My father has only one answer to the question, How are you?

He only and always says, I’m alive. Two words to account for his continued existence in this wonderful world, nothing more.

He said he was alive in the mornings when I was a teenager, helping him carry his briefcase to the car, the black Italian-made leather, with brass locks that had lost their shine from years of handling. Each morning I would carry it from the living room — where he worked after dinner, well past midnight till he dozed off on his armchair — to the black Nissan SUV in the driveway, feeling its weight, the accumulated gravity of over two decades as a cog in the corporate wheel.

He said he was alive in the evenings, when I checked on him while assisting my mother in serving his dinner, his eyes almost always glued to Channels News. He said it when he was tired, when he was not tired, when he had just returned from a difficult day at work, when the day had been fine. Always the same two words, I’m alive.

You see, my father was born in 1947. His father, my grandfather, was born sometime in the early 1900s, a time when colonial administrators kept records primarily for taxation and conscription, when African births were noted with the same administrative indifference accorded to harvests or livestock, so the exact year remains elusive. My grandfather would have been a young man when Things Fall Apart—not the novel, but the actual falling apart—was happening and would have been raised by men like Okonkwo, Achebe’s protagonist who measured his worth in yams and wrestling victories, a man who could not say a tender word to his son because he believed tenderness to be weakness.

My father never discussed the details of his days because it simply was not part of his lexicon, the phrases required to do so did not exist in the grammar of how he understood fatherhood. How do you give what was never given to you? This absence of vulnerability sits in my family’s history like a photographic negative; the shape of what should have been there, outlined by its very absence. So now I am in my mid-thirties and when people ask me how I am, I hear myself say, I’m alive. The words come out before I think about them, as automatic as breathing. It shocks me sometimes, this echo. I have inherited my father’s evasion, his careful distance from his own feelings, his refusal to name what might be happening beneath the surface of his days.

My grandfather died a couple of months after my birth and a lot of what I know of him comes filtered through my father’s reticence. My older siblings often spoke about how little he smiled and played or how much he scolded and chastised. But they felt his affection nonetheless because he always arrived bearing gifts. My grandfather loved his grandchildren, this much I believe with the certainty of faith, but he loved in a language my siblings could barely understand at the time, a language of sacrifice and survival. He loved in a language they could barely understand, but they knew they were loved because they understood that the limits of language are not the limits of reality; they understood that beyond the limits of language exist many synonyms for love.

My grandfather, despite everything he could not give, believed in letters with the fervor of a convert. He was not an educated man himself but he had seen what happened to the boys who went to secondary school, who had escaped the physical labor that bent backs and roughened hands, who learned English well enough to get jobs in government offices, who came back to the village at Christmas driving their standard issue Peugeot 404s.

He had seen that schools were doors through which one walked from one kind of life into another, so he paid school fees. Sometimes he had the money, sometimes he did not, but either way he found a way. He sold land and he borrowed. He worked extra shifts as cook on a trading ship between Lagos and Liverpool that aged him quicker. After secondary school, my grandfather’s sacrifices bore fruit when my father won a scholarship to study at Loughborough University in England and became the first person in his family to go to university. I have seen photographs from that period of my impossibly young father, standing in snow with friends whose names he struggles to remember, wearing coats several sizes too large. There are other photographs showing him surrounded by books, his expression serious and slightly dislocated. When he came back to Nigeria a decade later—with a first degree in chemical engineering, a master’s degree in engineering and then another master’s in business administration—everything changed for him and for the whole family. There was money now.

My father understood what his father had given him and because it was the clearest language of love he knew, it was the language he spoke to us. He paid for everything. Private schools, expensive tutors, textbooks purchased before the term began. When university approached, he said—and I remember the exact phrasing—You will go wherever you want to go, money is not your concern. And that meant a lot especially because money seemed to be a concern regarding everything else.

There were other languages in my father’s vocabulary for love. My father became a Liverpool fan when he was a student at Loughborough. In those days, Liverpool were winning everything. He watched them occasionally at Anfield but mostly in pubs with other international students, all of them cold and far from home, finding warmth in the communal shouting at a television screen. And when he came back to Nigeria, he brought Liverpool with him. Saturday evenings meant gathering in the living room to watch the Premier League on DStv. My father in his armchair, me on the floor, both of us leaning forward whenever Liverpool attacked. For my eighth birthday, he bought me a Liverpool jersey. Michael Owen, number 10. It was too big for me and came down to my knees, but I wore it every time.

Michael Owen left our club but we had Steven Gerrard and, because of Gerrard, we made it to the 2005 Champions League final in Istanbul. Liverpool versus AC Milan, by far the best team in the world at the time. Their Captain, Maldini, said before the game how only his little son kept him up at night because there was nobody on our team who made him lose sleep, then scored in the first sixty seconds. Kaka made the most impossible pass of our lifetime to Crespo for another goal. At halftime we were losing 3-0, and my father stood up and paced the room like a caged animal. But then Liverpool scored. And scored again. And again. Three goals in six minutes. The game went to penalties and we won. My father sat back down in his chair and wept. The only time I had seen him cry before then was the night we heard the news my grandmother had passed away.

Football seemed to be the only place where he allowed himself to feel things fully and he was always eager to share that space with me. Till now, he asks when I am coming to catch the Liverpool game with him as a translation for asking when I would be visiting. If there was not any game coming up, he would call and use player transfer news to fill in the silence. And over the years, whenever we fight, the tension would eventually dissolve the same way. Saturday would come, and we would sit together to watch Liverpool play. We would not talk about the argument. We would not apologize. We would just sit together, and in the sitting, something was repaired.

There were other languages that were harder to recognize as love until much later, like the language of refusal. After university, when I started working and money was tight, I would call my father and ask for help. Money to top up rent. Money to eat for a few days till salary drops. The small emergencies that punctures the wheels of a young man picking up motion in early adulthood. I would explain the situation, and he would listen with what sounded like genuine attention, and then he would say he was short on cash.

I knew he had money. His pension was ten times my salary so I knew he could help if he chose to. I did not yet understand that his refusal was not about the money but about forcing me to realize that a man only learns to find his way through by learning to find his way through. But what I learned instead was how love could be insufficient regardless of the language it was translated to. That each generation receives an inheritance that is both gift and burden, tools that worked for one world but may not fit the contours of another. That my father was giving me what he had been given; the hard lesson that survival requires self-reliance, even when self-reliance feels like abandonment. His refusal was the synonym he knew for I believe in you. But at the time, all I could hear was the silence where support should have been.

I resented it then. But I found a way through. I took on extra ghost writing jobs to support my engineering job. I borrowed from friends and paid them back. I learned to budget, to save, to make do with less. I started an energy business and when it failed I figured there were easier ways of making money and got into finance. Slowly, I stopped needing to ask.

Then there was the conversation about marriage, which happened on a Saturday afternoon empty of particular significance. I was home visiting, and we were sitting in the living room, not watching anything in particular when he turned to me and said — when you are ready to marry, these are the things that matter. I was so surprised I almost laughed. My father, who never discussed personal matters, who had never asked about girlfriends or offered relationship advice, was suddenly delivering marriage counsel.

She should be someone you find attractive, he said. Your type. Don’t let anyone tell you looks don’t matter because they do. He continued with his list which had been scribbled into a pocket notebook; kind temperament, stable disposition, shared values — personal, religious, cultural, financial — because if you disagree on the fundamentals, you will fight about everything. And then, at the end of his list, he said if you get a woman pregnant, you will take care of her and the child. That is not negotiable. But that does not mean you are obliged to marry her if you do not want to. That was the only time we talked about marriage before I actually decided to get married. And when I did get married, when I found someone who met every criterion on his unspoken checklist, my father did not offer to contribute to the wedding. I was mortified. But my father was unmoved. He is a man, he said to my mother. If he is ready to take a wife, he should be ready to pay for his wedding. So I paid for it myself. I cleaned out my savings, bought more beer and less whiskey for a while and made many other compromises. And my father came to the wedding, sat in the front row, greeted the guests, and never once apologized for not contributing money. It was another test, another refusal.

There is a saying my Yoruba relatives like to quote that best explains the synonyms for love — Owe l’esin oro, bi oro ba sonu, owe la fi n wa / Proverbs are the horses of conversation; when the conversation is lost, we use proverbs to retrieve it. What they mean, though it is never said directly, is that some things cannot be said plainly. Some truths require detours, require metaphor, require saying one thing to mean another.

This is the nature of translation. Anyone who has tried to move meaning from one language to another knows that something is always lost in the crossing. The French say — l’esprit de l’escalier / the wit of the staircase; to describe the perfect comeback you think of only after leaving a conversation. In English we have no equivalent, no single phrase that captures that specific regret. We can explain it, describe it, approximate it, but the original meaning exists in a space our language cannot quite reach.

I say all of this to say even the best translations make room for insufficiency. The translator stands between two worlds, trying to build a bridge with inadequate materials, knowing the structure will never be perfect but hoping it will be strong enough to carry meaning across. This is what my grandfather did. This is what my father does. This is what all of us do when we try to say I love you in languages we barely speak ourselves.

What strikes me now, looking back across the landscape of my childhood and the man who shaped it, is this; my father believed he was insufficient. But more than that, he knew his synonyms for love were imperfect translations, approximations of an emotion he could not express directly. He was trying to say I love you in a language he had inherited from his father, who had inherited it from his father, each generation passing down words that meant something close to love but never quite landed on the word itself. And I know these synonyms are imperfect because I feel the dread of insufficiency whenever I respond to intimate queries as my father does, knowing that what I am offering might not be what is needed.

Sometimes I do better than my father. I reach out to hold his hand when we speak just because. I start every visit to my brother with a hug and end it with a reminder of my love for him. When my younger cousin asks me how I am doing, I tell him about the things that have excited me recently and the things that are stressing me out. I trust him with things I would naturally withhold, using my own experiences as a lamp to guide his path, and I try to remind him I care for him.

Yet now that Oke and I have begun talking about having a child of our own, I see the world evolving faster than I can ever evolve with it and I’m coming to terms with knowing that all of these synonyms for love I am learning to give, however improved from what I was given, would likely still be insufficient. I know that my child will face challenges that I can never imagine and will need wisdom I do not possess and it makes me wonder what language of love I will speak that they will not understand until decades later, if at all? What refusal will I offer that will feel like rejection? What synonym will I use when the word itself is what they need to hear? Yet I know that, like my father, I will keep showing up. I will keep trying, offering what I have, insufficient as it is, hoping it might be something they can decode eventually because translation takes time.

But perhaps insufficiency is not the opposite of love but its necessary companion. The Sufis teach that there are ninety-nine names for God, each one revealing a different aspect of the divine, each one an incomplete translation of something too vast to be captured in a single word. Perhaps there are just as many names for love, especially the love between fathers and sons. School fees and football matches and strategic refusals and one awkward conversation about marriage.

My father never said the words, I love you. But he said it anyway, in a million different ways, in every language he knew how to speak. And perhaps love, in the end, is not about perfect translation but about the willingness to keep trying, to keep offering our insufficient words, to keep showing up generation after generation, alive and trying and translating.

I know that on the issue of security in Nigeria, a lot of attention is being given to Boko Haram, the Islamic State’s West Africa Province and a violent sect of Fulani herdsmen. But, as a concerned citizen, I recognize my civic duty to inform you of my discovery of an organisation, just as sinister, carrying out clandestine operations somewhere within, but definitely within, Nigeria—The Society of Connoisseurs of Mass Murder.

Now, I do not have any specific details on the identity of their members and so, of course, I cannot say if any of them have been actually responsible for any mass murders. But I know for a fact that they revel in news of large scale bloodshed as reported by the Nigerian police, Amnesty International, Channels News, gossiping market people and anywhere else they can source such news. And then, they proceed to investigate and appraise the fine lines between these acts of mass murder and the art of mass murder.

Personally, I find it reprehensible that mass murder would be tolerated, let alone celebrated, in a society like ours, so deeply immersed in Christian, Islamic and indigenous ethics. And so I have attached evidence—a copy of the quarterly lecture read before the society last week in celebration of the Armed Forces Remembrance Day on January 15th—to prove the existence of this devilish society and to alert the appropriate authorities who are mandated to preserve peace and safety in Nigeria.

While I fear for my safety as I share this with you, I am even more motivated to do so while pondering on the thoughts of the Christian philosopher, Lactantius,

‘Human life is guarded by rigorous laws, yet methods have been devised to evade these laws for the sake of murder… Now, if merely being present at a murder makes a man an accomplice; if barely being a spectator makes a man share guilt with the perpetrator; it follows—by necessity—that in murder, the hand which inflicts the fatal blow is not more deeply immersed in blood than the hand of the man who sits and looks on: neither can the man who tolerates the shedding of blood be clear of blood; nor can the man that applauds the murderer, calling for prizes on his behalf, be seen as anything other than a participator in murder’.

The members of the Society of Connoisseurs of Mass Murder are, therefore, as guilty as mass murderers and deserve to face the full might of the law.

Yours sincerely,

Ciroma Chukwuma Adekunle

The Lecture: On Mass Murder, Considered as one of the Fine Arts

Before I begin, I would like to acknowledge the presence of Your Excellencies, Most Honourables, Your Honours, Your Worships, My Lords, Your Highnesses, distinguished ladies, gentlemen and all other protocols duly observed.

As a very recent inductee of our eminent society, I am truly honoured to be appointed by the executive committee to deliver this quarter’s edition of the Murtala Muhammed Lecture Series on Mass Murder. My task would have been a lot less tedious about sixty years ago, when our country, Nigeria, was on the verge of independence, when mass murders were limited to crudely executed colonial genocides and inter-ethnic wars and when very little could be understood or appreciated about the art. But since independence, masterpieces of excellence have been executed by professional men. Naturally, in the style of criticism applied to the art of these murders, the public will look for something of a corresponding improvement. Practice and theory must advance pari passu. People begin to see that something more goes to the composition of a fine mass murder than a few hundred blockheads waiting to be killed, some tens of shooters waiting to execute the killings and a few bold men waiting to order the execution. Time, location, historical context, and sentiment are now deemed indispensable to attempts of this nature.

Col. Murtala Muhammed’s division of the Nigerian Army’s groundbreaking massacre at Asaba during the Nigerian civil war exalted the ideal of mass murder to all of us and to me in particular. Therefore, this has deepened the arduousness of my task. Like Milton in poetry, like Michael Angelo in painting, he carried the art to a point of colossal sublimity. To sketch the history of the art, and to examine its principles critically, now remains a duty for us connoisseurs.

So dearly distinguished, to begin, cast your imagination to a melancholic Asaba afternoon in August, 1967; markets stalls short of food, bars bereft of beer, every stroke of joy or optimism smudged off its people’s faces by the abrasive arms of war. When, the Nigerian troops, led by Col. Murtala Muhammed, having driven out the Biafran mutineers who had been occupying the town through the previous weeks—in one of the bloodiest and unprovoked incidents of the civil war—begin raiding homes and ravaging the streets, rounding up and executing an estimated 700 unarmed civilian men and boys, some as young as 12, for allegedly sympathizing with the Biafrans. Dearly distinguished, cast your imagination to the glorious gore! The angsty emotions on exhibit! Expressionist, as our European colleagues would describe it!

To theorize it, firstly, I would ask that we consider the words of Horace; ‘Ut pictura poesis; As is painting, so is poetry’. Secondly, and only if we truly acknowledge that mass murder is an art akin to poetry and painting, I would ask we also indulge in the liberty of paraphrasing Horace to declare ‘Ut pictura Occidendum; As is painting, so is murder’. While some exhibits impart on your senses from a distance, others would only make sense if , perhaps, you decide to step a little closer. The nature of the Asaba Massacre is of the latter. While employing your gaze from afar, it could be presumed to be as crudely motivated by sheer greed and conquest as colonial genocide or inter-ethnic wars. However, following a much closer observation and further introspection, a leading expert on the matter—Cheta Nwanze—observed that it was birthed, as most great works of art, from rigorous thought and very deep human emotion—in this case, vengeance. Nwanze notes, “A man, Patrick Kaduna Nzeogwu, who happened to be a soldier in the Nigerian Army, was one of the leaders of a mutiny. In carrying out his mutiny, Nzeogwu murdered Ahmadu Bello, the Sardauna of Sokoto, and leader of Northern Nigeria. Nzeogwu’s ancestors were from Okpanam, a village that is 10 minutes by car, from Asaba.” It is a matter of public record that Muhammed and the league of officers who reprised Nzeogwu’s mutiny were of Northern descent and ethnically tied to the Sardauna of Sokoto, and so I dare suggest that Muhammed’s representation of vengeance—in executing the Asaba Massacre—is as similar and culturally significant to the arts as Cain’s murder of Abel; both had unassuming victims who were punished because the wrong motivations were ascribed to their actions, both were executed shortly after the creation of a new nation of people and—most importantly—both became blueprints for the methods and aesthetics of vengeful bloodshed.

The foundation of the art having been laid, it is pitiable to see how it slumbered without improvement for decades. In fact, I shall now be obliged to leap over all mass murders, sacred and profane, as utterly unworthy of notice, until the end of the military era in 1999 when the army—under the democratic regime of former President Olusegun Obasanjo—executed the Odi Massacre. The army stated that civilian casualties amounted to 43, however, the Environmental Rights Action group, claims that nearly 2,500 civilians were murdered. But in my humble opinion, the specific numbers are largely irrelevant because—permit me to borrow from ancient Latin wisdom—‘Non id, quod magnum est, pulchrum est; sed quod pulchrum, magnum; A thing is not fine because it is great, but is great because it is fine’. That is to say, while mass murders of great magnitudes are remarkable, it is the taste and aesthetics of their execution—not the number of casualties—that really makes a mass murder great. So yes, the Odi Massacre is remarkable because the Army extended their grouse with a local militia to the riverside village’s civilian citizens—women and children inclusive, because all but three buildings—a church, bank and clinic—were burned to the ground and because the event was eulogized by Timaya on the song titled “Dem Mama” which featured on his True Story album. But considering taste and aesthetics, the Odi Massacre stands out because it details the ideal conditions for the event of a mass murder. So then, firstly, let us examine the Odi Massacre with the objective of showcasing the kind of people who are adapted to the purpose of being murdered en masse; secondly, of the kind of place best fit as a theatre of the art; and thirdly, of the suitable time.

As to the kind of people, I suppose it is obvious that the victims—like the people of Odi village—ought to be good people; because, if they were not, they themselves may possibly have been contemplating a mass murder of their own. But beyond that, the Odi villagers were aesthetically pleasing victims of mass murder because they were unarmed civilians. After all, to kill armed and uniformed opposition is simply yielding to the natural instinct of self-preservation. I mean, even reprobate beasts act on natural instinct, but the high level of contemplation and intelligence required to murder unarmed civilians is the hallmark of a professional artist. And, of course, it must be obvious that the victims ought not to be renowned public figures. For instance, no judicious artist would have murdered Ken Saro Wiwa and the other members of the ‘Ogoni Nine’ the way General Sani Abacha did. The murders had Nigeria suspended from the Commonwealth for three good years and, I am sure, we can all agree that there is nothing artistic about murder if you have to face the consequences of your actions.

So much for the person. As to the place, I have many things to say, which at present I have no room for. However, the good sense of the professional artist has usually directed him to a theatre public enough to accommodate murder by a wide range of tools yet remote enough to be veiled from the disconcerting eyes of the media and, as an extension, national consciousness. And as to the time, daytime is often preferred because the importance of the lights of nature—shadows, reflections, specular and diffused highlights—while searching for hidden and whimpering targets of mass murder can never be overstated. Or don’t we agree, following a keen scrutiny of the gallery of mass murders in our history, that it is only amateurs—like armed robbers and cultists—who hide behind the mask of the night.

Thus, gentlemen, I have traced the connection between the dastardly acts and the fine arts, until insensibly I find that I have wandered into the very modern day. And lest we believe the fine art of mass murder has been lost to the past decades, we must bear in mind that the modern day can boast of some fine specimens and, especially during this current democratic regime, there has been a most brilliant constellation of mass murders in this class; the 2017 bombing of the Rann refugee camp by the Air Force which killed over a 100 people—including six Red Cross aid workers—and left another 100 injured, the murders of members of the pro-Biafra group the Indigenous People of Biafra (IPOB) during peaceful protests between 2015 and 2016 by the Army’s Python Dance arts collective.

I need hardly say that the finest work of the modern day is, unquestionably, the 2015 Zaria Massacre. Upon this, Carl A. LeVan and Patrick Utaka, astute researchers who have an eye for effect, remarked, in their book ‘The Oxford Handbook of Nigerian Politics’, that the incident is considered among the “notable human rights violations since the return to democracy” in Nigeria. In this most remarkable exhibit, over 300 unarmed members of the Islamic Movement in Nigeria were murdered and buried in mass graves by the Army, just hours after the Islamic sects procession and the Army chief’s convoy obstructed each other on a gridlocked road. Beyond lives lost, buildings were levelled and the sect’s leader, Ibrahim Zakzaky, was and still has been detained without trial ever since. And beyond the magnitude of casualties—of life and property—the exhibit precisely—and to the point of excellence—meets the ideal conditions—of people, place and time—of a great mass murder. Its greatest achievement, however, it’s the unending spectacle this fine exhibit has evolved to. Over the past four years, the devotees of the Islamic Movement in Nigeria have consistently demonstrated against the killings and detainment of Zakzaky and have consistently met resistance by forces of the state. As evidenced in this exhibit, the only thing better than an excellence is sustained excellence. Excellence so sustained that it has spread to the southern regions of the state of Kaduna where it is rumored that very fine exhibits of mass murder are put on display every now and then.

But gentlemen, I must now direct your attention to what may well be the most problematic exhibit of our modern era—and I use that word deliberately, for it presents challenges to our very understanding of the craft. I speak, of course, of the Lekki Toll Gate incident of October 20, 2020.

On that fateful evening, soldiers opened fire on peaceful protesters—young people who had gathered under the banner of #EndSARS, waving Nigerian flags and singing the national anthem. Here we had unarmed civilians, precisely the type our earlier analysis identified as aesthetically ideal victims. And yet, dearly distinguished, the execution violated nearly every principle we have established tonight.

First, consider the matter of time. The assault occurred at night—specifically, after the removal of streetlights and CCTV cameras, under cover of darkness. You will recall our earlier observations about how only amateurs hide behind the mask of night. What are we to make of this regression to primitive technique?

Second, and far more vexing, is the question of place. The Lekki Toll Gate is no remote village veiled from disconcerting eyes of media. It sits in the commercial heart of Lagos, visible to the world. But more troubling still—and here is where we encounter the great crisis of our age—every young person present possessed a smartphone. Even as the lights were extinguished, even as night fell, dozens of cameras recorded. Videos streamed live to the world. Twitter, Instagram, Facebook became galleries exhibiting the work in real-time, beyond any curator’s control.

The artist’s traditional advantage—the remoteness of the theatre, the ability to shape the narrative—was nullified by technology. Within hours, the world had seen what transpired. Amnesty International issued reports. CNN investigated. The diaspora mobilized. The carefully cultivated veil between execution and public consciousness was torn asunder.

And yet, gentlemen—and here I must ask you to observe with the utmost attention—what followed may represent the most significant evolution in the craft since Asaba. For when confronted with this unprecedented documentation, with video evidence and eyewitness testimony, with the bodies and the blood made visible to millions, the state deployed a new technique entirely: categorical denial.

The Lagos State Governor declared that there were no fatalities. The Army spokesman dismissed reports as fake news. The Minister of Information spoke of a “massacre without bodies.” Alternative narratives proliferated: the videos were old footage from elsewhere, the blood was paint, crisis actors had been employed, foreign powers were orchestrating a conspiracy. A judicial panel was convened, heard testimony, documented deaths, and issued findings—which were subsequently dismissed and ignored.

What we witnessed, distinguished colleagues, was the birth of a new aesthetic: the massacre in plain sight, followed by the performance of its unreality. If the classical mass murder required concealment of the act, the modern iteration requires concealment of the truth. The crime is committed openly, but reality itself becomes the contested territory.

This represents both triumph and tragedy for our field. Triumph, because it demonstrates remarkable adaptability—when traditional methods of obscurity failed, new methods emerged. The professional men proved themselves capable of murder in the age of the smartphone, not by preventing documentation, but by rendering documentation meaningless through systematic denial. Tragedy, because this evolution threatens the very purity of the art. When a massacre must be followed by an elaborate denial campaign, when victims’ families must fight for acknowledgment that their loved ones even existed, when panels of inquiry can document deaths that officially never occurred—has the craft not become something else entirely? Is a massacre that everyone sees but half the nation refuses to acknowledge superior or inferior to one that occurs in darkness and silence? I confess I do not know the answer.

What I do know is this: the young people at Lekki came armed only with flags and songs. They were shot. They bled. Some died. And yet, years later, we still argue about whether it happened at all. That, gentlemen, may be the most disturbing masterpiece of all—not the killing itself, but the killing of certainty, the murder of shared reality, the massacre of truth.

To borrow, yet again, from Latin wisdom — Ex nihilo nihil fit; nothing comes from nothing. Eras of great art are almost always made possible by patrons of great art. And as the Medici family spurred on the Renaissance age of art centuries ago, we can say members of this current democratic regime are spurring our very own golden age of fine art in its nascence. We nod sagely at the rigour in which the regime has worked to expand the scope of the arts. Under the regime, professional men have inspired us to question the distinction — if any — between mass murder and ‘clashes’. Do we qualify the art as the former or the later when armed state forces assault unarmed protesters? Or when armed herdsmen attack communities of farmers? Under the regime, we have mused on the different values placed on the occasional kidnappings and eventual deaths by foul means of traditional monarchs and VIPs versus the very frequent and unceremonious end to unknown citizens. For this evolution, we our grateful to the patrons of the fine arts of mass murder.

And now, gentlemen, in conclusion, let me again solemnly disclaim all pretensions on my own part to the character of a professional man. I have never attempted any murder in my life, except in 2009, when I tried to kill a chicken for my grandmother’s birthday during my NYSC year; and that turned out differently from my intention. Since then, what wandering thoughts I may have had of attempting the life of a ram for Eid celebrations, of a noisy dog belonging to my neighbor down the street or the occasional mad man that cuts me off in traffic are locked up in the secrets of my own breast; but for the higher departments of the art, I confess myself to be utterly unfit. My ambition does not rise so high.

The practice of the fine arts of mass murder is best reserved for the men in the corridors of power, champions of political thought and methods, economic saboteurs and rent-seekers, or as they are referred to by my esteemed colleagues of the Society—the professional men. These are the ones who can order lights extinguished and guns fired, who can command both bullets and narratives, who can kill and then decree that killing never occurred. I do not have the means to reward their efforts but—I sincerely hope—their efforts are indeed rewarded, if not in this life, then certainly in whatever accounting awaits us all.

Dearly Distinguished, I appreciate you for extending your time and attention. As we depart this evening, I leave you with one final thought: in an age where every atrocity is recorded yet reality remains contested, where massacres are livestreamed yet officially denied, perhaps we are all—audience and documentarians, believers and skeptics, the complicit and the resistant—perhaps we are all now members of this society, whether we wish to be or not.

Until we meet again. Farewell.

NB: This essay is heavily influenced and — in some instances — borrows the language of “On Murder Considered as one of the Fine Arts”, an essay by Thomas De Quincey first published in 1827 in Blackwood’s Magazine. An earlier version of this essay was published in 2019.

I swear to God, when I be small pikin, me sef I wan become soldier. Cus when I small, na solider dey run things for this country. I no fit tell you whether na Buhari time or Babaginda time or Abacha time because as a guyman, you no suppose know my real age. But just know say na soldier get level pass that year. Khaki? Sharp. Boot? Dem no born your papa to misyarn or misbehave when e touch ground. So normally, me sef I wan become soldier.

So when my primary four teacher, Mrs Ikerionwu, begin dey find the people wey fit perform like soldier inside the children’s day film, nobody first me to raise hand. The film name na Skeleton and na one seniorman dem dey call Lookman Sanusi wey write am. But if you carry Oga Lookman comot, I no fit remember any other thing inside the story of that film. Nothing consign me with who be the main actor, nothing consign me with who be the boss. My own be say dem dress me for khaki, put wooden gun for my hand. I use that one belleful.

I use like how many weeks practice and my full work for the film, the same work wey plenty other pikin soldier get, na to de sing:

There’s a child friend of mine, who went to war in Liberia
he was seven years old, very young
when time came for my friend to be with me
he was cradled back home, he was cold
There’s no life, when there’s no peace
there’s no peace, when there’s no unity
Give us love, no more war
that’s a promise we must keep

When children’s day reach, I go National Theatre for Iganmu go act the film for stage. I just dey sing the song dey go. I dey cry for pikin wey I never see, for country wey I no sabi. I no even reason to ask wetin war mean. But as butty pikin, how I wan reason go that side sef ? how I wan reason say khaki no be only for fine boy and power ? How I wan reason say khaki na war, say khaki na trouble ?

Now, as jungle don mature and my eye don see one or two, I sabi wetin war mean. I sabi Congo. I sabi Sudan. And even for this we country, I sabi the North. If you no sabi, check Facebook, check Insta. Person Mama go just dey cry cry, e pikin body don tear tear. Khaki no be for fine boy and power again o, khaki na trouble. And anytime I remember say khaki na trouble, I go remember Sozaboy, that Ken Saro-Wiwa storybook. I go remember Mene, the main actor for the story. Mene, wey later become soldierboy. Or as dem dey talk am for Bori, sozaboy.

Mene na apprentice driver wey dey drive people from Dukana to Pitakwa, morning to night. Mene, my man, e no get one single wahala for this life, except to collect his driver’s license and to marry Agnes. Sweet Agnes, sweet sweet Agnes. But Mene na jew man, so e no sabi say food wey too sweet dey run belle. That year, Biafra war just dey ripe and Agnes just run come from Lagos enter Pitakwa because trouble scatter everywhere for Lagos. Agnes tell Mene say Nigerian soldier dey kill people wey no belong for Lagos and even as she run reach Pitakwa, Nigerian solider still dey follow dem for back dey kill people. She tell Mene say she dey find husband wey fit follow wear khaki, to protect am when the Nigerian soldier reach Pitakwa. See set-up. Mene dey talk love, see where Agnes go put ball.

All the senior bros wey dey Dukana—Duzia, Bom and Zaza—no even help Mene matter, specially Zaza wey be old soldier. As old soldier wey follow fight Hitler for Burma, Zaza get level for village but the man mouth no dey stay one place and the man too dey add salt and pepper for story. Zaza talk say nothing fit give man respect pass khaki, say khaki even give am chance to kpansh oyinbo woman for Burma. Zaza tell Mene say him don kill him own Hitler finish, say make Mene go kill Nigerian soldier to prove say e get liver. In fact, for the whole Dukana, na only Mama Mene beg Mene make e no put body for soldier matter because khaki na trouble. And if you follow trouble play for streets, trouble no dey ring bell when e come find you for house. Trouble go just enter house, sit on top your mattress, chop your food. But Mene no hear word.

Mene no hear word and pikin wey no hear something, go later feel something. As Mene collect khaki to fight Nigerian soldier, e begin dey waka, from frying pan enter cooking pot. From Dukana go Pitakwa. From Pitakwa to training camp. From training camp to front where dem drop bomb for e head. From front, e enter thick bush and from bush enter prison. And even though na suffer suffer story, e sweet like the kind gist wey you go hear for beer parlor after storyman don down two bottles. You know the pidgin wey Ugwu use tell story for Half of a Yellow Sun ? That pidgin wey somehow resemble the patois wey Marlon James use for The Book of Night Women and parts of A Brief History of Seven Killings ? You no undstend ? Na that kind pidgin dem use tell Sozaboy story. Oga Ken wey tell the story talk say na him create the style wey Mene dey use talk for the story, e say na him ”invent the language”, e call am “rotten English”. But abobi I no fit lie give you, difference no dey between the pidgin for that storybook and the pidgin wey common man dey speak for streets. Abi na him ”invent the language” the same way Mungo Park talk say na him “discover River Niger” ? If e talk say na him first put pidgin for inside storybook, no wahala. But e no mean say na him come get pidgin now. Anyhow sha, no be for my mouth you go hear say Pastor dey drop lamba for church. Make we focus.

Nothing burst my head for the storybook pass the many many people Mene meet for road as after e carry khaki, the people wey show am say war get two faces. The first face of war na the people wey dey wear khaki with pride and loyalty, like the one dem dey call Bullet, wey sabi book well well. Bullet be like Mene big bros wey show am the way for war front. Na him teach Mene say the fear of death na the rope wey dey hold all man together and khaki na brotherhood. But war no get joy, e be like game of Whot; say you no get mind to give your bros Pick Two, no mean say your bros no go later give you Pick Three. Because after all the love Bullet show boys, their Captain still treat Bullet like animal, force am drink piss from bottle on top small matter. E pain me reach my marrow. And after that one bomb still kill am one time, make grave for am inside pit. Even with all him sense, war still useless am.

The second face of war na the people wey dey wear khaki for opportunity to chop anywhere belle face, like the one dem dey call ManMustWak, one Sergeant wey the war don cook finish. If Zaza na the person wey wash Mene about how khaki sweet, na ManMustWak show Mene say khaki na bitter leaf. For ManMustWak side, war no get anything to do with hero or Nigerian soldier or Hitler. The man name alone don tell you everything—man must wak. Come rain, come shine, man must find wetin go enter stomok. While Mene still dey think say he be soldier wey get level, ManMustWak dey use style show am say for war front, no be grammar or uniform dey save person, na heart wey be like stone and eye wey sharp to find food. Anybody fit collect. ManMustWak fight for e people, fight for the enemy, go back to fight for e people then later still fight for the enemy again.

Last last, Sozaboy teach us say for war, we get friends and we get enemies, but sometimes even friends fit show you shege pass enemies. For war, winner no dey, everybody go suffer. The only thing be say suffer pass suffer. All suffering no be the same thing.

Sozaboy na personal story for me because my Papa follow fight for Biafra war. Like Mene, dem station am for Pitakwa. Like Mene, e get some of e family members wey e no fit find again after the war finish. So I dey always reason, if Biafra war turn Mene to living ghost, imagine wetin the same war come do my Papa. Imagine all the sides of my Papa wey I no get ever get chance see. Nna eh, the thing get as e be.

Till tomorrow, my Papa no dey gree talk about the war. Till tomorrow, e dey use two eyes look everybody. One eye to show love like Bullet. The second eye to guide like ManMustWak because life be like game of Whot; say you no get mind to give your bros Pick Two, no mean say your bros no go later give you Pick Three. My Papa dey guide because e no say if you follow trouble play for streets, trouble no dey ring bell when e come find you for house.

Nowadays, when me and my Papa dey gist, I dey see fear for e eyes anytime e hear say religious violence don burst for North. My Papa go tell me say the way news take dey fly now about how dem dey burn church or how dem dey kill farmers, e dey exactly like the way dem take dey hear about ethnic violence that year before Biafra war start. E go say that time, people think say na small play-play, dem think say the fire go quench by e self, but before dem open eye close am again, everywhere scatter. My Papa dey always warn me say make I dey shine my eye because trouble no dey ring bell; e no dey send message before e enter house come sit down for your mattress. War no be film where you fit press rewind or start again; once the wooden gun turn to real iron and the khaki begin soak blood, nobody dey win again. My Papa go say make we never forget wetin happen to all the people like Mene wey war useless, because history no suppose happen two times. Ozoemena.

I first read Teju Cole when I read Every Day is for the Thief, after I “borrowed” it from my Aunty Ayo’s bookshelf. This was the early 2010s, Chimamanda Adichie had made contemporary Nigerian literature cool again but nobody had really shown me Lagos as I saw it and lived it. In Every Day is for the Thief, I did not know the protagonist by name but I knew him by experience. He traversed Lagos by bus as I did, he stayed in Ojodu, the same neighbourhood I lived in at the time and when he narrated his stroll to a cybercafe where he was surrounded by Yahoo boys, wallahi, I knew the exact place he was writing about. I began writing my first novel, Prince of Monkeys, shortly after and was determined to set it in the same neighbourhood. Cole had shown me what was possible. And when I struggled for direction, his was one of the books I returned to like it was scripture.

The first time I saw Teju Cole was at Ake Arts and Book Festival in 2016. I had completed my manuscript earlier in the year and was already disillusioned from the dead silence I had received from all the agents and publishers, home and abroad, that I had pitched to. Abeokuta, our venue, was a town founded by defeated warriors who had found succor from invaders beneath its rocks. Maybe that was why I felt at ease from the moment I arrived Kuto roundabout. Maybe it was the writers’ workshop I had been selected to participate in where NoViolet Bulawayo exchanged ideas on dialogue as if we were peers, Helon Habila gave quiet but frequent nods of approval as we read out our submissions to his writing prompts and Sarah Ladipo Manyika encouraged us to read and act our lines out loud with reckless passion. It could have been any or maybe even all of the above. But at the end of the first day, I had forgotten I was a defeated warrior with an unwanted manuscript. Over the next three days, I bunked with Oluwabambi Ige who I knew from school, then met Ope Adedeji, Fope Ojo and Ona Akinde—who were all volunteering at the festival—for the first time. We would sit in on panel conversations through the days and ravage ofada rice with alcohol through the evenings, like I assumed the founding warriors of Abeokuta did. During these three days, every book chat and panel discussion was a hit; back to back. Teju Cole’s Known and Strange Things had just been released and, after his book chat on it, there was a long queue of guests waiting for him to sign their copies of his book. The man was my idol but, I refused to join the queue. I didn’t want to be rushed through a signature and photo, I wanted a proper conversation, a chance to exchange ideas and maybe even ask him to be my mentor. I assumed there would be other chances to see him again before the end of the festival. I never saw that man again.

After Tendai Huchu’s book chat at the festival, someone had made a mentorship request as I had intended to make to Cole. Huchu’s response was an embarrassed refusal. He confessed that he was too busy with the simple, unglamorous work of writing, surviving, and navigating life to give them the time they seek. He confessed that his own apprenticeship didn’t happen by corresponding with an older writer or in an MFA program but in libraries and second-hand book stores. His mentors were books from Roberto Bolano, Aminatta Forna, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Albert Camus, Wole Soyinka. He read one or two a week and through them, he learned to write. Most of his mentors, he pointed out, were dead.

The real revelation came when he told the story of Sarah Ladipo Manyika—who, fittingly, was in the audience. After three rejected manuscripts, Huchu was scavenging in a an Edinburgh bookstore’s closing-down sale when he chanced upon In Dependence for 99p. He bought it, thinking she was Zimbabwean, and was so struck by her mastery that he had an epiphany. He decided to, in his words, “steal her shit.” As he wrote his first novel, The Hairdresser of Harare, he used Manyika’s text as a metronome; he would write two or three chapters of his own, then reward himself by reading one of hers. She, he explained, was his primary mentor yet he only just met her for the first time, seven years after first reading her, at Ake. Since listening to that conversation, I have done my best to read everything Teju Cole ever published.

Prince of Monkeys got published three years later and I had never felt so blessed. Within the first month, I had received the sweetest reviews from Publisher’s Weekly, Kirkus Review and the New York Times. A couple of months later, Teju Cole and Emmanuel Iduma hosted a writing workshop at Angela and Muse and Oluwabambi Ige asked me to apply with him because we had always applied for everything together. I told him that I had a New York Times review just like Teju Cole, that he was now more peer than mentor, so there was no point applying. God knows the arrogance of youth is a mysterious and incredible thing.

But God is also kind and merciful so I have been fortunate to meet many other mentors since then. We discuss old ideas and new trends, sometimes we drink and gossip too. Yet, whenever it comes to the issue of craft and mentorship, they reinforce Tendai Huchu’s advice. When I complained that I often felt reading alone was insufficient, especially as I saw a lot of my peers go through prestigious MFA programs, Jennifer Makumbi and Petina Gappah asked; is it possible to study Alex La Guma’s A Walk in the Night, Yvonne Owuor’s Dust, Ben Okri’s The Famished Road, Ousmane Sembene’s God’s Bits of Wood, Ken Sara Wiwa’s Sozaboy, Nnedi Okorafor’s Death of the Author, their Kintu and Out of Darkness, Shining Light and the entire African Writers’ Series? Is it possible to thoroughly study all these books and not understand the craft? How much more mastery can a Masters in Fine Arts truly offer?

Whenever Ake Festival season returns, as it has again, there is a great migration of young writers who remind me of who I used to be, arriving with their dreams folded neatly between drafts. Some come wide-eyed and hungry. Many come already defeated. But Ake, like Abeokuta that first hosted it, is built for the defeated. It is a place where the defeated return to remember why they ever tried in the first place. Ake gives you permission to be small again, to be a reader again, to be a learner again. It gives you permission to be overwhelmed by ideas, to sit in front of writers whose sentences have stitched your life together, and to feel—if only for an hour—that you are not alone in this maddening pursuit of story. The rejections will still be in your inbox when you get back, but for a few days, you will not be alone.

You will be in the company of many magical people and the most important people you will meet at Ake are not on the stage, they are the ones you sit with in the audience. Find your Oluwabambis and your Opes, because these are the people who will form your true cohort, the ones who will read your messy first drafts and hold you accountable in the long, quiet years between festivals. They are your first and most vital support.

Second, by all means, join the queue and get that book signed.

But you must know what that moment offers; it offers a souvenir, not mentorship, for a writer’s mentor is a library not a person. So do not just buy what is popular, do not just fill your tote with names you know. Look for the books that speak to the writer you are trying to become. Read them until their seams burst. Argue with them. Underline their sentences. Steal their rhythms. Let them hold your hand and guide every stroke of your keyboard.

My favourite Teju Cole line was published even before Every Day is for the Thief. In 2006, he published a comment on Molara Wood’s blog about Granta 92: The View from Africa, about how appearing in Granta was his dream. Today, he has published three essays and sat for an interview in that same magazine. That sentence has stayed with me longer than any autographed book could have, especially considering how much my friends “borrow” from my bookshelf. It taught me that dreaming is a craft of its own, separate from writing, and that mentorship is anything that teaches you to imagine your way forward.

When I was much younger, with a lot less worries and a lot more hunger, I would listen to new releases from my favourite artists on the day they dropped. Before that day, I would have replayed singles to stupor, refreshed my Tumblr timeline for snippets of unreleased songs then researched every interview that had been granted on the album and published on the internet, because when you truly savour someone’s cooking, you don’t just ask for more, you wait in the kitchen as the food is being cooked in hope of undone crumbs.

One of the last times I remember standing in the kitchen was in John hall when I was at Covenant University, just before Jay-Z and Kanye West dropped Watch The Throne. I had been nibbling on all of their past collaborations for weeks and the morning the album eventually came out, I went to Mackson’s room with a flash drive because he was the one with best illegal download sites that always had these things. I waited around for the files to send and long after they did, talking about Lift Off because we heard Don Jazzy—just signed to G.O.O.D music—produced parts of it. After that, we tried to answer each of the philosophical questions Frank Ocean posed in No Church in the Wild. But we had no words for Niggas in Paris. There was no analysis, no long talk, just awe, pure and unfiltered. All we said that night—and for the next few months as a response to everything—was That shit cray.

We had no deep words for Niggas in Paris, maybe because the song itself had none. It was crafted for reaction, not reflection. Right after Kanye raps the line—Got my niggas in Paris and they going gorillas, we hear an audio sample from the 2007 film Blades of Glory saying—I don’t even know what that means. Nobody knows what it means, but it’s provocative. It gets the people going!

This was a mirror for the whole experience. For culture at large, Watch the Throne’s arrival in 2011 felt like the aesthetic summit of Black affluence. Kanye and Jay-Z were not content to make it in America, they needed to conquer the world’s capital of taste. Already regarded as rap royalty, their garish affirmation of excess and excellence in Paris, a city whose reputation for sophistication remained a yardstick of legitimacy, symbolised both an escape and a coronation but also contained its own critique. The fantasy of being in Paris revealed a persistent dependence on European affirmation that became a recurring theme in Kanye’s unraveling many years later. The need to be seen winning on the same stage where one’s ancestors were once excluded is a victory haunted by its venue. What does it mean that freedom is still imagined through the lens of empire? The song is a testament to excess, but also to dislocation. To be a nigga in Paris is to occupy an impossible space—both anomaly and spectacle, celebrated yet always curiously observed.

The Black creative’s railroad to Paris is well worn. A century before Kanye and Jay-Z, another generation of Black creators arrived in Paris chasing the same illusion of belonging. Josephine Baker danced her way out of St. Louis and into legend, her body weaponized into both protest and entertainment. James Baldwin escaped Harlem for Saint-Germain-des-Prés, where he could love and write without fear. Richard Wright and Chester Himes followed. They came to France because America’s promise of equality had proven fraudulent. In Paris, they found oxygen, but oxygen can also be thin air. France’s universalist myth—liberté, égalité, fraternité—hid a colonial truth: that the Republic’s self-image depended on the presence of its grateful others. The Black artist was free only insofar as he adorned the French imagination. Josephine Baker’s banana-skirt dance, Baldwin’s English fluency, the jazz clubs of Montmartre—all became exhibits in the gallery of French tolerance and the artist’s liberation was purchased with performance.

To the displaced, beyond offering a home, Paris offered staging that turned outsiders into symbols. Baker was a primitive goddess, Baldwin a prophet of conscience, Wright a chronicler of the American wound. Their art was praised precisely because it reflected Europe’s vision of itself as redeemer. In that sense, the Black expatriate in Paris a century ago lived the same paradox as Kanye and Jay-Z decades later: the thrill of being finally seen, and the ache of realizing who was watching.

The Black creative’s railroad to Paris also runs through West Africa. In 1960, a young Malian named Yambo Ouologuem arrived in Paris from Mali, then the French Sudan, as part of a scholarship program to study English, Philosophy, and Sociology at the Lycée Henry-IV and the Sorbonne. In 1968, after earning his degrees, Ouologuem published Le Devoir de violence—translated as Bound to Violence—a novel unlike anything the literary world had seen, asserting that the Black experience represented an endless performance of complicity. It excavated a thousand years of history in the fictional Nakem empire, revealing the deep sedimentary layers of internal cruelty preceding, and then cooperating with, the European arrival. Ouologuem is the writer as archaeologist, chipping away at the beautiful surface to expose the rot beneath, finding the calcified remains of ancestral betrayals, far superior to gold artifacts.

The book was a sensation, praised for its brutal cynicism and rejection of the prevailing aesthetic of its time, the Négritude movement, championed by Léopold Sédar Senghor. Ouologuem became the first African to win the prestigious Prix Renaudot, a major French literary prize, catapulting him to international fame. However, the triumph was short-lived. In the early 1970s, accusations of plagiarism surfaced, centered on uncredited passages taken from authors like Graham Greene and André Schwartz-Bart. The scandal led to the withdrawal of the novel from circulation by his French publisher, Seuil, and Ouologuem withdrew from the Parisian literary scene. Disillusioned by the accusations and the harsh scrutiny, Ouologuem was committed to a psychiatric hospital in Paris for some time, before returning to Mali where he spent the remainder of his life in seclusion, becoming a devout Muslim and refusing to speak French at all.

When I was much younger, with a lot less worries and a lot more hunger, I would read the old, dead masters and once came across a poem by Ouologuem in The Penguin Book of Modern African Poetry edited by Gerald Moore and Uli Beier. It was not the most spectacular poem in the collection. I also did not pay it any special attention as I had never heard of the writer before then and for long after. I only really learned of Ouologuem and Bound to Violence, described by Chérif Keïta, the renowned Professor of African literature, as “the most iconoclastic novel to have come out of Africa” when the Senegalese novelist Mohamed Mbougar Sarr resurrected the story through fiction in 2021. Sarr’s The Most Secret Memory of Men follows Diégane Faye, a young writer in Paris who becomes obsessed with the legend of T.C. Elimane—a vanished African author once accused of plagiarism. The novel spirals through archives, letters, and myth, blurring the boundaries between biography and imagination. Elimane is clearly modeled on Ouologuem, but he also stands for every Black artist who has been celebrated, then doubted and later forgotten. Through this labyrinthine investigation, Sarr exposes the fragile compact that binds Black creatives to White institutions. The metropole that crowns them can just as easily erase them. The praise that welcomes them into the canon also possesses the soft power to exile.

The scandal of authorship—who owns a story, who is allowed to tell it—runs through both novels and through modern Black art itself. Ouologuem’s so-called plagiarism was an early form of what postmodernism would later canonize: writing through quotation, remix, and intertext. African creativity has long understood originality differently. The griot does not invent, he reinterprets. The jazz musician quotes another’s solo to extend its life. The rapper samples Nina Simone to converse with her ghost. Kanye’s Otis production on Watch the Throne, built from snippets of Otis Redding’ Try a Little Tenderness, follows the same cultural logic as Ouologuem’s collage.

Like Ouologuem with the Prix Renaudot, Sarr became the first sub-Saharan African to win the Goncourt Prize in 2021, an incredible and enviable feat. Yet the novelty of the feat also reminds us who still owns the gate. The canonization, generous as it may seem, remains Parisian privilege. The deeper task lies elsewhere: to build ecosystems where the railroads to freedom of expression and validation no longer flows through Paris or London or any of the states of America. Across Africa, many new institutions are already doing the work of constructing parallel legitimacy, nurturing readers who do not need Paris to explain what matters. Still, we need more.

This reclamation extends beyond literature. It exists in Nollywood’s self-financing, in Afrobeats’ refusal to seek creative permission from global tastemakers, in the digital archives preserving oral histories once dismissed as folklore. The future of African art lies not in being watched but in watching itself—with love, with rigor, without apology. Sovereignty, then, is not performing one’s own dance on another’s stage but authorship on one’s own terms. It is the right to define excellence without contextualisation for a foreign audience. The ultimate evolution of Niggas in Paris is a transition from spectacle to sovereignty.

Frank Ocean asks on No Church in the Wild, the opening track of Watch The Throne, his voice stretched between arrogance and despair:

Human beings in a mob. What’s a mob to a king? What’s a king to a God? What’s a God to a non-believer Who don’t believe in anything?

These are questions that echo through Baldwin’s essays, through Ouologuem’s fury and through Sarr’s labyrinth. At the core of it, the question is—What is genius to a world that doubts your right to exist?

Across a century of migrations, Paris has remained the stage on which this question is rehearsed. The laughter in Niggas in Paris—that manic joy—is not ignorance, it is awareness. It is the laughter of men who know they are gliding on thin ice and decide to dance on it anyway. I hope the next act of this eternal rendition of Black narratives will not happen on that stage at all. I hope it happens in spaces that no longer seek permission, in languages reclaimed, with rebuilt archives of our history and before audiences that no longer require cultural translation.

On some Friday nights when I go to Scope on Montgomery Road to drink gin and people-watch, I walk through the little crowd waiting for suya in front of the Custodian tower on Commercial Avenue, past the police station at Sabo, and along Herbert Macaulay at its quietest, all the way back home to Moleye Street. Most times, I leave just before midnight so I can still see people dancing through the glass window of Oshey Bar, and I can still hear the electronic percussion from Sixty by Chef Lu cascading down from the rooftop.

Fifty years ago, walking these same streets, I would be more likely to pick up Ebenezer Obey’s guitar riffs drifting out of Miliki on Olonode Street. It’s easy to imagine that not much has changed—not even the night itself—because though Miliki is gone, replaced by a residential apartment building, the streets have preserved its memory with new bricks and sounds. In this regard, cities are witnesses: they record the passage of time, and every street is layered with memory. Every generation etches a new layer, like a palimpsest. Every building and bus stop, every pavement and pathway; time changes their faces but not their gaze. The nightclubs of one generation become the churches of another, the colonial bungalows of yesterday collapse into tomorrow’s high-rise apartments, what was once a collection of backstreets evolves into boulevards of ambition that some now call Yabacon Valley. The same street can host the rise of an empire and the fall of a love affair without blinking. To walk through a city, decades after its stories were first told, is to walk inside a memory so intact it lets us believe we are the first to dream here. And, of course, to read about a city is to uncover the past lives and dreams that were once anchored to its corners.

Fifty years ago, these same streets that lead me home lived in fiction too. Few writers caught their pulse as clearly as Cyprian Ekwensi, whose novels transformed Yaba from merely a setting into a living character. In Jagua Nana (1961), my neighborhood thrums with highlife music and imminent thrill; the air is thick with the scent of cigarettes and beer. Jagua, nicknamed for the luxurious car to denote her beauty and sophistication, is a forty-five-year-old prostitute who uses her allure as currency. Jagua hangs out at a popular highlife joint called Tropicana and, if the night winds down without her finding a man to pay for her company, she takes a slow, winding stroll down Skylark Avenue hoping to distract an Ikoyi big man on his drive home. Conscious that her beauty would not last forever, she seduces a twenty-five year old teacher, Freddie, whom she sponsors to study law in England, hoping he will marry and provide for her upon his return. After he leaves for England, she entertains entanglements with a local thief, a local politician (also a thief but important to make a proper distinction) and even a chieftain from Freddie’s hometown. Freddie is not any better as he returns to Lagos with a young wife and child, eventually becoming political rivals with Jagua. Seventeen years later, in Glittering City (1978), the story shifts to another restless soul—Fussy Joe, a small-time musician and dreamer who tries to ride the city’s rhythm into every girl’s shimmy. Fussy Joe has multiple women across the city who believe he is their one true love. He keeps them tethered with lies and lives off their kindness, yet he is thoroughly insatiable and so is perpetually on a quest to expand his roster. The lead characters in both stories are drawn toward the promise of Lagos’s nightclubs—its transient pleasures, its intoxicating sense of possibility. Together, their stories map an early cartography of Lagos’s nightlife; an immoral and sensual terrain hosting a confluence of newfound freedoms and fragile moral boundaries.

These days, the highlife guitars of Jagua’s Tropicana have given way to the heavy thump of log drums and electronic synths spilling out from rooftop lounges and makeshift clubs but night still draws in young men and women who come to dance, to forget, to meet someone, to be seen. Students, bankers, creatives, hustlers and everyone else are allowed to come in because music and desire are common tongues. But drink prices still decide who can go where because even inside the same spots, there are class divisions marked out with security barriers and bottle service. And everywhere you go, there’s still that careful balancing act; the calculated laughter, the seductive glances, the soft negotiations that happen over drinks. Each generation thinks their night is new, but it isn’t. Jagua Nana and Fussy Joe are still alive, just in different skins and clothes.

On some Saturday mornings, when Oke succeeds in getting me up before noon and then out of the house, we walk through the little crowd waiting at Alagomeji bus stop, past the people running and doing group exercises along Murtala Muhammed at its busiest. Most times, we leave just before noon so we can still see people who have arrived on the train from Ibadan make their way out of the new rail station which was built a few years ago since the old one fell into disrepair. But not everything could reincarnate after surviving disrepair. Opposite the old station, used to sit the headquarters of A.G. Leventis, one of the largest trading conglomerates in Nigeria and across the West African coast. This was when Murtala Muhammed way was still called Clifford Street and, at the time, Leventis’ Nigerian bottling company outfit—which was along the same stretch—was built with vacant walls, affording passersby a view of their manufacturing process in real time. All that is left on that road today is a decrepit building with the lettering of ‘Leventis’.

Every time Oke and I walk past the old station, I remember the opening scene of Glittering City where Fussy Joe waits at the same station to pick and trick an unassuming young woman arriving Lagos for the very first time. Like Jagua Nana, Glittering City is set in an era when independence had plugged something electric into the national imagination. Lagos had become a magnet, pulling in rural migrants with big-city dreams and anyone hoping to stake a claim in modern Nigeria. Nightlife became a way to dissolve the village accent, shed the expectations of home, and reinvent oneself under neon lights. For many, survival meant improvisation, which often meant selling something, performing somewhere, or seducing someone. The city was growing faster than its moral codes could adapt, and the commerce of pleasure became a kind of claim to modernity. This hedonism was inseparable from the rapid urbanization that defined Lagos in that period and is the tension that sits at the heart of Jagua Nana and Glittering City. Beyond the protagonists, their characters lie and steal in pursuit of money, sex and other selfish ambitions. In most cases, they die or fall from grace beyond any point of redemption and, perhaps, this is not accidental. Ekwensi was writing in an era when stories of hedonistic pleasure would struggle to stand on their own without a reckoning, so their endings reflected the moral architecture of their time; pleasure outside the approved societal boundaries is ruinous, and unbridled desire is a force that must be contained by narrative punishment. Their stories, no matter how vibrant and alive, had to end in tragedy because culture demanded it.

In spite of how often stories have punished it, hedonism has never really left Lagos. Fifty years later, the impulse is the same because time changes the face of a city but not its appetite. Lagos is still a city built on arrival, on people stepping off trains and buses with dust on their shoes and new questions in their mouths. They still come here to chase work, escape or reinvention and when the day ends, the night becomes the only space wide enough to hold all that restless hunger. Many of these people are young too, they have no family nearby, no inherited walls to fall back into at night. So after the city wears them down with traffic, bills, and the slow erosion of patience, they look to the night to soften that cruelty for a while. They build their worlds around friends, lovers and strangers if necessary. And unlike Ekwensi’s Lagos, the streets these days tell a different story that no longer has to close with shame or loss. Sometimes it ends with friendship, or love, or simply a story you’ll keep and tell years later. Sometimes it ends with a stranger whose name you’ll learn in the morning because ‘happy endings’ have a chance at happy endings, because pleasure no longer always needs to be punished to be valid. What was once seen as reckless is now ordinary. Jagua Nana and Fussy Joe would love it here. They would be at Scope, Oshey Bar, Sixty at Chef Lu’s or Moroko, living on the same thin line between want and consequence because the pursuit of pleasure remains one of the oldest ways to survive Lagos, even if it kills. I am sure long after I am gone, these nights will keep repeating themselves with new faces. Herbert Macaulay will keep dreaming the same dreams, and someone else will mistake them for their own invention.

When Robert Eggers released his long-awaited Nosferatu (2024), audiences outside Africa approached it with the memory of the original, F.W. Murnau’s 1922 silent film, whose story was somewhat a copy of Bram Stoker’s 1897 novel, Dracula. But for African readers less rooted in the classical vampire lore, another famous novel offers an illuminating entry point; Elechi Amadi’s 1966 novel The Concubine. Though separated by continents, culture and categorisation — one a European horror film, the other an African tragic romance — both stories orbit around the same question; what happens when desire seems doomed by forces greater than the desirous themselves?

Eggers opens Nosferatu with a whispered yet striking prologue. Ellen Hutter (Lily-Rose Depp), still a young girl, kneels in loneliness and prays for companionship. Unbeknownst to her, this childhood yearning establishes a psychic bond with Count Orlok (Bill Skarsgård), the vampire whose shadow will later consume her life. That tether remains dormant for years until, when married to Thomas Hutter (Nicholas Hoult), Ellen begins to suffer seizures and visions that unsettle her quiet life in Wisborg. Depp plays these moments with restraint, her tremors and hollow gazes suggesting a woman living in two worlds. Meanwhile, Thomas remains oblivious to these undercurrents. Eager to prove himself to his employer, he accepts a commission to travel east to sell a property to the mysterious Count and his departure sets the story in motion.

As Thomas journeys deeper into Transylvania where the ruins of Orlok’s castle loom, Ellen grows more entranced and tormented by Orlok’s pull from afar. For readers of The Concubine, this moment recalls the revelation of Ihuoma’s destiny. From the start, Amadi shows her as dignified and beautiful, admired by all, yet we learn later that she is bound to the Sea King, a spirit-husband who claims every man that draws near her. Just as Ellen’s innocent prayer entwines her life and sexuality with Orlok, Ihuoma’s beauty is her curse. This is the first shared theme, female sexuality as fated repression. Ellen and Ihuoma are not permitted to love freely because they embody fatal desire, repressed by cultural and supernatural systems that render their fulfillment destructive.

Thomas journeys through uneasy villages, where locals whisper warnings of vampires, just as Ekwueme, in The Concubine, defies the warnings of his elders and diviners, convinced that his love for Ihuoma can withstand whatever obstacles arise. Both men embody the tragic archetype of the devoted but powerless lover and their love is the very instrument of their destruction. Thomas arrives at Orlok’s castle, and Eggers turns up the gothic dial to the maximum. The ruined structure is composed of damp stone, hollow chambers, corridors lit by flickering torchlight that seem to stretch on forever. Skarsgård’s Orlok emerges from this darkness, unlike the suave modern renditions of vampires that have become popular, as something feral and corpse-like, his elongated frame bending unnaturally, his voice guttural and alien. Eggers also departs from the traditional neck bite, showing instead Orlok feeding from Thomas’s heart through his chest, a detail drawn from older vampire folklore and rendered with animalistic horror. Thomas, at first eager to conclude his business, soon becomes weak and disoriented under Orlok’s influence. Each night in the castle erodes his vitality. By the time he escapes and makes his way back home, Orlok has arrived in Wisborg with coffins of earth and rats, a plague and the calm inevitability of death.

At this stage Eggers establishes Von Franz (Willem Dafoe), the scholar who pores over manuscripts, mutters incantations and begins to decode vampire lore. His role is uncannily similar to Anyika, the dibia in The Concubine. Anyika interprets signs, divines the Sea King’s claim on Ihuoma, and warns that no mortal man can live beside her. Von Franz likewise interprets the folklore of Nosferatu, charting Orlok’s rules and weaknesses. However, their knowledge does not rescue, they name fate but cannot alter it. The most their counsel achieves is to make the doom more intelligible.

Amidst the devastation of Orlok’s plague, Ellen becomes the film’s center of gravity and Depp’s hitherto restrained performance finds its crescendo when the realization dawns that her role is not to be saved, but to save. If Depp does nothing again after this role, the scene where she confesses her past romantic and sexual encounters with Orlok to her husband, is sufficient to uphold her legacy as a thespian of note. In the same monologue, she transfigures from pleading lover to possessed vessel, her body convulsing as though Orlok himself were inside her veins. Yet, in spite of his own fear, trauma and the weight of his wife’s shared secret, Thomas reaffirms his love to Ellen, becoming the emotional anchor that empowers her to forgive herself and find the resolve to confront Orlok.

The final act unfolds with Ellen’s deliberate act of sacrifice. She lures Orlok into her bedroom, allows him to feed on her heart until her eyes glaze, her breathing falters, and outside the window, the sky begins to pale. The camera lingers on the imagery of the vampire hunched over Ellen’s body, the rhythm of her chest rising and falling slowly to stillness. Throughout the film, Jarin Blaschke’s cinematography frames the world in shadows and high-contrast lighting. He arranges wide, haunting images that evoke the memories of old, European paintings, making the supernatural feel like the natural order of Wisborg. The closing scene offers a befittingly beautiful end as the first shafts of dawn pierce the gloom with Orlok remaining locked in his hunger, even after sunlight floods the chamber and destroys him. Wisborg is saved, but at the cost of Ellen’s life.

Amadi’s ending to The Concubine is harsher. Ihuoma never gets to choose. Despite Anyika’s warning, Ekwueme pursues her, only to die from a stray arrow before they can wed. Ihuoma’s beauty remains the Sea King’s claim, and her lovers’ deaths bring no redemption to the community. And so we return to the question that unites both stories; what happens when desire is doomed by forces greater than the desirous themselves? Eggers and Amadi answer in opposite ways. In Nosferatu, Ellen’s choice — her sheer will to sacrifice herself — becomes an overpowering force, capable of destroying Orlok and lifting the plague. In The Concubine, by contrast, Ihuoma’s dignity and Ekwueme’s devotion crumble before the Sea King’s claim; here, human will is no match for supernatural design. One story suggests that even in the face of monstrous power, humanity can wrestle meaning and redemption from tragedy; the other insists that fate is merciless and inscrutable, indifferent to love or sacrifice. And perhaps this divergence speaks not only to the stories themselves but to the worlds that birthed them. It could be possible that Eggers’ society imagines human will as a weapon against the abyss of fate, while Amadi’s society sees the abyss as the determinant of life, before which human longing and striving must finally bow.

Through the lens of the Yoruba worldview, when someone dies, their ẹ̀mí is believed to linger for a short while before traveling fully to Ọ̀run, the spiritual realm. During this time, their ẹ̀mí may appear to its loved ones, often in dreams or fleeting physical manifestations. So when someone dies suddenly in a distant town, a close relative may dream of them, or even briefly see them moving through familiar spaces, before the official news of their death arrives. These visitations are not seen as illusions but as genuine communications; the ẹ̀mí uses its last strength to reach those it is tethered to through blood, love or destiny, to say goodbye, to reassure, or to complete unfinished bonds. In My Father’s Shadow—the feature length debut of Akinola Davies Jnr and Wale Davies, the director and screenwriter duo—two little boys memorate the ẹ̀mí of their father and a father memorates the ẹ̀mí of a nation.

The film begins with a family house in decay, in a small town not too far from Lagos, where brothers, Remi and Akin (Chibubuike Marvelous Egbo and Godwin Egbo), make a contest of their breakfast, their play and everything else, as they await the return of their mother who has stepped out. When their father—Folarin (Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù)—surprisingly shows up, after months away working in Lagos, their mood becomes solemn because even though they have longed for him through his absence, they know him as little boys are taught to know their fathers, to revere his presence and adhere to to his word as law. The ice only begins to thaw when he offers to carry them along on his return trip to Lagos that very morning.

The film continues with a city in decay as the brothers follow their father through the streets of Lagos. We see the world from their wide-eyed, upward gaze—their fascination by the Aro Meta statue along the Berger expressway and the Third mainland bridge, their fixation on taxi drivers and roadside food sellers, their distress from the constant stares of soldiers—as the film’s editor, Omar Guzman, curates a phantasmagoric montage of 90s era Lagos. Tension begins to seep into the plot when the boys visit their father’s place of work where he struggles, to no avail, to receive the six months worth of salaries he is owed. The tension between the brothers, borne out of rivalry, and the tension between father and sons, borne out of their resentment for his work that keeps him from home, soon takes centre stage and eventually comes to a head when they visit the beach. While the dialogue is at its simplest, with Folarin offering the age-old meditations on masculinity to Remi, his eldest son—the role of a man is to protect and provide for the ones he loves—the visual storytelling is at its most intricate, with Folarin balancing the ecstasy of creating a lifetime’s worth of memories from a single moment with the anxieties of knowing he does not have enough time to give. Folarin goes on to tell Remi the story of his naming; how he was named after Folarin’s own younger brother, whose ẹ̀mí kept appearing to Folarin in recurring dreams after his untimely death.

In My Father’s Shadow, the imminent arrival of death is subtly but constantly foreshadowed, from the moments just before Folarin arrives home to the Lagos excursion. Flies hover around every surface and vultures relentlessly circle the skies, trailing the trio. When they run into a friend of the family at a mama-put restaurant, she looks at Folarin as if she has just seen a ghost and holds on to him for a long time as if confirming she is feeling flesh, so much that every viewer is forced to contend with the same possibility. Each frame in which Folarin runs into old friends is heavy with liminality and the ambiguity of his presence begins to take on the weight of an apparition. Is he a father returned, or an ẹ̀mí come to bid farewell? The Yoruba understanding of death allows the film to hold this tension without resolving it, enacting what countless families have narrated in oral tradition.

The film ends with a nation in decay. After noticing trucks of armed soldiers moving around through the day and watching the military government’s annulment of the ’93 presidential elections on television, Folarin and his sons wade through fracas and flames as citizens take to the streets, rioting and protesting the death of Nigeria’s democracy. They realise the election itself was not real, rather it was a confrontation of the ẹ̀mí of a nation. According to the Yoruba worldview, the visitation of an ẹ̀mí is not only personal but communal; the dead return to remind the living of their kinship and their obligations. My Father’s Shadow expands this grammar of return by rendering Folarin not simply as a father but as the apparition of a nation itself—Nigeria in the 1990s, suspended between decay and hope, still struggling to deliver on promises of provision and protection. In his shadow, the boys learn that their farewell is double; the loss of a parent and the foreknowledge of a country’s broken covenant.

Yet the film captures Nigeria’s social landscape beyond a place of decay but as a field of kinship too. Citizens appear as siblings to one another, bound together by necessity and by a collective refusal to collapse under the weight of failing infrastructure. In crowded taxis and at roadside eateries, we watch them improvise joy in the face of unpaid wages and trade kindness in streets where scarcity reigns. These struggles are presented with an unflinching realism, but never veer toward the grotesque. Davies’ camera never robs its subjects of dignity. Instead, it insists that hope, though fragile, is reborn in gestures of shared laughter, shared hunger, and shared defiance.

The Davies brothers’ semi-autobiographical debut transforms cinema into an ancestral dialogue. Ṣọpẹ́ Dìrísù as Folarin embodies this dialogue with quiet mastery, showing us a father whose every word and gesture seems already haunted by his departure. The collaboration between director and actor yields a film that feels both deeply private and expansively communal, a film whose power lies in how it refuses to let loss be final, insisting instead that death is a passage filled with communication, instruction, and love. My Father’s Shadow is therefore not only a story of two brothers remembering their father, but also of two filmmakers reviving him through art, ensuring that his presence, like the nation’s own restless spirit, continues to haunt, to teach, and to guide.