Lagos made Wizkid.
His stardom was forged in the smithy of the city’s noise, hunger, and relentless motion. It shaped his ambition long before the world learned his name.
When he returned to Ojuelegba, the neighbourhood that raised him, he did so with a song that propelled him from local reverence to global recognition. Years later, he honoured the entire metropolis with the instant classic Made in Lagos, a declaration that his identity is inseparable from the place that made him.
Now, with a documentary bearing his name, the question shifts from how Lagos made Wizkid to how Wizkid wants Lagos to endure.
From its opening frames, the film announces itself as a meditation on legacy and origin, responsibility and communality. Dressed in all white, sporting a high-value diamond and sapphire necklace, bracelets, and rings, Wizkid saunters into the frame, lights a spliff, and takes a slow drag.
The Afrobeat icon Femi Kuti narrates Wizkid’s significance to Africa. “When you see how far Africa has come, you cannot ignore the impact of Wizkid,” Mr. Kuti says, affirming how relevant Wizkid is to African music and culture. “He is putting us first before any other culture or tradition.”
The scene transitions to the streets, capturing Wizkid’s status, the city’s noise, energy, and drive. In other scenes, we see Wizkid’s mural on walls, posters and stickers on vehicles, and billboards showcasing his importance to the city.
Subtly structured into three interwoven movements – intimacy and preparation, political and social consciousness, then collective dreaming and winning – the film resists a linear narrative of his rise to fame, typical of a documentary film. Instead, it positions Wizkid as both product and projection: shaped by Lagos, but now tasked with carrying its aspirations across borders, while indirectly serving as political consciousness and an inspiration for others.
The first movement centres on Wizkid and his manager and wife, Jada Pollock, offering an unusually restrained look into the machinery behind global superstardom. There are no chest-thumping declarations of greatness here. What the film shows instead is his preparation: rehearsals, quiet conversations and doubts, logistical and family pressure, and the nervous ticking clock leading up to the historic Tottenham Hotspur Stadium show.
Pollock emerges not as a background figure but as a support system, who understands both the vulnerability and the scale of the moment. Their relationship is displayed less as a celebrity romance and more as a working partnership built on trust, discipline, and shared stakes.
This section humanises Wizkid by refusing spectacle. Even at this height of his success, the documentary insists, greatness is still labour. Fame does not erase anxiety; it simply magnifies what is at risk. And when he learns that his ailing (now deceased) mother’s health has worsened, almost colliding with his struggles to get his set ready, we see the pain behind the fame. Wiz sinks into himself, his silence growing louder. The camera lingers on his pauses and silences, moments of inwardness, reminding us that behind the chants of “Starboy” is an individual still striving to deal with personal, familial, cultural, and historical expectations.
The second movement broadens the film’s scope, introducing voices that situate Wizkid’s Tottenham performance within a larger political and cultural continuum. Femi Kuti, Julie Adenuga, and Seni Saraki function as interpreters of significance, rather than ornamental talking heads. Through them, the documentary articulates what this concert means beyond ticket sales or streaming milestones.
Femi Kuti interprets Wizkid’s achievement as part of a longer lineage of African cultural assertion. The stadium becomes a symbolic terrain, a space historically reserved for Western dominance that is now repurposed to affirm African excellence. Julie Adenuga extends this argument, emphasising how visibility reshapes possibility. Wizkid’s presence on that stage signals to African youth that global relevance is not a miracle but a consequence of talent, persistence, and audacity, even in the face of suffocating economic realities. Seni Saraki adds a generational perspective, suggesting that such moments fracture old ceilings, allowing African artists to imagine ambition without apology.
Crucially, this political consciousness is not delivered as protest rhetoric but quieter, more potent. The film suggests that Wizkid’s politics lie not in slogans but in existence, in occupying spaces long denied, and doing so on his own terms
The documentary’s third and most emotionally resonant movement belongs to dreams and hope, embodied by “Starboy,” a devoted fan whose journey mirrors that of countless Nigerian/African youths. We meet him not in glamour but in motion, fixing a car, hanging out with biker friends, traversing everyday life, carrying an unshakeable belief that Wizkid’s success is not too far removed from his own dreams. His pilgrimage from Lagos to London is less about fandom than affirmation: To witness Wizkid perform at Tottenham is to witness proof that aspiration can survive geography, class, and limitation.
Through Starboy, the documentary collapses the distance between icon and admirer, showing that Wizkid is a lucky charm of hope for many in Nigeria and Africa. And his triumph is communal, a shared victory for all and sundry. This is where Wizkid:Long Live Lagos finds its emotional spine, showing how one man’s ascent becomes a catalyst for many striving to make it out of poverty.
Guiding this careful structure is Karam Gill, the documentary’s writer and director, whose light touch is felt less in overt authorial presence than in measured restraint. Gill allows the film to flow, resisting the temptation to overwhelm the narrative with spectacle or hagiography. His direction privileges mood, silence, and accumulation over dramatic excess, trusting images, voices, and moments to carry meaning. In doing so, Gill shapes Wizkid: Long Live Lagos as a reflective, patient meditation on fame, responsibility, and cultural inheritance.
Visually, the documentary favours restraint over excess. Lagos is not romanticised into postcard imagery, nor reduced to poverty porn. Instead, it exists as texture, felt in conversations, faces, and rhythms. The film understands that Lagos is not merely a city but a psychological condition: relentless, bruising, generous, and alive. London, by contrast, appears almost sterile, perhaps hostile. Its orderliness sharpens the magnitude of what it means for Lagos to arrive there fully formed and unapologetic.
If the documentary has a limitation, it is its reverence. At times, it hovers so close to admiration that it risks smoothing over tension. Wizkid’s silences, so compelling, are not always interrogated. Yet perhaps this restraint is intentional. The film seems less interested in demystifying Wizkid than in preserving him as a symbol, as a conduit, as a continuation.
From the onset, the documentary shows that Fela had a huge influence on Wizkid’s music, but he doesn’t fully embrace the political consciousness and activism of Fela. Instead, it hands Wizkid’s political consciousness and activism to the commentators to handle.
HBO’s Wizkid: Long Live Lagos is not about proving greatness. That has already been established. It is about legacy, about what it means for an artist born from the womb of a restless city to carry that restlessness into the world without dilution. Lagos made Wizkid, yes. But this documentary argues for something quieter and more profound: Wizkid, in choosing how he moves, performs, and represents, is now shaping how Lagos is seen, remembered, and believed in.
