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| Culture by Julie Pithers A Week of Yoruba Arts and Culture Once one of the strongest kingdoms in Africa, the Yoruba tribe has long since spread across the Atlantic Ocean from its original base of West Africa. The slave trade from the west coast was huge and the Yoruba made up the largest number of slaves taken to South American, Caribbean, and the British North American plantations. As slaves go, the plantation owners couldn’t have asked for better. Originally, the Yoruba people, though they had large thriving cities, would spend at least part of every year farming. They were also more resistant to malaria than the North American natives and the Europeans, and therefore able to hack out a giant money-making and nation-building industry from the jungles and bayous. They made the plantation owners rich and helped bring Europe and the Americas out of the middle ages and into the future. The only thing the Yoruba slaves got out of this deal was more slavery and a civil war, but what they brought with them to the new world transcends commerce – their culture. Not that it was easy, as attempts were made to strip them of their drums, art and religion, but throughout Brazil, Cuba and parts of Louisiana there is still plenty of Yoruba floating around. "When you see South American religion, like the Santa Maria festival, you will see lots of aspects of Yoruba," says Tunde Dawodu of the African Festival and Presentation Society. "Let’s look at Carnival. There is masquerade. Masquerade is more or less the interloper between the living and the dead. The Yoruba use the masquerade to invoke the spirits of dead relatives by representing them in the image they think their spirit might take on – like a tiger or an elephant, you try to imagine them as they are now." Calgary’s African Festival and Presentation Society is in the middle of a week of Yoruba arts and culture. They’ve brought in two of Nigeria’s best-known Yoruba artists to perform and give workshops for the event – Labayo and Seyi Olaniyi are siblings who have dedicated their careers to the Yoruba culture. Their parents are also internationally renowned Yoruba artists. Nike Olaniyi Davis, their mother, is a batik artist who had a showing in Calgary last year. Their father, Twin Seven Seven, who passed away last year, was a well respected painter and sculptor. (His name comes from the fact that his mother gave birth to seven sets of twins – the Yoruba have the largest number of cases of twins in the world.) Both Labayo and Seyi Olaniyi are currently studying in the U.S. Seyi is in theatre arts in New York, where last year she performed in an off-Broadway play about the life of rapper Tupac Shakur, and Labayo is completing his MFA in art history in Iowa City. Both are planning to return to Nigeria when they are finished school, but in the meantime they’ll be bringing the resilient beauty of Yoruba culture to the Eau Claire Market. Throughout the week, Labayo and Seyi will present drumming, batik, sculptures and dance workshops, then on Saturday they will present a concert at the Bow Valley College Auditorium. |
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