AFRIFF: Poverty is a deeply Nigerian condition. It weaves through our lives, some with worse wear than others; but there is no existence in Nigeria not impacted by poverty. It is also an orchestrated condition, a cycle of government cruelty designed to suppress and quench class solidarity, forcing us to believe in manufactured scarcity. So, why do we often pretend it doesn’t exist?
The Legend of the Vagabond Queen of Lagos takes us into the mouth of poverty, documenting the reality of the displaced Agbojedo community, a floating slum, of Lagos through Jawu (Temi Amu-Williams), a single mother, who finds a bag of money and sets off a series of calamities backed by the forced eviction of her community.
Watching this film was a lesson in activist filmmaking, a form that is often complicated in conversations. Debated questions include whether activism entertains, what the line between activism and propaganda is, and what material change a film can bring. Directed by the Agbajowo Collective of first-time filmmakers, Vagabond Queen finds a human core in a systemic issue and lays to rest a few of the questions surrounding film as activism.
Constantly shifting tone between real footage, brusque thriller and spiritual imagery, Vagabond Queen forms a cast around real members of a community, immersing itself in realities not built on sound stages or created by non-community members. This allows the acting to never feel like awkwardly putting on skin and for the conditions to hit you for the realities they are. Temi Ami-Williams (Eyimofe) performs Jawu with a captivating energy required of a spiritually ordained lead character while Adebowale ‘Mr Macaroni’ Adedayo excellently plays a character that, through corruption, oppresses and controls the community from high-rise buildings.
In a key scene at the beginning of the film, after Jawu is arrested while selling food along with other community members, we get a sense of the film’s core. She is arraigned in court and accused of wandering without evident means of livelihood as though her mere existence is a crime. This criminalization of poverty is a pit that gets deeper the more you try to get out; she saves money only to use it as bail. And because the government considers poverty a crime, it must snuff it out by violent capitalist expansion that favours a few. This expansion is portrayed in the film with real footage of demolitions that occurred to make way for vanity luxury apartments, a state-sanctioned destruction of a people.
The spiritual form of this film is constantly shifting in a way that reflects the people. Jawu’s mark on her back has already set her destiny in stone and the rest of her people move between rituals of faith in ancient gods and new ones. All these things combine to inform the hope and aspiration of the people: through sports betting for a man waiting to buy Jawu’s food and an aspiration to move to Dubai for one of the people used as a pawn of violence.
The Legend of the Vagabond Queen Of Lagos affirms its message with its visual language, placing Agbojedo in the dark while the high-rise buildings sparkle above it. This frames the aftermath of the demolition like a desert of ruin and never steadies the camera in moments of chaos. We`re often in the dark or in the shadows and frames are built from scraps and dirt, keeping you engaged with the material realities of the community.
As the events of this film collapse around the missing bag of money, you see the community on the brink of self destruction before the alignment of interests solidifies their resolve in an act of defiance anchored—not surprisingly—by the women, a hopeful lesson in the power of organization and the rejection of seeds of discord constantly sewn by the political class. It is ultimately a sort of call out of our pretence; these people exist in these ghoulish realities all around the country, what are we doing to save them?
The Legend of the Vagabond Queen of Lagos screened at the 2024 Africa International Film Festival.
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Side Musings
- The film doesn’t shy away from moments of humour which ground the characters even deeper. Jawu and her son were funny together.
- The CGI bird was pretty good, I was pleasantly surprised.
- When the film ends, a list of places where communities have been displaced around Nigeria is shown and I was a bit surprised at the scope, especially in places I recognized in the city I’ve spent a lot of my life in.
