Inua Ellams was walking through the streets of Lagos, the bustling former capital of Nigeria, when he began noticing a recurring phrase, spray-painted on to the sides of homes. “This house is not for sale,” it read. “Beware of 419.”
The number refers to section four, chapter 19 of the Nigerian criminal code, which specifically deals with fraud – obtaining goods or property by false pretences – and the warnings were painted on houses to deter conmen who would access empty properties and sell them without the owner’s consent. Now the criminal code reference has become a catch-all term for Nigerian cons and illicit financial activity.
The most famous form 419 takes in the west is the internet con, also known as the Spanish Prisoner, where the target (or “mark”) is offered a sizable cut from a sum of money that needs to be transferred out of the country, often by someone claiming to be working for a bank or a powerful figure (posing as the brother of the Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha was a popular tactic in the 00s). But in Nigeria the term has a universal meaning. “It covers everything,” Ellams tells me. “From a five-year-old trying to get extra sweets from his parents to a businessman embezzling money from his company.”
The playwright first noticed the signs back in 2013. He had been in town to research his hit play Barber Shop Chronicles, the award-winning tale about African men and their relationships, when the seed for his latest project was planted.
That project is The 419, a series of photographic portraits by Oluwamuyiwa “Logor” Logo and sonnets written by Ellams that combine to tell the story of how money and 419 culture weaves into every facet of Lagosian life. Actors will record Ellams’s sonnets so that you can hear the images “speak” as you gaze at them.
Logor’s portraits will hang on the walls of the West Wing gallery at Somerset House in London and depict real-life Lagosians who Ellams met and interviewed and whose stories he stitched together into sonnets. Those verses bind together as a crown of sonnets – meaning each opening line can be combined to create a new sonnet. The language evolves as the story progresses and the subjects become more middle class and managerial, as pidgin makes way for more formal English. It’s a fittingly intricate setup for a work that unpicks a byzantine world of money, bartering and power.
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