Inua Ellams was walking through the streets of Lagos, the bustling former capital of Nigeria, when he began noticing a recurring phrase, spray-painted on to the sides of homes. “This house is not for sale,” it read. “Beware of 419.”
The number refers to section four, chapter 19 of the Nigerian criminal code, which specifically deals with fraud – obtaining goods or property by false pretences – and the warnings were painted on houses to deter conmen who would access empty properties and sell them without the owner’s consent. Now the criminal code reference has become a catch-all term for Nigerian cons and illicit financial activity.
The most famous form 419 takes in the west is the internet con, also known as the Spanish Prisoner, where the target (or “mark”) is offered a sizable cut from a sum of money that needs to be transferred out of the country, often by someone claiming to be working for a bank or a powerful figure (posing as the brother of the Nigerian dictator Sani Abacha was a popular tactic in the 00s). But in Nigeria the term has a universal meaning. “It covers everything,” Ellams tells me. “From a five-year-old trying to get extra sweets from his parents to a businessman embezzling money from his company.”
The playwright first noticed the signs back in 2013. He had been in town to research his hit play Barber Shop Chronicles, the award-winning tale about African men and their relationships, when the seed for his latest project was planted.
That project is The 419, a series of photographic portraits by Oluwamuyiwa “Logor” Logo and sonnets written by Ellams that combine to tell the story of how money and 419 culture weaves into every facet of Lagosian life. Actors will record Ellams’s sonnets so that you can hear the images “speak” as you gaze at them.
The story starts with Zaria, an area boy – a thug for hire – who sells weed, before we meet a trader called Ronke who needs a guide to get her through a local market. Things slowly move up the food chain of Lagosian society to show how the lives of work-site foremen, architects and even a governor are all connected by the money that flows through the country. “Four one nine is the lubricant that greases the wheels of Nigerian localised capitalism,” says Ellams.
Logor’s portraits will hang on the walls of the West Wing gallery at Somerset House in London and depict real-life Lagosians who Ellams met and interviewed and whose stories he stitched together into sonnets. Those verses bind together as a crown of sonnets – meaning each opening line can be combined to create a new sonnet. The language evolves as the story progresses and the subjects become more middle class and managerial, as pidgin makes way for more formal English. It’s a fittingly intricate setup for a work that unpicks a byzantine world of money, bartering and power.
Ellams and Logor aren’t the first people to find inspiration in the phenomenon of Nigeria’s informal economy. In 2000, the Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto argued in his book The Mystery of Capital that the key to unlocking Nigeria’s potential lay in formalising the informal economy that 419 scams help to power.
But Ellams’s new work has a different approach: perhaps, it posits, we’ve been thinking about 419 offences all wrong. What if this extra-legal system of money and power is entirely logical in a country without the kind of welfare state that Europeans take for granted?
“The more I went back to Nigeria as an adult, the more I realised that what we termed as 419 often is the necessity of surviving in a country where there isn’t any sort of social safety net,” he says. “And there’s always this need to try and make more money to survive, literally to survive.”
Ellams has a work-in-progress theory about the evolution of 419 in Nigeria. He thinks that the tradition of always ensuring you didn’t turn up to someone’s house empty-handed (a yam, or other produce, was expected as a gift) has morphed into the contemporary “cash is king” culture.
“I suspect that when capitalism came, the demand or the expectation for goods became the expectation for cash, then became a demand for cash,” he says. “Somewhere it got corrupted.”
The repurcussions of 419 culture are huge, linking the country with a reputation for corruption. The former prime minister Boris Johnson wrote in a Spectator column that young people had “an almost Nigerian interest in money”, while the current Conservative leader Kemi Badenoch announced that she no longer sees herself as Nigerian.
“There are several things I think about Badenoch, none of them are good,” says Ellams. “I think she’s suffered various identity crises, which have only deepened since she became leader of the Conservative party. And I think in her appeal to be more British, she’s trying to cut off things that are undivorceable from her being, from her physical being, from her identity.”
What does Ellams hope people take away from The 419? “Art at its most primal is simply a mirror,” he says. “It just shows you who you are and asks you to confront the world. And that’s what I’m trying to say: these are individuals, they live in a different place. That different place requires them to act in a specific way. How would you act if you were in those exact situations?”
