Description

Twins Seven-Seven (1944 – 2011), Oshogbo, Nigeria
c.1978
Ink, pastel and oli on cloth
(50 1/2″ h x 30 1/2″w)

At the entry to the lane that leads to Prince’s compound in Osogbo, a palm-wine tapper sits on a bicycle, welded to Prince’s design out of scrap metal. In Amos Tutuola’s “Palm-Wine Drinkard”, the drinkard hunts for his dead tapster in the domain of the dead…. 

“This is when I was working on the book of Amos Tutuola, like Palm-Wine Drinker, My Life in the Bush of Ghosts, and something like that.”

“I made a poem about whoever want me to die earlier will be killed by a palm-wine tapper bicycle, because palm-wine tapper bicycle have no insurance. It was a song from, like, nineteen seventy-four.”

from Prince Twins Seven-Seven: His Art, His Life in Nigeria, His Exile in America, by Henry Glassie