In Igbo we have the saying that “the world is like a dancing masquerade, if you want to understand it, you cannot remain standing in one place”.
Emmanuel Ndefo: Englebert, Tarango and Carter (2002, 1096) have noted that some 44% of colonial borders were straight lines, leading to as many as 177 ethnic groups split across two and sometimes three colonial borders. From the beginning, we were conscious about representation, not only in terms of gender, but also in terms of capturing the cultural diversity of West Africa’s complex geography. This complexity was seemingly ignored by the colonial enterprise as they tore apart and stitched together parts of the continent like a piece of fabric. In particular, Oyindamola, can you walk us through the geographic and linguistic territories of former British West Africa that are represented in this exhibition?
Oyindamola Faithful: It’s been really interesting working on this project. We have had lots of different conversations and one thing that came up quite early on is that we wanted to have a broad mix of artists, both in terms of gender and demographic diversity. I’m Yoruba from southwest Nigeria and you are Igbo from southeast Nigeria, but born and raised in Hausaland in northern Nigeria. Admitting our limitations, in a country with around 371 ethnic groups, we wanted to have a mix of Nigerian artists in this project, covering at least the existing major geo-political zones in the country. We invited Adebukola Adelere, a Yoruba indigenous sound artist, from the southwest of Nigeria and Gerald Eze, a performing artist from the Igbo-speaking ethnicity of southeast Nigeria. Then, representing the south-south of Nigeria, we have the digital artist Malik Afegbua from Edo state and the textile artisans from the Kofar-Mata Dye Pits Association, located in the heart of Kano city in northern Nigeria.
Beyond Nigeria, the multidisciplinary artist Agnes Essonti Luque hails from Manyu land in southwest Cameroon and Ama BE is a Ghanaian-American transdisciplinary artist. West Africa or British West Africa also includes countries like Sierra Leone and The Gambia. I wish we could have extended an invitation to an artist from that region, but given the timeframe we had, I believe that the artist mix we have selected is broad enough to really speak to our subject matter of intangible archives.
Telling the stories of all people, groups and communities within British West Africa is an impossible task. Thinking about the number of ethnicities represented in Nigeria alone is staggering. However, I hope that we’ve been able to tell a cohesive story through music, Oríkì (Yoruba chant and indigenous poetry), textile weaving and dyeing, digital art, food and performance art. I’m looking forward to seeing how the audience will engage with the works in this exhibition.
Emmanuel: For people who don’t know, you mentioned the word Oríkì, which is a kind of praise–poetry of the Yoruba-speakers from West Africa. For this exhibition, the artist Adebukola has recited an Oríkì Ìbejì, a type of traditional Yoruba praise poetry for twins. She has done this in response to an object in the British Museum’s collection, which you have recently visited. The object is a wooden female Ibeji figure, collected from her hometown in Iseyin, Oyo state, Nigeria.
Audio: Ibjei Figure by Adebukola Ade
Èjírẹ́ Ọ̀kín (the twin which is as beautiful as a peacock)
Ọ́-bẹ́-kẹ́ṣé-bẹ́-kàṣà, (Hopping and jumping from a tree branch to the other)
Ó fẹsẹ̀ méjèèjì bẹ sílé alákìísa; (Jumping helter-skelter, you landed in a wretched man’s place)
Ó salákìísà donígba aṣọ. (Turning around his misfortunes)
Emmanuel: The Yoruba tribe is known to have one of the highest incidences of twin births in the world. Traditionally, Yoruba culture saw twins as extraordinary beings protected by Sango, the deity of thunder. Twins were believed to bring wealth to the families in which they were born, and misfortune to those who did not honour them. Twins were often honoured with carved figures known as ere Ìbejì. If one twin were to die, the representative figure was seen as an access point to the spirit of the departed individual. The mother of the deceased child would go on to provide ritualised care to the carved figures; bathing, dressing, adorning and even feeding them as if they were alive.
Adebukola responds to the Ìbejì figure by reciting a traditional Oríkì Ìbejì, which sheds profound light on the socio-cultural context in which this figure was created and then used. Embodying profound wisdom, our only obstacle to the full understanding and appreciation of these traditional poems is that they were meant to be performed orally in the source language, as this is the only language that can vividly portray the socio-historical context. There are countless variations of this Oríkì, though many of the phrases and proverbs used are the same, which allowed us to share the above translation. I am thinking about this specifically because when we asked Adebukola for a translation of this Oríkì she would laugh and say “Not everything is translatable“. So it seems to me that the art of translation appeared to her as a form of compromise. Just as the Japanese art critic Okakura Kakuzō once wrote in The Book of Tea: “Translation is always a treason, and can at its best be only the reverse side of a brocade.” This is true for a form of poetry like the Oríkì, which relies heavily on cultural references, tonality, proverbs, allusions and feelings which are only felt when expressed in the Yoruba language.
I suppose that objects like the Ìbejì figure, when transformed from a ritual statue into a museum object, can become victims of translation, of a misunderstanding which can greatly impoverish our understanding of the figure. This is why I think the work and knowledge of traditional poets like Adebukola is vital for museums and curators working towards decolonisation and a better understanding of their colonial archives.
Oyindamola: Yes, just last week I was at the British Museum and I was quite interested in the collections representing West Africa. Particularly how most of the objects originally required animation, they required bodies. I feel that through this project we’ve been able to animate some of those objects and highlight the role of being present, or “of being”, in the work of the collections and the work of the artists, by way of the works that have been submitted to us. I’m very excited to see it all come together.
One of the projects that was interesting for me personally was the intervention of the Kofar-Mata Dye Pit Association in Kano, through textile weaving, embroidery design and indigo dyeing. Especially knowing that the artisans are Muslims and that we commissioned them during Ramadan, we’ve had to be very… I don’t know if the word is careful, but we’ve had to be intentional with how we’ve worked with them, taking into consideration that they were observing the fast during their working days. It was important for me that we approach the task with respect and kindness and that we acknowledge the labour of each artisan could potentially put a strain on them if not done so with care.
Emmanuel: I also think we can pose the question of what value means in this context, and where value resides? Is it in the museum object, or in the tacit knowledge of the artisans, in their embodied know-how of textile dyeing, tailoring and embroidery design? After looking through museum objects found in collections in Britain, Europe and North America, Colleen E. Kriger concluded that there is in fact a shortage of archival evidence prior to the 20th century concerning cloth making, especially from the perspective of local producers. So in her book Cloth in West African History, she showed a deep appreciation for the place of textile dyers, weavers, tailors and embroidery makers in historical West Africa, noting that their craft has not been fully recognised by historians.
As a lover of art and heritage, I sympathise with the value of cloth as a historical object in the British museum, but what I realised in our conversations with the artisans was that their value of this cloth lies in the respect of the processes of social production, the time and the labour intensity, and then the potential of the final design to express hierarchy, difference, honour, and respectability; as well as to convey forms of political and spiritual authority.
Oyindamola: I feel that what the collective at Kofar-Mata has done with this project is to literally weave their real labour into the narrative of the works in the British Museum’s collection.
Oyindamola: Speaking of object versus embodied knowledge, value and ownership, let us come full circle on the question of museum collections. Who owns the archive?
Emmanuel: Let us not begin at ownership nor even at the archive itself, but rather from the origin of the word “archive”. The philosopher Jacques Derrida traced the etymology of this concept of archive to the Greek word arkhē, which, he explains, means both commencement and commandment:
The citizens who… held and signified political power were considered to possess the right to make or represent the law. On account of their publicly recognized authority, it is at their home, in that place which is their house… that official documents are filed… It is thus, in this domiciliation, in this house arrest, that archives take place. (Derrida, 1996)
This etymology is an important starting point because Derrida returns to Greek antiquity to study the arkheion, the home of the archive that was “initially a house, a domicile, an address, of the superior magistrates, the archons, those who commanded”. This explanation binds the term “archive” historically to government, power and law.
Oyindamola: So, whoever owns the archive controls the meaning. Moreover, the archives contain the story which can continue long beyond the war and the warriors.
Emmanuel: Exactly, the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe wrote this in his novel too, that “Until the lion learns how to write, every story will glorify the hunter.” The greatness of the empire has for so long been proclaimed, written and reproduced by the empire’s archival machine. But a story is never complete until the voices of multiple sides have been heard and echoed over and over again. I wanted us to examine the origin of the archive and its importance to the empire because central to both is the idea of commencement (of beginning, history) and commandment (law, power and authority), a place from which social order emanates. The linking of archives to the empire redirects critical focus from archives as simply evidence of the past to archives as the processes through which imperial power can also occupy the present. In fact, Derrida’s work on the archive has prompted a great deal of reflection, especially in academia about what a critical look at archives can imply for our understanding of the present. From the perspective of former colonies, especially in traditions where orality holds a strong grip, where history, knowledge, spirituality is not simply housed, but lived and then passed down from one generation to another, what can the empire’s archive tell us through the silence of its dusty materials?
Oyindamola: What about the intangible archive? This is what connects the works of the artists we have decided to include in this exhibition. Ama BE’s work is aptly titled an “ephemeral archive”, and Agnes Essonti Luque explores complex cultural emotions, memories and ideas contained within Cameroonian culinary traditions.
Emmanuel: Yes, it was interesting to me that the artist group Ozhopé Collective, from a previous chapter of this project curated by Khanyisile Mbongwa, wrote that:
After deliberation, we have decided that we should not choose any object from the British museum collection, because we think that doing so promotes the same kind of colonial logic that sees each masks as a complete object separate from the body, the music and its context.
I agree with this, because I believe that these intangible and embodied perspectives conserve heritage in a way which is antithetical to colonial thought of acceptable knowledge production practices and pedagogies. We can even argue that the idea of the living body, food, dance, proverb or music as repositories of memory is more central to an African conception of an archive, than a museum. For example there is the famous quote attributed to the West African philosopher Amadou Hampâté Bâ (1901–1991) that “Whenever an elder dies, a library burns down.” There are a lot of intuitions of this sort, in various formats, scattered in different West-African traditions. This perspective, according to scholars like Osita Igwe (2020), views our bodies as reservoirs of embedded cultural and ancestral memory that can witness and document, and are viable sites for history-making.
Oyindamola: To follow up on the proverb “when an elder dies”, the digital work of Malik Afegbua was inspired by the death of his mother. In this case it is not simply that a library is burnt to the ground, but a new one is rebuilt from the ashes, like the phoenix in Greek mythology.
Emmanuel: Or even the Mbari artistic tradition of the Igbo people in southeastern Nigeria.
Oyindamola: What is the Mbari?
Emmanuel: It is an artistic practice where young people of a certain age are commissioned as part of a social ritual to create mud buildings, which are populated with art figures, as a sacrifice to Ala the earth goddess, to acknowledge Ala’s charitable and overarching presence. Then within a few years these buildings are hollowed out by termites and crumble back into mud, all the sculpted and painted figures virtually collapse. There’s a beauty in that, you see, because the mud building and artwork must give way for the next generation to practice their own craft. The Mbari houses are also a kind of public museum, but with a kind of cultural acknowledgment of a natural regenerative cycle.
Oyindamola: You mean that unlike the Western archives that we spoke about, it is not an expression of monumentality and permanence, but of the continuation of knowledge and life?
Emmanuel: Exactly.
Oyindamola: You know one of the artists, Gerald Eze, was talking about speech surrogacy in the musical heritage of the Igbo people you just mentioned. A phonological system through which words of a spoken language like Igbo language are represented in the tones of their traditional musical instruments like the Oja, Ubo and Ekwe. It is simply fantastic to read, so to avoid any spoiler alert, I will let the readers discover this through the beautifully written composer’s note by the artist.
Emmanuel: I think that the idea of an “intangible archive” poses a threat to the empire’s logic, because for one it reminds you that there are certain things that cannot be collected and it places certain knowledge out of the empire’s reach. It does not validate the idea of a centralised place of truth or power. More importantly because it considers history as a “narrative, not a simple replication of past experiences, and encourages collective re-imaginations rather than conclusive evidence” (Sturken, 1997; Zepeda, 2014). There is a saying in Igbo that “the world is like a dancing masquerade, if you want to see it properly, you cannot remain standing in one place”. Perhaps archives and narratives, especially colonial ones, are also dancing masquerades! That is why we have invited these artists to propose provocations, or even interventions which infuse narratives into specific objects at the British Museum. To act as intangible traces of records which are otherwise absent from historical narratives of the empire.
Footnotes:
Englebert, Pierre, Stacy Tarango and Matthew Carter. 2002. Dismemberment and Suffocation: A Contribution to the Debate on African Boundaries. Comparative Political Studies 35:1093-1118.
Cloth in West African History. Colleen E. Kriger. Lanham, MD: AltaMira Press, 2006. 240 pp.1
Derrida, Jacques & Prenowitz, Eric (1995). Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression. Diacritics 25 (2):9.
Igwe, O., 2020. being close to, with or amongst. Feminist Review, Issue 125, pp. 44-53.
Sturken, M., 1997. Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, The AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Zepeda, S. J., 2014. Queer Xicana Indígena cultural production:Remembering through oral and visual storytelling. DecoloniSation: Indigeneity, Education & Society, 3(1), pp. 119-141
Oyindamola (Fakeye) Faithful is the Executive & Artistic Director of the Centre for Contemporary Art, Lagos, where she previously co-founded the Video Art Network Lagos in 2009. She has worked on various exhibitions and projects, including Identity: An Imagined State (2009), the first video art exhibition in Nigeria. She co-curated the Lagos Biennial II (2019), titled How to Build a Lagoon With Just a Bottle of Wine, alongside Tosin Oshinowo and Antawan Byrd. Emmanuel Ndefo (b. 1991, Kano, Nigeria) is an artist-researcher who uses his body as a tool for his creative process, to imagine how performance can contribute to wider contemporary conversations. He has an MA in Dance, Research, Heritage and Practice from Choreomundus Masters of Dance, a joint programme across four universities in France, UK, Hungary and Norway.