Lagos-Based Artist, Williams Chechet, Makes Nigeria Pop
The Sahel’s like a superhighway. Next stop’s Northern Nigeria, the Hausa heartlands where local custom and long-haul commerce make centuries-old trade-offs. Consider its foundational myth. A hero named Bayajidda, appears, saves Daura’s matriarchal state from the great snake, Sarki, and marries its queen, Magajiya Daurama. Bayajidda’s seven sons, in turn, found the North’s seven Hausa Bakwai states. Hausaland’s artistic and cultural heritage is a web of allusion, but those strands that tie it to the past intersect on an axis with the collage and pastiche of intercultural exchange. Even Bayajidda, as an exiled prince from Baghdad, was engrafted to the soil where later dynasties grew from his root. William Chechet, a Lagos-based pop artist, uses Hausa cultural iconographies to explore similar intertextualities of contemporary Nigerian life, reimagining Africa’s friction between longstanding cultural traditions and global mass culture.
