Practice as research as a decolonial praxis: Yoruba culture retrieval

Recent discourse around decolonial praxis has given rise to an urgency to look again at African indigenous cultures, including Yoruba. Sadly, from the late 1600s [ Ogilby’s Africa (1670) ] to the 1900s, Yoruba culture was described through an outsider, ethnographic, colonial lens as primitive, ungodly, and uncivilised. Furthermore, from the early 1900s to date, due to colonialism, the Yoruba language, classed as vernacular, was prohibited from being spoken at schools in Nigeria (Oluwole, 2016). The late Dr. Geraldine Connor (1952–2011) demonstrated decolonial praxis, expanding on Homi Bhabha’s (1990) ‘third space’ and fostering a unique creative space where cultures, including Yoruba, freely mingled and equilibrated into her PhD creative output, Carnival Messiah. Theory can be bridged into Afropolitan praxis via a Practice as Research (PaR) methodology, a non-hierarchical, multimodal design that layers multiple qualitative research methods, including what the author calls ‘decolonial autoethnography’. Yoruba scholars and writers such as Nike Lawal, Sophie Oluwole, Rowland Abiodun, and Babatunde Lawal advocate that one needs to let the Yoruba voice speak as a process of decolonising one’s own mind. The aim in this decolonial praxis is to dispel negative narratives about Yoruba culture, curb anxiety about partaking in it, and experience it through the spectrum of Yoruba philosophy, in its multifaceted whole as movement, sound, sculpture, and more. Decolonial praxis, in this case, looks like observing Yoruba culture in situ through (vis-à-vis knowing-in-action) art practice as a process of conceptual enquiry. The main outcome of the author’s PhD project was the retrieval and resurrection of Yoruba art aesthetics, including visual representation (Aworan) and sound (Oriki). This culminated in the author’s creation of the first sculpture of a black woman in Leeds: the life-size ultramarine-blue Aworan statue of Dr. Geraldine Roxanne Connor.