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| Get Into It! Spring - Summer 2008 |
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By Adisa S. Oji, Founder of MACPRI and Developer of the African Image Revolution
IT GIVES me great pleasure to have this opportunity to share my work with the readers of Black Woman and Child Magazine. In fact, a very significant chapter in the history of our people and the work of MACPRI has been written with this publication. This is the first time that one of my signature images has ever been featured in an African community-based publication committed to the development of Black women and children.
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"Some have argued that my love affair with the Africa Woman is, in some way, fetishism." |
For my students, colleagues and the private collectors of my work, there is a clear understanding that in my work as a documentary photographer and artist, I have always focused my energies in recording the daily activities of African women as they labor tirelessly in their multiple tasks providing for our children, our families and our future. I would have to say that more that 70% of the images I have taken in my almost 20 years as a photo-historian are of Black women and children. It is obvious from a brief glance at images on display in my home gallery, in private gallery collections and at my rare public exhibits that I have an inextinguishable love affair with the African woman in her glory and in her simplicity. I love everything about her, especially the fact that she is the first life giver, the true beginning.
Some of my critics have argued that, to use a European term, my love affair with the African Woman is, in some way, fetishism. Fetishism can be defined as reverence or worship given to an object, a thing or aspects of a thing, outside of the Christian context. When people want to be very crude, they define this form of honor, which elevates the object of worship to a deified status as idolatry. But if giving worship and praise to our mother, our mother’s mother, our sisters and wife is viewed as sacrilege, then we will continue to fail in giving our women the honor they are due.
Through the work of Mother Africa’s Children Photographic Reproductions International (MACPRI), since 1987, I have been privileged to meet and eat with African women and their children in Africa, the Caribbean and North America. I have watched, with sincere admiration, women who have traveled from villages with load and sometimes as much as four young children hanging on to them. There is one woman in Burkina Faso I remember vividly. She was young, about 24 years old. The woman was walking a bicycle with two 100-pound sacks strapped to the carrier. I was told that she traveled some 18 miles from her home village to come sell grain in the Koudougou market. I don’t know how she did it. Sweat was pouring down her face and she was noticeably in pain. But she was willing to stop, steady her bicycle and smile as I took her photograph. At the time I did not even notice the additional weight of a young baby on her back. This young market woman, I thought, is only one of the many who, with or without the assistance of a man, struggles and will continue to struggle to feed her children.
As I continued to watch her as she mustered up enough strength to push off the old bicycle, so many memories, so many instances rushed into my head of all that I have been privileged to become because a woman suffered. And should I not give this suffering woman, who should suffer no more, my worship? Every where I turn and in every action meted out among humanity, for advancement and preservation of our humanity, I have had no other choice but to draw the conclusion from what I have seen through my own eyes and have recorded with my cameras that “Mother Is God.”
The photograph featured on the cover of this edition of Black Woman and Child is from my controversial “Mother God” collection. It is one of my signature pieces that will be on public display at MACPRI’s 20th Anniversary photo exhibition to be held in Toronto, July 2007. This image of Ummu and her son Dudu was taken at the Makha family home on the Island of Goree, Senegal in December 2001. Ummu is a practicing Rastafarian who belongs to the Wolof people. Her husband Makha, Makha’s Mother and her four children live together in their humble concrete and thatched house. The family runs a bread baking business among other ventures -- including a small cash crop and substance vegetable garden. Mama Makha is a market woman and the children assist in selling the bread baked by Makha in the family oven.
In the photograph while preparing the evening meal, Ummu cradles Dudu on her back and takes pause while looking out at her garden creation.
Click here to see PDF of this magazine exert. To order a subscription to BWAC, visit our subscription page.
