Uche Okeke

Nza the Smart, also known as Beautiful Nza (Nigeria), is one of the artist’s best-known subjects, an allegory conceived on the eve of Nigerian Independence, taken from the traditional Igbo tale of the trial of strength between Nza the wren and Ovu the cuckoo:

“Nza was always despised because of his tiny size, so he angrily threw a challenge to Ovu. They agreed to fast for three full market weeks, three izu. They then placed their nests close together and put a great many brown ants in them… Ovu spent the first day of the contest sleeping while Nza tackled the ants. Ovu died and Nza made a flute out of Ovu’s bones. Egbe, the Kite, tricked Nza and flew away with the flute. Nza used a trick and retrieved the flute from Egbe’s mother and Egbe in anger burnt his mother’s but killing her in the process. Okeke’s Nza is not the one we know, but a mythical and highly imaginative one. Nevertheless, the creature is shown celebrating his victories over Ovu and Egbe. The beak is open in song and wings are spread out. This drawing exhibits typical linear gestures of Uche Okeke at this period, namely organic patterns that suggest scales, feathers, wood grains, leaves. There are, of course, the ubiquitous cowries which in this instance stand for the eyes.” (Donatus Ibe Nwoga, Critical Perspectives on Christopher Okigbo, 1984, p. 84)

Dating to his time as an undergraduate student at the Nigerian College of Arts, Science and Technology, Zaria, his 1958 drawing of the subject has been widely published, including in the students' magazine Nigercol in 1959, Ulli Beier’s Contemporary Art in Africa in 1968, Uche Okeke's Art in Development – A Nigerian Perspective in 1982, Nigeria Magazine in 1987, and Chika Okeke-Agulu’s Postcolonial Modernism: Art and Decolonization in 2015. A lithograph after the 1958 drawing is in the collection of MoMA in New York.

Refugee Family, executed less than a decade later in 1966, produced in response to the Biafran refugee crises, marks a very different period in modern Nigerian history. Independence from British colonial rule brought enormous political upheaval and factionalism along ethnic lines. An attempted coup d’etat in January 1966 marked the start of a series of uprisings, culminating in the 30 May 1967 secession of the Eastern Region of Nigeria, which thereafter declared itself the Republic of Biafra, marking the beginning of the Nigerian Civil War. Okeke, who was living in Enugu, then capital of Nigeria’s Eastern Region, witnessed first-hand the massive displacement of Igbo people from the northern and the western regions, and the untold violence of the ensuing civil war. During the Nigerian Civil War, 1967–1970, he headed the visual arts section of the Refugees Affairs Committee at Aba and Umuahia. By 1968, the International Red Cross, UNICEF, and other organisations released a joint statement: “The conflict, which concerned not hundreds of thousands but millions of people, was the greatest emergency it had handled since the Second World War”. By the Biafra surrendered to Nigeria in January 1970, they estimated that up to a million children had died.

The print is illustrated in Uche Okeke's 60th Birthday Anniversary Retrospective exhibition catalogue, Simon Ottenberg, New Traditions From Nigeria (1997, p. 65); Olu Oguibe, ‘Lessons from the Killing Fields’, Transition, No. 77 (1998, pp. 86-99); and P. Chike Dike, ‎Pat Oyelola, The Zaria Art Society: A New Consciousness (1998, p. 137).