A man crosses a damaged city with a bicycle he calls the White Horse. The vehicle matters because it once belonged to his ordinary life. In Owo Anietie’s War Hero series, the bicycle becomes the thread a viewer can follow through separation, danger and supernatural intervention. Tanks appear, soldiers close in, and green butterflies gather near the man before the story turns. The work is digitally made, yet its emotional center is a remembered family object. Anietie uses speculative form to revisit the Nigerian civil war without treating that war as a decorative backdrop for action.
The story grew from a conversation with his mother about her father, who was separated from family during the conflict. Anietie described the series at length in a first-person interview with Agbowó. He was not recording his grandfather’s movements as if every scene were a documentary fact. He used his mother’s memories as the beginning of a constructed sequence. That difference is crucial to the work. Its imaginative additions make room for fear, endurance and the possibility of rescue without replacing the actual history of people forced apart by war.
Anietie is a Nigerian 3D artist from Akwa Ibom. He describes much of his work as Afrofuturistic, shaped by African stories, religion, politics and mythology. His digital practice developed after years of drawing, painting and traditional sculpture. The move to software widened the audience he could reach, but it also gave him new means to stage histories too large for a single portrait. In War Hero, camera position, artificial light and sequential images let him move between a private family memory and a national catastrophe.
The White Horse
The opening image begins with an object that would be easy to underestimate from a present-day distance. Anietie’s mother told him that her father treasured one of his two bicycles. During the war, a bicycle could carry a person, supplies or news when a car was unavailable. The series gives the prized vehicle a name, The White Horse. That name joins affection to utility. A horse can suggest freedom, but it also requires care and can be burdened by work. The bicycle similarly carries more than a rider: it holds the family’s memory of what mattered before everything around them changed.
Anietie places his figure in an isolated city after damage has already been done. The bicycle’s continuing presence makes the scene more specific than a generalized postwar landscape. A viewer can ask where the man is going and what he hopes to preserve. The vehicle is a trace of a functioning world, yet it is also a practical tool for crossing a broken one. The scene’s uncertainty gives the series room to unfold. Anietie has not told the whole story in its first frame.
The next image, which he called Close Call, brings the man near soldiers and a tank. His bicycle stands near the military vehicle. Anietie described using unusually strong light in a night setting, as though the space were a barracks where concealment would be difficult. The formal choice matters. Darkness usually offers a fugitive the possibility of cover; here light turns the setting into a trap. The small bicycle and the armored tank occupy the same image but do not wield comparable power. Their contrast makes the man’s vulnerability visible without needing a caption that says he is afraid.
A later image shows him on his knees, hands behind his head, with the bicycle on the ground. The tank’s lights remain present. The posture is immediately legible as surrender. Then butterflies enter. Anietie says he made them green to mark growth and spiritual assistance, and one lands near the figure’s forehead. The effect is a change in the story’s rules. A man who seemed surrounded by forces larger than himself may receive help from something too small and delicate to fit the machinery of war. The image’s tension lies in the difference between the butterfly and the tank, not in a claim that butterflies literally stopped an army.
Anietie’s sequence then imagines a force striking the ground and scattering soldiers. He called the turn Merry-way and left the man’s onward journey unresolved. A speculative rescue appears, but a family reunion is not guaranteed inside the completed account he describes. The open ending gives the viewer space to feel both the wish for escape and the limits of invention. Art can imagine a path through danger; it cannot give back every life the historical conflict took.
The line between memory and invention
War Hero brings together family memory and invention. The artist’s mother supplied the recollections that sparked it. Anietie supplied the digitally staged journey and the supernatural event. He also drew on stories of spiritual transformation he heard while growing up, including tales of people becoming crocodiles. In the Agbowó interview, he describes those tales as part of how earlier generations understood survival and conflict. The inherited stories give a modern image its shape and emotional reach.
The series therefore moves through several kinds of truth. The historical war and family separation are not fictional. The precise sequence of a tank, butterflies and seismic counterattack belongs to the artwork. The feelings carried by those scenes, including dread and a desire for protection, may be recognizable to people whose families remember violence. This is where Anietie’s Afrofuturism differs from a simple tale of future robots. He uses advanced digital tools to bring an inherited story into a new visual relation, allowing ancestral belief and speculative technology to occupy the same frame.
His use of light gives that relation force. A digital artist can make a nocturnal scene glow with a source that is never shown directly. In Close Call, the brightness denies easy hiding. In the surrender scene, tank lights keep the threat alive even as smaller green forms gather around the figure. The contrasts carry narrative information before the viewer knows the artist’s explanation. One kind of illumination comes from military power; another signals an imagined spiritual intervention. Both are made of pixels, but they produce different ways of reading the scene.
Anietie says the series honours people who lost lives or were separated during the war. It is a serious claim, and the work’s episodic format helps sustain it. A single heroic image could too easily turn conflict into a triumphal poster. The sequence pauses at uncertainty, capture and aftermath. It lets the person remain a father and traveller with a cherished bicycle, not only a fighter endowed with a spectacular power. Even the imagined escape does not close every wound opened by the historical event.
The artist at the machine
Anietie first worked as an illustrator and traditional artist before moving into motion design, animation and 3D environments. He has spoken about studying composition, colour, camera lenses and lighting while learning software such as Cinema 4D and Octane Render. Those tools are central to how War Hero is told. A scene can be arranged with a long view of an empty street, then another can draw attention to a tank, a body’s posture or a small butterfly. The camera exists virtually, but its choices direct attention as decisively as one used on location.
He also described making art every day for an extended period, with each work functioning like an open journal. That discipline has artistic consequences beyond the number of images. It gives a maker repeated chances to test a new light source, learn how a surface responds or build a more convincing environment. The ambition is not that every daily work is equally finished or equally significant. It is a practice of sustained invention, one that can support the more complex narrative staging of a series such as War Hero.
The artist’s interest in technology is not an argument that digital media automatically provide a better future. Software can expand the kinds of scenes he can make and distribute, yet the story he chooses to render concerns war, family and loss. The futurist element lies in who controls the image and what inherited material he brings into it. He uses contemporary tools to tell a story he feels has been insufficiently represented, rather than using African motifs as decoration for a technological display.
In a GQ South Africa interview, Anietie described training with a sculptor in Akwa Ibom and later studying digital methods and advertising. Such a route explains his care for both object and image. A traditionally modelled figure must occupy space; a digitally rendered one has to persuade an eye that space exists. Neither medium guarantees emotional depth. In his most compelling work, the technical skill gives a family story enough visual structure to hold an audience’s attention past the first striking frame.
A mask marked for return
Another work, STOLEN, begins from the history of the Idia mask removed during the British invasion of Benin in 1897. Anietie describes it in the GQ conversation as an image of the mask with a note bearing the words “STOLEN” and “RETURN.” Its language is direct. The object is not treated as a mysterious relic awaiting interpretation by a museum far from the place of its making. The added note makes possession and restitution the subject. It also interrupts the smooth presentation through which a displaced object can appear to have arrived naturally in a collection.
The note is visually modest beside the cultural and political weight of the mask, and that mismatch is productive. A scrap of ordinary written instruction is enough to change how a viewer sees an image that institutions have displayed for generations. The work’s force does not require a fantasy battle or elaborate digital landscape. It stages a claim in plain language. Anietie’s broader interest in speculative storytelling remains present because a demand to return a stolen object asks people to imagine a future arrangement of ownership different from the one inherited.
In the GQ interview, Anietie described AfroDroids as a story set a thousand years ahead, asking what sort of planet future generations might inhabit. Its robot figures belong to a wider project rather than a single isolated image. In a 2022 interview, collaborator Esther Eze is credited with writing the project’s fictional myth. The project differs sharply from STOLEN. One is a concise intervention around an identifiable object; the other builds a speculative population across a digital collection. Both place consequences in view, though their artistic methods and time scales are distinct.
A contemporary account in Vanguard describes the fiction more specifically: humans destroy their ability to coexist and neglect the earth, while droids with human consciousness succeed them. That is the account’s summary of the project, not a prediction Anietie made about the real world. It also identifies beads, earrings and chieftaincy caps among the collection’s cultural references. These details give the robotic figures social signs rather than leaving them as anonymous machines. The imagined future turns a technological fantasy toward an old human question: what happens when people fail to care for one another and the conditions that sustain them?
Refusing a borrowed future
Anietie is clear that he does not need to begin every Afrofuturist image with a spaceship or astronaut. In the Agbowó conversation, he explained that he knows the stories he heard in Nigeria more intimately than he knows those imported genre figures. His interpretation of Afrofuturism includes priests as people who imagined futures for their communities. This is his own framing, not a historical classification that everyone must adopt. It helps explain why a grandfather’s bicycle, a mask and inherited tales of transformation can sit beside digital robots in one practice.
The relationship between Benin material and Anietie’s Akwa Ibom identity also deserves care. He has said he is not from Benin, despite his artistic interest in its history. The distinction prevents one Nigerian culture from being treated as a substitute for another. It also shows that research and curiosity can motivate a project without making its creator an automatic spokesperson for every tradition pictured. His family history anchors War Hero in one way; the Idia mask calls for a different kind of attention to evidence, removal and public claim.
Krull’s Futuristic Dreams editorial imagines a present altered by a different relation to colonial history. Anietie’s STOLEN asks a direct question about an object still held away from its place of origin, while War Hero builds a speculative passage through a family memory of war. These works do not share one method with Krull’s fashion editorial. They do share a refusal to leave history behind when an image turns toward possibility. A future has to address what people have inherited, including what was taken from them.
In War Hero, the White Horse remains the clearest sign of that inheritance. The bicycle has none of the glamour of a spaceship. It can break, be abandoned or become the evidence that a family once expected to travel together. Anietie places it beside soldiers, light, butterflies and the upheaval of an impossible escape. The effect is not to make the war unreal. It is to give a remembered person a form of motion that historical catastrophe tried to stop. The journey stays open beyond the last frame, leaving its viewer with a question more durable than the spectacle: what might it take to bring someone home?