By Nii B. Andrews.
From their momentous arrival in 1958, a roll call of the Zaria Rebels aka Zaria Art Society included Yusuf Grillo, Demas Nwoko, Emmanuel Odita, Simon Okeke, Uche Okeke, Bruce Onobrakpeya and Oseloka Osadebe.
At the outset, they were all students at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology (now Ahmadu Bello University) in Zaria.
They championed an artistic ethos and philosophy that emphasized and prioritized indigenous artistic tropes, narratives and strategies.
In an uncanny parallel with the Casablanca School and the Akwapim Six, the Rebels looked to their own ethnic traditions and thus formulated a “natural synthesis” that jettisoned the Western centered educational and artistic framework being pushed by officialdom at the time.
As Nigeria hurtled towards independence in 1960 and beyond, the Rebels harnessed aesthetic and cultural traditions from all over the country in order to weld and meld together a new national identity.
Their primary sources included ethnic myths and legends; artistic traditions and yes, Bible stories; these were the sources that became the “natural synthesis”- the mythology and grand epic for the new nation – the most populous in Africa.
Uche Okeke declared in the Zaria Art Society Manifesto of 1960, “Young artists in a new nation, that is what we are! We must grow with the new Nigeria and work to satisfy her traditional love for art or perish with our colonial past.”
And of course they soon devised an academic program outside of the official university curriculum.
Even though they took a similar conceptual approach to art making, the vast diversity inherent in the practices they analyzed led to great variation in their individual formal and stylistic synthesis.
Their individual artistic outputs flourished in the disparate geographical locations that they settled in within Nigeria. In the process they produced an important corpus that cemented the path of modernism in contemporary Nigerian art.
An exhibition (Oct 26 to Nov 15 2019) at the Lagos powerhouse ARTHOUSE CONTEMPORARY will inquire closely into the visual vocabulary and philosophical ideas of the Rebels; it will also explore how they influenced each other.
In short it will celebrate the legacy of the Rebels. The curator is Professor Jerry Buhari, professor of Fine Art at Ahmadu Bello University, Zaria.
The pieces in the exhibition include paintings, sculpture, prints, drawings and a wealth of archival materials.