all photos courtesy of the estate of Moyo Ogundipe
For Moyo Ogundipe (1948–2017), as for many contemporary African artists, the global condition has been experienced through the prism of migration. Disillusioned by political turmoil in Nigeria, he fled the country shortly after Sani Abacha assumed power in the early 1990s and settled in the United States, returning only in 2008. At that time, he joined a small but ever-growing returnee community in the southwest of the country and, as a mature artist, invented himself anew. In this article, I argue that the experience of migration, and particularly the experience of displacement (or sense of isolation from both a homeland and a new land) that so often accompanies migration, became the catalyst for his creative practice. He worked within the dynamic tradition of mythopoeia—what he conceived as poetic mythmaking—and produced an imaginative new body of work designed both to make sense...