Vagabonds!

VAGABONDS! is a tumultuous and unexpectedly joyous novel of oppression and defiance among the people and spirits of Lagos.

Lagos is a city for all. You’re not more important because you’re alive or because you see this way up or because you walk with your legs and breathe from your face. My point here is this: you share this place with flesh and not-flesh, and it’s just as much their city as it is yours.

Èkó, the spirit of Lagos, and his loyal minion named Tatafo are our guides in a whirlwind tour of Lagos, taking us deep into the hearts, minds, and bodies of its inhabitants. They weave trouble through the city’s streets and through the lives of the ‘vagabonds’ powering modern Nigeria: the unseen, the displaced, the queer, women and children. In this world, girls and women slip in and out of their bodies and their skins, men lose their heads and their souls; they all draw in the city’s chaotic, dark energy and breathe it back out again, creating new ways of living in the process.

VAGABONDS! is inspired by the real, legal definition of ‘vagabonds’ found in Nigeria’s Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act and is a tribute to all those who live their lives joyfully and unabashedly in the face of the hypocrisy of the law. It is a sharp stick poking at modern Nigerian capitalism, and corruption. Most of all, it is a celebration of queerness in all its forms.