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Sources and themes in the art of Obiora Udechukwu
African Arts, Summer, 2002 by Simon Ottenberg
In 1965-66 Udechukwu spent his first year at Ahmadu Bello University at Zaria in northern Nigeria, where an earlier generation of contemporary Nigerian artists, including Uche Okeke, had trained. It was the best art school in the country at the time. There was only one Nigerian on the staff, at a junior level; the remainder of his teachers were nearly all English. The artist told Ulli Beier about that period: "I think I learned how to draw in the conventional manner; I mean drawing from nature and putting down what is before you accurately" (Beier 1981:54). He did so while living in a physical landscape different from that of eastern Nigeria, yet one which did not later influence his art. "At that point in time," he said, "there was [a new move to basic design courses], so one can see that as a movement away from the previous Zaria system of just academy painting; there was more experimentation" (interview, 1994).
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The exciting cultural developments in Nigeria were interrupted by a dark period which was to shape Udechukwu's art and poetry. Beginning in 1966 there were pogroms by Hausa and Fulani in northern Nigeria against Nigerians who had moved there for work from the more developed south. The attacks, which resulted in many deaths, were in part a reaction to a coup at the federal level involving Igbo military officers, and in part to resentment at southerners taking jobs in the north. They were largely aimed at Igbos who resided in the north in substantial numbers. Most fled to Igboland, receiving little assistance from the federal government. Much of that area broke away from Nigeria and declared itself the country of Biafra. The civil war that ensued (1967-1970) was fought mostly in Igboland, which was blockaded amid great physical destruction and human misery. When it ended in Biafra's defeat, most of the countryside lay in ruins.
Udechukwu, in the army on the Biafran side, served in propaganda units, working collaboratively with other artists, musicians, dramatists, and poets to put on events for soldiers and refugees and creating war posters, strip cartoons, and other visual materials to strengthen the Biafrans' will. It was a strangely stimulating artistic time in the midst of terrible destruction as the federal troops gradually closed in and the artists fled from place to place. Oddly enough, like Udechukwu, most of them had been largely brought up in towns and cities, so during this period they had more contact with Igbo village culture than they had ever had before.
This experience reinforced Udechukwu's growing curiosity about Igbo life, evidenced in the collection of Igbo proverbs he made at the time. He saw much privation and himself suffered from hunger and the hardship of forced movement, but he also created his own art, mostly war images, as did other artists. Among them are a series of oils (Ottenberg 1997: figs. 74-77, 87) in strong colors--reds, blues, and yellows (Fig. 3)--whose subjects include starving figures, a mother wailing over her dead child, refugees solemnly walking in a war-torn landscape, a man holding his head with his hands in despair, and a scene of utter physical desolation with no figures at all. For many years afterward Udechukwu continued to depict images drawn from the conflict. For example, the Harsh Flute Series, in ink on paper, was created in 1989. A dramatic visual account of the Biafran side of the war from just before its commencement to its aftermath, it exhibits the artist's considerable drawing skills (Fig. 4).
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