Reflections on Yoruba Cosmologies in the Work of Rotimi Fani-Kayode

Rotimi Fani-Kayode’s work is a profound engagement with Yoruba knowledge systems originating in West Africa and proposes a unique perspective of the world. By reclaiming pre-colonial Yoruba traditions and challenging postcolonial impositions through the use of ritual, symbolism and desire, Fani-Kayode created a body of work that is deeply resonant, both culturally and politically. While his art recontextualizes ancient Yoruba concepts, the meanings of his images remain under-explored. This is partly due to the suppression of Yoruba logic in academic discourse and partly because of the colonial barrier separating those who fully understand it from a broader audience. Here, I seek to redress this with a reparative reading, which grounds Fani-Kayode’s work within his indigenous worldview.

The City of Ilé-Ifẹ̀

To fully embrace the ancestral meanings of Fani-Kayode’s work, it is essential to understand the place from which he found himself exiled. Although born in Lagos, his family originates from Ilé-Ifẹ̀, a city of great significance in Yoruba cosmology. Known as the Holy City, Ilé-Ifẹ̀ is regarded as the birthplace of Yoruba culture and territory. The word Ifẹ̀, means ‘expansion’, and Ilé-Ifẹ̀ refers to the origin myth: The Land of Expansion. Located in southwestern Nigeria, Ilé-Ifẹ̀ is not only the ancestral home of the Yoruba people but it is also believed to be the origin of humanity itself. The city is known as the home of the 401 orishas (divine spirits), with festive rituals celebrated daily throughout the year. It is also the ancestor of all lands, the first earth inhabited by humankind.

Therefore, Fani-Kayode’s loss of connection through exile can be understood as not merely geographical but also spiritual. Ironically, by evoking the memory of Ilé-Ifẹ̀ and its ritual dimensions while at the same time being unable to return, Fani-Kayode’s work resonates with the displaced condition of the African diaspora, blending his personal biography with historical layers of colonial cruelty.

Fani-Kayode’s exile from Nigeria was inherited. His father, Victor Babaremilekun Adetokunboh Fani-Kayode, was a British-Nigerian aristocrat born in Chelsea, England, in 1921.¹ A supporter of Nigerian independence, Victor played a pivotal role in negotiations with the British government, embodying the ambiguities of a family caught between two cultural poles. In 1963, he was conferred the title of ‘Balogun of Ifẹ̀’ (Leader of the Warriors of Ifẹ̀) by Oba Adesoji Aderemi, the late king of Ilé-Ifẹ̀. In 1966, following a military coup in Nigeria, their home was attacked, and Victor was brutalised by mutineers in front of his family. This event forced the family into exile in Brighton, England, where Rotimi Fani-Kayode would grow up.

From Ilé (family) to Ẹgbẹ́ (community)

The concepts of ilé and egbe are important to Fani-Kayode’s work. In a broad sense, ilé can refer to home, to earth and biological family - a group linked by traditional notions of sexual reproduction and lineage. Ẹgbẹ́, on the other hand, represents its opposition: a chosen family, or a society connected by common interests and shared conditions. Through his work, Fani-Kayode evokes characters (including Abiku and Ibeji amongst others) who are members of Ẹgbẹ́ Orun (spiritual society) to advocate for non-heteronormative forms of desire. In portraying desire between black men, Fani-Kayode's work advocates for a collective societal structure (egbe).

By ritualising his desires and using Yoruba traditions to represent queer "Black men from the third world",² Fani-Kayode breaks with colonial, male-dominated lineage structures and challenges the notion that Yoruba culture is inherently patriarchal or strictly defined by normative sexual bonds (ilé). In doing so, he reclaims pre-colonial structures in Yoruba culture, in which gender and sexual roles were not central, as authors like Oyěwùmí Oyèrónkẹ́ and Teresa Washington have called attention to.

As such, Fani-Kayode’s images challenge the colonial imposition of rigid gender roles and heteronormativity, and reclaims an ancient Yoruba understanding of personhood. This act of reclamation is particularly poignant in light of the colonial dynamics of self-hatred as described by Franz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks, where he argues that colonised individuals are forced to suppress parts of themselves to conform to hegemonic standards—a dynamic that Fani-Kayode’s work actively resists.

The Abiku (Born to Die)

One of the central characters in Ẹgbẹ́ Orun (spiritual society) and in Fani-Kayode’s work is the Abiku: a child destined to die young, caught in a cycle of birth and death as they move between the material world (ayé) and the spiritual realm (ọ̀run). In many ways, the artist embodies this character and in doing so, not only addresses his own Abiku status (as one who will die young), but also presents a vision of - and gives voice to - a wider community of Abiku. 1980s Britain, the context in which Fani-Kayode was producing his work, was a time of heightened violence against black communities; a decade marked by stop and search and increased police violence against black communities, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, and the Brixton Riots of 1981 and 85. Yet against this backdrop, Fani-Kayode persisted in his work, to address silenced forms of knowledge for people experiencing multiple exiles and oppressions, whether political, emotional, cultural, sexual or spiritual.

In Yoruba tradition, breaking the Abiku’s cycle of death and rebirth requires catching them in the act of revealing what it is that secretly connects them with their community of fellow Abiku. Fani-Kayode’s photographs, which immortalize moments of breaking multiple taboos, serve as vehicles to publicise his secret. The images themselves become eternal records of a communal secret and a truth intentionally suppressed by hegemonic culture. As Fani-Kayode expressed: "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."³

Fani-Kayode’s practice therefore operates on two levels. Firstly, he applies Yoruba ethics and aesthetics to a Western art media, addressing the sense of being in one reality but belonging to another world - like the Abiku. It also addresses the idea of exile, displacement and an in-betweener status, like being from ilé (traditional family or city) while feeling a strong connection to an Egbe (society or group). Secondly, the images serve as vehicles to publicise the Abiku’s secret, connecting them to their community. Thus, by producing an iconography that celebrates non-normative desire, he symbolically breaks a taboo. Like a Yoruba priest would do, Fani-Kayode performatively breaks the life-death cycle and prevents it from repeating by publicising the Abiku’s secret.

Ibeji (Twins) and Egungun (Ancestral Figures)

When considering the balance between the visible and invisible in West African philosophy, it is important to highlight two figures that influence this dynamic. The first is the Ibeji (twins), who embody the manifestation of invisible power over material reality. In African diasporic contexts, their actions cannot be undone by the orishas, reinforcing the idea that reality is more complex than binary oppositions such as life/death or day/night. Fani-Kayode’s work resonates with this opposition to binaries, representing ibejis within his universe together with other beings from spiritual society, thus challenging simplistic dichotomies and embracing the multiplicity of identities. This reflects a central belief in many West African cultures: the same reality can manifest in different ways.

The second figure is that of the Egungun (Ancestral), which belongs to the same category as Abiku but represents its opposite. The concept of Egungun evokes an impact on the material world that is so profound that the figure must be remembered long after their death. While the presence of Egungun is built over a lifetime through strong alignment with ilé (lineage), creating a lasting spiritual credit that allows the person to return to their community, an Abiku is excluded from familial lineage and has no possibility of becoming an ancestor (Egungun).

Despite embodying the Abiku, Fani-Kayode’s legacy endures, and he has achieved the status of Egungun. His photographs are testament to his Egungun status, they are an immortal body of work that transcend the predestined fate of those marked for early death. By employing a ‘technique of ecstasy’, Fani-Kayode perpetuated and expanded the ancestral knowledge inherited from his family, creating space for a radical imagination in which ritual desire restores power to bodies once stripped of it. Fani-Kayode’s legacy endures as a testament to the power of culture over hegemonic rule, his work a visual statement and tool in reclaiming, restoring and reimagining.

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¹ Femi Fani-Kayode, Lineage: https://femifanikayode.org/lineage/
² Rotimi Fani-Kayode, Tiwani Contemporary, 2014. p.15
³ Ibid, p.15

J. Ọmọṣade Awolalu, Yoruba Beliefs and Sacrificial Rites, 1979.

A. Akinjogbin (Ed.), The Cradle of a Race: Ife from the Beginning to 1980, 1992.

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 1952.

Marcus Harvey, ‘Engaging the Orisa: An exploration of the Yoruba concepts of Ibeji and Olokun as theoretical principles’ in Black Theology, 2008, 6.1: 61-82.

Melville J. Herskovitz, “A Note on ‘Woman Marriage’ in Dahomey”, Africa 10, 335-41, 1937.

Oyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women: Making an African sense of Western Gender Discourses, University of Minnesota Press, 1997.

Wole Soyinka, ‘Abiku’ in Présence Africaine, 1966, 57: 296-297.

Teresa N Washington, The architects of existence: Aje in Yoruba cosmology, ontology, and orature, 2014.