Identity; These are people of color
Year: 2019
Category: Portrait / Social Commentary
This series began with a jarring realization: I didn't know I was Black until someone told me I was. Growing up in Nigeria, surrounded by people who looked like me, race was never an identity I had to wear. It wasn't until I entered the Institute of African Studies, where conversations about colonialism, Pan-Africanism, and identity shaped the discourse, that I became conscious of "Blackness."
Here, I explore the irony of identity: how it is often only revealed in the presence of difference. In Nigeria, I was simply Kelvin. In Ilorin, I became Tiv. In a global context, I became Black. These portraits capture that layered discovery — of color, tribe, and self — as something both constructed and lived.
