It is morning. The light is the kind of soft that rarely gets caught on camera at a Nigerian wedding because the bride is the one with a photographer at her side from sunrise. The groom's getting-ready is normally a brisker affair — a quick suit fitting, a brief check in a mirror, a fast walk to the car. Lately, however, a small video genre has emerged that quietly subverts that pattern. The groom's father is in the room. The father is fixing his son's tie.
It happens in a hotel suite or a family home, depending. The two men stand close. The father, often older than he was when he himself was married, lifts the strip of silk over his son's shoulders. The son angles his neck. There is no music in the original footage, sometimes added later in editing. The camera holds a wide shot. The father's hands are steady. The son does not speak.
Why this image? Partly because Nigerian masculinity has, in the last decade, been having a quieter conversation with itself. The crying groom is one part of that. The dancing father-of-the-bride is another. The tie-tying scene is its most modest expression: a father transmitting a small, specific competence to a son who, on this day, is becoming what the father has been for thirty years. The act is tactile. The instruction is wordless. Both men know the gesture, but only the father has done it for himself, every working day, since he was twenty-three.
The transfer is not of authority. It is of a small, working knowledge — the kind a father holds for his son until the son needs it.
The choreography rewards repeat viewing. The father takes his time. He smooths the collar. He steps back. He steps forward to fix something he sees. The son submits — a word that is unfashionable but accurate — to the brief, careful labour of being dressed. There is a flicker, sometimes, of the toddler in the man. The father seems to feel it. He pats his son once, lightly, on the chest. There.
What the new genre is documenting, perhaps, is a male tenderness that has always existed in Nigerian families but rarely been filmed. The wedding gives it permission to be filmed. The internet, in turn, gives it permission to circulate. A whole afternoon of Lagos uncles will eventually see this two-minute clip on their nephew's WhatsApp status. Several of them will, without saying anything, find a reason to call their own fathers later that week.