An exhibition at the Red Door Gallery Lagos, set against the backdrop of Asaba Massacre to raise funds towards the development of the Asaba Memorial Park dredges up conversations around collective trauma, memory and communal healing. Yinka Olatunbosun reports
There were gunshots. Followed by tears, sorrow and deaths. The year was 1967. Fast-forward to 2022, the video installation inside Red Door Gallery, Victoria Island Lagos showed a young autistic artist, Kanye Okeke creating ‘In Memoriam’ a striking large sized painting with names of all the victims of the Asaba massacre written all over the colour drips.
Titled ‘Asaba Memorial,’ the show is curated by Otsholeng Poo and produced by A Whitespace Creative Agency. An evocative display by 26 artists, every work tells a different side to the entire story of an unforgettable day in the history of Nigeria. A thousand persons were estimated to have died in the Asaba massacre. Only one woman was killed in the massacre. One of her sons, a lawyer and the convener of the exhibition, Chief Chuck Nduka-Eze met with students of Chrisland Schools as he recounted the story of his slain mother, a true heroine in the Asaba massacre narrative.
The project is deeply personal to Ndula-Eze having represented his community, Anioma at the special panel of The Human Rights Violation Investigation Commission of Nigeria in 1999 with respect to the genocide of his people during the Nigerian Civil War. He recounted the circumstances under which his mother was killed.
“She wasn’t killed on the square where a lot of the massacre took place,’’ he explained. “She was killed in a separate incident where she was demonstrating against the soldiers who were bullying, harassing and beating up civilians and consequently, they shot her. It has been something that has impacted quite a number of us tragically, there is no Asaba family that is not affected by this incident.
“The significance of this exhibition is that a lot of Nigerian artists from different parts of the country donated specific works to represent the tragedy. All the works form the Asaba Memorial Collection. The purpose is to use these works to raise money for the memorial park that we are trying to build in Asaba for all of the victims. For this and many other efforts, it is intended to lead to the development of our park.”
The park is designed to illustrate the victims’ final journey. To immortalize these slain heroes of Asaba, 1000 trees would be planted and the park will also have a gallery to hold the memorial collection and a space for artists in residence.
“We are partnering with an architectural firm called the MOE run by Mosun Ogunbanjo and Papa Omotayo. They have offered us a lot of charitable service for this design of the park,” he revealed.
As for the South African curator, Otsholeng Poo, the Asaba massacre shares some semblance of atrocities with the apartheid and Sharpeville massacre history in South Africa. Hence, she highlighted the global resonance of the theme of the collection.
“The project has attracted mid-career as well as established artists. Some created new works for this show while others looked into their existing collection and donated works that speak to this massacre. I can name one work –this one is by Kelani Abass titled About One thousand heads. It is a 2014 work but then we know about the estimated number of people killed at the Asaba massacre. That is an example of a work that wasn’t produced specifically for this exhibition but somehow made its way into this collection.”
The collection include a body of work donated by Enotie Ogbebor, the son of a senior military officer in the Nigerian army who gave an eyewitness account of the massacre; a piece by Ade Bakare to represent the fabric worn by the slain father of Nigeria’s former first lady, Mrs Maryam Babangida Anthony Nwalupue’s mixed media painting titled Nneka which is a brilliant mixture of newsprint and motifs of bullet holes to capture the agony of a mother and her children. The artist’s use of charcoal creates an imagery of soot from a community caught up in devastation and grief. Also, Adekusibe Odunfa’s piece titled “The Portrait Called Courage’’ tells the story of a woman holding a baby with several guns aimed at her head.
The Asaba Memorial Exhibition is a visual critique of the inaction of the government towards justice for the victims of the Asaba massacre and a reminder that some history can never be buried.
