'Figure it out for yourself'.

Welcome to one of Africa's avant-garde artists, Romuald Hazoume, from the Republic of Benin, whose current solo exhibition is turning heads at the October Gallery in London. Juliet Highet has been there to see it.

IN MANY WAYS, SLAVERY HAS NEVER ended--many people live in the same kind of conditions, bound to work their whole lives for rich bosses, who use them without regard for their humanity, and who then throw them away like refuse, says Romuald Hazoume.

The whole thrust of his work is to show how historical patterns of exploitation and unequal trade are repeated today in continued greed, poverty--and enslavement. With his installations of commonplace objects like petrol cans and panoramic photographs of the markets that contain them, he alerts us to their social history and their resonance with the political and historical realities of today.

"Made in Porto Novo" is the title of Hazoume's current solo exhibition in London at the October Gallery. The Gallery represents artists from around the globe, who epitomise the trans-cultural avant-garde. Some of the most groundbreaking artists of our time, mostly from the developing world, have found a platform there, from which Hazoume has sprung to international acclaim.

So what has been Made in Porto Novo? Hazoume's studio in the capital of Benin has launched new takes on his masks and installations developed from plastic petrol cans, and other media embodying his socio-political message.

Photographs show life in Benin today, and a series of new canvases focus on symbols of Ifa, an ancient Yoruba system of divination. Hazoume declares that these evocations of his ancestry nourish the roots of all his artwork, an elemental thread drawing together the diversity of his media into a unified entity.

Born in 1962, Hazoume became a full-time artist in the early 1980s and has continued to live and work in his home country. Winning a series of prestigious international prizes and commissions, as well as having many successful solo and group exhibitions, he has become one of the foremost contemporary African artists of his generation.

He first attracted the critical attention of the global art world in 1992 in the exhibition "Out of Africa" at London's Saatchi Gallery, where his jerry-can "masks" subtly critiqued the Western reverence for "exotic" traditional African masks.

Another highly significant exhibition in 2005, again at the October Gallery, was titled ARTicle 14 and premiered Hazoume's "manifesto for resistance"--Figure it out for yourself translated from "Debrouille-toi, toi-meme". "Debrouillardise" means the ability to "make do" and "be resourceful". It is not only abou overcoming hardship with limited means, it has come to embody a philosophy of sustainability, a manifesto for resistance. Article 14 is a hypothetical clause inserted by popular African imagination into their constitutions. Literally, it signifies a talent for survival, in which nothing material is wasted, and every resource can be repeatedly used, reused, mended, reinvented and reworked.

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The debris of capitalist exchange

In the central installation at the October Gallery, Hazoume has constructed a market vendor's hand-cart, carrying a load of seductive but in reality unproductive imported Western commodities, such as mobile phones, DVDs, plastic toys, and of course Coca-Cola. Fascinatingly, Hazoume's installation consumes, digests and reinvents such debris of capitalist exchange. As Hazoume says: "Materials are a way of connecting with people's lives. Everything we use says something about us, and all the things we reject and throw away are still part of us."

The year 2007 was one of "uncomfortable truths" for anyone who cared to listen. It was the bicentenary of Britain's parliamentary abolition of the slave trade. In their summer exhibition "Unfair Trade", the Victoria & Albert Museum collaborated with the October Gallery to exhibit several African artists' works in connection with the slave trade. Among them was Hazoume, who created a Rainbow Serpent, a huge and extraordinary wheel of African destiny in metal and plastic, translating as Dan-Aiyedo-Houedo. In this seminal year, Hazoume addressed the legacy of the Kingdom of Dahomey, nowadays known as the Republic of Benin, his own territory. It was infamous for the brutality and the scale of its slave trade.

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At the October Gallery now, Hazoume is showing vast, stunning panoramic photographs of a place where a river joins the sea, landscapes today eerily free of human presence, with the melancholy title "And from there they leave". This location in reality is La Bouche du Roi, literally translating as the "mouth of the king". But it is the "mouth" of a river from which slave ships departed for hundreds of years.

Another panoramic photograph of a nearby goat market provokes reflection on the value of life--better to sell goats than human beings. Hazoume's major oeuvre, entitled La Bouche du Rot, created during 1997-2005 and also a part of this new exhibition, originally arose from coordination between the October Gallery and the British Museum. Exhibited there in early 2007 and subsequently travelling to many destinations, it is a powerfully evocative, shocking, and moving installation exposing historic and contemporary forms of slavery.

La Bouche du Roi is a symbolic representation of a slave ship transporting slaves from Africa to North America, the Caribbean and Europe. The artwork is composed of 304 black plastic petrol can "masks", stacked in serried overlapping rows to evoke the appallingly cramped conditions on board a slave ship.

Every mask represents a person. The installation is based on a woodcut of a Liverpool slave ship called Brookes, produced in 1789 for an anti-slavery campaign. Though the original demonstrates the inhumane conditions on board ship, it deprived the human beings there of any individuality or culture.

So in his installation, Hazoume challenges this perception of African people as passive victims, attempting to restore the identities of the enslaved. This he does by giving each mask its own significance--a name, a voice actually calling out in the languages of Benin, and objects attached are connected with the Yoruba pantheon of Orishas--gods and goddesses. Religion, language, music and culture, though suppressed and changed in the territories of enslavement, were powerful forms of resistance for slaves. Small masks represent women and children; broken ones the people who died during the voyage. Narrow masks show how people lay squashed together below decks.

Further objects in the installation include gin bottles, illustrating how slave traders "relaxed" above their cargo. Liquor was one of the items exported to Africa as barter for people; others were tobacco, beads, spices, mirrors and clothes to tempt local caboceers, who sold human beings and are part of the installation.

Guns were also barter goods, and in La Bouche du Roi guns scream of the violence and violation of the slave trade. The ghastly smells of a slave ship drift around too--urine, faeces, blood and fear.

La Bouche du Roi includes a short film made by Hazoume documenting the precarious lives of motorcyclists today who convey petrol from Nigeria to Benin in clusters of plastic cans of the same type that Hazoume has evolved into masks.

These jerry cans are expanded with the use of heat so that they contain as much petrol as possible, a horribly hazardous procedure, since they frequently explode with fatal consequences for the cyclists. So in a sense, they too are slaves--to poverty, and Hazoume's message is clear throughout--that the legacy of enslavement, of exploitation, greed and oppression has not ended. Yet the concept of debrouillardise--overcoming hardship with limited means, the manifesto for resistance present throughout his work, also celebrates the triumph of the human spirit in the face of so many odds--"figure it out for yourself".