Word: yoruba
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...carved figure embodies meanings that are entirely based on gesture and posture. Art Historian Robert Thompson, in showing these works drawn from the superb African collection owned by Katherine White in Los Angeles, demonstrates the canons of African motion across the diversity of regional cultures: Dan and Dogon, Yoruba and Ogoni, Luba and Ashanti, Benin and Ejagham...
Just as sitting suggests permanence, calm and repose, so the act of balancing -as seen in the Yoruba "Gelede" masks with animals riding their heads and in the figures on houseposts or columns -indicates a harmonious equilibrium with the world and its spirit forces. Kneeling "conveys belief that life demands the beautiful giving of the self to persons of honor." A standing posture implicitly suggests power, life, fortitude, kingliness-as in (amid a host of other examples) the sacred fetishes of Zaire, wooden figures into which tribesmen ceremonially hammer nails as a proof of moral integrity; the fetish, they believe...
...commercial instinct is reasserting itself everywhere-from the $20-a-night Bristol Hotel in Lagos, where Ibo businessmen throng to re-establish their contacts, to the smallest villages, where young boys sell cigarettes for a few cents' profit. "They have learned a lot from the war," a Yoruba from Nigeria's Western Region told TIME Correspondent James Wilde last week. "They will never try armed force again, but will use their brains instead. This is far more dangerous...
...Yoruba spoke with mingled admiration and apprehension. Three years ago the Ibos established the breakaway nation of Biafra and precipitated Black Africa's worst civil war. When the war ended last January, close to 2,000,000 of them were dead or missing, Biafran Leader Odumegwu Ojukwu was headed for exile in the Ivory Coast, and the Ibo homeland was a shambles. But with the armistice six months old this week, the Ibos appear well on the way to reviving. "They have not been conquered," said the Yoruba. "They have merely cleared the decks to build anew...
...attempt at looting. The looting took place right on the main square in front of most of the visiting newsmen. Several marine enlisted men simply entered a house and started ransacking it. They pulled out a bed and a table before an officer saw them and started shouting in Yoruba. They shrugged and carried the bed and table back inside...