LESS than a week after collecting my bags at the domestic terminal at Lagos Murtala Muhammed International Airport, I have come to fully accept that all the warnings and cautionary tales about this chaotic city were little more than old wives’ tales and urban legend.
Yes, the traffic and roads are insane. The people are loud and aggressive. The nights can certainly get sketchy. And most importantly, it contains pockets of poverty that strain the mind’s ability to comprehend.
Lagos faces a future fraught with numerous challenges, but any city has its woes, and at its heart, Lagos is like other metropolises in that it is a place where millions of hopeful people flock in order to pay huge amounts of money to live in small, often rundown homes in exchange for the sheer privilege of being there.
Clearly there’s a reason why we urban-dwellers make that decision, despite all the difficulties and downsides of living in a densely-populated environment that thinks nothing of chewing up and spitting out a person who doesn’t have the talent, means and luck it takes to survive there.
Some of these reasons are largely based on atmosphere and superficial concerns. Parisians love their city for its beauty, high art and refinement. In Tokyo it’s the brash futurism juxtaposed against the soothing peace of the Japanese approach to life. Romans’ strongest amour is reserved for their country’s spectacular food.
As for Lagos, part of what draws thousands of new residents to the city every week is its dynamic culture, the spirit of its people and the excitement of its raucous atmosphere, parties and commerce.
But in Lagos, as in every of the world’s other capital cities, the real draw is the sense that anything is possible — a strong, passionate hope and drive to succeed that persists even among many of its most downtrodden citizens.
Big dreams
While it is exceedingly difficult to come up from nothing in this teeming city on the Atlantic, every person who makes the decision to pack up their lives and start anew in Lagos must truly believe that they have the capacity to do just that. Given how intimidating this town can seem even to a short-term visitor with sufficient means, it must be terrifying to move here from a small rural village in Borno State or the Republic of Niger with little more than the clothes on your back.
Yet new success stories are told every day, even as millions of people starve, flounder and struggle to feed their families. In every megalopolis around the globe, it’s that dream of reaching epic heights that drives people to fight through the soul-crushing lows.
There’s a famous saying about my hometown of New York City that “if you can make it there, you can make it anywhere.” It’s an apt slogan for the Big Apple, the place where big dreamers go in America, but I believe that it should be passed on to Lagos.
Lagosians, as I’ve been told countless times since I arrived here this past weekend, often drive upwards of three or four hours each way in exasperating go-slows just to get to and from work. And to top it off, they seem to work longer hours than the people of any other city I’ve visited. It’s why the clubs only really start hopping around 1 a.m. They do what New Yorkers do, only they’ve taken it a step further, and I like where they’ve landed.
Lagos to me is a heaving, collective organ of striving and selling and enjoying and lamenting. At the same time, it’s an exciting place to visit and explore, and a gateway to the horrors of concentrated urbanity. It’s New York in Africa, and that’s a high compliment coming from a Manhattanite.
The Lagosians
The people of Lagos will be what I remember best upon my return to the U.S., I’m convinced of it. Dissertations have probably been written by previous Western visitors about how welcoming and personable and lovely people are across Nigeria. These are well-known facts among those who have been here.
What impresses me most about Lagosians is how much I see myself reflected in them. New York has always seemed like the one place in the world where a fast-talking, loud, aggravating person like myself could fit into the social order, or lack thereof.
But what blew me away in my interactions with Lagosians is that they are all those things, only magnified. Much as Lagos is bigger, dirtier and more hectic than New York, in my experience, the people of Lagos are often much more interesting, outspoken and more fun than my friends and I tend to be. You very nearly have to assault them if you want to pay the bill, no matter how many Gulders everyone has had, and their energy seemingly knows no limit.
They read newspapers, listen to the radio and watch movies from Nigeria, America, England and beyond, absorbing a wider range of knowledge than many insular New Yorkers ever do.
They dance better, they know how to show people a good time, and they want to be your friend the moment you get past their hardened shells, which can be thicker than those of most New Yorkers, but fall away much quicker. Lagosians laugh, scream and cry louder than we do, and they drive in a manner that would have our cabbies handing their taxi medallions in out of pure shame.
At the same time, much like New Yorkers, they sometimes get a bad rap among their disapproving fellow countrymen for being rude, manic, overly obsessed with money and generally unpleasant. Those negative impressions should be struck from the record in regards to both cities, because though we learn to put up barriers to maintain our sanity in the face of so much humanity, both New Yorkers and Lagosians are just fronting, and that charade of toughness helps us retain our exuberant essence.
The dilemma of progress
Looking back on the defining moments of my time in Lagos as my journey here nears its unfortunate end, the first things that come to mind are fried croaker with jollof rice and plantains; dancing at Fela Kuti’s shrine and the endless hours spent laughing with new local friends as they manoeuvred their cars through the city’s congested streets.
But the experiences of one eye-opening day persist in my memory as well, and they are not easily ignored considering how destructive the trend they represent is to the spirit of Lagos, and the ways they clearly illustrate the challenges that lie ahead for the city, its government and its residents.
Thursday is the day that I began to see clearly why Lagos must change in order for it to respect its people, its heritage and its character.
My photographer and friend Cameron Barnes and I started the day by visiting the Oto-Ilogbo Extension slum of mainland Lagos, where we found ourselves face-to-face with the reality of a situation that as Americans had always previously existed for us only as a concept and a smattering of pictures and news stories.
We saw with our own eyes what the poorest Lagosians deal with on a day-to-day basis, walked the trash-strewn streets, spoke with folks who call it home, stood atop the mound where they relieve themselves in full view of their neighbours and friends. We were stunned, saddened and humbled to our cores, and neither of us will ever forget our walk through Oto-Ilogbo.
But we had to continue to work, and from there, we trekked to Victoria Island for an interview with some of the city’s well-off professionals, young people who thought nothing of spending $25 on a bowl of pasta with pesto. It was a contrast so stark it has stuck with us to this moment, and it mirrors the troublesome wealth divide between much of Africa and the West.
But this is a story about Lagos and Nigeria, not about international economic forces, which clearly have done next to nothing to help the situation. The wide dichotomy between these two extreme results of modern capitalism’s excesses recalled the myriad news reports I’ve read on corruption and the yawning income gap between the rich few and the impoverished many in Nigeria.
Government’s role
The need to find a workable situation to the global slum travesty will only grow in coming years, as the United Nations reported in 2003 that nearly a billion people already lived in slums worldwide, and that a third of the world’s population will reside in them by the mid-2030s.
And yet it appears that Nigeria’s local governments have chosen a slash-burn-redevelop approach to their urban slums. As Barnes and I learned in both Oto-Ilogbo and Mpape, Abuja – which have been targeted for demolition, but have so far escaped that fate – and hundreds of thousands people from Lagos communities from Bar Beach to Badia East know all too well, local governors are more interested in tearing down slums, kicking out their residents and building shiny office buildings and hotels than working with slum-dwellers to find workable solutions.
The blanket arguments against the slum-dwellers are many and varied: they’re squatters, they’re criminals, they don’t own their land, they shouldn’t be subjected to such horrendous living conditions.
But in the end, even if many of them were able to be fit neatly into one derisive box or another, the denizens of these marginalised communities are still humans, and they deserve some form of dignity and compensation, if their lives are to be uprooted in the name of making millions for developers and appeasing the wealthy.
It’s a problem that’s playing out around the world, but if Lagos is to become a world-class city, as its leaders have said they intend for it to be, it needs to find a way to deal with its ballooning slum problem over the coming years, or it will fall victim to its own excesses, as the people of Oto-Ilogbo did long ago.
Just as Lagos is messy, multi-faceted and impossible to define, so too are my thoughts as I take stock of this mind- and world-expanding trip that I’ve been given the privilege to take part in by the International Center for Journalists, International Press Centre and U.S. State Department.
There’s no one way to sum up my impressions of Lagos, just as there are so many different versions of the city within its expansive environs.
Lagos is a place with wonderful qualities and with nearly intractable problems, but as can also sometimes be necessary in the course of human relationships, I have learned to love it in spite of itself.
