— Curated Folio —
The Hyena Men from Nigeria
The Gadawan Kura — often referred to internationally as the “Hyena Men of Nigeria” — occupy a rare space between folklore, performance tradition, animal handling, medicine, and itinerant street culture. Your collection can position the plates not as sensational curiosities, but as carefully observed field studies documenting a fading and often misunderstood tradition through the lens of historical natural history illustration.
0 Plates
In 2022, I traveled through northern Nigeria to spend time with the Gadawan Kura — a semi-nomadic community internationally known as the Hyena Men of Nigeria. Traveling alongside handlers, storytellers, herbalists, and performers, I documented their traditions, animals, tools, medicines, and daily life through photography, field notes, and direct observation.
This collection transforms those encounters into a series of museum-style natural history plates and visual studies inspired by nineteenth-century ethnographic and scientific illustration traditions. Rather than presenting the subjects as spectacle, the works aim to preserve fragments of a disappearing cultural practice: the bond between humans and predators, the rituals surrounding performance animals, and the complex social identity carried by the Gadawan Kura across generations.
The plates combine field documentation with crafted infographic compositions, anatomical studies, environmental observations, and archival-style visual storytelling. Each illustration draws from material gathered during the journey itself — from conversations and demonstrations to close studies of hyenas, baboons, snakes, charms, traveling equipment, and performance techniques. Together, the collection serves as both artistic archive and field record: an attempt to document a rarely explored tradition through the visual language of historical museum plates and naturalist expeditions.