On Saturday, June 20th, a small crowd gathered at a converted room inside Padà, the guesthouse-turned-cultural-outpost in Onikan, Lagos, for the opening of A Luta Continua! Aesthetics of Popular Struggle in Nigeria. The free exhibition, organised in partnership with Archives of the Nigerian Left, also included an archiving workshop, a soft book launch and a […]
4 weeks ago
On Saturday, June 20th, a small crowd gathered at a converted room inside Padà, the guesthouse-turned-cultural-outpost in Onikan, Lagos, for the opening of A Luta Continua! Aesthetics of Popular Struggle in Nigeria. The free exhibition, organised in partnership with Archives of the Nigerian Left, also included an archiving workshop, a soft book launch and a roving exhibition, reflecting PARC’s preference for programming that invites participation rather than passive viewing.
The exhibition had already toured several states before arriving in Lagos: posters with raised fists, pamphlets calling on market women to “Wake Up,” photographs of student marches and union pickets from a Nigeria most of the room’s visitors never lived through. It is the kind of show that could easily exist as a single afternoon’s spectacle — a few hours of nostalgia for the politically curious, then packed away. At the Pan-African Research Centre (PARC), it is something closer to a thesis statement. Because the question PARC is actually asking isn’t “what should we exhibit?” — it’s “where can people in this city go to think?”
Padà was founded by Folayemi Brown and Jacob Fodio Todd as a guesthouse and social development space on Lagos Island. The name draws from the Yorùbá expression padà wá meaning “come back,” and the instinct behind it runs deeper than hospitality. Situated within one of Lagos’s most historically layered neighbourhoods, the space was conceived as a gathering point for curious minds from Nigeria and the diaspora alike, somewhere the act of returning might mean something.
That question has been gathering shape inside Padà since 2024, when the guesthouse began hosting occasional public activities built on three pillars —accessibility, the democratisation of knowledge, and a deliberate centring of African and Pan-African culture. By 2025, that impulse had a body. The team invited Lagos-based researchers to make use of a growing collection of books, records and audiovisual material, among them Philip Fagbeyiro, who would become PARC’s Programme Coordinator, and researcher Jini Agbu, brought in to imagine what a multi-sensory home for deep research inside Padà might actually look like —the final piece in the puzzle that has since taken shape as the Pan-African Research Centre.
In February, that vision opened its doors: Thursday to Saturday, 10am to 4 pm, for ₦1,000 a day or ₦5,000 a month. The centre communicates its programming and upcoming initiatives through a mailing list and its community Instagram page, the Padà People, and has already begun producing publications —among them the Padà Directory and the Brazilian Quarter— as a model for being generative with the materials housed within it. The publication’s Easter programme drew audiences to conversations around the neighbourhood’s layered history, illustrating the centre’s broader belief that research should circulate beyond shelves and into public life. That commitment to generating new conversations around African history and culture extends beyond its own publications. In recent months, PARC also hosted the Lagos launch of Alayo Akinkugbe’s Reframing Blackness: What’s Black about “History of Art”?, bringing discussions around art history, race and representation into the space.
The fee is cheap enough to read as symbolic, and that is precisely the point. In a city where rest, quiet, and focus have increasingly become amenities sold back to residents at a markup, PARC is saying the conditions for deep thought and stillness shouldn’t be a luxury good. Few public libraries in the city are in a state that invites use, and the ones that are tend to sit out of reach for the people who might benefit most from them. Lagos has no shortage of spaces offering wellness and escape, but they come with price tags that place them well beyond the reach of the general population. Democratising stillness, in PARC’s terms, means stripping it of the luxury category it has been placed into simply by virtue of living life in this city —making room for the slowness and quiet needed to think, to follow a line of inquiry to its end, to formulate something new. PARC isn’t positioning itself as a replacement for the city’s public infrastructure so much as a demonstration of what infrastructure built around the user, rather than the institution, might look like.
Agbu, now PARC’s Project Coordinator, spent two months in residency before PARC’s research floor existed in any concrete form, tasked with translating the collections space in Padà, which had functioned more as ambient cultural texture since its founding, into something with its own discipline and purpose. “More than a library,” she says, “a research centre holds possibility for the sustained development of projects and ideas.” A focus group held before the official launch, with key actors working across Lagos’s cultural heritage ecosystem, confirmed the appetite: what people were asking for wasn’t another third space so much as one that “prioritised access over exclusivity and intentioned process over polished finished product.” At that point, she says, it felt less like a choice and more like a duty to remain part of bringing it to life.
That distinction — process over product — runs through nearly every operational choice PARC has made since. There’s a PARC Guidance document, built from that early focus group and the team’s instincts, that governs how the space should be inhabited. Instead, the centre asks something smaller and more demanding. “We expect people to greet whoever walks in, return a misplaced book to its shelf, turn off a light no one is using anymore,” says Agbu. At a time when “community” has become an overused buzzword drained of meaning, this unspoken, unpoliced reciprocity, a real care for the collective, is what lies at the heart of PARC.
That philosophy has also informed its residency model. In May, artist Mimi Koku spent six weeks at Padà as part of a Moving Image Residency that culminated in a screening of Jean-Marie Téno’s Lieux Saints, followed by an open discussion with Lagos filmmakers, producers and other cultural practitioners. Rather than presenting the residency as a finished output, the programme foregrounded dialogue, exchange and the possibility of longer-term collaboration.
The same logic shaped the cataloguing process, which Agbu has spent months building out with her team and which remains unreleased to the public. A catalogue can serve the institution or the user, and the two needs don’t always align — the more granular the metadata, the easier it is for internal staff to organise, but the more complex the search becomes for an ordinary visitor. Her academic training at The University of Oxford was rooted in formal categorisation. At PARC, however, the challenge was to build a system shaped by how people naturally seek information, not one that forces them to learn an institution’s internal grammar. It is, in miniature, the same question the centre keeps returning to: who is a research space actually for, and what does it cost them to use it?
Stillness gets the same treatment. When PARC ran its founding focus group, the words that kept coming back —quiet, minimal distractions, comfort— sound, at first, like baseline expectations for any reading room. Agbu reads them as more loaded than that. “We often don’t realise how political those words can be,” she says. “Where does a labourer working twelve-hour shifts go to find rest in the commercial centres of Lagos? Or where does a trader who spends sun up to sun down in a bustling marketplace — with everyone from travelling salesmen to roadside preachers clamouring for audio space — go to find the silence needed to calculate their books at the day’s end? Nothing about Lagos is quiet, and yet so much brain power goes into simply navigating everyday life here.” The PARC is communicated as a quiet, phone-free zone, one of the few non-negotiables the centre is upfront about. As Agbu puts it: “A person coming to use the PARC usually already knows what they are there for — they came for what they required.”
If the research floor is PARC’s infrastructure, A Luta Continua! is an early indication of what that infrastructure is for. The exhibition sits inside a longer Padà tradition of pulling unheralded Nigerian and African histories back into public view, but its timing — among the centre’s first major public programmes — wasn’t incidental. The history of the Nigerian Left is often filed away as a story about party politics and electoral shifts. PARC’s read on it is broader: at its core, it is a record of how ordinary citizens organised to reclaim some say over their own communities and futures —a story the centre sees reflected in its own mission, just with archives standing in for ballots.
What the exhibition’s materials do that a textbook can’t is evoke an emotional response rather than simply convey information. Agbu is precise about the distinction. “I often say that while we are trained to focus on history for its political, economic and social revelations, we rarely ever interpret or read history for its affective capabilities as well,” she says. “Archives are special tools for this because they can reflect history in a way that feels more urgent and familiar.” It is one thing to know, abstractly, that working women have long organised for equal pay and protections; it is another entirely to see a poster of market women with fists raised and broken chains, calling for a national “Wake Up.” The gap between those two registers — between knowledge and recognition — is where PARC seems most interested in operating. “You get the sense that these people are not so far away from you, and that in fact you still share the same struggle, or the same joys. You stop trying to isolate, individualise and iconise yourselves and the present moment, and instead you can more clearly interrogate the collectivity of human experience.”
That same instinct shapes what Agbu identifies as still missing from Nigeria’s archive: not the speeches and military history that are comparatively easy to find footage of, but the texture of ordinary life. “It’s still close to impossible to find evidence of mundane Nigerian histories from as recent as the early 2000s,” she says — what broadcast television show congregated families in front of box sets in Enugu at 7 pm sharp every night, what music played on the radio home from school, how local communities organised in response to changing climate realities. There is still no comprehensive etymological corpus of Nigerian Pidgin, despite projections that it will be spoken by over 293 million people by 2050, making it one of the largest languages in the world. “These are the parts of history we have been convinced are not useful,” Agbu says, “and yet they represent the very soul of how a people responded and adapted to changing social realities.” The challenge is not a lack of interest so much as the absence of a framework to capture these histories in the first place —which is partly why oral history, as a method, keeps resurfacing in PARC’s talks about its own future.
It would be easy to read PARC’s wider programming — a clean-air workshop with Lagos City Zens Hub of Urban Better, recurring sessions with Noname Book Club, archive workshops with Archives of the Nigerian Left — as a calendar of disconnected moments. PARC is explicit about resisting exactly that framing. Its three core tenets are expanding access, democratising knowledge, and fostering engagement with Pan-African history and cultures. Programming proposals are filtered against all three through an end-to-end review process. Beyond that, the centre is deliberate about avoiding what it calls “singular moments” — events that do not leave room for continued engagement or further personal and collective development. The aim is for PARC to register not as a social club or a one-off experience, but as something stable and gradual, which, in turn, asks more of the people who use it. Collaborations go ahead only when real relationships, built around shared values, have had time to develop — and some, by design, simply need more time than either party would like.
The clean-air workshop is a useful illustration of what that philosophy looks like in practice. Rather than a single awareness-raising event, it trained young residents of Onikan —including many local to the Boyle Street area— in how to actually test air quality, log the data, and use it to engage the decision-makers and stakeholders who could act on it. Padà has committed to continuing to test the air quality around its own street. It is civic+ education with a deliverable attached, which is the register PARC seems to operate in most comfortably: less an institution hosting the public, more an institution trying to hand the public tools.
Ask founder Brown what he is actually chasing, and he doesn’t land on a single flagship programme or partnership. The ambition is structural: for PARC to function less as a destination and more as an incubator —a place where ideas take their first shape before scattering back out into the wider ecosystem, with the people who pass through eventually feeding something back in. It is a definition of success that resists the metrics most cultural spaces are measured by — footfall, virality, a marquee opening night — in favour of something slower and harder to capture. The hope, she says, is that the space continually inspires people based in Lagos year-round, and that they “do not feel like their intellectual, creative or civic potential is limited by life in Lagos.”
That, more than any single archive or workshop, is the case PARC is quietly making. Not that Lagos needs another cultural venue —it has plenty—but that it needs somewhere that asks nothing of its visitors except the discipline to use it well. In return, the Pan-African Research Centre at Padà gives back something the city rarely offers for free: room to think.
All photos are by Emmanuel Nwafor
