After Nigerian Independence, One Renowned Artist Made Jesus a West African Savior in His Vibrant Work
In the 1960s, a Catholic priest named Father Kevin Carroll approached [Bruce] Onobrakpeya, alongside fellow Nigerian artists, to interpret the Passion of the Christ for local parishioners and Christian converts, highlighted by a series of murals at St. Paul’s Church of Ebute Metta in Lagos.
Instead of reproducing or reappropriating the Western gaze, Onobrakpeya casts Jesus as a West African savior and sets the biblical parables in Nigerian cities, with local architecture and expressive signs of traditional life. In his work, clothing becomes a striking focal point of heritage and agency. As Jesus carries the cross on his relentless trek to Calvary, the women of Jerusalem wear adire, a native brilliantly patterned indigo-dyed fabric; Pontius Pilate appears in royal costume, as a Yoruba or Ghanaian chief in kente cloth; the Nativity shepherds are dressed as members of the Hausa people, an ethnic group in Nigeria and other parts of Africa.
“Certain situations would be completely unknown to us in West Africa,” says Onobrakpeya, a founding member of the Zaria Art Society or the “Zaria Rebels”—a student group in 1958 at the Nigeria College of Arts, Science and Technology famous for blending modernist Western techniques and local art traditions. “For instance, in the interior of the country, you don’t have rivers. You don’t have any water.” An anchor as a biblical metaphor to represent God and faith, he continues, “is difficult for people to understand. So instead of using an anchor, I use a pin that will pin down a tent.”
“The Catholic priests preached goodness. They were agents of development and progress,” he says. “But their mission, apart from teaching, apart from health and so on, was to create a situation whereby the minds of the people were softened to the extent of accommodating all the colonial masters.”
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