Wale Adeyemi MBE (@whereswale ) started with a stall at Camden Market in 1995. The brand (@bywaleadeyemi ) sat somewhere between the kerb and the boutique, the UK streetwear scene was small, and the industry was not sure what to make of him.
Thirty years later, he has dressed Beyonce, the Beckhams, Rihanna, and Missy Elliott. His Graffiti Collection is in the V&A. He holds an MBE, and he is still independently owned and run from East London.
The full conversation is on getunruly.com.
Cover Photo by Adam Fussell
Earlier this year, our editor, Tobi searched Google for a dedicated print magazine store in Lagos. He found nothing clear.
That search is what started this essay. Because the infrastructure problem and the demand problem are related, but they are not the same thing. Nigerians are not searching for the kind of print that used to exist. That is not the same as saying no one wants what is being made now.
The publications doing it in Nigeria today, The Republic, DADA, Gida Journal, Native, Deeds, Unruly, and others are all operating from the same understanding: print is no longer a distribution medium. It is a commitment. The reader who buys it is not buying convenience. They are buying permanence.
The full argument, including the economics, the history, and more on getunruly.com.
Nollywood’s romantic comedies have spent years oscillating between high-octane glamour and slapstick comedy. Call of My Life does something quieter. It does not try to convince you that love is perfect. It lets you feel it.
Written by and starring Uzoamaka Power, directed by Dammy Twitch. In cinemas May 15.
The full review is on getunruly.com.
There is a particular kind of post Nigerian Twitter (now known as X) knows well. It says something designed to be wrong in a specific and irritating way. Within minutes, the replies flood in. By evening, it has thousands of engagements. The person who posted it made money from the interaction. This is not accidental. It is a business model.
Being talked about and mattering are not the same thing.
The full argument is on getunruly.com.
Nigeria has built one of the most remarkable creative economies on the planet. N728.80 billion contributed to GDP in a single quarter. 4.2 million workers. A film industry, a music genre, and a fashion scene that the world is actively paying attention to.
The people funding that economy domestically are the same people most vulnerable to AI-driven job displacement. And the middle class was already shrinking before AI entered the conversation.
The full argument is on getunruly.com.
According to the Migration Policy Institute’s 2024 data, 67 percent of Nigerian immigrants in the US are college graduates, the highest rate of any sub-Saharan African immigrant group. Nigeria also placed five firms on CNBC and Statista’s 2025 global fintech top 300, more than any other African country.
The temptation is to credit the hardship. To say that Nigeria forges people in ways that softer systems cannot. There is something true in that. But there is something else also true: the Nigerians who leave are not a cross-section of the country. The visa route filters for the most credentialed, the most adaptive, the most institutionally legible. What the data captures is who was allowed to leave, not what Nigeria is actually capable of producing.
The full argument is on getunruly.substack.com. It’s free.
Lagos is one of the hottest cities in the world to live in. Some of that is climate. A significant amount of it is architecture.
Between 1990 and 2020, the city’s vegetation cover shrank by nearly 400 square kilometres as concrete replaced it. The buildings going up today have small windows, flat roofs, and solid walls that absorb heat through the day and release it through the night. Pre-colonial Nigerian architecture did none of this. The Igbo compound, the Hausa courtyard, the Yoruba open plan: all of them were designed specifically to manage the climate they were built in. That knowledge was abandoned, and the city is living with the consequences.
The full argument is on getunruly.com.
Ruby Okoro (@rubyokoro ) does not go into a shoot with a rigid shot list. He goes in looking for a frequency. Not constructing an image but allowing one to surface.
Born in Enugu, raised between Rome and Lagos, entirely self-taught. His work has moved from the streets of Lagos to the Gothenburg Museum of Art, from the Coke Studio campaign to exhibition walls in Zurich and Milan. The emotional compass he carries into every room stays the same.
The full conversation is on getunruly.com.
Before Boyedoe (@boyedoe_ ) was a brand, it was a way of seeing. Growing up in Kumasi surrounded by Kente cloth and Ashanti visual culture, David Kusi Boye-Doe (@iamboyedoe ) learned early that clothing communicates: identity, history, belonging.
Everything the brand touches carries that understanding. Sankofa is not a concept Boyedoe borrows at launch season. It is a working method applied from the first moment a collection begins to take shape.
The full conversation is on getunruly.com.
Iyunade Judah’s (@iyuna.ca ) grandmother vanished without explanation in the early 2000s. His family made peace with it through a story about ascension. It took twenty years for someone to tell him the truth.
Àwọ̀ Ojú Ọ̀run is the film he built from that silence. It premieres at Anthology Film Archives, New York, on May 2nd.
The full conversation by @tems_a_dayo is on getunruly.com.
In January 1977, Lagos hosted the largest Pan-African gathering in history. 17,000 artists, writers, musicians, and scholars from 55 nations. 29 days. A colloquium debating the future of Black intellectual life. Stevie Wonder playing drums in FESTAC Village. Fela Kuti running a counter-festival at the Shrine three kilometres away.
It has never happened again. The archive is still being recovered. The building that housed it fell into disrepair and has only just been restored.
What FESTAC built in 29 days, and what the continent did with it after, is a story worth telling. The full argument is on getunruly.com.
Cover photo by Roy Lewis.
On a weekday morning in Bacongo, a man drives a taxi through the streets of Brazzaville. He finishes his shift, goes home, and opens his wardrobe. What comes next is not a change of clothes. It is a transformation.
The Sapeurs of Congo have been making this argument since the 1920s: that beauty is a right and not a privilege, that elegance can coexist with hardship without diminishing either. They call themselves the Society of Ambiance-Creators and Elegant People. The streets of Brazzaville are their runway.
The full conversation is on getunruly.com.
