Zina Saro-Wiwa and the Boy’s Quarters

Mid-august I was having dinner with the artist, Zina Saro-Wiva in New York City at the little Italian restaurant around the corner from where I live in the West Side. A few days before Zina had contacted me asking me if I could help her promote her latest photographic work on the Ogole dancers. She needed the proceeds of the sales to finance her upcoming work that is to be exhibited at the Seattle museum.

Alternating between vivacious and impassioned descriptions of her two major projects and moments of silence heavy with angst, Zina updated me on what was happening at Port Harcourt where she is running her own pop-up gallery and working with the Ogoni people on her next video.

A year or so ago Zina had decided to leave her life in Brooklyn to go back to Nigeria. A bit like the heroine of Adiche’s “Americanah”, she was feeling the need to go back to where she came from and in her case face the heavy legacy of her father,Ken Saro-Wiwa. While she was raised mostly in the UK , Zina’s father Ken Saro -Wiwa was a very vocal activist in the Niger Delta who came to an untimely death when he was hung in prison under the orders of the Nigerian government. The anniversary of his death was coming up.  History and the opportunity to shape the future were calling her. It was time on a more personal level to contend with the grief surrounding his death as well as the complicated feelings she must have towards her father who had more than one family and was away most of the time.

Her first career for many years was in the media working as a freelance researcher, producer and presenter on BBC TV and radio. In 2010 she made her debut as a video artist and filmmaker in New York City in the group show “Sharon Stone in Abuja”. She then produced several video and short films with the goal of changing the way Africa is viewed, spoken about and discussed.

She says: “ My art career started when I left my journalism background and dedicated myself to changing the way the world saw Africa. I set up the (now dormant) organization AfricaLab to this end. By immersing myself fully in this endeavour, I discovered that contemporary art practices would give me the power, license and freedom I needed. Art challenged me to be freer and deeper in my thinking. What I did no expect, however, was how focusing in on Africa has often resulted in work that transcended the ‘idea of Africa” and became deeply personal. And really it is the relationship between the personal and the political that interests me.”

She went to Port Harcourt, the capital of Rivers State, located in the Niger Delta in South Eastern Nigeria. She repossessed her father’s office, which had been kept intact since his hanging in 1995. It is now a miniature museum site hosting projected photographic and video installation works relating to Ken’s personal life and international legacy.

The rest of the space is now a pop-up gallery called the “Boys Quarters”.

“The Boys’ Quarters” is the colloquial name given to the servants’ quarters, a post-colonial hangover and an ever-present feature of modern West African life. The place where, to this day, servants and sometimes extended family members live. We believe that in order to transcend limitation and excel – a Nigerian pre-occupation – we must run towards and not away from The Boys’ Quarters. We must investigate ourselves, go inwards as a society then reflect and expand upon who we are from our core. Our true wealth is in the people at every level of society. “ ( Zina Saro-Wiwa)

With the same spirit as her father she decided to effect change by reframing the narrative surrounding the Niger Delta. The Niger Delta is rich in oil reserves that have attracted years of exploration from multinational oil corporations (Shell and others). It has suffered tremendous environment destruction. In addition ethnic communities such as the Ogoni and the Ijaw people have felt exploited. Communities were forced out by the Nigerian government to allow for exploration and very little of the wealth produced by the oil exploration has trickled down to the local communities. As a consequence various forms of resistance to the presence of the big oil companies and to the corruption of the Nigerian government have emerged since the 1990’s. Zina ‘s father, Ken Saro-Wiwa, a play-right and author is the most well known of the activists for the rights of the Ogoni people. More recently activism has taken a more violent turn with many militias operating in the Delta.

Zina is proposing an alternative platform for discussing environmental issues in the Delta, one that is peaceful and uses art as a way to offer different ways of looking and apprehending ones own context, environment and history. In this process Zina wants to highlight an emotional and spiritual dimension to the life in the Niger delta.

Zina’s idea of a contemporary gallery is not the highly commercial gallery one sees in Nigeria or Ghana for that matter. She is quite adamant about that. I knew just what she was talking about. Last fall I went to Ghana and was struck with the absence of galleries that showed anything slightly conceptual. Most of the work tended to be more traditional and a bit too decorative and commercial. A more conceptual approach to contemporary art that addresses contemporary issues was sorely lacking. This is just what Zina is doing here: Presenting an alternative, a new way of looking at one owns environment.

With help from donors, she restored her father’s office and cleaned up, painted and refurbished the other rooms. I loved what she did with the space shaping it into a haven of peace and light, a contemplative space in the middle of busy and noisy Port Harcourt.

Currently, the Niger Delta artist, Perrin Oglafa is having a show called “The Restless Grove” in the main gallery and Zina’s video “An Ogoni Heart” is set up in the back room. Zina tells me how she discovered Oglafa’s sculptures. Oglafa is known in the area for his paintings, which are quite colorful and can be found on the walls of banks, hotels and homes of foreign oil executives. While she was visiting him in his studio, she noticed what looked at first glance like a pile of ropes. Intrigued she asked him what this was. He explained that this was a private work that he had never shown because he did not think it fit the local market. He had painstakingly dissembled a raw canvas, one thread at a time creating a sculpture that looked like fishing nets. His forefathers were fishermen and in unraveling the canvas perhaps there was a mirroring of the unraveling of the lives of these fishermen as a result of the pollution in the Niger Delta. Zina responded to the expressive power of the piece, and to the fresh and novel way of addressing an aspect of Niger Delta life.

This was exactly what she was looking for! She displayed the body of work beautifully and with great simplicity in the new space highlighting its metaphorical qualities while revealing its beauty. Included were wooden pieces, which reflect Oglafa’s love of nature. Nature is a loaded subject in the Niger Delta. In addition to the issue of the damaging effect of the exploration of oil on the environment, nature has mystical powers according to pre-Christian animistic beliefs. Zina speaks of the “Restless Mangrove” as “the representation of the spirit of a fisherman of souls.”

The first time I heard of this pop up project I was very intrigued. I feel that true change in the art scene in Nigeria or other African countries happens from within. It is not enough that a few well-intentioned and generous western people collect or show African art outside of the country. It is essential that Nigerians such as Zina bring a new perspective to the arts locally and encourage local Africa collectors and artists to embrace alternative yet authentic ways of encountering their environment and life. In addition, Zina’s gesture has an inherent legitimacy because of her familial history in the Delta.

I could relate to her desire to reckon with her father’s legacy, change the way people look at her country of origin and in so doing confront her inner demons. A few years back I embarked on a project – the performance in the USA of my Bulgarian grandfather, Petko Staynov’s music – that aimed in part to honor his legacy in the Western world, to repair some of the impact of the Cold War years on my family and on the arts, and improve my relationship with my father. I can’t say I was fully successful on the family level. While my uncle from Bulgaria attended the performances which were wonderful, and helped in many ways, my father did not come.

These things need to be done and they demand a good dose of courage and they are no guarantees. In Zina’s case the bravery is multifold since Port Harcourt is not a safe place and Nigeria faces at this moment several very serious health and security challenges. Furthermore she is a woman and in doing this project and her performance work there she is confronting entrenched gender taboos.

While she is overseeing the pop-up, Zina is also working on a new body of work that centers on the Ogoni people and in particular the Ogele Masquerades. See next post.