POSTCOLONIAL GOVERNMENT INTERVENTIONS IN OSUN GROVE

In its Declaration Notice of 1965, the Antiquities Commission of Nigeria recognized “the river-side shrine and sacred grove of Oshun at Osogbo … together with its shrine, its grove, the surrounding land within a radius of 400 feet” as a national monument effective 5 August 1965.^{Footnote 7} This declaration, in accordance with Section 14(4) of the Antiquities Act, effectively appropriated a precolonial local historical heritage site and transformed it into a place of national value by bringing it under the management of the Federal Department of Antiquities. The inscription of the grove as a national monument however took place ahead of the proper delineation of the boundaries of the site. At the request of the federal government, the mapping of Osun Grove was undertaken by the then Western Region’s Department of Survey and completed in 1976 “following the boundaries pointed out by the elders … [and of] the river altars.”^{Footnote 8} It should be noted that both the Federal Department of Antiquities and the Antiquities Commission were merged with Decree 77 (under the then military rule) into one administrative unit—the National Commission for Museums and Monuments (NCMM)—in 1979.^{Footnote 9} Hence, the new body NCMM was responsible for incorporating the 1976 surveyed plan of the grove into law with the Museums and Monuments (Declaration) Notice of 1992, which amends the 1965 Notice, offers more precise boundaries for the grove, and stipulates the size of the grove as consisting of 75.11 hectares.^{Footnote 10}

Four years earlier (1988), the commission had established the National Museum office at Osogbo for the management of the Osun-Osogbo Sacred Grove and its associated sites. Before 1988, volunteer and nongovernmental organizations such as the Osun Grove Support Group (OGSG), under the patronage and direction of Susanne Wenger, were responsible for protecting the grove from illegal activities.^{Footnote 11} Wenger and local artists used their stylistic humanist sculptures to create and beautify sacred spots all over the grove. Security men were hired for day and night patrol to deter poachers, and laborers were hired to maintain the good appearance of the site. In fact, it was the effort of OGSG led by Susanne Wenger and the active leadership of Oba Samuel Adeleye Adenle (the King of Osogbo, 1944–75) that ensured that the grove was declared a national monument in 1965. With this legal and state backing, Susanne Wenger became the leading advocate and moral voice for the preservation of Osun Grove, with the support of many indigenes as well as foreign and Nigerian sympathizers. The establishment of the National Museum Osogbo office was an important turning point for the grove because this established a direct federal government staff presence to supervise the grove as a national monument. In the process, Susanne Wenger and a number of the OGSG members—mostly artists and maintenance workers—were hired as junior employees of NCMM in order to ensure continuity.^{Footnote 12}

A living heritage such as the Osun Grove presents the challenge of balancing the good intentions of the state with the needs of the local community to whom the patrimony has relevance in experiential, metaphysical, and ontological terms (encompassing historical, community identity, and spiritual). Living heritages cannot be treated in the same way as the nonaffiliated heritage sites such as the two-millennia-old Rock Paintings of Dutsen Habude at Birnin Kudu or even the 800+ Esie figures, both in Nigeria, neither of which has any direct or immediate genealogical relevance to the communities living around them today. The case of Osun Grove is different because it has organic relevance to the Osogbo community, past and present. It is a social common held in trust for the community by the king, Ataoja of Osogbo. Although Act 77 of 1979 does not allow shared government–private ownership of any cultural patrimony that the federal government has declared a national monument, the state allows the priesthood of Osun to make use of the grove for noncommercial religious and cultural activities. Such activities must be undertaken without damaging the integrity of the grove as a national monument. Hence, the local priesthood and their guests do not pay fees to make use of Osun Grove, but other visitors are required to pay entrance fees.

There are three layers of institutional authority for the grove. At the topmost is the federal government, through NCMM the body responsible for the overall management of the grove. This is followed by the Osun State government and the Osogbo and Olorunda local governments.^{Footnote 13} The state and the local tiers of government act, in accordance with the federal government’s Land Use Act of 1978 (originally Decree 6 of 1978), as part of the government trustees of Osun Grove since the site is a protected land in an urban area.^{Footnote 14} The state and local governments may provide amenities, such as social conveniences, roads, and parking space within and around the grove but these must not constitute potential harm to the integrity of the site. The third tier of authority is the community of Osogbo, whose “traditional … and cultural rights are exercised through the Oba of Osogbo and the priestess who lives in the palace compound.”^{Footnote 15}

One of the striking aspects of the state intervention, however, is that neither the Federal Department of Antiquities nor the succeeding NCMM ever arranged for an archaeological survey or test excavations in the grove to assess the historical heritage of the site as a guide for delineating its boundaries. Yet, the nomination document that the state submitted to WHC, based on the oral traditions, claims that the grove is the origin of Osogbo settlement and the Osogbo kingship institution.^{Footnote 16} The authors of the document also vaguely refer to “some traces of the early occupation of the grove that are sufficient to buttress the oral history which reckons two successive settlements before the community migrated out of the grove as a result of limited space.”^{Footnote 17} These two phases of settlement history produced, according to oral traditions, two palaces. The document mentions that the remains of these palaces are still visible in the grove. One of these is identified as the temple of Osun in the southern wing of the grove. The other is the structure currently housing the Ogboni cult in the grove’s northern wing (Figures 3a and 3b). These are claims that require tangible archaeological evidence, but the government did not provide any. It is therefore not surprising that the WHC eliminated this criterion in its decision, and focused instead on the natural, religious, cosmological, and modern artistic features of the site.

A series of archaeological surveys and excavations that I conducted in the grove since 2003 have uncovered only one settlement site, and this is in the northern section of the grove. No archaeological evidence has turned up in the southern wing of the grove to confirm that there was an early settlement there. It is possible, though, that any such early settlement was an ephemeral campsite close to the river, and that the repeated flooding of the site had washed away any remains that could give us evidence of early occupation. More importantly, our archaeological surveys show that most section of the old Osogbo settlement is outside the official boundaries of the Osun Grove (see Figure 1). It is obvious that NCMM relied on oral traditions and the distribution of over 90 New Sacred Art sculptures to define the grove’s boundaries. If an archaeological survey had been conducted in 1965 or 1976, the commission and the local advocates would have averted the error of excluding the larger sections of the early Osogbo settlement from the grove. That portion of the settlement is where the School of Nursing campus of Ladoke Akintola University was built in 2003–2004. Unfortunately, in the process of building the campus, most of the old Osogbo settlement was destroyed. Our archaeological team succeeded in conducting rescue survey in the course of the construction work in 2004. This and other investigations have since shown that it was indeed from this old settlement that the grove derived its spiritual and social significance as the ancestral home of Osogbo community.^{Footnote 18}

PERFORMING THE STATE, PERFORMING THE SOCIAL COMMON

Oral traditions indicate that the Osun Grove (especially the riverside sanctuary dedicated to the Osun river goddess; see Figures 3a and 4) was from its inception, perhaps as early as the 17th century, a site for performing power and for staging political as well as religious rituals.^{Footnote 19} It has served as an important locus of social common for the different sectors of the society—those with multigenerational roots and those who are recent arrivals in Osogbo—and the interests they represented. The grove was where these groups performed their becoming as well as negotiated their status and rankings as members of the community. The grove still serves these roles today, but it is not a static site: The shrine that formed the focus of the Osogbo community festival in the grove has not only changed its location more than once but its meaning has also become pluralistic over time, connoting multiple things to different people.^{Footnote 20} The grove now plays the role of defining pan-Yoruba identity at the national and international levels.^{Footnote 21} Osun Grove is also a space for civil religion, as it is an important site for spiritual and religious practice for thousands of individuals beyond Nigeria who visit the site every year.^{Footnote 22} The annual festival that takes place in the grove has served to renew the social contract between the community and the river goddess, between the Osogbo people and their king, and between devotees and the goddess Osun. It is in this context of shared heritage, as well as the historical and contemporary relevance of Osun Grove to the indigenous institutions of Osogbo, that I refer to the grove as a social common.

Figure 4.

River altar (facing the Osun temple in Figure 3a).

Raymond Kea describes a social common (e.g., land, water, forests) as an area of social existence that experiences active social struggles, and which is subsequently formalized as a communal possession through institutional norms and practices.^{Footnote 23} Elsewhere, I have provided a preliminary historical explanation of how the Osun Grove emerged as a social common in Osogbo, showing that the grove has undergone three major phases of contestation.^{Footnote 24} First, the grove became a social common in the 18th century as part of the efforts to accommodate the interests of the autochthonous and immigrant populations that settled in Osogbo between the late 16th and early 17th centuries. It was at this phase that the very process by which the Ataoja (the title of the King of Osogbo) institution was established also involved formalized the birth of the river-based goddess—Osun—and her sanctuaries within the grove. The resolution of the conflicting interests between the autochthons and immigrants involved the Osun deity and the Ataoja institution becoming one indivisible institution. Second, between 1830 and the 1930s, the grove went through renegotiation as a social common between the citizens of Osogbo and the large number of immigrants (mostly war refugees from across the Yorubaland) who were displaced from their home as a result of the collapse of the Oyo Empire and its ripple effect across the region. The resolution here involved segments of the immigrants (more populous in number) becoming stakeholders in the Osun priesthood. And third, the grove was a site of contestation from circa 1930s to 2003 between advocates of public ownership (especially preservationists) and claimants of private ownership (individuals and family members who claim that most of the grove acreage, outside the riverside temple, is their private property, inherited from their ancestors). This struggle transcended the colonial and postcolonial Nigerian state, and it culminated in the state intervention in 1965 as previously discussed.

The declaration of the grove as a national monument and the establishment of National Museum Osogbo effectively made a local social common into a national social common. Notwithstanding the federal government’s direct administration of the grove beginning in 1988, the grassroots organization—the OGSG—aided the government efforts in the early decades of the National Museum Osogbo. First, the then small NCMM staff in the 1990s relied on the efforts of the local artists and artisans in preventing further encroachments on the social common. Second, the zeal of the OGSG, headed by Susanne Wenger, provided guidance and direction for the government efforts.^{Footnote 25} And, third, the employment of members of the New Sacred Art Movement (NSAM) and the OGSG by the commission ensured continuity in the management plan implemented by the NCMM at the grove. The strategies pursued by the then NCMM Director General, Professor Ade Obayemi, in establishing partnership between the commission and the local stakeholders were very productive. They ensured the sustainability of the government intervention. However, this partnership began to falter in 2008 with the layoff of many of the members of the NSAM and OGSG, and the increasingly inefficient NCMM bureaucratic system. More important, the work of NCMM in the grove has foundered precipitously in recent years as the overwhelming majority of staff employed in the grove consists mainly of middle to top managers. Most of these employees are college graduates, but they have not received proper training in the basic expertise and incentives for heritage management and preservation.

This second phase of NCMM’s involvement is consistent with the Late Elinor Ostrom’s concern for what may (and likely will) happen to a social common appropriated by the state. The concern of Ostrom was that governments, as well as international and local nongovernmental organizations, may unwittingly destroy “the very social capital—shared relationship, norms, knowledge and understanding” that has been used by local stakeholders to sustain their social commons over the long term.^{Footnote 26} Ostrom’s fear of the negative consequences of government’s intervention in the management of social commons, such as the Osun Grove, seems to be unfolding.^{Footnote 27} However, as I will demonstrate below, the situation is more complicated than this because the grove as we know it today would not have been in existence without government intervention.

Oba Samuel Adeleye Adenle, the charismatic and first Western-educated king of Osogbo (1944–75), and Susanne Wenger (the latter working through the NSAM and the OGSG) understood the power of government, and they made use of that power by facilitating the declaration of the grove as a national monument in 1965. Since then, the state has been effective in ridding the grove of a section of Osogbo indigenes who claimed that the grove is part of their family inheritance and therefore they should have the rights to use their ancestral ownership as they saw fit, including selling off the land. I am not in the position to fault the argument of these claimants, but it is certain that both the federal government’s Land Use Act of 1978 and the National Commission for Museums and Monuments Act of 1979 weakened the claims of these citizens. A number of senior NCMM officials whom I interviewed confirmed that the government paid some of these claimants compensation, as late as 2001, so they would abandon their lawsuit actions and evacuate the grove as part of the process for nominating the grove for World Heritage status. The last holdout of these claimants was a prominent Islamic cleric—Ibrahim Mukanda—who operated an Islamic school in the southern part of grove from 1968 until 2001.^{Footnote 28} From this perspective, the government has been good for the Osun Grove in terms of getting rid of the antipreservation claimants to this prime real estate. Without the strong arm of government, the grove would have been divided among the various claimants. The moral persuasion of the NSAM and OGSG and the sometimes tepid local support would not have stopped these claimants from achieving their goals. The involvement of the government therefore facilitated the avoidance of “the tragedy of the commons.”^{Footnote 29} This is because the government took the grove away from the control of all claimants, transformed a piece of local real estate to a federal government property, and created regulations that delegitimized the claims of all parties except the claim and access of the worshippers, the annual Osogbo Festival, and the use of the grove for tourism. However, everyone was subjected to the same rules about how the resources of the grove must be used (Figure 5).

Figure 5.

NCMM billboard.

From the preservationist and patrimonial perspectives, the federal government’s intervention has been good for Osun Grove. I will proceed to highlight, though, that the case of Osun Grove gives us insights into the performativity of power and authority of the state and its local allies. Here, I adapt the term “neo-theatre state” from Clifford Geertz’s Negara: The Theatre State in Nineteenth-Century Bali,^{Footnote 30} in order to explain the performative roles of the postcolonial state, and the political drama that is reenacted every year in the Osun Grove as part of the annual Osun Festival. In Negara, Geertz describes the precolonial Balinese state in Southeast Asia as primarily a performative political system whose raison d’etre was not governance and management for public good but to stage spectacles of elaborate court ceremonialism.^{Footnote 31} Since the publication of Negara, Geertz has been criticized in many quarters for his ahistorical conceptualization of precolonial Balinese state and his omission of the impacts of colonialism on the 19th-century constitution of Balinese life. And, the critique continues, Geertz’s preoccupation with symbolic interpretation made him overlook the fact that only kings who had “control over substantial manpower resources” were also the ones who “put all the extravaganza on their stage.”^{Footnote 32}

Aware of the limitation of Geertz’s conceptualization of the precolonial Balinese state as a theatre state, my use of the term is within the context and framework of the postcolonial state in Africa (especially Nigeria). Hence, my coinage of the term “neo-theatre state” is to situate the critical study of heritage or patrimony issues in Osun Grove in the broad postcolonial literature. This literature has called attention to the postcolonial condition as a state of crisis in knowledge about how people and cultures are positioned and position themselves in the world;^{Footnote 33} as well as a condition in which the state subordinated social welfare to the performance of political ceremonies of development. The formalization of Osun Grove as a national monument began the process of the appropriation of the grove for the performance of state power and authority. The culminating spectacle of this performance was, however, not the original intention of the invitation that brought the state to the grove. Neither is this spectacle the same as the performance of the precolonial Bali theatre state. In the case of Nigeria, we are referring to a postcolonial neo-theatre state. Unlike the precolonial Bali state (or any other premodern political entity or sovereign, for that matter), where the state only had very limited responsibilities to the subjects, the Nigerian state has an expansive welfare mandate for its citizens. It has the responsibility, and it is expected by the citizenry, to provide infrastructure, welfare, and security for the society and the people. Yet, all indices show that the postcolonial state has consistently failed to meet these expectations due to leadership crises and massive political-bureaucratic corruption.^{Footnote 34} As far as cultural patrimony is concerned, the Nigerian state has chosen instead to lay emphasis on the performance of culture but without providing the facilities for the maintenance of cultural resources and cultural workers. The postcolonial Nigeria as a neo-theatre state is therefore a condition in which spectacle becomes important for staging and exercising power, legitimacy, and authority. Andrew Apter has described the logic of this spectacle “as a form of cultural commodification” that allows the state elite, whom he describes as “rent-guzzling comprador bourgeoisie,” to lavishly stage extravagant cultural spectacles, so that it not only loses “touch with the very public it was supposed to elevate and represent,” but also damages the culture, and creates false hope for the people.^{Footnote 35}

The Osun Grove presents a complex space for exploring the character of the postcolonial state in relation to heritage or patrimonial management. Of the four criteria that WHC used to inscribe the Osun Grove as a World Heritage Site, only the fourth—the annual Osun Festival—has attracted continuous state and public attention. At the center of the ceremony is the king, who is liminally suspended between the goddess of Osun and the people (Figure 6). The king is assisted in this regard by the chief priestess of Osun (Figure 7). The festival is a renewal of the original pact between the goddess of the river—Osun, who assisted the first king—and pioneering immigrants to settle in the present grove about 400 years ago. The event therefore celebrates the foundation of Osogbo and its emergence as a community. The circumstances that resulted in the formation of the early Osogbo settlement are widely represented in many versions of the oral traditions.^{Footnote 36} Two hunters—Larooye and Timehin—are credited, in the various versions, with leading the migrations that established the early Osogbo settlement. The immigrants were helped in their effort to master the new landscape by the primordial goddess of the river—Osun—who gave them directions on which part of the grove to settle, farm, hunt, and fish. Larooye soon became the favorite of Osun, and she made him the king of the settlers. The man and the goddess then entered into a pact that if he worshiped her and observed certain taboos, she would bless him with many children, assist the settlement to repel any external aggression, and make the community prosperous and famous worldwide. The chairman of the planning committee for the 2012 Osun-Osogbo Festival, Chief Popoola Bolarinwa, summed up the purpose of the annual festival:

Figure 6.

Oba Jimoh Olanipekun, Larooye II (left) and people paying obeisance to the king (right).

Figure 7.

Osun priestesses.

During the festival, it is not only the traditional leadership that assumes the status of the theatre state. The federal government of Nigeria (including its state and local government appendages) also enacts its own theatre statecraft. The august visitors from the federal, state, and municipal arms of government are seated in the pavilion constructed for that purpose (Figure 8a). This party often includes the Minister of Tourism, Culture, and National Orientation as the guest of honor representing the president of the republic (special guest of honor); the state governor (as chief host); and the federal and state legislators. At the center of the pavilion is the king (the festival custodian) and the major chiefs and guests.^{Footnote 38} The political cohort and members of the state bureaucracy generally occupy the state pavilion, where they perform the rituals of the state in form of making speeches that tout the accomplishments of the state and its lofty plans to boost the tourism potentials of the grove. Opposite the pavilion is the Osun temple, in front of which the members of the priesthood congregate. They shuttle between the temple and the river to perform rituals dedicated to the Osun deity, including sacrifices and prayers. During the event, the king steps out of the pavilion to join the priesthood in order to reenact with the priestess the first pact between the Osun goddess and Larooye (first king). Hundreds of onlookers watch the performance of the state, culture, and religion on all sides around the center stage (Figure 8b). About 50,000 tourists also mill around strategic parts of the grove and Osogbo city as participants in their own ways. And several thousands more watch the event live on TV sets across the country.

Figure 8.

Spatial layout of the center stage (A) and audience (B) for the annual Osun Festival.

Through the Osun Festival, the public came to experience the state in activities endorsed by the people. Although the state and society are usually far apart in terms of social welfare, the festival offers that rare moment when the state and society present the façade of unity. For the thousands who throng to Osun Shrine every August for the annual festival, their audible complaints against the state for its neglect of social welfare is suspended while they focus on the worship of the river goddess, the enjoyment of the pageantry, and the marketing of sundry items to tourists and pilgrims. In the hands of the state apparatus, the Osun Festival offers the opportunity to showcase how an authentic African culture can be modernized and adapted to present-day imperatives. The festival itself, with national and international press in attendance, is a good example of how well the state is doing in terms of marketing Nigerian culture for global consumption. In this scenario, however, the past becomes timeless and static, and the past is an antithesis of modernization, which tends to be treated in the popular discourse as synonymous with normative liberal economy and Western knowledge system.

This performative role of the state with reference to patrimonial administration gives an insight into how the state uses history and tradition to (1) generate memories that are channeled towards creating local identities, (2) strengthen its own power through collaboration with the local elite who claim to speak for the society but who are only patrons and allies of the state, and (3) create a new memory and an adaptive history that are relevant to the present interests. No wonder, then, that the recent official publications have been citing 1370 ce as the absolute date for the pact between Larooye and Osun deity, and the year early Osogbo was established.^{Footnote 39} No one has identified the basis for deducing this date, which is also now being widely cited in the national and region press.^{Footnote 40} It is, however, awkward that studies that are deemed scholarly work and published in the NCMM’s official academic journal are also citing 1370 ce as a matter of fact for “the foundation of Osogbo kingdom” without questioning the authority or scientific basis of the date. This chronological citation developed sometime in 2003, when corporate marketing of the Osun Festival began in earnest. The date was created specifically for the performance of the Osun Festival, and the purveyors of this date have ignored the alternative and original chronological calculations, based on oral traditions, which place the origins of the early Osogbo community between the late 16th and early 17th centuries.^{Footnote 41} And, the oldest radiocarbon date 200 ± 70 years BP (Beta-197305) so far obtained from our excavations supports the historical sensibility of oral traditions. Calibrated at 2-sigma (98% probability), this chronometric date and the two other slightly younger ones suggest that the oldest occupation level of the site was circa 1590–1620 ce.^{Footnote 42} These dates are consistent with the associated dateable artifacts, such as tobacco pipes and cowry shells, obtained at the site. These offer post-15th-century relative chronologies. There is, therefore, agreement between the archaeological evidence and oral traditions that the early Osogbo settlement did not originate earlier than the 16th century.

In the performative model and theatre scenario painted above, no one needs empirical historical or archaeological evidence for the state performance of cultural patrimony. It seems that the older the patrimony is claimed to be by the elite, the more authentic it is. With no fund set aside to investigate the historical and archaeological evidence of the grove, it is obvious that the state performance does not really seek to validate the past and its cultural tradition but to use the assumed static past to legitimize the position and power of the state agents in the present.

NEGLECT OF THE SOCIAL COMMON

It is not only that the state has invested no resources in the historical and archaeological study of the grove, it has also not done much to maintain and improve the physical outlook of the grove that it worked so hard to inscribe as a World Heritage Site. Why has the site been deteriorating in physical facility since it was inscribed? One would expect the attention to the maintenance of the cultural and natural resources of the grove to have intensified since the inscription of the site as a World Heritage Site. The contract is the case. Weeds grow around the sculptures, poachers still occasionally encroach in the grove to hunt, and the overall physical landscape suffers from neglect. Yet there are over 100 full-time staff members of the NCMM working in the grove. The local artists and devotees of indigenous religion who have been associated with the grove for more than 25 years mentioned that the grove was better maintained when it was under the patronage of the OGSG than in the time it has been brought under the care of the federal government protection in terms of everyday maintenance—weeding, cleaning, and restoration of the sculptures.^{Footnote 43} Akangbe Ogun, a master wood-carver, stated as follows:

Adebisi Akanji, master cement-sculptor and a pioneer artist in the grove, alongside Susanne Wenger, also shared his opinion as follows:

Comments such as the ones above are common among members of the local community who have spiritual, creative, and existential relationships with the grove.^{Footnote 46}

The case is not, however, that the state is underfunding the grove generally. The problem is that the type of expenditure the state commits to the grove only serves to act out the power and presence of the state, not only through the annual staging of the festival but also through the massive federal government employees affiliated with the grove.^{Footnote 47} Such expenses have not contributed to the sustainable maintenance and preservation of the sacred grove. The government representatives at the festival (usually led by the state governor and the minister of Tourism, Culture, and National Orientation) often use the occasion of the festival to make big statements in order to chart the attention of the audience to the project of modernization, what is often erroneously called development. At the 2012 grand finale of the Osun Festival, for example, the governor of Osun State, speaking through his deputy, Chief Titilayo Laoye-Tomori, announced that his administration had invited private investors all over the world to come up with viable proposals, aimed at developing tourism in the state. According to the governor, this would help to achieve the state government’s target of increasing its tourism-based revenue to N7.5 billion by 2015.^{Footnote 48} The details and feasibility of this plan are not yet clear, especially given the dismal state of cultural patrimony and tourist sites across the state, as well as the shoddy conditions of infrastructure and amenities across the country.

Although a large federal government bureaucracy is maintained as part of the incorporation of Osun Grove as a national monument, and a palace-sponsored cultural outfit—Osogbo Cultural Heritage Council (OCHC)—is maintained to organize the annual festival, the worshippers, priests, and priestesses associated with Osun are not supported by the state or by OCHC. The members of the Osun priestly community have begun to speak out about their neglected condition. For example, Mr. Osunbolaji Olayiwola, a spokesperson for the Osun priesthood and son of the current chief priestess of Osun, threatened in July 2012 (few days before the 2012 Osun Festival) to withhold support for the annual Osun Festival if the bureaucrats and the traditional elite did not start paying attention to the welfare of Osun priests and priestesses. Speaking to a newspaper reporter, Olosun stated:

And when this is considered in relation to the inattentiveness of the state and its institutions to scholarly research and the artists’ concerns, one gets the impression that the state has put “its interests before history and the people.”^{Footnote 50}

PARTNERS AND MEDIATORS OF THE STATE: THE GLITZ AND OPACITY OF CORPORATE SPONSORSHIP

The Ataoja-in-Council through the OCHC, the Annual Osun Festival Planning Committee and its professional marketers, Infogem Limited, serve as the middlemen between the state and the society, but as I will argue below, they do not mediate the two. They are partners of the state. Since Infogem Limited came on board in 2002 as the marketing consultants for the Osun Festival, the planning committee of the festival seems to have solved the perennial problem of finding money to organize the annual event.^{Footnote 51} Marketed as Nigeria’s “ecotourism destination,” there were three sponsorship categories for the 2011 Osun Festival. At the top is the platinum category, which, at the published price tag of N50 million (about U.S. $312,500), provides “exclusive title sponsorship right to the entire event.” This is followed by the gold category, tagged with the price of N30 million (U.S. $187,500). Any sponsor in this category bears the title of cosponsorship. The silver category has the price tag of N10 million (U.S. $62,500) and confers the title of contributory sponsorship.^{Footnote 52} MTN Nigeria, the most prominent telecommunication industry in the country, has been the leading corporate sponsor of the annual festival. The other sponsors of the 2011 festival included Intercontinental Distillers Limited, makers of Eagle Aromatic Schnapps; Nigerian Breweries PLC, makers of the Star Larger Beer; and Seamans Schnapps, a brand of Grand Oak Nigeria Ltd. The account of how much is raised annually from corporate sponsorship is not available to the public, but the amount must be substantial since it supports the service of a major marketing firm in the country, two full-time staff of the OCHC, and myriad expenses associated with the services of high-profile members of the Osun Festival Planning Committee. Yet, despite the fact that the festival is hosted within the grove and that the annual festival has been marketed in the past few years as “Nigeria’s ecotourism destination,” no part of the corporate sponsorship is set aside for the maintenance of the grove. The NCMM retains the primary responsibility for the maintenance of the site, but it is not allocated any funds for the maintenance of the grove by the Annual Osun Festival Planning Committee.^{Footnote 53} Instead, the NCMM relies on the government allocation for the management of the grove and all of its museums and monuments. It should be noted, though, that by a developing country standard, the state allocation to NCMM is very substantial.^{Footnote 54}

ARCHAEOLOGY OF OSUN GROVE

My research in the grove has been fueled in part by the desire to use the archaeological resources of the grove to shed new light on the history of the grove and to use some of the artifacts as the basis for creating a public education program on the early history of Osogbo. I have observed firsthand the way the archaeological heritage of the grove has been neglected by the state agencies who claim authority over the protection of the grove. I have also witnessed how the most important archaeological site associated with the grove was destroyed under the very eyes of the officials whose job it is to prevent such destruction. Since our archaeological investigations in the grove began in 2003, and continued in 2004, 2009, and 2011, we have excavated an area of more than 106 square meters, surveyed about 20 hectares within the Osun Grove, and recovered more than 20,000 artifacts. Most of the finds have come from the 71-square-meter unit that we excavated in the early Osogbo settlement area (Figures 1 and 9). The excavation yielded a wide range of artifacts, with ceramics being the largest, followed by an assortment of well-preserved animal bones, cowry shells, tobacco pipes, clay lamps, glass beads and cullet, metal objects, and flora remains (Figure 10). The early settlement reached about 18 hectares in size before it was abandoned sometime in the early 18th century.

Figure 9.

Excavated floor of Mound A, Osun Grove.

Figure 10.

Archaeological artifacts.

At the end of the 2011 fieldwork, I developed and served as curator of an exhibition that was based on my archaeological investigations in Osun Grove. Titled Ancestral Legacies in Osun Grove: Archaeological Exhibition of Early Osogbo History, the exhibition consisted of 16 11 × 17 poster presentations, 32 artifacts, and a catalog.^{Footnote 55} I used these to illustrate the everyday lives, crafts technology, regional networks, foodways, and subsistence strategies in the 17th-century site (Figure 11). The exhibition was declared open on 19 August 2011 by the King of Osogbo, Oba Jimoh Olanipekun, Larooye II, who hosted it in the public pavilion of the palace (Figure 12). The exhibition was the first of its kind in Osogbo and for the grove, and it is now donated it to the NCMM. The expectation is that the exhibition will form a permanent collection of the National Museum Osogbo, and that the museum will display it in Osun Grove and use it as a traveling exhibit for public education. Working with community collaborators and the museum staff, I designed the exhibition in order to present the results of the archaeological investigations in ways that would be familiar to the local audiences, to facilitate discussion and rethinking of what people know about the foundational history of the city, and to make a diverse cast of audiences come to new understandings about the history of the grove and Osogbo.^{Footnote 56}

Figure 11.

Author (left), at the opening of the exhibition.

Figure 12.

Oba Jimoh Olanipekun, Larooye II, declaring open the exhibition, flanked by NCMM staff.

FINAL THOUGHTS: THE FIELD ARCHAEOLOGIST AS INTELLECTUAL MIDDLEMAN BETWEEN THE STATE AND SOCIETY

The case of Osun Grove corroborates the observation that has been made by several authors that the World Heritage List system is about the heritage of the “governing elites”^{Footnote 57} whose choice of what to nominate for WHC inscription is fueled by their vision for what constitutes national heritage. Of course, this reifies and empowers the state bureaucracy, helping justify the creation of new administrative positions and the expansion of bureaucracy. The process also increases the international connectivity of the national elite. While this effort may not necessarily empower the people “traditionally” in charge of the heritage, it has played some role in halting the physical destruction of Osun Grove.^{Footnote 58} The intervention of the state has been crucial to preserving some of the natural and even cultural aspects of the grove. The bureaucratic institutions of the state have done an excellent job in providing the legal framework for the state ownership of the grove. The casualty, however, has been the management of the grove’s resources; and the implementation of the management plan for the grove.

The foregoing shows that the operationalization of patrimony by the Nigerian state, in the context of the World Heritage List, ultimately serves three purposes: (1) social capital—identity, locality, history (memory), religion, and affective self-realization; (2) political capital—legitimacy of the local elite and authority of the postcolonial state; and (3) economic value—conceptualization of heritage as alienable resources (similarly to natural resources such as oil) for generating income and wealth. The constituencies for these three spheres of patrimony tend to be distinctive but they also often overlap and are interdependent, as is obvious in the case of Osun Grove. Thousands of people throng to Osun Grove every year for the social capital that the site holds for them. In the weeks leading up to the festival, the city of Osogbo benefitted from a big spike in economic activities. The professional marketing of the festival and the state support have been beneficial for the seasonal economic well-being of Osogbo, especially from mid-July to mid-August. And both the local and state elite have incredibly used the festival as political capital for the annual renewal of the legitimacy of the king and for the state to reenact its performative roles. However, my central argument here is that all of these have not contributed to the preservation of the material and knowledge base of the grove. So far, the cumulative actions of the Nigerian state serve to erase certain kinds of memory about the Osun Grove—especially about history and religious heritage—while fostering a new set of memory and perspective that focuses on modernization and economic development. It is rather ironic that the modernizing state and its elite agents (at the local and national levels) who seek to make the grove a mecca of local, national, and international tourism have not seen it fit to support, encourage, and promote the facilities that would not only allow the dream for tourism dollars to be actualized but also uncover the historical legacies of the grove.

The case of Osun Grove shows that the preservation of the grove and its use for discovery and public education has lagged behind the investment in the state performance. This critique notwithstanding, this article highlights the space for collaboration between the independent scholar and the postcolonial state and the local communities. This collaboration is dialogical, aimed at showcasing the potentials for best management practices in cultural patrimony. The independent scholar is involved in what LauraJane Smith calls “intellectual practice”^{Footnote 59} with the responsibility to generate original research and new evidence, the results of which may go against the government or community narratives about the past. This is because the scholar is involved in migrating and translating academic research between the local community and bureaucratic spheres of practice. The bureaucratic and traditional elite institutions must be informed that they damage cultural patrimony when they make bogus claims about its date, purpose, and authenticity. It is also important that the official documents about a site be continuously refined and revised based on new evidence in order for the site to maintain its integrity as worthy of local, national, and international value. It is this condition of renewal that would make a site appeal to visitors in anticipation of new finds and new knowledge. The way the Osun Grove has been presented to the public is very staid, with little imagination and with almost zero understanding of the archaeological ramifications for the grove’s history. Now that the Ancestral Legacies exhibition materials have been donated to the NCMM, we hope the commission will incorporate the results of the archaeological investigation into the presentation of the grove to the many publics it is set up to serve. We can then hope that a sustainable balance will be reached between these poles of social common and uncommon ground—a place where the state performance enables, and not undermines, the preservation of the cultural, historical, and natural resources of Africa’s largest protected sacred grove.