Stepping Out of the Shadows

Since 2006, Nigeria has not conducted a nationwide population census. In the digital age, can we build a functional country without knowing how many people we actually are?

Decades of failed governance, banditry and economic collapse are driving young men from northern Nigeria across the Sahara in search of gold, dignity and a version of manhood Nigeria no longer offers them.

Audience Lead at The Republic, Tomi Olugbemi, talks with Nigerian mixed-media artist and sculptor, Dennis Osadebe, about his new public installation, This is Lagos.

Sophy does not answer at once. This is one of her more irritating tactics. She knows how to use silence. Sophy is the layer beneath the Stanley cup, the speaker, the medical robot docked near the bathroom. She is the super-agent Sophie named after herself during the first month when everyone was naming their agents and pretending the jokes did not mean their world was changing.

I never could understand white people’s obsession with dead things…Most exhibitions about Africa had been about the dead or animals—nothing about the living; the people.