Freedom Ceremonies in 1970s Lagos reveal a side of the city’s history that rarely appears in accounts dominated by politics, military rule, oil wealth and rapid urban growth. In neighbourhood workshops and small businesses, another institution was shaping working lives: apprenticeship.
Young people learned occupations directly from experienced practitioners. They observed, practised, made mistakes, repeated tasks and gradually acquired the knowledge necessary to work with greater independence. When an agreed apprenticeship was completed, the transition could be marked publicly through what became popularly known as a “freedom ceremony”.
A remarkable photographic record of this practice survives in the work of Abi Morocco Photos, the Lagos studio operated by husband and wife John Abe and Funmilayo Abe. Among the surviving images is a photograph identified as “A tailor’s freedom ceremony, Shogunle, 1974.”
The image is more than a portrait from another era. It preserves a moment in the history of Nigerian vocational training when years of learning were publicly acknowledged and a trainee’s relationship with a master craftsperson entered a new stage.
Freedom Ceremonies in 1970s Lagos and Yoruba Apprenticeship
The word “freedom” had a particular meaning within this occupational setting. It did not refer to political independence, emancipation from slavery or release from legal confinement. It referred to the end of an apprentice’s subordinate period of training under an established practitioner.
Apprenticeship had deep roots in Nigerian societies long before the 1970s.
Historically, skills could be transmitted within families and communities from one generation to another. As commerce expanded and occupations changed, apprenticeship also developed beyond strictly kinship-based relationships. Young people could train under craftspeople outside their immediate families, sometimes under arrangements involving fees, sponsors or agreed periods of service.
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Economist Archibald Callaway examined this system in his influential 1964 study, “Nigeria’s Indigenous Education: The Apprentice System”. His research showed that indigenous apprenticeship had adapted alongside social and economic change and had become significant to the development of small enterprise in Nigeria.
Callaway’s work demonstrated that apprenticeship was not simply an informal survival from an earlier society. It was an important method through which practical skills entered the working economy.
By the 1970s, this system formed part of the commercial life of expanding Nigerian cities, including Lagos.
Learning Through Work
Traditional apprenticeship depended heavily on practical participation.
A trainee did not simply listen to lectures about a trade. Learning occurred through work itself.
In tailoring, an apprentice might gradually learn measurement, cutting, sewing, fitting, finishing and the handling of customers’ requirements. In mechanical trades, trainees learned tools, diagnosis and repair by observing experienced practitioners before performing increasingly complex work themselves.
Photography followed a similar pattern.
This is particularly important to the story of Abi Morocco Photos because John and Funmilayo Abe themselves entered professional photography through apprenticeship.
Funmilayo Abe, born in Mushin in 1953, trained with a female photographer professionally known as Nike Photo in Shogunle between 1967 and 1970. John Abe also learned photography through apprenticeship, training under a photographer known as Yankee Photo in Ogun State.
Their later careers therefore emerged from the same broad culture of vocational learning that they eventually photographed.
John and Funmilayo Abe Build Abi Morocco Photos
John and Funmilayo initially developed their photographic careers separately.
After meeting, they began working increasingly closely. In 1973 they combined their professional activities under the name Young Abi Morocco Photos, later known simply as Abi Morocco Photos.
Their work captured a wide range of Lagos life.
They photographed people in formal studio settings, made commissioned photographs in homes and recorded celebrations and neighbourhood events. Their surviving images show schoolteachers, traders, families, festival participants and ordinary Lagos residents presenting themselves before the camera.
For many years their studio operated on Aina Street in Shogunle.
The studio became both a commercial enterprise and a place of training. At the height of its activity, as many as eleven apprentices were working there, demonstrating that the Abes were not merely products of apprenticeship but eventually became trainers within the system themselves.
Their photographic practice lasted for decades, spanning the analogue era and the later transformation of commercial photography through digital technology.
The Shogunle Tailor’s Freedom Ceremony of 1974
Among the images preserved from the Abi Morocco archive is a photograph identified as “A tailor’s freedom ceremony, Shogunle, 1974.”
Its significance lies in the event it records.
A freedom ceremony marked the successful completion of apprenticeship or skilled trade training. It publicly recognised that the learner had reached a major occupational milestone and was leaving the status of apprentice.
The ceremony could bring together the apprentice, trainer, relatives, professional associates and members of the surrounding community. Gatherings could include food, prayer, advice and expectations concerning the graduate’s future professional behaviour.
Practices were not necessarily identical in every occupation or neighbourhood. Different masters, families and trades could observe completion in different ways. What remained central was the transition itself.
The learner had spent a period under instruction.
That period had ended.
The apprentice was entering a new professional stage.
Why “Freedom” Mattered
Freedom did not automatically mean that a newly trained craftsperson immediately possessed the money, equipment or premises required to establish a successful business.
Independent work required resources.
A tailor needed machines, materials and customers. A photographer needed cameras, processing equipment and access to a studio or other working space. Mechanics required tools and somewhere to carry out repairs.
Yet completing apprenticeship changed a person’s occupational standing.
The trainee was no longer simply someone learning under another practitioner. The individual could begin pursuing a more independent livelihood, develop a customer base and, where circumstances allowed, eventually take apprentices of their own.
In this way, apprenticeship could create a continuing cycle of practical education.
A craftsperson trained a learner. The learner became more skilled. Training ended. The former apprentice entered professional life and might later train another generation.
The freedom ceremony marked one of the most visible points in that cycle.
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Workshops as Places of Education
Modern histories of education often concentrate on schools, universities and government training institutions.
Nigeria’s economic history also includes countless places of learning that did not resemble conventional classrooms.
Tailoring shops, mechanical workshops, photographic studios and other small enterprises could simultaneously function as businesses and centres of occupational instruction.
Apprentices learned while participating in production.
This arrangement gave the training system a direct relationship with working life. Learners were exposed not only to technical processes but also to the demands of customers, workplace discipline and the practical realities of operating within a trade.
Formal technical education and workshop apprenticeship existed alongside one another, rather than belonging neatly to separate historical periods.
Apprenticeship practices have continued to adapt as technical education, changing technologies and new occupational standards reshape vocational training.
The freedom ceremony, therefore, was not merely a colourful custom. It belonged to a wider system of acquiring and transmitting practical knowledge.
The Camera as Witness to Everyday Lagos
The importance of Abi Morocco Photos extends beyond the history of apprenticeship.
The studio documented people who might otherwise have left little visual trace in formal historical archives.
Political leaders, military officers and wealthy industrialists were photographed extensively. Ordinary workers, apprentices, neighbourhood traders and small business owners were less likely to become subjects of nationally preserved historical records.
Commercial studios helped fill that gap.
The photographs of John and Funmilayo Abe preserve clothing, occupations, celebrations, aspirations and social relationships from a period when Lagos was undergoing major transformation.
Nigeria’s oil boom accelerated economic activity during the 1970s. Lagos expanded rapidly, attracting people seeking work, business opportunities and new forms of urban life.
Yet the city’s economy was never built only by government institutions and large corporations.
Small enterprises were everywhere.
Tailors produced clothing. Photographers recorded important moments. Mechanics maintained vehicles. Carpenters made furniture. Hairdressers, traders and numerous other artisans provided services while passing practical knowledge to learners.
A photograph of a tailor’s freedom ceremony therefore illuminates something larger than one individual celebration.
It belongs to the social history of work in Lagos.
Preserving the Abi Morocco Photos Archive
The survival of the photographs is itself significant.
The movement from analogue to digital photography placed many older Nigerian studio archives at risk. Film negatives could deteriorate in humid conditions, be discarded when studios closed or simply become unwanted as photographers adopted new technology.
Lagos Studio Archives emerged as an important preservation initiative concerned with endangered photographic collections of this kind.
Its work helped recover and organise thousands of negatives associated with Nigerian studio photography.
The Abi Morocco archive eventually became the subject of Abi Morocco Photos: Spirit of Lagos, an exhibition at Autograph in London. The exhibition ran from 31 October 2024 to 22 March 2025 and focused particularly on photographs produced during the studio’s formative decade in the 1970s.
Sixty-seven prints were produced for the exhibition, bringing images created in neighbourhood Lagos into a major institutional setting decades after they had first been taken.
Several works subsequently entered Autograph’s photographic collection.
From Apprentice to Practitioner
There is an especially fitting connection between the photographers and the ceremonies they recorded.
Funmilayo Abe began as an apprentice.
John Abe began as an apprentice.
Together they established a successful photographic business.
They later trained apprentices themselves.
Their camera then recorded other people reaching the end of their own periods of occupational training.
The archive therefore documents apprenticeship from within a professional world that also depended upon apprenticeship.
This relationship gives the photographs unusual historical depth.
The Abes were part of a commercial environment in which knowledge could pass directly from experienced practitioners to learners through sustained practical training.
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Conclusion
Freedom Ceremonies in 1970s Lagos preserved an important moment in the working lives of apprentices: the transition from supervised learning towards professional independence.
The 1974 photograph of a tailor’s freedom ceremony in Shogunle provides a valuable visual record of that tradition. Behind the people before the camera were years of instruction, observation and practical work. Behind the ceremony stood relationships between trainers, apprentices, families and occupational communities.
The Abi Morocco Photos archive allows modern audiences to see a history that might otherwise remain largely invisible.
It reminds us that the history of Lagos was created not only in government offices, corporate headquarters and political institutions, but also inside workshops and small neighbourhood businesses where one generation taught another how to work.
The photograph captures a ceremony.
The larger history is the transfer of knowledge that made the ceremony possible.
Author’s Note
Freedom ceremonies demonstrate how deeply vocational learning was woven into everyday economic and community life. The Shogunle photographs are especially valuable because they restore artisans, apprentices and neighbourhood businesses to the historical record of Lagos. John and Funmilayo Abe themselves travelled from apprenticeship into professional photography and later became trainers, making their archive an extraordinary record of a system they understood from personal experience. Their photographs show that Nigerian history can be found not only in major political events, but also in the ordinary moments when skill passes from one person to another and a learner becomes a practitioner.
References
Autograph. Abi Morocco Photos: Spirit of Lagos. Exhibition, London, 31 October 2024 to 22 March 2025.
Autograph. Introducing Abi Morocco Photos: Spirit of Lagos. 2024.
Autograph. Abi Morocco Photos, Collection Highlights.
Callaway, A. “Nigeria’s Indigenous Education: The Apprentice System.” Odù: Journal of Yoruba and Related Studies, Vol. 1, No. 1, 1964, pp. 62–79.
Ajao, Adeyemi S., and Aifuwa O. Lucky. “Synergy of Contemporary and Traditional Apprenticeship Learning Systems in Automobile Mechanic Works in Southwest, Nigeria.” Shodh Sari: An International Multidisciplinary Journal, Vol. 5, No. 3, 2026, pp. 648–672. DOI: 10.59231/SARI7976.
