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1. Heritage as Source: Histories and Images of Osun Osogbo
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CHAPTER 1 Heritage as Source Histories and Images of Osun Osogbo It was a few days after my arrival in Osogbo in July 2000. I was sitting with Jimoh Buraimoh in the bar of his Heritage Hotel. On the TV was the news of Osun State—“State of the Living Spring” as the subtitle said. “Why ‘living spring’?” I asked, and was told that the Osun River was not only the liquid body of the goddess Osun, but also the fountain , spring, and source of people’s wealth and well-being.1 “Osun is important to us, our history is entangled with hers,” Buraimoh added and referred to a bead painting I had seen in his show room. Executed in vibrant colors, the painting depicted an elephant whose body was filled with circles and rested on the head of a stylized person standing underneath. As Buraimoh explained, the scene could be understood in two ways. On the one hand, the elephant referred to Timehin, a courageous hunter and cofounder of Osogbo, who is said to have killed an elephant after discovering the Osun River. On the other hand, the elephant also symbolized Obatala, the Yoruba deity of whiteness and creation, who is said to collaborate with the goddess Osun in all artistic endeavors. In both ways, Buraimoh noted, the bead painting visualized how he understood himself as an Osogbo artist: not only did he come from a family whose lineage goes all the way back to Timehin; he also felt indebted to Osun as the source of his identity both as a native of Osogbo and as an artist whose practice is rooted in Osun: Osogbo is a unique city in the sense that before we started art, there has been art in the city itself. There has been a traditional art here which has been in a system but our own is to modify. Our own is more of a modern art which we share from the past and give to the modern generation. We are in between the past, the present and the upcoming generation.2 Back in my room I wrote down Buraimoh’s comment in my notebook. It was only much later that it came back to me, when I was reflecting upon the idea of heritage as property on the occasion of the Osun grove being announced as a UNESCO World Heritage site in July 2005. As 14 OSOGBO AND THE ART OF HERITAGE noted in the introduction, the listing prompted an advertisement on the back cover of the festival brochure with reproductions of two of Nigeria’s most famous art works, both of which had gone missing, thus recalling the trace of absence and death inscribed in the Western history of the concept of heritage. The Yoruba word ogún is used to mean both property and heritage . Since the acquisition of heritage/property necessarily implies death, the Yoruba term seems to share ideas with Western notions of heritage, inheritance, and absence. But there is a difference: among Yoruba, those who have bequeathed property to their descendents are not thought of as “gone” but instead remain present among the living with whom they maintain ongoing, changing relations. When, for example, news of the UNESCO designation reached Osogbo, officials of the Osogbo Heritage Council quickly responded that this inscription was the result of Osun expanding her kingdom across the globe. On the same occasion, Osun devotees performed songs praising Osun not only for her elegance and sense of beauty but also for her wealth. The songs described the goddess as a woman with long arms and a long neck full of yellowish brass bangles, necklaces, and fanciful beads, wearing precious ornamented brass fans and a coral comb, and they lauded her as a source of both fertility and prosperity, the latter alluding to the economic benefits the UNESCO award was expected to generate. Crediting a deity for the commercial success of a religious festival might look rather strange when viewed from the perspective of the popular critique of the heritage industry (Hewison 1987; Lowenthal 1998). After all, the industry is criticized precisely for the same reasons the deity is praised by her devotees, that is, for turning cultural productions like the Osun grove and festival into a reified, claimable, and profit-making heritage/property. The puzzle vanishes, however, when we realize that property is not a “thing” but a cultural construct formed by social relations which themselves are informed by entangled concepts of personhood (see...