Opposite the Nigerian National Museum in central Lagos once stood a memorial hall which formed an integral part of the city, a popular congregation point that evoked a sense of pride. This year, decades after memorial hall fell into disrepair, a state-of-the-art museum dedicated to Yoruba culture opens to the public. The John Randle Centre for Yoruba Culture and History, which describes itself as “a fitting symbol of the multiplicity of identities in the metropolis”, is in the Onikan area, the cultural heart of Lagos island. Unlike the National Museum, built in the late 1950s on a western model by the English archaeologist Kenneth Murray, the centre is “unapologetically Yoruba.” Seun Oduwole, the site’s lead architect, seeks to create a museum where art viewers do not have to go to the basement of the museum to access African art. Instead, this museum pops with colour and sound to highlight the vibrancy and the dynamism of the Yoruba culture.
Former Nigerian president Muhammadu Buhari unveiled the centre, commissioned by the Lagos state government, in January 2023, but it will open its doors to the public this autumn. The museum stands alongside a now renewed swimming pool which was built by a Sierra Leone born doctor from a returnee slave family who saw how young Lagosians were drowning in the surrounding lagoon under colonial rule, John Randle, who the museum is now named after. Besides the museum, the centre also has three restaurant spaces serving contemporary Yoruba cuisine, a library, a temporary exhibition gallery, seminar rooms and a gift shop. Accoreing to Oduwole, the museum serves as an interrogation of museology as a construct and explores why the western model doesn’t work within the African context, while actively creating a space that is a theatre of living memory.
Talks are under way to receive 12 items on long-term loans from the British Museum, including the Lander stool, one of the first Yoruba pieces taken from Nigeria by the British, which has been the subject of repatriation calls. Among items donated to the museum is a costume worn by the notable Nigerian musician Fela Kuti, regarded as the King of Afrobeat.
