Originally featured on The New Telegraphng

There’s something quite audacious about THE HARBINGER”, a landmark four part book series written by Oriiz U. Onuwaje. This book is not just about documenting 8,000 years of Nigerian art history, a window into the soul of a people; it aims to reframe the nation’s art as single, continuous, a civilisation with a continuous intellectual, spiritual, and artistic memory, an unbroken thread, rather than fragmented historical periods.

For too long, the history of Art in Nigeria has been presented as a series of magnificent, yet disconnected, events: the Dufuna Canoe, the striking terracottas of Nok, the bronze realism of Ife, the ceremonial regalia of Igbò-Úkwú, and the courtly majesty of Benin.

Published in 2025 by Crimson Fusion, Nigeria, ‘The Harbinger’, a four-part landmark series culminating in A Window into the Soul of A People: 8000 Years of Art in Nigeria, seeks to correct that narrative. The author argues that these masterpieces are rightly revered, “but their isolation in Western narratives has masked their true meaning.