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.