Monochrome Football-in-Lagos

A documentary photography project Shot By Mustopha.

Lagos, Nigeria. A city that never sleeps. The days are earmarked for wanton hustling, the nights, impromptu parties and weekends, well, are for Owambe.

This is a project to capture that part of Lagos, the part where people let out all their worries and just live in the moment.

Lamido is a 23-year-old chartered accountant from Kano State who has lived most of his life in communities on the Gulf of Guinea. He speaks 4 languages fluently — Hausa, English, Yoruba, and Pidgin — and struggles with French as he needs to communicate with colleagues from other nations. Living in Lagos for him, like many others, has been a journey-to-the-end-of-world, no one knows what to expect.

One Wednesday morning, on his commute to work, he realized the bus conductor hadn’t given him change, and instantly proceeded to ask for it. Big mistake. He left the encounter with swollen eyes and an aching head, in addition to losing his voice due to all the shouting. The conductor, who seemed to be having a normal day since the encounter hadn’t roughen him a bit, claimed to have given him the change moments earlier.

This singular event marked the beginning of a terrible day. A day in which he could not wait to get back home.

Just as the basking sun made way for the rising moon, marking close-of-work for the day, he stepped out into Lagos thinking the worst was behind him. In a bid to escape the struggles for public transport, and specifically another bus conductor, he hailed a taxi. What a novel idea.

Everything went well halfway into the journey until SARS stopped the vehicle. They searched and found our man sitting happily in the back, at which point they demanded to see his phone.

“Why you get oyinbo picture for your phone?,” they asked sharply. Our protagonist, in anticipation of what was coming, sat upright, moved closer to the window and tried to explain, with his conflated northern accent, as carefully as he could “na my colleague from Europe him be.”

“You don travel go Europe before?,” they asked him, with their gun pointed into the car and at his thigh.

“No,” he answered, knowing had entered one-chance.

“How you kon dey take work with this person?” they pushed further, and without waiting for a response, “You be thief,” they stated conclusively, “you be Yahoo Boy.” And then they delivered his punishment like a judge that had other affairs waiting to be attended to “Your bail na 600,000 thousand naira.”

About this moment, he stepped out of the car. ‘Fear hold am.’ He trembled as he realized this could yet become another sad tale of extortion and torture on Nigerian social media. Cold sweat dripped from his forehead as he leaned against the car to support his frail legs. “Oga, abeg, I no get reach that thing wey you talk,” he managed to say as respectfully as he could. His right eye was twitching pretty fast which made him smile quietly to himself knowing his whole existence was being ruined.

After several rounds of negotiations, where one resulted in showing them his bank account, he was able to get away with 40 thousand naira.

Some minutes after passing the check-point, he looked out through the window of the sixty-something-years-old taxi driver who had kept quiet through out the encounter, and tried to scream at the top of his lost voice at no one in particular and simultaneously at everyone “Lagos! Lagos! I no gree.”

The residents of Lagos are resilient. They shake away everything that has happened with parties 🙌 on weekends. And weekends in Lagos starts on Friday — did I hear TGIF? Let’s party till mama comes. Saturdays are for weddings and Sundays are for religious activities, somewhere in between people go out to catch some exercise. They burn the fat, break their bones, and rejuvenate the dying cells in preparation for the coming week.

This is a project to capture that part of Lagos, the part where people let out all their worries and just live in the moment.

“What will we find when we strip football-in-Lagos off its colors?”

The Expression

We get to see people in whole; hopes and aspirations.

The Pain

We get to see pain, the struggle being let out. No holds barred.

The Actions

Will the ball go in?

No … they stopped him.

Will the keeper catch it?

1 —Center — A dribble is on the way.

2 —Left — Keeper is preparing for action. 3 — Right — The last defender is beaten. Will the ball go in?

4 —Center — They want to collect the ball! 😠

5 — Center — Issa GOOALL! Issa GOOAAAAL! Jubilations! 🏃

The Fun

There are the smiling ones, who are always having fun.

Who will get the ball?

All pictures are taken with mobile-phone cameras.

This project is inspired by the works of Monochrome Lagos.

Follow the journey on Twitter and Unsplash.