The Alphabet of Gods: Anthony Azekwoh's Visual Mythology

By @JustinWetch

When Anthony was about ten years old, a teacher in his Lagos school got frustrated that the students weren't speaking English with a proper British accent. The class was meant to train them to sound a certain way, to smooth out the Nigerian inflections and replace them with something more acceptable to whoever decides these things.

Anthony, a prefect and supposed model student, raised his hand and said no. They speak English. People understand them. Communication is accomplished. Why should they contort their accents to fit someone else's idea of correct?

They hauled him to the principal's office. It was a whole dramatic thing. Then, on prize-giving day, they announced the award for best in phonetics. It went to Anthony.

"Those were my first thoughts that the world works a certain way but I actually think it's kind of stupid," he says. "I don't agree with a lot of these things."

He was a sensitive kid in an all-boys school that didn't reward sensitivity. He got into fights because he had no other outlet. Then, at thirteen, a teacher named Atiku Shehu gave an unusual assignment: start a blog. Use the internet to express yourself. Anthony kept that blog going for years. Writing became the valve that kept him from flying off the rails.

"To me it's more than just a fun thing," he says of creating. "It's really like breathing."

Before Anthony ever painted, he wrote fiction. Teenage novels with titles like The Fall of the Gods and The Day the Devil Came to Nigeria. He loved Percy Jackson and Neil Gaiman and kept wondering why there was no African equivalent, no stories that treated Yoruba mythology with the same epic scale.

The question that haunted him: if I ask you to imagine Zeus, you can. You've seen a thousand renditions. But if I ask you to imagine Shango, the Yoruba god of lightning, your mind draws a blank. Even Anthony's mind drew a blank, and Shango is his god.

"What would that do to a deity that feeds on belief?" he asks. "All these stories are fed by how many times they're told."

He wanted to explore what happens to gods when people forget them. It was a poetic way of asking what happens to a culture when it's cut off from its own mythology. Anthony and his peers grew up learning everything about other cultures and almost nothing about their own.

"I could draw you the Starbucks logo right now from memory," he says. "I've been to America only a couple times and I don't even like coffee. That's how powerful that imagery is."

He wanted to build that myth for his own people.

The Christian university Anthony attended required church twice a week at 8 AM, plus 6:30 AM devotions daily. Casual clothes were banned. Students wore suits and ties to class. Shorts, piercings, any hint of informality, all forbidden under the umbrella of God.

He wrote an essay about it. The essay went viral. Thousands had passed through that system, but nobody had spoken publicly about how suffocating it was. Some peers warned him he was in trouble. Some professors, people three times his age, thanked him quietly for saying what they couldn't.

The administration wanted to punish him for the essay but knew that would draw more attention. So they waited, then suspended him for facial hair. By his fifth year, Anthony was depressed and suicidal. But outside the university walls, his art was gaining traction. He asked himself: why not just do this thing full-time?

He dropped out. It's been five years. He calls it the biggest and scariest decision of his life.

Anthony was sixteen, broke, and had no support from his parents for this new art hobby. He got a cracked copy of Photoshop, not even knowing what cracked software meant, and taught himself to draw using a mouse because he couldn't afford a tablet.

"I look back at that and I'm like, damn, that must have been very hard," he says. "I don't think you could pay me to draw with a mouse right now."

But back then it was fun. It took his mind off everything else. He treated learning like a game, watching YouTube tutorials, studying art books, reverse-engineering paintings by artists he admired like Sam Spratt. He spent four years just learning the alphabet of visual art before he felt ready to tell his own stories.

"Before you can say the things you have to say, it's almost like a language," he explains. "You have to learn the alphabet first."

In 2020, he posted a painting called The Commander. He'd spent maybe twelve hours on it. Nobody cared. He remembers the frustration: "Damn, I hate you guys so much. Nobody wants to support me."

A week later he posted The Red Man. It went viral and changed his life. His father was confused by the DHL boxes suddenly arriving at the house, convinced it was some kind of fraud. Where was all this demand coming from?

When The Red Man exploded, Anthony was completely unprepared. He had no website. He didn't know how to ship prints. He built everything overnight just to keep up with orders. Thousands of people were suddenly in his ear telling him what to do next, and he felt the weight of it: if he got this right, he could escape going back to university. If he got it wrong, he was finished.

Around this time, his father said something that confused him. Quietly, almost offhand: "Your life is over. All that partying, going out, chilling with your friends, it's done."

Anthony was upset. They were supposed to be celebrating.

Years later, he understood. Success is a target on your back and a crown you can't take off. People will see you through that lens forever, whether you want them to or not.

The Wedding is Anthony's largest collection to date, and the one where everything finally came together. He'd learned the alphabet. He had a team. He understood the rhythm of visual storytelling.

At its heart, The Wedding is about love and how messy it gets. Anthony based it on Nigerian weddings he attended as a kid, the way they functioned like theater. There's the aunty dancing no matter what happens. There are friends who genuinely love you, and friends who are secretly apathetic, or worse. There are people who weren't even invited. And at the center, the anxious bride and groom.

Despite all these different motives, everyone shows up. Something powerful draws them there.

Traditional portraits paint people how they want to be seen. In The Wedding, Anthony did the opposite. He painted people as they are, flaws amplified. Scratches, tears, blood, smeared lipstick. Love doesn't erase imperfection.

"Happiness becomes optional," he says. "Even with my parents, they may not understand exactly what I'm doing, but if the chips are down right now, they're my fiercest supporters."

That's what the final painting conveys. Conflict, pain, chaos, secrets, but also love. When love is real, you show up even if things aren't perfect. You deal with the issues later.

Anthony shouts out the people who believed early: Mysteria NFT, Elizabeth Kolapo, Busuwa, Jabota. "These are people who believed in the work before there was even the hype."

Artists inspiring him lately: Sam Spratt ("I'm a Sam Spratt fanboy"), Duro Arts, and Betty Jiang for her incredibly textured digital paintings.

What does he wish people understood about his work? That these aren't just pretty pictures. They're chapters of his life. He's grateful to be alive at the same time his work is being appreciated, something most artists throughout history never got to experience. He tries to pour that love into every piece.

"I hope that if people don't know," he says, "they do see and feel that love and appreciation I'm putting in there."

For future Weekly Dose episodes, Anthony recommends Mayowa Alabi, Duro Arts, and Renée Kir.