THE BODY RE-MEMBERS: Reflections on being named Èyàn Akínkánjú — Hero of Egbaland

There are moments when what you carry finds language beyond you.

Not in words, but in presence,in alignment,in recognition.

Recently, in Abeokuta, at the just concluded Lisabi Festival / Egbaliganza 2026, I was named Èyàn Akínkánjú—Hero of Egbaland—alongside 39 others shaping the cultural imagination of the Egba people.

I receive this with care.

I recognise it as continuity.

For those less acquainted, Abeokuta—àbẹ̀ òkúta, “under the rock”—carries a history shaped in urgency and held in resolve.

In the upheavals of the 19th century, as the Egba people moved through the violences of war and enslavement, they gathered in what would become more than a site of refuge. What took form was a federation—an assembly of communities bound through necessity, and over time, through a shared sense of identity and purpose.

Olumo Rock rises within this history as both shelter and vantage. Around it, the city learned endurance. It held its ground through periods of conflict, while cultivating its own forms of governance—structures that grew from within, attentive to the realities of the people who sustained them.

From this terrain has emerged a lineage whose influence travels well beyond its immediate geography: The Nobel Laureate - Wole Soyinka, Fela Anikulapo Kuti, Olusegun Obasanjo, Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, Amos Tutuola, Ayinla Omowura, Efunroye Tinubu, Ebenezer Obey, Sir Shina Peters, Majek Fashek, to name a few—figures whose work continues to shape cultural and political thought across contexts.

To be received into such a lineage is to enter a continuum—one that carries memory forward and places each new contribution in relation to what has come before.

Over time, I have come to understand the human body as an archive. As material. It holds memory, genealogy, intelligence, histories that refuse erasure. Each work I have made—as a dancer, choreographer, an artist, teacher, curator—has been an act of translation: of culture into something contemporary, something structured, something that can travel forward.

My work has always been a return to a single question:

How does culture move forward without losing its identity?

For me, culture has never been spectacle alone. It is infrastructure. Before institutions take shape, before systems are formalised, before futures are outlined, there must be a shared act of imagination. Culture shapes how we think, how we create, how we relate, how we assume responsibility. This remains the center of my practice—on and through the human body.

In Abeokuta, that understanding found resonance.

Meeting Aare Lai Labode brought into view a parallel articulation of this same concern. What he is shaping is transcending fashion as a form, but as a cultural identity, articulated with precision.

The human body finds in him a sculptor - one who forms presence, who carries weight before the body speaks. With the Lisabi Festival, he has found a platform for cultural expression in which every detail carries intention—each cut, each texture, each composition forming a complete language.

With Egbaliganza, he presents work that arrives fully formed—work that does not seek explanation, work for bodies that arrives already knowing what they are with clarity.

To be named Èyàn Akínkánjú at the just concluded Egbaliganza, is not something I receive lightly. It is something I recognize as continuity. A pattern of work, of conviction, of staying with the same questions— even when the answers are not immediate.

Abeokuta holds a particular weight. Not merely as place, but as origin that does not let you go. A place where my father was born. A place he left for Lagos at 23, never to return—even now, at 93. What left seventy years ago returns in me. What is carried reveals itself over time.

This recognition, then, is not about a moment. It is about alignment. It brings into focus the scale of the work—work that extends beyond the individual, beyond a single generation.

Culture, held with clarity, becomes something living. It moves. It speaks. It establishes connection. It carries responsibility. And perhaps that is the task before us. To take what we inherit and render it usable for the future. To ensure that what we now carry does not end with us.

In this spirit, my work as CEO and Director of the J. Randle Centre for Yorùbá Culture & History remains committed to cultivating spaces where culture is carried beyond preservation into activation—where memory serves as a source of imagination, and imagination is shaped into a shared future.

Ire o

Q.