[2] The proposal for the sculpture originated with Enwonwu who contacted Alan Lennox-Boyd, the British government's Secretary of State for the Colonies.

It was intended that the completed statue would sit in the Nigerian House of Representatives prior to the independence of the Federation of Nigeria and the end of British colonial rule in 1960.

[3] Enwonwu later worked in a studio belonging to the Sculptor in Ordinary for Scotland, William Reid Dick, in Maida Vale in west London due to the growing size of the sculpture.

[1] Ogbechie extensively analysed the sculpture in terms of the subversion of the white gaze, and colonial perceptions of black male sexual dominance.

In the comparative intimacy of a gallery however the boldly semi abstract treatment of the lower folds of the dress not only directs attention upwards, as designed, to the more conventional realism of the head but it underlines in this and other important, detailed passages of the figure a general feeling of constraint and lack of vitality".