Richard Ayodeji Ikhide
23 5/8 x 17 3/4 in
Recently, I had been looking at a lot of images of African children at missionary or religious institutions praying. I was drawn to the solemn image of a lot of these children in prayer, which also got me thinking about the impact of monotheistic religions in Africa and how that has shaped the spiritual lives of Africans over the past couple of hundred years.
This piece is my attempt to challenge some of the ideas around African spirituality, where Africans themselves don’t see the value in honouring past traditions and see these foreign religions as progressive and theirs as archaic. I was thinking around the idea of worshipping images of gods and goddesses which look like us.