Producer: Tolulope Itegboje
Director: Tolulope Itegboje
Genre: Documentary
Year of release: 2019
Tolulope Itegboje’s poignant and heartfelt film, Awon Boyz opens with a definition of success but it is not the one you are used to.
According to Uchman, success is finding what you are looking for at any given time.
What is he looking for, this thick set Igbo man with thick lips? He wants the freedom to eke out a living, albeit a precarious one hustling on the streets of Lagos.
Uchman is an area boy, a street hustler with a baby mama and a daughter. “I am happy for the life I am living,” he says staring straight into the camera. “I am living a very free life.”
But how happy and free can a life be when it is circumscribed by poverty and lack and deprivation. How happy can life be in the ghetto?
This is one of the questions at the heart of this stirring and visceral documentary film, written, produced and directed by Tolu Itegboje. Executive produced by advertising maven, Steve Babaeko, it is the latest offering from Zero Degrees.
The film which tracks the goings and comings of eight area boys across three Lagos ghettoes provides us a handle for interrogating and understanding who an area boy is, where they come from and what motivates them.
In what ugly smithy are these scarred and often toothless street dwellers forged? Uchman, always voluble, has a thesis and it has to do with the road not taken.
“I can tell you categorically that 70% of the people you find on the streets of Lagos deviated from their original plans.”
But it is not always so. Ete beat his own path to the streets without help. With his father dead, the family relocates to Ondo but the provincial and sedate pace of Ondo is not to Ete’s taste and so he returns to Lagos where, by his own admission, he steals from teachers, steals from classmates and steals from neighbours.
His shenanigans lead him straight to the street where he now calls home even though he has achieved some success – “I get children and I get house. My house dey for Ifo and rent na N30,000 for one year.”
Volume came to Lagos from the north. After seeing his city of Kano riven by religious violence, he comes to Lagos to chase his dreams as an artist. He checks into a hotel and lives it up until one day he realizes he has run out of money and unable to secure lodging in any of the rooms, he sleeps outside. When he wakes up, he discovers that he has been cleaned out – no phone, no money, no jewelry.
So, Volume joins them because he can’t beat them and in no time becomes “the man who arranges bitches for niggas.”
Today, Volume, with his fresh skin and beautiful locks is an area boy who makes a fairly decent living hawking female flesh and self-produced paintings.
Onigho believes that to call him an area boy is to insult him. “It is an understatement to call me an area boy. If I dress now come outside you go sabi who I be?” he asks.
He tells a story that captures the quick thinking and resourcefulness needed to survive on the streets.
A man sees him and says he wants to buy a puppy (and for those who do not know, Lagos is probably the only city in the world where you can buy a dog on a street corner.) Onigho says, of course I can get you the dog. The man returns the next day, asks for his account number and wires N80,000 to Onigho.
“So, the man paid money to me but there was a problem, I did not have the puppy,” he says with a laugh his eyes twinkling.
He goes in search of the particular breed, pays for it, delivers to the man and makes a profit.
Watching Awon Boyz one gets the impression that the streets are often tribe agnostic. No one really cares where you are from so long as you can stake your claim on the street, which is why an igbo boy like Ugonna with his raspy Yoruba accent would appropriate Oshodi as his own telling us that you don’t mess with Oshodi boys.
Tolulope Itegboje’s film grapples with a tough subject. Area boys are a Lagos menace. They are seen as thugs and thieves and pick pockets but in telling their story, he does not exploit their situation for cheap gain and neither does he judge. His directorial approach is to observe and present leaving the viewers to make their own judgements.
The story of Awon Boyz is also in many ways the story of Lagos, of fractured dreams and misshapen destinies, of corrupt policemen and an unforgiving landscape.
The writer/director’s narrative style and the stories he chooses to present help humanize these rough living, weed smoking, street hustlers by showing their softer sides.
For almost all of them who have children, the coming of new life seems to present an opportunity for righting the wrongs they have done.
When Yobo, who says he did “not come to Lagos to sell red oil and yellow garri” talks about his woman, his face is transformed and he is a young man like any other in the full grip of affection. He says the birth of his baby was the “happiestest momentest day of my life” while for Uchman, the announcement of his baby’s birth was a cue for a celebration and confirmation of his street cred.
“I did not spend a dime. Na turn up. I got men!”
But the street is not just hustle and smarts. The street as Ete confesses is a battle field and he must know.
Ete has a face that looks like a map drawn by a mad man and his body is no better. After telling a story of being beaten within an inch of his life, Ete says with regret “I hate all the scars but street na battle field.”
Agamma, a habitue of The New Afrika Shrine tells a story about Lion and Deji and it is one of the saddest street stories you will ever hear.
It is a Thursday and Femi Kuti has just finished his show. Lion buys some suya and as he spreads it out to eat, Deji dips in and snags a piece of cabbage. Lion is incensed. He punches Deji who falls and cracks his skull open. Deji bleeds out and Lion tries to run. Area boys who have witnessed the incident grab him. Lion ends up in jail and distraught at having killed his friend starts pounding his head against the wall of his cell and eating his own excreta.
Lion dies a few months after killing his friend.
The area has claimed another boy!
