A tiny little peeve of mine—so tiny that on most days it’s just a single fruit fly that passes my eyesight and I throw the entire banana away immediately and forget—is when people pronounce ‘Studio Styles’ as studio [different kind of styles], not studio [styles as in someone’s name].
Part of it is that when they pronounce Styles as the first, I imagine they are thinking of this work as decorative, and this forecloses their imagination/openness to imagine the substance of this space. To be sure, decoration is not a lesser aim, but it’s just not what I’m doing here. That mis-seeing brings out a glint of the angry tiger’s rage inside me. Very briefly… because I remember they probably don’t know or aren’t curious enough or don’t care enough, and that’s not a crime.
So who then is Styles?
2011 or so. I was sitting in the multi-purpose events hall in my secondary school with about three-quarters of the student body after lunch one school day. It was a hot afternoon. Most of us had the itis from lunch and, more pressingly, assignments, sleep, or laundry to catch up on. The vibe was ~frustrated~ mixed with that particular cynicism common back there/then that said: “lol, which one is this again? The school administration is always trying something it thinks is cool but is just so fucking lame and unnecessary and deaf to our actual grievances or desires.”
Me, I was having one of the most touching moments of my life, so much so that the memory I have is of looking at the room from an out-of-body, floating-above-the-crowd viewpoint. We were watching a rendition of Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona’s 1972 play Sizwe Bansi is Dead.
Most of the play takes place in the studio of a photographer called Styles.
Sibusiso Mamba as Sizwe Banzi.
Photo by Richard Hubert Smith.
Styles is sharp. He is funny. Witty. Talkative. Fashionable—he isn’t called Styles for nothing. Puts on a good show for his clients. I mean, a good show of himself and a good show of them. I mean, he offers them a vision of themselves that reminds them of their dignity, beauty, and respect. He is deeply empathetic. Wise. And growing in wisdom with every client. Entrepreneurial. Heavy inside his bones. Heavy because he is critically observant of the system, but the heaviness is inside because he is ultimately faithful about life and about the freedom of Black South Africans, just like him, under Apartheid.
He had quit a gruelling job at a Ford motor plant to run his own business, a business of seeing ordinary Black South Africans as more than a pass number, a threat, a labor unit—as the Apartheid government saw them—but as people with dreams, agency, dignity and style. His business was to carry their dreams through photography. (The same photography that had gotten the real-life Ernest Cole exiled for his photobook House of Bondage just six years before this play premiered.) Running his studio let Styles practice being a self-sovereign person despite Apartheid.
*
The gist of the play is that Sizwe Bansi comes to Styles’s studio to get a passport photograph. Sizwe had come to the city of Port Elizabeth from his rural hometown looking for work, but his search was unsuccessful. Right before he was due to leave Port Elizabeth, he stumbled upon a dead man’s body and saw the man’s work permit, the very thing that Sizwe needs to be able to stay in the city so he can get a job and feed his family. Sizwe decides to take the man’s identity Robert Zwelinzima, and so Sizwe Bansi has to die so that Robert Zwelinzima continues to live, albeit in another body. Another face. The very face and body Styles has now been tasked to photograph.
*
The story and the idea of the man Styles stewed in my head throughout that decade. And as 2019 came to an end with me in grad school, feeling existentially out of place in my own life, just as much as I felt in the cold, beautiful, and polished stiff upper lip of my university, I saw no other option than to quit grad school and go become Styles, in the form that my own life could allow.
On the day I submitted my suspension-of-studies form, my friend H asked me in the common room of his accommodation building, “So what will you do when you go back to Nigeria?”
I replied something like, “I really don’t know what it will look like, but I’m calling it Studio Styles. I want to see how far I can go in using all these frustrations I have.”
I remember there was a lot of hand-wringing to explain what I didn't yet have the language for. I do now, and it is that I wanted to understand:
what it would take for me to study Nigeria in Nigeria with other Nigerians in the rich, deep, critical, and joy-of-learning way I had enjoyed in UWC and undergrad,
and what it would take to find the resources—in cash and kind—such an endeavour requires.
I returned in 2020 to complete my master's, where I began studying the 1980s Structural Adjustment Programs and informal workers in West Africa. That subject matter remained a key area of my work in my 2021–2025 period, from my collaboration with Sa’eed Husaini on the Archives of Nigerian Left/Radicalism project, to my Sweet Medicine podcast on the impact of the SAPs on Nigeria’s humanities industry. Sweet Medicine has now taken me down a wider path. Even though one of my fundamental beliefs is that humanity finds ways to attend to its ever-changing needs, and for everything lost, something is gained, I can’t help but feel like we’re shrinking something vital to society’s wellbeing with funds for the humanities being cut down all around the world. And so, these days, I find myself with new dreams related to this problem/opportunity: a library/public education centre where I can activate my ideas about education for liberation (which is really just the old dream, given form to), and a humanities endowment serving Nigeria and other African countries.
Styles was a practitioner of concrete freedom. An every-single-day revolutionary, seeing his people—and offering them a vision of themselves—as more than a number, a threat, or a labor unit, but rather as people worthy of curiosity and self-determination.
All with delight—and style!
