Shades of ochre

Knowledge of ochre dates back to the origin of our own species, Homo sapiens 1. Ochre pigment absorbs all the vibrant and fresh tones of verdant and cooler hues, to reflect only the primal clay-earth reds and yellows. In Ben Okri’s fairytale world, the mineral substance ochre binds him to his worldly cares. “My troubles are all around me … They are like the ochre of our sentient stones. I am weighed down by the buildings and the yellow earth.” But then, in the midst of his anguish, some formless dream plays with his attention, breaking the spell. “As the air loves the sky, so am I soaring above the roof-tops. My fears have been abandoned to the ochre of the earth. Upward lifts the spirit beyond the measure of the sky.” 2

Put ochre paints to work on a canvas, and they might reveal the transformative powers of their absorbed light as much as their reflected shades of red and yellow. One of Okri’s short stories sees his narrator tasked with educating the orphaned children of a war zone. Finding them too traumatised by loss to absorb any teaching, he resorts to handing out sheets of paper and crayons. “To my surprise, they take to it. They paint and draw freely, for long hours, absorbed and lost in colour, fleeing from grief into a world of mysterious shapes, of bulls, birds, hybrid creatures, and patterns in which are concealed indeterminate beings.” He shows their art to visitors. “They are astounded at the paintings, in rich ochre, in reds and yellows, of enormous wild bulls. The canvases are large, and the paintings bristle with unaccountable energy and wildness.” 3

• Humans used ochre minerals before any other pigment, at least 320,000 years ago in the southern Kenyan rift valley. Palaeolithic uptake subsequently spread the length of eastern Africa, into both southern and northern Africa. Perhaps ochre first functioned as a pigment for ceremonial purposes, or as body paint to protect the skin. It later found additional uses in compound adhesives, as a preservative, and as an abrasive agent. By 73,000 years ago it was serving as a crayon for drawing on rock in southern Africa, having some millennia earlier functioned as a substrate for engraving; many millennia later it became widely adopted as a pigment for cave paintings. By about 50,000 years ago, knowledge of ochre pigments had spread through Europe into Asia, and on to Australia by 40,000 years ago. Red ochre, reddened by hematite, was first mined in North America about 13,000 years ago.
• Excerpts from ‘The Spirit Lifts’ in Ben Okri’s (2017) The Magic Lamp (published by Apollo/Head of Zeus).
• Excerpts from ‘Wild Bulls’ in Ben Okri’s (2009) Tales of Freedom (published by Rider & Co.). Okri was exposed as a child to the brutality of the 1967-1970 Biafran Civil War in Nigeria.

C.P. Doncaster, Timeline of the Human Condition, star index