This incredible creative caricature does not merely resemble me, it actually reads me. It reads my silences with the same attentiveness as my declarations. It stages a quiet but insistent argument about what it means to live as a thinking African in a world that often prefers spectacle to substance, noise to memory, and speed to meaning. At the centre stands a man formed by words long before he was shaped by institutions, a writer who began at fourteen not as an experimenter but as someone already aware that language could wound as much as it could liberate. The pen and the camera are not ornamental here; they are witnesses, bearing testimony to a life spent documenting what power attempts to erase and illuminating voices history habitually relegates to footnotes.
What radiates from the image is a tension deliberately embraced, royalty without arrogance and radicalism without chaos. Rooted in Ejigbo Awori soil and refined through the discipline of linguistics and literature, the figure stands at a crossroads where ancestry meets inquiry and heritage confronts injustice. The Awori dialect, the palace motifs, and the ancestral calm embedded in the image are not nostalgic gestures. They are intellectual positions. They insist that indigeneity is not intellectual poverty and that tradition, when interrogated rather than idolised, can serve as an instrument of justice rather than a refuge for silence.
From this grounding in identity and place emerges the body of work that surrounds the figure. The books stacked beneath him do more than announce authorship; they map a moral geography shaped by lived experience. ISA N WO RUU – The Boiling Cauldron is not a metaphor fashioned for effect but a condition lived daily. The boiling is social, political, emotional, and psychological, reflecting the unrest of women denied safety, children denied futures, elders denied dignity, and persons with disabilities denied visibility. In this visual narrative, poetry does not escape reality; it confronts it directly. Literature becomes civic labour, journalism evolves into cultural defence, and advocacy emerges as art sharpened by ethical responsibility.
It is this merging of identity, work, and purpose that gives the caricature its deepest resonance. The image refuses to compartmentalise the self. The artist does not retreat to make room for the activist, and the professional does not silence the poet. Instead, they coexist in productive and sometimes uncomfortable dialogue. This convergence mirrors my work with Voice of Awori and Unchained Vibes Africa, my long commitment to the local and international creative cum human rights communities that have shaped my journey the years, and my insistence through reportage, blogging, performance, and poetry that African narratives must be authored by Africans accountable first to their communities, not to applause or institutional convenience.
Seen this way, the caricature becomes more than representation; it becomes a point of reference. For critics, it offers cultural advocacy as practice rather than posture, and art as an ethical stance rather than ornament. For readers, it extends an invitation to read deeper, question harder, and listen more carefully to indigenous voices speaking in their own tongues and on their own terms. For me, it stands as a reminder that the work remains unfinished. The pen is still warm, the camera still searching, the cauldron still boiling, and the responsibility to memory, justice, truth, and the making of self remains urgent and non negotiable.
@Prince Adeola Goloba 2026
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