Yoruba Heritage as Project

24 | african arts WINTER 2009

Yoruba Heritage as Project Reauthenticating the Osun Grove in

Osogbo, Nigeria

Peter Probstall photos by the author except where otherwise indicated In July 2008 I attended the birthday party of the Aus-

trian artist Susanne Wenger in Osogbo, Nigeria. It was Wenger’s ninety-third birthday and, as it turned out, her last. In January 2009 she passed away (Probst 2009). It was a private family event. Practically all the guests were either adopted children or members of

Wenger’s New Sacred Art Group. Before the cutting of the birth-day cake each one of the guests stood up and gave a short speech praising the jubilee and her achievements. The style and topics of the speeches varied. While some eulogized the importance of Wenger’s deeds for their own personal life, others acclaimed her active participation in Osogbo’s ritual life and her relentless efforts to preserve the grove of Osogbo’s guardian deity Osun through the erection of new images. Still others took a more statesmanlike stance and stressed Wenger’s contribution to the reputation of Osogbo as Nigeria’s center of art and heritage.

As I listened to these speeches I found myself recalling the time I first visited Osogbo, in 2000. I had come to Nigeria to look into the question of what ever happened to the “Osogbo art school.” In the 1960s the label stood for an exciting though also contested center of modern—then still contemporary—African art. In the 1970s and 1980s Osogbo’s fame faded. The name grad-ually disappeared in the art historical references. By the end of the 1990s the literature suggested the name Osogbo had shrunk to a historical footnote. Encountering the reality thus came as a surprise. During my first visit in 2000 I quickly realized that the city and its artists had embarked on a “second career.” After a first career in the global art world, the city had successfully reinvented itself as an important destination in today’s roots and heritage tourism, with the Osun grove and annual Osun festival being the city’s main attractions (Fig. 1).

The Nigerian state was obviously supporting this development. Not only was the Osogbo museum—a branch of the National Commission of Museums and Monuments—involved in the organization of the Osun festival which climaxes in the Osun grove, but rumor also had it that the Nigerian state intended to nominate the Osun grove to be added to the UNESCO list of World Heritage sites. I asked around to get more information on the nomination plan but failed. The more I talked to people, the more I realized that I was obviously the only one who found the story stunning. What I conceived as a particularly striking case of postcolonial hybridity, (most) people in Osogbo found per-

(opposite)1 Osogbo Youth, Osun Festival 2002. The fish is both a depiction of Osun’s messenger as well as an emblem of royal authority and power.

hybrid heritage

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WINTER 2009 african arts | 25

fectly normal—by now. The long-standing reservations against Wenger and her work in the Osun grove, once articulated both inside and outside Nigeria, seemed to have been forgotten: her intrusion into the Yoruba iconoscape, the effects her structures had on the atmosphere of the grove, and the way it had led to a touristification of Yoruba art and culture, resulting in a kind of “Yoruba light” which had nothing to do with “real” Yoruba anymore. In the 1970s and ‘80s the reservation tied in with the debate on the foreignness of the grove’s images on the one hand and the debate on the foreignness of Wenger as the artist who created and prompted these works on the other. Both debates went together, doubling the feature of difference and thus creat-ing a double hybridity, as it were. And as if this is not enough, there was—and still is—also the hybridity of the site as such, simultaneously an active Yoruba ritual site and a Western sculp-ture garden where Nigerian school children and American and European tourists alike get guided tours, during which they learn about traditional Yoruba ritual and religion. Given these circumstances I found it difficult to envision that the plan of the Nigerian government to add the Osun grove to the UNESCO list of world heritage list would come to fruition. How to com-

bine UNESCO’s seemingly conservative nomination criteria (“authenticity,” “integrity,” or “masterwork of human creative genius,” etc.) with the celebration of newness and hybridity the reshaped Osun grove seemed to represent? And yet, when in July 2005 members of the World Heritage Committee decided to approve the Nigerian nomination and consequently declared the Osun Osogbo grove a UNESCO World Heritage site, that is exactly what happened (Fig. 2).

Depending on one’s perspective, one can see the decision either as a domestication or a celebration of hybridity. Whatever one opts for, the approach and analytical concepts to substantiate one’s argument will differ. After all, it is one thing to historicize the hybridity of objects (domestication); it is another to study the hybridity of subjects producing such objects (celebration). What is necessary to understand what has happened in Osogbo is a combination of both perspectives. In other words, an approach is needed which allows one to study the appropriation and authen-tication of both subjects and objects. The organization of the pres-ent essay into four parts results from this task. In the first part I will give a brief outline of the history and social importance of the Osun grove as an expression of locality and collective identity. The

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second part deals with the advent of Wenger and her modern-ist agenda which drove the reshaping of the grove. The third part looks at how the new was turned into heritage while the fourth and last part investigates the effects of this development. As I will show, each part represents a certain stage in the evolution of dif-ferent “regimes of value” (Myers 2001). To elicit the changing role of the Osun grove in the unfolding of these regimes I argue that it is useful to study Osogbo heritage politics along the lines of the “cultural script” (Kasfir 2007) and the dialectics of “flow and clo-sure” (Meyer and Geschiere 1999, Geschiere 2009) which struc-ture sociohistorical processes of accelerated change. Since heritage is a result of these acceleration processes and as such subject to their peculiar dialectics (Probst 2008) we need to understand both the concept and its expressions not as something fixed but as an open, ongoing project which can encompass and appreciate also a “hybrid heritage” such as the Osun grove. Having said that, let us look how this particular project evolved.

A CITADEL OF HISTORY

The sacred Osun grove today is a 75 hectare (185 acre) patch of primary forest alongside the Osun river in Osogbo, a Yoruba city-kingdom and capital of Osun state in Southwest Nigeria. As the signboard erected at the entrance to the main river shrine states,

the grove is the “Citadel of Osogbo History” (Fig. 3). As such it is full of “historical monuments, sculptures, and structures,” all created by members of the New Sacred Art Group founded by Wenger in the early 1960s. Scattered throughout the forest, the works vary in size, form, and material. A coherent style does not exist. Buraimoh Gbadamosi’s stocky and compact stone sculp-tures differ strongly from Kasali Akangbe’s dynamic, elongated wooden carvings and Adeyemi Oseni’s stylized cement figures (Figs. 4–5). While the latter show a restrained grace, Wenger’s cement architectures and plastics are excessive in their feverish celebration of expression. Yet different as the works in the Osun grove are, as gestures of respect to Yoruba religion they are all visible reminders of what constitutes Osogbo’s historical identity.

To the Nigerian public the Yoruba deity Osun and the Yoruba city Osogbo go together. People in Osogbo venerate Osun as their guardian deity and conduct an annual festival to honor and revive the relationship with her. In the numerous praise songs Osun is depicted as a big, massive woman wearing brass ban-gles, a brass fan, and a beaded comb. Her origin lies in Ekitiland west of Osogbo, the area where the Osun river originates. The river is in fact Osun’s epiphany, her liquid body as it were. Con-sequently Osun is first and foremost a water or fertility deity, but the notions associated with Osun are much wider, embracing

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imageries of healing, femininity, motherhood, sexuality, wealth, wisdom, knowledge, beauty, art, and power. In fact, as Rowland Abiodun (2001) has pointed out, Osun has different identities, depending on the various conditions under which people have lent meaning to her, a strategy which fits well Osun’s changing role in history.

As the only female of the original seventeen Yoruba divini-ties who descended on earth, Osun plays a special role in Yor-uba religion and politics. As the chapters òsétúá in the divination corpus Ifa narrate, Osun was initially left out by the other male deities but later gained power and influence. Based on oral tra-ditions and his own archaeological findings, Yoruba historian and archaeologist Akinwumi Ogundiran (2003:62ff.) has argued that Osun’s belated recognition and subsequent ascent in the pantheon of Yoruba Orisa might reflect historical transforma-tions in the Yoruba/Edo corridor. According to Ogundiran the upper Osun region was once a frontier zone in which the agency of hunters, ambitious traders, and upstart political scions remapped hitherto existing sociopolitical boundaries and led to a fusion of artistic traditions between Benin and the Yoruba groups standing under the influence of Oyo, the dominant polit-ical power which had succeeded Ife in the seventeenth century.

Though speculative, Ogundiran’s scenario correlates with the history of Osogbo. Thus, until the early nineteenth century Osogbo played practically no role in Yoruba politics. Situated on the old Oyo/Ijesa boundary, the town stood in the shadow

of Ilesa. With the collapse of Oyo and the subsequent struggle to fill the resulting power vacuum, this began to change. Osogbo became the frontline of two new regional powers: the Fulani coming from the north, advancing southwards, and the Ibadan marching northwards, determined to stem Fulani aggression. Eventually, the Ibadan and Fulani armies clashed in around 1830 in the legendary Battle of Osogbo, during which the Ibadan troops defeated the Fulani army. In Osogbo itself, the defeat is credited not to the military strength of the Ibadan army but to the power of Osun. According to one version, Osun gave warn-ing of an imminent Fulani attack by making a carving fall in the Osun shrine at the palace. Other versions tell how the deity turned into a food vendor who sold the Fulani poisoned bean-cakes, which killed many in the Fulani army and successfully ended its advance.

Be that as it may, Osun’s protection had important conse-quences for Osogbo. Within the next decades Osogbo turned from a sleepy settlement into an important Oyo-dominated eco-nomic center that was even able to marginalize its former over-lord, Ilesa. By 1905, Osogbo is said to have had about 60,000 inhabitants, Ilesa only 5000. The extension of railway and tele-graph lines from Lagos port to Osogbo not only strengthened the commercial importance of the city, it also led to a further massive population increase (on the history of Osogbo, see Awe and Albert 1996).

Traditionally, the palace’s policy for coping with the city’s expan-

(opposite)2 Entrance to the Osun grove with UNESCO logo, Osogbo 2008.

(this page)3 Billboard National Commission of Museums and Monuments, Osun grove, Osogbo, 2008.

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sion was by way of binding the newcomers to Osun. For this, the king of Osogbo, as the owner of the Osun cult, declared certain places along the river in the Osun grove as sites of minor dei-ties, all belonging to Osun’s “royal court,” which were then given to the newcomers as private places of worship (ìbú). Marked by an evergreen Peregun tree, this was where lineage members came together to settle disputes, baptize newborns, or seal marriages with the water of Osun’s associates. In other words, the body of Osun was extended into multiple localized refractions, which allowed the incorporation of the new groups of worshippers into the cult’s ritual body, in this way making the worshippers into citi-zens of the state or kingdom. In the course of time, however, this strategy of extended mediation seemed to have reached its lim-its. The increase in population in conjunction with the inclusion of Osogbo into ever more encompassing mediaspheres weakened the cohesive force of ìbú in favor of other spatial centers of polit-ico-religious unity like the church and the mosque.

William Schwab (1952), an American anthropologist who did fieldwork in Osogbo in the 1950s, has given a good account of the manifold frictions and tensions resulting from this develop-ment. Being concerned mainly with the effects of urbanization on the social and political organization, he did not discuss the Osun grove and the integrative role of the various ìbú. However, he paints a picture of issues of land shortage and changes in the transmission of land rights leading to a kind of opening in the use of the grove, which made it possible to fill the gap with new meaning and new forms of expressions. It is this historical sit-uation which marks the context of Wenger’s arrival and which allowed her to reshape the grove.

MODERN MAN AND ANCIENT GODS

Wenger was born in Austria in 1915. After her academic train-ing at art schools in Graz and Vienna, she spent eight itinerant years in Nigeria before settling in Osogbo in 1958 (Probst 2009). Wenger, initiated into Sonponna and Obatala, two important Yoruba cults and deities, had already rebuilt Yoruba shrines in Ede and Ilobu (Fig. 6). In Osogbo she continued her work, now in collaboration with Ulli Beier and Duro Ladipo, with whom she started the so-called Osogbo art movement.1 While Ladipo and Beier founded the famous Mbari Mbayo Club, in which they organized readings, art workshops, exhibitions, concerts, and theater performances, Wenger made it her life task to pre-serve and reshape the grove of the city’s guardian deity with new shrines and sculptures (Fig. 7).

Artists were intentionally drawn from the street. The focus was on those inhabiting the urban, popular sphere. What drove the agenda was the belief that it was incumbent upon art to leave the walls of the museum, to go out into the public realm and become integrated into everyday life. In view of the widespread opin-ion that African art was on the verge of collapse, the aim was to reunite art and culture in order to counter effectively the alien-ating effects of colonialism and capitalism on Yoruba society, as well as colonial ideas of authenticity and an uncontaminated cul-tural purity. With the world of tradition regarded as doomed and the world of the modern as constituting the root of all problems, the only appropriate solution was the creation of new art forms—“new images”—expressing the fluid, open, and still undetermined phase that society was believed to go through.2

As a project to counter the effects of colonial domination and

4 Stone sculpture by Buraimoh Gbadamosi referring to Esu. In the background the Osun river. Osun grove, 2008.

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revitalize Africa’s creative energies, Osogbo was not unique. It was a time of workshops, patrons, and mediators—developments sim-ilar to Osogbo’s occurred in other parts of the continent as well (Kasfir 1999:48–101). What made Osogbo a special case, though, was that the focus on newness and openness permeated the expressions of religious beliefs and experiences. In terms of the work in the Osun grove, this meant that the shrines intentionally departed from the conventions of Yoruba aesthetics.

The Shrines … have to be new and original in their concept of the enduringly divine. If not they are falsely affecting the spiritual flow. Their symbolism cannot persist to glorification of out-lived ideals, but must encourage new interpretation, individual spontaneity, and spiritual independence, which modern man needs to experience with his gods (Wenger 1977:11).

The quote is from Wenger’s book The Timeless Mind of the Sacred, published in 1977, when the reshaping of the grove was in full swing. As the older members of the Osun cult recall, at the time Wenger arrived the grove was practically devoid of sculptures. The only major structures were a few modest, adobe-like mud temples along the river. Occasionally, clay sculptures were erected to mark the individual places (ìbú) where various Osogbo families conducted their private rituals and sacrifices to different refractions of Osun (see above). In contrast to the tem-ples, which belonged to the palace, these sculptures did not last long. But the major temples were also beginning to show signs of decay. White ants had begun to affect the main Osun river tem-ple. In addition, farmers and businessmen had moved into the grove, violating the pact the founder of Osogbo had made with

the goddess to protect her homestead.Initially, Wenger’s role was restricted to the repair of the ant-

infested temple. Soon after, however, the work expanded to the restoration of the collapsed earthen wall that had once protected the entrance to the temple. A gate and further projects followed. With each new site, the structures became larger and more imposing. The materiality of the media, wood and cement, also enabled those Wenger had recruited to help her in the project to express themselves. In fact, the cement architecture functioned as a kind of canvas upon which artists inscribed their presence and visualized their own ideas.

A good example is Iya Mapo, a deity associated with female sexuality and pottery, and one of the more than forty sacred sites (ìbú) in the grove (Fig. 8). The structure is the result of a col-laboration between Wenger and Adibisi Akanji, a former brick-layer well known for his playful cement screens. In an interview in 2002, Akanji explained the working process as follows:

We heard of Iya Mapo that she has two hands, but when we saw her in the dream we discovered that she had more than two hands that we human beings have. She uses one hand to produce palm oil, another to make pots, and another to spin cotton wool. That is why we made her to have many hands. We just felt that at this place it is okay for it.3

Like most of the other big structures in the grove, Iya Mapo was erected in the 1970s. At this time the reshaping of the grove was well advanced and Osogbo artists profited from the new transcontinental artscapes their “new images” had helped to generate. Negotiating exhibitions, accepting fellowships, and obtaining commissions exemplify the ways Osogbo artists were

5 Ensemble of cement figures by Adeyemi Oseni representing the arrival of the founders of Osogbo in the present settlement area. Osun grove, 2003.

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able to make active use of the flows within the artscapes. They also illustrate the ambition to strengthen these flows with the production of ever more images. Yet it was also a time when crit-ical voices became louder, addressing problems of authenticity and legitimacy in the work of the Osogbo artists and those who promoted them.

TURNING THE NEW INTO HERITAGE

The new artistic closure was part of a major shift in Nigerian cultural politics concerning issues of heritage and authenticity, culminating in 1977 in the Pan African Festival of Arts and Cul-ture (FESTAC). As Olusegun Obasanjo, then Nigeria’s head of state, put it, the aim of FESTAC was “to recapture the origins and authenticity of the African heritage” (cited in Moore 1977:20; see also Apter 2005)

FESTAC was actually a sequel to the first Pan African Festi-val of Arts and Culture held 1966 in Dakar, Senegal. Conceived by Senegal’s president Léopold Senghor, the original Dakar fes-tival had been basically a platform for the celebration of Négri-tude (see Harney 2005:70ff.). As such it was first and foremost an intellectual and academic event. Effective participation required the knowledge of the sources that formed the basis of Senghor’s political aesthetics or at least responded to it. Contemporary art played only a minor role, the main focus being traditional or clas-sical African art.4 In this respect Senghor praised Nigeria as a “star culture” and—invoking Frobenius—the “Black Greece,” a status which earned it the honor of hosting the sequel to the Dakar event (Nzekwu 1966:82). As it turned out, however, Nigeria’s conception of the sequel did not correspond to Senghor’s expectations. At the

surface, the debate was on questions of style, vulgar commercial-ization, and French elitism. Ultimately at stake were issues of cul-tural supremacy and the hegemony of interpretation regarding the meaning of “Africa” and “Black Culture.”

As much as FESTAC was an expression of Nigeria’s political and economic self esteem as a new powerful petro-state (Apter 2005), it was also an expression of the country’s changing artistic discourse. Already in the early 1950s Nigeria’s then most famous and influential artist, Ben Enwonwu, had bemoaned the non-existence of a real and genuine Nigerian art movement (see Okeke 1995, Ogbechi 2008). With the end of colonial rule in 1960 and the emergence of work by Uche Okeke, Bruce Onabrakeya, and others, such a movement eventually emerged and affected the public status of the Osogbo artists. Given the framing of FESTAC as a celebration of heritage and authenticity, Osogbo’s “new images” became “false images,” that is, images that bore the testimony of an overcome colonial past.5 As a result, the FES-TAC planning committee intended to ban Osogbo artists from participating in the events. Though the exclusion was later over-ruled, on the level of public visibility Osogbo artists saw them-selves confronted with a de facto boycott.

In Osogbo itself the national turn towards heritage and authenticity focused less on political and artistic than on com-mercial issues. As part of the FESTAC euphoria, plans emerged to turn the grove into a tourist complex targeting the groups of white and African American visitors that the Osun grove and the annual Osun festival attracted. The money for the complex was supposed to come from American foundations that had expressed interest in financing the project. From the perspec-

6 Shrine constructed by Susanne Wenger in the late 1950s devoted to Erinle, guardian deity of Ilobu. Ilobu 2008.

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tive of the king and the palace the plan was welcomed. After all, Osun was and still is considered to be not only the source of water, fertility, and prosperity, but also the source of money (ilé owò).6 Given that understanding, to generate money from Osun was not a matter of commodifying or exploiting the deity, but rather a practice induced, encouraged, and even exhorted by the deity herself.

Not all agreed though. Protest came especially from Wenger and her group. Conflicts over land and the erection of new images had accompanied the reshaping of the grove right from the beginning. After independence King Adenle, who had invited Wenger to come to Osogbo and who backed the reshap-ing project, used his political influence to ensure that the new government declared the grove a national monument. The sta-tus granted some protection. With Adenle’s death in 1976 not only the incumbent of the throne but also the strategy of pro-tection shifted. While Adenle had focused on art, his successor favored tourism. For Wenger the plan meant a banalization of the grove. Serious conflicts between her group and the palace developed (Probst 2007). The dispute culminated in 1985 over the erection of one of Kasali Akangbe’s elongated wooden statues at the market place opposite the Osogbo palace. The figure’s erect penis caused an outcry of protest and led to a public debate over the role of Wenger in Yoruba art and religion in general and in Osogbo’s Osun cult in particular. During a meeting of the Local Government Traditional Council, members of the council con-demned Wenger’s “gross disrespect for our cherished antiquities” and her “profaning our tradition and cultural heritage.”7

A few months later, in August 1986, the Osogbo Heritage Coun-

cil was established. As the secretary of the Council pointed out:

Perhaps one singular developmental project that ruminated many minds for a long time here in Osogbo was the launching of the town into the full arena of tourism. Blessed with innumerable show pieces both natural and man-made Osogbo had coined, almost from incep-tion, a fame for itself in the distinguished and distinct world of arts and culture … The historical monuments and activities are to be fully revived or developed into tourist attractions … There would be a national park, amusement park … restaurants, information kiosks, preserved art works and natural features Through the Osogbo Heri-tage Council, there is anxious vision of Osogbo becoming another Mecca or Jerusalem attracting visitors from all over the world not only for sight-seeing but also for research (Osun Osogbo Festival Brochure 1986:6–7).

Artistic activities were affected by the turn towards heritage. Thus members of Wenger’s New Sacred Art Group were now working for the newly established Osogbo Museum, a branch of the National Commission of Museums and Monuments. Even Wenger herself was put on the payroll of the museum, whose director now acted as a mediator between Wenger and the pal-ace. Work shifted from the building of shrines to the erection of new representational structures like a new iron gate at the entrance to the Osun river temple and a VIP pavilion for high-ranking guests during the annual Osun festival (Fig. 9).

A similar development happened among the Osogbo art-ists who had come out of Beier’s workshops. What can be seen here is a kind of “branding” of Osogbo art with certain stylistic features—like Twins Seven Seven’s ornamental scale drawings, Rufus Ogundele’s painterly adoption of Yoruba crown iconog-

7 Cement sculpture, Obaluaye, Susanne Wenger late 1970s, Osun grove 2001.

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raphy, and Jimoh Buraimoh’s bead paintings—becoming the primary expressions of Osogbo art (Fig. 10). Just as Osogbo art became heritage art, heritage tourism also became a source of income. Thus in 1982 Nike Okundaye founded the Nike Centre for Art and Culture. In 1985 Jimoh Buraimoh started his night-club and hotel. In 1987 Muraina Oyelami opened up his arts- and tourist-oriented Obatala Centre in nearby Iragbiji. A year later, in 1988, the Osogbo musician Okonfo founded the Jungle Com-munication Centre, where he held music workshops for mostly German tourists. Two years later, Jimoh Buraimoh expanded his hotel and renamed it Heritage International Hotel. In line with that trend, Twins Seven Seven purchased land in the nearby vil-lage of Sekola and, from the early 1990s onwards, began to build the Paradise Resort, an idiosyncratic mixture of a Yoruba theme park, culture center, and tourist resort.

Contrary to people’s hopes, heritage tourism, the dream of the 1970s and 1980s, did not come to fruition. In fact, with the per-version of power under the Abacha military regime, the 1990s were a period of decline. Change and a wave of new aspirations only came about in the early 2000s. After a phase of political clo-sure, a new phase of flow set in. Thus the start of the new millen-nium meant not only Osogbo’s reentry into the UNESCO heritage empire but also a reconfiguration of the Osun grove’s authenticity.

GOING GLOBAL

To understand how both the reentry and the reconfiguration took place, we need to distinguish what happened in Osogbo, Abuja, and Paris. As for the UNESCO headquarters in Paris, the policy of awarding the World Heritage designation had changed. Two basic conceptual shifts were responsible for this. One con-cerned UNESCO’s revised understanding of authenticity, for-

mulated in 1994 in the so-called NARA declaration. In contrast to the previously held universalist conception, this document subscribed to a relativist approach, rejecting any fixed judg-ment concerning the value and meaning of authenticity.8 While authenticity was retained as a crucial criterion in assessing the value of a heritage site, the determination of authenticity itself was left to the party nominating a site. The second shift con-cerned the emergence of postcolonial theory and identity poli-tics. As we have seen, in the 1970s the “new images” coming out of Osogbo did not resonate with the new national visual lan-guage coming out of Nsukka. An appreciation came only some two decades later. Through the new theorization of “border zones” and the work of cultural translation, the Osogbo project appeared as a postcolonial project avant la lettre. In fact, Homi Bhabha’s idea of “border art” reads as if it is modelled after the practices prevailing in Osogbo during the transition from colo-nialism to independence:

Border art demands an encounter with newness that is not part of the continuum of past and present. It creates the sense of the now as an insurgent act of cultural translation. Such art does not merely recall the past as social cause or aesthetic precedent; it renews the past, refiguring it as a contingent “in-between” space, that innovates and interrupts performance of the present. The “past present” becomes part of the necessity not the nostalgia of living (1994:7).

Given this conceptual revision of the Osogbo case, the postco-lonial discourse affected also the realm of global heritage politics. Thus, together with the postmodern wave of deconstructiv-ism, the postcolonial critique of power gave the long-standing critique of the Eurocentric bias of UNESCO’s understanding of “world heritage” a theoretical foundation. A practical effect

8 Cement sculpture, Iya Mapo, Susanne Wenger and Adebisi Akanji, late 1970s, Osun grove 2002.

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was the “Africa 2009” program. Launched by UNESCO in 1998, the aim was to provide African nation states with the necessary technical and administrative equipment to enable them to suc-cessfully nominate sites situated on the African continent to the UNESCO World Heritage Center in order to transform the imperial structure of the global heritage landscape.

The result of this policy was Nigeria’s first World Heritage site: Sukur, a “cultural landscape” in the Mandara Hills at the bor-der with Cameroon, was added to the UNESCO list in 1999. The declaration coincided with the return of Olusegun Obasanjo into Nigerian politics in 1999. Obasanjo had been head of state from 1976 to 1979 and FESTAC had been conducted under his command. In view of FESTAC’s success, Obasanjo was eager to revive the issue of heritage as an important part of his politics.

In 2000 he appointed the Yoruba priest and archaeologist Omotoso Eluyemi as new director general of the National Com-mission for Museums and Monuments and Michael Omolewa, a professor of adult education of the University of Ibadan, as Nigeria’s ambassador and permanent delegate to UNESCO. They were later joined by Wande Abimbola, a prominent Ifa priest and “Special Advisor on Cultural Affairs and Traditional Matters” to Obasanjo. The three prepared an official application to enlist important features of Yoruba culture in the UNESCO program. For the newly implemented category of intangible heritage, efforts focused on Ifa and Gelede, for the established category of tangible heritage the target was the Osun grove.

With the inscription of Ifa and Gelede into the UNESCO list

9 New iron gate at the entrance to the Osun river temple by Mackay Tsemuya—an Igbo artist not residing in Osogbo. The depiction of Osun as a mermaid/Mami Wata is a recent development and correlates with the growing economic importance of the Osun grove. Osun grove 2003.

in 2003, their efforts were crowned with success. But the nomi-nation of the Osun grove had also made progress. In the sum-mer of the same year, a delegation of UNESCO consultants and local and state authorities arrived in Osogbo to inspect the Osun grove. The latter expressed their willingness to fix the critical issues listed by the consultants but pointed to economic con-straints. The consultants responded by stressing the implica-tions of a successful nomination: World Heritage Sites trigger economic growth in the host communities by attracting tourists and therefore lead to the establishment of a viable tourist infra-structure. The message was well received. A few months before the Osogbo Progressive Union had launched Osogbo’s own web site—www.osogbocity.com. Under the rubric “investment opportunities” it noted:

Given the right push, Osogbo has the natural and precedent tendency of becoming a true African “Disney World” with her God-endowed landscape, thick rain forest, and above all abundance of natural artis-tically inclined talents. In Osogbo, notable among the many places of cultural entrancing interests are the Obafemi Awolowo University Museum at Popo Street, Nike Art Gallery, Susan Wenger’s studio at Ibokun Road, the Osun grove, the Ataoja’s old and new palaces, bus-tling trading activities at Oja Oba or Orisunbare markets etc. Osogbo also play host to thousands of visitors who come from all across the globe to see and appreciate authentic African arts and also participate in the annual Osun-Osogbo Festival.

Providing the “right push” was left to the new governor of Osun state, Olagunsoye Oyinlola. As son of late Oba Moses Oye-

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wole Oyinlola, the Olukuku of Okuku, with whom Ulli Beier had collaborated closely in the 1950s and 1960s, Oyinlola had a personal connection with Osogbo, a circumstance that paid off. Thus, prior to Oyinlola’s election as governor, the financial com-mitment of the Osun state to the festival was less than 100,000 naira. With Oyinlola, the stakes were not only raised consider-ably, but he also encouraged the Osogbo Palace and Heritage Council to join a public/private partnership with Infogem Nige-ria Limited, a Lagos based marketing firm and event organizer.

Infogem’s involvement turned out to be highly effective. Dur-ing the festival, Coca Cola transformed Osogbo’s visual land-scape and turned the city into a dominion of the festival’s main sponsor (Fig. 11) Throughout the city countless Coca Cola ban-ners, flags, and billboards were posted. At the palace, Coca Cola-sponsored singing contests took place; in the grove the company financed the erection of restrooms whose wooden doors were now decorated with a carved Coca Cola logo above Osun as a mermaid (Fig. 12).

The move caused vehement protests on the part of Wenger and her supporters. Their effect remained limited, however. From the perspective of Infogem and even some devotees, the relationship between the sponsor and the deity was quite fitting. After all, the global reach of the soft drink corresponded with the global reach of the deity. The announcement of the success-ful inscription of the Osun grove into the UNESCO in July 2005 was therefore not a surprise. While the official explanation in the UNESCO document focused on issues of environment, dias-pora, and cross-cultural exchange,9 the local heritage commit-

tee saw the decision as an expression of Osun’s global power. As a prominent representative stated: “Recently the Osun Goddess had established her kingdom across the globe and this is why the UNESCO had declared the Osun grove as a World Heritage Site” (Osun Osogbo Festival Brochure 2006:21).

As it happened, the UNESCO decision fell together with Wenger’s ninetieth birthday. The palace and the governor of Osun state organized a birthday party and erected big birthday billboards in the city (Fig. 13). The media coverage and the visit of many high-ranking Nigerian officials gave Wenger a prom-inent platform to raise her concerns with regard to an uncon-trolled commercialization of the grove and festival. Subsequently the Coca-Cola logo on the newly built restrooms in the Osun grove did in fact disappear. For Infogem’s Managing Director Michael Ayo Olumoko however, the challenge was of a different nature:

We should feel proud today for the global recognition conferred on this festival. By all means, this is no longer a local festival because the Osun Oshogbo Grove, this year, has been listed as one of the World Heritage Sites. From now on, we can not afford to present any-thing less than a world class show. We can not allow the challenges for excellence to overcome us. As marketers of the Osun Osogbo Festival, Infogem Limited is redoubly committed to exploring new avenues and knocking on every door of opportunity (Osun Osogbo Festival Brochure 2005:45).

Indeed, with the UNESCO listing, finding “new avenues” has become easier. Thus in 2007 with the new definition of the grove as “Nigeria’s ecotourism destination” Infogem was able to raise 200 million naira (more than US$1.6 million) in sponsoring money.10 Sponsors included Seaman’s Schnapps, Nigeria Televi-sion Authority (NTA), African Independent Television (AIT), and the main sponsor: MTN, Nigeria’s leading telecommunica-tion company. From an economic point of view, prospects for the future of the festival are rosy. In June 2008, Infogem signed a five-year deal with the Osogbo Heritage Council that secured the company the sole rights to market the festival.11

Surely, there are many who reject this development. For instance, in September 2008 the BBC carried an article titled “Marketing ‘Killing Nigerian Festival’” which caused a minor outcry in cyberspace (Walker 2008). As much as the concern is justified, one needs to be careful not to fall into the trap of a modernist separation between culture and commerce. That is to say, the critique is based upon a sharp compartmentalization of objects and activities with distinctly different audiences, curato-rial practices, and visual ideologies. It was and still is, however, precisely the basic interconnectedness of commerce, art, and fes-tivity in Yoruba culture that enabled Osogbo to reinvent itself as a heritage site (see also Appadurai and Breckenridge 2002).

The reinvention also affects the arts. Among the investment opportunities Infogem offers to sponsors is the so-called artist village. Situated next to the Osun grove, the village will demon-strate Osogbo’s international fame as a city of arts and heritage. To that effect, studios will be built, each housing one or two art-ists working in Osogbo today with whom tourists can interact. Work will not be limited to modern art but will comprise tra-ditional artistic activities like dyeing, pottery, carving, or black-smithing. The arrangement will enable tourists to understand

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(opposite)10 “Twins Style” is a phrase referring to paintings honoring the popularity and success of the work of Osogbo’s most prominent artist, Twins Seven Seven. Osogbo’s galleries are full of these visual praise works. An example of a work in “Twins Style” is Aro Femi’s The Hunter (2008). Nike Art Gallery, Osogbo.

(this page)11 Coca-Cola signboard on the way to the Osun grove, Osogbo 2002.

12 Resthouse Osun grove with Coca-Cola logo and Osun as mermaid/Mami Wata. The wavelike struc-ture of the cement-coated surface alludes to the fl ow of the Osun river. Osun Grove, 2006.PHOTO: HEIDI MIMRA

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and appreciate the particular “style” of Osogbo art. In line with this policy, in summer 2008 the Heritage Council, the Festival Committee, and Infogem announced the plan to “immortal-ize” Wenger by organizing a “Susanne Wenger Heritage Sacred Art Exhibition” and an annual Wenger symposium at the Nige-rian Institute of International Affairs in Lagos, prior to the start of the festival.12 The announcement occurred before Wenger passed away in January 2009. It might well be that the intended “immortalization” will follow the same lines as the reauthentica-tion of the Osun grove.

CONCLUSION

At the beginning of this essay I noted the difficulty a study of contemporary Osogbo presents. As I pointed out, it is one thing to conceptualize the hybridity of objects; it is another to unite this study with the hybridity of subjects producing such objects. My answer to that challenge was to look into the flows and clo-sures that structure the appropriation and authentication of both subjects and objects. That the analysis has shown a clear linkage between authenticity and power should not come as a surprise. What we are confronted with is another layer of authenticity, a layer that has become almost forgotten in the wake of modern-ist reframings of the concept. Thus, the legal reading of authen-ticity in terms of that which is authorized, credible, convincing, and trustworthy is much older than the nineteenth century aes-thetic understanding of authenticity in terms of sincerity, gen-uineness, truth, and the sublime (see Knaller 2006). Rooted in ancient Greek and Roman questions over the interpretation of written documents, authenticity was understood as a quality that did not rest in the text itself but was endowed upon it from a

source of authority external to it. Hence, changes in authority often affected the authenticity of a given object.

The rise of the Osun grove to a UNESCO World Heritage site reflects this hidden subtext of authenticity. But there is more to it. Authenticity has not only been reconfigured. Rather, its reconfiguration was a result of the reappropriation of the objects that led to the dispute over their authenticity in the first place. Needless to say a master plan for that reappropriation did not exist. The actors differed and so did the modes and motives of appropriation. Still, taken together the heritagization of the grove’s images in terms of turning the once new into expres-sions of heritage seems to have been taken over by something which, for lack of a better word, might be called the deification of heritage. In fact, belief in heritage and in Yoruba deities have much in common. Just as the idea of the authenticity of heritage changes, so do the imageries of deities such as Osun. The capac-ity of reconfiguration is characteristic to both. Furthermore, the turning of ancestors into deities also seems to inform the plans of the Osogbo Heritage Council to “immortalize” Wenger. Of course, deities only live as long as they have devotees to revere them. Yet the same applies to heritage. Both are ongoing proj-ects, continuously evolving and changing.

Peter Probst is associate professor at the Department of Art History at Tufts University where he teaches African art and visual culture. His fieldwork in Cameroon, Malawi, and Nigeria has resulted in numerous publications on heritage, memory, modernity, and visual theory. In 2009 he completed the manuscript for his new book, provisionally titled Keep-ing the Goddess Alive: The Art of Heritage in Postcolonial Nigeria. [email protected]

13 Birthday billboard at the occasion of Wenger’s 90th birthday, Osogbo 2005. PHOTO: HEIDI MIMRA

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Notes

This paper is part of a larger research project on art, media, and heritage politics in postcolonial Nigeria. Research was carried out in several intervals of five to two months length between 2000 and 2008. I am grateful to the German Research Foundation and Tufts University for generous research grants. For precious help and assis-tance in Nigeria, I want to acknowledge my gratitude to Adigun Ajani, Abiodun Adediran, Sangodare Gbadegesin Ajala, the late Osuntogun Osanike, Jimoh Buraimoh, and Heidi Mimra. I also want to thank Hans Belting and Lutz Musner, who invited me for a fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Cultural Studies (IFK) in Vienna, Austria, where I was able to finish the book manuscript and think through some of the arguments presented here. Last but not least I want to thank Ferdinand de Jong for his insightful comments on an earlier version of the paper.

1 A good description of the movement is given by Beier (1968, 1991) himself. Georgina Beier, the fourth person instrumental in founding the movement, came only in 1963.

2 In 1966 Ulli Beier and Frank Speed did a docu-mentary on Osogbo art titled New Images in a Chang-ing Society.

3 Interview with Adebisi Akanji, August 12, 2002.4 The leading Western authorities on the subject

were invited, including Jacques Maquet, Germaine Dieterlen, Douglas Fraser, Michel Leiris, Roger Bastide, Ulli Beier, and Bernhard and William Fagg. Fagg’s Nige-rian Images received the first prize in the art literature section. The other two awards went to Robin Horton’s Kalabari Sculpture and Beier’s Nigerian Mud Sculpture. See Moore 1977:15.

5 In a biting critique, significantly titled “The Search for Identity in Nigerian Art,” Babatunde Lawal (1977:145) characterized Osogbo art as “… a psychodra-matic outpour of images that invited the comparison with psychotic art …Whether by design or accident, the type of identity which Osogbo art has tried to give Nigeria abroad and Africa is that of the innocent Afri-can child at the crossroads of modernization.” See also Robinson 1977.

6 Restrictions exist, though. Thus devotees initi-ated into the Osun cult and therefore authorized to divine and heal are expected to deliver their services for free or a minimal fee. Moreover, there is good and bad money. The former is known as “cool money” (ówó tutu), like the cool water coming from (the) Osun (river); the latter is “hot money” (ówó eru), obtained by treachery or deceit. See Adebayo and Falola 2000.

7 Osogbo Local Government Traditional Council, January 15, 1985. I am grateful to Ulli Beier for letting me read and quote from the document.

8 Paragraph 11 of the document states: “All judg-ments about values attributed to cultural properties as well as the credibility of related information sources may differ from culture to culture, and even within the same culture. It is thus not possible to base judgments of values and authenticity within fixed criteria. On the contrary, the respect due to all cultures requires that heritage properties must be considered and judged within the cultural contexts to which they belong.” http://whc.unesco.org/archive/nara94.htm.

9 The official UNESCO document lists three points. 1. “The development of the movement of New Sacred Artists and the absorption of Suzanne Wenger,

an Austrian artist, into the Yoruba community have proved to be a fertile exchange of ideas that revived the sacred Osun Grove.” 2. “The Osun Sacred Grove is the largest and perhaps the only remaining example of a once widespread phenomenon that used to character-ise every Yoruba settlement. It now represents Yoruba sacred groves and their reflection of Yoruba cosmology.” 3. “The Osun Sacred Grove is a tangible expression of Yoruba divinatory and cosmological systems; its annual festival is a living, thriving and evolving response to Yoruba beliefs in the bond between people, their ruler and the Osun goddess” (World Heritage Centre 2005:35–36).

10 www.guardiannewsngr.com/sunday_magazine/article34/071007

11 www.tribune.com.ng/04072008/wed/tourism.html

12 Susanne Wenger Heritage Sacred Art Exhibition flyer, Infogem 2008.

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