This wonderfully written and illustrated book offers a culturally sensitive reading of Yoruba art forms such as sculpture, masks, paintings, cartoons, photography and installation art produced since precolonial times. Written by an art historian, the book is easily accessible to outsiders. In each of the five chapters, Ola selects a handful of art works which he explores in the context of the socio-political environment and the artist's biography.
The main analytical thread is carefully explained in the introduction to the book. Ola argues that colonial and postcolonial visual forms of political protest need to be traced back to the politics of communication that thrived in precolonial Yoruba society. A proverb such as ‘The mouth we are using to approve a crown as straight and fitting is the same mouth we are using to deride it as skewed and awkward’, and the accompanying ambiguous role of jesters and poets, who not only praise but also critique, constitute the feeding ground of ‘a widespread culture of aworerin’ (p. 8) that emerged in the colonial press and which was made manifest through political cartoons. Aworerin, which literally means ‘to-look-and-to-laugh’ (p. 7), refers to the various forms of parody and satire in Yoruba verbal and visual arts and is usually translated as caricature.
Ola offers the reader a chronological view of the various influences on, and transformations of, visual commentaries on power in Yoruba society. Chapter 1, ‘Satirizing with Yoruba sculpture’, explains that satire and irony are integral parts of Yoruba precolonial masking and sculpting traditions. In celebrations of Egungun, Gelede, and so on, artists critiqued inept leaders and unjust political systems. Chapter 2, ‘Satirizing colonialism: Akinola Lasekan (1916–1972)’, describes the artistic life of Lasekan, whose black and white cartoons on the perils of colonial domination were the first Yoruba visual newspaper satire. First published in the West African Pilot during the 1940s, Lasekan's visual commentary inspired the creation of a satirical magazine called Aworerin. Ola's reconstruction of the emergence of political editorial cartooning explores the intimate connections between the written press and the colonial government.
The following chapters are devoted to postcolonial political satire. Chapter 3, ‘Satirizing military dictatorship’, sketches the role of visual art ranging from propaganda to critique in the postcolonial press. Cartoonists soon learned to straddle the demands of media owners and political patrons. They also had to deal with state violence, and had to look for ways to protect themselves once a cartoon with harsh criticism was published. Ola argues that the proliferation of newspapers heightened the production of humorous publications, which contributed to what Ola enigmatically describes as ‘the aworerin effect in postcolonial consciousness’ (p. 99). The final section of this chapter describes work by what Ola calls ‘the third generation of cartoonists’, including artists such as Tayo Fatunla and Boye Gbenro, who actually live and work in the diaspora. Chapter 4, ‘Satirizing political corruption’, which extends into the early 2000s, explores artists’ engagement with various types of corruption. This study of visualizations of ‘the big man’, critiques of election rigging and faulty infrastructure offers an overview of the major scandals that have punctuated postcolonial Nigerian politics. Political editorial cartoons, and other forms of visual satire such as comic strips and acrylic paintings, are interpreted by Ola as daily protests, serving as a critical voice for the voiceless. In the final chapter, ‘Satirizing from the heart of the empire: Rotimi Fani-Kayode and Yinka Shonibare’, Ola engages with photography and installation art produced by two Nigerian artists living in the diaspora. Through the rubric of the trickster Esu, the youngest and wittiest god in Yoruba mythology, Ola reads Fani-Kayode's and Shonibare's art as ambiguous responses to the complexities of life in the diaspora. Like the Esu figure in Yoruba storytelling, both artists play with the ambiguity of parody.
A short conclusion summarizes the main theme of the book and opens up an avenue for the continuation of his analysis: as visual satire is increasingly expressed through social media, Ola suggests that the internet allows for the further circulation of aworerin consciousness and the emergence of novel appearances thereof.
The book should certainly be applauded for its consistent attempt to read Yoruba art forms through a Yoruba paradigm. Yet, the overly strong focus on Yoruba origins prevents Ola from developing comparative insights through engagement with, for example, Congolese popular painting (Fabian and Szombati) or cartoons in Cameroon (Mbembe), South Africa (Hammett) and Madagascar (Jackson). Also, more attention could have been given to the external influences on individual artists. For example, Ola suggests that Lasekan's cartoons are inspired by African and European sourcebooks, but without showing which ones and why. In a footnote (p. 94, footnote 46), Ola mentions that local artists were inspired by Danish comic strips published in the West African Pilot in the late 1930s, or by action adventure comic strips that appeared in the Daily Mirror, both of which circulated across British colonies. These were obviously part of a visual culture that also interacted with power, and about which I would have liked to read more. In addition, a discussion of ‘form’ or ‘genre’ is missing. It would have been interesting to learn more about the affordances, or action possibilities, associated with particular ‘forms’ (painting, cartoon, comic strip, photograph, etc.).
Notwithstanding these shortcomings, this book certainly deserves to find a large readership among those interested in (post)colonial visual culture, African media, civic forms of resistance, and the dialectics between art and politics.
