Remembering Chief Susanne Wenger - Àdùnní Olórìṣà...

Chief Susanne Wenger MFR,  1915 – 12 January 2009). 

Chief Susanne Wenger MFR, also known as Adunni Olorisha, was an Austrian-Nigerian artist, illustrator and comics artist, who resided in Nigeria. Her main focus was the Yoruba culture and she was successful in building an artist cooperative in Osogbo.

EARLY LIFE

Susanne Wenger was born in Graz, Austria. She is the daughter of an English and French high school teacher and a mother born to a high ranking Austro-Hungarian army officer. Wenger attended the School of Applied Arts in Graz in 1930, specializing in pottery. She later continued her studies, first at the Higher Graphical Federal Education and Research Institute and then at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna alongside, among others, Herbert Boeckl. While at the academy, she learned the fresco technique and improved on her drawing skills.

After the end of the war, Wenger was an employee of the communist children's magazine Unsere Zeitung ("Our Newspaper"), which was the cover of the first edition she designed. In 1947 she was invited by friends to co-found the Vienna Art Club. In Vienna, during and after the war, many of her works were experimental, drawing inspiration from spirituality; these works included surreal colored pencil drawings and surreal images difficult to decipher.

In 1947, Wenger traveled to Italy, the trip was given to her as a prize for winning a poster competition. After her return, she found some success selling her works to an art dealer, Johann Egger, who also held works by Hans Arp, Paul Klee and Piet Mondrian.

After living in Italy and Switzerland and upon the suggestion of Egger, in 1949 Wenger went to Paris, where she met her future husband, the linguist Ulli Beier. That same year, Beier was offered a position as a phoneticist in Ibadan, Nigeria. When he was offered a position as a phonetician in Ibadan, Nigeria, shortly afterwards, they decided to marry so she could accompany him.

The couple quickly assimilated in Nigeria, he as a teacher and she as an artist, but they moved from Ibadan to the nearby town of Ẹdẹ in 1950 to escape what Wenger called the "artificial university compound". In Ẹdẹ, she met one of the last priests of the rapidly disappearing, ancestral-based Òrìṣa religion. She quickly became engrossed in his life and rituals, even though at that time she spoke no Yoruba. "Our only intercourse was the language of the trees," she said later.

Wenger and Beier ultimately divorced, with Wenger later marrying local drummer Lasisi Ayansola Onilu, by which time she was establishing herself as an active participant in the revival of the Orisha religion. Wenger left Ede and moved to Ilobu, before she finally settled at Osogbo in 1961. While living in the town, she became interested in the shrines dedicated to Orishas; she later rebuilt many of the religious carvings within sacred places and was also commissioned by the Osogbo District Council to renovate many of the local shrines, in particular the shrine dedicated to the river goddess, Oshun. Wenger was also initiated into the cults of Obatala, Soponna, and Ogboni, and was later given the chieftaincy title of Adunni Olorisha.

She was founder of the archaic-modern art school "New Sacred Art", a branch of the wider Oshogbo school, and became the guardian of the Sacred Grove of the Osun goddess on the banks of the Osun River in Oshogbo.

 On 12 January 2009, Wenger died at the age of 93 in Oshogbo.

She worked hard to revive Yorùbá among Nigerians who had drifted away from it.

LEGACY AND HONOUR

The sculptures that were placed in Oshun's grove from the late 1950s onwards, sculptures that were created by her followers and local artists, have belonged to the UNESCO World Heritage Site since 2005.

In 2005, the Nigerian government admitted her as a member of the Order of the Federal Republic.

For her efforts on behalf of the Yoruba, she was given a chieftaincy title of the Osogbo community by the king, or Ataoja, of Oshogbo.