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The map of my homeland has changed.
The cartographers blot out forests and rivers.
Oil wells and flares dot the new landscape -
now nobody recognises the beauty queen's face.1
UPON ENTERING THE SAINSBURY AFRICAN GALLERIES at the British Museum, a visitor is first greeted by an impressive steel sculpture called "Otobo (Hippo) Masquerade" (1995) ? The masquerade, which is almost two metres high, is made of wood, steel, and palm-stem brooms, often used to "sweep away evil." According to Kalahari mythology, it is a fierce and dangerous character in its mixture of animal and human features. A little further to the right, the visitor encounters an equally magnificent figure, labelled "Big Masquerade with boat and household on his head" (1995)· This two-and-a-half-metres-high masquerade, made of steel, wood feathers, and mirrors, is clad in a bloody apron and is wielding two machetelike knives.3 In Kalahari society, swords "show power, violence, control," and the boat and the house signify wealth. At the same time,
there is also a reminder of the religious side of masquerading. The stomach area of the masquerade has a white apron, the white apron is spattered with blood. This mark is a sacrifice to the gods that play in any performance.4
Furthermore, as part of Britain's "Africa 05" season in 2005 the museum's forecourt was transformed into an Africa Garden by the BBC 's garden-makeover show Ground Force, temporarily displaying sculptures by contemporary African artists such as Rachid Korai'chi, Emmanuel Taiwo Jegede, and Adam Madebe. The garden also included a colourful water-sculpture with the name "Asoebi, or Lace, Sweat and Tears" (2005), which showed "five galvanised steel figures of Nigerian women, each nearly 2.5 metres in height and brightly painted in pink and green" which are "collectively described by the Yoruba concept of 'Asoebi'. The nearest English equivalent might be 'blood, sweat and tears', suggesting the beauty, suffering and indomitable spirit of the Kalahari people."5 The creator of all these works, "Otobo," "Big Masquerade," and "Asoebi," is the Nigerian-born British artist and sculptor Sokari Douglas Camp, who mainly works in galvanized steel and who describes her transnational upbringing as follows:
I was one of these colonial children that was mailed back and forth to school. So did I live in Nigeria? Quite...