Footnotes

A week before the city burst into sequins and sound, we walked.

Lagos Island, Broad Street, Odunlami, Bamgbose, was unusually hot that Sunday. The clouds hung low, like they were listening. The streets weren’t empty, but they moved slower than usual. In that rare stillness, the city’s old bones felt more visible.

We didn’t have a clear goal, only a sense that something important might unfold. Sometimes that’s enough. And with Kelechi as a guide, it often is. He moved through the city like someone retracing a dream, pausing mid-sentence to name buildings long gone, pointing to balconies that could have once held Sunday choirs, recalling a time when Lagos Island could have rivaled Havana for its architectural grace. Kelechi knows these streets like memory knows a body, familiar, imperfect, sometimes painful to hold. He is an archivist and a photographer, but mostly he is someone who listens closely to cities. His practice began, strangely enough, in a cyber café in 2009, chasing the visual poetry of Afro-Brazilian architecture. Over time, the images became stories. The stories became names. And the names became a kind of duty.

Kelechi isn’t new to this. Years ago, he contributed to ìrìn's exploration of Badagry, another layered place, full of quiet weight and dislocated memory. Even then, his camera didn’t just capture surfaces. It lingered. Observed. Respected.

Since then, he’s spent years documenting not just Lagos Island, but fragments of Nigeria’s architectural soul, journeys to Ibadan, Osogbo, Ilorin, and back again. Often solo. Often self-funded. Piecing together his own kind of syllabus. “There was no blueprint,” he told me. “I had to learn on the go. Teach myself what I wasn’t taught in school.”

Later, he shared the story of a friend who recently traced his ancestry back to Lagos Island. By chance, Kelechi had photographed the tombstone of that friend’s ancestor, a church founder in Ikoyi, during an old research trip.

“You think you’re documenting buildings,” he said. “But you’re really preserving people’s stories. Family homes carry the answers. It’s never just about walls.”

“Walking slows time,” he said. “It helps you notice the chipped cornice, the arch of a window, the space where a building used to be.” His favourite street? Bamgbose.“The architecture there was once spectacular. Afro-Brazilian houses, now mostly gone. But I keep going back. Even if it’s to mourn.”

What do you do when your subject has already disappeared?

This is the quiet dilemma that followed us that day. It trailed behind us like the heat. So many of the buildings Kelechi once photographed are now just coordinates in his archive. Empty lots, collapsed beams, windows boarded like closed eyes.

This way of seeing, of reading memory into mortar, is what led to his role as curator of this year’s Fanti Carnival exhibition. But even that came with its own excavations. In preparation, he stumbled across the forgotten names of Afro-Brazilian women, barely mentioned in public archives.“Most of what’s recorded is about men, those who were famous, or married well,” he said. “But the women… they carried so much, and we only know them through obituaries. If that.”

Later, while crossing a street, I asked what detail still captivates him most.

“The floral embossments on windows,” he said, eyes flickering. “Not roses. Local flowers. And elephants. You’ll find them in Ijebu-Ode, in Yaba. That’s how you know it’s Brazilian. Neo-Classical uses keystones. Brazilians? They prefer flowers.”

The professorial tone slipped in briefly, but not in a way that demanded anything. It felt more like sharing a secret. A gift from someone who’s paid close enough attention to distinguish beauty from ornament.

On the walk, he unspooled a personal glossary of styles and eras, Neo-Classical, Tropical Modernism, Afro-Brazilian, Post-Independence Modernism, layered like sediment in the streets around us.

“Every generation adds something,” he said. “But sometimes, what’s added erases what was.”

What’s left is often covered in dust or draped in scaffolding. The walk is never just about admiring beauty. It’s also about cataloguing loss. And Lagos does not always make that easy. We weren’t allowed to photograph freely. Some places were off-limits. At one point, even Freedom Park wouldn’t let the camera in. The irony of it didn’t escape us.“You want to show the city with love,” Kelechi said, frustrated. “But the city doesn’t always want to be seen. Or maybe it doesn’t want to be remembered.”

Still, we entered. And in that oddly quiet pocket of the city, once a colonial prison, now a cultural park, we rested. Sat on plastic chairs. Drank cold Fanta from sweating bottles. Talked in the kind of way you only can after walking a while, when the body slows and the heart opens.

There, Kelechi opened up in a way he rarely does: about the toll it takes to keep going, to keep documenting a city so intent on rewriting its history. The creative loneliness. The struggle to preserve the past when the present feels intent on tearing it down.

“I’ve seen shege,” he admitted, laughing quietly but without mirth. “But therapy, community, and faith… they’ve carried me.”

I could feel the weight of his words. This wasn’t just about buildings. It was about something deeper, something personal. It was about a man, tirelessly walking through a city that doesn’t always love him back, doing the work no one else will. I understood that. It hit differently in that moment, in the quiet space of Freedom Park, where we sat surrounded by the ghosts of the past and the noise of the present.

In the vulnerability of that exchange, I couldn’t help but reflect. The recognition was instinctual, not just as a fellow creative but as someone who understands what it means to fight for something no one else sees, or understands, or even acknowledges. The affirmation was simple, scriptural:

“See a man diligent in his work. He will stand before kings…” Kelechi finished the verse, not out of habit, but as a promise to himself:“…and not mere men.”

The streets are still loud. Lagos is never quiet. But somewhere between the din and the dust, a city is being remembered, one careful step at a time.

The carnival arrived the following week. Colour, movement, spectacle. Lagos Island, alive in a different rhythm. But the walk we took, the quiet one, the intimate one, stays with me more. Because that was the real entry point. That was the reminder of what all this is actually about.