I was sitting on my three-seater chair with its peeling leather in my 2-by-2-metre apartment when I heard a voice: “Egbon, ba yi si?” Looking up, I discovered it was Saheed Olugbon, a serial award-winning photographer, who plies his trade with the most widely read newspaper headquartered in a gigantic white edifice along the Lagos-Ibadan Expressway. I answered, “Ba wa,” with the same Egba dialect he used to greet me, the language of the most urbane Yoruba nation?
I went back into my shell, deep in thought, without offering him a seat. With our lovely fraternity, he did not need to be offered one, as he took a seat in the dining area, opened his laptop, and buried his head in it.
After a long silence, I asked, “Omo, kini o sele ti o kan dake sibe?” — meaning, what is happening, why are you silent? As I moved closer, I noticed he was captioning photographs.
I stayed glued, watching the spectacle in every shot. I saw people in different colours of Aso-Oke; men in Agbada and women in iro and buba. I also saw coral beads, well-dressed horses, different shades of designer sunglasses, and anklets.
I was about to move back to my seat when a particular shot caught my attention: a sidestream enveloping a man on a horse. My attention immediately shifted from the perfunctory. I saw a man with a porcelain complexion punctuated with freckles, wearing an agbada, badass sunglasses, layers of coral beads around his neck, a tattooed hand, and a cigar in his mouth.
