Undressing ethnicity. (Yinka Shonibare).

The comfort of knowing which side of the fence you are is being constantly thrown.

(Shonibare 1992)

.... his work tricks the mind, by first making it comfortable with its own contradiction, innocence, and ignorance, and then by quickly deflating those sentiments.

(Enwezor 1999:8)

Shonibare's work registers the invalidity of borders.... He subverts notions of traditionality through parody ...

(Oguibe in Enwezor 1999:11)

Over the past ten years Yinka Shonibare, an artist of Nigerian origin working in Britain, has achieved a very considerable measure of international success. (1) I am interested in examining some aspects of his work and in showing how that work can be seen to address the taken-for-granted status of ethnic categorization in the literature on African art. My title is an obvious play on "Dressing Down," the name of Shonibare's 1999 retrospective exhibition at the Ikon Gallery, Birmingham, England (see Ikon Gallery 1999). I first met the artist at a talk he gave at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, early in 1992. (2) Later that same year we saw his installation at the Serpentine Gallery (see Shonibare 1992; Court 1993); but the story as presented here begins in Chicago in February 2000.

Kathleen Bickford Berzock had invited me to the Art Institute of Chicago to participate in "In Context, In Depth: A Symposium about Yoruba Art and the William B. Fagg Photographic Archive." She organized this event to celebrate the Institute's acquisition of two sculptures by Areogun of Osi-Ilorin (see Picton 1984a, b) and a set of William Fagg's field photographs. I arrived in Chicago with a day or so to spare, and after visiting the Yoruba display, a first-rate installation of sculpture and masquerade, with Fagg's photography, I was taken to see the set of photographs by Yinka Shonibare entitled Diary of a Victorian Dandy. They were not on show in the Yoruba or Africa galleries but in rooms devoted to contemporary art; not "contemporary African art" (with all due respect, only the National Museum of African Art in Washington, D.C., has been that daring) but "contemporary" as understood in an international sense. That usage in reality means Europe and America, though Latin America just about makes it in these days, and there is the occasional visitor from Japan, India, and South Africa. (3) The Shonibare photographs were on loan on the recommendation of Okwui Enwezor, who is, among many other things, an adjunct curator of contemporary art at the Institute.

In the other gallery I had just seen photographs of Yoruba people and things, taken by an Englishman, that provided a necessary element of the documentary requirements of the sculpture and masquerade on display in the context of museum ethnography. In this gallery I saw photographs of an English household, a fiction authored by a Yoruba man, that provided for the exposure of one of the secrets of nineteenth-century English prosperity and leisure: their dependence upon the hidden presence and work of black and African people. This exposure was achieved, of course, by Shonibare himself, placed within the picture as the dandy.

What was I to make of all this? Was it yet one more example of the wholly unsatisfactory split between "traditional" and "contemporary" (see Picton 1992)? Or was it rather that "Africa" and "Yoruba" (Yinka Shonibare is, after all, a Yoruba name) have the power to transcend the limitations of categories? Or had west Africa now been admitted to the Citadel of Modernism (Araeen 1989:16)? (4) Local modernisms and modernities (5) had been put in place in west Africa since the 1850s and throughout the twentieth century, pioneered in Freetown by the African American photographer Augustus Washington (1820-1875) (Viditz-Ward 1999; Willis 2000) and in Lagos by the painter Aina Onabolu (1882-1963) (Fosu 1986). The problem for me was that I knew enough to bring Shonibare and Areogun together as both (what we now call) Yoruba, and yet the connection I perceived was not obvious within the works themselves. Perhaps the confusion was wholly mine. Is there, indeed, any necessary connection between the art and life of a late-twentieth-century modern city such as Lagos (where Shonibare spent his childhood) and of a village a generation or two earlier and close to the northeast margin of what we now call the Yoruba-speaking region? There are no simple answers to any of these questions.

Photographs from Diary of a Victorian Dandy, curated and produced by the Institute of International Visual Arts, had been seen on station walls throughout the London "tube" during October 1998. At the same time (see Atha 1998) the Tabernacle Gallery in west London exhibited an installation by Shonibare entitled Alien Obsessives: Mum, Dad and the Kids (Fig. 16), which interrogated assumptions about the normative status of the nuclear family. (7) The figures, derived from science-fiction movies, were made up of the African-print fabric the artist first used in his 1992 Serpentine installation. (8) Following a talk that he gave during the Alien Obsessives show, he was asked by a heavily dreadlocked man: "Where is Africa in your work?" Shonibare's response was bold, indeed shockingly so: "I don't give a toss about Africa!" He immediately qualified this by insisting that his work was not about Africa, that it could not be seen in Africa as it was in Europe and America. When Shonibare used African-print fabric during his participation in the 1995 Tenq workshop in Dakar, Senegal, his studio assistant protested that people could have been wearing the cloth. Shonibare's response was to return to the market and purchase some more, which he then gave to his assistant to distribute as he thought fit. In other words, his work was about being in London; and as such, it was concerned (among other things) with the deconstruction of stereotypes, most especially of black and African people in the so-called West with its insidious liking for the essentialized identities, ethnic as well as continental, that still hang about within the threefold legacy of racism, slavery, and colonialism. (9)

[FIGURE 16 OMITTED]

Yinka Shonibare is Yoruba, but it does not follow that he is to be classified as a Yoruba artist; conversely, the fact that he is Yoruba and Nigerian does not make him any the less British. Indeed, being Nigerian and Yoruba is how he is British. My argument here is, of course, that the attribution of ethnicity to works of art is inherently problematic. The artist said as much (Shonibare 1992) when asked by Clementine Deliss about the categorical terms that might be used of him and his work:

   I spoke of wanting my work to be local, to contain specificity, enabling
   someone to locate something in the work.... At the same time, I create a
   space in which one can manoeuvre.... I accept all those terms if they are
   simply shortcuts to describing my origin and as long as they are not used
   as a means of fixing me. I believe that visibility is extremely important.
   I don't feel that I am location-less or colour-less because if I do, I am
   immediately denying myself very fundamental aspects of my own visibility. I
   don't subscribe to the notion of anonymity. (10)

Shonibare's life history to date has described a pattern of transhumance taking in both Lagos, where he lived and went to school as a child; and London, where he was born, where he pursued his undergraduate and graduate studies, and where he now lives and works. Shonibare is Yoruba, but to look for evidence of some quintessential Yoruba (and African) signifying practice in his work is to misunderstand and oversimplify the complexity and sophistication manifest in the working through of questions of identity-and-difference in his personal trajectory and current circumstances. It would also misunderstand and oversimplify the intentions and presuppositions entailed in art making in general. (11)

Shonibare is currently one of the more successful British artists of his generation internationally. It would be absurd to suppose that the latter is not in some sense predicated upon the former, even as his work resists inscription within the rubrics of a Yoruba ethnicity, and even though that ethnicity was forged in the contestation of colonial rule in the period since 1850. I shall return to this below, for Yoruba ethnicity is among the markers of a local modernity, in common with photography, easel painting, and the Brazilian-style architecture that provided Yoruba people with built form that was modern yet not colonial (Picton 1995c:78). One could also make the point that the need for an identification with Africa was forged in the diasporic contestations of the practices and legacies of slavery. Shonibare's work, however, resists inscription within both an essentialized "Africa" and an essentialized "Yoruba," even as Lagos and London are among the elements of a trajectory brought to bear upon the processes of his art making.

Colonial rule had made possible the continuity of access to the cheap labor and raw materials that were once the context and justification for transatlantic slavery, and it also worked to encourage a demand within the local markets of west Africa for artifacts industrially produced in Europe. All this contributed to the foundations of European imperial prosperity that some people could waste through dressing up, gambling, carousing, and so forth. Whether directly, as domestic servants, manual laborers and tradesmen (usually of slave descent), or indirectly within the colonial territories, black and African peoples were there, hidden from sight by the circumstances of their place. Shonibare's exposure of that hidden presence in Diary of a Victorian Dandy continues in photography a thematic development that followed on from the success of his use of African-print fabrics:

As he said at that time (Shonibare 1992), his use of these textiles

   refers to the experience of the urban African artist ... and these fabrics
   are industrially manufactured. They contain motifs on them from alphabets
   to footballs and are reproduced over and over again. I want to incorporate
   this symptom of commodification into my work ... there is a deliberate
   denial of the authentic in this installation. The fabrics are bought from
   shops and they do not correspond to the primitivist expressionism
   epitomized by the Nigerian Oshogbo school of the 1960s.... I would like to
   do more with African fabrics because I find them very engaging.

African-print fabric is perhaps the classic example of an industrial product developed in Europe for which an African demand had to be generated. In 1992 Shonibare stretched several short lengths on frames and then painted out either the edges or the front, thereby partially obliterating, denying, the identity of the cloths themselves. He explained (Shonibare 1992):

   The problem is that of trying to introduce, in a conscious way, other areas
   of knowledge into what one is doing, so that the work doesn't become
   hermetic, purely referencing itself, about itself, about the object.... At
   the same time, there is a very obvious reference to the cultural
   significance of pattern and the area of popular culture.... You can
   identify relationships but there is no attempt to be didactic....
   Presenting different points of negotiation interests me a lot, for although
   the image may be localized and mean certain recognizable things, the viewer
   is given the possibility of several narratives .... That also helps to
   avoid fixing meaning in a binary or oppositional way. I create two sides of
   the coin which you can constantly negotiate.... In fact there are many
   more, three, five, six, seven points through which you can negotiate the
   content of a piece. The comfort of knowing which side of the fence you are
   is being constantly thrown ...

Yet the history of these textiles identifies a west African capacity for the subversion of European intention; and this realization has made these cloths so apt a continuing medium for Shonibare's work. It is also fair to suggest that as our knowledge of their history and patterning has developed, so too his use of these fabrics has become more knowing, and more pointed, but only occasionally and never as if they were no more than an overworked cliche. In 1992 his coincidental use of a given pattern allowed some of us to "read" the work in a manner that enhanced our curiosity while misleading us in our perceptions of his intentions. The artist set us straight (Shonibare 1992):

   The South African artist Pitika Ntuli came to see the installation at the
   Serpentine Gallery and he picked out some Ghanaian Adinkra symbols. He knew
   what they meant and could talk about their meanings. Yet that is not the
   focus of the work.... My work is not exclusively about the relations
   between cultural signs and their reception but much more to do with the
   art-ness of the objects in relationship to the art context. (12)

Shonibare's interest in using African-print fabric remains primarily with their generic formal attributes as a hybrid and subversive outcome of a fortuitous late-nineteenth-century engagement between Indonesia, west Africa, and a Europe intent upon colonial rule; and as his work has come to address an ever-widening set of stereotypes (as in Alien Obsessives) the fabric remains an effective medium because of its generic status. Moreover, this effectiveness is enhanced by the fact that whereas at first Shonibare used both wax-print and the cheaper fancy-print cloths, and without distinguishing between cloths produced in European, African, and Asian factories, in more recent work he has tended to restrict his use to the Dutch Wax cloths which are both the most richly textured and the most costly.

African-print fabrics emerged in the nineteenth-century Dutch attempt to undercut Indonesian batik production through the mechanization of the wax-resist process (see Picton 1995a, 2001). This is why they were called Dutch Wax or Wax Print. No wax has in fact been anywhere near them: they are resist-dyed fabrics, but the resist agent is resin, printed at high temperature on each face of the cloth. (13) The Indonesians rejected these fabrics because of the unacceptable quality of their veining and spotting, but these very imperfections found favor on the colonial Gold Coast. In any case, here was a textile that was both exotic and modern without being European. Though produced in Europe, it manifested an aesthetic which was clearly of no appeal there. Moreover, almost as soon as the Gold Coast became the most profitable market for these cloths, local sensibilities began to creep in, most obviously in the visualization of proverbs that is so well known a feature of the aesthetic of Twi-speaking peoples. The earliest dated cloth is the still-popular "Hands and Fingers" pattern, which was in production by 1895. In Ghana it is called "The Palm of the Hand Is Sweeter Than the Back of the Hand," for the palm is where we hold on to good fortune as represented by the twelve pennies of the old English shilling (Picton 1995a:27). (14)

"Staff of Kingship" is another still-popular pattern, its design based upon a wrought-iron sword captured from the Asante (see Phillips 1995:434) and acquired by the British Museum in 1896, the year Prempeh I was sent into exile. We have documentary evidence that this pattern was in production by 1904 (Picton 1995a:25). I suggest that the early establishment of its popularity through almost a hundred years can be attributed to its once subversive implications, surely an unwitting and unintended consequence of its selection by those who did not realize the implications of its very specificity. By incorporating a captured sword, a well-publicized image in its day, the designers of the Haarlem Cotton Company had made a cloth that would remind Gold Coast people of the wars fought over access to Asante gold, resulting in the British defeat of the Asante nation and the profits to be had in Britain thereby. Perhaps the very wearing of this cloth gave Gold Coast people an opportunity to register their opposition to the colonial pretense to authority. They could quietly flaunt their regard for a local authority even if, for a while, its preeminent figure was languishing in exile. Now colonial rule is long gone, but the cloths remain popular. (15)

Thus, How Does a Girl Like You, Get to Be a Girl Like You? (Fig. 9) was produced by Shonibare in response to a commission from the Barbican Art Gallery for its 1995 textile show. (16) Three late-Victorian women, headless as if to throw back to Europe the anonymity foisted upon Africans within colonial rule (and remember the painted-out designs of 1992), are dressed in African-print fabrics. Shonibare used both Wax and Fancy Prints, some probably of Japanese manufacture, including the "Staff of Kingship" (Fig. 10). Its appearance (Picton 1995b:141) together with hitherto unpublished evidence of its source (Picton 1995a:25) was happily fortuitous, as if to underscore the answer to Shonibare's question, How Does a Girl Like You, Get to Be a Girl Like You? This work was subsequently acquired by the Saatchi Collection, whence it appeared in "Sensation: Young British Artists from the Saatchi Collection" (Royal Academy 1997:164-65).

Shonibare later addressed another well-known if bizarre pursuit of the leisured elite: the use of dogs in chasing and killing wild animals. In Hound, first shown during the summer of 2000, at the Camden Arts Centre in north London (Figs. 4-6), three headless men in nineteenth-century dress made of the most costly Dutch Wax African-print cotton cloth, are following their dogs in pursuit of a fox. One of the hunters is dressed in "Staff of Kingship," and the cloth is mostly deep pink in color, a reference to Hunting Pink, the red cloth worn by English huntsmen. Another of the three figures wears a cloth patterned with the words "High Life," and immediately one thinks of the popular west African music of the 1950s and '60s initiated in Ghana, and of the leisure and luxury predicated upon the threefold inheritance of racism, slavery, and colonialism. (17)

Neither Hound nor How Does a Girl Like You is based upon a European art-historical prototype, unlike Mr. and Mrs. Andrews Without Their Heads, 1998 (though it includes fabric with the "Staircase to Heaven" pattern; see Ikon Gallery 1999:42-43), and one of his two most recent works, The Swing (Cover), based upon a Fragonard painting, and shown at the Stephen Friedman Gallery in April-May 2001. (18) In the longer run, of course, just as colonial rule was brought to an end, so too the leisure that it made possible for an elite class might be in the grasp of us all; but we should never forget those upon whose labor these possibilities were forged. Moreover, the headless figures in Hound, Mr. and Mrs. Andrews, and The Swing are distinctly swarthy (a term based upon the Anglo-Saxon for "black"), suggesting, further, the hidden facts of miscegenation, more covert than overt and more widespread than we recognize. (19)

Yinka Shonibare exposes hidden realities and challenges commonplace stereotypes with irony and gentle humor. Yet he does so as firmly and as thoroughly as Samuel Johnson, who, a century before, challenged imperial and colonial history with his History of the Yorubas. (Johnson was himself Yoruba, the child of Sierra Leone repatriates, and his research, though unpublished until 1921, was completed in the late nineteenth century.) Johnson used "Yoruba" to contest colonial history, thereby participating in the invention of that modern ethnicity, while Shonibare uses African-print fabric and photography to contest ethnic, racist, and other stereotypes. Whatever ethnicity might be, the problem lies with its essentialized all-embracing interpretation, and this must be put aside. Shonibare does not reject "Yoruba" as a badge of identity. It is rather that only he can identify the circumstances in which "Yoruba" is the relevant identity to be chosen. As I have previously suggested (Picton 1991), each of us, irrespective of labels and geographies, is the locus of several dimensions of identity-and-difference; and the manner in which we interpret the world by our placing of things in it to these (and other) ends is inevitably complex and negotiable, and never all of a piece. The categories are inherently labile.

The story now returns to Chicago. William Fagg had included Areogun of Osi-Ilorin among the sculptors to be celebrated in a never-to-be-written book entitled Seven Yoruba Masters. Yet the evidence suggests that until well toward the mid-twentieth century, in Ekiti and Opin (whence Areogun came) people used the word "Yoruba" not of themselves but of the Oyo kingdom and people. This is also the usage found in district officers' reports from Ekiti in the colonial period. Areogun would probably have denied he was Yoruba (if anyone had asked him). In any case, his work cannot be configured within the events that comprise the evolution of the modern sense of Yoruba ethnicity; and an identity as "Yoruba" is indeed precisely that: modern. It developed, in the manner in which we now know it, roughly between 1850 and 1950 through debates about language and literature, and about dress; through writing history; through an intellectual interest in mythic and ritual tradition, an interest that did not hamper widespread conversion to Islam and Christianity; and through education, journalism, and political action. The context was, most significantly, the tightening grip of colonial government, and the key players initiating many of these developments were repatriated freed slaves from Sierra Leone, and their descendants (see Picton 1994a etc., and the references given therein, especially Peel 1989). "Yoruba" is part of that world that comes into being with the replacement of transatlantic slavery by a colonial rule that was immediately contested and eventually defeated.

Shonibare asks us to consider the seeming paradox of a personal trajectory that includes elements appropriately identified within ethnicity, as well as elements identified with resistance to the stereotype of ethnicity. Yet the more one thinks about it the more one realizes a wider generality, for the paradox is exclusive neither to Shonibare nor to Black British art. It is more characteristic of local and international modernisms and modernities than is yet acknowledged. Admittedly there are exceptions, such as Taiwo Jegede (sculptor, printmaker, poet, who comes from Ekiti but lives and works in London) and Twins Seven Seven from Oshogbo, Yoruba men who choose to play upon an essentialized identity as "Yoruba." Osi Audu, on the other hand, who is not Yoruba by parentage though he was brought up Yoruba-speaking in Lagos, encountered the ideas about aesthetics and metaphysics that now dominate his interpretations of his painting and drawing in lectures given by Professor Rowland Abiodun at Ife University. "Yoruba" is, in other words, Audu's chosen aesthetic identity. There are many others, however, for whom ethnicity has been left behind in the development of their art, even as it is among the constituent elements of a personal trajectory, artists such as Aina Onabolu, Justus Akeredolu, Akinola Lasekan, Yusuf Grillo, Agbo Folarin, and Gani Odutokun (see Fosu 1986; Picton 1994a; Jari 2000; and here I only list artists who are Yoruba).

The politics and culture entailed in the articulation of identity-and-difference are a shifting kaleidoscope of likenesses and contrasts, within and between ideas and principles, practices and people, things that are local and others that are longer distance, even international, and all of this evolving through time perhaps within an ever developing sense of tradition; and "modern" is about where it is at now. Shonibare gently insists, as Vansina did in 1984, that we recognize, question, critically distance ourselves from, take apart, and even forsake the taken-for-granted status of the ethnic paradigm with which we interpret our material, a paradigm that pervades the literature of African art with a mere delusion of certainty. (20)

I am drawn to three or four possible conclusions. Maybe ethnicity matters sometimes (no matter how problematized); maybe modernity transcends ethnicity (but we have seen Yoruba ethnicity among the elements of a local modernity); maybe ethnicity never was the all-purpose defining social parameter that we have taken it to be; and maybe each of these propositions might apply to particular aspects of any given social and material environment. (21) The best one can say of ethnicity is that it cannot be taken to provide a categorical boundedness: it is about a loosely packaged set of resources and practices that makes it possible for individuals and communities to draw upon (variously, according to the circumstances at hand) languages, political and ritual loyalties, artworks, and so on, for all kinds of reasons, including the provision of badges of being-the-same-as-and/or-different-from. But that is not for the most part why these practices exist. It is merely a use that can be made of them; and whether in ignorance or in retrospect, or even as a deliberate strategy, these resources have become identified with a form of bounded specificity. Yet the relevance of ethnicity cannot be taken for granted of art; rather, it must be demonstrated. In the meantime, Yinka Shonibare's work is also always good fun. (22)

[This article was accepted for publication in June 2001.]

(1.) Stephen Friedman has been representing Yinka Shonibare since 1996. A complete list of exhibitions and publications of his work is available from the Stephen Friedman Gallery, 25-28 Old Burlington Street, London W1S 3AN. Tel: [phone], fax: [phone]; e-mail: [e-mail]; website: www.stephenfriedman.com.

(2.) I was first introduced to Yinka Shonibare by Dr. Clementine Deliss, who at my suggestion organized a series of artists' talks and seminars at the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London) during the autumn and winter of 1991-92. This project was funded by the Research Committee of the School, to which we were most grateful. It had been the intention to publish their proceedings, but completion of the editorial work was displaced by the research that led to africa 95 (the celebration of African art held throughout the UK in fall 1995) and Seven Stories about Modern Art in Africa (Deliss et al. 1995), which, in any case, could be said to have provided the culmination of our project. The March 6, 1992, interview with Yinka Shonibare, referred to in this paper, was to have been published with the proceedings. Publication might yet happen, but in the meantime a copy of the complete interview is available on request from [e-mail].

(3.) You will find William Kentridge, an African within South Africa's definition of the term, in London's Tate Modern, for example.

(4.) The successes of Chris Ofili and Steve McQueen in winning the Turner Prize in 1998 and 1999 respectively (see Picton 2000) have been widely reported; and in 2001 Isaac Julien was among those selected. Yinka Shonibare, though taking another path, is equally among those artists of African descent who represent a breach in the walls of that Citadel. In contrast, very few artists living and working primarily in west Africa can yet claim to be part of an international art world. There are exceptions, of course, a dozen at the most: artists such as Bruce Onobrakpeya, El Anatsui (see Picton 1997, 1998), and Atta Kwami (on show at the Kunsthalle, Basel, August and September 2001).

(5.) There is, I presume, a difference, for modernism can be taken to refer to more-or-less overt art movements, as in Europe where in retrospect we attribute a coherence by capitalizing its initial consonant. On the other hand, modernity refers to the developments that bring social practice to the period of "just now" (the root meaning of modern; see Williams 1976:174-75), whenever that "just now" is. We must, however, put away the idea that modernism/modernity comes to Africa from Europe. There are, of course, a series of engagements between these continents, as also with the Islamic nations of the world, to engender a series of local modernities that are quite specific to their particular locations in Africa, given the manner of the domestication of alien forms and practices within local frameworks of reference; and in that context there have of course also been local visual modernisms, such as Natural Synthesis in Nigeria and Negritude in Senegal.

(6.) Onabolu was, of course, a contemporary of Areogun (ca. 1880-1954), although they would never have met: Areogun had no reason to travel to Lagos, and Onabolu had no reason, as far as we know, to visit the Opin village of Osi-Ilorin.

(7.) This installation comprised two groups of figures, each including two adults and two children. One set is dressed in a predominantly yellow fabric, a Vlisco/Dutch Wax in a largely geometric pattern that Kathleen Bickford Berzock tells me is known in Cote d'Ivoire as "Men Are Not Grateful" (but I, at least, am grateful to her for this information). The other set is dressed in a blue-green fabric decorated with red eyes. I understand (from an anonymous reviewer of this paper) that they have been acquired by the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art. The complete set of eight figures was, as far as I know, published for the first time in Hassan & Oguibe 2001:220-22. The original Alien Obsessives show was accompanied by a limited-edition artist's book (Shonibare 1998) and the screening of science fiction movies.

(8.) Shonibare says his use of African-print textiles, which predates his photographic art, was a response to a tutor's comment about his work as a student: "It's not really you, is it?!" "So I thought 'OK you want ethnic, I'll give you ethnic'" (Shonibare 1997). His pieces published examples at the point of this transition, in which he uses oil paint and collage, are hard to find. The one example I have to hand is in Interrogating Identity (New York University 1991). Three works were included in this exhibition at the Grey Art Gallery, NYU: Caryatid Figures Rafia Color Motif with Viscount from British Telecom (1989), Schnapps (1989), and Beetle Painting (1989-90), which is the only one illustrated in the catalogue. In their catalogue introduction the curators, Kellie Jones and Thomas W. Sokolowski, write: "In the U.S., `Black' refers to people of African Heritage. In the United Kingdom, however, the term `Black' is more heterogenous and can refer to people of African, Caribbean, South Asian and Middle Eastern heritage ..." (New York University 1991:9-10). If only it were that simple.

(9.) I am not aware of any direct comment about Shonibare's work when it was shown in "South Meets West" in Accra 1999. This exhibition was important for at least two reasons: it brought together artists from west and southern Africa; and although curated from Switzerland it was funded in order to permit a first showing in Africa, in this case at the National Museum, Accra. The catalogue was published in Switzerland and includes Accra visitors' comments (Kunsthalle, Bern, 2000).

(10.) The complete text of this part of the interview is worth reading in full. One should note that while accepting "African" in 1992, he already hints below at its problematic status, and that by 1998 the quest for an essential Africanness in his work is firmly rejected.

   CLEMENTINE DELISS: In a review of this installation you were named a "black
   artist" and this label immediately raises the question of how you locate
   yourself and your work in relationship to the art of black artists here and
   the issues of the black arts, identifications which are problematic and
   contain many readings?

   YINKA SHONIBARE: Earlier on I spoke of wanting my work to be local, to
   contain specificity, enabling someone to locate something in the work and
   for it not to be just post-modern and floating. At the same time, I create
   a space in which one can manoeuvre. In terms of being visible, or of being
   described as a black artist, in this context--and words are slightly
   unfortunate--I would prefer the term African artist.

   CD: You accept the term African artist rather than Nigerian or Yoruba or
   even Black British?

   YS: I accept all those terms if they are simply short cuts to describing my
   origin and as long as they are not used as a means of fixing me. I believe
   that visibility is extremely important. I don't feel that I am
   location-less or colour-less because if I do, I am immediately denying
   myself very fundamental aspects of my own visibility. I don't subscribe to
   the notion of anonymity.

   CD: There seems to be a formula that fits the histories of different
   peoples of African descent, and can be used as a quick way of
   problematising their marginalization. This formula contains references to
   vernacular culture and within the vernacular to notions of irony, to double
   meanings, and to an insistence upon narrative whereby narrative becomes
   more than merely a case of making a naive statement about the world, and
   includes an element of social history and self-politicization. You are a
   special case, however. You have not spent your formative years in art
   schools in Nigeria so you don't qualify as an "exile" in the artistic as
   well as existential sense adopted by many African artists who have come
   over to Britain and Europe. Nor are you of the second-generation of Black
   British whose parents came here in the 1950s. You have a different recourse
   to narrative and to locating yourself within a narrative.

   YS: We have reached the question of hybridization and of living in 1992. My
   experiences in Britain are multi-layered. I am bi-lingual. I have to
   constantly negotiate between two cultures speaking Yoruba to my family and
   English when at college or when I am involved in official practices. It is
   true that there are all those different levels and formulas, but what I
   want to achieve is to make objects which can be talked about without
   necessarily having to use those words you mentioned.

(11.) Appiah's comment (1992:29) "`African' can surely be a vital and enabling badge; but ... there are times when it is not the label we need" is apposite, and it can be rewritten for any identifying label, including "Yoruba."

(12.) His choice of this pattern was, in other words, as much for its (almost blatant) quality as a design as for its precise historical references. In any case, until the research for the Barbican show we had not realized the often very specific reference entailed in the particular designs.

(13.) Dutch production was clearly established by the 1890s, and British textile factories followed within the next decade, hence the term English Wax. However, the technique was complex, and soon the Dutch and British factories each began printing imitation resin-resist patterns on just one face of the cloth, and without the subtle random qualities of resin-resist fabrics. Called Fancy Prints, these were marketed in west Africa alongside the more costly Wax Prints. Much later, at Independence, the Dutch and the British established textile factories in most of the countries of west Africa, transferring the wax- and fancy-print technology thereto. With the international expansion of their production in Africa, and in Pakistan, Indonesia, China, and for a time Japan, there are now just two factories in Europe producing African-print fabric: Vlisco, in Helmond, the Netherlands, which produces the most costly cloth and leads the design process; and ABC, Hyde via Manchester, UK.

(14.) At the very last minute, when it was too late to make any changes to the catalogue, we found a "Hands and Fingers" cloth in the ABC archives which carried a label dating it to 1895. I also then realized that my identification of a "Probable original printing by Haarlem Cotton Company" (Picton 1995a:27, the upper of the two illustrations) is wrong. The hand is the Manchester version, and in any case the cloth is 48 inches wide, whereas all the earliest example are only one yard in width. The lower illustration on the same page shows the Haarlem hand: the difference in form is very clear.

(15.) In Nigeria this cloth was, and still is, known as "Corkscrew."

(16.) In resisting ethnic categorization, Shonibare also resists any placing within museum ethnography, and there were those who at this time thought that his acceptance of a commission for the Barbican textile show was odd. However, apart from the fact that not all museum ethnography is unthinkingly locked into the stereotype of the Ethnographic Present, the intention of the Barbican's "The Art of African Textiles" was to focus upon those areas of change and development in textile design and technology as things worth attending to, and to expose the hollow charade of traditionality for what it really is: a stereotype imposed from "without." (Of course, traditionality can also be imposed from "within"; though different, it is no less stereotypical.) In that context, Carol Brown, the Barbican curator, and I concluded that they should commission Shonibare, and his response with How Does a Girl Like You was particularly apt.

(17.) Hound was shown together with 100 Years (Figs. 7, 8, and Enwezor 2001:132-33) in which there is one panel for each year of the twentieth century. Of these, fifty are painted over to obliterate the cloth pattern. Instead they show bacterial, fungal, and insect infestations, the hidden dangers always lurking behind a taken-for-granted order. Of the fifty unpainted panels, sixteen (32%) show designs whose enduring popularity was established in the first decade of the century. These include a design based upon the Indonesian Garuda bird but known in Ghana as "Bunch of Bananas" (see top row, third from left, and eight further panels); the "Sunburst," also known as "Target" (second row, first left, and two other panels); "Staff of Kingship" (top row, nineteenth from left, and bottom row, thirteenth from left); and "Alphabet" (fourth row, fourth and ninth from left). A further five panels (10%) are made from "Men Are Not Grateful" (top row, eighth from left, and four others). Unlike Hound, however, it would be a mistake to look for evidence of the kind of presuppositions entailed in "High Life" and the Hunting Pink "Sword of Kingship."

For other illustrations of Shonibare's work using African-print fabric, see Enwezor 1997, 1999, 2000; Ikon Gallery 1999; Kunsthalle, Bern 2000; Museum Villa Stuck 2001.

(18.) The other most recent work on show at that time was Dorian Gray, a set of photographs in which Shonibare pursues his interest in the Dandy.

(19.) It has been estimated that 20% of the British population has black and African ancestry due to slavery and miscegenation.

(20.) It could, of course, be said that ethnicity is no longer a live issue, certainly in British Africanist studies, e.g., see Fardon 2001.

Anyone working on sub-Saharan Africa in the last quarter of the century took it for granted that the region had been shaped by Islam and Christianity, by four centuries of the Atlantic slave trade, by a century of colonialism, by the tribulations of postcolonial government and by increasing economic marginalization. Ethnic identities were a hot topic because they were both problematic and politically charged.

In contrast, in the otherwise magnificent History of Art in Africa (Visona et al. 2000) the paradigm of ethnicity is not discussed and is by implication unproblematic; but the dependence on it is such that by leaving out the Urhobo people, Bruce Onobrakpeya, arguably the single most important post-Independence west African artist, is also left out.

(21.) This argument follows closely upon Richard Fardon's discussion in his introduction to Counterworks (1995).

(22.) The trajectory of Shonibare's work could be said, in its own way, to parallel the manner in which New Orleans musicians a hundred years ago set out to challenge racism while at the same time having fun. Meanwhile, we might also remember that "From the colonial era, the major legacy Europe left to Africa was not democracy ... it was authoritarian rule and plunder" (Hochschild 1999:301).

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JOHN PICTON is Reader in African Art at the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London. He worked for the Government of Nigeria from 1961 to 1970, and for the British from 1970 to 1979, when he moved to SOAS. He is also a consulting editor of African Arts.