The Burden of Cultural Rebirth: A Hermeneutic Reading of Violence and Resilience in Adejimi’s Painting
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Abstract
Muri Adejimi’s painting, Baptism, presents a visually unsettling encounter between Christian symbolism, colonial
memory, and African cultural endurance. Although the title evokes the theological language of purification,
renewal, and spiritual rebirth, the painting complicates these interpretations by depicting a young African woman
whose body appears simultaneously transformed and damaged. Emerging from the water with indigenous
adornments, preserved bodily dignity, and an unwavering posture, the figure embodies the contradiction of
colonial conversion: a process that promised salvation yet often operated within broader structures of cultural
transformation and identity reconfiguration. Drawing on Hans-Georg Gadamer’s theory of historically situated
interpretation and Paul Ricoeur’s understanding of symbolic surplus, this article examines the painting as a visual
discourse on the colonial politics of identity. It argues that the fractured anatomy of the maiden represents the
psychological and cultural injuries produced through colonial systems that sought to reorder African
consciousness through religious conversion, naming practices, language hierarchies, and Western ideals of
civilisation. The substitution of indigenous names with European Christian names is examined as a symbolic
practice of identity displacement, while Fela Anikulapo-Kuti’s concept of “colomentality” provides an African
vernacular framework for understanding the persistence of colonial mental structures after political independence.
However, Adejimi’s painting does not present African identity as defeated by colonial intervention. Through the
survival of beads, hairstyle, bodily confidence, and monumental presence, the figure becomes a symbol of cultural
resilience. The wounded body is not merely an archive of colonial injury but also a site of resistance,
demonstrating that external systems of domination could transform African appearance and social expression
without destroying indigenous consciousness. The article therefore proposes that Baptism functions as a counterimage of colonial conversion: an artwork in which the African subject emerges from the waters of imposed
transformation, carrying historical scars but retaining cultural agency.
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