Àdùnní was frail, bent over with age, her body lost in the voluminous folds of a brilliant but worn green and magenta agbada, a men’s robe. Her wide-brimmed hat called to mind a Hasidic man’s, her face pinched and sunken under it. She looked unflinchingly at me from heavily kohl-lined eyes whose retinas were pushed out, dangling like refulgent blue-gray scales. My shock at her condition immobilized me, left me feeling intrusive and uncomfortable that I had come only to witness, to peer in. I mumbled something about admiration for her and about indigo, and I was invited to snap a photo of her like a tourist. Then the younger woman led me away, asking if I would leave something for Mama. “You see she is very old now, and she needs our care.”
Àdùnní was born Susanne Wenger in Austria and had been a resister of Nazism. She was an unusual, stubborn, and avant-garde thinker and painter, whose surrealist work influenced a generation of postwar artists. She married the world-renowned German scholar and historian Ulli Beier, who was also a doyen of Yoruba sacred arts and African literature and theater. He had just accepted a teaching post at University of Ibadan.
They moved to Nigeria in 1950. In her early days there Wenger was infected with tuberculosis. She sought native healers as part of her rehabilitation, which brought her into contact with an important generation of Yoruba priests. She came to understand her illness as part of her initiation as an olorisha, one who is inhabited by an orisha (a spirit or deity) and a priestess of Obatala, the powerful god who is the custodian of ori, one’s soul or destiny.
She went about restoring the ancient shrines in the sacred grove along the Osun River, hoping to preserve traditions and spiritual practices in a region where Christianity had run rampant. Throughout the grove she and other artists, priests, and artisans also built their own expressions of the sacred. Their huge, mystical, breathtaking structures were expressions of the gods and goddesses. The sanctuary they created has become world renowned, a place of spiritual pilgrimage as important as any.
Wenger was both revered and hated for her work. The Osun-Oshogbo Sacred Grove came under fierce attack by traditionalists as well as by African and Western progressives, whose unease with the movement was as fierce as the support by spiritual and cultural adherents. At the same time, powerful interests in fishing, lumber, real estate, and farming forced her to seek protection; on occasion she and the grove were physically attacked.
She was a painter primarily, and she continued to paint in Nigeria, but the Western notion of solitude for the artist was too much in conflict with Yoruba society. Eventually she began to work on cloth so that she could work with others or simply in others’ company. So began her initiation into indigo, and indigo deepened her initiation into the world of the orishas.
In Yoruba, everything in life has a spiritual significance. Even the most rudimentary work is guided by the realm of the spirits, and so as one works, one pays tribute. The goddess Iya Mapo is the patroness of all exclusive women’s work, trades like dyeing, pottery, and soap-making. She is the deity of sex. She guides all things erotic. She guides conception and birth. She guides the tricky realm of the indigo dye pot, and the hands of the women and girls who design cloths, perform the intense preparation for dyeing, and undertake the many steps to a finished cloth. So important is Iya Mapo that on the fourth day of each week, on her ose, or day of worship, women bring sacrifices of food to her shrines and spend the day celebrating and worshipping her.
Wenger became known as Àdùnní and began to perform the work of the initiate. She also began painting images on cloth that were as significant as her earlier European works. She wore clothing made from indigo adire at a time when adire was considered out of fashion, a peasant’s cloth. She wore her buba (a blouse) without its essential mates of a wrapper and gele or head wrap. She often wore men’s smocks. She was slight and lanky, her hair was cut short or shorn, and her face had a severity and intensity, so she appeared bizarre, even fearsome, to the people around her.
She, along with Ulli Beier and the Nobel Prize-winning author Wole Soyinka, are credited with the revival of adire, which led to a recognition and protection of indigo arts and the resurgence of a lucrative market. In fact, a great convergence of politics and personalities and tastes ushered in a new era of blue. In the 1950s and 1960s, when the three wore adire shirts, the stewards at the Mbari Mbayo club in Ibadan, a center of avant-garde theater started by the playwright Duro Lapido, began to imitate them. They were joined by students and Peace Corps workers, African-American intellectuals, artists (including Jacob Lawrence), and travelers. The “Mbari shirt” craze began. Street hawkers followed fashion. In the 1960s, after Nigeria achieved independence, indigo adire was then worn increasingly by the country’s elite as a sign of both Yoruba ethnicity and Nigerian identity.
The era of the 1960s was a powerful recall of a practice in the 1890s and early 1900s, when elite Yoruba women began to incorporate Yoruba clothes—many of them indigo—with European prints, a signal of a rejection of Christian missionary prescriptions on Yoruba dress and cultural practices.
Yet another blue revival had occurred in the 1970s and 1980s. By this time, the older, finest cloths were beginning to have considerable value to Western collectors.
Later, as I walked in the Osun-Oshogbo sacred grove, entranced by the beauty and the feeling of that place, people appeared suddenly. Some begged, some had small boys playing for money on talking drums, some purported to be custodians, shrine-keepers, or guides.
I had arrived in Lagos a few days before, on a Sunday morning, in the midst of an oil strike. The old 747 had flown from Accra, but the wheel that pushed open the doors would not turn, and we eventually had to exit through a tiny hole in the cockpit, down a wobbly wheeled-in staircase. The morning seemed to have an eerie tameness, but on that day more than three hundred people were slain in the city in retaliation for an earlier slaying in the north. A terrible fight for basic resources, and for dignity, was being played out as Muslim-Christian violence. People were being randomly pulled from cars and hacked. The city stank of fire and dead bodies. The car that my hosts drove was stopped repeatedly by ill-outfitted policemen with hunger in their eyes, and these men with Ph.D.’s spoke obsequiously to them, pleading gently that they too were civil servants and I was a visiting student.
The dislocation in Àdùnní’s eyes had reached into me. What was I here for? I was a tourist, as much as I was encountering places and people of great meaning to me. All my encounters were fleeting; they were merely helping me to knit together pieces of experience, knowledge, bits of history.
At the University of Ibadan faculty guesthouse was a lone vendor, a lady who had sat there for decades and who remained even after far fewer people traveled there. She found pieces of cloth one by one, visiting old dyeing compounds and cloth sellers, buying from the cloth boxes of old ladies and families eager for cash a few of the literal fragments of it all.
I arrived at her stand on a good day. She showed me four cloths that were very old, pristine, fine examples of important designs. One was Olokun, representing the goddess of the sea, also known as “Life is sweet,” a name spun into “Money comes from the sea and makes life sweet,” or “Money comes from overseas.” The cloth was patterned with abstract forks and knives, kola nuts, chieftancy leaves, a scorpion, and cranes, hand-drawn in cassava paste with a chicken feather, becoming the crackling soft white lines emerging from the soak of dark indigo.
The second was Eiyepe, “All the birds are here,” with fine, intricate patterning of many birds, a blue-black aviary. “No more velvet” was a dark and thick embellished cloth, textured from stitching, a comment on periodic government bans on imported textiles. And finally Sun bebe, or “Lifting up the beads,” had sharp, rhythmic patterning, a nod to the eroticism of waist beads and the beauty of the wearer.
I felt something like a thief, and, in fact, my host, Peju, had looked them over and commented that I was one of the people extracting, for very little money, the last bits of a national treasu
re. Indeed, by 2010, some of the cloths, bought for less than $30, would value at $1,500, and the trader at the faculty guest house rarely finds a single one.
The evening after my visit to the grove, I sat in the compound of a babalawo, watching him read the entrails of a chicken I’d presented for sacrifice. The people around him, and the friend who had accompanied me, clapped and offered excited blessings. I would have success in my work; the road was clear for me; it was good work. But I would always battle loneliness. I was to keep a purple cloth with me always, and a broom, or its fibers. I was to sweep the air of this loneliness and wear a favored perfume. I would have strength for my journey because it was just.
Ten years earlier I had consulted a legendary Yoruba priest who had stayed in Brooklyn for some time. I met with him over that year and wasn’t quite sure what I was seeking, but I could never break from my fascination. Still, unlike Àdùnní, I could not enter the realm of the believer. The closest expression of the divine had been in my quiet absorption with indigo.
Àdùnní would die in 2009, at the age of ninety-three, eight years after my visit. In 2005 the Osun-Oshogbo Sacred Grove was registered as a UNESCO World Heritage Site. By that time I was deep into my work and glad that I had met at least the receding footprints of her world.
That night, I slept in Oshogbo in a room at the Nike Center for Art and Culture. Nike Olaniyi Davies, now Nike Davies Okundaye, an internationally celebrated artist opened her center in 1983 to encourage and create jobs for young artists, especially women, and to preserve traditions in Yoruba arts.
Nike is every bit a modern-day heroine. She was raised in Ogidi, a town forty kilometers from Lagos, where the Benue and Niger rivers meet. Ogidi is famous for its celebrated son, the author Chinua Achebe; for weaving and pottery; and for indigo, which is said to grow in abundance there. Nike’s great-grandmother, Ibitola, or “Red Woman,” was an Iyalode, one of the astute and enterprising businesswomen who held chieftaincy titles and influence in the local councils. In the 1950s Ibitola was the head of an important women’s loom guild in Jos, a seat of power in central Nigeria. She had specialized in ojas, finely woven and designed baby carriers, but abandoned that work to make indigo adire, because of what she described as the even more intense labor of weaving. Nike grew up assisting her great-grandmother with the strenuous preparation of the cassava paste used in designing the cloth; it became a resist to the indigo bath. She hand-tied and stitched designs on cloths—also a tedious, involved, and slow process—and did embroidery work for a local tailor.
After primary school, Nike was hired as a nanny and left her family home, an arrangement not unusual for girls of that age, whose families were unable or unwilling to continue their schooling. She continued to make adire cloths on the weekends, which her employer sold to Canadian visitors who admired her work. She reinvested her profits from these sales and sold more and more of the cloth.
When Nike’s father arranged a marriage for her to a much older man, she and a friend ran away to escape. They joined a traveling theater, which led her to a life in Oshogbo. Yoruba traveling theaters were similar to the world of the Western circus of long ago. Troupe members were often viewed as outsiders or drawn there out of desperation, as much as a desire to perform. The troupe belonged to or “married” its creative master, who paid them low, irregular wages and often coerced members physically or sexually, manipulating the laws of polygamy. The female cast especially bore intense abuse and also disdain by the outside community, which often likened the girls to prostitutes. Nike eventually left the theater because of these hardships, and because her father had succeeded in tracking her and made increasingly stronger attempts to force her into the marriage.
In Oshogbo, Nike met Prince Twins Seven Seven, a member of the playwright Duro Lapido’s theater company. He would eventually be introduced to Àdùnní and Ulli Beier and became one of the most important, but wildly eccentric and volatile, personalities in the Oshogbo School of Art. Nike married Twins in an attempt to escape her father’s pressure and over the years their marriage was joined with eight other wives. The household was violent and contentious, as the wives competed for food and money and other basic resources, as well as protection from Twins’s abuses and excesses. Twins relied on his wives to do the base work for his painting and tapestries, and Nike, who was favored for her work, and smart and adept in her relationships, used her situation as an opportunity to shelter herself and develop her skill with adire and with other artistic forms. In interviews, she has talked of the abuse and forced sexual relationships between the co-wives, and how it fostered attachments between the women and allowed them to consolidate their own power. As Twins began to sell his work and travel internationally, he increasingly relied on Nike, sometimes even sending her as his agent. She slowly developed contacts with other artists and patrons and buyers. By the time she escaped the marriage (also assisting some of her co-wives in leaving), her own art was receiving the same attention as the stars of the Oshogbo movement.
But for the most part women were left out of the Oshogbo movement. They were, on the whole, bound to domestic duties and to supporting their children. Only through contact with the work of individual women’s husbands did a very few catch the attention of Àdùnní, Ulli Beier and his second wife, Georgina Beier, also an important artist and figure in Oshogbo, and foreign agents and buyers. And then the Oshogbo artists, as a whole, were assigned the same stigma as traveling theater: they were branded as derelicts and mad persons and pagans in Yoruba society. For women, it meant an intense, if not unbearable, exile.
Nike’s most celebrated and iconic works are elaborate wax paintings on fields of indigo, an art form she shares with Àdùnní. Her work can be found in the most important auction houses and museums worldwide, often sold alongside the works of Àdùnní and Twins Seven Seven.
The afternoon before I was to visit Nike’s Center for Art and Culture, I was walking on the road in Oshogbo with my research assistant, Yinka, a graduate student in African studies at the University of Ibadan. Yinka spotted a former college classmate carrying a newborn and called to her. We talked for a long time at the roadside, and then Yinka’s friend invited us to an apartment just down the road that was rather lavish but suffering somewhat from neglect, dust, and pollution. It turned out to be Twins Seven Seven’s home, and the young woman was his newest wife. She could not have been thirty; the man would be nearing sixty, I calculated. The two of them reminisced in Yoruba in the tones they must have used as schoolgirls. I was trying to conjure Nike’s life and imagined this young wife might offer me some look into her husband’s world. But she seemed to have no further ambition beyond marriage to a man who could set her up in this house, no plans except babies; everything rested on her marriage and her beauty, which was already battered by motherhood. When their attention turned to me, Yinka told her about my work and my interest in the Oshogbo artists.
When we were leaving, she disappeared for a long time and returned to offer me a battered, unremarkable painting by Twins at an inflated price. She and I were both latecomers, guided by yearning for beauty belonging to long-ago lives. We said good-bye, and Yinka and I had hastened on.
Thousands of young artists have come to the Nike Center for Art and Culture for training by the few remaining old master artists, including a few of the Iyalaros, the masters of the indigo pot. The center was inspired by the work of Georgina Beier, also a textile artist, who, one by one, trained women and men in textile techniques, and she began feeding the Oshogbo arts movement.
Georgina drew on traditional Yoruba textile designs, then led artists to use imported materials like velvet. Adire designs on velvet, dyed in indigo, created intensely glowing wrappers and geles that became high fashion. Yoruba society seemed to have an insatiable taste for new things. Modern fashions in a Yoruba aesthetic easily became a rage. She also introduced quilting work, using European conventions on indigo adire. These quilts inspired exhibits and high-end sales to foreign visitors who
flocked to Oshogbo and to exhibits abroad.
Nike took Georgina Beier’s vision and expanded it. The original center is housed in a fancy compound and has a large boutique that sells Nike’s and her students’ work, as well as masterworks by other Yoruba textile artists. She has added centers in Lagos, Ojidi, and Abuja, Nigeria’s new capital city—each compound more lavish.
Nike frequently shows her work abroad and is invited to arts and African studies conferences all over the world. I had met her in New York, where she charismatically held forth in a room of buyers and fans. She was not at the center when I arrived; now married to a former police chief, she lived primarily in Lagos and was at that moment traveling in Germany. But I hadn’t really come to Oshogbo for Nike, as much as I considered her a heroine. I was aware of how remarkable her world was, glad to look in but not sure it was my path. I wanted to find of indigo what was hidden.
That night I slept under a hand-sewn indigo quilt I’d bought from Nike’s shop, made from an exquisite old piece of Ibadandun, “Ibadan is sweet.” My nose was filled with it, and it took me into a calm trance before sleep. Sleeping in the next room was Iyalaro Silifatu Àdùnní Suliman. She had arrived in the night from Ibadan, summoned by Nike’s brother when I informed him of my quest. I was anxious to meet her; she was one of the remaining iyalaros whom Nike had invited to the center to teach.
The next morning I found Iyalaro in an adire buba and iroin, the same cloth tied at her head. She was sitting on the floor on a pile of white and aquamarine sheddar, a shiny, expensive damask cloth that was stiff from designs hand-painted on it in cassava paste. She had a quick smile, tiny eyes full of grace and humor, and high, full cheeks that, from her temples to the corners of her mouth, were crossed with the deep scars of the Yoruba. Her twin granddaughters, who were twelve or thirteen, dressed in matching rose-colored knit dresses with powder-blue knit hats, were at work with her, inspecting and folding yard after yard of cloth.
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