Uli: The Colonial Archive as Decolonial Cultural Resource

To the best of our knowledge, the British colonial anthropologist Northcote W. Thomas was the first to comprehensively document the art of uli photographically during his 1910-11 survey of the Igbo-speaking people of what was then designated as Awka District, in the Protectorate of Southern Nigeria. Culturally, this is the region sometimes described as the Nri-Awka axis, associated with the so-called Nri hegemony and the Ozo title system (Onwuejeogwu 1979, 1981). Despite the early date of this photographic record, made soon after the imposition of colonial administration in the region, scholars of uli have neglected this important archive and have tended to focus on the later documentation of individuals such as M.D.W. Jeffreys, E.H. Duckworth, W.B. Yeatman, and K.C. Murray in the 1930s. There is no doubt that traditional uli practices were very much “alive” at the time of Thomas's surveys; by the 1930s, after a further twenty years of colonial interference, Murray considered uli to be a dying art (Willis 1997: 106).

N.W. Thomas was the first Government Anthropologist to be formally appointed by the British Colonial Office. In this capacity, Thomas led three anthropological surveys in Southern Nigeria, including tours of Edo-speaking regions (1909-1910), the Igbo-speaking region of Awka District (1910-1911), and the Western Igbo area of Asaba District (1912-1913), before transferring to Sierra Leone to complete a final survey (1914-1915) (Basu 2016). In Nigeria, his surveys encompassed much of present-day Edo, Delta, and Anambra states. During these tours, Thomas and his local assistants took thousands of photographs, made hundreds of sound recordings, and assembled large collections of artifacts and botanical specimens.²

From the perspective of the colonial authorities, these surveys were intended to inform the implementation of British policies of indirect rule in West Africa. This early experiment in the use of anthropology as an instrument of colonial governance was, however, considered a failure, and the kinds of knowledge that the surveys produced were rarely of practical use in administration (Basu 2016). Indeed, it could be argued that the most significant legacy of the surveys is the archive of photographs, sound recordings, artifacts, and other materials that Thomas and his assistants assembled in Nigeria and Sierra Leone and which was subsequently dispersed to numerous institutions in the UK. Since 2018, this comprehensive, multimedia ethnographic archive has been the focus of a research collaboration entitled “[Re:]Entanglements.”³ This has involved a sustained critical reengagement with the archive: retracing the itineraries of Thomas's surveys, returning copies of photographs and sound recordings to the present-day communities whose heritage they document, and inviting Nigerian and Sierra Leonean artists to respond to the materials through their creative practice (Basu 2021). The project has resulted in a number of exhibitions in Nigeria, Sierra Leone and the UK, including [Re:]Entanglements: Colonial Collections in Decolonial Times at the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology in Cambridge (Borgatti 2023).

Uli is a celebrated traditional Igbo artform. It has been the subject of several studies (e.g., Adams 2002; Ikwuemesi 2015, 2019; Sanders 2010; Willis 1987, 1989, 1997), and has inspired subsequent generations of Nigerian artists, particularly those, such as Uche Okeke, Chike Aniakor, Obiora Udechukwu, and Ikwuemesi himself, associated with the Nsukka School (Ottenberg 2002). The word uli refers to a number of plants in Igboland, the berries of which are processed to produce a dark dye that was traditionally used to draw tattoolike designs on the skin (Fig. 1). Many of the design motifs of this body art were also used in murals, which were often painted on the mud/clay walls of shrines. These murals were usually created with a limited palette of locally available pigments— typically white (nzu), yellow (edo), red (ufie), and black (oji). Both body and mural designs are known as uli, and both were ephemeral: those painted on the body (uli aru) might last a week or two before fading, while those painted on walls (uli aja) would typically be renewed annually in the days before a festival. Traditionally, uli was a vernacular artform performed by women. Mural painting especially was a communal art practice.

Compositionally, uli is characterized by linear forms, stylized motifs drawn from nature, elongated figures, outline shapes filled with dots or cross-hatching, and the use of “negative space.” There is generally a great economy of form. As Sarah Adams has observed, skilled uli artists are able to “suggest the world around them in their work by depicting only the essential lines that make up any given object” (Adams 2002: 246).

Between November 1910 and December 1911, Thomas and his local assistants conducted field research in approximately eighteen different towns in the vicinity of Awka in present-day Anambra State. During the survey, they made approximately 100 photographs relating to uli. These include images of what we would readily identify as uli wall paintings in the towns of Agulu, Agukwu Nri, Nibo, Nise, and Amansea. There are also photographs of other less characteristic wall paintings and designs—some including typical uli motifs—either incised or molded in relief in the fabric of the walls. Notable examples of the latter were made in Awka itself, as well as Agulu, Agukwu Nri, Enugu Ukwu, Nimo, and Amansea.

As with many topics that Thomas investigated, his findings were not written up or published. Only one photograph of an uli mural was, for example, published in Thomas's Anthropological Report on the Ibo-speaking Peoples of Nigeria (1913), illustrating a brief description of the shrine complexes of local deities (alusi) in Igbo traditional religion. Thomas mentions in passing that “worship” of such alusi would take place “in an area of ground, frequently of considerable size, specially set apart for the purpose” and that these sacred precincts would often be “surrounded by a wall decorated with curious paintings” (Thomas 1913: 28).

From such a limited account of these “curious paintings,” one might conclude that Thomas had little interest in art or aesthetics as subjects of anthropological inquiry. It must be remembered, however, that Thomas had been cautioned by the colonial authorities that his investigations should focus on matters of a “practical nature,” relevant to colonial administration, and not get distracted by topics of primarily academic interest (Basu 2016: 97, 100). Indeed, the fact that Thomas made so many photographs of uli wall designs suggests that he had more than a passing interest in this local artform. Several pages of the official photograph albums from his tours were devoted to “decorative art,” for instance, and these include around thirty images of uli murals (Fig. 2).⁴ Unfortunately, few of Thomas's fieldnotes survive from his Igbo surveys. What has survived, however, is an intriguing collection of annotated drawings of uli motifs, demonstrating that Thomas did make more extensive enquiries about them. While he did not write up this aspect of his research from his 1910-1911 survey in Awka District, Thomas did publish a short, descriptive article following his 1909-1910 Edo tour in the anthropological journal Man concerned with “Decorative Art Among the Edo-Speaking Peoples of Nigeria” (Thomas 1910). This was mainly focused on mural designs.

While uli is generally regarded as a traditional Igbo art, this is largely a stylistic determination. Thomas documented the same methods for creating both body and mural art during this earlier Edo tour. In the context of body marking, for example, the equivalent of uli is known as asu in the Edo language. (Like uli, this is also the name of the plant from which the dye is produced.) What is especially evident in Thomas's documentation of such practices in the Nri-Awka area, however, is the need to understand uli within a wider Igbo aesthetic manifested across a wide range of media, including other body arts such as scarification and hairdressing, as well as wood-carving, metalwork, ceramics, and textiles (Figs. 3-4). In this way, uli forms part of a wider “Igbo artistic cosmology,” which has “multiple functions and meanings”—“religious, aesthetic, symbolic [and] social” (Aniakor 2002: 302)—and is expressive of a “holistic Igbo world view” that is notoriously difficult to communicate in writing, for instance (Cole and Aniakor 1984: 216).

Thomas may have been the first to attempt to compile a glossary of uli motifs, with their Igbo names and interpretations. As noted, among his surviving fieldnotes from the Awka District survey are many loose-leaf pages of drawings, apparently made by different informants, with annotations in Thomas's hand (Fig. 5). Subsequent researchers have compiled more systematic glossaries of uli motifs, notably Elizabeth Willis's 1987 “Lexicon of Igbo Uli Motifs” published in the Nsukka Journal of the Humanities. As Ikwuemesi has noted, however,

Despite this caveat, it is nevertheless insightful to understand that what may appear as abstract designs are often in fact representational forms.

Setting these drawn motifs alongside corresponding photographs in the archive enables one to compare representational form across different media. One can, for instance, compare the representation of mbubu scarification marks, an adornment made on young women's chests and abdomens prior to marriage, in a drawing of an uli figure with a photograph of the actual scarification marks (Fig. 6). It is interesting to note how the beltlike strip of alternating crosses and circles, which wrap around the woman's waist, extend out from the drawing of the body as a horizontal band.

When documenting uli murals in the field, Thomas sometimes took just one or two photographs of a particular wall or building. In other cases, he took multiple photographs. Most of these photographs were made on 3¼×4¼-inch glass plate negatives with Thomas's Adams Videx camera. On occasion Thomas also used a Kodak Panoram camera to make panoramic photographs of buildings with uli murals, exposed on 3½×12-inch film strips. He documented four locations in particular detail: the Ogwugwu shrine at Agulu, the Ngene (probably Ngendo) shrine in Nibo, the Mpuniyi shrine in Nise, and the Iyiazi shrine in Agukwu Nri. During fieldwork for the [Re:] Entanglements project, we revisited these locations, shared our knowledge of Thomas's research in each place, left copies of the photographs with community members, and collected oral histories relating to the sites. In the following sections, we discuss these shrines in turn. In the light of Ikwuemesi's observations concerning “deculturation” and the “heritage crisis” in Igboland, it is significant to note that, while contemporary community members could readily identify uli in general terms, it was only in Nibo that we encountered a surviving oral tradition of uli as a vernacular art practice.

During his anthropological survey of Awka District, Thomas made a number of visits to the town of Agulu. In February 1911, he documented what he recorded as the “Ogugu ceremony” and “Ogugu house.” Today, “Ogugu” is spelled “Ogwugwu.” Ogwugwu is a female deity or alusi. The uli paintings in Thomas's photographs of the Ogwugwu shrine appear fresh and unweathered, and it is likely that Thomas photographed the paintings soon after they were made in preparation for the annual festival held for Ogwugwu.

When we visited Agulu, we were told that Ogwugwu was a very popular deity of the region and that Ogwugwu shrines were to be found in every settlement. People would make sacrifices at the shrine, appealing to the alusi to grant them children and wealth. In Agulu, the two major deities were Haaba and Ududonka. Ogwugwu is regarded as the child of Ududonka. There is still a shrine in Agulu known as Ududonka Ogwugwu, and it was felt that this is the place that Thomas photographed.

It appears that Thomas and his assistants photographed two different structures decorated with uli wall paintings. One series of photographs, documenting what Thomas describes as the Ogwugwu “ceremony,” shows a group of men (and a male child, with uli-styled coiffure) dancing in front of a structure—possibly a thatch-topped wall enclosing the sacred precinct—to the accompaniment of ufie drums. The wall is divided into a series of painted panels, each with a distinct repeating design (Fig. 7). The second structure, which Thomas labels Ogwugwu “house,” appears to be of a shrine building within the enclosure (Fig. 8).

The uli designs on the shrine building are quite different from those on what we are interpreting as the enclosure wall. They include a number of more representational forms, including a python (eke), which is a venerated totemic animal in Agulu, and a human figure (perhaps wearing a masquerade headdress or carrying a pot on its head). The composition includes other familiar uli motifs, including lozenge shapes with alternating light and dark colors. One of the photographed walls of the Ogwugwu “house” is different again, with repeating patterns that resemble those cut into small wooden stamps used to print uli motifs on the body.

On a subsequent visit to Agulu, Thomas photographed a remarkable building he labelled “Ochiche's house” (Fig. 9). Rather than being painted, the designs on the walls are created in relief in clay. In addition to the relief designs of a python, lizards, an ogene gong, and a fan (all familiar uli motifs), there is also a series of three-dimensional carved clay figures extending out from the wall. The latter appears to include two male figures, a mother and child, and a female alusi figure. A further figure can be made out on the side wall on the right of the photograph. Although Thomas refers to the building as “Ochiche's house,” this is again likely to be a shrine rather than a residence. Thomas also photographed other locations such as the “Obu of Ochiche” and the “Sacrificing place of Ochiche,” suggesting the shrine was located in the compound of a prominent individual named Ochiche. During our fieldwork in Agulu, however, this name was not recognized nor could the location of such a compound be identified.

The most detailed photographic documentation of an uli-painted structure made by N.W. Thomas was of the “Ngene house” in Nibo. Thomas visited Nibo in June 1911 (Fig. 10). Ngene is a male alusi. In nearby Enugu Ukwu, Ngene's female consort is Ogwugwu, whose shrine Thomas photographed in Agulu. There are many Ngene shrines in Nibo, including Ngene Okweafa, Ngene Ezeonyia, Ngene Ukwu, and Ngene Igweagu. During our fieldwork in Nibo, the shrine that Thomas photographed in 1911 was identified as that called Ngene Ngendo. This is the shrine of the Ngene whose mother is the deity Udo, whose own shrine is close by and was also photographed by Thomas. The name “Ngendo” is a compound of “Ngene” and “Udo.”

During our fieldwork, we discussed Thomas's photographs with two elders, Nwoye Okoye Ogbuefi (one of the priests of Ngene Okweafa) and Evelyn Echeta. Evelyn Echeta had herself participated in the painting of the Ngendo shrine walls in 1953-1954. Our interlocutors explained that the decoration of the walls would be done by younger women and girls in the days leading up to Ikpo Ngene, the festival of the Ngene alusi. Those participating were from families who were adherents of Ngene.

Echeta elaborated that the painting of the walls was a festive occasion in itself. The young women would bring food with them. We were told that of the approximately forty participants, only about five would actually create the uli artworks. The majority of the women would support them by fetching water, preparing the colors, and so on. The decorative motifs, while expressive of a wider shared cosmology and aesthetic, were also matters of personal choice on the part of the artists. The designs were inspired by plants, animals, celestial bodies, and personal objects as well as including abstract forms. Interestingly, when we discussed Thomas's photographs of the Ngene shrine walls with community members, it was not the iconography of the uli designs that elicited most interest; rather our informants were most animated when recalling the sociality associated with the process of making this communal art. Without excluding the possibility of individual stylistic expression, the act of uli mural-making was itself an arena for social interaction; not only a “product of a larger cosmology and network of sociality” (Fredericks and Bradfield 2021: 38), but also generative of such shared knowledges, experiences, and worldviews.

Recalling her own participation in uli-making in Nibo, Echeta explained that the designs were painted using a stick that had been crushed at one end to create an improvised fiber brush. The colored paints were made from pigments sourced from the local environment: nchala, a yellow clay deposit sourced from a local stream; nzu, crushed white kaolin chalk; ufie, a dark red pigment from ground camwood; and anunu, a type of leaf that is mixed with unyi (charcoal). Each of these would be mixed with water to create the yellow, white, red, and black colors used in the paintings.

The painted mud wall was used to separate the sacred space of the shrine (ebede alusi) from the wider enclosure, which the public was permitted to access. The wall was topped with a thatched roof (aju) to protect it from being weathered away during the rainy season. It is difficult to ascertain the layout of the walls from Thomas's photographs—in one image there is a gateway, through which one can see a second wall, which is also painted with uli motifs. It is not clear if this is a separate structure or the back wall of the large enclosure. The designs include many “classic” uli motifs, including odu enyi (elephant tusk), eke (python) and enyo (mirror), as well as anthropomorphic figures (Figs. 11-12).

As part of our fieldwork, we attended the Iwa Ji Ngendo (Ngene New Yam Festival) in Nibo in September 2019. We were invited to set up an exhibition of Thomas's photographs taken in Nibo, including those of the Ngene shrine walls, which attracted much interest. During the festival the area around the Ngendo shrine was filled with people bringing offerings for Ngene and seeking the intercession of the Ngene priests to pray for them to the deity. Although the beautifully painted walls that Thomas photographed in 1911 are now little more than eroded banks of earth, they still delineate the most sacred space of the shrine (Fig. 13).

N.W. Thomas visited the town of Nise in August 1911. Here he photographed the decorated walls of the Mpuniyi shrine in a section of the town called Ara (Fig. 14). One of the interesting aspects of the uli decoration technique at this shrine is the combination of painting and relief work (Fig. 15). As with the other sites discussed here, Thomas did not publish any details of the shrine in his reports and no fieldnotes survive. During fieldwork in Nise, however, we met Felix Nweke Echele, the son of the last chief priest of Mpuniyi, and together with the stories of other elders, we were able to learn much about the shrine. When we were first shown the area we were told: “This is Mpuniyi, but the shrine is no more.” While the shrine is gone, the area remains an important sacralized space.

The Mpuniyi shrine took its name from the wider area in which it is situated, all of which is regarded as sacred. Behind the shrine the land falls away into a deep gulley along which runs the Olulu Mpuniyi stream. Water issues from the rocky sides of the gulley from a number of springs. The water from the stream is regarded as having healing power. Traditionally water was collected from the stream by a man especially designated for the task and brought to the shrine, where it was used for washing, cooking, and other ritual purposes. While fetching the water to the shrine, this man had to be naked and had to hold a palm leaf (omu nkwu) between his lips. He was not permitted to talk with anyone, and could not place the pot containing the water on the bare earth.

Felix's father, Echele Edolu, died in 1966 when Felix was just six years old. The man who was to succeed as chief priest did not take up the position, however, due to his Christian faith, and another priest could not be found. As a result the shrine went into decline and the building eventually collapsed. In the 1980s, a village hall and school were built in the vicinity, and in 2005 a large Catholic church dedicated to St. Peter and St. Paul was established on the site (Fig. 16). By this time, the majority of the people of Ara were Christians. In the gulley an “adoration ground” was established and various concrete statues inspired by biblical scenes were erected. In 2012, the adoration ground and the Mpuniyi stream itself were blessed by the Catholic bishop of the Awka Diocese in order to Christianize them. Just as people came from far and wide to seek the blessings of the Mpuniyi deity, crowds now come to the adoration ground to pray and take the holy water. It is a very interesting example of the sacred power of an indigenous deity and its shrine being appropriated by the Christian religion, and hence the Christianization of the Igbo sacred landscape.

Thomas spent a considerable amount of time in Agukwu Nri during his 1910-1911 anthropological survey. In May 1911, he photographed the remarkable uli designs on what he described as the “market house” (Fig. 17). During our fieldwork in Agukwu Nri, this was identified as the Iyiazi shrine, which was located in the Afo market place in Amaeze, in the Agbagdana section of Agukwu Nri. Iyiazi is the main alusi of Amaeze. Traditionally the women of Amaeze would decorate the shrine in the lead up to the annual Ife Iyiazi festival.

The uli paintings of the Iyiazi shrine in Agukwu Nri are perhaps the most documented in Igboland. Most of this documentation has, however, taken place in the last fifty years and records various attempts to revive the uli art tradition. To the best of our knowledge, Thomas's photographs taken in 1911 are the only record of the paintings from a time when the Iyiazi cult and its festival were still thriving. According to Elizabeth Willis, the first time that the shrine was painted after the Biafran War was in 1972 in connection with the opening of the Odinani Museum. This museum was established by the Ibadan-based anthropologist Michael Angulu Onwuejeogwu on a plot adjacent to the Afo market and therefore close to the shrine. A student at the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, H.T. Agbogu, photographed the designs that the Amaeze women painted in 1972 and again in 1973 for his BA dissertation (Agbogu 1974).

Unfortunately, the shrine again fell into disrepair. Then, in 1983, the Nsukka-based artists Obiora Udechukwu and Chike Aniakor, along with the American art historian Herbert Cole, led a project to restore the shrine walls and commission the women artists of Amaeze to repaint them. Udechukwu photographed the dilapidated state of the walls prior to the renovation and reported with regret that: “It captures graphically not just the decline of physical structures but the decline of a whole system of beliefs, practices, social and economic relations, art, and culture in general” (cited in Willis 1997: 165). Some fifty women were enlisted to paint new murals as part of the project. The process and completed paintings were documented thoroughly and have been published in various books and articles on uli (e.g., Cole and Aniakor 1984) (Fig. 19).

The cycle of decline and revival has occurred repeatedly. In 2003-2004, Udechukwu returned to Nri, this time with his younger Nsukka colleague Chuu Krydz Ikwuemesi, to lead another restoration and repainting project. Ikwuemesi, in turn, recruited the assistance of another young art historian, Okechukwu Nwafor, who was then completing his MFA at Nnamdi Azikiwe University, Awka. In his essay about the project in Uli and the Politics of Culture (Ikwuemesi 2005), Ikwuemesi notes that it was very difficult reassembling the women artists who had worked with Udechukwu twenty years earlier. Many were now very elderly or had died, others declined the invitation to participate, explaining that they had now converted to Christianity. Udechukwu, Ikwuemesi, and Nwafor eventually located twelve women, most of whom were from other towns but who had married into Nri families, to work on the project. Ikwuemesi explains that they brought their own uli traditions to the work.

We made several trips to Agukwu Nri as part of the [Re:] Entanglements project. The Iyiazi shrine was undergoing a further transformation at this time. The walls at the original shrine site were no longer standing, though the sacred trees of the shrine still stood in the old market place (now flanked by modern buildings). The Odinani Museum itself had long-since fallen into disrepair and was in the process of being restored by the local philanthropist Chief Charles Tabansi. As part of the restoration, the location of the shrine was moved to a site immediately adjacent to the museum and new concrete walls were erected around it. For the reopening of the museum in December 2018, the walls of the newly relocated Iyiazi shrine were painted with uli motifs by a group of art students from Nnamdi Azikiwe University, under the direction of Tony Otikpa, a retired art lecturer resident in Nri (Fig. 20). Since 2018, the market place has been given a further make-over: the trees at the original shrine site have been removed, and the old market square has been paved to form a forecourt to the Museum.

Although still associated with the Iyiazi shrine, the uli murals at Agukwu Nri are no longer the communal work of the women of Amaeze and no longer painted in anticipation of the traditional Iyiazi festival. Rather, they have become secular works carried out by young, professionally trained artists from the local university. Indeed, the uli paintings have effectively become an extension of the Odinani Museum itself. Like other artworks and artifacts in its collection, they represent vestiges of a precolonial Igbo world driven to the brink of extinction by colonial modernity and Christianity; remnants of a flourishing culture salvaged as cultural heritage and conserved in the museum, but no longer generative of a shared cosmology or networks of sociality. This sense of a lost world was frequently expressed by community members during our fieldwork when we showed them Thomas's photographs of uli. As such, the return of the ethnographic archive elicited mixed feelings, its visual evidence of precolonial cultural flourishing serving also as a reminder of the profound existential losses incurred as a consequence of colonialism.

And yet, of course, the “erasure” of Igbo culture has not been complete. This incompleteness is evident in the different ways the “curious paintings” photographed by Thomas are remembered as both presences and absences in the various locations we have discussed in this article: in the recognition of “Ogugu” and puzzlement over “Ochiche” in Agulu; in the sacred space delineated by a wall that no longer stands in Nibo; in the conscious appropriation of the supernatural powers of Mpuniyi by the Catholic church in Nise; and in the “musealization” of the Iyiazi shrine in Agukwu Nri. On the one hand, as absences, they reflect a “process of deculturation” and devaluation of “Igbo autochthonous ideas” (Ikwuemesi 2019: 187-88). On the other hand, however, as residual presences and traces, they attest to the resilience of Igbo cultural traditions. Mixed with nostalgia for what has been lost, the return of the colonial anthropologist's photographs of uli represence an “artistic cosmology” and contribute to its revalorization, even as cultural heritage. As prints of Thomas's images are added to the displays of the Odinani Museum, they, too, become resources in a local project of “cultural rearmament” (Ikwuemesi 2019: 187-88).

In the 110 years since Thomas's anthropological survey of the Nri-Awka area, uli has disappeared as a vernacular art in Igboland. While now only remembered as an absence in its communal context, uli has, however, survived—and indeed thrived—as an inspiration to generations of fine art practitioners in Nigeria, particularly those associated with the Nsukka School. Here, then, professional artists, art schools, and galleries have had a crucial role in maintaining traditional Igbo arts such as uli, albeit in transformed forms. In the absence of a living vernacular practice of uli mural-making or body-painting, it might be argued that the colonial visual archive has also become crucial as a primary repository of traditional uli imagery: a reservoir for contemporary artists and designers to drawn upon in the project of decolonial “reculturation.”

As well as retracing Thomas's journeys in Nigeria and Sierra Leone and returning copies of archival photographs and sound recordings to the local communities in the locations that were documented, the [Re:]Entanglements project has also shared the materials with Nigerian and Sierra Leonean artists, musicians, and storytellers and invited them to reengage with the archive through their creative practice. These creative collaborations have involved different partners and approaches and have focused on different parts of the collections. The results of these projects have been displayed in a series of exhibitions, juxtaposing the contemporary works produced with the historical materials that have inspired them (e.g., Basu 2019a, 2019b; Borgatti 2023).

One of these collaborative projects was with artists associated with the Department of Fine and Applied Art at Nsukka. This focused specifically on the archival legacies of Thomas's 1910-1911 Awka District tour, and culminated in the [Re:] Entangled Traditions exhibition that we co-curated at the University of Nigeria in February 2020 (Basu 2020). In their contemporary responses, the Nsukka-based artists engaged with different traditional Igbo artforms represented in the archives, including wood carving, hairdressing, scarification and, of course, Thomas's documentation of uli.

Here, we briefly discuss three of the participating artists’ works, juxtaposed with the artists’ own reflections on the significance of their encounter with the archive based on interviews conducted with the artists. Among the works that were featured in the [Re:]Entangled Traditions exhibition, those of the three artists demonstrate the most explicit engagement with Thomas's uli photographs.

Chinyere Odinukwe is one of the younger generation of artists that we collaborated with in Nsukka. She completed a BA in Fine and Applied Arts at the University of Nigeria in 2007, followed by an MA in 2015. Although Odinukwe grew up in Abuja, her maternal home town is Nibo, and it was the photographs that Thomas and his assistants took in Nibo in June 1911 to which she was especially drawn. In her painting Akwamkosa Achalugonwayi (Fig. 21), Odinukwe collages together elements from different archival photographs in her composition. This includes profile and full-face “physical type” photographs of a young woman named Nwambeke (Fig. 22). Instead of the blank photographic backcloth of the originals, Odinukwe places her portraits of Nwambeke on a background that incorporates uli designs inspired by those in Thomas's photographs of the Ngene shrine in Nibo previously discussed (Fig. 22, right). The intricate swirls and spirals of Nwambeke's coiffure reproduced from the original photograph reinforce the contiguity between uli and other Igbo body arts.

While Odinukwe has recollections of seeing uli murals on childhood visits to Nibo, it was only after she began her studies at Nsukka that she understood what they were. Having been introduced to the archival photographs as part of the [Re:]Entanglements collaboration, she visited her aunts in Nibo to learn more. Reflecting on the significance of the archive, she explained:

But Odinukwe is not uncritical of the past and her painting does not merely reproduce the archive. Where her portrait of Nwambeke departs most significantly from the archival original is in her wrapper (akwamkosa) and earrings. Odinukwe explains that she wanted to dress Nwambeke in a dazzling contemporary fabric to create a dialogue between present and past, and particularly to consider the changing status of women in Nigerian society. As Odinukwe elaborates:

RitaDoris Edumchieke Ubah is a Lecturer in Textile Art at Nsukka, where she also studied for her BA, MFA, and PhD. Ubah's late aunt was herself a traditional uli artist. When Ubah started teaching at Nsukka, she was fascinated by artists’ incorporation of uli traditions into different forms of contemporary art. She realized, however, that, while fine art practitioners were reimagining uli through drawing, painting, and ceramics, this had been underexplored in the field of textile art. Thus Ubah was keen to bring uli into the curriculum as well as into her own textile practice, whether through weaving, embroidery, knitting, or appliqué work.

Ubah was particularly excited to discover the rich historical documentation of uli in Thomas's photographs. She describes the archive as a “comprehensive primary source,” and a “landmark resource.” As part of the [Re:]Entanglements collaboration, Ubah produced a number of works that incorporated motifs directly inspired by the uli designs documented in the photographs. These included a fashion collection, which was modelled at the opening of the [Re:]Entangled Traditions exhibition in Nsukka (Fig. 23). Most spectacular, however, was a three-meter wide appliqué work entitled Igbo Kwenu. The uli motifs incorporated into Igbo Kwenu are, again, direct quotations from Thomas's photographs, particularly his documentation of the uli murals and relief designs that he encountered in Agulu (Fig. 24; see also Figs. 8-9).

For Ubah it is the “authenticity” of the historical artworks documented in the archive that is most important. This is especially significant given that the artform is an ephemeral one. Ubah had learnt much from her aunt, who had been born around the time of Thomas's anthropological surveys, but what was conveyed to her was, of course, an oral tradition. Ubah explained that now she had access to an authentic visual source: “When people ask me what this uli is all about, now I just show them the photographs.”⁷ As Ubah and others continue to decolonize the art historical curriculum at Nsukka, the colonial archive has become an essential resource for her teaching. Ubah elaborates:

Much of this essay has been written as a dialogue with Chuu Krydz Ikwuemesi's work. Ikwuemesi has been associated with Nsukka since 1987. As an undergraduate, he made a study of uli in the work of the founding figures of the Nsukka School, and, having worked closely with Obiora Udechukwu and Chike Aniakor, he has continued this tradition in his own creative practice. It was with Ikwuemesi that we made our first visit to Agukwu Nri.

As part of the [Re:]Entanglements collaboration, Ikwuemesi produced a series of paintings entitled Playing with Time and Memory (Fig. 25), drawing both upon Thomas's historical documentation of uli murals and the history of reengagement with the uli tradition at Nsukka over more than fifty years. The work speaks of continuity, including continuities of change and innovation, which has always been essential to art. “The history of African art is a continuum,” Ikwuemesi states.

Indeed, Ikwuemesi's longstanding commitment has been to champion the “revernacularization” of the art of uli. He envisages uli again becoming part of everyday life in Nigeria, not in the rarefied world of fine art, but in contemporary commercial design, fashion, and home furnishings. “Uli can go anywhere,” Ikwuemesi argues. “It could be on anything.”¹⁰ The women who once decorated the walls of shrines with uli, such as those photographed by Thomas, have long since passed away, but Ikwuemesi ponders how younger generations might engage with this tradition. “How can they relate with these things?” he asks.

This article has sought to raise awareness of a remarkable, but hitherto neglected photographic archive documenting the Igbo art of uli when it was still a flourishing cultural practice in the early twentieth century. Uli was then part of a wider aesthetic sensibility, both expressive of, and generative of, a cosmological and communal order that would be fundamentally transformed by colonialism and Christianity. In the continued devaluation of indigenous Igbo culture, including among Igbo people themselves, Chuu Krydz Ikwuemesi observes how the colonial condition is ongoing in postcolonial Nigeria. As an act of resistance, Ikwuemesi argues that “the Igbo need to rearm culturally” to fight back against this process, and that “their arts,” including uli, “must be chief among the arsenal” (2019: 198).

While Ikwuemesi's call to arms is directed to Igbo artists, creative producers and communities in Nigeria, we must acknowledge that the arsenal of Igbo arts may be found in many different locations, including sequestered in colonial archives such as we have explored here. Freeing Northcote Thomas's photographs of uli from their archival confinement, returning them to the communities in which they were taken, and recirculating them to the current generation of artists at Nsukka, enables us to understand something of the affective ambivalence with which they are received. While they undoubtedly presence the absence of uli as a living vernacular art and call to mind the losses imposed on Igbo societies by colonialism, they also represent a “landmark resource” affording access to an “authentic” historical record capable of inspiring new works and interpretations. Uli was never a static art, and Ikwuemesi sees little value salvaging it merely as “a shrivelled commodity to revive and exploit” (2019: 198). The vision worth fighting for is the restoration of the social and cosmological role of indigenous arts as “a living agency that can fertilize the present” (Ikwuemesi 2019: 198). In respect of this decolonial struggle, we can at least call upon institutions responsible for caring for colonial ethnographic archives, such as that resulting from Thomas's anthropological surveys, to ensure this matériel is made available and accessible to those whose heritage it documents and for whom it is most important in the fight for a cultural future.