Agbarha-Otor As Spiritual, Artistic Centre of Global Significance

Oluwatoyin Adepoju

Having completed my third visit to Agbarha-Otor in Delta State, Nigeria’s Niger Delta, I believe I have enough information to demonstrate why Agbarha-Otor is a site of global spiritual and artistic significance, a potential UNESCO World Heritage Site, and what can be done to advance this value of Agbarha-Otor.

At the core of Agbarha-Otor artistic and spiritual culture as achievements of global stature are two institutions – the Onobrak Art Centre of Bruce Onobrakpeya and its Harmattan Workshop and the Ekene Society, its natural and human made shrines, its architecture, dance, dress, verbal and instrumental music and its theology unifying nature, humanity and family.

A climatic point of Ekene Society spirituality and arts is the Ekene Festival, held every fifteen years, in which the various Ekene arts are unified, at the core of which is the Ekene mobile architectural and dance structure, many feet high, constructed through a process unknown beyond the artists and described as unreplicated in skill anywhere in the world.

Complementary to Ekene are the spiritual and associated arts of various spiritual practitioners and artists, who dramatize, in their unique ways, various possibilities of the total complex constituting Urhobo spiritualities and related arts, Urhobo being the ethnicity to which Agbarha-Otor belongs.

The Onobrak Art Centre galleries contain representative examples of Bruce Onobrakpeya’s greatest art, projecting a secular spirituality, a spirituality not active in relation to any particular religious practice, but distilling the inspirational essence of Urhobo spiritualities, in relation to other Niger Delta and  Edo, Yoruba and Hausa-Fulani and Christian spiritualities and related arts, at times also reflecting other classical African arts and their spiritual resonances, from Onobrakpeya’s use of Akan Adinkra, to examples from classical African artists of a wealth of creative forms from Yoruba edan ogboni, to Chi Wara of the Bambara.

Complementing Onobrakpeya’s work in these galleries is that of other artists who have participated in the two annual Harmattan Workshops, which, for decades, have brought people from different parts of the world to Agbarha-Otor to learn, practise and discuss art.

What needs to be done to advance the global visibility of these achievements? The Ekene Society is against visual and certainly against photographic depiction of its arts. This orientation has to be balanced against the prospects of the historical longevity of Ekene and its sustenance in human memory.

What are the chances that Ekene will survive in Agbarha-Otor, a town described as largely Christian, in which most Ekene members might be largely elderly or middle aged? What are the chances that Ekene artistic achievements can be sustained and its memory maintained without documentation, particularly visual?

What are the chances that the Ekene sacred groves can survive, given increasing population pressure that has led to building on their spaces, leading to their becoming a fraction of what they once were? What are the chances for the survival of Ekene and the Ekene Festival, in spite of their great artistic achievements, if those negative practices described as associated with the festival are sustained?

What are the chances for the survival of Ekene if some of its members remain opposed to non-Agbarha people even showing interest in the spirituality and its arts, a resistance I have observed, though only from a minority of those I have met?

How likely is Ekene to survive if it remains localized to Agbarha communities in terms of practice and location of shrines? Why can’t it be practiced as a universally valid spirituality open to all? What are the chances of Ekene surviving if its practices and beliefs are not codified, systematized and presented in written form rather than limiting the knowledge and practice of these structures and practices to the oral tradition?

These are pertinent questions for all to ponder as the dream of seeing Agbarha-Otor become a UNESCO World Heritage Site grows.

This piece is part of Adepoju’s research on Sacred Sites of Classical African Spiritualities in the Niger Delta.