Last year, I cannot remember vividly exactly the month. A female friend of mine that I met in camp sent me a video when I was in camp, and in the background, clearly visible, I was seated there with one other person I met in camp too, eating at Mammy Market while we were talking and also laughing, even though we were passing through camp stress that year. No dramatic violation, I guess. She was just making a random video with her friends too. No embarrassing moment as far as I can say. Just me and my guy eating the pounded yam and egusi soup we ordered just to ease up the stress before going in for another stressful activity.
I did not see myself at first; I just looked beyond the video she sent and saw myself in the background. I laughed. And at the same time, I felt a bit uncomfortable even though I did not tell her. I was not angry about being filmed unaware. It was just the way I appeared in the background, unbothered, distracted, and captured eating in public; now it existed somewhere in someone's content with any form of agreement between us. I had no description or say in the version of myself that appeared in that video and how many eyes have seen it.
And this is one thing in particular that filming in public usually misses, especially in some environments. Some people will prefer to tag it as privacy versus freedom. But where the real tension comes in is the narrative control. When I am in a public space, there is no way I can avoid being seen by others. I do not need to accept being archived. I believe those two things are not the same, and it has now become normal because the digital camera has collapsed the difference between them so gradually that we have not even paid attention to it in a big way.
Just last week, I saw a video on Instagram of a videographer recording Bezema in his Ferrari car, and then in the background, I saw billionaire Femi Otedola strolling on the street with another hourglass woman, not his wife or daughters. This video alone has raised a lot of discussion online, and I believe that he didn't even plan to be recorded. Just a random appearance.
And in my country, this is very complicated because we have never really had any private public spaces. In the church, in the mall, and on the street, these are some of the places where we watch each other for free. A stranger randomly admires the outfit I wear or just something about me without invitation. That communal gaze is deeply built into how we exist outside our homes. And if the lawmakers at all want to criminalise public filming in an environment like mine, which has always treated public space as shared visibility, that would be very strange.
And yet I know vividly why some people might be requesting such protection. And it is not everyone that appears in the background of other people's videos is eating pounded yam and egusi soup openly and unbothered. Some have been seen in their vulnerable state, which they would not like, a private grief that happened to occur outside.
Me eating outside is, honestly, fine in a way. I have no problem with that at all. And what I am less certain about is the version of other people in their vulnerable state, that they have no idea that it has been kept or appeared somewhere.
Thank you for reading.
Images created by Gemini AI
