“Ba A Gudu Ba A Bar Gida”: Fifth Chukker, photography, cultural memory, and the responsibility of belonging, By Mudi Yahaya

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The “Ba A Gudu Ba A Bar Gida” exhibition locates the responsibility of belonging within this relationship. Nina Fischer-Stephan’s photographs offer evidence of lives whose significance exceeds both the photographer’s original intentions and our present interpretations. Encountering them in Kaduna allows memory, research and lived knowledge to question one another. The exhibition asks us to carry that questioning into the present: to preserve what we can, examine what we inherit and leave future generations the means to understand us more fully. Home endures, in part, through the care with which we make such understanding possible.

The significance of the “Ba A Guda Ba A Bar Gida” archival photography exhibition at the Fifth Chukker Polo and Country Club Resort, Kangimi, Kaduna, takes on a particularly deep relevance at a time when Northern Nigeria is facing political unpredictability, economic hardship, societal disintegration, instability, and displacement in the run-up to the 2027 general elections. The main premise of the exhibition relates to the shared moral obligation to comprehend, defend, and critically analyse what makes up a society. The Hausa proverb from which the exhibition takes its title — understood here as “One does not flee and abandon one’s home” — carries an ethical challenge. In this instance, “home” survives through more than the continued existence of buildings, streets and familiar landscapes.

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Home in this instance also depends on the knowledge through which people recognise themselves, understand their relationships and imagine a shared future. When this knowledge becomes inaccessible, a society can become estranged from itself, even while its people remain on the land. This is at the heart of the “Ba A Gudu Ba A Bar Gida” exhibition.

Nina Fischer-Stephan was born in Munich in 1922 and moved to Ibadan, Nigeria, in 1959, with her husband Klaus Stephan, then the Africa correspondent for German television. For more than eleven years, her husband’s press passes afforded her rare access to the royal courts, prominent figures, and architectural heritage of Northern Nigeria. Drawing on Nina Fischer-Stephan’s photographs of Northern Nigeria around the early years of independence, the exhibition asks what it means to remain responsible for a place, its people and historical inheritance, through periods of profound uncertainty.

In a region confronting insecurity, displacement, economic hardship and political apprehension, belonging cannot be reduced to residence. Nor does the theme proverb become a judgement against people who leave in search of safety. A family may lose its house without surrendering its identity; a dispersed community may continue to sustain its language, memories and obligations. The question is how the responsibility of belonging survives departure, adversity and change. Understood in this way, home includes what we carry, what we protect, and what we remain willing to rebuild. The exhibition’s title asks whether a society under pressure can preserve the resources through which it understands itself and renews its obligations to others. Historical memory becomes part of that task. Without sustained attention to the lives, institutions and knowledge that have shaped a community, proposals for its future risk resting on an impoverished account of what it has been.

Nina Fischer-Stephan’s photographs offer a compelling starting point, as they allow the viewer to approach historical transformation through everyday life. A country’s independence is often narrated through constitutional milestones, political leaders, and the emergence of national institutions. Yet people also experience historical change through their homes, work, clothing, streets, and encounters with one another. Political transformation enters the ordinary arrangements of existence, sometimes dramatically and sometimes almost imperceptibly.

These photographs invite us to examine that quieter history. Their significance does not require the claim that Northern Nigeria entered photographic history through a European camera. Such a claim would obscure Nigerian photographers, local practices of image-making, and the communities whose participation made the photographs possible. Neither should the photographer’s nationality automatically determine our assessment of her work. What matters is the particular encounter each image records, the perspective it brings to view, and the questions it permits us to ask. Nina Fischer- Stephan’s archive is valuable as a situated record whose meanings can develop through research, comparison, and renewed engagement with the people connected to its subjects.

The Northern Nigeria encountered in the “Ba A Guda Ba A Bar Gida” exhibition was already a complex social world. Its architecture, commerce, scholarship, religious life, craftsmanship, and political institutions did not begin with independence. This “infrastructure” entered a new post-colonial national framework while continuing to change and metamorphose as it reacted to the changes that independence brought. That instance in time in Northern Nigeria therefore invites the viewer to reconsider the assumption that inherited cultural forms and modernity must be opposed. A courtyard, market, or mode of dress, may embody adaptation, practical intelligence, and historical movement, even when an unfamiliar viewer sees only “tradition.”

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Looking closely means asking about the knowledge that made visible life possible. A building may reveal decisions about climate, privacy, materials, and relations between households. A market may suggest networks of production, exchange, and trust extending far beyond the frame. Clothing may carry distinctions of occupation, occasion, taste, and affiliation that require local knowledge to interpret. These possibilities remain questions for investigation rather than conclusions supplied by appearance alone. The photograph preserves traces of social intelligence; understanding that intelligence requires further work.

This attention gives ordinary people their proper place within history. Those who build, teach, trade, farm, care for families and maintain communal life do more than inhabit the background of political events. Their decisions sustain the worlds in which those events acquire meaning. To attend to everyday life is to recognise forms of historical agency that official commemoration frequently overlooks. The dignity of the ordinary becomes a serious subject of inquiry.

Such inquiry also changes our understanding of photography. A photograph’s meaning does not end when the shutter closes. It continues through the circumstances of its preservation, the captions attached to it, the institutions that circulate it, and the audiences who encounter it. Ariella Aïsha Azoulay’s work on photography, including Potential History, helps frame this continuing relationship between images, power and responsibility. Applied to this exhibition, that approach asks us to consider what obligations arise when we inherit the representations of other people’s lives.

The setting at Fifth Chukker Polo and Country Club resort also becomes part of this discussion. A contemporary institution associated with sports, hospitality and international encounters provides a vantage point from which to consider earlier forms of social organisation. The relationship raises questions about how prestige, private initiative, and public cultural responsibility intersect. An exhibition concerned with collective memory gains substance when the institution hosting it helps people participate in that memory’s interpretation.

All archives are selective; one has to be cautious about how a group of photographs are read and interpreted. Some people become visible because of their statuses, accessibility, or significance to the photographer; others remain unnamed or outside the frame. Saidiya Hartman’s writing on archival silence, developed in the distinct historical context of Atlantic slavery, offers a methodological caution here: surviving records cannot be mistaken for the fullness of the lives they reference. Her work encourages attention to the conditions under which people enter an archive and to the limits of what can be recovered. It does not authorise us to fill gaps with convenient certainty.

Responsible historical imagination acknowledges possibility while keeping speculation distinguishable from evidence. That distinction is essential because seeing can produce a misleading sense of understanding. An authentic photograph can support an inaccurate account of the society it depicts. An orderly street does not establish social harmony; an imposing palace does not demonstrate general prosperity; a market portrait cannot stand for the experience of every woman in a region. The fragment becomes misleading when it is made to carry more historical meaning than the evidence can sustain.

There is a related danger in applying familiar categories too readily. Descriptions such as “backward,” “progressive,” “traditional,” or “modern” may tell us more about our assumptions than about how the people photographed understood their circumstances. Historical interpretation requires us to let evidence unsettle those assumptions. It also requires attention to inequality, exclusion and conflict. Admiration of an image’s elegance should not become an assertion that the world beyond its frame was just.

This is why the “Ba A Guda Ba A Bar Gida” exhibition cannot rest on nostalgia. Beauty may invite attention, but it cannot substitute for historical explanation. The past contains achievements worth sustaining and arrangements that deserve criticism. A mature relationship with cultural memory allows both to be examined. The purpose of preservation is to give future generations the evidence with which to reach informed judgements of their own.

Presenting these photographs in an exhibition in Kaduna creates an opportunity for that examination to become a conversation. Viewers with connections to the places and practices represented may recognise details that other audiences overlook: a building’s former use, the significance of an object, the character of a gathering or the history concealed within a familiar street. Such knowledge can correct inherited descriptions and generate new lines of research. An archive becomes more useful when stored evidence meets living memory.

At this critical time, the choice of location for an exhibition like “Ba A Guda Ba A Bar Gida” is noteworthy and important. Kaduna is the most historically relevant northern town in this regard, as it is a place where different northern experiences can enter the sort of conversation that the “Ba A Guda Ba A Bar Gida” triggers. Kaduna’s connections with administration, education, migration, trade and cultural exchange make it a productive setting for thinking about continuity and transformation. Yet proximity alone does not guarantee accuracy. Local memories can disagree, and identification requires corroboration. The aim is to broaden interpretive authority while maintaining the discipline of inquiry. Community testimony should be treated seriously enough to be recorded, examined and preserved.

The setting at Fifth Chukker Polo and Country Club resort also becomes part of this discussion. A contemporary institution associated with sports, hospitality and international encounters provides a vantage point from which to consider earlier forms of social organisation. The relationship raises questions about how prestige, private initiative, and public cultural responsibility intersect. An exhibition concerned with collective memory gains substance when the institution hosting it helps people participate in that memory’s interpretation.

By extension, the role of the facilitator of this sort of exhibition also matters. Adamu Atta’s role as commissioner therefore matters beyond the provision of a venue or financial support. It raises the question of what patronage can make possible for a wider public. Influence acquires cultural value when it supports access, sustained inquiry and institutions capable of outlasting individual initiative. The exhibition’s open-access intention is particularly significant here. Students, teachers, artists, photographers, craftspeople, and people connected to the photographed communities should have meaningful opportunities to encounter the archive and contribute to its interpretation, especially in a part of Nigeria where there is little or no functional visual art ecosystem of galleries and museums. The irony is even that where a semblance of spaces for aesthetic contemplation in northern Nigeria exists, such places are seen as elitist and out of bounds to the everyday person.

Offering access to spaces where the public have a tradition of visiting to watch and follow popular sports like polo then presents a unique opportunity. Public relevance would now depend on how that welcome is realised.

The Islamic concept of amanah, or entrusted responsibility, offers a meaningful ethical framework for this work. Surah An-Nisa 4:58 connects the rendering of trust with just judgement. Applied to cultural stewardship, its principle encourages us to understand custody as an obligation towards people beyond the institution itself. A photograph may matter deeply to a family, a community or future researchers, regardless of its market value.

There was an intentional curatorial decision to omit detailed scholarly captions from the immediate display. This was done to encourage viewers to look, remember and converse before receiving an authoritative explanation. However, that openness creates a responsibility to distinguish personal recognition from established historical knowledge. The accompanying research record should retain available dates, locations, provenance, and uncertainty, while any new identification should be documented and checked. An invitation to interpretation becomes most valuable when it also provides a route through which knowledge can be tested and added to the archive.

These considerations extend to museums, curators, and cultural institutions more broadly. To preserve photographs of other people’s lives is to accept responsibility for how their humanity will be remembered. Decisions about selection, naming, sequence, and omission influence public understanding. A caption can turn an individual into a stereotype; an unsupported attribution can circulate until repetition gives it the appearance of fact. Institutions must make clear what an image establishes, what research supports, and what remains unknown.

Inherited captions also require scrutiny. A description supplied by a visitor or colonial official may reveal important information about the observer while misidentifying the subject. Preserving that description as part of the archive’s history need not mean endorsing it. A responsible catalogue can retain the original wording, explain its limitations and record subsequent corrections. Historical integrity includes the ability to show how knowledge has changed.

In Nigeria, these sorts of obligations have profound educational consequences. For instance, the Nigerian federal government’s September 2025 curriculum announcement placed renewed emphasis on Nigerian history in basic education.

Such a policy, however, must be supported by teachers, reliable learning materials, and access to primary sources. Museums and archives can help students move beyond memorising names and dates towards evaluating evidence and recognising competing interpretations. Historical consciousness grows when people can ask how an account was produced and whose experience it leaves out.

These policy concerns lead to the question of preservation, which itself requires continuing material commitment. Photographic negatives deteriorate; documents lose research value when their origins become uncertain; digital files become inaccessible without maintenance. Oral knowledge disappears when those who possess it die without being recorded. A collection may survive physically while remaining unavailable in practice because it has not been catalogued or made accessible. The loss reaches beyond scholarship. When evidence disappears, a society has fewer means of questioning the stories told about it.

The Islamic concept of amanah, or entrusted responsibility, offers a meaningful ethical framework for this work. Surah An-Nisa 4:58 connects the rendering of trust with just judgement. Applied to cultural stewardship, its principle encourages us to understand custody as an obligation towards people beyond the institution itself. A photograph may matter deeply to a family, a community or future researchers, regardless of its market value.

This application is an ethical reading, rather than a claim that the verse directly addresses museums or photography. Such a framework should also acknowledge the diversity of Northern Nigeria and the differences within Muslim thought about images. One must first and foremost acknowledge that in many Muslim communities in Northern Nigeria, objections to depicting living beings have created uncertainty about portraiture and the public display of photographs. Interpretations differ amongst scholars, families, generations, contexts, and settings; thus, responding to situations like this requires Islamic theological referencing.

When we encounter the archival photography of our societies, particularly those taken during periods of tremendous historical transformation, we are not only looking at people and places that no longer exist. We are encountering evidence of lives whose meanings were never fully exhausted by the conditions in which they were recorded.

A photograph taken in Kano, Zaria, Kaduna, Maiduguri, Katsina, or Sokoto during the early years of Nigerian independence may appear to offer a simple historical proposition: this is how a specific place looked, how people dressed, how a community lived, and how a society presented itself at a given time.

The “Ba A Gudu Ba A Bar Gida” exhibition consequently turns the viewer’s attention towards the records being created now. Whose daily work receives recognition? Which communities appear only when disaster strikes? Are we preserving enough context for future viewers to understand what they see? The proliferation of digital images does not answer these questions. Abundance can coexist with poor description, fragile storage and a narrow concentration of attention.

However, the deeper relevance of such photos does not always stem from what they disclose about the past. It is in what they reveal about the limits of our current understanding. The photograph becomes a conflict between what we think we know and what history gently urges us to reassess. We may find sophistication where current narratives have led us to assume backwardness. We may find dignity in places where political discourse has conditioned us to expect hardship. We can recognise social cohesion in communities that are currently portrayed predominantly through conflict-related language. We may observe architectural wisdom, cultural assurance, restraint, elegance, and collective belonging that are nearly undetectable under our current notions of development. This does not imply that the past was necessarily superior.

Archival photography should not be used to romanticise historical societies, as its photos can conceal inequality, misery, and injustice just as easily as they reveal beauty.