 This talk was recorded by Professor Wale Shoyinka at the British Library in October 2015. Professor Shoyinka is a distinguished Nigerian playwright, novelist, poet, academic and commentator. In 1986 he became the first African to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. His works tackle key issues for colonial and modern Africa while drawing on a deep and complex African cultural heritage. Throughout his career, Shoyinka has been an outspoken critic of injustice and corruption, and he spent time in prison in Nigeria during the 1960s. The talk has the rather mysterious title, West African Road Relief, The Open Galleries, and Shoyinka approaches his subject in a playfully cryptic way. What he's talking about is the public art seen everywhere across West Africa and in other parts of Africa too. Streets, marketplaces, gathering places, buildings are all shaped by a very particular visual culture far from the corporate images that dominate Western public spaces. In Africa, public places are crowded with multiple artistic visions and verbal contributions, with a strong sense of individual authorship and creativity, from the work of the professional artist to signboards written by bus and lorry drivers. This visual culture is composed of, for example, murals, art for sale, textiles bearing many types of meaning, but here Shoyinka is talking especially about the decoration of vehicles, minibuses, lorries, taxis. These are all conveyances for hire in one way or another, and they are in the hands of people who earn their living from driving and take pride in communicating their beliefs and knowledge through their choice of sayings and slogans for public display. In the talk, Professor Shoyinka also references the African Union. This body, which was founded as the Organization of African Unity, is an international association promoting co-operation among Africa's nations. Shoyinka juxtaposes the power of presidents with the word from the street. This, the word from the street, is, he suggests, a strong expression of democracy, a democratic instinct deeply embedded within African history and society. Slogans and saying seen on buses and taxis such as, no condition is permanent and the big leaf shall not crush the smaller, challenge the hubris of the powerful in Africa and elsewhere. This particular kind of art, which I have in mind, I sometimes call mobile murals. Here's what I have to say about them periodically. Most of us here would have seen those, no, not most, some would have seen those murals, assumed that you've never been knocked out by one of them or you wouldn't be here listening to me today. The kind of mural I have in mind exists also abundantly in Latin America. Often brash, crude, exhibiting an on-tutored draftmanship, displaying bizarre color combinations, then underless statements of great political astuteness, pithy comments on day-to-day realities as well as aspirations. It gave me much pleasure some years ago to propose some of these inscriptions, these panel inscriptions during an address in Addis Ababa as ideal logo or motto for those charged with establishing modalities for the creation of the Africa Union. The reasoning was this. The Africa Union is intended to be a replacement of the ancient rickety political conveyance on which Africans have travelled ever since independence. Would the new conveyance be an improvement? At least the mobile murals to which I refer and surely by now some of you would have guessed the kind of peripatetic art I'm talking about. Those conveyances at least get you somewhere. Well, it's an hour later, that is. Another first, by the way, to remarked the trenchant politics of those popular art forms, however. The Ghanaian novelist Iqoyama constructed his scatological narrative titled The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born around one of these famous inscriptions, which he took from a Troto lori. Those who read the novel or simply travelled on West African roads would certainly have deduced from that final comment the kind of mobile mural that constitutes my affection. Iqoyama's title was taken from one of them, locally built transport known in Ghana as the Troto, or in Nigeria as the Mamiwagon. Bolecaja, Danful, et cetera, et cetera. Inscriptions that have formed the subject of quite a few monograms and monographs, coffee table publications. Inscriptions on these trucks, better known as loris in local language, have been taken from proverbs. Expressions of traditional wisdoms, soundbites from the most unlikely sources wrenched from their original contexts. Whitney Dairy from Shakespeare, a favourite is Julius Caesar, you know. And especially that section, the evil that men do to passages in the Bible, Quran, not a meeting dialogue from Indian films, Westerns, and even Kung Fu narratives. The Quranic inscriptions appear in Arabic, and you can tell that Arabic script is a favourite for some, not only for what it actually says, but for the attraction of its calligraphy, which is then subjected to real, marvellous admirations. But it doesn't matter the language of expression, ever, tree, Yorubaibo, Hausa, et cetera, et cetera. The calligraphy, this sum shows attention to the inscription, usually in every incompatible colour of the spectrum, is literally a blinding piece of art. The more complex statements attain artistic eloquence through companion illustrations in the text, sometimes embedded, sometimes just acting as a frame, sometimes just written, scrolled right across the picture so that even the illiterate will understand what the textual reference is about. This eclectic appropriation of shorthand quotations and aphorisms for contemporary realities, anxieties, aspirations, and even as a shorthand record of momentous events is very much a feature of popular culture that extends even beyond the mobile murals. From religious mythology, comes a favourite, an eloquent one, the painting of David routing Goliath in single combat with the reinforcing inscription, y wella cwnyru wewe, which translates as, the big leaf shall not crush the smaller. Not but comment is necessary to grasp its sociopolitical message, the championship of the little man, the powerless citizen against the more powerful. The idioms of action in some of these paintings are as fascinating as they are unpredictable. These are the artists of the modern world. So don't look out for a David armed with a slingshot. No, you are more likely to encounter our diminutive champion directing a Bruce Lee flying karate kick at the neck of Goliath without unfortunate giant buckling at the knees staggering backwards. That's one of my favourites. This mural arts of social commentary extends into the world of song, lyrics, and needless to say popular theatre. It functions in the same way as the works of the more so-called sophisticated writers who operate in modern modes of expression or adaptations of the old. I've always considered them statements beyond the mere art of the mural, however, and tend to view them as instructional open air panels on sociopolitical ethics. That is why in my address in Addis I also proposed a composite exercise for African leaders which would take the form of a staggered ride through the length and breadth of the country over which they exercise power in one of those mommy wagons with a booklet of the inscriptions in their hand and preferably that they change conveyances every 10 kilometres and so. Not only would they have, I swore a very real lesson in how the other side lives. They might even begin to understand how these crude inscriptional artworks are the very definition of the existential reality and worldviews of their neglected companions in the rickety and tumultuous, often fatal contraptions. They would experience the environment of which they preside as the other side does with all the bums, corrugations, filth, edge of survival, commerce, rockersness, uncertainties, all-time tragedies, and petty triumphs. But above all, a resilience that is often the sole surviving element of society itself appears to collapse around them. In short, they would experience not only how the other side lives, but how they die. Sample a few of these inscriptions. No telephone line to heaven. Chop small, no quench. Extension, chop small, quench small, chop big, quench big. Extended starts to leave no shred of ambiguity in the mind of the slow-witted. And there is the fervent prayer and summons to the responsibility of elders, another one, one that might have a special resonance for the European and American green campaigners for clean air and protection of the ozone layer. This goes, the young shall grow. The context, of course, is different at source. But it's a direct admonition to the first comers in the stakes of social status and economic wealth to remember that there are generations after them who also deserve their own place in the sun. We see, however, how this can be extended to the real concern for preserving the planet as a space of survival for coming generations. Let me just add one more of my favourites, which should not surprise anyone. No condition is permanent. With the other, the first one, which I mentioned, a windlock on your way away, the big leaf shall not crush the smaller. They form the two of my favourites of the hundreds that I've ever seen. They've actually viva primacy, I think, in my social choices, and also offered them the leaders in a choice between these various inscriptions, especially those of them who insist, for instance, that I'm talking about the dictators, who love to insist that democracy is an alien concept to Africans. I think most of my own skill of thinking will disagree. In fact, I consider it one of the most intolerable political blasphemies ever uttered by anyone. You can try an experiment, you know, debate democracy any way you like, mystified, reified, but make a simple test. Take a few Africans, especially West Africans, peasants, factory workers, motor, highway drivers, et cetera, et cetera. Take them to a motor park, place 100 lorries with all the various panels with these numerous inscriptions, and ask which of them actually spells and defines democracy. And unerringly, I bet you there will point out no condition is permanent.