A transformative force in the Niger Delta: Through the art of performance Zina Saro-Wiwa highlights the importance of the people’s emotional and spiritual relationship to the environment.

Loaded and painful history has a funny way of leading us on roads far away from our beginnings to avoid reckoning with our past and delay our coming fully into our own. Some of us never come back home. Others have the courage to return to their place of origin, face their grief, come to terms with their past and make a new beginning.

Zina Saro-Wiwa is one of those.

A couple of years ago she returned to Port Harcourt in the Niger Delta and challenged the status quo while honoring her father’s activist legacy and her cultural heritage. Zina’s father Ken Saro-Wiwa was an activist who fought against the environmental degradation due to oil exploration in the Niger Delta and was eventually murdered. As a result the Saro -Wiwa name became associated with environmentalism and activism. In Zina’s new body of work she is proposing an alternative conversation around the idea of regeneration.

Zina engages in a process of self-determination while also acting as a transformative force. Within the context of local and cultural dynamics and of the legacy of years of corruption and environmental degradation she first makes room for herself and then puts forth her essentially positive vision for the Niger Delta. Setting aside the old narrative of the Niger Delta as a doomed place she constructs alternative narratives that highlight the Delta as “a verdant place, abundant food producer, and provider of crude oil and natural gas.”

First she opens a gallery, Boy’s Quarters, in Port Harcourt in the Niger Delta where she exhibits contemporary African art. At the same time she embarks on a new body of work that is on show in Houston at the Blaffer Museum. The exhibition is called Did You Know We Taught Them How to Dance and was conceived by Amy L. Powell, curator of modern and contemporary art at the Krannert Art Museum, University of Illinois and co-organized with the Blaffer Art Museum.

In this body of work she is keenly aware of the physical degradation but her emphasis here is on the spiritual and the emotional, two spheres that have been deeply impacted by the oil exploration.

Indeed the focus of the local people has shifted to oil and its monetary rewards and away from an engagement with land, tradition and culture. In the exhibition she puts forth a new alternative where the emphasis is on the richness of the produce that comes from the land, on local culinary culture, religious rituals, and the century old tradition of the masquerade.

She believes that what you put your attention on is what grows. This is a process of repair.

She gets emotional. It all matters a lot. She has hope.

Zina’s engagement with her subject – the spiritual, and the social ecosystems of the Niger Delta – is deeply personal, and at times emotional. She expects the same engagement from the viewer and I found myself propelled into a world of intense emotions, hers but also mine.

The next morning after the banquet I returned to the Blaffer museum to see Zina’s exhibition located on the second floor. I climbed the stairs, and once on the landing, a series of earphones hanging from the ceiling caught my attention. I proceeded through the sound piece listening to each recording where I heard Zina’s voice repeating, “I am sorry.” Her tone shifted in each recording.   At first she sounded slightly defensive, then more sincere. The tone changed yet again. She sounded like she was making an abject apology that morphed finally into what seemed to me an act of self-flagellation. It reminded me of all the ways one says, “I am sorry” to a person who is reluctant to accept the apology and desperation rises in the voice of the apologizer. I was transported back to times in my life when my apologies sounded so similar when no forgiveness was forthcoming.

The title of the piece. Hubris room: Killer of Ancestors says it all.

She makes us witness to her internal conflict as she is torn between her attachment to tradition and history and her need to break from it to redefine herself.

I love how Zina speaks of her creative urges as if some unexplainable spiritual force is driving her.

In the next three works, she turns to cultural traditions that are deeply rooted in the Niger Delta. Zina appropriates their form to assert her reality and vision for Ogoniland while highlighting their potential for effecting change.

In her five channel digital video Karikpo Pipeline (2015) she celebrates a playful masquerade tradition  where male dancers wearing antelope masks dance around decommissioned pipelines or areas where pipelines once existed.

You see them dancing on roads that were once considered possessed because of the presence of the pipelines.

Zina filmed this video with a drone and was therefore able to capture the landscape in all its beauty and breadth. At a more conceptual level the drone makes reference to the surveillance effected by the oil companies but perhaps more importantly for Zina it stands  for invisible spiritual forces.

Long drawn out shots of sand on the ground create moments of abstraction that take on deeper meaning when Zina told me that sand was added to absorb the oils spills and leaks.

The dance is athletic and playful and the mood is at time contemplative.The dancers become playful spirits that are reclaiming Ogoni land as theirs. No longer restricted to a narrow conversation around oil, through the art of performance Zina presents Ogoni land as a site for culture, history and life. She is proposing a different solution than the AID or NGO paradigm. This is regeneration from within.

While I sat watching this video I heard the preaching and singing coming from her other video Prayer Warriors. I didn’t understand the words they were saying but I felt the intensity of the emotion. It was raw and passionate. As a result, while the masqueraders’ dance and the beauty of the landscape unfolding in front of me seduced me, I could not forget the backdrop of the human drama. Zina explained to me that female pastors come to your home to pray with you. It is their version of Christianity infused with local tradition.

Moving away from the videos I walked through the dark space towards The Invisible Man, a sculpture/mask representing Zina’s decision to immerse herself in the spiritual life of the Niger Delta. Inspired by new styles of masquerades she discovered in Ogoniland – particularly a masquerade called Ogele – Zina commissioned her own Janus-faced mask (a two faced mask) intended for masquerade performance.  In part the motivation was to help her confront ” the invisible man”, a spirit of her tragic familial past that seems to follow her around,  she says. It is  only to be worn by a woman which is a very novel idea in Ogoniland and anywhere else in West Africa. Masks and masquerades have been traditionally the sole domain of men.

The set up was dramatic and situated the sculpture within a conversation where the spiritual, the emotional and culture were at the core. Emerging out of the darkness of the exhibition space the massive two-faced mask, one side painted white and the other pink, bears the weight of the figures of Zina’s father and young brother both deceased. More than a simple sculpture, this awesome mask is imbued with personal emotion and symbolism. It is also a gesture of catharsis and cultural connection. The weight of it born by the bearer during the performance/ masquerade is meant to mirror the weight of the absence of departed loved ones.

Zina has spend years in the UK and the US but Ogoni mythology stays close to her heart. In another body of work Kuru’s Children she turns to folklore and inserts an African  feminist agenda.

Table Manners was another very effective installation that included 5 TV screens arranged on a table covered with periwinkle shells. Each video shows a person eating a meal from beginning to the end while looking directly at a stationary camera. The tableaus were carefully constructed half way between documentary and fiction and point to regional identities and personal style. The people come from all over the Niger Delta, which includes 5 kingdoms and 111 villages.

I found myself being stared at unblinkingly, at times defiantly by these men and women eating their food with their fingers and relishing their experience. It was a show of resistance. I could imagine them saying to me: “Yup, this is the way I eat and I am proud of it. I am not apologizing and I am rejecting all your western definition of proper manners.” I was laughing because I was remembering my reticence to embrace their custom the previous night at the banquet. Furthermore the sexual aspect of the performance was not lost on me.

Of equal importance was the focus on produce locally grown, on the idea of a bountiful land, of sensual pleasure and joy of cooking and living. The land is no longer seen as depleted or ravaged but as a source of life.

Zina is promoting a nuanced view of the Niger Delta. Most of the photographs I have seen of the Niger Delta have been by George Osodi and while they are stunning shots they focus on the ravaged land, struggling farmers and armed militias.

In her last video Niger Delta: A Documentary, she gives us a bucolic view of the river where a man transporting sand upriver in his boat floats by on peaceful waters. The river is now a place of leisure. A red chair sits on the beach facing the viewer. It is a sign of rebirth and fertility.

Zina is making her own mark,  not quite following in her father’s footsteps, but surely with the same spirit of courage, commitment, and love. Something about her journey catches my imagination and emotions. Her struggles with her grief, her determination to confront her past, embrace her cultural roots, and her commitment to create space for her own values while engaging in a process of repair and renewal are sentiments I can relate to.

She turns to western notions of performance art as evident in her Table Manners installation as well as African performative practices such as masquerades to highlight art’s power to shift perceptions.

Furthermore by going back to the Niger Delta and focusing in her videos on the land instead of its cities  Zina identifies it as playing an important role in the determination of a spiritual, emotional and social identity.  In other words she proposes the rural as an alternative to the urban as a fertile and relevant site for the foundation of an African identity.

Mid-august I was having dinner with the artist, Zina Saro-Wiva in New York City at the little Italian restaurant around the corner from where I live in the West Side. A few days before Zina had contacted me asking me if I could help her promote her latest photographic work on the Ogole dancers. She needed the proceeds of the sales to finance her upcoming work that is to be exhibited at the Seattle museum.

Alternating between vivacious and impassioned descriptions of her two major projects and moments of silence heavy with angst, Zina updated me on what was happening at Port Harcourt where she is running her own pop-up gallery and working with the Ogoni people on her next video.

A year or so ago Zina had decided to leave her life in Brooklyn to go back to Nigeria. A bit like the heroine of Adiche’s “Americanah”, she was feeling the need to go back to where she came from and in her case face the heavy legacy of her father,Ken Saro-Wiwa. While she was raised mostly in the UK , Zina’s father Ken Saro -Wiwa was a very vocal activist in the Niger Delta who came to an untimely death when he was hung in prison under the orders of the Nigerian government. The anniversary of his death was coming up.  History and the opportunity to shape the future were calling her. It was time on a more personal level to contend with the grief surrounding his death as well as the complicated feelings she must have towards her father who had more than one family and was away most of the time.

Her first career for many years was in the media working as a freelance researcher, producer and presenter on BBC TV and radio. In 2010 she made her debut as a video artist and filmmaker in New York City in the group show “Sharon Stone in Abuja”. She then produced several video and short films with the goal of changing the way Africa is viewed, spoken about and discussed.

She says: “ My art career started when I left my journalism background and dedicated myself to changing the way the world saw Africa. I set up the (now dormant) organization AfricaLab to this end. By immersing myself fully in this endeavour, I discovered that contemporary art practices would give me the power, license and freedom I needed. Art challenged me to be freer and deeper in my thinking. What I did no expect, however, was how focusing in on Africa has often resulted in work that transcended the ‘idea of Africa” and became deeply personal. And really it is the relationship between the personal and the political that interests me.”

She went to Port Harcourt, the capital of Rivers State, located in the Niger Delta in South Eastern Nigeria. She repossessed her father’s office, which had been kept intact since his hanging in 1995. It is now a miniature museum site hosting projected photographic and video installation works relating to Ken’s personal life and international legacy.

The rest of the space is now a pop-up gallery called the “Boys Quarters”.

“The Boys’ Quarters” is the colloquial name given to the servants’ quarters, a post-colonial hangover and an ever-present feature of modern West African life. The place where, to this day, servants and sometimes extended family members live. We believe that in order to transcend limitation and excel – a Nigerian pre-occupation – we must run towards and not away from The Boys’ Quarters. We must investigate ourselves, go inwards as a society then reflect and expand upon who we are from our core. Our true wealth is in the people at every level of society. “ ( Zina Saro-Wiwa)

With the same spirit as her father she decided to effect change by reframing the narrative surrounding the Niger Delta. The Niger Delta is rich in oil reserves that have attracted years of exploration from multinational oil corporations (Shell and others). It has suffered tremendous environment destruction. In addition ethnic communities such as the Ogoni and the Ijaw people have felt exploited. Communities were forced out by the Nigerian government to allow for exploration and very little of the wealth produced by the oil exploration has trickled down to the local communities. As a consequence various forms of resistance to the presence of the big oil companies and to the corruption of the Nigerian government have emerged since the 1990’s. Zina ‘s father, Ken Saro-Wiwa, a play-right and author is the most well known of the activists for the rights of the Ogoni people. More recently activism has taken a more violent turn with many militias operating in the Delta.

Zina is proposing an alternative platform for discussing environmental issues in the Delta, one that is peaceful and uses art as a way to offer different ways of looking and apprehending ones own context, environment and history. In this process Zina wants to highlight an emotional and spiritual dimension to the life in the Niger delta.

Zina’s idea of a contemporary gallery is not the highly commercial gallery one sees in Nigeria or Ghana for that matter. She is quite adamant about that. I knew just what she was talking about. Last fall I went to Ghana and was struck with the absence of galleries that showed anything slightly conceptual. Most of the work tended to be more traditional and a bit too decorative and commercial. A more conceptual approach to contemporary art that addresses contemporary issues was sorely lacking. This is just what Zina is doing here: Presenting an alternative, a new way of looking at one owns environment.

With help from donors, she restored her father’s office and cleaned up, painted and refurbished the other rooms. I loved what she did with the space shaping it into a haven of peace and light, a contemplative space in the middle of busy and noisy Port Harcourt.

Currently, the Niger Delta artist, Perrin Oglafa is having a show called “The Restless Grove” in the main gallery and Zina’s video “An Ogoni Heart” is set up in the back room. Zina tells me how she discovered Oglafa’s sculptures. Oglafa is known in the area for his paintings, which are quite colorful and can be found on the walls of banks, hotels and homes of foreign oil executives. While she was visiting him in his studio, she noticed what looked at first glance like a pile of ropes. Intrigued she asked him what this was. He explained that this was a private work that he had never shown because he did not think it fit the local market. He had painstakingly dissembled a raw canvas, one thread at a time creating a sculpture that looked like fishing nets. His forefathers were fishermen and in unraveling the canvas perhaps there was a mirroring of the unraveling of the lives of these fishermen as a result of the pollution in the Niger Delta. Zina responded to the expressive power of the piece, and to the fresh and novel way of addressing an aspect of Niger Delta life.

This was exactly what she was looking for! She displayed the body of work beautifully and with great simplicity in the new space highlighting its metaphorical qualities while revealing its beauty. Included were wooden pieces, which reflect Oglafa’s love of nature. Nature is a loaded subject in the Niger Delta. In addition to the issue of the damaging effect of the exploration of oil on the environment, nature has mystical powers according to pre-Christian animistic beliefs. Zina speaks of the “Restless Mangrove” as “the representation of the spirit of a fisherman of souls.”

The first time I heard of this pop up project I was very intrigued. I feel that true change in the art scene in Nigeria or other African countries happens from within. It is not enough that a few well-intentioned and generous western people collect or show African art outside of the country. It is essential that Nigerians such as Zina bring a new perspective to the arts locally and encourage local Africa collectors and artists to embrace alternative yet authentic ways of encountering their environment and life. In addition, Zina’s gesture has an inherent legitimacy because of her familial history in the Delta.

I could relate to her desire to reckon with her father’s legacy, change the way people look at her country of origin and in so doing confront her inner demons. A few years back I embarked on a project – the performance in the USA of my Bulgarian grandfather, Petko Staynov’s music – that aimed in part to honor his legacy in the Western world, to repair some of the impact of the Cold War years on my family and on the arts, and improve my relationship with my father. I can’t say I was fully successful on the family level. While my uncle from Bulgaria attended the performances which were wonderful, and helped in many ways, my father did not come.

These things need to be done and they demand a good dose of courage and they are no guarantees. In Zina’s case the bravery is multifold since Port Harcourt is not a safe place and Nigeria faces at this moment several very serious health and security challenges. Furthermore she is a woman and in doing this project and her performance work there she is confronting entrenched gender taboos.

While she is overseeing the pop-up, Zina is also working on a new body of work that centers on the Ogoni people and in particular the Ogele Masquerades. See next post.

Listen well: African women are talking about their hair.

I just finished Chimamanda Ngozi Adiche’s novel, Americanah, and was totally taken by her wonderful vivid description of a hair-braiding salon in Trenton New Jersey. I never realized it took six hours to have one’s hair braided and that it hurt so much! Being a person who hates going to the hairdresser – I don’t like getting my hair pulled- and who rarely styles her hair I also found myself quite amazed by the time, effort and even health risk that are involved in achieving the alternative soft wavy look many black women favor.

J.D. Okhai Ojeikere photographs of Nigerian women hairstyles have fascinated me recently.  They do feel abstract and impersonal however. While that is part of their appeal I loved getting Adiche’s insights into women’s daily lives and hairstyle practices. Suddenly, something that had felt distant and looked like an abstract art form came to life.

To give you an idea of how intricate, sculptural and varied these hairdos can be, here are wonderful photographs taken by J. D Okhai Ojeikere who sadly past away very recently.

These images come from his series Hairstyles. In the street, at the office, at parties, he photographed women’s hairdos from behind and highlighted their sculptural qualities and the play of forms. Beyond their aesthetic qualities his series offer a mix of ethnographic and anthropological insight into Nigerian culture.

I am a woman and I assure you hair matters very early on the life of a little girl. I remember trying different hairstyles as a child: braids, ponytails, with lots of colorful bows. It was about vanity but also identity and pleasure. However, in African culture and tradition cornrow braiding has much greater and deeper significance. It is much more than an expression of personal vanity. It has communicative power and traditionally speaks of religion, kinship, status, age and ethnicity. When a black woman chooses to braid her hair she is embracing and honoring her cultural heritage.

Adiche, born in Nigeria but now living both in Nigeria and in the US brings her personal Nigerian perspective to the discussion of race in the United States. In Adiche’s third novel, Ifemelu the outspoken Nigerian heroine is returning to Nigeria. In preparation of her return, she wants to have her hair braided. With no braiding hair salon in upper class Princeton where she was on a research fellowship she goes to Trenton to have her hair braided.

Ifemelu has all the characteristics of what Adiche calls an Americanah: After 14 years in the US she has given up some of her old habits and adopted American ways.  Sitting in a hair salon having her hair braided for six hours by ladies from French speaking West Africa she munches carrots and granola bars while they are eating spicy and greasy food. She reads an American novel while they stare in rapture at Nigerian Nollywood movies, which she dislikes.

Adiche weaves through out the novel the theme of Ifemelu’s black kinky hair and its care, here an index of Ifemelu’s race and gender. The evocative  hair braiding episode  followed subsequently by the many references to hair become a metaphor for Ifemulu’s struggles in the US as an African immigrant.   A Nigerian African contending for the first time with her blackness in a predominantly white society, Ifemelu gradually emerges as an independent and authentic woman.

Ifemelu is a blogger in the story. She is not afraid to speak her mind about issues of race and has the refreshing perspective of the outsider on America’s political correctness that looks so foreign to people that come from abroad. I loved the frankness and outspoken nature of her posts and it made me realize that my own posts could be spunkier.

All simplistic notions of race and identity particular to the western perspective and America’s “ tribal” approach to difference are challenged: People from Nigeria are different from people from Senegal, or Kenya or Mali, even though Americans would prefer to bunch them all under the term “Africans”. African-Americans are different from what Adiche calls American- Africans and there are many shades of “blackness”. She defies easy categorization, highlights differentiation while not minimizing prevailing deeply rooted racial prejudices.

Lets get back to the subject of hair.

“Can you imagine Michele Obama wearing her hair natural?” says Ifemelu.

Michele Obama has to have her hair relaxed and has to risk burning and scarring her scalp to achieve a look that voters are all comfortable with. The question begs to be asked. Would Obama have been elected if Michele wore her hair natural and short? Kind of crazy to think that we, voters, would have taken her hairdo into consideration. Yet, I think many would have.  So before any of you start thinking it is ridiculous to be spending so much time on ones hair, lets remember the magnitude of the consequences. Thank you Chimamanda Adiche for pointing it out! I take so much for granted and I really appreciate when I get a new awareness.   Hair is no joke in this country! It has huge symbolism though that is not the case everywhere in Africa. Trust me in the middle of the bush in Kenya it is a subject far from a woman’s mind.  However it does matter to the young male warriors!

According to Zina Saro-Wiwa, another Nigerian artist who has just returned to Nigeria after years abroad, one needs to pay attention to how black women in America are dealing with their hair these days. In spring of 2012 she made Transition a documentary video for the New York Times about the new natural look that many black women in America are adopting. She calls them “transitioning” women and points to a quiet revolution that is taking place.  I met her just as she had shaved off her hair and was keeping it short and natural. She was at the same time dealing with the long overdue grieving process over the violent death of her father Ken Saro-Wiwa. Determined to embrace her history, and in a courageous act of self-acceptance and honesty she included in a video recording of performances around the idea of “Grief” one scene where she allows herself to show her grief unabashedly and without any visual adornment. Her hair is cut very short and all the emphasis is on her expression.

She highlights the significance of this movement and its potential impact.

“[But] black hair and the black body generally have long been a site of political contest in American history and in the American imagination. Against this backdrop, the transition movement has a political dimension – whether transitioners themselves believe or not. Demonstration this level of self-acceptance represents a powerful evolution in black political expression. If racial politics has led to an internalization of self-loathing, then true transformation will come internally, too. It will not be a performative act. Saying it loud: “I’m black and I’m proud” is one thing. Believing it quietly is another. So the transition movement is much more profound and much more powerful – and I believe it offers lessons in self-acceptance for people of all hues and all genders.”

Zina is now in Nigeria working on  commissions for a couple of US museums and opening a pop up contemporary art gallery in her father’s old offices focusing on life and its struggles in the Niger Delta.

I find both Zina and Ifemelu’s determination, courage and self –acceptance deeply moving and inspiring. I thrive to be true to who I am and that includes cultural heritage and personal experience. I have learned from an early age that most people are attracted to you for the parts of you that are like them and not for what makes you different and separate.  With that in mind, choosing to honor difference, like Ifemulu or Zina are doing, can seem a risky proposition at times and yet I think it holds an abundance of richness. Holding at once what makes us similar and what makes us separate is the key to a rich and peaceful life and world.

From this point of departure – the hair salon – we follow the trials and tribulations of the two main protagonists Ifemelu and Obinze, who are lovers in high school in Nigeria then part ways as they try to improve on their choices in life. Obinze, a soft spoken young man with a passion for the US, cannot get a visa and ends up in London scrubbing toilets. He is deported back to Nigeria after he has been found to be working with false papers. He finds material success in Lagos. Ifemelu goes to university in the US where she struggles terribly to make ends meet. Her perseverance pays off and she becomes a very successful blogger. Despite her success she feels something deeply lacking in her life and returns to Lagos where she eventually reunites with Obinze.

The overriding narrative of boy /girl in love, going their separate ways and finding each other again is a time worn structure. More interesting are the insights into the life of Ifemelu when she was a young girl in Nigeria, highlighting the gradual disappointments and frustration with the way things were going in a country trying to find its way after independence.

Most of all, I love how Adiche highlights difference and creates a rich tapestry of colorful and unique experiences which are a powerful antidote to the toxic dangers of prejudice.