Museum of Yoruba life is custommade for Lagos

Opposite the Nigerian National Museum in central Lagos, a swimming pool and a memorial hall once stood as an integral part of the city, a popular congregation point that evoked a sense of pride.

- Saeed Kamali 

This year, decades after the compound fell into disrepair, a new pool is opening to the public alongside a state-of-the-art museum dedicated to Yoruba culture.

The John Randle Centre for Yoruba Culture and History, which describes itself as "a fitting symbol of the multiplicity of identities in the metropolis", is in the Onikan area, the cultural heart of Lagos island. Unlike the National Museum, built in the late 1950s on a western model, the centre is "unapologetically Yoruba", according to Seun Oduwole, the site's lead architect.

"If you go to a western museum, the African section is often in the basement, it's dark. But this museum pops with colour and sound to highlight the vibrancy and the dynamism of the Yoruba culture," Oduwole said. Yoruba words are bigger than English counterparts on signs and displays.

Will Rea, the Nigerian-born curator and academic who has helped steer the project, added: "It is very different to a European museum, you walk in a soundscape and it's noisy, it's performative, you have to move your body the whole time."