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CHAPTER 3 Heritage as Project Hybridity and the Reauthentication of the Osun Grove In July 2008, I attended Susanne Wenger’s birthday party in her house on Ibokun road in Osogbo. It was her ninety-third and—as it turned out—last birthday (half a year later, in January 2009, she passed away). Practically all the guests were either adopted children or members of Wenger’s New Sacred Art Group. Wenger sat between Adebisi Akanji and Buraimoh Gbadamosi, two of her closest and oldest co-combatants in the fight to preserve the Osun grove. Before the cutting of the birthday cake each of the guests stood up and gave a short speech praising the jubilee and her achievements. While some eulogized Wenger’s importance to 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. 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 days of my first research forays into Osogbo in the early 2000s. As noted in the preface and introduction, I had come to Nigeria to investigate what had become of the once-famed, now presumably defunct “Osogbo art school.” It did not take me long to realize that the city and its artists had embarked on a “second career” in today’s roots and heritage tourism, with the Osun grove and annual Osun festival being the city’s main attractions. 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. My attempts to elicit more information on the UNESCO nomination met with failure. The more I talked to people, the more I realized that I was obviously the only one who found the story stunning. What struck me as a particularly vivid case of postcolonial hybridity had become by now the “new normal” for most people in Osogbo. The 58 OSOGBO AND THE ART OF HERITAGE longstanding reservations against Wenger and her work in the Osun grove, once articulated both inside and outside Nigeria—the charges of her intrusion into the Yoruba iconoscape, the effects of her structures on the atmosphere of the grove, the consequent touristification of Yoruba art and culture that arguably results in a kind of “Yoruba lite” having nothing to do with “real” Yoruba anymore—all seemed to have been forgotten. In the 1970s and ’80s, these reservations were embedded in the dual debates on the foreignness of the grove’s imageworks on the one hand and the foreignness of Wenger as the artist who created and prompted these works on the other. And as if this double hybridity were not enough, there was—and still is—also the hybridity of the site as such: simultaneously an active Yoruba ritual site and a Western sculpture garden where both Nigerian school children and American and European tourists are given 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 nominate the Osun grove for inscription to the UNESCO list of World Heritage sites would come to fruition. How would it be possible to combine UNESCO’s seemingly conservative nomination criteria (“authenticity,” “integrity,” “masterwork of human creative genius,” etc.) with the celebration of newness and hybridity represented by the reshaped Osun grove? And yet, in July 2005, members of the World Heritage Committee approved the Nigerian nomination and consequently declared the Osun Osogbo grove a UNESCO World Heritage site, de facto reconciling these irreconcilables. Depending on one’s perspective, one can see the development either as a domestication or a celebration of hybridity. The approach and analytical concepts to substantiate one’s argument will differ accordingly. 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). To properly understand what has happened in Osogbo we must combine both perspectives. In other words, an approach is needed which allows one to...

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