Tag: statue

I have followed with keen interest the debate on the new Awolowo statue in Ikeja. On one hand, some people have dismissed the new statue on the grounds that it does not bear any resemblance or image of Chief Awolowo that they knew. On the other hand some have said the artist has a right and artistic license to bring his imagination to bear on his work.

May I commend the Lagos State government for commissioning the work in the first place. I have always said our country must honour those who deserve to be honoured. Those who deserve to be honoured should be those who have made great contributions and impact on our lives. We have mythical figures like Oduduwa, Oranmiyan, Bayijiddah of Daura whose visages nobody knows. We have recent leaders of the 19th and 20th centuries that we can easily identify. They should not be politicians alone they should include leaders in commerce and industry, education and science, sports and entertainment.

It is of course easy to identify our past political leaders without whom we would not have had our independence at the time we had it. And for those of us who are historically minded, there are leaders of the Nigerian area going back to as far back as the 9th century who deserve to be honoured. The only problem with the men of antiquity is that we do not know how they look. But we have pictures of some of our leaders of the 19th century like Usman Dan Fodiye, founder of the Sokoto caliphate, Alaafin Ladigbolu 1 of Oyo and Ooni Ademiluyi of Ile – Ife who were on their thrones when the white man came for example. We also have photos of Sarkin Mohammad Abbas, of Kano and king Jaja of Opobo and so on.

In relatively recent times we have photos of Bishop Ajayi Crowther and later on, the photos of Sir Ibikunle Alakija, Herbert Macaulay,  Dr Adeniyi Jones, Ernest Ikoli,  Samuel Akisanya, H. O. Davies, Nnamdi  Azikiwe, Obafemi Awolowo, Kashim Ibrahim, Ahmadu Bello,  Samuel Ladoke Akintola, Michael Okpara, Ibrahim Imam, Anthony Enahoro, Joseph Sanwuan Tarka, Samuel Festus Okotie-Eboh, Aminu Kano, Saadu Zungur, and Adegoke Adelabu to mention a few.  I know the religion of Islam frowns at making representational image of God’s creation including man, but Turkey with its old and exceptional civilization permits this. There is no religious tradition in Christianity that is opposed to all kinds of art including imagining what God and our Lord Jesus Christ may have looked like to the artist.

Now to the Awolowo statue. Some two or so years ago, some primary school children in Ikenne the home town of Chief Awolowo were asked who Obafemi Awolowo was and none of the children could hazard a guess except one intrepid little boy who put up his hand to answer the question. The teacher was relieved and asked the boy to educate his class of dullards only for him to say Obafemi Awolowo was a footballer. The teacher was surprised and was told by the boy that Obafemi played centre forward for Nigeria. This was how the teacher knew the young child’s Obafemi was Obafemi Martins. The little boy should not be blamed. Many of our university students do not know who the founding fathers of Nigeria are. We have spent most of our post-independence life under the military who apparently to keep our people disconnected from their past, banned the teaching of history in our schools. It is heartening to hear that the present government is trying to return historical pedagogy to our schools.

This is where monuments come in. A visit to nearby Ghana will show us how this is done. The slave castles used by the Dutch slavers in the 16th to the 18th centuries are well kept and are visited by fee paying Black American tourists in their hundreds of thousands every year thus contributing to the Ghanaian economy. The residences of their colonial governors are still maintained and put to official use. The Race Course where Kwame Nkrumah proclaimed independence in 1957 still has the busts of Nkrumah, Ako  Adjei, Krobo Edusei and  Komla Agbedi Gbedemah standing there with correct-visages not as idealized by an artist. The Ghana government went all the way to Lincoln Pennsylvania to bring home the bed used by Nkrumah at the Lincoln University where he was a student in the 1930s having been predated by our own Nnamdi Azikiwe by almost a decade. His body and that of his wife Fatimah are preserved in a mausoleum in the Race Course.

I remember visiting New Delhi sometimes ago and being shown the small bed Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Indian Prime Minister was sleeping on when he led a country of one billion people. It was not a golden bed but simple wooden bed without mattresses. Of course the bust of Nehru was the realistic image of the man as we see in his photographs. Any visit to the United States and either to the Lincoln column or the Kennedy centre would see the correct facial image of these two iconic presidents. Recently I was in the House of Commons in England and I saw the standing busts of British prime ministers from Walpole to John Major. I noticed the giant sizes of Winston Churchill and Margaret Thatcher which illustrates the bias of the officials of parliament to the Conservative Party. I was particularly impressed by the figures of Benjamin Disraeli and William Gladstone whose rivalry and competition dominated British politics for most of the 19th century. What you see in any public square in England is not the imagination of artists but the way their heroes looked not necessarily in sizes but certainly in their faces. There  is no doubt about the  likeness of these figures to the real people being celebrated at least for those from the 18th century to the present  when photos were available and those before that time were copied from painted images of their heroes.

In Nigeria, we have no idea of how to preserve the past especially the recent past.  What have we done to our First Republic parliament? Our Prime Minister’s official residence is now an army officers’ mess!  The official residence of our Governor -General/ president was abandoned for years until it was recently handed over to the Lagos State government. The Premier’s Lodge in Ibadan has been converted to a High Court. The one in Kaduna is housing, I believe, the Gamji Foundation. The premier’s house in Enugu may have been put to other usage. The governors of the south-western states could have approached the estate of Chief Awolowo to buy his private residence which he used when he was premier of the West and convert it to Awolowo centre, open to the public to hold his library and memorabilia and to keep the flame of his memory burning.

I acknowledge the fact that governments at various levels have honoured our past heroes. We have universities named after Obafemi Awolowo, Nnamdi Azikiwe, Ahmadu Bello, Abubakar Balewa, Ladoke Akintola, Michael Okpara, Michael Ajasin, Olabisi Onabanjo. None is yet named after Kashim Ibrahim, first central minister of education and governor of the whole of northern Nigeria. There are also roads and avenues named after some of them in Lagos and Abuja and other cities. In essence, their families cannot complain. Whatever is worth doing at all is worth doing well. A statue should look like the one it is made to replicate. It should not be left to the imagination of any artist to tell us what Awolowo looks like whether sitting or standing. It is my considered opinion that this Awolowo statue should be removed and somebody who knows how to make a look-alike statue of Obafemi Awolowo be contacted and contracted to do it.