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How sculpture has shaped Enugu landscape

By Gregory Austin Nwakunor
05 June 2022   |   4:03 am
Nestled in Milliken Hill’s all-encompassing art scene, Enugu is a curatorial marvel. There are a few impressive alternative art spaces in the former capital of Southeast. And these spaces, though hardly visible, co-exist alongside the established galleries.

The Otigba Statue

Nestled in Milliken Hill’s all-encompassing art scene, Enugu is a curatorial marvel. There are a few impressive alternative art spaces in the former capital of Southeast. And these spaces, though hardly visible, co-exist alongside the established galleries.

Some situated in storefronts, loft apartments or abandoned buildings, these spaces, usually run on shoestring budgets by young and ambitious curators, gallerists and artists, who want to prove that grassroots art scene can never be dead.

Enugu people, especially those residing in and around the capital city, have always been known as fun-loving, providing music and other forms of entertainment to visitors, including the white colonialists.

For those who enjoy night outings, every day in the ‘Coal City’ is a celebration with a good number of night joints and clubs that always operate on weekdays and weekends, especially Fridays and Saturdays, with a large influx of guests from outside town.

Though night outings and activities are gradually declining in the city because of heightened insecurity and restriction of tricycle movements at night, preventing many residents from enjoying themselves, Enugu remains one of the few cities defined by public art.

Urban sculpture is an important aspect of landscape environment, also gradually attracts the attention of people. With increasingly wider application and bigger role in landscape environment, sculpture has unique functions that cannot be replaced with other artistic forms and achieve the best artistic effect in landscape environment with its distinct expression form.

Urban sculptures in addition to beautifying urban spaces can undertake positive and important features such as identity building in urban spaces, building mental image, transferring valuable messages, transferring culture and history within community, causing more interaction of citizens at urban spaces through creation of interesting and high quality spaces. In this context, sculpture is a veritable tool for bringing culture into urbanisation.

It is undisputable that urban sculpture has long become the veritable furniture in the environmental space. Enugu in the South East of Nigeria is a hub of artistic activities and artists, budding and old alike.

All around Enugu, there are carefully sculpted works, which have tales that you could understand by looking closely or sometimes with a little explanation.

From the artwork at the Milliken Hill – Iva Valley intersection depicting the 1949 massacre of protesting coal miners at the Iva Mines, to the sculpture of a drummer at a roundabout in downtown Enugu that lends its name to the surrounding Otigba neighbourhood, the city is, no doubt, one mass of art.

All over the Coal City are famous artworks and landmarks that define both the history and the bubbling arts scene.

The Enugu State Governor Ifeanyichukwu Ugwuanyi’s urban renewal project offers a rare window of opportunity to student-artists to interrogate the cityscape. Part of the scheme involved the mounting of sculptures designed by students of the Institute of Management Technology’s Fine and Applied Arts Department at major roundabouts and the Unity Park, the wooded area in the middle of the state’s three-arm zone.

These works and several other such post-independence commissioned works were sculpted mostly by accomplished artists of the Ben Enwonwu generation. But the project has further enlivened public spaces, enabling works by younger contemporary artists and those by preceding generation to enjoy a common platform.

The entire project’s crowning glory is a huge lion sculpture sitting at the Unity Park. Twelve sculptors and several artisans put the structure, which is over 40 feet high and 70 feet long, with a width of about 20 feet, together.

The Coal Miners at New Market Roundabout – This statue is a tribute to the coal miners that were killed and injured during the coal miner massacre on November 18, 1949.

A British policeman called Captain F.S. Phillip, who was scared of Africans and fearful of communist subversion, initiated the violence. This statue will always remind the living of fallen brothers who died unjustly.

The Drummer at Otigba Junction – Otigba itself means to play the drum. The drummer is used to symbolise the musicians who have made the Igbo music so popular.

Recently, three more musician statues have been added to the drummer. Truck Pusher at Mgbemene – a market district and if you have been in this market, you will know that one constant thing is the barrow or truck pusher in every corner of this market.

The three women at Ogui Junction – women angels with their wings in the sky, as well as the three monkeys on EFCC Road – These monkeys have different postures. One has its eyes closed, one has its ears closed and the last has its mouth closed, which indicates see no evil, hear no evil and speak no evil.

The Runner at Stadium – The stadium is for sporting events and many other activities. I believe the runner is symbolic to the sporting events held within the stadium.

The three wise monkeys

THE story of artworks adorning famous junctions and sights began four decades ago (in 1986). The Military Governor of old Anambra State, the late Group Capt. Samson Emeka Omeruah, visited the Institute of Management and Technology (IMT) Enugu, in the state capital.

In the course of being conducted around the institution’s Campus II on Abakaliki Road, he was taken to the bespoke IMT Art Garden. This is the place where excellent students’ artworks were being kept.

The Governor immediately decided that the pieces he saw there – particularly, the sculptural works – shouldn’t just be sitting there. He ordered them to be installed at strategic road junctions and landmarks in the City.

They were to be placed in such a way that Enugu residents and visitors will see and also appreciate them.

A committee was set up to implement the Governor’s directive. They transported a number of artworks and installed them at many spots around the Coal City.

Among the sculptural pieces carted away is the Otigba, the drummer. The Otigba statute is a giant drummer beating an equally gargantuan drum, which was placed at the junction where Chime Avenue (New Haven) joined Ogui Road. In short order, the drummer took over as the landmark for the area, subsequently renamed Otigba Junction.

Afuba, then a third year student of IMT carved the Otigba Statue in 1980. In 2020, residents of Enugu watched in horror as miscreants who infiltrated the #EndSARS protests set the iconic sculpture on fire.

Two things distinguish the artworks found around the City. Many of them, like Otigba and the Reticent Baboons (Monkey Junction) in Independent Layout have become landmarks. Today, there are many such iconic works of art that people now use as landmarks to give directions to visitors and those looking for directions to places that they are not familiar with. One of them is Monkey Junction also carved by an IMT student.

The “Three Wise Monkeys” can be found at Ozubulu Street, near the EFCC State Office. They are sitting on the fence, with their famous “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” gestures.

A second attribute of the artworks is that many of them represent the history of Enugu. The first sight that hits visitors coming into Enugu from the Ninth Mile Expressway is a depiction of the 1949 coal miners’ strike. It shows a politician joining a group of miners protesting the condition of the mines. As many as 49 miners were shot dead by the British task masters during the strike.

coal miners strike Enugu artwork

There is another artwork in front of the Park Lane Hospital, the oldest hospital in Eastern Nigeria, honouring healthcare providers trying to do what they know best how to do – which is taking care of health for the people.

Rounding up these symbolic artworks is the Cenotaph in Okpara Square. It shows a military officer with gone raised high indicating that they presumably the Nigerian Civil War was over. If we move further down to Aguleri Junction, there is a molten sculpture that indicates to all that they have arrived at a court zone – the symbolic blindfolded maiden with a sword and a scale in both hands.

Cenotaph at Michael Okpara Square

The Ifeanyi Ugwuanyi Government has added a dash of artworks here and there and substituted others. Some of the additions defy rational explanations. Examples are replacing the lions at both entrances to Government House Road and the Lion Building itself with “white lions” and adding three more Otigba artworks in the same Origba Junction.

However, the administration compensated these flamboyant displays with some original pieces that adorn the rehabilitated forest park beside Okpara Square (now renamed Unity Park).

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