The Conflict

Conflict depicts the scene in Chinua Achebe's novel Things Fall Apart (1958) in which powerful Egwugwu masks and their attendants converge on the Umuofia village church, as the mortified Reverend Smith and his interpreter stand between the surging crowd and the soon-to-be-destroyed church

Although Conflict is based on a work of fiction, it invokes a moment in imagined history in which heroic action achieved immediate but temporary

It was a sacred spring, close to his family home in Nimo, which some local Christians had threatened to destroy through fishing. Uche Okeke demonstrated in this painting, his disgust at the attitude of the new Christian converts in destroying Igbo tradition.