From the studios of Lagos to the stages of London and New York Nigeria's photographers, musicians, and fashion makers built a visual and sonic language the world is still borrowing from. This is their archive.
Nigeria began as a profession in the late nineteenth century, attracting practitioners from across West Africa. The professional prestige accorded to photography in Nigeria has led to the country being characterized as a 'photographic giant' in the region
Photography in Nigeria began in the mid-19th century, when British Methodist pastor Daniel West reportedly took daguerreotypes in Abeokuta and Lagos in 1856.
By the 1880s, professional photography studios had emerged in Lagos, often operated by Sierra Leoneans, Liberians, and Brazilians. Neils Walwin Holm became one of Lagos’s leading photographers between the 1890s and 1910.
Jonathan Adagogo Green (left) and Solomon Osagie Alonge (right) helped establish photography across Nigeria. Alonge became the official photographer of the Benin royal court in the 1930s, while the National Professional Photographers Association was established in 1947.
Nigeria did not receive music from the world. It gave music to the world. From the talking drums of the Yoruba and Igbo to the polyrhythmic fury of Fela Kuti to the billion-stream dominance of Afropop this is the lineage of a sonic nation.
Tunde King is widely credited with creating Jùjú music in Lagos in the 1930s a fusion of Yoruba percussion and the guitar that had arrived with Sierra Leonean Krio settlers. I.K. Dairo later electrified it in the 1950s, earning an MBE from the British crown and sending it around the world. Nigeria had already exported its first genre before most Nigerians owned a radio.
Highlife arrived from Ghana but Nigeria made it its own Bobby Benson, Victor Olaiya, and Rex Lawson giving it a Lagos swagger that was entirely distinct. Then Fela Anikulapo Kuti changed everything in music.
Returning from the United States in 1970 with a new ideology and a new sound Afrobeat he turned music into a weapon. His Afrika Shrine became the most politically dangerous nightclub in the world. The government raided it. They burnt his house. He kept playing.
“High” was in the name because highlife was reserved for “highly” placed Africans resident in urban centres.
While Sunny Ade took Jùjú to Carnegie Hall, a new sound was rising from the mosques and streets of Lagos. Fuji music born from the Islamic Ajisari night-chant tradition found its commercial prophet in Sikiru Ayinde Barrister.
Meanwhile, the Nigerian gospel movement, led by figures like Panam Percy Paul, was filling stadiums with a sound that was entirely Nigerian in its rhythm, even when the words were drawn from scripture.
In the early 2000s, a new generation raised on American hip-hop and Nigerian percussion began fusing the two. 2face Idibia's "African Queen" in 2004 was a signal flare. D'banj and Don Jazzy built an empire.
Then Wizkid, Davido, and Burna Boy took it global not by copying the world, but by insisting the world come to them. By 2020, Afrobeats was the fastest-growing music genre on earth.
Long before Lagos Fashion Week, before Arise Magazine, before any Western publication acknowledged it Nigerians dressed. They dressed with intention, with status, with joy. Aso-oke was not traditional dress. It was architecture. Ankara was not a print. It was a declaration. The Nigerian approach to clothing has always been: more is correct.
1960s — Aso-oke Era
Hand-woven on narrow-band looms across Yorubaland, Aso-oke was never casual. It was worn at marriages, naming ceremonies, funerals, and coronations a textile that carried the weight of occasion. The three canonical colours Etu (dark indigo), Sanyan (beige brown), and Alari (deep red) each had social meaning that fashion schools are only now beginning to study.
1970s – 1990s — Ankara Revolution
Shade styled up with buba, the first Nigerian modern fashion designer. Dutch wax fabric made West African tailors become Nigeria's dominant fashion language. Lagos tailors developed a cutting style known as the "up and down" suit that was entirely distinct from any Western equivalent. Every market woman, every Lagos socialite, every university lecturer had a tailor.
2000s – Present — Global Stage
When Deola Sagoe showed at Arise Fashion Week in 2009, she arrived not as a student of Western fashion but as an authority on a tradition the West had never seen. Her Komole collection was built from hand-embroidered Aso-oke was the moment Nigerian fashion stopped seeking approval and started setting the terms.
In pre-colonial Yoruba and Igbo society, clothing was a form of speech. The weight of a coral bead necklace communicated rank. The width of an Aso-oke stripe spoke of occasion. A Hausa-Fulani babban riga the wide-sleeved, embroidered robe of the north required fabric from Kano, embroidery from the hands of craftsmen who had learned the pattern from their fathers. To dress was to speak. To dress well was to declare your place in the world with precision and intention. Nigeria never needed to be told that fashion was serious. It already knew.
Nigeria is the most populous Black nation on earth. It is also, by most measures, the most creatively prolific. With over 200 ethnic groups, 500 languages, and a history that predates any colonial boundary the creative output of this country is not a recent development. It is the result of thousands of years of making, thinking, and refining. The archive is not a tribute. It is an accounting.
Every photographer who pointed a lens at a Nigerian face and said: this is worth preserving. Every musician who built a groove from nothing and made the world move to it. Every tailor who cut fabric in a way nobody had cut it before. This archive exists because forgetting is the only thing they were never willing to do. Join us in keeping it alive.
