Rachael Engmann ends Fellowship programme at OYASAF

Ms Rachael Ama Assa Engmann recently completed her fellowship program at OYASAF, where she conducted research and enjoyed professional work experience on West African heritage, art and material culture.

Her research at OYASAF was on Nigerian Islamic talisman and writing systems with particular reference to Insibidi form of art in the OYASAF collection.

Her exposure at the Foundation was to help expand her research horizon building to a doctoral dissertation at Stanford University (USA) on the topic; Nineteenth Century Islamic Talisman in Asante, Ghana.

Her PhD project places material practice at the center of an historical and contemporary analysis of West African Islam, by way of archaeological ethnography and textual analysis. Islamic talisman is seen as part of a

living tradition, which is a local social phenomenon where artifacts containing texts, and manuscripts circulated in the past and at present.

In addition to her interest in antiquities, she also researched into some contemporary Nigerian art works in the OYASAF collection thereby broadening her knowledge and understanding of Nigerian art/material culture as a social document.

Moreover, her fellowship at OYASAF provided her the opportunity to relate and learn from Nigerian artists, cultural workers, academics, museologists, collectors and representatives of government agencies to which she was linked by OYASAF in Lagos and Ibadan.

Such contacts also afforded her the opportunity to benefit from their enlightened views about African arts, which greatly assisted in  her understanding of the ways in which historical archaeologists could alternatively frame their questions and interpret the past.

She focused extensively on the relevance of the production of knowledge to the socio-politics of archaeology and the influence that historical archaeologists have on how the public conceptualizes and understands the past.

Ms Engmann was also able to gain knowledge about other heritage projects in Nigeria while with OYASAF.

Since the politics of heritage in West Africa is central to her work, particularly given the unprecedented threat faced by the cultural heritage sector with the current global economic crisis and the long-term erosion of funding sources, the OYASAF fellowship program, became very useful to her research dissertations for her PhD work at Stanford University.