/REPEAT/ /ARTS & ENTERTAINMENT/ARTS: Painting Of A Black Virgin Mary Sparks Debate In Nigeria

By Toye Olori Reprint | | Print |

Toye Olori

LAGOS, Oct 26 1999 (IPS) - The painting of a Black Virgin Mary by a London-based Nigerian artist, Chris Ofili, has sparked a heated debate in Nigeria.

The painting, which has been exhibited in Brooklyn Museum, the United States, for three weeks now, depicts a Black Virgin Mary with breasts made of elephant dungs.

Besides enraging Cathrine Acholonu, Special Adviser to President Olusegun Obasanjo on Arts and Culture, the painting has also sparked a heated debate in Nigeria.

In a statement issued in the capital Abuja last week, Acholonu criticised the painting as an abuse of African womanhood and motherhood. She says the Virgin Mary represented the African equivalent of a matriarch who should be seen as a role model for young women and mothers.

She says the symbolism of elephant dung used in Ofili’s painting, “Sensation”, violated all the artisitic and cultural tradition of Africans.

“All over the continent and in Nigeria, African traditional behaviour is destinguished by cleanliness, restraint and a sense of order and propriety. Africans don’t plaster themselves or their environment with faeces, a substance which they view with disdain,” says Acholonu, a playright, poet and literary critic.

She notes that, while democratisation has restored free speech, African creative artists should not use it to promote such decadent art as potrayed by the Ofili painting.

“Sensation is one sure way to derail entire generations of questing young African minds. The painting had further cheapened African culture, womanhood and spirituality by potraying Africans as incapable of conceiving a spiritual phenomenon, such as the Madonna without smearing it with filth and obscenity,” Acholonu says.

She urged Nigerians to respect the religious sensibilities of others in line with government’s respect for religious diversity in Nigeria.

Acholonu also describes as fallacy, the defence by some art critics whom, she says, have tried to deceive the Western audience by referring to elephant dung as means of expression in African arts.

“It is a fallacy. What faeces is in Africa is what feaces is all over the world. It is something that is dirty. Ofili should have a rethink,” she says.

“African men are mother worshippers and so Virgin Mary should not be painted with dungs. Every African woman will take exception to the interposition and mixing of the idea of a matriarch with pornography. We can’t afford the luxury that corrupts our children, mess up the image and icons of the society,” she says.

At the heat of the controversy generated by the exhibition of Ofili’s painting, the Mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani, had threatened to cut off the city’s 7.2 million US Dollars subsidy to the museum, uless the exhibition was cancelled.

However, Dele Jegede, a Nigerian Arts teacher in Indiana State University, was quoted by newspapers as saying that Ofili had been misunderstood in the painting.

“One thing I don’t like in the whole issue is that Ofili used elephant dung from his African home. It is all a misunderstanding. I find it really problematic for people to see an artist in that light. What happens if Ofili had been a German or Briton,” Jegede was quoted as saying.

Francis Nwosu, a Journalist and an art critic, does not see anything wrong or controversial about the painting.

“As an artist, he can represent Virgin Mary the way he feels and perceives her. How are we sure Virgin Mary was not black and if she was not as beautiful as the early Christians and artists of those days potrayed her? That also was a product of their thinking and an artistic impression by them”, Nwosu told IPS in Lagos.

Nwosu believes that the use of elephant dung does not in any way defame the Virgin Mary or the Christain faith.

Nwosu says a similar painting by renowned Nigerian artist, Bruce Onobrakpeya, generated controversy but critics were eventually overshadowed by those who supported the work.

One of Onobrakpeya’s oil paintings, dated 1976, depicts Jesus Christ with the cross and Women of Jerusalem on the way to Calvary, all blacks and in African costumes with the cross well decorated.

The idea of the painting, according to Onobrakpeya, was to encourage the use of African art and craft in Christian worship.

“Here Jesus Christ and other religious figures were to be treated as universal, laying emphasis on the Christian essence rather than a belaboured geographical, anatomical and costume study of Jewish and Roman people.

“These morals generated a lot of criticisms, unleashed by some priests and laity of the parish,” Onobrakpeya told the Lagos Guardian newspaper recently.

Like the controversy generated by Onobrakpeya’s work on Station of the Cross, the comments by Obasanjo’s Adviser on Arts and Culture has been criticised by Yinka Oyegbile in a reaction published by the Guardian last weekend.

Oyegbile says Acholonu’s criticism of Ofili’e painting was based on her confessed faith of Catholicism which sees the image of Mary as sacred.

“Her criticism rather than representing the views of government is, I think, her own world view and bias. She should have left her religious view out of this sensitive issue,” he argues.