Arts and aesthetics reflect a people’s traditions, values, practices, pervasive realities, and external relationships. In the traditional African setup, art is intricately bound up with spirituality and culture. Thus Somjee (1992, 49) observes that “… art objects are not mediators of aesthetics but of ritual processes and institutional law that define and maintain relationships of the sexes, age groups, clans, and with neighboring ethnic groups.” The boundary between art, social practice, and spiritual or religious performance is subtle, but real (see Jahn 1968, 57-58). To illustrate this fact, one only has to witness the performance of the following Ifa divination verse: The day Epe was created Was the day Ase became law Likewise, Ohun was born The day Epe was invoked Ase is proclaimed Epe is called But they both still need Ohun (Abiodun 1994, 73). This verse cannot be properly comprehended without acknowledging the Yoruba religious beliefs and[…]

Almost all of Africa’s ancient artistic heritage and natural history collections are preserved in European countries: the United Kingdom, France, Germany, the Netherlands, Vienna, and Belgium. Difficult as it may be to articulate the magnitude of this reality, it is even more difficult to learn how such previous cultural identities were looted and stolen from their birthplace. The restitution of African Art has long been a conversation since the year of Africa, 1960 when the independence movement began. In addition to African art, Africa’s natural history collections contain countless botanical, geological, and human specimens— prestigious unique specimens that were also extracted from Africa. For example, the fossil bones of the largest dinosaur known to the world, a one hundred and fifty million years old fossil that was extracted from Tanzania now displayed in Berlin, Germany since the 1930s. For centuries, Africans have been described as people without history, culture, or civilization and that Africans never invented anything therefore,[…]

In this series we are embarking on a pioneering  corpus aim to highlight the rich history of some of the varied African tribes or people groups, their impact on African and world history, legacies and stories that matter. Studies have shown that the African continent contains the highest genetic diversity of any place in the world and population genetics theory predicts that the highest level of diversity exists at the source of the population’s origin. For humans, that is Africa — with respect to Africa being the cradle of humanity — the birth place of humankind. As the second largest continent, Africa is home to more countries than any other continent in the world and more tribes or people group than any other continent not to mention the highest variation in language with more than 2,000 distinct languages, Africa has a third of the world’s languages. The Yoruba are[…]