On Eje Ayo: My Homecoming Exhibition
Sorting through paintings for my upcoming solo exhibition at the National Museum of Arts and Monuments, I have been thinking about the voices that travel with the work. Not just my own voice, but the voices of family, friends, viewers, elders, places, and moments that have shaped the making. This exhibition is in memory of my late parents and honors such voices.
This essay was written for the catalogue by Ike Francis Okoronkwo, my cousin and forever friend. Enjoy!
Reading The Signs of Tony Nsofor's Return
by Ike Francis Okoronkwo
Some journeys take us away from home, and there are journeys that teach us how to see home anew. After an expedition spanning close to a decade through Lagos, Abidjan, New York, Maryland, and Alexandria, Anthony Chukwudinma Nsofor returns to Lagos, Nigeria, carrying more than the memories of places traversed. With his colors, brushes, and a mind open to the essences of people, places, and time, he returns with a body of work shaped by encounters, observations, and the transformative experiences of travel. ‘Eje Ayo - The Homecoming’, his first solo exhibition after coming back from the United States of America, is therefore not simply a celebration of return; it is an exploration of what the journey has made of the traveler and what the traveler has come to see differently about home. In writing this curatorial essay for the exhibition catalogue, I am conscious of the personal connection with him as cousin, friend, professional colleague, shared alma mater, circle of friends, travel interests, and cultural consciousness. Notwithstanding family ties, we also had shared spaces at Yaba, Ajah, Oguta, dreadlock wearing, and Rasta consciousness (without being Rastafarians by religion), as well as a similar disposition towards art and life. These nuances of relatedness serve as a reflective bridge bringing intimacy and credibility along with my observation as a witness to some aspects of Tony’s formation, convictions, and persistence across distance. Tony has decided to open what resides within the traveler’s bag through a Monographic Exhibition that encompasses his extensive sojourn in spaces around the world and his current output from his Oguta studio.
In retrospect, I remember taunting Tony for contacting Sokugo, an uncontrollable wanderlust disease cast on pastoral Fulani herdsmen, which, according to Cyprian Ekwensi (in his novel Burning Grass), affected Mai Sunsaye. In the Igbo language, it relates to Ojemba syndrome without the negative connotation of Sukugo. The good thing with the Ojemba personality is that, contrary to being an affliction, it is actually a higher form of education that transforms the individual to possess an incremental panoptic view of the world. This is why the Igbo will say “Oje mba enwe ilo, which translates to ‘the traveler has no enemy’. I discovered his Sukugo around 1997 after his NYSC days in Bauchi State, when we thought we had lost Tony to the wandering spirit, but he returned to Oguta with a pet monkey. So, when he set sail around the world as a typical Ojemba, I knew he would definitely find his way home. The Oguta Ameshi people will always say to a traveler, “Eje Ano, bu ishi ije,” which means that homecoming after extensive travels is the crux of travelling. When the Ojemba returns, we say ‘Onye Ije Nno’, traveler, you are welcome. Tony’s affliction ceases to be Sukugo when we coalesce Oje mba with the Ghanaian Akan philosophy of Sankofa to privilege an ever-expanding, panoramic understanding of the world within and around us. While Oje Mba Enwe Ilo opens the traveler to the lessons of distant places, Sankofa insists that those lessons find their fullest meaning only when they are brought back into conversation with cultural memory. It is no coincidence that Tony encountered Sankofa as a creative methodology through El Anatsui's intervention within the Nsukka Art School's Uli revivalism. At U.N.N, returning to indigenous knowledge was never an exercise in nostalgia but a strategy for imagining contemporary African futures.
In the Igbo philosophy of travel, “Oje mba enwe ilo puts into context the place of ‘Mobility, Memory and Belonging’. The fact that the traveler brings back ways of seeing, making, remembering, and interpreting the world reminds us how the Igbo see traveling as a learning process. The mere act and art of traveling, according to the interpretive emphasis of “Oje mba enwe ilo, presents an invitation to openness: an opportunity to suspend assumptions, encounter differences, expand perspectives, and enable a formative process through which self and artistic identity are continually negotiated and reinvented. The proverb thereby resonates how the traveler is exposed to gaining knowledge through multiple perspectives and the ability to navigate cultures and circumstances. The depth of the traveler’s openness played out in one of my discussions/arguments with Tony when I suggested a change of word from Eje Ayo, which sounded more like the Owerri dialect, to Onye Ije Nnoo to resonate a typical Oguta Amaeshi slant of the Igbo language, but he insisted on Eje Ayo. In his insistence, he opened my perspective further by reminding me that he had lived most of his early years in Owerri and questioning my understanding of ‘Home’. The take-home from this encounter is germane and underscores the exhibition titled “Home Coming.
Eje Ayo- The Homecoming becomes neither a retreat from the world nor a sentimental return to the past. It is a homecoming informed by movement; a return carrying accumulated histories, altered perceptions, and renewed consciousness. It presents a materialization of the traveler’s experiences of otherness, artistic trans-formation, and return through colors and the elements of art. With the awareness of the aforementioned proximity and the vantage point it offers, I dare say that the temptation towards autobiographical and biographical accounts is irresistible; however, these would guide my essay to move fluidly between personal witness, art historical context, and semiotic interpretation. I only hope this curatorial account will be able to show the evolving relationship between movement and memory, discovery and belonging, departure and return as an introduction in the exhibition catalogue.
Belonging, for Tony, has always exceeded geography. He belongs to what might be called the mythical country of ‘Nowhere’, a country of histories, meanings, migrations, and unfinished journeys in which he assumes the role of both witness and storyteller. His paintings speak through color, line, texture, pattern, form, and recurring motifs that function less as illustrations than as signs whose meanings unfold across historical time. As a student shaped by Obiora Udechukwu, El Anatsui, Chika Okeke-Agulu, Chike Aniakor, and Ola Oloidi, and alongside contemporaries such as Ozioma Onuzuluike and Sukanthy Visagaperrumal, Tony inherited the Nsukka tradition's conviction that painting can become a language through which history is continuously rewritten. The historical narratives woven through this exhibition are neither isolated episodes nor chronological illustrations. Instead, they operate as what Roland Barthes might describe as second-order signs, images whose visible forms carry deeper cultural meanings. Tony's paintings transform historical events into visual signifiers through which contemporary questions of migration, identity, power, and belonging are negotiated. The cadence of his studio echoes his philosophy. I suspect the spirit of conscious reggae vibes transmuted into his colors, carrying the essence of Dutty Boukman, the conscious militancy of Peter Tosh, the dub-poetry of Mutabaruka, and the revolutionary spirit of Buju Banton. They become rhythmic structures that seem to migrate into the canvases themselves. Just as Dutty Boukman's enduring declaration that freedom refuses extinction, Tony's paintings insist that memory survives displacement.
History as Sign, Home as Movement: Encountering Tony’s Oeuvre
The story of Igbo Landing in 1803, where captive Igbo men and women marched into Dunbar Creek in an act of collective resistance, becomes a sign of refusal against forced displacement. Likewise, the succession struggle between Oba Esigie and Arhuanran after the death of Oba Ozolua, and the subsequent dispersal that eventually finds resonance in the founding narratives of Oguta Ameshi through the navigator Eneke Oki Tutu, tells us that home itself is born from movement. The traveler who discovers a new settlement and returns to lead others toward it becomes an ancestral embodiment of both Oje mba and Sankofa. Tony’s paintings extend these historical signs into contemporary visual narratives to concur with the saying that a ‘painting is worth a thousand words’. Looking at the 185 x 137 acrylic on canvas piece titled 12,000 Ships from Africa/The Clotilda and Others, I cannot help but feel a kinesthetic jolt as though the turbulence of the sea woke me up to the secrets that lurked within those transatlantic ships. In a true artistic transubstantiation of The Clotilda and the issues it generates in contemporary times, Tony created the embodiment of the turbulence, anxiety, longing for home, and uncertainty under paint on canvas. The emotion evoked through the painting calls to mind David Jones’ observation that, “the painter may say to himself: this is not a representation of a mountain, it is 'mountain' under the form of paint” (Jones, 1959 as cited in Phillipson, 1988, p. 5). Indeed, Tony’s 12,000 Ships from Africa/The Clotilda and Others succeeded in bringing the transatlantic slave movement into a new form of colors. This is perhaps the exhibition's most historically charged sign. The reference to the Clotilda collapses centuries of transatlantic trauma into a contemporary visual language, connecting forced migration with ongoing questions of memory, justice, and return. The pervading colorfulness of Clotilda as presented by Tony begs the question: Is Clotilda the last ship from Africa to the New World? The answer will be found in the number of Africans who leave their shores to ‘Nowhere’ and the realities of existence.
Another work charged with a similar history is “Clashing Bodies Make Good Music (Mansa Musa Travels series)”. The title transforms collision into creativity. The encounters between cultures, peoples, and histories become rhythmic rather than purely conflictual, recalling Mansa Musa's travels as symbols of African mobility, exchange, and intellectual circulation. In his characteristic palette of raw umber and chromatically muted earth colors enlivened by vibrant blues, pinks, and yellows, Tony constructs a visual field in which partially concealed faces emerge and recede within the compositional weave. These enigmatic visages recall the grotesque, obscure, and interwoven faces in Ishmael Winifred’s paintings, yet Tony redirects this visual device through the metaphor of Mansa Musa, the fourteenth-century Malian emperor whose celebrated pilgrimage to Mecca embodied the possibilities of African mobility, wealth, cultural exchange, and transcontinental encounter. The clashing bodies of the title suggest that cultural contact is rarely seamless; it involves the negotiation of differences, the collision of identities, and the tension of shared histories. Anchoring on Mansa Musa’s historic travel to Mecca, Tony seems to remind us that movements across cultures are actually a new recipe for coexistence.
In the Citizens of Nowhere series, Tony validates the old wisdom that a painting is worth a thousand words. Each canvas becomes a visual proverb, an extension of Oje mba enwe ilo and Sankofa, where signs gathered from distant places return home transformed into images capable of speaking across generations. I believe that the recurring Citizens of Nowhereseries which spans more than half of the works billed for this show, is the exhibition's conceptual anchor. Rather than depicting homelessness, these works challenge the assumption that belonging depends exclusively upon fixed borders. They resonate with the historical movements connecting Benin to Oguta, Igbo Landing to the Diaspora, and Lagos to Abidjan and Alexandria. They remind us that African history has always been one of movement as much as settlement. Within the Citizens of Nowhere series, Tony explores the ambiguities of human existence through a semiotic language in which color, form, title, and pictorial arrangements become signs of the choices, desires, uncertainties, and consequences that shape individual lives. In Choices (2025), the grays and muted umber are decisively dissected from top to bottom of the picture plane, while the jarring red that traverses this subdued chromatic field becomes a visual sign of the decisive moments through which human lives are redirected. The composition evokes the inexorable movement of life’s pendulum, indifferent to personal sentiments while suggesting that our philosophies, destinations, and eventual circumstances are often rooted in the choices we make.
The existential uncertainty extends to ‘One Among You’, a popular phrase in the Christian Bible where Jesus pointedly mentions one of his inner circle to be a betrayer. In another context, it could also refer to the historical betrayal of Dutty Boukman after the legendary gathering of co-travelers on August 14, 1791, called the Bois Caiman ceremony. ‘One Among You’ suggests an accessible intertext from both the religious and historical account hinted above; however, when narrowed down to the context of this exhibition, it constantly alludes to the shared humanity of Ojemba and his host; whoever, wherever, and however it's conceived, it serves as a super text. Therefore, its application in ‘One Among You’evokes the fragility of the Ojemba encounters of both good and evil from strangers and familiar people. And this is why Oje Mba Enwe Ilo fits the disposition of the traveler.
Other sub-titles within the Citizens of Nowhere series include: In Line to Nowhere. Queues become symbols of bureaucracy, migration systems, waiting, travelers’ ordeal, and suspended futures. The line itself becomes a signifier of modern uncertainty. The Christmas People Seasonal celebration is for the Igbos an examination of temporary belonging. It is one of those moments when Igbo migrants ritually do a homecoming to reconnect with relatives dispersed across Nigeria and abroad. Wherever You Are, another work within this series dissolves geographical boundaries. Home becomes relational rather than territorial. In Avtar Brah's notion of 'homing desire,' is particularly instructive. The longing for home does not necessarily mean a desire to return to a fixed or idealized place of origin. The longing for home in Tony’s paintings expresses the continuing negotiation of belonging, identity, and attachment across changing locations, placing this alongside the Igbo philosophy that the traveler has no enemy, which remains grounded in Ojemba's openness. Osondu/Runners is not confined to physical movement; it is the perpetual motion of migrants, refugees, seekers, and dreamers whose identities remain unfinished. Osondu agwu ike, meaning, following life tirelessly or ‘the run of life is never tiring’, reinforces movement as survival.
Outside the Citizens of Nowhere series, there are also some titles charged with intense poetry and philosophy. For Ducks and Rocks, nature becomes metaphor. Ducks signify migration and instinctive return, while rocks suggest permanence. Together, they create a semiotic tension between movement and rootedness, which is a central paradox of Homecoming. Encounters in this Place Called Life/Strange Sightings functions as an archive of perception where "strange sightings" become visual equivalents of the traveler’s accumulated observations, echoing Ojemba's insistence that travel enlarges consciousness. Memory and immediacy collide in “I Gave Myself to Dreaming, but the Present Followed Me” as the painting captures the traveler’s dilemma: dreams of elsewhere cannot entirely escape the realities carried from home. Tony did not spare the obnoxious enterprise involving some African shortsighted rulers and their comprador cohort in Black Diamonds from the Earth's Belly/Joyful Africans. This work transforms extraction into metaphor. The "black diamonds" signify both mineral wealth and African humanity itself, whose brilliance often emerges through histories of exploitation and resilience. Tony is royalty, from a long bloodline of kings, queens, princes, and princesses, so when I saw the title The Crown is Near, I understood it not as a floating desire, but the crown in this context carries the weight of inherited memory, ancestral entitlement, and maybe, a desire for a place in the order from which his bloodline draws its historical significance. Yet the crown remains both a tangible emblem of authority and a symbolic destination.
Ultimately, Eje Ayo- The Homecoming asks us to read these paintings as maps rather than destinations. They chart journeys between memory and history, departure and return, exile and belonging. Like Eneke Oki Tutu, who traveled outward to discover a new homeland before returning to guide others toward it, Tony's paintings suggest that every meaningful homecoming begins long before arrival. The traveler returns not to reclaim an unchanged past, but to illuminate it with the wisdom gathered along the road. Through layered signs, evocative titles, and chromatic tensions, Tony explores the choices, disappointments, aspirations, and desires that shape human existence. His works reveal that belonging is neither fixed by arrival, but continually negotiated through experience. Read through Oje Mba Enwe Ilo and Avtar Brah’s notion of homing desire, the journey becomes an education in difference and self-discovery. Typically, I urge us to look into Tony’s traveler’s bag of experiences with openness to glimpse the world through his lens.
References
Brah, A. (1996). Cartographies of diaspora: Contesting Identities. Routledge.
Philippson, M. (1988). Painting Language and Modernity. Routledge & Kegan
Professor Ike Francis Okoronkwo writes from Port Harcourt, Nigeria.
The exhibition Tony Nsofor: Eje Ayo opens to the public at 11 am on November 3, and ends on November 9, 2026. See you there!
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