Susanne Wenger “Adunni Olorisa”: Austrian woman who traded marriage for love of Nigerian culture
It’s eight years since the passing of Adunni Olorisa Susanne Wenger, the legendary Austrian artist who worked and lived in Oshogbo, South-West Nigeria, empowering local artistes and preserving the culture and heritage of the people for over sixty years.
Adunni Olorisa was born in 1915 and passed on at the beginning of 2009. Between the events of her birth and death, Olorisa, experienced art and culture in the West and in Africa. She settled for the latter.
She visited Europe after spending almost three decades in Nigeria but admitted to friends “I didn’t’ fit in”.
If linguist Ulli Beier had known taking Wenger to the African country would turn her into “Olorisa”, he probably would have had second thoughts about teaching Phonetics at the University of Ibadan.
The couple had met in Paris after Wenger moved there in 1949. They got married in London and moved to Nigeria after Beier took the Ibadan job. They later moved to Ede in Osun State. It was there the allure of Nigerian art and culture won Wenger over.
She was born to Swiss and Austrian parents, and attended the School of Applied Arts in Graz and the Higher Graphical Federal Education and Research Institute. She then studied at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna alongside, among others, Herbert Boeckl. In 1947 she co-founded the Vienna Art-Club.
If Beier wasn’t Wenger’s first love, art and culture were.
“It was impossible to grow up in Yorubaland in the 1970s and not be aware of Suzanne Wenger,” Muraina Oyelami, a chief in Iragbiji wrote after “Olorisa” went to the great beyond on January 12, 2009.
“In 1991 when I met her, I was aware of meeting with a legend. As usual, legends differ from the actual nature of the person or event that becomes legendary.
“The Suzanne Wenger I met was a small old woman already frail, who spoke a heavily Austrian-inflected but fluent Yoruba, and who looked at you with light-green eyes sharp as glass, highlighted by bold Egyptian style dark outlines.
“She spoke about her adopted children in Osogbo, about efforts to secure UNESCO protection for her work with the Osun Osogbo sacred grove and her struggle for continued relevance in a changing world.
“But surprisingly for me, after an hour of conversation, she spoke of her visit to Austria the previous year, and how out of place she felt,” he wrote.
Olorisa, according to the chief, said “I didn’t fit in”.
She had teamed up with Beier, her first love, to establish, according to Oyelami, “the most significant workshop institution for art and cultural education in Nigeria in the post-independence era.”
The couple combined skills to help the local people. But the love between them was lost after Wenger’s heart warmed towards those people and their way of life than it did to Beier like on their wedding night.
Wenger’s conversion was set in motion after she became ill due to tuberculosis. She then turned to Yoruba religion for healing, many believe, and became attracted to the religion after meeting one of its few remaining priests. She Eventually became a Yoruba priestess and many came to know her as “Adunni Olorisa”.
Wenger and Beier ultimately divorced, with Wenger later marrying local drummer Ayansola Oniru in 1959.
Beier married the artist, Georgina Betts, an Englishwoman from London who was working in Nigeria. In 1966 when the civil war broke out between Biafra and the federal government, they left the country and moved to Papua New Guinea.
Wenger’s romance with the Yoruba religion spanned at least six decades. She went to the grave serving the goddess of Osun.
She was founder of the archaic-modern art school “New Sacred Art” and became the guardian of the Sacred Grove of Osun goddess on the banks of the Osun River in Oshogbo.
The sculptures that were placed there 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. For her efforts on behalf of the Yoruba, she was made an Oloye (a chief) of the tribe by the Ataoja of Oshogbo.
Susanne Wenger was 94 years old when she passed on. Her legacy lives on.
