Reimagining Nigeria’s Yoruba Folk Tales Through Photos

When Nigerian author Amos Tutuola's book My Life in the Bush of Ghosts first came out in 1954, it was celebrated internationally as a richly imaginative take on Nigerian folklore. At home, however, the story—a Yoruba folk tale of a boy who escapes war into a forbidden world of ghosts and spirits—was largely shat on by the intellectual elite, who felt the language, written in the fantastical and naive perspective of a child, was a digression from the "proper English" impressed upon them from their colonialist past.

But it's that playful remixing of language that gave Tutuola's story a magical feel, enamoring it with audiences in Britain, Africa, and America. Today the book is essential Nigerian reading, and went on to inspire musician David Byrne who, alongside Brian Eno, recorded a groundbreaking, but also initially derided, album with the same name.

The book continues to enchant new readers, including Spanish photographer Cristina de Middel—an artist and documentary photographer whose previous exploration into African history, Afronauts, re-imagined imagery from Zambia's failed space program in the 60s.

VICE chatted with de Middel, whose show closes November 7 at the Contact Gallery in Toronto, about the haunting and beautiful Tutuola-inspired images from her new series, This Is What Hatred Did.

VICE: Tell me about how you were inspired by Amos Tutuola's My Life in the Bush of Ghosts.
Cristina de Middel: I loved the narrative sequence and structure of the book, and the images that would come to my mind while reading it were already very interesting. I started sketching that and I didn't know what I would do with that, but when I was invited to show the Afronauts, they took us on an excursion to an area called Makoko, where most photojournalists go to take pictures of the cliche of Africa. You know: the poor kids and the poor neighborhood, while they are all happy and smiling. It's a very stereotypical neighborhood where they smoke fish so there's all this smoke and it's so dark and beautiful at the same time, and spooky and scary and romantic. I felt it was the best place to really try and tell the story because I could talk about the story itself—about the book, which I thought was incredible—and I could really give a chance to the neighborhood to be portrayed from a different angle. If you type in Makoko, Lagos, or even Nigeria on Google Images, one of the first images that will come up is from Makoko.

I wanted to tell the story of the neighborhood—or at least try to, because I'm still a white woman and I can project my imagination to that—but of course I am not an expert, I will never be an expert in what happens in the neighborhood. It's not my job.

I wanted to do the opposite that I did to the Afronauts. The Afronauts is a real story that I translated into fiction and this is a pure fiction that I made happen for real, so I took the story and took it to the place and made it happen in the place, so it was a return journey from the Afronauts.

You have a photojournalism background, right? I'm interested to see how this move toward fiction relates to your work as a photojournalist.
For me it was just to realize and acknowledge something that everybody knows—I mean, I'm not discovering dynamite here—but [it is] the fact that photojournalism needs to get harsher and harsher to engage the audience. Like, you really need to see the corpse of the kid on the beach for people to react. And I think that's a failure in the photojournalistic language, because we got used to it, and sometimes it doesn't provoke the reaction—that at least the author, the photojournalist—wants.

So for me, it was like, "OK, this language is not working, so let's experiment with other languages." It was easy because first, I love fiction, I love ghosts and I love space. I'm kinda childish in my tastes for stories. I'm not super intellectual and I'm very happy not to be because I can interact with normal people. Not that [intellectuals] are abnormal. [Laughs] I have a lot of fun playing on the surface of things. I think we kind of underestimate surface because it's where everything happens.

Doing work that is so fantastical, was there ever a concern that you were perpetuating an exotic "black magic/witchdoctor" stereotype of African cultures?
Honestly, I didn't think about it that way. Maybe I am. I am more worried about the stereotype about Africa that just talks about poverty and smiling kids with flies around the mouth, so my priority was to fight against that stereotype. But it's true that maybe the second most-powerful stereotype coming from Africa is this dark magic thing, but I think it comes from people's… not ignorance… but lack of interest or understanding what all this is about. I am now doing a series specifically about this—it's not black magic, it's a religion. The Yoruba, the Ifa religion, that traveled with the slaves to Haiti, to Cuba, to Brazil, and it's a religion and we can still call it black magic because we don't understand it!

Of course, I tried to have a superficial level that, at an aesthetic level you can enjoy it and it's a beautiful image, that of course is important because it can catch the eye and attention of people. But then I want them to question and try to understand why. I tried to mix real documentary images with staged images. I remember showing that series and at least two people came in asking about the picture of the little boy and the bride—the bride dressed as a ghost and the bouquet—and they asked if that was a traditional way of getting married in Nigeria. I mean, I cannot go down to that level.

What was it like working in the community?
The main problem of working in Makoko was that there are community leaders/kings of the neighborhoods—and there was a couple of them—I had to get their permission to work there, so it took me some time and I had to spend two, three afternoons with them and explaining why I'm a single woman and not married, why I'm not at home with my kids, why I'm taking pictures in Africa and not my hometown. I talked about my life at a very deep level and got drunk with them and eventually they realized that I don't want to do anything bad to them and that it's going to be fun and something I really wanted to do together with them. I need people to engage with the project, I need sort of a performance that I document. I create, I generate the performance, and then I play the photojournalist—I don't work like a fashion photographer, I still work like a photojournalist. But what is in front of the camera is something I've created, too.

How important for you is it to work with the community you're shooting?
That's part of my experience. There's something about making a project—a photographic project, as I make them—that one part is to share with others, and that's the book and the image. And then there's something that I do just for me because I want to live that experience and I want to understand that experience and I want to talk to these people.

Maybe because I showed the Afronauts two years before, they were super amused by it and they couldn't believe it. It's not that I was scared, but I was a bit worried about them understanding my position and approach by, uh, multiplying the cliche and intensifying the cliche, because it's something I can control in the Western world but I have no clue how [the people in Lagos] would react. But I was very surprised.

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