Published 27 November 2025 in The Man
Uche Okeke Legacy Editorial
Holding the Line in a Time of War
Between 1967 and 1970, Nigeria was at war with itself. In the East, blockades starved entire communities, bombs shattered cities, and cultural life seemed destined for silence. Yet in Enugu, the wartime capital of Biafra, artist and educator Uche Okeke refused to let creativity die. He sketched, wrote, and convened conversations in an underground salon where art became an act of resistance.
Uche Okeke, Help Biafran Refugees, 1968, linotype, 20 x 15 inches, Uche Okeke Legacy Collection
Salon in the Shadows
Okeke’s instinct for gathering people around ideas long predated the war. In the early 1960s, he and fellow artists had already built a cultural centre in Enugu (later the Asele Instutute), inspired by the Mbari clubs of Ibadan. These were spaces where writers, dramatists, and painters cross-pollinated ideas, staging exhibitions and performances.
When conflict made such institutions unsafe, Okeke found ways to continue - quietly. As Smarthistory notes, he “mobilized participants at the Mbari to produce art, literature and performances that reflected their experiences of the conflict.” This covert continuation wasn’t about grand events; it was about survival, exchange, and memory.
One of his works from just before the war, Refugee Family (linotype, 1966), is often seen as prophetic. Its figures, stark and alienated, outlined in bold Uli-inspired lines, seem suspended in displacement - an image of crisis even before the fighting began.
Uche Okeke,
Refugee Family, 1966, linotype, 40.3 x 30.3 cm, Uche Okeke Legacy
The Line as a Quiet Weapon
Okeke’s primary instrument was the line. In later reflection, he described line as “a living thing” able to evoke rhythm, movement, and emotion. (Uche Okeke Legacy) In war’s darkness, those lines traced not only bodies under strain but contours of memory, displacement, and survival.
His wartime pieces avoided grandiosity. They are modest in scale, symbolic rather than literal, circulated quietly. Around him poets, thinkers, visual artists gathered, not for public display, but for moral and cultural sustenance.
Rebuilding After Ruin
After the war ended in 1970, Okeke joined the University of Nigeria, Nsukka, as head of the Department of Fine and Applied Arts (1971–1983). There, he integrated lessons from wartime practice into pedagogy, nurturing what would become the Nsukka School where artists fused Uli, Nsibidi, and postcolonial modernism.
Ijeoma Loren Uche-Okeke, Okeke’s daughter and former director of the Asele Institute, has spoken about the Institute’s role in preserving his archival legacy: sketchbooks, manuscripts, lecture notes, correspondence. The Asele Institute stands as material proof of the continuity he preserved.
Lament for the Great Dead, Uche Okeke, n.d.
Reflections
No transcript of those wartime gatherings survives. What we know comes through fragments: sketchbooks, postwar interviews, and the testimony of collaborators like Obiora Udechukwu and Chike Aniakor, who both acknowledged the formative impact of working alongside Okeke in Biafra.
In times of rupture, Okeke held the line, literally and figuratively, ensuring that Nigerian modernism did not vanish in the smoke of war but emerged transformed, rooted, and renewed.
