“Looks like all the beatings I’ve dealt you with my belt haven’t done anything,” Caleb the Magician recalls his father saying when he caught him trying card tricks for the umpteenth time in his bedroom. “Next time, I’ll use my fists.”
This wasn’t an empty threat — it was a final warning. In Caleb’s devout Christian home in Benue State, Nigeria, magic wasn’t a hobby; it was blasphemy. Card tricks weren’t clever; they were corrupt. His father saw them not as art but as evidence of spiritual defilement — the kind that demanded cleansing, not coddling.
Caleb, 19 at the time, had been caught before. But it was this time, on Christmas Eve three years ago, that broke whatever thread of patience his father had left. Caleb had fallen asleep with a notebook of tricks beside him — notes scribbled in the margins, diagrams drawn like spells. His mother found it before dawn and quietly showed it to his dad. “He didn’t say anything at first,” Caleb says. “We finished morning devotion, then he asked for the book — and the belt.”
The first strike came quickly, then again. When the leather side failed to make a dent in Caleb’s resolve, his father flipped it. Metal buckle to skin.
Caleb remembers the sting, the cold metal slicing air before it kissed his head. “I remember it like it was yesterday,” he says. “After, I grabbed the belt and said, ‘Daddy, it’s okay’ — tears free falling. He dropped it — then came his fists. He punched my back, my hands, then my lip. It burst open. My blood mixed with the saliva in my mouth. At some point I almost thought I had gone deaf.” To his father, it was an intervention to keep his child from the devil. To Caleb, it felt like an exorcism of imagined demons.
Caleb’s ordeal reflects the fraught and sometimes dangerous endeavor young Nigerian magicians are embarked on as they reclaim illusion from the shadows of fear and folklore. In Nigerian society, magic is often conflated with “jazz” — a euphemism for the mystical or malevolent — and Christian and Muslim orthodoxies both condemn it as a dangerous transgression. Though the Abrahamic faiths hold sway over most of the country, traditional folklore looms large, and it isn’t uncommon to find those who still believe people endowed with otherworldly powers can cast spells and wreak havoc in their lives. What might be celebrated elsewhere as entertaining theatrical artistry is mistaken for spiritual subversion.
Yet a quiet rebellion brews. A new generation of Nigerian magicians is recasting hocus-pocus as craft — not covenant, not curse, just skill. In their hands, magic is shedding its age-old ties to spiritism and becoming something else entirely: a choreography of misdirection and imagination, performed not in secrecy, but in pursuit of awe.
Precious the Magician, who has spent 13 years straddling magic and a career in law, tells New Lines that “the confusion is made worse by fellow performers who proclaim or lean into the aesthetic of the supernatural, knowing fully well that it isn’t. It is what will and is killing the craft. They’re just tricks.”
But those tricks, even when they awe and delight a crowd, have long drawn suspicion. Consider Professor Peller, a legendary Nigerian magician whose levitations and dismemberments dazzled crowds in the ’70s and ’80s. Though a national icon, his brilliance stirred the ants of suspicion beneath the skin of public wonder. His sequined robes drew whispers about the occult, despite his insistence on pure entertainment. A devout Muslim, Peller distanced himself from sorcery — yet when he was shot dead in 1997 during prayer, rumors swirled. Assassination, karmic justice or a witch hunt? Many saw it as punishment for dancing too close to the edge. Today’s magicians still conjure wonder under that same cloud, their illusion often mistaken for invocation.
Yob the Cardist, a 23-year-old magician and university student, knows this tension intimately. One afternoon, while performing card tricks on the streets of Lagos, he found himself cornered by a mob of skeptics.
“I normally go out to the streets to better myself and wow people, and this particular day was no different,” he tells New Lines. “I spotted a group of guys, introduced myself and did my first trick. Their reactions were rowdy — they were mind-blown.”
But excitement quickly gave way to disquiet. “Do it again,” they demanded, as more onlookers gathered. He obliged, repeating the trick once, then again, until murmurs began to ripple through the crowd.
“They said it was ‘jazz,’” Yob recalls. Normally, he’d let that narrative ferment in his audience’s mind — let the mystery linger. But this was different. In a city as unpredictable as Lagos, where belief and superstition intertwine in volatile ways, he sensed the crowd could turn. To defuse the tension, Yob broke a magician’s cardinal rule: He revealed his secret and showed how the trick was done. Only then was he allowed to leave unscathed.
Caleb wasn’t so lucky. His father’s beatings were followed by a financial estrangement — he stopped sending stipends to Caleb’s school over suspicions he was still practicing magic. It was a dark and lonely time. “He had almost given up on magic,” says Precious of Caleb’s ordeal.
But where his birth family had rejected him, a cohort of colleagues stepped in: the League of Nigerian Magicians, a collective of over 100 illusionists working to reframe magic as art, not anathema. “We sent some money and reached out to people who checked on him.”
The league was born from two earlier groups: Magical Minds, founded in 2014 by Olanrewaju “Mastermind” Ige, and The Sleights, launched in 2018 by Damilola Fajemisin, Jemimah and a magician known by his online username Khel_Magic. The groups merged in 2019 to form the League, led by Precious, Mastermind and others determined to make magic visible and viable in Nigeria. “We created the group to build a community, help other performers, foster collaborations, to standardize things and give magic a face,” says Fajemisin, one of the founding members.
When she first dabbled in magic, Fajemisin was a wide-eyed 13-year-old in 10th grade. Like many of her fellow magicians in the League, she was instantly hooked the moment she saw someone perform a trick.
“He taught me the trick, and I got completely hyperfixated,” she says. “I remember telling him, ‘I’ll learn my own trick and show you.’ When I got home, I drowned myself in YouTube videos. Fueled by excitement, I started picking up trick after trick.”
Her family was surprisingly receptive, often sitting through her impromptu performances and encouraging her curiosity. “I remember asking my dad to get me a deck of cards from Amazon while he was ordering some other things,” she says. “And he did.” But after high school, the scaffolding of college life and the rigors of studying architecture began to rise around her, and magic slowly slipped to the back burner.
Unlike in the West, where magic has evolved into a multimillion-dollar industry, Nigeria’s magic scene faces significant hurdles. In the United States alone, the magic industry generated approximately $394.6 million in revenue in 2024, supporting over 10,000 performers and nearly 9,000 businesses. Globally, the magic performance market was valued at $32.71 billion in 2023 and is projected to grow to $49.68 billion by 2032. This robust infrastructure has produced world-renowned magicians like David Copperfield, whose net worth is estimated at $1 billion.
In contrast, Nigeria’s magic industry struggles with recognition and support. Often dismissed as illegitimate, magic in Nigeria suffers from limited opportunities and scant institutional backing, stunting its growth as a viable art form.
Thanks to social media, magic in Nigeria is slowly shedding its stigma and moving into the spotlight. Performers like Babs Cardini — who broke out during the pandemic by turning water into wine, landed a BBC feature and now hosts his own YouTube show, “Love & Magic” — have helped bring illusion to broader audiences. The magician Felven Brain followed suit with a magic show on Pop Central TV. Platforms like “De9jaSpirit Talent Hunt” a televised competition spotlighting diverse performers, from singers to magicians, and giving unconventional acts a rare chance at national recognition, have also created room for magic to dazzle alongside music and dance. In its third installation, one of the finalists was the act known as Simply Smart Magician. A few months ago, Yob and Ibu the Magician were invited to perform tricks on a Twitch livestream hosted by Santi — one of Afropop’s most genre-defying artists.
Speaking about the experience, Yob describes it as a “pinch-me moment.” A longtime fan of Santi, he was thrilled to perform, not just for his idol, but also for Grammy-nominated producer and artist Bloody Civilian and chart-topper OdumoduBlvck. “It meant a lot to me — not just as a person, but as a magician,” he says.
Ono Macaulay, the former manager of Babs Cardini and a key figure in Nigeria’s magic revival, has spent over 15 years in entertainment, driven by a childhood fascination with illusion. “There still aren’t enough platforms that recognize magicians as part of Nigeria’s entertainment space,” he tells New Lines. Mentioning Professor Peller, the legendary pioneer many older Nigerians grew up watching, often helps: “There’s a nostalgia that makes them lean in.” Still, cultural bias is hard to shake. “Magic still meets friction,” he says, “but I’m hoping my upcoming tour can start to shift that — one city at a time.”
Some nightclubs now hire resident magicians, offering a fresh pool of work, but the gigs are too few and far between — the industry itself would need a trick on the scale of Copperfield to multiply the opportunities for a growing number of young performers chasing the glitter and shimmer of magic.
Beyond perception, the practical realities of performing magic in Nigeria are just as unforgiving. Many magicians struggle to access quality props, with import fees often exceeding what they earn from performances. “For my first five years in magic, I didn’t make a single kobo in profit,” Precious says. “Everything I got went right back into props, shipping, and learning tools. It’s not just the art — it’s the cost of the craft.” This underscores a persistent challenge: While top Nigerian magicians can earn up to $700 per gig, most exit the craft before it pays, or prefer more stable occupations that offer a clearer path to financial comfort. In today’s harsh economy, passion alone rarely leads to a sense of fulfillment.
But Caleb says he’s found something close. He loves the craft, the country needs it, he’s earning from it and he’s very good. Even his father, who saw devilry where there was only sleight, has started coming around. Today the same balled fists that tried to beat the magic out of him pat him openly on the back. “He’s yet to attend any of my performances,” Caleb says, “but I performed for him in our home last year and I revealed exactly how I did the trick.”
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