Osogbo and the Art of Heritage: monuments, deities, and money by Peter Probst (review)

This book is not about the 'saving' of African art by European art aficionados, although that story is required background reading. In 1958 the German Ulli Beier and his Austrian wife Suzanne Wenger set up an art school in Osogbo, Nigeria. Inspired by the art brut movement led by Dubuffet, they launched various projects to teach Africans to make 'raw' art. Whilst the marriage between Beier and Wenger did not last, the projects they initiated produced a lasting legacy. Famous Osogbo artists like Twins Seven Seven and Jacob Afolabi first experimented with art under their guidance. Beier eventually moved to Papua New Guinea, but Wenger 'went native', immersed herself ever deeper in Yoruba religion, and became an Olorisa, a worshipper of Yoruba deities. It was in that capacity - and as an artist - that she started repairing and rebuilding dilapidated shrines. In collaboration with Nigerian artists like Adebisi Akanji, she reshaped the ritual landscape of the Osun grove of Osogbo by placing cement sculptures of deities and shrines in the grove. Probst paints a vivid account of the remaking of the Osogbo sacred grove with the 'new images' of Wenger's Sacred Art group. Situating her initiative in a colonial context, he reminds us that it was based on the widely shared opinion that African art was dead, or dying. The modernist 'experiments' in Osogbo were part of a modern movement to 'revitalize' African creativity and to counter the destructive impact of colonial modernity.

Critical of the colonial nostalgia that drove the experiments in Osogbo, this book is really about something else; it is about the Osun grove as heritage. In 1965, due to the effective action by one of Osogbo's sons who was a minister in the Nigerian federal government, the Osun grove was credited with the status of national monument. Although still ignored during FESTAC '77 - for being too much indebted to colonial intervention - the grove's hybridity was increasingly valued in the international contest for local cultural achievements. In its 'second career' as heritage, the grove was eventually awarded UNESCO World Heritage status in 2005.

Today, the Osun grove and its annual Festival attract many national and international visitors - although perhaps not as many as the applicants for the UNESCO qualification had hoped. But the 'success' of this process was never secure. In fact, Wenger's 'new images' have always attracted fierce criticism and their authenticity was debated at various moments. How the participants in the annual Osun Osogbo Festival experience the 'new images' and to what extent they deem these images effective in communicating with the deity Osun is discussed in several chapters. This excellent anthropological analysis is matched with a good historical analysis of how the traditional rulers have reshaped the significance of the sacred grove. In a context in which the majority of Osogbo's population converted to Islam or Christianity, they strategically represented Osun grove as a memory of the Osogbo past, rather than a symbol of Yoruba religion. Needless to say, these processes of representation - including photography and images circulating on the Internet - were, and still are, highly contested.

Probst places the current struggle for authentication of the grove against the background of Osogbo mythology on the foundation of the city and its grove. In this cosmology, the traditional ruler and the sacred grove are said to mediate between the people and the deity Osun. Drawing upon contemporary media theory, the last chapter analyses the grove as medium and explicitly situates the modernist 'experiment' in this longue durée. Thus we learn Probst's take on Suzanne Wenger's innovations in the sacred grove: 'What from the outside looked like a modernist "experiment" in public art was and still is part of a long and well-established local strategy to remain in control of media...