Invisible Woman: Reclaiming Josephine Ifueko Osayimwese Omigie in the History of the Zaria Art Society and Postcolonial Modernism in Nigeria
2019; UCLA James S. Coleman African Studies Center; Volume: 52; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1162/afar_a_00461
ISSN1937-2108
Autores Tópico(s)Art History and Market Analysis
ResumoAll rephotography by Adeyemi Akande, Black & Loud Photography, Yaba, Lagos; and Christian Scully, Design Imaging Studios, Providence, Rhode IslandThe "Zaria Art Society" carries a lot of weight in Africanist art history circles. It was the name of a club founded by students at the first Western-style formal art program in Nigeria, the fine arts department at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science, and Technology (NCAST) at Zaria (now Ahmadu Bello University). Led by painter Uche Okeke, the Society critiqued the colonial thrust of art education that taught Nigerian artists to draw snow and sculpt like Michelangelo (Okeke 1998a: 57–59). Instead, in the face of antipathy from some faculty and students, Society members articulated a new program for Nigerian art. They called their program "natural synthesis," a framework for filtering appropriate elements of Nigerian cultural traditions into contemporary Nigerian cultural production and synthesizing "old and new" and "functional art and art for its own sake" (Omezi 2008: 34–45). Although individual members of the Society interpreted this guiding principle in different ways, they shared a commitment to identifying an artistic language to embody the emerging modern nation.The precise composition of the short-lived (1958–1961) Zaria Art Society has been widely debated. Though the group was barely in existence long enough for its membership to consolidate and its founding ideas to take root, the subsequent and longstanding success of members has created incentive for the membership net to be cast wide and for the group's influence to "metastasize" (Ugiomoh 2009: 7, Ogbechie 2009: 9; Gbadegesin 2009). Perhaps we can understand this "posthumous" growth of the Society in the Bourdieuan sense of the role played by educational credentials and other nonmaterial forms of value—cultural capital—in social reproduction in capitalist societies (Bourdieu 1977; Sullivan 2002). If we understand the Zaria Art Society as the product of a new system of Western art education in Nigeria, then it should come as no surprise that affiliation with or proximity to the group bred cultural capital. Through publications, exhibitions, and workshops organized primarily by a network of European artist-scholars who saw the continent as an ideal site for alternative artistic practice (Probst 2011: 37), Uche Okeke's vision of the Society and its history was established as the canon of modern Nigerian art. Much subsequent scholarship on the topic has built on histories written by Okeke, whose own narratives were likely shaped by an all-too-human desire to center his own interventions (Ugiomoh 2009: 7).Most accounts of the Zaria Society agree, however, that its members were all men, with the exception of a lone woman who joined the Society near the end of its life. Little seems to be known about this woman, whose name is given variously as "I.M. Omagie" and "Ikponmwosa Omagie/Omigie" (Dike and Oyelola 2004: 11, 17, 73, 77; Ikpakronyi 2004: 22; Omoighbe 2004: 179). When discussed at all, she is dismissed: "She was a young member. She wasn't terribly active. If I see her today, I may not be able to recognize her" (Okeke 1998b: 52). Who was this woman and why do the scholarship and the historical record appear to be silent about her? Because of its now-iconic status as an instrument of decolonization and founding institution of postcolonial Nigerian culture, the Zaria Society is an ideal launching pad for a consideration of the art and life of this specific pioneering woman artist as well as of the role of women in modern Nigerian art in general.The answers to these questions are implicated, not surprisingly, with gender and its particular valencies in the history of Nigerian art. Indeed, the absence of women in academic histories of art in general has long been debated in the Anglo-American academy. Feminist art historian Linda Nochlin wrote in 1971 that the problem stems from a false understanding of art as a "free, autonomous activity of a super-endowed individual, 'influenced' by previous artists" (Nochlin 1988: 158). But in the 1980s, the idea of women's agency came under attack as part of a wider poststructuralist critique. In Griselda Pollock's words, the concern was now about how women were refracted in the "web of psycho-social relationships which institute a socially significant difference on the axis of sex" (Pollock 2012: 47). Lisa Tickner argued that the question was no longer "why are there no great women artists?" but "how are the processes of sexual differentiation played out across the representations of art and art history?" (Tickner 1988: 106). After decades of deemphasizing the work and agency of individual women artists for fear of falling into the trap of essentialism, since the 1990s, feminist art historians have again focused on identifying the agency of specific women, the subversive power they actually exercised, and the unremitting disruptive pressure that their agency has exerted upon culture (Broude and Garrard 2005: 3). Feminist oral history, which challenges the principle of objectivity promoted in positivist research, emphasizes connections between public and private worlds, highlights the subjectivity and intersubjectivity of the researcher and subject, and offers a basis for a potential paradigm shift in art history that enables us to finally see women artists (Gluck 2008: 118–20; Pollock 2013, 2008; Cvetkovich 2013). As a clearly defined methodology with critical implications, oral history has become a legitimate tool for inquiry in feminist scholarship but has only slowly made inroads into mainstream art history (Reading 2014: 207; Brucher 2013). Similarly, since the 1960s, historians of Africa have found oral history useful because it has the potential to fill gaps in the canon and transform historiography in the process. In 1965, Jan Vansina revolutionized African history by positing oral traditions (the performed telling and retelling of oral histories) as plausible historical sources. Oral history has since served as an important although not primary method in Africanist historiography (Doortmont 2011; Vansina 1996; Cooper 2005). Lessons from African history have perhaps finally transformed Africanist art history in Rowland Abiodun's (2014) call for a new paradigm based on understanding African cultures (specifically, Yorùbá culture) as integrated wholes often housed in oral and linguistic discourses.Building on its possibilities in women's history, African history, and art history, I use oral history as my primary method in this article. To learn about the work and life of this pioneering woman artist—positively identified as Josephine Ifueko Osayimwese Omigie in the following pages—I have interviewed her family members, colleagues, and students. I understand the outcomes of these interviews as coproductions that say as much about my relationship to the interviewees and the selective and synthetic character of human memory processes as they do about "what actually happened" (Grele 2007: 49, 53, 59). These newly created texts are as much performed acts as they are static "evidence." I combine interpretations drawn from these new texts with formal analyses of Omigie's few extant works, most notably a resist-dyed wall hanging she likely designed in the 1970s (Fig. 1). Indeed, the significance of oral history to this project is illustrated by its inception story quoted at the beginning of this article.As this first-person narrative explains, the project grew out of my encounter with one of Osayimwese Omigie's former university classmates. Initially, I experienced the encounter as a classic clash between my subjective experience and my academic disciplining as a historian. Academic disciplines are not only about the circumscribed bodies of knowledge generally accepted as constituting each discipline, but also about the rules governing these bodies and the ways in which scholars are socialized to approach their work. Generally, to preserve the fiction of objectivity, historians do not write histories of themselves. Certainly as a relative of Osayimwese Omigie's, I have privileged access to material that has been difficult for other researchers to uncover. And this personal relationship and the oral history methodology that it demands are arguably susceptible to the same self-serving impulses that shaped Osayimwese Omigie's exclusion in the first place. As gender studies scholar Ann Cvetkovich suggests, however, including oral history excerpts within historical and analytical writing itself foregrounds subjectivity and intersubjectivity as opportunities rather than problems. Analyzing these excerpts can provide an opening to "invent vocabularies" for social formations that combine the intimate, social, informal, and institutional in novel ways that are particularly relevant to women artists (Cvetkovich 2013: 127).Philosopher Nkiru Nzegwu (1999) has hypothesized that gender has had a unique effect in Africanist art history. She conceptualizes "gender transmogrification" as the "grotesque" and systemic distortion of the role of women in creative production in African societies as a result of biases inherited from cultural anthropology and Western feminism. The result is a sexist flattening of complex social realities and artistic histories. Here, the typical negative framing of African histories—underpinned by asymmetrical power relations—is layered over with gender ideologies that code women's art as inferior, domestic, personal, derivative, passive, and ultimately, invisible. Nzegwu's arguments are useful for understanding Osayimwese Omigie's erasure from the scholarship on postcolonial modernist art in Nigeria.1Also associated with this expurgation of women is the issue of marital name change as an element of Christian practice and of the nuclear family ideal promoted by European missionaries in Nigeria (Suter 2004). In the context of modern English law, marriage naming practices are closely associated with the patriarchal concept of woman-as-property and thus with women's ability to claim rights associated with personhood. When introduced to Nigeria, these ideas sometimes contravened existing cultural norms, such as Yoruba customary laws that recognized married women's right to own property, but did not automatically endow a single wife and her children with the right to inherit all of a man's earthly possessions upon his death (Mann 1982; Otite 1991: 33). It seems likely that in Nigeria, as in Europe and North America, the perceived legal and social impact of marriage on women's identities has often made it difficult to trace their agency and write their histories.Though the lone woman in the Zaria Art Society is often noted as "I.M. Omagie/Omigie" in existing literature, no such person attended the Department of Fine Arts at NCAST between 1958 and 1961. Instead, we find a "J.I. Osayimwese," a name that like "Omagie/Omigie" is of Edo extraction. Both family history and university records confirm that Josephine Ifueko Osayimwese matriculated to NCAST in 1958 and graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts in textiles in 1963 (Ahmadu Bello University 1990:16).2 Osayimwese was born on July 2, 1936, in Ibadan, Western Province. She attended C.M.S. Girls' School in Benin City from 1946 to 1952, and was one of few girls in the country to go on to a secondary education, which she received at the newly opened, government-sponsored, and highly selective Queen's School Ede from 1953 until 1957. After a gap year, she gained admission to NCAST, where she remained for six years. After an additional year of study, she obtained a Postgraduate Art Teachers' Certificate. Upon graduation, she embarked, in October 1964, on her teaching career at Edo College, Benin City. She had only been at Edo College for a few months when she married Mr. F.N. Omigie and relocated to Lagos, where he worked for the Nigerian Railway.Between 1965 and 1970, she gave birth to three children. But she also taught art at Lagos City College, Yaba College of Technology, and Queen's College, Yaba. In 1974, she joined the Arts Division of the Federal Ministry of Education and later moved to the Scholarship Division. She relocated to Benin City when her husband retired from the railway in 1978. In Benin, she was appointed vice principal of the recently opened Federal Government Girls' College (FGGC), where she served as principal from 1980 until 1985. Between 1985 and her death in 1997, Osayimwese was the Coordinating Inspector, Inspectorate Division, Federal Ministry of Education, Benin City.3 Though mourned within the community of Nigerian women educators, her death went largely unnoticed in the larger network of artists and former Zaria classmates:It is at the moment of marriage and childbirth that Osayimwese Omigie's art historical biography goes awry. Her first child, a son, was named Ikponmwosa. It is telling that her name, "Josephine Ifueko," has somehow been supplanted by her son's name in some published sources. While the slippage might be attributable to a simple typographical error, it also illustrates the dynamics at work in her exclusion: in the minds of some of her male colleagues, Osayimwese Omigie's role as a wife and mother displaced her from consideration as a serious artist. The colloquial practice of calling Nigerian women by their first child's name may also have contributed to this mix-up. In many precolonial Nigerian cultural traditions, reproduction was one of the primary purposes of marriage and a woman's social status was closely aligned with her reproductive power. These ideas still exerted a strong influence among educated urban men and women in the 1960s and beyond. To her neighbors, friends, and family then, Osayimwese Omigie became "Mama Ikponmwosa."As is wont with such errors, subsequent publications have perpetuated the misidentification of Osayimwese Omigie. The fact that variations of her married name rather than her premarital name have been retained even though she was unmarried at the date of her involvement with the Society also supports my hypothesis that her male peers saw marriage and motherhood as defining and limiting factors in her life. Alternately, it indicates that Osayimwese Omigie was known in artistic circles or at least maintained contact with some former Society members after her marriage—which was in fact the case, as I will show. In an effort to suture the threads of her life story back together, reclaim her subjectivity, and highlight her agency, I have chosen to use her unmarried and married names simultaneously throughout this article.Of the small collection of Osayimwese Omigie's works that are available, the earliest known dated piece is a glazed ceramic bowl, inscribed with her name and the date "14.11.1958" (Fig. 2).4 This was the year that she gained entrance to NCAST. The bowl has the attributes of a school assignment: the uneven circumference of its base and bumpy excrescence of superfluous glaze that surround it suggest a developing competence with the potter's wheel and glazing techniques. Yet the bowl's careful balance between the buff color of its interior and near-translucent green glaze of its outer surface, the careful articulation of a heavy dark green line of the dripping glaze below the rim followed by row of crescent moons, indicate an emerging aesthetic position situated neither in the female-dominated pottery traditions of Nigeria such as the geometric and stylized naturalism associated with the Gwari nor the minimally decorated utilitarian vessels and ornate anthropomorphic and zoomorphic ritual pottery of the Yoruba, among others. Neither does it fit into the purely derivative European practices and forms typically associated with colonial schooling or in the colonial nativist reinvocation of tradition that Chika Okeke-Agulu argues was becoming the official line in art teaching in Nigeria in the 1950s (Harrod 1989; Okeke-Agulu 2015). Pottery was among several basic subjects of study that made up the four-year curriculum offered by the Department of Art after 1955, so it is possible that Osayimwese Omigie created this piece soon after her arrival in Zaria. A rare photograph from her archive shows Osayimwese Omigie sculpting a nude seated figure on a tilt-and-turn table in the sculpture studio at NCAST in 1958 (Fig. 3). What factors converged to lead Osayimwese Omigie to Zaria?Osayimwese Omigie's unusual academic success as a female in 1940s–1960s Nigerian can be attributed in part to her upbringing. She was the eldest child of progressive Christian parents (Fig. 4). Her father traveled the country in his role as an accounting clerk for the British colonial government, leaving a matrifocal family to develop back in Benin City. Josephine likely visited him in locations as diverse as Port Harcourt and Ibadan. Due to this itinerant lifestyle and the family's Edo-Akure heritage, Josephine was fluent in Yoruba, Edo, and English, but she and her siblings found it difficult to understand their maternal aunt, who only spoke Akure Yoruba (Akintoye 1969).5According to family lore, Josephine's mother, Madam Margaret Jose Omozuwa Osayimwese, was of the ilk of self-determining Nigerian women who traded beads, textiles, and other goods in order to gain socioeconomic power and access to public life. As part of her diversified business activities, Margaret Jose tailored and sold school uniforms and was treasurer of an esusu (an informal credit institution or savings club famously associated with Yorubas) (Adebayo 1994: 393–96).6 There was, however, significant precedent for Margaret Jose's participation in the public sphere. Since precolonial times, Yoruba women were renowned as successful entrepreneurs who traded, locally and across long distances, in goods such as palm oil, dye, ceramics, and textiles that they or their family members manufactured. Through the capital they accumulated, these women could become extremely wealthy and advance their political and social status (Oladejo 2015: 7; Falola 1995; Ogbomo 1995; Kriger 2006: 44). Furthermore, following Rowland Abiodun, we could argue that the (woman-centered) activity of dyeing was vital because it was associated in Yoruba language and philosophy with communicating the essence of an individual's existence, character, or being (Abiodun 1990: 67). To the southeast of the Yoruba, Edo women were also involved in trade, and in spinning, dyeing, and weaving textiles both at home for household use and in a public context as members of the royal weavers' guild (Mba 1982: 18–20; Ben-Amos 1995: 17, 1978: 51–52). Over the course of the colonial period, Yoruba and other southern Nigeria women used these traditional routes to financial independence and self-determination as an effective platform for political action. Their activities significantly shaped the face of Nigerian politics in the run-up to independence in 1960.As an Edo-Akure, Margaret Jose may have drawn on these models of women's activity, and her activities may have shaped her daughter's own interests and choice of profession. Margaret Jose herself had been forced to abort teacher training in order to take the reins of the family after her parents were murdered. She undoubtedly believed in the value of education for both her female and male children and, like many colonial-era urban Nigerian women, worked hard to fund their education and run her household from her own earnings. As historian Abosede George contends, urban elite women in 1940s Nigeria formulated a vision of modern Nigerian womanhood in which education was a means to economic, political, and social participation and full citizenship (George 2014: 7, 213).It is in this context that we must situate Osayimwese Omigie's entry into Queen's School Ede. Arguably, her experience in Ede was instrumental in her pioneering presence on the arts scene in Zaria. When she arrived in Ede in 1953, the town was blossoming under the enlightened leadership of the famed timi (king), Oba John Adetoyese Laoye I (1899–1975). A British-trained pharmacist, Oba Laoye became king of the old Yoruba town of Ede (northeast of Ibadan) in 1946. He pursued two simultaneous and mutually supportive programs during his reign. On one hand he was determined to modernize Ede by establishing schools in collaboration with Baptist, Catholic, and Seventh Day Adventist missionaries. He also conceptualized the construction of a large dam—the ultimate modernization project undertaken by soon-to-emerge postcolonial nations. It was through Oba Laoye's initiative that Queen's School—one of the few girls' secondary schools in the country established as part of a state-sponsored (rather than mission-funded) initiative to improve girl's education—came to be established in Ede in 1952. Oba Laoye's wife, Flora Ebun Laoye, would further cement these foundational ties through her teaching appointment at the school.On the other hand, Oba Laoye, who descended from a lineage of drummers and was an accomplished practitioner of the Yoruba talking drum, cultivated a renaissance of Yoruba culture through his promotion of drumming and dance via performance, writing, public speaking, and radio broadcasts in Ede, throughout the Western Region, and at international venues (Adekilekun 1987: 17; Kehinde 2016). In a sense, Laoye offered a living model for balancing the seemingly competing agendas of modernity and tradition.Chikwenye Okonjo Ogunyemi, who arrived at Queen's School at the same time as Osayimwese Omigie, recalls these exciting years in Ede. As one of only a handful of Igbo and Edo girls at Queen's School, Okonjo Ogunyemi and Osayimwese Omigie spent many hours traveling together on government lorries between Ede and Benin City before Okonjo Ogunyemi journeyed alone on the final leg of her trip home to Ogwashi-Ukwu. According to her classmates, Osayimwese Omigie was a good student whose seriousness, good leadership, and likeability earned her a prefectship. Fine art (taught by a European woman) was a required subject at the school. According to another classmate, Rachel Adegboye (nee Oye), the school was so impressed by Osayimwese Omigie's developing skill that they sent one of her artworks to England for a competition.7 A similar practice of sending student work to England has been noted among some progressive male English art teachers, like K.C. Murray, working at boys' schools in Nigeria in the 1920s and 1930s (Harrod 1989: 148). To Adegboye's knowledge, nothing came of this submission, but it certainly serves as early evidence of Osayimwese Omigie's aptitude. Indeed, art was one of six subjects in which Osayimwese Omigie sat and passed her school leaving examinations in 1957.Her training in the classroom may have mingled with varied external stimuli. Okonjo Ogunyemi notes that the girls at Queen's School were suffused by Laoye's project of modernization alongside his affirmation of Nigerian cultures. With the help of the school lorry that drove them into Ede proper, Queen's School girls visited and participated in celebrations and saw colorful masquerades, like Egungun, hosted by Laoye. The Oba also performed at school for the girls, who welcomed his presence and composed songs praising him. This is particularly noteworthy, since modern European schools in Nigeria typically took a hard line toward local cultural practices. For example, almost every student in colonial Nigeria was familiar with the stricture against speaking any language other than English at school. Okonjo Ogunyemi confirms that this rule was strictly enforced at Queen's School as well. This kind of "linguistic violence" has of course provided fertile ground for postcolonial theorists trying to understand the insidious mechanisms of colonial hegemony and their postcolonial legacies (Fanon 2008: 8; Mazrui and Mazrui 1998). By contrast, Queen's School's purported openness to Laoye's cultural experiments seems to contradict longstanding colonial education policy and highlights Ede and its oba as harbingers of a new epoch.The school lorry also drove the girls to nearby Osogbo, where they met the Austrian artist Susanne Wenger, who would soon become known for her attempts to revive Yoruba religion through art. This must have been soon after Wenger arrived in Osogbo after an earlier sojourn in Ede itself and in nearby Ilobu (Probst 2011: 48).8 Wenger left a significant impression on the girls, since she was the only white woman they had met who was "neither Catholic nor Anglican."9 It was clear to these girls that Wenger was defiant in the face of societal expectations about her personal and professional life. As Okonjo Ogunyemi put it: "She recognized art in objects that no one else saw as art. Pots of different kinds, calabashes, and so on adorned her walls. No one did that back then."10 Okonjo Ogunyemi's comments are particularly interesting in light of the cultlike status that Wenger acquired among a certain segment of the Nigerian intelligentsia, beginning in the 1960s and continueing unabated even after the artist's death in 2009. And Okonjo Ogunyemi's narrative of Queen's School's early years is undoubtedly also shaped by her own foundational 1980s contributions to theorizing "African womanism," an autonomous alternative to Western feminism that contextualized the criticism of gender relationships in relation to African specificities (Arndt 2000; Ogunyemi 2006). It is notable that Wenger was still married to the expatriate literary and cultural critic Ulli Beier during this period. Indeed, it was Oba Laoye in Ede who introduced Beier and Wenger to aspects of Yoruba religion and its associated arts and thus laid the foundation for their subsequent deep engagement with Yoruba traditions (Okeke-Agulu 2015: 302; Oyeweso 2017: 35). Beier would later "discover" and canonize the work of Zaria Art Society members like Uche Okeke. It seems highly likely, then, that Osayimwese Omigie met Beier and was introduced to the idea of a modern Nigerian art rooted in but different from indigenous artistic traditions almost ten years before he visited NCAST in Zaria in 1960. For her, Ede, rather than Zaria, was the birthplace of a postcolonial modern art.Meanwhile, Wenger had gone through a spiritual and artistic conversion of sorts. She was initiated into the worship of several Yoruba deities. In response, she created large, brightly colored, expressionist oil paintings that, in her own words, captured the violence of human experience. At the same time, she began to find solace in another type of painting. Under the tutelage of an unnamed Yoruba woman in Ede, she learned the technique of adire eleko—a method of dyeing textiles using painted starch, practiced by women. While indigo textile dyeing dates to at least the ninth century in West Africa, adire eleko itself is a fairly recent development that owes its origins to the Atlantic trade on the Guinea Coast that introduced new materials, patterns, and techniques (Kriger 2006: 120). Though adire making is said to have started in Abeokuta, Ede is remembered as a major supplier of the dye itself to Abeokuta dyers. Indeed, Olugbemisola Areo and Razaq Kalilu point out that Ede's oriki (citation and attributive poetry) links the city to "Iya Mapo, the Yoruba goddess of creativity, who is revered as the protector and guardian of all female crafts and [is] believed to be the first dyer" (Areo and Kalilu 2013: 357; see also Abiodun 2014: 324). Thus, along with Abeokuta, Osogbo, Ibadan, and Ondo, Ede was a historical center of adire production.Looking back at the years in Ede and Osogbo, Beier explains that Wenger found the slow and disciplined nature of this technique calming and was drawn to the "organic" nature of Yoruba art production in place of the isolation of the European atelier. In order to gain more flexibility with colors, she switched from this local technique (which allows the artist to use only one color) to an imported wax-based process (generally called "batik" today) which soon spread, under her influence, to Yoruba artists in Osogbo and the region. Her work from this period not only represents a change in media but also reveals new motifs and subjects. Specifically, contrary to Beier's characterization, I would argue that Wenger occasionally borrowed Yoruba forms. Classic adire eleko patterns like Olokun often use grids as the basis for "translation symmetry" or repeating geometric arrangements that extend to infinity. Additionally, certain design elements, including spinning tops and diagonal subdivided checkerboards, were standardized within configurations like Olokun (Kriger 2006: 159). Wenger borrowed the grid, top, and checkerboard elements in batiks like Obatala Catches Sango's Horse (1958) (Fig. 5). She uses them in expected ways to create a grid, but this grid remains only a frame to larger, more important elements in the center or offset on the side of the batik. The Yoruba motifs also serve as building blocks for these larger elements—anthropomorphic figures and objects that float on circular or rectangular blank fields.11 Their large, angular limbs are engaged in energetic and sometimes tortured movements that suggest expressionist inspiration but also embody narrative—specifically her interpretation of Yoruba mythology. With this, Wenger developed a new artistic language grounded in Yoruba traditions (Beier 1975: 25; Drewal 2003).Osayimwese Omigie probably saw some examples of Wenger's textile work during school visits to her workshop. But it is even more likely that she encountered numerous examples of the work of local aladire (female adire practitioners) from the ranks of the seventeen historic indigo-dyeing families of Ede and observed their mysterious indigo vats, the careful, almost meditative painting of patterns onto undyed fabric, and long arrays of dyed cloths drying in the sun. Between Oba Laoye's efforts to modernize Ede
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