Have you heard of Rotimi Fani Kayode? The late Nigerian-born photographer is one of the queer Africans we’re featuring this Pride Month 2024.
In 1966, Fani-Kayode and his family fled Nigeria for the UK. His father was a prominent Yoruba political figure and moved the family following violent events that would eventually lead to the Biafran Civil War. Rotimi was 12 years old at the time.
Fani-Kayode passed away in 1989, but in his short life of 34 years and career of just six years, he produced a body of work that is still powerful and revolutionary today.
His photography added a rarely-seen narrative to the Western art world. One of cultural displacement, Yoruba spirituality, gay black love, and the subversion of neo-colonialism.
Just a year before his death, Fani-Kayode penned an essay titled “Traces of Ecstasy” that offers the best insight into the philosophy of his work. Here’s what he had to say:
“Both aesthetically and ethically, I seek to translate my rage and my desire into new images which will undermine conventional perceptions and which may reveal hidden worlds. Many of the images are seen as sexually explicit – or, more precisely, homosexually explicit.”
“I make my pictures homosexual on purpose. Black men from the Third World have not previously revealed either to their own peoples or to the West a certain shocking fact: they can desire each other.” Rotimi Fani-Kayode — Making Queer History
“But the exploitative mythologising of Black virility on behalf of the homosexual bourgeoisie is ultimately no different from the vulgar objectification of Africa which we know at one extreme from the work of Leni Riefenstahl and, at the other from the ‘victim’ images which appear constantly in the media.” Rotimi Fani-Kayode — Making Queer History
“It is now time for us to reappropriate such images and to transform them ritualistically into images of our own creation. For me, this involves an imaginative investigation of Blackness, maleness, and sexuality, rather than more straightforward reportage.” Rotimi Fani-Kayode — Making Queer History
