My quiet riot of words begins here.
Time has moved fast.
Three hundred sixty five days
since we were taken,
one full year of pain and agony.
The memory burns.
The memory of never going home.
I stand here as a woman,
my innocence seized and buried.
I nurse Mohammed now.
He smiles, unaware he is
the living scar of my sorrow.
Do not weep for me.
I am a child shaped
by a greedy society,
an offering placed
before a selfish deity.
I pray the gods receive me.
I pray other girls survive.
My voice fades.
My story ends.
Now I die.
We sat around the evening fire, warming our cold skin dried by the harmattan breeze. My joy rose as I sat beside him. He cracked his knuckles, spat into the fire and stared ahead with grey brows that carried age and wisdom. I listened as he recalled his boyhood. Days when the Lagos Ibadan expressway was not bloodthirsty. Days when children played outside without fear of kidnappers. Days when you did not need to rob a bank to eat a decent meal. He paused and murmured, the good old days.
The storm in my stomach refused to settle. I asked what happened to those days. I raised my voice. We are being robbed by the failures of your generation. Democracy is stunted. The country stands on the edge of a cliff. Corruption rules with reckless boldness. Hospitals are hostile. Universities resemble abattoirs. Roads are traps. I spoke like someone rewriting the book of Lamentations. He kept watching me.
He spat into the fire again and called a little boy to fetch more firewood. He coughed and spat once more. He asked for the cup of water in my hand. It had gone lukewarm. He thanked me and tried to start another health lecture on the benefits of warm water. I stayed silent. He saw I had no interest.
His voice weakened. I moved closer to this old man, the patriarch of my line. Tears gathered in my eyes. I asked him how we escape this wahala. He fixed his eyes on me and asked what I knew about Switzerland and the Swiss model of government.
My mind raced. I remembered an earlier conversation with my grandmother, Iya Agba. She often said love without marriage is a lesser evil than marriage without love. She described the 1914 amalgamation as the worst kind of marriage without love. My father hated when I discussed national issues with her. He called her an ethnic bigot. She carried her scars from the Biafran war and never hid them. She rejected the mantra of one Nigeria. She believed the 100 year old error of Fredrick Lugard could be corrected without bloodshed. She argued that what separates us is stronger than what binds us. If unity is the goal, she said the Swiss model is the only rope strong enough to hold us.
She often described Switzerland as a place where many cultures live in peace despite different languages and religion. She praised their true federalism, where the national government controls only a small share of spending. The president and vice president hold ceremonial roles and serve short one year terms. The federal council provides continuity. No full renewal since 1848. She loved that kind of stability.
To me, Iya Agba was brilliant. Yet I never knew how to tell her that Naija is a different ground. Our politics is volatile. Our democracy is fragile. The Swiss model feels impossible here.
I rose from the fire, told them I needed a midnight snack and promised to return.
When my son was born,
I knelt and whispered,
Son, I am happy you arrived.
I wish you never came.
You were brighter as a star in the night sky,
watching weak earth dwellers from above.
Your promise shone clearer there,
than it ever will on this soil.
They will tell you
you can be anything.
Do not trust it.
It is a tired line.
This place has written your part
in ink that never fades.
If you step outside the script,
they will name you a deviant.
I love you,
and I fear the price of deviation.
They mock celibacy.
They praise virility.
They want you to seed the town
and boast of your conquests.
Steal a little
and they cage you.
Steal a fortune
and they kneel before you
with titles and praise.
Do not teach.
Teachers wait for rewards in heaven
if heaven even remembers them.
Seek power.
Politicians plunder
and holy men defend them.
Their victims bow in gratitude
and crown them.
Keep the people hungry.
Keep them hopeless.
Their devotion will deepen.
Their voices will bless you
as you feast.
While you walk this earth,
take your share and breathe easy.
You are loved.
I love Lagos. I never denied this. My bond with the city sits deep, the same way people in Sapele hold on to their local gin called Ogogoro. The affection I have for Lagos beats the commitment my Enugu people give to Okpa. The feeling pulls through my skin in a way I still struggle to explain.
Lagos plays like a long performance. The city operates like a stage filled with strange scenes. You live here, you risk your sanity at intervals. The triggers come from everywhere.
My dawn sleep ended often with a loud call to prayer from a nearby mosque. Other times it was the smooth voice of an Agege bread seller announcing hot bread. Both sounds marked the start of a new Lagos day.
Friday nights were never silent. A Pentecostal church two blocks away kept us awake with one thousand decibel speakers and shouts of fire. Sleep had no authority on nights like that. The street owned your ears.
A ride on a Molue trapped you in heat, sweat, noise, and stench. End of business hours brought the worst smell. Survival in those buses shaped your patience.
My boyhood sits in the memory of the city. It stretches across Mushin and every corner I walked through. I grew up in Mushin in the late nineties. The period came with raw events. One week, armed robbers sent a letter to warn us of their visit. The street prepared. We made bonfires for more than three weeks. We waited. They never came. Someone later confessed the letter was a prank from boys in the neighborhood. The whole area breathed out at once.
Children in Ilupeju, Maryland, and Anthony watched Captain America, Samurai X, Earthworm Jim, Godzilla, and other foreign heroes. My hero lived on my street. His name was Budossa. He was a ram. He was strong, fierce, and proud. I idolized him. Few children grew up with their hero five houses away.
His handler, Ogbeni La, trusted him with no hesitation. Every fight ended in Budossa’s favor. His horn behaved like a weapon. One charge from him dropped his opponent. The impact could crush the panel of a Picanto. People placed bets on him with full confidence. He never failed his supporters. Arsenal fans never knew that level of stability. Budossa ruled Mushin. He was king of three straight wins. He was lord of the rams.
Every morning, before school, I touched the hair on his body. I slipped out of the house to pay respect. It became a ritual. It shaped my routine.
Years later, my family moved out of the neighborhood. When I returned to visit, someone told me Budossa died a few years after we left. The news sat heavy on my chest for weeks. It felt strange to lose a ram that shaped so much of my childhood.
The story stays with me. Lagos gave me chaos, noise, and trouble. It also gave me memories I use to measure parts of my life.
On the morning of Saturday, October 11, 2025, a user with the handle @Thelashbrowque1 posted a tweet that shook the +234 timeline.
It read:
“The olosho my neighbour brought home last night charged him 130k. She said he agreed to the price. The guy did a fake transfer and escaped. The babe has been crying and making calls. Why can’t she work? What a life.”
Within hours, the post went viral, over 1,500 quotes, 6,300 likes, 814 reposts, and 1,296 bookmarks, before it was deleted under the weight of backlash.
The internet laughed.
Some mocked the woman for selling her body. Others mocked her for getting duped.
Some cursed the man. Others dragged the poster for hypocrisy.
Amid all that noise, one fact stayed quiet: she was robbed.
Reading that post dragged me back to some years ago, when I worked as a banker in Lagos. I lived with my friend Nathaniel, who worked in hospitality. We had another friend, Olumide, a computer science graduate who couldn’t find a job. One Friday night, after a long week, Nath and I went to Surulere to unwind. Olumide joined us. He was broke, so we took care of him. I bought him two bottles of Star Lager, Nath bought three, and he finished all five on the spot.
Nath and I didn’t drink or smoke, but we loved the atmosphere, the lights, the noise, the sense of being part of something reckless yet harmless.
Since I started making money, I’d decided never to deprive my eyes of beauty. I wear glasses, and I’ve always thought of my eyes as older than I am, like they’ve been here before me, watching the world’s small foolishness long before I arrived.
Later, we ended up in a club where I got a lap dance for fun. When it was time to leave, Olumide invited a call girl to follow him home.
At Olumide’s apartment, Nath crashed on the couch while I shared the thin mattress with Olumide and the lady. I fell asleep quickly. At dawn, I heard muffled crying but didn’t move. When morning came, I asked what happened. She said Olumide was “too much” for her, he’d been rough and she was small-built, drained. Olumide was a big man, over 150kg and more than six feet tall.
As she dressed to leave, Olumide admitted he didn’t have money to pay her. He’d brought her home on credit, planning to “sort it out later.” We insisted he pay. He begged Nath to drive him to an ATM, but on the way confessed his account was empty. We refused to cover him.
So we drove to Lawanson, where he sold his phone and handed the entire proceeds to the woman. No one spoke on the way back. We dropped her off, drove home to Fola-Agoro, and never mentioned it again.
That was Lagos, a city where sex is both forbidden and everywhere. You could condemn it in the morning and chase it by night. Everyone claimed moral superiority, but everyone had a price.
Years later, I visited Amsterdam’s Red Light District. I walked past glass windows where women stood under red lamps, calm, confident, and in control. Their work was licensed. Their rooms were clean. The Museum of Prostitution displayed tax forms, union cards, panic buttons, and stories from the women themselves. At the Erotic Museum and the Casa Rosso theatre, the acts were mechanical, not wild, routine, like any job done too long.
There was no shame there. Only business.
The contrast hit me. In Amsterdam, sex work was regulated, taxed, and protected. In Lagos, it was illegal, dangerous, and hidden. The same act, selling intimacy, was “labour” in one city and “sin” in the other.
We call people immoral for surviving. We call it culture when they suffer.
The difference between the woman Olumide couldn’t pay and the woman behind Amsterdam’s glass isn’t virtue. It’s law.
Spend two days in Paris and you see a city of contradictions. Beneath the postcard images of the Eiffel Tower and the Seine lies a metropolis where colonial history is not just remembered in museums, it walks the streets, fills the schools, and shapes the very character of urban life. Paris today is not “dirty” or “overrun” because of migration; it is a mirror of France’s empire, reflecting both its former reach and its present dilemmas.
France once extracted raw materials, cash crops, and human labour from vast swaths of Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean. When formal empire ended, that extraction did not stop; it simply changed form. Trade dependency, the CFA franc currency system, and unequal development agreements kept former colonies tethered to the metropole. And when poverty, instability, or lack of opportunity drove people to move, there was only one obvious destination: France itself.
This created a one-way migration funnel. Francophone Africans do not have the luxury of multiple obvious diasporic destinations. English speakers can scatter to the UK, the U.S., Canada, or Australia. But for many in Dakar, Abidjan, or Yaoundé, the imagined El Dorado is still Paris.
The result is demographic concentration. France has more than 3 million Africa-born residents, heavily weighted toward the Maghreb and West Africa. In Paris, a quarter of the population is foreign-born, with North Africans making up the largest single bloc. That concentration makes Paris feel, at times, like the gravitational centre of the francophone world.
Contrast that with London. Yes, it has large Nigerian, Ghanaian, and Somali communities. But anglophone migration disperses across the Anglosphere. Toronto, Houston, Johannesburg, and Sydney all carry part of the load. No single city becomes the unavoidable focal point in the way Paris does.
Where critics often misstep is in assuming the urban challenges are caused by migrants themselves. Paris’s housing shortage, high rents, and sanitation strikes are products of policy failures, not nationality. Migrants live at the sharp end of these failures, often concentrated in peripheral banlieues with poor services and limited mobility. The issue is not that migrants make Paris unequal, but that inequality makes migrants hyper-visible.
Paris is not merely a capital; it is empire folded into a city. Its boulevards carry the names of colonial generals; its museums house objects taken from Bamako and Hanoi; its banlieues shelter the descendants of those once ruled overseas. To call Paris “mongrel” is to miss the deeper truth: the city is not contaminated by migration, it is constituted by it.
The story of Paris is the story of a republic grappling with the long shadow of colonialism, trying to reconcile universalist ideals with the hierarchies it once enforced abroad.
If Paris feels different from London or Toronto, it is not because francophone Africans bring disorder. It is because France created a system that tied them to its core long after the empire supposedly ended. Paris today is the living archive of that entanglement, diverse, unequal, and unfinished.
The question, then, is not whether Paris is “dirty,” but whether France is willing to confront the empire that still structures its society.
Where death is certain
and strife is brief,
We journey,
hopelessly live for death,
like the man born of a woman,
who hopelessly searches
for death’s love.
We dwell with temptress,
as dawn fades
and the hourglass drains.
We hope for a never-coming tomorrow,
like the lazy ‘eye Ọkín’
that waits for tomorrow
to make its nest.
As the dust beckons,
we wend into eternity,
and wish yesterday
was here again.
Soothing death,
my body a burden,
frail and fragile,
my spirit a prisoner
held by its bond.
Soon the gaol shall break,
my body planted eternally
in the earth,
that my spirit may be set
free and loose.
It shall travel with her
across borders and boundaries,
greet miles,
and dwell beyond distance,
walking her into eternity.
Death, my hope of reunion
with my blushing bride.
O death, your pang I treasure,
that I may be with her,
and she with me, eternally.
Through dark clouds and deep sea,
through jungles and wilderness,
through life’s twinge and wreck,
through hills and valleys,
Closer, I crawl.
Death I shall kiss,
to wane and marry with the bride,
amidst beatitude and glee.
In gaiety shall I dwell,
like a peony in a pouch.
Blest shall pious mortals be;
there shall be glowing laughter
from earthlings with pure thought.
Rejuvenation for the aged,
brawn and vigour for the frail,
solace for the downtrodden,
allay for the laden.
A glimpse of eternity at apogee,
this my spirit yearns for,
this my soul beseeches.
As I journey through earthly experience,
eternity I foresee.
The truest of all,
you were the purest.
I was a juvenile,
an unworthy man,
yet your companionship
was an embodiment of grace.
I loved you wholeheartedly.
You were a gift not procured
by merit,
but bestowed.
A paragon of beauty,
an epitome of virtue,
your radiance made goddesses
blush with envy.
Though we were from
two different worlds,
our love built bridges
across the divide.
I desired the world to know:
you were a priceless gift,
and my love for you
was inestimable.
Welcome! 