Uche Okeke

Collection of the artist

Thence by descent

Acquired from the above by the current owner

Uche Okeke, Art in Development - A Nigerian Perspective, (1982, illustrated p.16)

Simon Ottenberg, New Traditions From Nigeria (1997, illustrated p. 65)

P. Chike Dike, ‎Pat Oyelola, The Zaria Art Society: A New Consciousness, (1998, illustrated p.140)

Chima J. Korieh (ed.), New Perspectives on the Nigeria-Biafra War, (2001, pp.374-375)

Simon Ottenberg, The Nsukka Artists and Nigerian Contemporary Art, (2002, p.97)

“A national calamity of Biafra's dimension calls out for swift thinking and action. The dreamer must turn activist in order to rescue our civilisation from destruction and death… In war, man destroys man and his civilisation; man descends to the level of the brute. Man's creative force must continue to rebel against the destruction of human values by man himself.” (the artist, 1968)

After his return from Germany in 1963, Okeke settled in Enugu, then capital of Nigeria’s Eastern Region. With the help of other former Zaria Art Society artists, Okeke established a cultural centre, which he directed from 1964 to 1967. Modelled on prominent scholar Ulli Beier’s Mbari Artists and Writers Club in Ibadan, Okeke’s Mbari Enugu brought together artists, writers, dramatists and intellectuals to exchange ideas, collaborate, exhibit and discuss new work.

However, those years immediately following independence from British colonial rule brought enormous political upheaval across the country 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 (1967–1970). Osondu (Refugees) was produced in response to the escalating Biafran refugee crises, and marks one of the darkest periods in modern Nigerian history.

Okeke 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. 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 time Biafra surrendered to Nigeria in January 1970, they estimated that up to a million children had died.

Following the war, Okeke took a position at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, where he was head of the Fine Arts department from 1971 to 1985. His tenure was branded by the rise of the Uli Revivalist Movement, whereby members sought to achieve a radical reassertion of Igbo ethnicity developing in the wake of the war.