Before Lagos became a city of millions, it was home to one man. And even then, there was heartbreak.
In *The First Lagos Man*, Anthony Azekwoh imagines the city's earliest inhabitant not as a conqueror, a king, or a founding hero, but as a man undone by love. Draped in a sea of red, he sits withdrawn from the world, his body folded into itself, his arms raised as though shielding himself from something that has already happened. His eyes, however, remain watchful. There is defiance in his sorrow, a quiet refusal to be completely overcome.
Behind him, a procession of ethereal figures emerges from a vast blue expanse. They appear to dance, to embrace, to exist in a world of movement and tenderness from which he has become estranged. Whether they are memories, spirits, or visions of a happiness now beyond his reach is left unresolved. Their weightlessness stands in contrast to the heaviness of his grief.
Born from Azekwoh's own experience of heartbreak and malaise, the painting transforms an intensely personal condition into something primordial. By placing sorrow at the beginning of Lagos's imagined history, the artist suggests that beneath the city's noise, ambition, romance, and relentless movement lies something far more ancient: the human longing to love and be loved in return.
Here, Lagos is not yet the sprawling metropolis we recognise. It is a landscape of emotion, a place where the mythology of a city begins with the vulnerability of a single man.
The first Lagos man has loved. He has lost. And despite being the first, he has already discovered one of the oldest truths of being human.
That even in a city full of people, a broken heart can make a man feel like the only person in the world.
