Culled From The African Press Club | By Obiora Nwazota

As an architect, my preoccupation with design is unending and has largely become the filter through which I interact and dialogue with the world around me. I am an Igbo man from South-east Nigeria and I believe in the importance of design and its critical role towards defining and elevating not only Igbo identity but that of other African ethnic groups. Given the constraint of space, my article will be limited to generalized excursions into the matters raised. I welcome comments, discussions, and collaborations that are essential and instrumental in realizing this pursuit in all African cultures.

Design has the power to transform and make better our lives by improving our living standards. Good design allows us to ingeniously engage smart technology to make our lives better. It has the power to communicate in clear and simple language philosophy of life for our contemporary Igbo culture. When combined with philosophy, good design gives order to our world. Omenala (in Igbo) is our timeless philosophy that is ever relevant and provides us with our moral compass. We the Igbos are a humane people with a deep understanding of nature and her laws.

Existence for us is a dual but interrelated phenomenon involving the constant interaction between the world of man and the spirit world; the visible and invisible forces; masculine and feminine forces.Our understandings of the natural world have influenced our representation and expressions as defined by our cosmology. This in turn, has largely shaped our worldview and by extension the design objects used by us in daily living or in ritual.

Design is neither a new concept to the Igbo world nor to other African cultures. In Igbo language, the word Omenka, aptly captures the Creative artist. Okwa nka is the skilled carver and the very highly skilled is known as “husband of craftsmanship” Di nka. We the Igbos have always had a high regard for good design expressed through the catalog of objects we surround ourselves with. It is not enough for a carver to simply craft pragmatic objects; he is expected to bring out the object’s Chi from within where it has always resided. He expresses these distinctly Igbo designs as beauty marks and patterns that we enjoy.

These designs are seen and appreciated in our uli art. The remarkable discoveries excavated in Igbo Ukwu dated to the 9th and 10th centuries AD are some of the finest examples of innovation of its kind anywhere on earth from that time period in human history. The artistically refined and technically advanced bronze, iron, terracotta, and fiber artifacts and their supporting cultural matrix form the major historical benchmark in Igbo land prior to the European era.

Objects carry with them, an incredible story of the Nri Institutions created by our ancestors that had achieved such a complex system of living that was highly intellectual and sophisticated, which sadly, today we currently lack.

Until European contact, most Africans considered themselves to be self-sufficient both materially and spiritually. Today, unlike in the time of our ancestors, the so called ‘first world economies’ we desperately try to emulate in a ‘copy and paste’ fashion, fundamentally understand the relevance of design in conjunction with invention and innovation. In their recognition of design’s importance, European countries, have given it the central place in their development.

It is without doubt, a distinction of the branding of modern global economies, be it as expressed succinctly in German precision engineering, or the American knowledge economy championed by the likes of Apple and Google. Nations like Italy exert great influence in all forms of design and are recognized as trendsetters in various areas of our lives as modern humans. However, it is in Japan that I find a template that best illustrates the convergence of traditional and modern aesthetics which, we wrangle with daily.

In Japan, we see how modern and traditional can live side by side with each other, informing and influencing the other while maintaining their unique identities. Wa – the Japanese character that refers not only to the concept of harmony and peace but to Japan itself and Japanese culture – has evolved into a term to describe that peculiar ‘Japaneseness’ which Western culture finds at the heart of Japanese beauty. We never really left our culture for the West – we simply adapted or rather adorned ourselves with it without meaning, philosophy or structure.

I often ask myself this question: If someone came into my home today in my absence, what in my home identifies me the occupant as a person of Igbo extraction? The same question goes for other Africans. Some might easily respond saying they have Igbo art on their walls or they have Igbo food in their refrigerators etc. Guess what my people? A great collection of Igbo Art is owned by western institutions and in the hands of private collectors. Does that make them Igbo? And eating sushi I’m afraid does not make you Japanese either? Not too long ago such a question would have been considered preposterous! In a short century, we have somehow willingly managed to not only neglect but to reject our institutions which were carefully crafted over thousands of years in exchange for identities that lack any meanings or reference to our sense of self.

Today, I ask, Kedu afa gi? (what is your name) Onye ka ibu? (who are you). A proper appreciation of this seemingly benign question reveals how bankrupt we have become in the areas of our identity. How long we have existed with a forgotten and often twisted sensibility and a lack of appreciation of our self worth as a people. This which I speak of is in itself not a revelation of any sort it is nothing new to us. Truth is this shameful abandonment of our rich traditions did not start today.

In fact, Rev. G.T. Basden said in his famous book Niger Ibos in which he lamented at the balance of life, which was seriously being disrupted. “The younger generation has shed old manners and customs freely, and somewhat hastily. They are ardently grasping at all things new and foreign. Not all, by any means, can discriminate between the wheat and the chaff.” This he already was observing firsthand in the first decades of the 20th century and promptly wrote about in 1938.

It is without debate that one can say that, colonialism has caused a widespread involuntary intermixing of Western and African intellectual categories in the thinking of contemporary Africans. However, it does not require the disavowal of all foreign sources of possible edification. It seems to me likely that any Igbo synthesis for modern living will include indigenous and Western elements, as well as some from the East.