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MAKOKO’S GHOSTS PHOTOGRAPHS BY CRISTINA DE MIDDEL
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MAKOKO’S GHOSTS A WORLD OF SPIRITS IN A LAGOS SLUM
PHOTOGRAPHS BY CRISTINA DE MIDDEL
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n 1954, the Nigerian author Amos Tutuola published My Life in the Bush of Ghosts. The novel tells the story of a young Yoruba boy fleeing an attack on his village by slave traders. He escapes into the wilderness, only to find himself in a surreal world of spirits where no other humans are allowed. The boy spends 24 years trying to find his way home, all the while living with the spirits and adapting to their way of life. Writing in a deliberately naïve voice, Tutuola fused elements of autobiography and folklore to create a distinct new form of African narrative. This is What Hatred Did, a series by Cristina de Middel from which the images here are taken, draws heavily on the novel, and presents, in the photographer’s words, an “enhanced reality of one of the most iconic places in Nigeria.” (The title of the series—which is on display at the Goa Photo festival this year— comes from the novel’s last line.) De Middel started on the project in October 2013, in Lagos, Nigeria’s former capital and one of the most populated cities in the world. She worked in the megalopolis’ largest settlement, Makoko—a centuries-old fishing village now transformed into a sprawling slum, perched on stilts above a lagoon. Largely removed from the city and cut off from civic services and governance, the community forms a world of its own, lorded over by its own leaders and “kings.” De Middel eschews the realism and customary sterility of documentary photography. In her work on Africa, she strives to describe the continent “from a different perspective, that doesn’t focus on wars, famines and refugee camps.” For this project she decided “to do something very absurd in a very dramatic place … to convey the idea of Makoko that I recognised and wanted to share.” De Middel dressed volunteers as Tutuola’s spirit characters, using whatever materials were at hand, and staged scenes based on conceptual sketches and scripts. The images are phantasmagoric yet contemplative, straddling fact and fiction—reminiscent in mood and style of de Middel’s acclaimed book The Afronauts, inspired by a schoolteacher’s audacious attempt to create a space programme in 1960s Zambia. Taken together, the photographer said, she hopes the images from Makoko stand as an “illustrated, contemporary version” of Tutuola’s classic.
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