Undressing ethnicity - Yinka Shonibare

African Arts, Autumn, 2001 by John Picton

The story now returns to Chicago. William Fagg had included Areogun of Osi-Ilorin among the sculptors to be celebrated in a never-to-be-written book entitled Seven Yoruba Masters. Yet the evidence suggests that until well toward the mid-twentieth century, in Ekiti and Opin (whence Areogun came) people used the word "Yoruba" not of themselves but of the Oyo kingdom and people. This is also the usage found in district officers' reports from Ekiti in the colonial period. Areogun would probably have denied he was Yoruba (if anyone had asked him). In any case, his work cannot be configured within the events that comprise the evolution of the modern sense of Yoruba ethnicity; and an identity as "Yoruba" is indeed precisely that: modern. It developed, in the manner in which we now know it, roughly between 1850 and 1950 through debates about language and literature, and about dress; through writing history; through an intellectual interest in mythic and ritual tradition, an interest that did not hamper widespread conversion to Islam and Christianity; and through education, journalism, and political action. The context was, most significantly, the tightening grip of colonial government, and the key players initiating many of these developments were repatriated freed slaves from Sierra Leone, and their descendants (see Picton 1994a etc., and the references given therein, especially Peel 1989). "Yoruba" is part of that world that comes into being with the replacement of transatlantic slavery by a colonial rule that was immediately contested and eventually defeated.

Shonibare asks us to consider the seeming paradox of a personal trajectory that includes elements appropriately identified within ethnicity, as well as elements identified with resistance to the stereotype of ethnicity. Yet the more one thinks about it the more one realizes a wider generality, for the paradox is exclusive neither to Shonibare nor to Black British art. It is more characteristic of local and international modernisms and modernities than is yet acknowledged. Admittedly there are exceptions, such as Taiwo Jegede (sculptor, printmaker, poet, who comes from Ekiti but lives and works in London) and Twins Seven Seven from Oshogbo, Yoruba men who choose to play upon an essentialized identity as "Yoruba." Osi Audu, on the other hand, who is not Yoruba by parentage though he was brought up Yoruba-speaking in Lagos, encountered the ideas about aesthetics and metaphysics that now dominate his interpretations of his painting and drawing in lectures given by Professor Rowland Abiodun at Ife University. "Yoruba" is, in other words, Audu's chosen aesthetic identity. There are many others, however, for whom ethnicity has been left behind in the development of their art, even as it is among the constituent elements of a personal trajectory, artists such as Aina Onabolu, Justus Akeredolu, Akinola Lasekan, Yusuf Grillo, Agbo Folarin, and Gani Odutokun (see Fosu 1986; Picton 1994a; Jari 2000; and here I only list artists who are Yoruba).