Principles of Traditional African Art in Yoruba Thorn Wood Carvings: Conversations with Titi Adepitan

Sarah Krose: How do the thorn carvings fit in with more contemporary Nigerian art in terms of, well, contemporary Nigerian art, tourist art? What place do they have in the spectrum?

Titi Adepitan: They don't quite represent the very core of Yoruba art, because they are tourist art, as you observed. For one thing, the Yoruba imagination is a rigorously religious one and works like these can only be defined in terms of what serious artists would do for recreation, you know, more or less like creating a lighter side to their more serious engagements. And the figures actually illustrate this. They depict people in various poses, various attitudes, at various chores, you know, that capture the everyday, the humdrum. But I don't think they really do speak for the (pause) soul of the Yoruba approach to art in a fundamental sense. . . . They look a lot to me like just marginal art, but not marginal in the sense of cheap or low or debased. Marginal in a sense that is very, very unique, to the Yoruba conception of art in general. You'll find it in music, in writing, in every kind of creativity. The serious artist who does serious work, and has time once in a while to create things on the lighter side. I mean, it's very central to the Yoruba reception of creativity.

Could you comment on the state. . . . These were carved around early 1970s, 1972 is when they were collected. Could you comment on the state of Yoruba society around that time, maybe what the artist was, at least in a political sense, perhaps.

By 1972, Yoruba society couldn't really be described in purely homogeneous terms. You want to keep in mind that Yorubaland has been the center of the Nigerian nation for almost a century now, from 1914 actually. That is the date of the amalgamation of the different provinces into the country of Nigeria. And what that means is, people come from various parts of the country to flourish in Lagos. Politics, commerce, education, all kinds of things invariably took their shape and definition in Lagos. Lagos is not quite the heartland of Yorubaland in terms of culture and things like this. Lagos is too cosmopolitan, too "generic," too . . . almost fake. For statements on culture you need to go to places like Ilesa or Osogbo, Abeokuta. Abeokuta for instance is very noted for tie-dyed fabrics, batiks; to Ibadan, the city of Nigeria's first university. And clearly by 1972, all of these things had taken shape. It's not quite correct as I read somewhere just now, to suggest that culture, society was at a very pristine stage, where people are drumming, people are dancing—they "dance automatically"—as somebody said (laugh). I read that and I was amused. The only thing is that many of the carvers themselves must have been, you know, country folk, and so they tended to recreate visions of the countryside from their own imagination that was itself limited by the quality of their exposure or non-exposure. I think that is very, very important. If a student of art, a carver or an artist who had a Western training in these things were to do something like this, you would find nuances of interpretation, you know, deriving directly from their own contact with other realities from across the world, I suppose.

Is there a symbolism associated with the tortoise?

Oh yeah, the Tortoise is the archetypal Yoruba trickster figure in the same sense as the Raven in First Nations folklore, or the spider in West Indian folklore. The tortoise is the archetypal figure of the trickster.

In what context?

In a...