Everyone in Nigeria’s culture and arts industry worth their salt knows Chief Dr Mrs. Nike Okundaye-Davies, or Mama Nike as she is fondly called. At the age of 72, Okundaye-Davies has devoted 55 years of her life to the preservation of the traditional Yoruba craft (Adire making) and empowerment of women and young people through the arts.
It all started at the age of 7 when her mother and grandmother passed on. Unable to continue with her formal education, she went to Oshogbo to live with her great-grandmother, who taught her how to make Adire. She would master the labour-intensive traditional way of making the fabric, achieved through the extraction of indigo from the “Elu” plant, followed by painting and resist-dyeing the fabric with a homemade cassava emulsion. She has consistently passed on this tradition to the younger generations till date. In 1968, she had her first solo exhibition at the Goethe Institute, Lagos.
Having wriggled herself out of poverty, Okundaye-Davies was determined to do so for others, particularly women whose stories mirrored hers, by teaching them the Adire crafts so they could support themselves. In recent years, she successfully trained hundreds of female prostitutes in the streets of Italy in arts and crafts, changing their lives forever.
By 1983, she had established the Nike Centre for Arts and Culture, Oshogbo, which offers training in various forms of traditional arts to Nigerians, both young and old. The Centre in Osun State admits and trains undergraduate students from Nigerian and international universities in textile design. She proceeded to open three of such centres: Nike Weaving, Adire & Indigo Centre, Ogidi, Kogi State; Nike Art Foundation & Gallery Limited, Lagos; and the latest, Nike Research Centre For Arts & Culture, Piwoyi, Abuja, commissioned in March 2023. The centre houses over 25,000 artworks, a textile school and a waste-to-wealth outfit. Altogether, the centres have provided free training to over 3,000 Nigerians, enabling them to attain financial independence.
An admirable quality of Okundaye-Davies is the fact that she didn’t limit herself to the Adire craft. She diversified her talents to the visual arts – creating life-size gender- and Yoruba-motif-based artworks rendered in oil paintings, beadworks, among others. She has had about 116 solo exhibitions, and her works are displayed in several sites around the world, including Smithsonian Museum in 2012. Her works are further housed in the collections of the Gallery of African Arts and the British Library in London, as well as the Johfrim Art and Design Studio.
While encouraging young people to get educated, Okundaye-Davies believes that education goes beyond the classroom to mastery of one familial heritage and developing it as a means of financial empowerment; and the preservation of same heritage for the next generation, hence her serving on the UNESCO Committee of the Intangible Nigerian Heritage Project.
Okundaye-Davies holds an honorary doctorate degree she received from Rhodes University in 2019. She was conferred the Ordine Della Stella Della Solidarieta Italiana, one of the highest national honours in Italy, and was recently appointed the ambassador of the 2030 World Expo, Busan, Korea, by the South Korean government.
She is married; and she is blessed with two sons and five daughters three of whom are artistes.
