Olayinka Miranda Burney-Nicol (Olayinka, her preferred name). was born into an upper-middle-class Creole (Krio) family, in Freetown, Sierra Leone in 1927. In 1955, Olayinka arrived in postwar England to study art at the Central School of Arts and Crafts. As a pioneering African modernist Olayinka fused abstraction with African themes in her work. Olayinka died in London, England in 1996.
Artist Olayinka Miranda Burney-Nicol (Olayinka) was born into an upper-middle-class Creole (Krio) family in Sierra Leone's elite hierarchy, in the capital city of Freetown in 1927. Olayinka's African ancestors were resettlers in Freetown, during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, having taken refuge in Sierra Leone, a British protectorate, far from the violent servitude, social persecution, and racial discrimination of their former lives, labouring on white-owned sugar and cotton plantations. The Krio people, from whom Olayinka's ancestors hailed, were historically an amalgamation of returnees of formerly enslaved Africans, transported away during the transatlantic slave trade. Survivors of those scattered across the Americas, Canada, Europe and the Caribbean, Olayinka's Krio status made her acutely aware of her ancestral heritage, and how West African men, women and children encountered sadistic cruelty, subjugation, and inhumane treatment during the European slave trade.
Olayinka's primary and secondary schooling during the twentieth-century British colonial era consisted of British missionary education designed to create African Englishmen and women. The curriculum, as Susan Shepler points out, was the perfect 'terrain for political revision' (Shepler, 1998, p.3) Furthermore, the colonisers' effectiveness lay in the redrafting of African knowledge, by devaluing the Africans' own cultural history and teaching malleable primary school minds an unchallengeable pedagogy that featured European superiority. Shepler proposes that the educational system was 'the fundamental element in African social change' (Shepler, 1998, p.3). Olayinka's upbringing was typical of Krio society, where they excelled within the British education system, were employed in senior roles in the judicial, legal, and medical fields, and led in business and the colonial government's civil service. This collective, upward social mobility of the Krio hierarchy pushed indigenous Africans to the margins. Olayinka's Krio background, therefore, enabled her to pursue her artistic goals with confidence. In 1949, she received a scholarship to study art and humanities at Long Island University in New York, USA and she later travelled throughout Europe to experience the privileges of European art circles, while continuing her art studies.
In 1955, Olayinka arrived in London, England to study art at the Central School of Arts and Crafts during the period of British postwar austerity. Olayinka engaged with postwar artistic trends that heavily featured expressive abstract art and the depiction of trauma. Postwar artists sought creative catharsis following the human tragedies, horrors, and devastation of the Second World War and its effects on British society. While Olayinka's paintings incorporated abstraction, her themes, nevertheless, reflected the overlooked colonial memories of African trauma. Her art school training at the Central School of Arts and Crafts informed her approach to painting, printmaking, and mixed-media work, while absorbing African historiography. In her oil painting, Mother Africa (1972). Olayinka depicts a haunting, abstracted female figure in earth tones, seated amid a cacophony of colour: feverishly applied streaks and strokes of blues, greens, purples, yellows, greys, and white tones. Mother Africa's facial expression is clear, stoic despite the intrusions, her eyes staring forward, intent, challenging, unrelenting. The yellow form, resting on her chest, represents positive colour, affirming the self. On the far left of the composition, raised above her eyeline, an ancestral mask is also drawn in yellow, with mesmerising yellow eyes, evoking the past and the present, calling, warning, and pulling back to Mother Africa. Her woodblock print Family unit (undated), similarly themed, is printed on delicate rice paper. Olayinka uses red to detail levels of African-ness, with buildings, contoured hands, masked faces, ancestral masqueraders, symbolic patterns, and ancient marks. Olayinka refuses to forget her Krio origins, a people composed of unknown mixed African backgrounds and differing ancestral roots: individuals stripped of language and knowledge of their former names and ethnicity. Krios included, variously, black soldiers who had fought in the American Revolutionary War (1775–1783) and arrived with their families; liberated African captives from European pirate ships, saved from being trafficked into slavery by the British Royal Navy, taken instead to Sierra Leone (Tezak, nd, p.1); emancipated Black Londoners who emigrated from Georgian-era Britain (1714-1830); Caribbean plantation escapees; Jamaican Maroon freedom fighters; and Canadian Black Nova Scotians. Olayinka's abstract expressionist art would express how the Krios, nevertheless, shared a collective cultural human-complexity trauma, addressing colonialism, injustice, and Africanism in a unique and pioneering way.
After completing her art training in London, Olayinka returned to her homeland in 1958, where she embarked on teaching and experimenting with different media, exhibiting in Sierra Leone and across Africa, and receiving commissions for government murals. Olayinka subsequently returned to live in England and died in London, England in 1996. Her works are represented in the UK public domain, including in the collections of Bristol Museum, and Leeds University. Her work was exhibited posthumously at the Newark Museum, USA (2024) and at the inaugural exhibition of V&A East, London (2026).
Joy Onyejiako.