Mbari Mbayo Club African arts club - Ekemode Damilare Seun

Mbari Mbayo Club, club established for African writers, artists, and musicians at Ibadan and Oshogbo in Nigeria. The first Mbari Club was founded in Ibadan in 1961 by a group of young writers with the help of Ulli Beier, a teacher at the University of Ibadan. Mbari, an Igbo (Ibo) word for “creation,” refers to the traditional painted mud houses of the area, which must be renewed periodically. The Ibadan club operated an art gallery and theatre and published works by Nigerian artists and Black Orpheus, a journal of African and African American literature.
Duro Ladipo, a Yoruba playwright, was inspired to start a similar club in Oshogbo, then a city of 250,000 people, about 50 miles (80 km) northeast of Ibadan. With the help of Beier, he converted his father’s house into an art gallery and a theatre, where he produced his plays. The Oshogbo club became more than a meeting place for intellectuals. Because it was on the main road, the club attracted women on the way to the market, hunters, chiefs, kings, schoolchildren, farmers, politicians, and the unemployed, and it became a vital part of Oshogbo life. The name of the club was inadvertently altered when the Igbo word mbari was mistaken for the Yoruba phrase mbari mbayo, meaning “when we see it we shall be happy.” To reach the local, mostly Yoruba audience, Ladipo drew upon Yoruba mythology, drumming, dance, and poetry and soon developed a kind of Yoruba opera.
Beier organized art workshops in Ibadan in 1961 and 1962 and at Oshogbo in 1962 to attract unemployed primary-school dropouts. The school was run to give the artists a committed, critical audience on the theory that their art would degenerate if subjected only to undiscerning tourists. The young artists drew on their traditions and their contemporary environment and rapidly created a fresh, sophisticated art. The problem of how to protect these artists from the easy tourist market was solved by social acceptance of the Mbari Mbayo Club, which provided a lively, local, outspoken audience; soon local groups commissioned palace murals, stage sets, church doors, and an Esso gasoline station. With this firm local support, the artists were able to sell to European collectors and send exhibits abroad without compromising their art.

Founded in 1961 by a diverse group of writers, visual artists, musicians and actors, and active throughout the 1960s, the Mbari Club was originally located in Ibadan's Dugbe Market, on the site of "an old Lebanese restaurant that was converted into an open-air performance venue, an art gallery, a library, and an office."^[3]

A number of well-known artists emerged from the Mbari Mbayo Club in Oshogbo. Twins Seven Seven was a dancer, drummer, and graphic artist; his themes were imaginative variations on Yoruba mythology and legend and were always full of humour. Jimoh Buraimoh was known for his mosaic compositions made with local beads, potsherds, or stones. Samuel Ojo worked in appliqué with cutout and embroidered fantasy-like figures. Ashiru Olatunde’s aluminum panels are found on Nigerian banks, churches, and bars and in private collections in Europe and America. His quiet folk art, which comments on Nigerian life, was as popular with farmers and market women as it was with intellectuals. Yemi Bisiri made lost-wax brass figures for the Ogboni cult, but in a contemporary style. Jinadu Oladepo created brass figures and bracelets and pendants that were worn by the Oshogbo artists as a kind of insignia. Senabu Oloyede and Kikelomo Oladepo both worked in cloth dyeing (traditionally reserved for women) and used the traditional indigo dye, producing works contemporary in style.
The success of the Mbari Mbayo Club lies as much in the artists it has produced as in its social impact on Oshogbo, for the club helped reaffirm the traditional interdependence between African art and African society.
While celebrating the creativity of Nigerian talent in the newly independent nation, Mbari "was an international environment, attracting artists from across Africa and beyond".^[9] The premieres of Soyinka's The Trials of Brother Jero and Clark's Song of a Goat were staged at Mbari, and internationally renowned artists were also invited to play or exhibit their work, including Langston Hughes, Jacob Lawrence, Pete Seeger.^[4] The club also initiated writing competitions.^[5]
As recalled by Lindsay Barrett, secretary of the Mbari Club from 1966 to 1967: "We were in a historic, literary setting ... when the civil war [1967–70] broke out and disintegrated everything."^[
The Mbari Club was a centre for cultural activity by African writers, artists and musicians that was founded in Ibadan, Nigeria, in 1961 by Ulli Beier, with the involvement of a group of young writers including Wole Soyinka and Chinua Achebe.^[1][2] Mbari, an Igbo concept related to "creation", was suggested as the name by Achebe.^[2][3] Among other Mbari members were Christopher Okigbo, J. P. Clark and South African writer Ezekiel Mphahlele, Frances Ademola, Demas Nwoko, Mabel Segun, Uche Okeke,^[3] Arthur Nortje and Bruce Onobrakpeya.^[4]
The Daily Telegraph in an obituary of Beier noted that "the Mbari Club became synonymous with the optimism and creative exuberance of Africa’s post-independence era. Fela Kuti made his debut as bandleader there, and it became a magnet for artists and writers from all over Africa, America and the Caribbean."^[1] In the words of Toyin Adepoju: "Coming to birth in the flux of the preindependence and immediate postindependence period in Nigeria, it brought together a constellation of artists whose work embodied the quality of transformation embodied by the aesthetic of creation, decay, and regeneration evoked by the Mbari tradition."^[5]
Closely connected with the literary magazine Black Orpheus, which Beier had founded in 1957, Mbari also acted as a publisher during the 1960s — considered to be the only African-based publisher of African literature at the time — producing 17 titles by African writers.^[6] Mbari published early works by Clark, Okigbo and Soyinka, poetry by Bakare Gbadamosi (Okiri, 1961), Alex La Guma (A Walk in the Night and Other Stories, 1962), Dennis Brutus (Sirens, Knuckles, Boots, 1963), Kofi Awoonor and Lenrie Peters,^[4] as well as translations of francophone poetry.^[3] Brutus was chosen as winner of the Mbari Prize, awarded to a black poet of distinction, but turned it down on the grounds of its racial exclusivity.^[