People · 1940 to today
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Muraina Oyelami went to Osogbo to drum for a theatre company. A free paint workshop turned him into one of the first Osogbo painters, and he ended up a chief back home in Iragbiji.
Iragbiji is a small town in Osun State, a short drive from Osogbo. Muraina Oyelami was born there on 21 February 1940, and before he was ever a painter he was a drummer.
In 1962 he joined the theatre company of Duro Ladipo, the Yoruba playwright whose folk operas about kings and gods were filling halls in the early 1960s. Oyelami acted on stage and played in the band. He took the drumming seriously. Between 1963 and 1965 he trained on the dundun, the talking drum, under Oba Laoye, who was the Timi of Ede, a king who was also a master drummer. At the same time he studied the bata drum with Ayantunji Amoo of Okinni and with Abeyefo of Iseyin. Think about that for a second: a young man from a small town, learning the drum language of his people directly from a reigning king.
The troupe travelled. In 1964 it went to Germany for the Berlin Festival, and in 1965 to Britain for the Commonwealth Arts Festival. So Oyelami saw Europe as a performer before anyone there had heard of him as an artist.
Years later he wrote a short book about this part of his life, My Life in the Duro Ladipo Theatre, published in Bayreuth in 1982. And he never let the drum go. In 1989 he published a guide to dundun music with a new way of writing it down and five drum repertoires. In 1985 he played on an album with the German band Embryo. In 1998 he was the musical director for a Manchester production of Wole Soyinka's Death and the King's Horseman and wrote its score. Painting came along, but drumming was always the first language.
In 1964 there was a summer school at the Mbari Mbayo club in Osogbo, the artists' and writers' club linked to Ulli Beier and his wife Georgina. Georgina Beier ran a painting workshop, and Oyelami went along. Many of the people who came were not trained artists at all. Some, like him, were actors and musicians from Ladipo's company.
His own memory of it is the best description anyone has given. Georgina never told them what to paint, he said. She just handed out materials. They did not know what she was looking for, but they loved doing it, because they had never seen so much paint, so much colour. He said the workshop taught them to see their own potential, and that he, Bisi Fabunmi, Rufus Ogundele and Twins Seven-Seven each found a new side of themselves there. Making a painting, he said, was like walking into unknown territory with nothing but your own honesty to guide you.
That workshop became the root of what the world now calls Osogbo art, and Oyelami was in its first generation. He went on to printmaking classes with the Dutch artist Ru van Rossem. His early oil paintings were close to abstract, pictures of city life built from strong lines and muted colours. By the 1980s his work had become more figurative.
When he first showed in Edinburgh in 1967, critics compared him to Paul Klee and Modigliani. He had never seen their work. That tells you less about him than about the critics, who seemed to need a European name to make sense of what they were looking at. Over the next twenty years his work travelled widely: London, Paris, Prague, New Delhi, Los Angeles, New York, Washington, Berlin. His 1971 painting Birds in the Garden is now in the Smithsonian's National Museum of African Art. Another from the same year, Village on the Hillside, is in a collection in Tasmania, on the other side of the world from Iragbiji.
For all that travel, the story keeps circling back to Osun. Oyelami studied at the University of Ife, getting a certificate in dramatic arts with a focus on theatre design, and from 1976 to 1987 he taught traditional music and dance there. He made mosaics for the university too; his first pair, on the health sciences building, was finished in 1975. In 1982 he became the first African artist-in-residence at Iwalewa-Haus, the African art centre at the University of Bayreuth in Germany. In 1993 Ulli Beier edited a book of his life in his own words, called Abefe.
At home he founded the Obatala Centre for Creative Arts in Iragbiji. And on 14 February 1993 the town made him a chief, the Eesa of Iragbiji. So the boy who left to beat drums for a travelling theatre came back to sit among the town's senior chiefs.
He did not treat that as retirement. In 2018, at 78, he opened the Abeni Visual and Performing Art Institute in Iragbiji and became its artistic director. It teaches young people the things he spent his life on: printmaking, textile design, painting, and drum making. In 2021, on his 81st birthday, he launched a dance company as well.
What is striking about Oyelami's story is how little of it was planned. He went to Osogbo for theatre. He went to the workshop because it was there. And a few days with free paint turned a talking-drum student into a painter whose work hangs in Washington. But he never had to choose between the two lives. In Iragbiji today the painter and the drummer are the same man, and he is still teaching both.
