Ben Ngobeni’s cosmo-dramas of the Afrofuture

Abstract

The print series entitled Bridge of the Spirits (2017) by visual artist Ben Ngobeni is redolent with depictions of “the cosmos” or outer-space. In this series, the bull is a prominent motif as it is represented literally and in some works, indirectly. The bull, as we may know, is central to many cultural rituals in different African societies. Ngobeni’s metaphorical use of this animal is resonant with Afrofuturist visual tropes that often employ space allegories. Yet it also invokes what jazz musician and Afrofuturist Sun Ra refers to as cosmo-drama. When coining this term, Sun Ra was alluding to the sense of otherworldliness he sought to achieve by staging cosmo-dramas, that is, spaces that were meant to “awaken their audiences to the greater potentials of another kind of life” (Youngquist, 2017:204). Cosmo-drama is here a fitting description of the type of themes engaged with in this body of work. This article is orientated around the notion of cosmo-drama to locate, on the one hand, the Afrofuturist proclivities in Ngobeni’s work, which are found visually. On the other hand, it seeks to understand how these supposed Afrofuturist proclivities are informed by aspects of ancestry.