Uche Okeke

Biography

Among the Igbo of south-eastern Nigeria, uli patterns were drawn by women: on the body, and sometimes on the walls of shrines. The colour was extracted from the pods of several plants, and the motifs were taken from nature, from the stripes and spots of the python to leaves. The signs themselves hardly changed; the skill lay in how they were arranged. Uche Okeke’s mother also made uli designs, and he considered drawing and line the foundation of all his work.

Out of this line a whole school grew in the 1970s.

Christopher Uchefuna Okeke was born on 30 April 1933 in Nimo, in what is now Anambra State, to Isaac Okonkwo Okeke and Monica Mgboye Okeke. In 1940–1953 he attended schools in Kafanchan, Onitsha and Orlu, and was already drawing a great deal. In the mid-1950s he worked as a clerk in the Department of Labour in Jos and Lagos. Before entering college he had managed to show taxidermy of his own making at a meeting of the Field Society in the Jos Museum, help the curator Bernard Fagg with an exhibition of Nigerian painting and drawing, and hold a solo exhibition in Jos and Kaduna, which Sir Ahmadu Bello attended.

He studied in the fine art department of the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology in Zaria (now Ahmadu Bello University), and in 1958, together with Yusuf Grillo, Bruce Onobrakpeya, Oseloka Osadebe, Demas Nwoko and others, he founded the Zaria Art Society. The country was moving towards independence; the college teachers were mostly British and taught Western technique. The Society opposed the imposition of European art school ideas on young African artists. Okeke studied the art of the Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa, searched for a language of his own, wrote essays in the spirit of Pan-Africanism and Négritude, and it was apparently his forceful prose that earned the group the nickname “Zaria rebels”. In the Society he was first secretary and later its second president.

The early 1960s were very full. In 1959 he opened a cultural centre in Kafanchan, which grew into the Asele Institute in Nimo. In 1960 he made the mural “Mother Nigeria and Her Children” for the independence exhibition in Lagos, and in 1961 a mural for the Mbari Artists and Writers Club in Ibadan, where a book of his drawings with an introduction by Ulli Beier came out the same year. In 1962–1963, on a West German government fellowship, he studied mosaic and stained glass in Munich. Then came a three-man exhibition with Ibrahim El-Salahi and Malangatana in India and Pakistan, the directorship of the Mbari centre in Enugu in 1964–1967, and the World Festival of Negro Arts in Dakar in 1966. In 1965 he illustrated Achebe’s novel “Things Fall Apart”.

In 1968 he worked on the Refugee Affairs Committee in Aba. In 1971 his collection of Igbo folk tales, “Tales of Land of Death”, was published in New York, and in 1972 the national UNESCO commission named him illustrator of the year. In his drawings for folklore he often portrayed the heroes of myth.

Okeke came to the University of Nigeria in Nsukka in the early 1970s and until 1985 headed its department of fine and applied arts, also serving as dean and as director of the Institute of African Studies. He rebuilt the curriculum around traditional African art and design and introduced postgraduate courses. Together with Chike Aniakor and Obiora Udechukwu he turned the language of uli into modern drawing and painting, and the circle of their students came to be called the Nsukka School. Commissions went on alongside: carved doors and the archbishop’s throne for Holy Trinity Cathedral in Onitsha, fourteen Stations of the Cross for the university chapel. In 1977 his terracotta “Dance of Unity” won a prize at an international sculpture competition in Lagos. In 1981–1982 he spent a sabbatical year at the University of Minnesota.

I think his principal creation remained, after all, the Asele Institute.

It holds documents, objects and works that Okeke brought back from his travels around Nigeria or received from friends; it is one of the most important collections of mid-twentieth-century African art. In 1996 part of the educational film “Nigerian Art: Kindred Spirits”, supported by the Smithsonian Institution, was shot there, and in 1997 the National Museum of African Art in Washington showed the exhibition “Poetics of Line” on seven artists of the Nsukka group. In 2006 the Newark Museum mounted a solo exhibition of his works on paper.

Uche Okeke died on 5 January 2016 in Nimo, at the age of eighty-two. In 2024 his work was shown at the Venice Biennale for the first time.