Jelili Atiku’s Dance of Justice and Sacrifice

Though Atiku’s art confronts external issues, it is more an art that demands inwardness, reflection, and contemplation of what we are, what we want, and what we want our world to be.

The image that often strikes one upon seeing any of Jelili Atiku’s many performances is that of an Egúngún masquerade strutting his stuff in a public square—and here, it is the maverick, spiritual effect of a figure confident in the riot of colours he displays in his garments, his body markings, and his other accoutrements that magnets the spectator; a figure that calls attention to itself with its choreographed or arbitrary movements. He appears to us like an otherworldly figure, a performer who seems to straddle a line between the activism of urgent contemporary concerns and an acrostic possession of the influences of Yoruba spirituality. To witness a performance such as his, in person, is to unwittingly find oneself in a natural partnership, to become an acolyte in a ritual of protest. The man is not so much a man as a vessel whose very bearing mimes powerful visual messages and symbols. In large part, the shadow that Atiku casts on his audience is that of a conspicuous enigma. And on the informal and formal stages where he performs, that enigmatic appearance becomes precisely his leverage: he somehow manages to transmogrify his entire frame into a potent medium for protesting injustice.

Consider ‘Aragamago Will Rid This Land of Terrorism’, a performance he did in his hometown of Ejigbo, Lagos, on 14 January, 2016, following the torture and assault of women who were accused of stealing pepper in Ejigbo Market. The observable detail of the performance is the representation of a cleansing: five strange figures stoically moving through streets like ritual masquerades, festooned in red and white nylon garments, carrying figurines around their head, and throwing flyers everywhere as they went. When we view Atiku and his acolytes (Monsuru Saula, Hassan Nosiru, Jamiu Sanni, and Ashimiu Muyideen) here, what we see inscribed upon their body language is defiance and revolution. ‘Aragamago’—the power of the wife or Orunmila, the Yoruba God of wisdom—corrals all the pent-up anger of Ejigbo into what is more or less a renunciation of injustice, co-opting the entire community into that event, out of which auspiciousness Atiku attained his biggest head-on confrontation with authority. For a few days after the performance, Atiku and his cohorts were arrested and detained at the Ejigbo Police Station for, amongst other alleged offenses, disturbing public peace. They were later acquitted by the Ejigbo Magistrate Court...