Speaker

Sokari Douglas Camp 
Artist 
London, England 

Hello, my name is Sokari Douglas Camp. I’m a sculptor. I live in London, and my heritage is Nigerian British. My people are called Kalabari people, and we live in the Niger Delta in Nigeria.

I have made a sculpture called Relative Pelican, and it depicts two figures in Kalabari attire, which is wrapper and top and head tie. And the man is wearing a shirt called Etibo and a bowler hat. These are traditional clothing that Kalabari people might wear to an important occasion. They are holding a framed picture of a pelican between them, just because we have a tradition as part of our funeral ceremonies that we might hold a picture of a beloved relative in our hands, a large A3-sized framed picture. And sometimes, you get relatives that look alike, and one might be male; one might be female. But you can see the family features are the same. And they parade through the town with pride to show whom they’ve lost and who they are. I thought that it was very important to show that we are members of the human race that should be acknowledged. But, we have a bird between us, the pelican who suffered very much in 2010 when there was an oil spill off the coast of Florida. And there were pictures of pelicans on newspapers all over the world, front pages of pelicans who had been covered in oil on the Florida coast. Fishing has been disrupted by this oil spill at this time, and the oil spill was created by BP. And Obama, the President of America at the time, made a campaign to get BP to compensate and clear up the mess they had made.

I felt very struck by this because people in the Niger Delta have been suffering from oil spills for over 30 years if not 40 years, and we’ve never had front page news to say how much we’re suffering. We haven’t really been compensated, and our communities have been disrupted, polluted. We’ve had to emigrate from our homes, and we haven’t been given the service that the pelicans got in 2010. And this isn’t really a memory; it’s a record of how some members of the human race are treated.

Relative Pelican is a—would it be called a whimsical piece? A whimsical but very, very serious piece of work. Just saying, “I’m your relative; take notice of me,” and the Kalabari people, and how our land and coast has been decimated by oil spills for the last 50 years almost. And we want to be noticed as much as these birds were in 2010.