An insidious strain of primitivism is assiduously cultivating its generous plot in horticulture of Afrocentrism. Mushrooming into a metastasis, it theoretically threatens aesthetic core of study of African art with its pseudo-aesthetic dogmas. In a lecture delivered on 11 April 1997 at Wellesley College, Wole Soyinka spoke against that malignant cell of pseudo-ethnicity currently proliferating in West, under ide? ologies and rhetorics of Afrocentrism. am not an Afrocentrist, he reveals in a voice echoing his tigritude rebuke. Warning ofthe danger inherent in strain of ethnocentrism that projects and protects primitivism, in all its ramifications, as image of Africa, Soyinka specifically addressed his message to his kin in Diasporas, insisting on need to move beyond danshiki groove. His oracle should have saved some of that divination for his in situ kin, based on content ofthe above three books, two of which were written by Africans, and third of which has an image of Africa gracing its front cover, even though it was written by a European. I could picture brooding laureate, with his extravagandy white sartorial halo, breaking into following Yoruba proverb as he contemplates transAtlantic panorama of Afrocentrism and African studies: Oruku tindi tindi; Oruku tindi tindi; Oruku bigba omo, gbogbo won ya aje: Oruku, the formidable one, who mothers a zillion offsprings, and all, without exception, turn out to be witches. Oruku?of whom more will soon be divulged?apparentiy anchors these three books together in quays of Adantic ocean, from Florence to Washington, DC, to Ile-Ife. Begin with ridiculous, National Geographic-inspired Smithsonian Press cover of Museums and Community in West Africa. Behind ceramist's pendulous breasts (sucked dry by coundess babies and multiple infant mortalities) hides an ocean of texts, whose visual rhythm represents riddle of transAdantic, triangular rela? tions of last five hundred years. During that period, and with trian? gular trade, emerged a triangular aesthetic attitude, altogether nourished in disproportionate hegemonic imbalance, that links shores previously plied by slave ships. That aesthetic attitude, Atlanticism, ebbing back