place a building to house such a centre in the proximity of the Ogba forest, or ideally, within it, not realizing that bold eyed people, sacrilegeously fearless, were already raping the sacred space, decimating the vegetative wonder, populating it with brick and mortar monstrosities necessary for housing the delicate bodied creature who dominates the earth.
What, however, is the quality of life of the two legged ambulant one without the intimate companionship of his elder brethren, those who do not move but whose solidity of presence and serenity of character are vital for discovering the still centre of existence, facilitating finding direction in the frenetic flow of time?
''You cannot eat your cake and have it,'' it is said. I returned to Nigeria only after what may be described as the cycle of my education in England had been completed, an education partly formal but significantly informal, both planned and fortuitous, a good part of it accidental, unanticipated circumstances introducing me to creative possibilities I would otherwise have been unaware of.
Even my understanding of the potential of such an educational matrix as I visualized was limited by my lack of exposure to examples of such achievements, my time in Cambridge after the dissolution of my own research and retreat centre being indispensable for such exposure, as I describe in ''Paradoxical Homelessness from Cambridge to Lagos: Cambridge, CRASSH Research and the Concept of an Academic Centre.''
The Cathedral of Memory
The Ogba forest as it once was now exists for me only in memory, a memory within which I will live, as I also live in the physical world of the here and now, oscillating in focus between the two.
The memory of that forest will remain for me a celestial sanctum, in the spirit of AMORC, the Ancient Mystical Order of the Rosy Cross, one of the inspiring institutions I earlier discovered in Benin, the sanctum a zone outside time and space, a construct of the imagination, but through consistency of visualization, in relation to intensity of aspiration, becoming a convergence of the finest values, the most lofty possibilities conceivable, cosmic creativity given shape by human thought, as Charles Dean outlines this idea in an edition of the AMORC publication Liber 777: The Celestial Sanctum, and Raymond Bernard develops it in Messages from the Celestial Sanctum.
What Next?
I intend to journey beyond the heavily built regions of Benin, from Ekehuan Road to what used to be the richly forested areas around the village of Ogbowhioko, where I once spent many delightful hours trekking, discovering trees luminous with potent presence and magnificent beauty, areas which I now understand are heavily urbanised, up to Barracks, as a farther region in that landscape is called, moving till I come to the end of the urban expansion, pressing on beyond there to what I hope is still virgin forest.
Such great presences as I encountered at the Ogba forest must be present elsewhere. I hope to see again that radiance calling to me from within the trees as once led me to that wonder, possibly indicated by a flood of light pouring from within a central vortex, as was my experience there, mighty trees potent in eloquent silence, a stillness suffusing space, evoking the pregnant moment before creation, as something of continuously unfolding power pulsates, preparing to break forth into cosmic munificence, actualised in terms of the fertilization of the human mind by primal fecundative powers, a treasure held in trust for us by our elder brethren as our shared heritage.
Such empowerment would enable deeper engagement with Benin-City, studying its great culture of sacred trees, groves and forests. I aspire to add the Oshun forest to this exploratory itinerary, eventually returning to Ife for an in depth encounter with the glorious university landscape which ignited this exploration, a dream long slumbering within me without an understanding of how to fulfill it, until this fortuitous development.
I shall build a publicly accessible site to house the outcomes of the project.