Twins Seven Seven

Biography

At birth he was named Omoba Taiwo Olaniyi Oyewale-Toyeje Oyelale Osuntoki. His mother bore seven sets of twins, and he alone survived. A diviner told her to drink water sacred to the river goddess Osun so that the child would live, and the boy came to be regarded as a reincarnation of his great-grandfather, Osun-toki, whose name means “Osun is worthy of worship”.

The name by which he later became known recalls that count.

He was born on 3 May 1944 in Ogidi, in what is now Kogi State. His father, Aitoyeje, was a Muslim from Ibadan; his mother, Mary, a Christian from Ogidi. He came to art through dance: by Yoruba custom the mother of twins was expected to dance in the streets for alms, and from the age of sixteen her son danced in her place. He finished primary and secondary school, spent a year at a teachers’ training college and passed his examinations well, but he could not bear the classroom; music and drawing drew him more and more. For a time he was an itinerant singer and dancer.

In 1964, after a performance at the Mbari Mbayo club in Osogbo, he met Ulli Beier, a German editor and scholar who ran a workshop for artists there together with his wife, Georgina. The Osogbo School took pride in teaching no one and only giving each person the chance to find a vision of their own. Twins Seven Seven was given the simplest tools and almost no instruction. Georgina Beier gave him Amos Tutuola’s book “My Life in the Bush of Ghosts”, which left its mark on his early work; later he drew more and more on Yoruba folklore and his own dreams.

The world of his paintings is fantastic: humans, animals, plants and Yoruba gods are woven into a single whole. The compositions break up into compartments, repeating and dividing motifs as Yoruba carving does, and the subjects constantly set the earthly against the spiritual, past against present, industry against agriculture. The early “Dreams of the Abiku Child” (1967) deals with the abiku, a spirit child, and with the orisha Osun; he returned to the theme in “Healing of Abiku Children”. He called his work contemporary Yoruba traditional art, meaning both his heritage and his response to current events and the country’s postcolonial experience.

He deliberately kept away from other painters. On his first visit to the United States he refused to go to a Picasso exhibition: everything he did was already in him, and he had no intention of learning to mix colours like a European painter. I think there was more calculation than pride in this stubbornness: he was guarding what Osogbo called a personal vision.

In 1972 he taught in America, at Merced College in California and at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts on Deer Isle, and in the early 1970s he worked at the Ile Ife Black Humanitarian Center in North Philadelphia alongside Barbara Bullock and Charles Searles, on whom he had a marked influence. He remained a musician too: in 1986 his record “Slang in Trance” came out. In the 1990s his work was shown in major exhibitions in Spain, Finland, Mexico, the Netherlands, England, Germany and the United States. In 1996 he received chieftaincy titles in Ibadan and in his native Ogidi, and in 1999 he published an autobiography, “A Dreaming Life”. His family elected him head of the clan, which opened the way to the title of ruler of Ibadan under the name Osuntoki II, but the coronation kept being postponed and he did not live to see it. The park devoted to Yoruba culture that he planned in the village of Sekola was never built.

In 2000 he moved to Philadelphia, hoping to settle there for good. The years turned out hard, until in 2005 George Jevremovic mounted an exhibition for him and gave him a space to work; he worked there until 2008 and then returned to Nigeria. On 25 May 2005 UNESCO named him an Artist for Peace for his contribution to dialogue among the peoples of Africa and the African diaspora.

Twins Seven Seven died on 16 June 2011 in Ibadan, at the age of sixty-seven. In 2015 his work was included in the Woodmere Art Museum’s exhibition of Black artists in Philadelphia from the 1920s to the 1970s.