Turbator.

Still no news has arrived about Orokie. But I will keep his blog open in his absence, hoping that news will come soon.

This picture was completed recently by Orokie. (Just before the silence). The picture shows much of what was on his mind.

He was talking (at this time) about his early education at boarding school in Africa. He wrote about the school’s repressive regime, artistically and sexually. (A regime inherited from White male colonialism). These view points clearly enter into the first level of the joke. “Boarding Dorm Fav”.

Then, there is a second level. A picture of an up-and-coming model from Sierra Leone with large boots, whose over-sized boot straps resemble wings, is turned into Hermes/Mercury, god of trade and artists. Orokie’s cartoon makes fun of Western modelling and its commodity fetishism…which includes the Black male model.

And the third level introduces something else that kept flying through Orokie’s mind at this time: the African Hermes, the trickster, the left-hand/sinister side of maleness. Hermes makes sharp and wicked puns…” Help them to come good”. This has always been a character of Orokie's satirical art. Turbator, troubled, isn't far removed from Master-bator...a familiar Orokie sexual pun.

Like the fake product, Orokie’s humour varnishes and strips away layers of repression in the name of freedom.