The art of Chris
Ofili causes offense to powerful interest
groups the way that his historical
subject, The Virgin Mary, caused and still
causes offense to the non sensibility
of certain communities of interpretation.
The idea of a virgin mother was
abominable in her historical era and she
would have been stoned to death
had the New Age man, Joseph, not accepted
to play the role of a surrogate
father to the child of his fiancee.
This is why we should
avoid religious sectarianism and political
posturing in our reading of
what seems to be a historical excavation
by Ofili for the purpose of recovering
a lost tradition that is threatened with
extinction. This work by Ofili
seems to argue that The Virgin Mary was
black. There is anthropological
evidence in support of this argument. For
example, Frazier's classic comparative
anthropology, The Golden Bough, documents
evidence that ancient Egypt was
the first to develop the mythology of the
Virgin Mother of the Sun God
whose birth day was celebrated on the 25th
day of December many centuries
before the birth of Jeso Christi.
If Mary was blonde
and blue eyed the way that Western artists
portray her, it is impossible
to understand why the Roman army and
owners of Motels could have turned
away a heavily pregnant blonde and blue
eyed mother on the pretext that
the motels were full. Such a treatment is
reserved for black couples in
racist cultures although racism would not
be the same in those days as
it is today. Even with a husband, the
pregnant virgin could not find lodging
in any hotel because she was a Black
Madonna. Toni Morrison narrates this
painful aspect of the black experience in
her latest novel, Paradise, where
even heavily pregnant black women were
refused rest and forced to trek
for miles to virgin land. The Black
Madonna was turned away with the familiar
excuse, 'No blacks, no donkeys, no
bullshit'. And so, we are told, the
holy Bambino had to be born surrounded by
sheep, donkeys and, of course,
smeared with dung!
If this was not enough
indication of the lowly origin of the
beloved Christ, we are told that
the Virgin Mary was chosen because she was
a maid, not a princess or a
queen. Those who deny her African ancestry
are forced to agree that the
Wise Men came with gifts from Africa. The
star that guided them was an
Eastern Star, right? They had to be in
Africa in order to follow an Eastern
Star to Jerusalem. If they were from
Persia in the European continent,
as some white supremacists would have us
believe, then the Eastern star
would have led them to Moscow. They were
from the East, not the Middle
East and not from the Far East.
Geographically, that East is Africa
because
Jerusalem is to the East of Africa and so
travelers who follow an Eastern
Star to Jerusalem must have started their
journey from Africa.
Historically, there
is evidence that the young family fled to
Africa to save the life of the
young Christ. Mary fled home to her
kinsmen and kinswomen in Africa and
she was taken care of, no questions asked,
because Africans have had a
longer tradition of belief in the ability
of virgins to have Divine children.
This is similar to the story in Chinua
Achebe's Things Fall Apart where
Okonkwo had to go to Mbanta, his maternal
kindred, when he was forced into
exile by calamity. So the thesis of
Ofili's essay is not as strange or
as offensive as it seems. The Virgin Mary
was and could only have been
black.
Chris Ofili is not
only a Catholic but also almost a Christ
by name! His essay is challenging
Modernist ideas of progress and increased
human happiness to acknowledge
that the Virgin Mary is a sad figure today
due mainly to neglect and ridicule.
He seems to have demonstrated, indirectly,
that King Herod is still in
power in New York and that he is still
ordering the massacre of innocent
creations. The controversy over the work
reminds us that in spite of the
posturing to being an enlightened age, we
still clamor for the dung-smeared
virgin to be excluded from respectable
Guest Houses and confined to the
manger once more. The same people who are
chanting the rosary in condemnation
of a homage to the Black Madonna would
have been the first to chant, 'Crucify
him, crucify him!' when Pilate gave them a
chance to parole the innocent
lamb.
Ofili seems to be
arguing that the true origins of the Black
Madonna have been hidden, downtrodden
like dung; but that the Black Madonna is
far from being a waste product.
Rather, the dung represents manure,
fertility, a source of life and a source
of fuel, energy and strength. Blackness
signifies dung to white supremacists
except when it says that their bank
account is in the black - an obvious
reference to slave-holding measures of
wealth and worth.
Do you know that
in Scotland, there is a mythology of the
black foot? If the first person
to step into your house after the New Year
is black, that is an omen of
affluence or in plain English, an
indication that you will have your own
house slaves to wait at your own great
table. John Dunn, the Scottish poet
illustrates this with a poem about 'One
Blackamoore' in which a French
merchant gave the king of Scotland a gift
of an African Princess. The black
woman was so beautiful that the king
decided to organize royal battles
in her honor. The prize for the winner
was that they had to kiss her black
ass. Of course, the king always won the
battles! This is probably why
many European cultures have cults
dedicated to the worship of the Black
Madonna in the spirit of capitalism,
hoping to be made rich and prosperous
at the same time that they were using a
ship called The Jesus to engineer
the African holocaust.
Jesus Christ once
told his disciples that if no one believed
his gospel, he would turn rocks
into his obedient followers. Chris Ofili
seems to be saying that Westerners
no longer believe in virginity, period.
Anyone who remains a virgin until
marriage today in the West is to be pitied
and ridiculed rather than admired
or venerated. Similarly the elephant was,
once upon a time, a venerated
being around the world. Indians worshiped
it and tamed it to transport
them to war, Hannibal used it to carry his
strong army to Europe, the Igbo
of Nigeria sing a victory song that
compares them to a community of elephants
(Enyi Mba Enyi) - suggesting strength,
fearlessness, intelligence, resilience,
respect for elders and egalitarianism all
at once.
But the elephant
has since become a laughing stock. Wole
Soyinka, the Nobel Laureate, laments
this in his elegy to Ajanaku, a dead
elephant whose skeleton and yam pounding
mortar-sized molars are awesome and whose
spirit seemed to be imploring
humanity to celebrate the living elephant
and not the dead one. Today,
the elephant is more to be remembered for
such laughable metaphors as a
white elephant or an ivory tower. The
French came to West Africa and did
not see the elephants, how much less their
mountainous dung. All they saw
was ivory in a place that they tried to
name the Ivory Coast! That was
a better name, however, compared to the
British who called the coast a
Slave Coast long before it occurred to
them that Gold Coast sounded better.
Ofili seems to be
saying that the miracle of the elephant
dung (how could one being do such
a mountain of poo?) has been ignored,
denigrated, marginalized for too
long. He goes on to show that some
cultures still value the dung for
fertility
and energy reasons. The lesson of his work
of art is that Africans should
take this to a higher level of technology.
Africans should re-learn the
culture of taming the elephant for
transportation, agricultural and energy
purposes.
The wider lesson
from Ofili's essay is that we should try
to see the beauty in things that
are different. We should be more tolerant
of diversity or we will continue
the genocidal culture of massacring the
innocent just to keep a clique
in power. You do not have to be a Catholic
or a Rocket Scientist to know
that the vilification of Ofili is ill
informed. Let us join him and chant
the rosary, 'Hail Black Maria'!
First Published in 1999 'Ofili’s Black Madonna', October 26, http://www.artnespaper.com/flash/Agozino.htm
also published in The Guardian, October 31, http://ngrguasrdiannews.com/editorial/en765801.htm
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