SHUTA BUG
Riveting is often used to describe Shuta Bug’s (Mayowa Alabi) art. Movement, suspended, dances in his colours and their application. Lagos, being his preferred setting, comes with a lot of history. That seemingly mythical place, known to the entire country and famous beyond the continent, has had countless artists inspired by its boisterous song. Yet the work of Alabi strikes itself as original, vibrates attentively to the city’s representation while pointing towards an alternate, albeit realised vision of its own. This vision places him amongst the top rank of contemporary visual artists who are creating indelible profiles of the materials of modern art-making and whose stories, even while understudied, contribute in no small part to the sprawling, intersecting landscape of our respective societies.
Alabi’s collection Kamoru vs The World is a masterpiece of worldbuilding. It creates intimate and investigative portraits of people whose stories intersect with the greater story of Lagos, which is movement and humankind’s primal desire to protect itself while in transit. Psychological in its broader scope, the details are hearty, the faces of Mayowa’s character impressing a distinct, unrecognisable emotion on the viewer. Although the collection incorporates a closely-controlled cast of characters, the frontline actors are undoubtedly the area boys, a term deeply entrenched in the Lagos narrative and whose literal translation still remains arguable. Alabi directly references them in All Area Boys Go to Heaven II, a sky-set frame of them, literally, going to heaven. Glorious captures the mood, as a pane of light descends from above, mirrors the fluttery whiteness of their expressively-drawn wings, almost like the focused scribbling of an imaginative kid.
The artist says the paintings were inspired by introspection. He thought: how differently would his life have turned out if he wasn’t born in the circumstances he was? What if he was an area boy? Would his emotional spectrum be invalidated, carried along the tides of known lores? Sodiq, Mr Romantic lies at the far end of that emotional spectrum, the titular character holding flowers for his intended. It’s an image almost impossible to happen in Lagos, not due to lack of emotional sentimentality, but because flowers as totems of love aren’t quite entrenched in contemporary Nigerian culture. Shuta Bug isn’t limited by realism; indeed some of the paintings shimmer in the fantastic realm; Trabaye depicts the faces of smokers as ancestral masks, a touch that elevates its narrative possibilities.
Lying among the streets of Lagos, so familiar, are the physical and emotional repositories of our mixed memories. Alabi conjures the heat of game houses, the fury of a danfo driver braving the Lagos road, the revelry of drums relaying a Fuji rhythm, the whiteness of celestial church members, people, everywhere. He reiterates the ethos that people create the stories of cities and this is especially true for Lagos where each generation comes along with its own sensibilities.
Always Guiding and Omo Iya Mi are personal favourites. Though the former’s titular phrasing is taken from an Internet expression, there’s an epic atmosphere which covers the painting. Boxing culture is not widespread in Lagos but in places where it is—the innards of the mainland—it’s a celebrated activity of revelry and routine. People gather around and watch, the story in the centre not eclipsing the smaller, untold stories around, the pilferer’s hand moving through unguarded pockets, the weed seller stylishly advertising his wares, the hoarders of gin and their overmade faces, the potential of violence so closely aligned with communion.
It is what makes the latter so soulful; that the street knows your pain because they lived through it too. They saw the seams of your image come undone, spiralling over the ground and everyone watched, with a bit of shock and a bit of enjoyment, because who wants an area boy to live a good life?
AKINBODE AKINBIYI
“Rapid motion through space elates one; so does notoriety; so does the possession of money.”—James Joyce, “After The Race”
A lot of information, a lot of crisscrossed wires. The image is one of activity. High-rise buildings on either side of the frame, their windows and balconies visible after some contemplation. It’s a scene of ordinariness. There are people in the frame but objects are the most consequential features: poles, zinc, a shop’s torn covering. A girl crying, or is she laughing? Her hair swirls, intense emotion on her face, dark as most parts of the photograph are. She is a collector of longing.
For six decades Akinbode Akinbiyi has documented life’s austere properties. His medium is photography, particularly black-and-white shots which underplays the intensity of colours and brings the viewer directly into the world he portrays. That world is often Lagos, where he grew up after being born to Nigerian parents in the United Kingdom. Akinbiyi’s Rolleiflex medium format camera enhances his eye for Lagos, which is seen in photographs such as the one with the girl. Titled Bamgbose, Lagos Island, 2004, it was part of the series Lagos: All Roads. In a cerebral interview of himself, he describes the image’s layering as “deliberate, an attempt to convey something of the multifaceted structuring that is continually going on in the city.”
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In November 2023, residential houses in Festac Town and several other parts of Lagos were marked for demolition. The action found its way into social media where its motivating reasons were discussed, including the political, the economical, and irredeemably the ethnic. Because Lagos has long been the nexus of Nigerian multiplicity, it has long vibrated with ethnic overtones, such as the First Republic clashes which rocked the leading southwestern politicians and spilled onto the front door of the common man, the incessant Ajegunle riots of the late nineties to early 2000s, and most recently, in 2023, following the favoured candidacy of Peter Obi, the violence and abuse meted out to Igbo-looking voters across the state.
Now houses were being demolished and people claimed it was mostly Igbo properties being marked. It reminds me of Akindode’s word—continually—and how Lagos, by virtue of its centrality in the Nigerian imagination, has failed to move beyond its mythos. It has failed to reflect, in trueness, that “multifaceted structuring” that makes its art so riveting. In his work, Akinbode is not explicitly political; he craves rather the intimate and the quiet. Even the bustle that comes with street photography doesn’t obscure his simultaneous quality of stillness and movement. 2001’s Popo Aguda, Lagos Island captures a group of little kids walking as though in a procession, their whites stark against the darkened outlook of the buildings around. An okada driver parks to watch them, an extension of the photographer’s wonder. There’s an innocence embodied, which resists the involved vivacity that is Lagos, that is the currency of its narrative.
Six Songs, Swirling Gracefully in the Taut Air is Akinbode’s project collecting photographs from over four decades. An exhibition in Berlin demonstrated the evolution of his gaze which, put together, reveals a collectivity in the places he pictures. In one photograph bold letterings are juxtaposed with quiet, huge buildings in the background; in another, the top of a small cluster of houses are paired with the dominant image of a hippie-dressed, middle-aged man, his sensibilities visibly American. Lagos appears in white, as a group of women in garments, the outline of a palm tree suggesting their presence at a beach, a favoured location for inspired prayers. A boy turning backwards and the woman holding a candle: they are immediately arresting. The boy’s appeal arises from his disinterest, the woman’s for the exact opposite. From Akinbode’s angle the candle becomes a microphone; a doubling of representation evokes prayer and politics. The image contradicts itself.
FELA KUTI
What does Fela say about death? His chosen middle name—Anikulapo—tells us all we need to know. It means, in Yoruba, “I have death in my pocket.” The genius, with triumph, relished telling wondrous onlookers that “I will be the master of my destiny and decide when it’s time for death to take me.” That perspective gives an opening to how the great musician lived his life, with revelry and spontaneity, a breathing embodiment of the Lagos he grew up in.
Many things have been said about Fela’s life and music. Divisive at best, it epitomises the contrasting personalities he showed to different people through the different phases of his life. In his pre-music days, to his parents, he was a privileged kid who was too stubborn to make peace with that privilege. To Isizdore, the African American Black Panther devout who helped radicalise his perspective, he was a charming young man with the potential for growth. Several band members from Afrika 70 left him after the Berlin Jazz festival in 1978, with disputes over pay and his growing involvement in politics touted as some reasons. The revered drummer and former band leader Tony Allen would speak later of these inconsistencies in his image, though he was often careful not to poke too strongly into the vulnerable legacy of a dead person.
Death: this presents our purest opportunity to enter the person of Fela, unencumbered. Particularly the death of his mother, the activist Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, whose health complications exacerbated with her throwing off the balcony of a storey building. In “Coffin For Head of State,” Fela accounts for that harrowing experience, emerging without piety but renewed passion, detailing the iconic story of how he dropped his mother’s coffin at the then military headquarters at Dodan Barracks in Lagos. But where his initial response to the event was triumphant, as time passed, Fela lapsed into the sentimental, into the tremulous satisfaction that is spirituality.
First-person account of his activities at the Afrikan Shrine afterwards narrated how he would carry out elaborate rituals on-stage, before performing and during performance, a means of invoking the dead into art. Was it worth it? The musician’s style and ethos were already established by then, meaning it wasn’t the art that craved fulfillment; it was his aching soul. Perhaps if that had happened today he would have sought therapy, or spoken about his disillusionment with his loved ones. Then again, Fela’s sentimentality was shrouded in a certain hard-headedness about his ideals. He didn’t want to compromise on what he, an Egba man, believed to be the way of life.
In his music, the most common narrative devices are humour and characterisation. Utilising storytelling, he often blends the two, which produced memorable albums until his passing in 1997. An understated but unparalleled technique he also used was his evocation of death, which wasn’t the death of sealed coffins but the death of fearful hearts, which was the death of succumbing to the fate of being Nigerian. Of the several incandescent cities in the country, Lagos has a peculiar merit to its madness—that it has long been this way. And no other person, as Teju Cole rightly pointed in a playlist titled The Liquid Grooves of Lagos, no one has catalogued that madness as poignantly as Fela Kuti.
And what is madness, if not the unravelling of a certain death?
CYPRIAN EKWENSI
Ekwensi is a storyteller of the highest rank. Contemporary readers of his work might ponder the merit of his language, its penchant for simplicity which is often (and sometimes wrongly) considered an antithesis of technically-proficient writing. But the Minna-born writer had an irreverent perspective of cities and the humans which make them up, and his novels were celebrated for that quality—the heart of a story. Before he came to his throbbing depictions of Lagos, he wrote, among other books, The Leopards Claw, and An African Night’s Entertainment, in 1950 and 1962 respectively. The accessible vision of these works saw them categorised as children’s novels, which might have caused some to question the seriousness of his work. He cleared those doubts with People of the City, the 1954 novel which brought him international recognition.
In the fifties, what was known as Nigerian literature hadn’t built up an ideological core. Devoid of tradition, the novel was yet a product of individuality and ingenuity. When Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart was published in 1958, its stylistic blending of Igbo and English saw many African and international readers herald it as the birth of the Nigerian novel, and thereby ingraining its own artistic ethos as the base of our novelistic tradition. Ekwensi was a different writer; rather than chart the “high art” of perusing the machinations and manifestations of colonialism, he was rather interested in the interiority of cities.
Owing to the use of simplistic, everyday language in his work, Ekwensi was sometimes described as embodying the characteristics of Onitsha market literature, that famed movement which brought the great Eastern city and its neighbouring environs into a colourful, distinct view. In a 1976 article for the Journal of Black Studies, John McClusky explored three novels of Ekwensi—People of the City, Jagua Nana, and Beautiful Feathers—and highlighted how he “closely parallels the naturalists with his treatment of men and women who arrive and suffer in Lagos.” He writes: “The impact of the city on the lives of his characters is the core of Ekwensi’s novelistic concerns. The city becomes much more than a setting in Ekwensi’s novels, but a chief character that grinds down the most noble idealists and compromised individuals to succeed.”
To be sure, no other Nigerian writer of his generation viewed the cataclysm of the country from the varied vantage points Ekwensi did. Having written works set in the northern and southern parts of Nigeria, his most-accomplished books—People of the City, Jagua Nana—arrived, like so many others, at the intersection that is Lagos. He found its multiplicity appealing. That interest is obvious from the feverish imagination he weaned from the city’s characters and their infamous lifestyle. The criticism of Russell Linnerman considers the structural flaws of Jagua Nana which, although he described as “one of the most enduring of all African novels,” can be summed in the paragraph:
It is conceivable that the short story is Ekwensi’s most effective literary vehicle; shallowness of character description is a trait of all his other novels as well. Perhaps he does not have the ability or the drive to sustain character development over the course of the longer genre. He does a far better job with Jagua than with any of his other figures, but what disappoints the reader in this case is that he comes so tantalisingly close to real success only to fall short at the last moment. In terms of what Jagua does and what she is, Ekwensi is solid; but why she thinks the way she does, why she responds the way she does, what made her the way she is and how she spent crucial periods in her life are matters virtually left untouched.
Nigerian writers know the merit of Ekwensi’s city narratives, especially those of Lagos. In The Republic essay “The Exceptional Mind of Cyprian Ekwensi,” Kechi Nne Nomu views the writer through the social role of the novelist which is “both self-assigned and thrust upon the author by the reader [and how it is] constantly shifting,” thereby placing Ekwensi in a larger discourse about cities and the language of their expression. For The New York Review of Books, Emmanuel Iduma considered Ekwensi’s Lagos noir, pointing out the 1954-published People of the City, which was preceded in Britain only by Amos Tutuola’s The Palm-Wine Drinkard, and opines, “That no one speaks of Ekwensi as the father of Nigerian literature is perhaps due to the undisguisedly didactic and moralising character of the stories he told.”
And still, Iduma makes the point—which I agree with—that “any Nigerian writer who has tried to write about Lagos as a city with feeling descends from Ekwensi.” From Sefi Atta’s Everything Good Will Come to Teju Cole’s 2007 autofiction novella Every Day Is for the Thief, the gaze of Ekwensi peeks through the colours and craze and complexities. Since then countless novels have attempted, to varying success, to explore something of Lagos’ core and what it makes of people. The trio of Leye Adenle’s Easy Motion Tourist, Igoni Barrett’s Blackass, and Toni Kan’s The Carnivorous City are spellbinding in their evocation of divergent social realities and characters which leap off the page, as though seeking to sell their visions of the city. Adenle’s novel makes an art of the city’s uncanny penchant for crime, achieving a detached rigour through the propulsive character of Guy, a British journalist who works with a lady who works to protect sex workers.
I was born in Lagos and lived there all my life, until I moved to Awka, a capital city in southeast Nigeria, for my undergraduate studies. What was most evident to me about Lagos was its relentless surge towards somewhere; the city—not just its inhabitants—always seemed to be moving somewhere. Where that is isn’t always visible, but the vivacity of that movement constitutes the core of its throbbing heart. And to love such a place would become a sort of mythical exercise; thus, that famous admonition visible at the entrance into the state—This is Lagos, shine your eyes—makes a lot of sense. There is always something to see, because here the communal and the intimate swirls in perpetual motion.♦
Complement this essay with fiction set in Lagos, Adeyeye Okikijesu’s “Swipe Right to Cancel.”
Emmanuel Esomnofu is a Nigerian writer and culture journalist. His essays have appeared in The Republic, and NativeMag, among others. He is working on his debut collection of essays.