COLORSxSTUDIOS

It’s a hot April Saturday afternoon in Surulere, Lagos. A collection of BMX riders, rollerbladers, and dancers are earnestly practicing on the uneven concrete surface of a foyer at the National Stadium. Rookie bikers collide into rollerbladers and vice versa as they navigate make-shift obstacles that have been erected to spice up their routines. To the left of this cramped space, a small group of skateboarders try out kickflips and ollies. 21-year-old Boluwatife Omotoso sits on the periphery of the frenzy, observing the action after spending the last 20 minutes working through a series of tricks on his skateboard.

Affectionately known as Bvrna to his friends, Boluwatife has been skating at the National Stadium since 2021 after a fallout with his pro football team left him disillusioned with team sports. “It’s my own thing,” he says on his decision to get into skating. “When you are skating, it’s just you and your board. You don’t have to answer to anybody, you don’t have to follow anyone else’s schedule. You can skate anytime you want to. You can have fun and do whatever you want.”

The crew’s growing popularity and success has helped to encourage more people to explore their interest in skating. “There was a BBC documentary about WAFFLESNCREAM in 2016. It was really intriguing to me that this was happening in Nigeria,” says Nasir Ahmed Achile, a writer and skater based in Lagos. “It felt like a community I would like to be a part of.” 20-year-old London-based designer and artist, Olu Slawn, who went on to co-found skateboarding inspired streetwear brand Motherlan, also got his start working with WAFFLESNCREAM. He remembers the experience fondly. “When I met Jomi, he helped me integrate into a community of skaters in Lagos,” Slawn explains. “There weren’t so many of us at first. Later, we grew to a group of 10 or 15 people. To us that, that was a lot.”

While that number has skyrocketed in recent years, there are still many social and structural challenges to skateboarding in Lagos. One of the biggest difficulties skaters face is the lack of appropriate surfaces to train on, as well the city’s poor road conditions. “We will constantly be a work in progress until we get more dedicated skating surfaces. That’s the only way to really mature as a community,” says Nasir. “We can only get to a certain level practicing on flat surfaces.” Boluwatife adds that the authorities at the National Stadium in Surulere have been hostile towards skaters in the past due to the long-held perception of skateboarders as miscreants and rascals. “We’ve been sent away from here a lot of times. They told us that we shouldn’t come here to skate. We used to have proper training obstacles but we were asked to take everything away. I think some things were even confiscated.”

For all the subversive and progressive leanings of skating in Lagos, it still remains a male-centric activity. This said, a concerted effort is being made to encourage female participation in the sport. Blessing Ewona, a 25-year-old model and skater, is leading the drive after experiencing discrimination while skating herself. “When I started skating, even some of my friends said: ‘what are you doing? Don’t do this thing, you are a girl. It’s for men,’”she recalls. “Sometimes when I’m skating along the road, women stop me to tell me that I should not be a skater. It’s just because I’m one of only a few women doing it. If they saw five or six girls skating, I don’t think they’d tell them to stop it.”

In April last year, Blessing started an Instagram account to connect with other female skaters and share videos of her training progress. Encouraged by the positive response to her page, she set up Dencity, a skateboarding crew for women and other marginalized identities in Lagos. “I didn’t realize that there were a lot of girls in different states, not just in Lagos!” Blessing exclaims. “There were other girls in Port Harcourt and Abuja.” There is now a Dencity WhatsApp group to support skateboarders and foster a sense of community. “We all skate together, create stuff together, do whatever and just have fun,” says Blessing. “I have this friend who’s a great artist. Whenever we skate together, she does some paintings of us after. Sometimes we just go out and have drinks. That’s really what I want. A community that feels like a family.”