Integration by Dotun Adegbite

This month's cover art is a collage combining acrylic paint with bits of textile and twine on canvas.The piece, with its stylized figures and West African-influenced patterns of flat color, is titled Integration.However, what the artist had in mind with this title is perhaps not immediately obvious.Integration often means a coming together of different people, yet the picture is really about a journey that ends in a carnival.The journey is from Nigeria to Britain, and it is both psychological and physical in nature.Its endpoint is in a carnival that celebrates a culture carried from Africa, a culture growing roots and joining, not submitting to, the new environment.For our cover artist, integration occurs when this joining succeeds, gains acceptance in the adopted country, and remains dynamic and vital.Dotun Adegbite is a British painter, sculptor, and graphic designer, born and educated in Nigeria.He emigrated to the United Kingdom with his family in 1996 after a 14-year career in advertising, which built to the position of creative director at a leading agency.It was a move many Nigerians have undertaken, seeking a better life away from "the security situation" and corruption in their home country.For Adegbite, relocation meant a career change to the field of welfare rights consulting, advising youth on their rights and opportunities for financial support.As an artist, he has had two solo exhibitions of his work and participated in auctions and group exhibitions in London.There is an irony involved in the life-altering journey of the Nigerian diaspora.For centuries, Britain, the old imperial power, extracted slaves from the West African coast, transporting them to the Caribbean where they were worked to death on sugar cane plantations.After emancipation in 1834, colonization shifted to the extraction of the region's material resources, especially palm oil.The country that became Nigeria was constructed out of British holdings.Following independence in 1960, the population endured decades of autocracy as the exploitation of petroleum powered the economy and enriched a few at the expense of the many.Millions left for the United States, Canada, and, yes, the old colonial "motherland," Britain.The descendants of people whose resources, and even lives, were once appropriated have arrived in the island kingdom.They are