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Preface and Acknowledgments
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PREFACE A N D ACKNOWLEDGMENTS In a sense, this book began in the late 1990s when I moved from the Free University of Berlin to take up a new post at Iwalewa Haus, the Center for African Art and Culture at the University of Bayreuth in the South of Germany. In the 1980s, during the years of my study in Berlin and Cambridge (England), I had often come across references to “Iwalewa Haus.” In German Africanist circles at that time, the name had the ring of legend, conjuring a unique space of experience where one could not only see contemporary African art and listen to African music but actually meet and converse with African artists, writers, and musicians in a club-like environment right in Bayreuth’s baroque old town. When I arrived in 1999, Iwalewa Haus still existed, although its founders, Ulli and Georgina Beier, had already gone, leaving behind not only nostalgic memories of a special place but also an impressive collection of modern African art. As it happened, my arrival coincided with the plans of Bayreuth African Studies Center to establish a new research program on local agency and the dynamics of globalization. Invited to join the program, I used the opportunity to familiarize myself with the specific history of Iwalewa Haus and its collection. Searching for a way to integrate my own interests with my new institutional affiliation, I started to read through the ample material about the so-called “Osogbo art school” that Ulli Beier, the founder of Iwalewa Haus, had initiated in the late 1950s in Nigeria, together with the Austrian artist Susanne Wenger and the Nigerian dramatist and composer Duro Ladipo (and later joined by Georgina Beier). The international outreach of the school seemed to link up with the globalization theme of the research program. As I learned, as early as the mid-1960s, Osogbo artists had traveled extensively within the artscapes their images had created. In addition, there was the story of the Osun grove, the sacred homestead of Osogbo’s guardian deity, Osun, which had been artistically reshaped by members of the New Sacred Art group founded by Susanne Wenger in a spirit complementary to the initiatives of Duro Ladipo, Ulli and Georgina Beier. Curiously enough, however, all the accounts of this vibrant art scene ended in the 1970s. The abrupt silence that followed piqued my interest and I eventually wrote a proposal arguing that a revisitation of Osogbo was called for to determine what had happened to the city and viii OSOGBO AND THE ART OF HERITAGE its cultural productions forty years after the inception of this influential movement. The proposal led to an initial exploratory visit to Nigeria in the summer of 2000. I had conducted previous research in Cameroon and Malawi, but urban Nigeria was a novel visual experience. I remember clearly driving on the highway through the outskirts of Lagos up to Ibadan. The ride turned out to be a singularly cinematic experience. Huge billboards erected along the streets captured my gaze. Swiftly passing by, the lustful mise-en-scène of commercial desire appeared like pages of an oversized flip book for which Walter Benjamin seemed to have provided the plot. “The emblems return as goods” (Benjamin 1974: 245) he had once noted. And indeed, in the rapid pictorial sequence of billboards erected against the landscape in a gesture for attention, it was difficult not to see the book and the clock behind Maggi and Marlboro, not to recognize the transference of a project from colonialism to globalization. The fact that the advertisements of all these secular goods mixed with billboards of churches announcing Christian mega events seemed more than appropriate. After all, did the colonial emblems not always entail the cross? And was the history of goods and their consumption not always also a history of salvation and the promise of redemption? A ring of billboards also surrounded Osogbo. Yet inside the city the arts still seemed to “reign,” as film and newspaper reports from the 1960s had put it. In fact, I was baffled by the multitude of artists I met during my first exploratory stay. Painters, carvers, sculptors, Adire dyers, batik and metal artists, from artists in their seventies to artists in their twenties—the number and variety of people working in the realm of art seemed to be surpassed only by the number of the city’s galleries. Again the spectrum was wide, ranging from proper show rooms along Osogbo’s main...