🥤Fight against the olodo uprising

👋 Good morning, everyone. In case you don’t know, Olodo uprising means a decline in intelligence. Anti-intellectualism is having a moment; you should resist it. You're reading this, so you're already winning. Let's get into it.

In this edition: this week in pop culture, are Lagos fashion crowds hypocritical, the book purist vs. the film realist, and more.

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Question of the week

Sycophancy

Answer at the bottom of this newsletter

🗞️ THIS WEEK IN POP CULTURE

🎵 MUSIC

Asake shut down Christian Louboutin's Paris Fashion Show. Rema performed at Mawazine, one of Africa's biggest music festivals. Nigerian artists are headlining everywhere this year.

🏫 EDUCATION

Nigeria has been delisted from the International Mathematics Olympiad, whose finals will be held in Shanghai this July. One of the most prestigious academic competitions in the world, and we're out, not for lack of talent, but for lack of funding. That one stings.

🤖 AI

Google is investing $75M into A24 as part of an AI filmmaking research partnership. Yes, that A24. We're not okay. Some things should just be left alone.

📽️ FILM

The Oscars Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences just invited 529 new members, and My Father's Shadow has a strong showing. Akinola Davies Jr., Sope Dirisu, and costume designer PC Williams all made the cut. The film really is the gift that keeps on giving.

🚨 TRENDING

Adedamola Michael Oyewole was arrested by the Delta State Police after allegedly stabbing his girlfriend to death. She had traveled from Abuja to visit him. This is femicide. It is not a relationship gone wrong, or a crime of passion; it is a pattern, and we should call it what it is

MAIN SQUEEZE

Are Lagos fashion crowds hypocritical?

When Dorathy Bachor launched her clothing line earlier in the week, it sparked a conversation the fashion industry has been having for a while.

People noticed similarities between her pieces and Bawsty, a ready-to-wear brand that has carved out a distinct identity in the Lagos fashion space. The comments came fast, the comparisons came faster, and before long, there was a verdict.

But here's the thing, mesh has existed long before either brand. It has lived on runways, in dancewear catalogues, in Balogun market stalls, and in our mothers' wardrobes.

So the real conversation isn't whether Bachor copied Bawsty. The question is: in a city where trends move at the speed of a repost, where does inspiration end and theft begin, and who actually gets to draw that line?

The fashion industry is growing faster than the structures meant to support it; there are no strong IP frameworks, no accessible legal tools for emerging designers, and no industry body making the hard calls. What exists instead is the court of public opinion, and it is rarely interested in nuance.

We spoke to Wumi Tuase-Fosudo, a former fashion editor, to understand what's going on beneath the pile-ons, and what it would take to build an industry that protects creativity without punishing coincidence.

Lagos fashion moves incredibly fast, new styles, new drops, new “it” pieces every few weeks. Is that pace healthy for the industry?

The speed isn’t a Lagos problem; it’s a reality of the global fashion industry. Trends move quickly because technology and social media have accelerated how we consume fashion. The challenge is that while there’s a craving for new pieces, conversations around sustainability, craftsmanship, and longevity don’t often keep up.

Economic realities are complex in Lagos, and Lagosians are largely aspirational, so people understandably want access to fashion at affordable price points. I don’t believe we’re quite there at building an industry that can balance accessibility with responsible production and creativity.

Ultimately, fast fashion exists because people buy it. How complicit is the Lagos consumer in the culture they’re criticising designers for creating?

Consumers play a bigger role than they’re often willing to admit. It’s easy to criticise designers for producing fast fashion, but demand drives supply. Many people who criticise local fast fashion brands are shopping from international fast fashion retailers.

That doesn’t mean consumers should shoulder all the blame, but it does mean we need a more honest conversation about our purchasing habits. If we want a fashion industry that prioritises originality, quality, and sustainability, consumers have to be willing to support those values with their wallets. And we all know the reality of that lol. 

Is there such a thing as a truly original design? Where does inspiration end and theft begin, and who gets to draw that line?

Fashion has always been built on references, influences, and reinterpretation. Original ideas are rare, but they exist. The issue is when a designer reproduces another person’s work so much that the distinction between inspiration and imitation totally disappears.

Ideally, industry experts, legal frameworks, and professional bodies should help define those boundaries. Unfortunately, those structures are still developing in many markets, including Nigeria. That’s why I think education around design history, intellectual property, and creative ethics is important. Every creative should at least have some knowledge about these. 

If a designer in Lagos comes up with something genuinely new, what practical tools do they actually have to protect it?

Protection can be challenging. Registering trademarks and pursuing intellectual property claims can be expensive, time-consuming, and really inaccessible for many designers. Especially the emerging ones. 

Due to this, many designers are more focused on building strong brand recognition, getting media coverage, and establishing themselves as the original source of an idea before the copies emerge. We’ve seen brands successfully use visibility and reputation as a form of protection, particularly when they gain both local and international recognition.

If you could change one thing about how the Lagos fashion industry handles originality, credit, and inspiration, what would it be, and who would need to move for it to happen?

I’d like to see a stronger culture of research and creative curiosity. Great design doesn’t happen in a vacuum. It comes from studying art, history, culture, architecture, textiles, and the world around us.

At the same time, consumers also have a role to play. There’s a growing demand for affordable versions of luxury designs, and that pressure influences what designers produce because they want to sell. If we want a more original industry, both creators and consumers need to value creativity enough to move beyond trends and herd mentality.

🔪 THE PEEL

Who owns a story once it leaves the page?

When Mo Abudu announced that The Secret Lives of Baba Segi's Wives was finally getting its big screen moment, a December 2026 theatrical release, backed by a massive ensemble, the reaction split neatly in two. One half of the internet screamed with excitement. The other half screamed, full stop. 

Some BTS footage posted yesterday suggested a glossy, Lagos luxe treatment of Lola Shoneyin's deeply layered 2010 novel, and for book lovers who'd spent years living inside that polygamous household, the glamour felt like a betrayal.

It begs the question: do filmmakers owe a book its exact reality? 

The case for creative freedom

One of the first books to be adapted into film was Cinderella, adapted for the screen in 1899 by Georges Méliès.

Since then, the story has been remade dozens of times, as animation, as a modern high school romance, as a fantasy with Anne Hathaway under an obedience curse, as a Brandy and Whitney Houston musical, as a Camila Cabello pop film, it goes on.

Each version took enormous liberties. Each version found its audience. Not a single one invalidated the original fairytale.

That is the argument for creative freedom in its purest form: a story is not a scripture. It is raw material. When Peter Jackson adapted The Lord of the Rings, he cut Tom Bombadil, restructured storylines, and invented moments Tolkien never wrote.

The films won 11 Academy Awards. When The Devil Wears Prada was adapted from Lauren Weisberger's novel, the screenplay was, by most accounts, more compelling than the book. The film became a cultural landmark. The book became a footnote.

Film is not literature. It is a different medium with different grammar. A novel can afford to live inside a character's head for 40 pages; a film has about 90 minutes to make you feel everything.

The choices made in compression, casting, visual tone, and pacing are translations. And translation, by its very nature, requires some loss and some invention.

The Case for Staying True

And yet, not all liberties are equal, and not all source material is equal.

The Percy Jackson films are the cautionary tale that haunts every adaptation conversation. The filmmakers aged up the characters, rewrote the ending, and effectively disregarded what made the books work. The film barely broke even.

When the Disney+ series was made with author Rick Riordan in the writers' room, it found its audience immediately. The lesson is freedom without fidelity to tone and intent is not creativity, it is indifference.

Baba Segi's Wives is a story about survival, the weight women carry inside homes that look fine from the outside. If the BTS footage signals a film more interested in Lagos aesthetics than in that psychological interior, then the concern is legitimate.

The truth is:

A luxurious visual treatment doesn't automatically betray the themes, but it does carry risk. The Great Gatsby was beautiful on screen, and some critics argue it was empty at its centre, because its filmmaker chose spectacle over the novel's sadness.

But I enjoyed watching The Great Gatsby; in fact, it’s one of my favorite films. A film can be genuinely enjoyable and still be a loose interpretation of what the source material was trying to say. Both things can be true at the same time.

Where Does That Leave Us?

The honest answer is somewhere in the middle, which is unsatisfying but true.

Creative freedom is not a blank cheque. The question to ask of any adaptation is not whether it changed things, but whether the changes serve the story's soul or replace it.

A Lagos treatment of Baba Segi's Wives can work, if the opulence is used to interrogate the lie of it, the performance of a household that looks whole while breaking apart from the inside.

That is what Shoneyin's novel does. Whether Abudu's film does the same, we find out in December.

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WORD OF THE WEEK

Sycophancy: noun — excessive flattery or agreement directed at someone in power, usually for personal gain.

As in: the comments under every celebrity's post are a masterclass in sycophancy.