Rotimi Fani-Kayode's Ecstatic Antibodies

Abstract

In December of 1989, after a mere six-year artistic career, Rotimi Fani-Kayode died from complications due to AIDS in a Brixton, London hospital. In that brief span, the gay Nigerian-British photographer produced one of the most moving portraits of human sexuality and spiritual transcendence. Doubly marginalized—rejected by his family and society—Fani-Kayode’s photographic vision lifted him out of painful abjection and loss and left behind a profound message of hope and self-love. Fani-Kayode first came to London in 1966 after fleeing civil war in his home country of Nigeria. His father, a prominent revolutionary and politician known as “Fani-Power,” had been a chieftain of Ife, the ancestral Yoruba capitol, before being deposed in a military coup. Fani-Kayode was eleven at the time, just becoming aware that he was different from other boys. A growing attraction to his own sex made Fani-Kayode a pariah in socially conservative Nigeria, but in London his very skin marked him as Other. In 1976, he moved to the United States to study at Georgetown University. By the time he received his MFA from New York’s Pratt Institute in 1983, the AIDS epidemic was in full swing. Not much was known about the virus then, except that it disproportionately affected gay men. Cases had been reported in thirty-three countries, and in the U.S., of 2,807 cases, 2,118 had died. No federal funds had been directed to finding a cure for AIDS or preventing its spread. Ronald Reagan was poised for reelection, and Margaret Thatcher had just retained leadership of Parliament by the largest electoral margin since the Second World War. Wall Street was booming; Gorbachev’s Soviet Union was in steep decline. Ruthless capitalism, it seemed, had won the day. The New Right willfully ignored the growing number of AIDS deaths because the disease seemed to affect only the margins of society—homosexuals