Meet Oscar Ekponimo The Nigerian Allievating Hunger With His App

Something shifts in the air when you walk into a Lagos rave. There is, for lack of better words, a quiet radicalism that settles over you. A knowing that here, you can move however you want, move however you like, because everyone else is doing the same. “Outside, I calculate every gesture, monitor my voice, watch my walk,” Deji, a 26-year-old graphic designer, tells The NATIVE. “But when I attend raves, I just exist and I dance. Raves taste like freedom.”

This feeling, the opportunity to finally breathe without reservations, is what these spaces offer to so many young Nigerians, particularly those marginalized within society. In a city where authenticity often carries devastating consequences, the thrumming basslines of underground raves have carved out rare pockets where vigilance can momentarily surrender to abandon, where calculation yields to expression, and the perpetual performance of conformity dissolves into the honest fluidity of movement.

A Community Built On Freedom

Cultural historians trace the beginning of Nigeria’s electronic music evolution to the mid-2010s, when local DJs began experimenting with blends of traditional African percussion and global electronic production. It started with house parties. WhatsApp & Telegram flyers passed like secrets. Intimacy mattered more than scale. It wasn’t about clout or big venues. It was about creating a space that felt safe. A space where people who often felt out of place in the real world could finally belong.

These gatherings were built around a shared love for the genre, a communal appreciation for sounds that weren’t mainstream. People found one another through EDM playlists and mutual connections, creating communities anchored by musical taste first. The spaces were accepting by nature, rejecting judgment and embracing differences. Queer people naturally gravitated toward this openness, finding rare solace in venues that didn’t question gender expression or sexual orientation. The rave community became a refuge not by explicit design, but through an organic understanding that everyone deserved to feel comfortable and free.

Gbadebo, a filmmaker who has been involved with the Lagos rave scene since 2019, recalls the early days fondly. “The buzzing DJs then were DJ Aye, DJ Combs, and Tigran,” he says. “It was low-key, chill community gatherings. There used to be mats and rugs spread on the floors during early raves, where people would lie between sets. It was lowkey, but it felt like home.” These spaces became and remain essential for queer people. Places where you could kiss who you wanted, wear what you wanted, move freely, and love loudly. The dance floor became one of the few places where it felt possible to exist on your terms within the melodrama of Lagos.

Back then, it was simple. You showed up with your drink, found your people, and flowed. 

What Even Is This Sound?

What struck me most at my first rave was how present everything felt. People were there for the music. They screamed genuinely at beat drops, at brilliant transitions, at that one unexpected song. It felt like communion. Like everyone was holding their breath for that exact moment. The soundscape is difficult to box in. It borrows from everywhere—Afrohouse, Amapiano, and weird soulful remixes of Afropop songs. It’s layered, warm, and often bizarre. It loops when you expect it to break. It stretches where it should snap. It doesn’t ask to get under your skin, it just does.

The scene still sits at the margins of Nigerian music, described as too “alternative” or  too “strange.” That strangeness holds its kind of magic. Strange, beautiful music for strange and beautiful people. The kind that gets side eyes at house parties or a confused “what kind of music is that?” But maybe that question feels familiar, because what kind of music is that, really, if not the perfect soundtrack for people who’ve always been asked: “Why are you so different?”

You Can Always Tell

You can always tell a raver from a Lagos outsider. Or at least, I can. The fashion is different.

Bolder colors. Intentional clashes. People wear things that might be seen as “abnormal” anywhere else—fishnet vests, platform boots, mesh, metallics, glitter, lace. What might be mocked on the street feels perfectly ordinary here.

Rave fashion, which intersects heavily with the alté aesthetic, has long been criticized online. But in these spaces, people dress without fear of mockery. And that alone draws many in. Still, as rave culture expands rapidly, new faces arrive—some merely curious, others less understanding—which threatens the safe and accepting environment that initially defined these gatherings.

StyledByNasky, a rising Lagos stylist, explains this phenomenon: “There’s no limit to self-expression here, no policing of it,” she says. “For me, rave fashion embodies freedom, fun, and comfort.” She points out that practicality is as important as style. “It’s usually warm, and things get very heated, so comfort is essential. The choice of shoes, the amount of skin exposed, the selection of breathable fabrics; every element serves both style and functionality within the rave setting.”

Going further, she says that rave fashion in Lagos represents an intentional defiance of cultural norms around dress and presentation. In her words, what we see is a “visual language that communicates belonging to a counterculture.” The clothes become flags of identity rather than mere aesthetics. Oversized silhouettes, gender-neutral styling, and DIY alterations all signal a rejection of mainstream Nigerian fashion constraints.

For queer folks and other marginalized communities, these clothes transcend aesthetics. They become armor and announcement simultaneously. “Before, they felt safe dressing however they wanted, breaking gender stereotypes,” Nasky adds. “But now, in a country where dressing ‘weird’ or outside norms is frowned upon, these spaces don’t feel as safe anymore. It’s exposing.”

These spaces offered something rare: the ability to perform gender—or avoid performance entirely—without punishment. To show up in the truest version of yourself and still be enough. In a country where stepping outside of gender norms can mean ridicule, violence, or worse, the freedom to dress as you feel has always been a gift. But that safety now feels less certain.

The Shadow of Surveillance

More than ever, Nigeria’s Same Sex Marriage Prohibition Act of 2014 looms large over queer communities. Beyond banning same sex marriage, it criminalizes public displays of affection between same sex people, advocacy for queer rights, and even queer-friendly gatherings. Penalties can stretch to 14 years in prison.

The economy is withering, as it has been for years. But now, it feels like it’s on its last breath. Traditional nightlife is following the same path because purchasing power shrinks every day. Nobody can afford to order expensive bottles of alcohol anymore, and regular night crawlers are hunting for cheaper alternatives. Underground raves have emerged as a viable option, much to the detriment of the tight-knit communities that built them.

“Back then, there weren’t tickets; you just came and made ‘donations,’” Gbadebo recounts fondly. Today, a few raves still run on donations, but most have leaned into steep pricing. “Prices are now crazy,” Gbadebo admits. “I don’t attend races much ever since I paid 8k and had to stand from 11 to 4 am. I even saw a flyer for a rave with tables for reservation.”

In April 2025, a local online blog threatened to leak the location of Group Therapy, one of Lagos’s most beloved, queer-inclusive raves. The post was laced with moral panic and targeted language. It didn’t go viral, but it didn’t have to. In a city like Lagos, where rumors move faster than facts, it only takes one post to make people feel unsafe. 

The damage wasn’t physical, but it was deeply felt. It was the first time some attendees realized just how exposed they were. “I didn’t even wait to see if it was serious,” Faith, a regular attendee, told me. “I just didn’t go. I couldn’t risk it. All it takes is one wrong person showing up.” Even after the post was taken down, the damage lingered. For queer people who rely on these spaces to feel normal, it was a reminder that the safety they’d built was still fragile. 

“An attack on Group Therapy is actually an attack on the rave scene in Lagos,” one tweet said. “God forbid that actually happens. You cannot take out queer people from raves, it started from them as a refuge in music. We literally do not bother anybody”.

For some, these risks are worth it. For others, the threat is too high.

Holding On To A Fragile Future

Lagos raves are gaining popularity. As more people know about them, many more want in, and the energy is infectious. There’s talk about raves becoming mainstream. When that happens, many queer folks and original community members start retreating, creating smaller, more exclusive gatherings. These “mini-raves” become refuges within refuges — intimate, secret, and protected.

The question for organizers is: As raves gain cadence and popularity, is it worth risking losing the original community that gave them meaning? The people who built the scene, who know why it matters, who rely on it as a lifeline? Are we ready to welcome everyone — even those who might not understand the deeper value these spaces represent?

Rave culture in Lagos stands as a form of resistance, a reclamation of identity, and a fight for safe space in a world that too often denies it. It testifies to the resilience of a community that refuses to be erased. In a city as complex and vibrant as Lagos, where the stakes are high and the risks real, raves remain one of the few places where marginalized people can truly be themselves, if only for a night.

In these charged, fleeting hours, queer Nigerians reclaim what the world keeps trying to steal: joy, safety, belonging. By dawn, the masks of caution are back on. The city resumes. But somewhere, someone is already planning the next one.

Somewhere, safety is being rehearsed. In another place, the bass is warming up.

One of the more pressing topics of discussion amongst party-goers today is the curious question of why people don’t dance at gatherings anymore. While partying, theoretically, includes other activities like talking to strangers, getting drinks, and conducting business, it is primarily geared towards dancing and living in the moment. 

These days, however, there seems to be more emphasis on these other activities than actual partying. People are doom scrolling on the dancefloor or are more occupied with trying to take the perfect selfie. Enter: True Clrs, a travelling party series launched by Adeola Kofoworade and Menab Tesfu that aims to bring the dance back to the parties by centering on the richness of African sound and the communities that love it. 

“We found that there were a lot of parties in Dallas that had cultures that didn’t encourage dancing or interaction between customers,” Kofoworade tells The NATIVE about the inspiration for True Clrs over a Google Meet conversation in July. “Seeing how parties were being thrown in L.A., New York and other places in Europe, we thought to bring that idea here to Texas.” 

Since its inception in 2023, True Clrs has hosted over 15 editions of its travelling party series across cities in the United States. In addition to a dedicated real-life following that engages with their series, they have also cultivated a robust online presence thanks to their meticulous branding and active CRLS YouTube page that features various thrilling DJ sets. 

Ahead of the latest Houston edition of True Clrs, which featured ODUMODUBLVCK and Sarz headlining the Global Sounds Stage and others like Native SOUND SYSTEM’s DJ Sholz, Lowkey Ade, and Khulumars on DJ duties, we caught up with Adeola Kofoworade to discuss how they’ve managed to position True Clrs as the go-to party series in Texas, what makes them unique, and what their long-term plans are. 

What inspired True Clrs?

We originally started True Clrs about two years ago because we noticed that there was a space in Dallas that we could infiltrate. We found that there were a lot of parties in Dallas that had cultures that didn’t encourage dancing or interaction between customers. That’s something pretty notable down here in the South. In clubs, there are a lot of sections and no big dance floors, so people are stuck in their sections without really interacting with other people. Seeing how parties were being thrown in L.A., New York and other places in Europe, we thought to bring that idea here to Texas.  At first, we started with Afrobeats and Amapiano-centred parties, but then we started branching out to other genres as well. 

How have you been able to position True Clrs as one of the go-to diaspora-focused party series in the U.S, especially in Texas?

We try to be innovative. We always try to make every event better than the last one. So if you came to one of our events the previous month, we try to switch things up and make sure you have a better experience the next time you come. We do this by booking notable DJs from around the country and even around the world. We also started booking a lot more talents. Last year, we had Lancey Foux; we had Sholz, who brought ODUMODUBLVCK; and we also had Skyla Tyla. This year, we’re looking to do more of that so we can always give our audience a notable experience. 

How do you balance catering to the African diaspora with appealing to a broader audience that might be unfamiliar with the music and experience? 

There are a couple of ways we try to do this. First, since we have monthly events, we try to switch between different genres and vibes. So let’s say, one month we have an Afrobeats and Amapiano party, the next month we could switch to this concept that we call the R&B rave. In the R&B rave, we basically play all types of R&B music, whether it’s old, contemporary or alternative, and we curate a rave-like setting. 

We also run this concept where we have like two or three stages playing different genres. We could have one stage playing Amapiano, the other R&B and the other more global sounds. I guess it just depends on the venue we use. But we’re able to offer different experiences even at the same party. 

Are there any other unique elements that set the True Clrs experience apart from other nightlife events?

One of our main appeals is recording DJ content. I know DJ content has become saturated recently, but what separates us is that a lot of our content is very genuine. It’s not made up or staged. We get real-time reactions from people. A lot of the time, people don’t even know they’re being filmed. Our content makes us notable, and it’s helped push our brand forward.

Since you began True Clrs, how have you been able to cultivate a strong online presence as well as a thriving community in real life? 

With our online presence, it’s really been our content that has helped put us out there. We’ve had a couple of reels or YouTube sets go viral, and that’s definitely helped our online presence. Also, just being the kind of people we are, we take our time when it comes to branding True Clrs. We get a lot of feedback from people regarding our content, and we take it into account moving forward. For our real-life community, my partner and I had already been heavily involved in the entertainment space and the African community here before we began True Clrs. So we got a lot of support when we first started, and we’ve just kept building from there. 

What’s the long-term vision for True Clrs? Are there any plans to expand into other U.S. cities or even international markets? 

Definitely. Last year, we had our first international event in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. My partner was up there for a holiday, and we decided to throw an event there. In the future, we do plan to expand to other countries, whether in Africa or Europe. With our connections with talents like Lancey Foux, Skyla Tyla, we’re also looking to see if we can put together festivals. That’s what’s on the horizon for True Colors. 

What would you say to someone who’s never been to a True Clrs party? What should they expect, and why should they come?

Our goal is community curation through music. So what I would tell someone who’s never been to a True Clrs party is they should come with an open mind. They should trust our DJs because they might hear songs they’ve never heard before and still be able to have a good time. Also, while we don’t force people to interact, we encourage people to interact and dance while listening to good DJs.

Carl Terver Reflects On Benue, the Yelewata Killings, and the Politics Of Naming In An Earnest Op-Ed. 

     1.

These days, I hardly remember I am a poet. Only in momentary phases do I recall I am one. My thoughts constantly betray me, taking the form of essays. These phases, when I recall I am a poet, come because of the emotions of love or of war. When I speak of war, there are the wars every man faces within himself. And then there is the war Nigeria brings to your doorstep: the kind that inspires sad, grief-laden poems or such that, through the numbness of it, makes you find ways to understand what is going on in your country. It is this second war that inspired me to write, in 2019, in a poem titled “This Blood,” that “My country has an alternative Stock Exchange / that counts dead bodies, / the more the bodies / the shares bought, / that raised Patience’s Cry: / This blood we are sharing!” It was a response, months later, to the killings of 73 persons in Benue on the New Year’s Eve of 2018, whose victims were interred in a state-organised mass burial that came to be known as Black Thursday. 

    2.

In 2015, I wrote my first short story, which, after several re-titling (and editing), would become “Once Upon A Time in Jato-Aka,” now published in The Stockholm Review of Literature. It was inspired by a beautiful experience of my visit that year to Jato-Aka, a town in Kwande LGA, Benue, which borders Cameroon in the Mandara Mountain range. Jato-Aka is a small, sleepy agrarian town, and the road that leads into it suddenly stops in the town square. 

With an artistic eye, I imagined the arrival of something extraordinary to spice up the people’s lives, or the town itself, and the idea of a retired general came to mind. I drafted this into the story and painted the picture of what such slow, border towns looked like, having once lived the life of a farm boy in the countryside myself, depicting the sedentary, the communal, the calm, and the peacefulness. Then I ended the story with a cliffhanger that even I didn’t know was an apt example of the artistic unconscious at work: “Then one day, it happened again, the pestilence of locusts that struck every year, unexpectedly. In the time the old General was back, it had not happened. The Fulanis came.”

3.

For years, I was disturbed by this ending. It felt incomplete. It felt prejudiced. It felt phobic and eager to misrepresent and profile the entire Fulani ethnic group as a plague, as aggressors, when I was supposed to believe in the pluralistic multi-ethnicity of the so-called Nigerian project. Not only that, I judged that being Nigerian means living among other ethnicities and respecting them. But I was also aware of the fact that I have friends; I know and have met a good number who are as human as I am, with the daily worries of life, as feeding their children, paying school fees, and affording transportation. 

I struggled with whatever justification I could contrive to make the story work, to make it not look like, “Oh, here is a Tiv writer who has written to paint the Fulanis bad.” Eventually, I let go, refusing to be held back by what, in retrospect, I feel was simply too much correctness in the face of confronting a real problem that was not simply a short story. And I used a character in it to ask a question which remains baffling: “Why should one man have more right to kill another?” In an earlier version of the story, the question was, “Why should a group of Nigerians have more right to kill other Nigerians?” 

4.

The question now, away from fiction, but to the crisis of what is now becoming the daily barbaric killings of Nigerians—not just in Benue, but in Plateau, Kaduna, Nasarawa, Zamfara, Borno, and wherever pleases the homicidal urges of these terrorists—is what are these killings for? But it is another question rendered meaningless by the indifferent climate that has become Nigeria for more than a decade now. Because the government has refused to fight insecurity, creating a loophole for further insecurity, which now appears glaringly to us (not that we never suspected it) to be a deliberate ploy to cause confusion and artificial helplessness. To solve a security crisis of this nature, the state has to identify it, classify it for what it is, before setting the right apparatus to combat it. This has not been done, and in the years these killings have continued, it has been misidentified as herdsmen-farmers clashes. News outlets, without on-the-ground investigations, have peddled this narrative whenever there’s another case of killings where, often, the victims are unarmed Nigerians, sometimes killed in their beds. 

The mistake so far, I believe, was the Benue state government’s tolerance in not naming the problem until past governor Samuel Ortom’s accusations of a Fulani expansionist threat in the state, which led him in 2017 to enact an anti-open grazing legislation known as the Open Grazing Prohibition and Ranches Establishment Law. But to some of us, even if this addressed the problem at some scale, it was merely reactionary; a band-aid to what we think is a larger conundrum. It was like sending rice—the typical Nigerian politician’s answer to a crisis. 

The attacks never stopped. Not only so, they began to assume a recognisable M.O. of displacing and occupying, as people flee and abandon their indigenous homes. Even more, there appears to be a desire to instill terror and intent to harm: on 8 April 2023, as the country waited to inaugurate Bola Tinubu as president, after what seemed to have been a sham election, Channels TV reported: “Many feared killed as suspected herdsmen attack Benue IDPs.” 

These were people who had fled homes where their farms were. What was such an attack for? What farmlands of these displaced persons were the attackers after? Or in recent Yelwata, on 14 June 2025, where a hecatomb of deaths was orchestrated in a very cold and methodical execution? The police station had been attacked first, to cripple any armed resistance, the villagers report, before a door-to-door, family-by-family execution began, going on for three unholy hours, in a community less than an hour’s drive from the state capital, Makurdi; with another attack orchestrated a few hours apart at the other exit of the capital, in Mbaivur, near the Air Force Base in Makurdi. 

Sending the herdsmen away, which Benue citizens have cried for in the past, it seems, doesn’t end the problem. And if there have been fears this is beyond conflicts about grazing, these scenarios only intensify, if not to confirm them. 

5.

The first time I drank kindirmo, fresh cow milk hawked in colourful calabashes by Fulani women, was in my secondary school, perhaps in 2003 or 2004. I remember it was after closing, and the sun was high. My female classmate who made me try it said the women had tied ice blocks in a nylon and placed them in the calabash to chill the milk. Thirst had driven me, rather than curiosity. But it tasted wonderful, so that after that day I always looked forward to it whenever I had small change to spare. 

This was deep in Ukum LGA. On the way to the farm with my grandma, or returning, we’d sometimes meet Fulanis on the road walking together in a group, men (who looked more like boys, too young), women, and children. They were nomadic Fulanis, who often, to us, appeared to come out of nowhere as they lived in very interior settlements, and sometimes went to the local markets to buy goods and trade. 

I do not recall any bad blood existing between them and us, or maybe I was too innocent to notice. They simply existed as a curious exotic to us: their slim men carrying staffs and looking like women, sometimes wearing make-up. Unimaginably, there was such understanding that they would often have an agreement with farmers to bring their cattle after a harvest to graze the pasture from stalks of maize and other harvested plants. 

I am not being romantic about such a past, nor do I wish to patronise anyone. Because once in a while, we heard of cattle destroying farms. But I can tell you that Nigeria was once like this. That Benue was once like this. There was no need for fighting because the herder Fulanis were under the protection of the communities they lived in, and mutual understanding was established. So what happened? Why did herdsmen start using machetes on people? And when did guns come? Why are so-called herdsmen, who do not have cattle—because you need a herd of livestock to be a herdsman—but instead ride on motorcycles, invading and attacking villages with assault rifles? 

It is not just Benue under attack by such barbarians, but Nigeria. It is not just about usurping authority anywhere they can, stoking tensions, or causing confusion and political instability. It is the fact that children are burned alive by criminals who will never meet justice, or worse, who know no one is going after them, and that they will emerge again to continue their terror. And that we are caught in a trap where the Nigerian government, with the strongest military force in West Africa, pretends to be helpless. 

6.

What we are dealing with, not only in Benue, but nationwide, is a successful plan of confusion sown by a group with their plans. Surely, these killers take orders from someone. Possessing arms is strictly regulated in Nigeria, but these killers have no problem accessing not mere guns but assault rifles. In Yelwata, the killings were executed like an operation. Two days after this attack, a list of the families killed was published in Daily Post (courtesy of a Franc Utoo, a lawyer and native of Yelewata “who lost over 33 members of his extended family”). There were the Adam family, Ajah family, Akpen family, Amaki family, Anya family, Aondona family, Aondovihi family, Asom family, and so on, numbering up to 47 families, like a roster. What is to say that one day it won’t become more targeted, as genocidal killings are often planned to take out specific persons? 

Finally, perhaps, the misinformation about this simply being herdsmen attacks or internal clashes, as the news ignorantly reports, is now evident. And this was why the Tor Tiv, Professor James Ayatse, the number one Tiv citizen and perhaps an authority on Tiv matters, at the president’s visit to Benue state on June 18, unequivocally stated, that: 

“We do have grave concerns about the misinformation and misrepresentation of the security crisis in Benue State. It’s not herders-farmers clashes. It’s not communal clashes. It’s not reprisal attacks or skirmishes. It is this misinformation that has led to suggestions such as ‘remain tolerant, negotiate for peace, learn to live with your neighbours’. What we are dealing with in Benue is a calculated, well-planned, full-scale genocidal invasion and land-grabbing campaign by herder terrorists and bandits, which has been going on for decades and is worsening every year. Wrong diagnosis will always lead to wrong treatment. So, we are dealing with something far more sinister than we think about. It’s not learning to live with your neighbours; it is dealing with war.”

For many who do not know, historically, this is not the first time foreigners (whom the Tivs call “Uke”) have attempted to suppress the Tiv people, such that there’s even a song about this. The “Myam ciem er uke hide” song, translated as “I had a nightmare that the foreigner has returned.” Centuries later, the song remains true. The history of the Benue Valley during the 1700s through the 1800s is mired in conflicts over land among the different groups that had migrated and come to settle in the region. But the Tiv ancestors fought with their lives to defend the home they’d made for themselves in this valley. 

It was because of this consciousness to defend themselves that subjugation by the British colonial forces in the early 1900s didn’t happen so easily for the latter. It is on record that the Tivs were the last ethnic nation in colonial Nigeria to be penetrated by the British, who afterwards ignorantly tried to govern them indirectly through proxies under their colonial government—a situation that was exploited by the Caliphate in northern Nigeria at the time to exert dominance southwards. 

It is a known history that has been amply written about, with one of the more insightful works being Moses E. Ochonu’s ‘Colonialism by Proxy: Hausa Imperial Agents and Middle Belt Consciousness in Nigeria.’ There were pushbacks and unrelenting resistance, of course, by the Tiv nation. It is the history of this conflict that eventually led to the creation of Benue State. I am not a historian; I have only brought this up because history is all too familiar whenever it rears its head again. Many theories, histories, or causes of the terrorism going on in Benue will be spread. And sadly, the truth is we can’t say what it is; we are not security experts and have no concrete intel, so we talk about what we see: that we are being attacked by terrorists who come for our heads, and our land. And whoever they are, they are enemies of Nigeria. 

When the musician 2Baba Idibia made a video responding to the Yelwata killings, his words were “I don’t even know what to say.” Truly, there aren’t any words for such madness other than Yelwata was indeed one of the darkest days for many of us. But for how long must this go on?