Musa Jibril
As the plane descended on the rain-swept city, an enchanting view of the city spread out below showing a grid of roads interspersed with verdant greenery and rusty brown rooftops with miniature vehicles dotting the landscape. Out of the airport straight into a blast of tropic sunshine, and into the heart of a city wreathed in red, everywhere along the airport road was branded with red and the NAFEST signage. The air was thick with excitement.
“Oba ato pae ee!
Isee!”
The air resonated with the Bini royal greeting that has become the standard pleasantries extended to all and sundry in the ancient city of culture.
There is no better time to visit Benin City than on festive occasions, on a day of celebration when the city’s cultural flowering is in full bloom. That is what plays out this week from Sunday 19 to Saturday 26 of October 2019, when Oba Ewuare II’s third coronation anniversary and birthday coincided with the weeklong National Festival of Arts and Culture (NAFEST) organised by the National Commission for Arts and Culture (NCAC) and hosted by Edo State. The resulting proceeding over the next seven days immersed the capital city in bursts of cultural effervescence tinged with royalty.
The extravaganza is understandable: Edo State, vaunted as the home of culture, is hosting the 40-year-old annual culture festival for the first time. Tagged Our Royalty, Our Pride, it was evident the proceedings of the next few days had been preconceived to infuse a dash of royalty into the regular smorgasbord of cultural activities.
Hence, it came as no surprise when on Sunday, October 20 at the anniversary ceremony of His Royal Majesty, Omo N’Oba N’Edo, Uku Akpolokpolo, Oba Ewuare II, the full gamut of the Bini culture, in forms and features, from coiffure to fashion to etiquette, song, dance and bronze artworks, was extravagantly displayed. It was an early indicator that this year’s will be a special NAFEST.
The opening ceremony the next day, at the Uniben Sports complex, was enlivened with a live performance by Prof Victor Uwaifo, who brought nostalgia with a rendition of his, his evergreen highlife tune. An electrifying performance by Tuface further raised the notch. Martial display by the Presidential Guards Brigade and the Nigeria Army women combatants added a new dimension to the NAFEST opening ceremony since its resurgence in 2017 under Director-General Segun Runsewe.
From Monday, the Oba Akenzua Cultural Centre, which has not hosted a live drama in the past 15 years, came alive and the whole cultural ensemble of Benin – fashion, drama, poetry, dance, visual art – awakens giving the millions of tourists and inhabitants in the city a memorable experience.
The Stakeholders’ Roundtable on Entrepreneurship on Tuesday was an encounter with three personalities, Mr Florence Robinson, 12-year-old kid photographer James Ikemisinachuckwu and Lancelot Imasuen, a filmmaker.
Here visitors learned that “Benin has an Akara story” and it was told of a woman who fried bean cakes for half a century and was well celebrated before her death in old age. Mrs Robinson story was from the same skein, having spent the last 30 years of her life selling Akara, from Kano,where she once lived, to Benin City where she is resident now; she has raised a family and sponsored her children through tertiary institutions, all from daily earnings from fried bean cakes.
A similar inspirational story also came from Ikemisinachukwu, the 12-year-old photography prodigy, who explained “how you can turn your hobby into a profession and start making money” in a presentation that also included a music rendition where he strummed his guitar and crooned a special song about photography.
Lancelot Imasuen capped the session with a pep talk about art: “I have never done any other thing in my life. All I have ever done is art, culture and general entertainment and I tell you it pays,” he attested.
To the younger ones in the audience, he offered a piece of wisdom: “While studying, choose a craft, an art alongside it. It is no longer art for art’s sake; it is art for existence. You can make a living out of it.”
The free skills acquisition component of the festival was embraced by Benin City. Various training, in the professional art of make-up, bag and shoe-making craft, and beads decoration skills, among others, were attended by over 2, 000 young people.
Benin is a city with hidden depths that pickles tourists’ curiosity. On Wednesday, when the cuisine competition took place at the National Museum, it was an opportunity to explore another facet of the Bini life. At the museum––planted in the centre of the roundabout of the Ring Road––the curator, Theophilus Umogbai, who has been at the helm of affairs since 2012, was on hand to answer questions.
Under his charge, the museum, which last organised an exhibition in 1973, was revamped and has had a collaboration with the Smithsonian National Museum of African Arts, Washington DC in the exhibition of the collection of photos of Chief S.O. Alonge, iconic photographer to the Benin Royal Court, whose catalogue of 60 years of professional work, starting from the late 1930s, covered the reign of Oba Akenzua and Oba Erediauwa’s era.
Alonge’s Ideal Studios was where nobles and commoners took photographs of the milestones of their lives –wedding, birthdays, birth and death. The photographs, kept intact over the years, were acquired by the Smithsonian museum and specially showcased in Washington in 2014 and later in Benin City in 2017.
In Alonge’s photos, most Bini people encountered their progenitors in their youth. For instance, the present governor of the state, Godwin Obaseki went for the exhibition in Washington DC and found photograph of his mother at 16 (presently 86 years old).
“We have had similar discoveries. An old woman of 78 saw her husband when he attended a wedding ceremony in 1950 and she became very emotional about her now late husband. Another lady in her 40s came here and saw her mother (who died in her 80s) when she was 21. She was so overwhelmed she brought all the pupils in her school down to the museum for a tour,” Umogbai recounted.
Because of the photographs, “the museum came alive,” the curator asserted. “Now we have a place you can call a rendezvous for family bonding, reunion, and interaction. That is what our museum is now.”
Some of the photos are housed in the first of the three floors in the museum.
Among other NAFEST activities, traditional wrestling has always been a big attraction. Its charm worked in Benin. On Wednesday evening, the cultural centre was filled to the brim. The air reverberated with ooohs and aaahs as bouts are won and winners and losers emerged in a series of elimination process that climaxed in the final two contestants that produced the eventual winner.
Hours later, the Oba Ewuare II Foundation Night brought the Benin royalty and the crème de la crème of Edo State, including the state governor, his deputy and Secretary to the State Government, together under one roof. After the king’s grand entry into the hall, the event kicked off with fashion runway, a showcase of collection by kid models that catwalked with precocious swag and style. The highlight of the soiree was a dance performance titled, “Idia Ni’Iyesigie: The Benin Warrior Queen,” the dance choreography, a narration of how the Idah insurrection was suppressed by the warrior queen. It was also a night of poetry. The programme came to a close with the announcement of an invitation to participants and visitors to the palace of Oba of Benin by 2 pm the next day.
So it was at the King’s palace that the main activities of Thursday unfurled.
Tagged Celebration of Royal Splendor, the series of colourful performances by some of the participating states was kickstarted by the Edo troupe that drew from the rich Bini cultural broth, followed by a kaleidoscopic performance of dance and acrobatic display in quick succession. The highlight was the Calabar contingent’s mapouka style dance that raised the tempo of excitement in the king’s courtyard.
If you are accustomed to Western-derived decorum, then Benin City is good shock treatment. Once, at the Oba Akenzua Cultural Centre, males, old and young, were shooed away from sight, forbidden to glimpse the entrance of a queen; at a visit to the palace later in the day, those garbed in black articles of clothing were forbidden from entry; during the royal performance at the cultural centre with Oba Ewuare II in attendance, all males were required to doff their caps and hats, leaving their pate bare in the presence of His Royal Majesty.
The festival village that sprang around the Oba Akenzua Cultural Centre was in full bloom by Thursday. Vendors of varieties of items–clothes, mementos, artworks and victuals supplied by a mushroom of food–kiosks were doing brisk business from morning till evening. A standby band playing at the centre in the evening kept an upbeat atmosphere around the Oba Akenzua Cultural Centre.
For seven days, the Oba Akenzua Cultural Center was a melting pot of culture, the happening place inside Benin City.
The NCAC director-general, Otunba Runsewe, gave a wide-angle view of the events: “What we have seen generally is that we have a culture that is very rich. We must believe in ourselves. We must understand that our culture our heritage, our history is our strength as a people.”
As the festival wraps up this afternoon, there is a general sense of satisfaction that the festival lived up to its billings. No doubt about that. In the continuing reinvention of the cultural narrative of the country by NCAC, the Benin City experience is an aperture on how to properly harness Nigeria’s rich cultural heritage.