The Radical Grace of Damilola Feyide: How a Saturday Outreach Became Lagos’s First Free Boarding School

By the middle of our virtual interview, I had lost count of two things: how many times Damilola Feyide had been interrupted, and how many times I had said “wow”.

Our call was taking place across a screen, but her laptop offered a clear window into a working day that refused to pause. Her office looked much like any other school administrator’s desk, except for the transparent glass walls surrounding it. From where she sat, Dami could see everything happening outside, and it did not take long before the world outside her door stepped into our conversation.

Every few minutes, a student would pop into the office. Dami would turn to them—sometimes firm, sometimes amused, always familiar—answer a quick question, and seamlessly pivot back to our discussion. What was meant to be a formal interview quickly stopped feeling like one. It became an intimate observation of a founder whose life and institution were moving in real time around her.

Listening to her explain how Let It Shine Academy (LISA) grew from an idea she could barely articulate into Nigeria’s first free boarding secondary school, the numbers were impressive. But the numbers were not what stayed with me. It was the sheer weight of responsibility behind them: more than 300 children living on site, over 50 staff members, three meals a day, accommodation, security, electricity, water, books, uniforms, healthcare, examinations, safeguarding, parents, and university applications.

And Dami, who had initially arrived in Nigeria intending to complete her National Youth Service Corps (NYSC) year and leave, found herself responsible for all of it. “I was just to do NYSC and go back,” she told me candidly. “I was to go finish, if I’m being honest. I was going to do that thing where somebody…