Painters, blacksmiths and wordsmiths: building molues in Lagos

African Arts, Autumn, 2008 by Damola Osinulu

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In an ideal environment, the construction process should take about fifteen days but the builders I interviewed--Morningstar Construction, Ise Oluwa Transportation Ltd., and TIT Body Builders--all decried how their work was regularly interrupted up by electricity blackouts. Komolafe of Morningstar estimated that it now took them thirty days to complete a bus. Delays also occur when a client does not have sufficient funds to complete the project.

Since the bus's structural integrity comes from the steel frame, the purpose of the sheet metal skin is to define its volume. This volume is the space of encounter for the molue-riding Lagosian. Two art forms that, like molue building, actively shape space are sculpture and architecture. Speaking about the resonances between his steel sculptures (Fig. 9) and architecture, American artist Richard Serra declared that

   Space here has become a material for me. I'm trying to deal with
   the substance of space, to make it affect your body in ways that
   haven't happened before.... Architects usually generate structures
   with planes. They think about planes in relation to planes, not
   about the lines that generate the plane (1997:26).

In its molding of space through planes of sheet metal supported by a framed structure, molue building is most like architecture. One is reminded of the complex steel frames that lie under the curvaceous metal skins of Canadian-American Frank Gehry's Bilbao Guggenheim or his Walt Disney Musical Hall. Or more importantly, one is reminded of his landmark 1978 house in Santa Monica, California, in which the exposed wood flame structure becomes part of the aesthetic. The structural logic of the molue is analogous to the American stick-flamed house. One can start to identify headers, top plates, sole plates, cripple studs, and king studs in the molue's anatomy. None of this structure is hidden from the passenger since the sheet metal skin only mediates between exterior and structure. Unlike Gehry's Santa Monica house, though, the immediate concern is not artistic statement, but economic efficiency. This then is an Architecture of Survival.

British-Nigerian sculptor Sokari Douglas Camp has seized upon this functionalistic aesthetic in her "living memorial" for murdered Nigerian activist Ken Saro-Wiwa. In her studio she built a sheet-metal bus sans engine and utilized its expressive potential in a function entirely different than that of the molue owner. "I would like to make a sculpture that is like a vehicle, the yellow buses in Lagos, or similar to the trucks that travel laden with goods from farms to the cities or the campaign buses that some politicians use." (7) The bus is a large shiny volume with a band of Ken Saro-Wiwa's accusatory words circumscribing its body, "I accuse the oil company of practicing genocide against the Ogoni" (Fig. 10a-b). On top of the bus are nine oil drums recognizing the activists who were murdered along with Saro-Wiwa. In another interview Douglas Camp explained her rationale for adopting the expressive potential of the bus,