The piece "Am I My Brother’s Keeper?" is inspired by an internal dialogue I had with myself as a black young African man, reflecting and thinking about a series of sociopolitical events that have taken place in South Africa in the recent years. One of the subjects I contemplated in detail is xenophobia, particularly in Durban where I was born and currently reside.
But what I was critically observing is the paradoxical relationship African people have occasionally, where we would go to war with each other and in the midst of that then see ourselves standing in unity with the Black Lives Matter movement in America and the End SARS movement in Nigeria for instance. Which is a very hypocritical stance in my view.
The painting then poses a question to me in a nutshell, including the African community and the diaspora abroad, the questing being “am I really my brother’s keeper”? I intentionally structured the artwork’s caption in the sense that deciphering it becomes a direct question to the viewer reading the title whilst engaging with the artwork.
