 Mae'n meddwl gyda'r mewn cyfnod. A, eich ddweud yna. Mae fydd o'n gwybod. Er mwyn o'n gwneud. Mae'n meddwl gyda'r mewn cyfnod, dyma'n meddwl gyda'r mewn cyfnod. Mae'n meddwl, mae'n meddwl gyda'r mewn cyfnod cael cael ddechrau, ddechrau, Cymru. Gweithio'r meddwl gyda'r mewn cyfnod mae'n meddwl i ddim yn brydol, Soes yn Sucari have many concerns in common, identity, history, migration, inequality and injustice amongst them. But as academics, mostly word smiths, we can only admire the arresting medium she has to share hers. Sucari was born in Bwggema, a coastal Calabari town of Nigeria's Niger Delta. The year was 1958. On the death of her sister, who had been her guardian, and with the outbreak of the Nigerian Civil War, she moved to Britain to continue her education. She lives in Elephant and Castle. In the age of bland globalisation and celebrity cosmopolitanism, place names like Bwggema and Elephant and Castle, anchor identifications and their responsibilities. Sucari's art is passionately engaged with family, neighbourhood and history, and above all with the capacity of art to encourage us to want a better future. Among the earliest of Sucari's works to attract wide attention were the animated steel sculptures that riffed on the Calabari masquerades that she understood both with immediacy from her childhood experience of them and intellectually from the conversation she listened to between the British anthropologist Robin Horton, her brother-in-law and guardian, and his friends. Widely exhibited, for instance at the opening of the Smithsonian Museum of African Art in 1988, they were also the most celebrated modern art works of Africa 95 in London when they were as installed at the Museum of Mankind. We've time to see only a few instances of Sucari's subsequent productivity but you may visit a pair of her works after this ceremony since she's loaned them to us. You will admire their headscarves and wonder at such tenderness with steel. Three pairs of sculptures, dyads, had earlier loitered if heavy metal figures can be said to loiter around the Brunai Gallery and the Soas College buildings. They were there to celebrate both Sucari's 2012 Centre of African Studies annual lecture under the title What Picasso Knew, Highlighting Contemporary African Art and the creation that autumn of a Soas School of Arts. They are all dressed to the nines, Sucari's own comment on the energy of Nigerian self-presentation fashion. At first sight, Purge is the most traditional pair. Dressed typically for the elites of Sucari's oil-producing delta region of Nigeria, they stand on oil drums with flower-like patterns which transpire on closer inspection to be bullet holes that have riddled both the figures and their barrels. A second couple, Material Salsa, emblazoned with the logos of BP, Shell and Red Bull, have the wealth they need to choreograph their tastes for global fashion as well as their dance styles. From where the installation asks might this wealth derive? A pair of shiny, suited and booted, born-again Christian Pentecostal Londoners offers one answer under the title Jesus Loves Me. They visited us again this year for the Soas Centenary exhibition celebrating art and music by when they'd acquired a youngster. The dyads suggest the complex condition of these three self-presentations, a cocktail of oil, violence, multinational companies, local elites, diasporic cosmopolitans and new religious movements. Recent works continue this aesthetic interrogation of contemporary history. All the world is now richer, a memorial to the ending of slavery, toward the United Kingdom. In London it was installed in the Westminster Parliament as well as at St Paul's and it also travelled to the cathedrals in Bristol and Norwich. Clarish responds to her own questions. How do you show that the people of slave heritage are brave and have dignity and strength? How do you show the social and economic legacy that has benefited the world from their suffering? Her response consisted of six figures. The first as he would have been clothed before enslavement. The next to a field hand with a machete and a domestic servant. These succeeded by a woman in cray dress, a businessman and a youth in a t-shirt. The installation has yet to be realised in the complete form Socari imagines for it when each figure will be placed at the end of a path drawn from a text by William Prescott, a former slave, reading, they will remember that we were sold but not that we were strong. They will remember that we were bought but not that we were brave. Socari's largest campaigning work was impounded by Nigerian customs and she tells me there it remains. The battle bus was created as a touring memorial to the executed activist Ken Sarrow Weaver so as to commemorate his life and to draw attention to the causes of continuing ecological degradation in the night of Delta. My own first encounter with Socari's work was the delighted surprise of three enormous glittering steel palm trees in Kew Gardens one summer while we were both working on the West African Music Village in 1989 for the Charity Cultural Corporation. I lose track of the times in the subsequent three decades that Socari has been the mover behind something life affirming. Recently her Botticelli Moose living over the road with our friends at the October Gallery recently her Botticelli Moose who else would re-render spring so tenderly in steel engaged our attention mischiefously but then held us by the intelligence of the transformation he had wrought and her iron commitment to regeneration. We are after all these events which we are here to honour on this occasion. Socari and her family but Socari is already our family she's already our fellow she speaks here frequently she loans us artworks she invites our students to her studios and is simply and effortlessly her inspirational self so let's make it official. It's my privilege Madam President to present to you Socari Douglas Camp for the award of fellowship of the school and I invite her to address this assembly. Good afternoon everybody on this wonderful day very very special day for all the graduates here. I just thought I'd try to say a few things. I really wanted to talk about my works that are in the public realm just because you don't have to pay or anything to go and see them they just kind of appear in spaces and I especially wanted to talk about the bus which has been impounded in Nigeria and that that is quite a sad thing for me but then there's a positive side in that I've discovered in my latter years now that art is very powerful so powerful that it can make a government scared and they can shut you down but the interesting thing is that in Nigeria there are wonderful young people like yourselves activists that are very concerned about the environment in the Niger Delta and they've gone out of their way to kind of stand up and let it be known that something like the bus is an emblem for a way to clean up the Niger Delta and I hope that you guys if you come across this thing anywhere that you will help to support them because it's our future, the environment is our future and the other piece that I have in the public realm is all the world is now richer and this is in the diaspora pavilion in Venice at this moment I was given a grant to make a film with these six figures and we had them in a boat of course because everything in Venice gets moved by boat and on the boat we realised that it had an echo of the transatlantic slave trade and it just appeared but with the beautiful backdrop of Venice which had nothing to do with the slave trade but then there were echoes of the current migrant situation so you simply can't get away even when you're looking at beauty there is this hard sight in life that we all have to be aware of but here you've been given the tools because you're thinkers in the world and so has encouraged kind of discovery and courage and all sorts of things because you've all got your degree things on and I look forward to you leading the way because this is our future and humanity matters, thank you