tiganeasca
Moderator
While we have a thread for African Literature--which, frankly, strikes me as odd since we don't have one for European Literature or Asian Literature--I believe that what follows more properly belongs in a long-overdue thread devoted to Nigeria and its many excellent authors. Of course, having said that, my first post will be something slightly different. From time to time, I have posted columns posted in a New York Times series devoted to the literature of many different world cities. Now, they have finally arrived at Lagos. And so I excerpt that column below.
Read Your Way Through Lagos
By Stephen Buoro
Feb. 7, 2024
Lagos is an experience of a lifetime. The city will enchant and wreck you. The bedlam. The 15-minute journeys that stretch to five hours because of traffic jams. The multitudes everywhere you turn, each individual fizzing with hope and energy and stories, each unfazed by the maladies of living here — crumbling infrastructure, an oppressive kleptocratic government, the daily whiff of disasters brewing.
Lagos, or Èkó (as it’s known in Yoruba), is a city of paradoxes, of extremes. Every condition exists prodigiously here. This is why Lagosians sometimes quip, “Èkó no dey carry last”: “Lagos never ranks last in anything.” Take housing. In the neighborhoods of Lekki and Ikoyi, you’ll find mansions posher than any in Manhattan or Mayfair. But across the Lagos Lagoon, you’ll find a floating city: thousands of families living in shacks built over stinking waters.
With more than 15 million people, Lagos is Nigeria’s capital of culture, finance and entertainment. It is the laboratory of two of Nigeria’s major cultural exports: music (including Afrobeat) and cinema (Nollywood). Afrobeat songs chart high on the Billboard Hot 100; Nollywood is the world’s second-largest movie industry by output. Even when I was a boy growing up in northern Nigeria, hundreds of miles away, the city was my reality. Like most Nigerians, it informed my identity — culturally, linguistically, philosophically.
Each time I visit, time seems both to freeze and to hasten. Every moment amid the orchestra of Lagos’s streets or the polychrome of its markets, every stop at its psychedelic owambe parties or its devious police checkpoints, every conversation overheard or scene witnessed makes me wiser, more conscious, more human.
What should I read before I pack my bags?
Although Lagos is ever-changing, like most Nigerian cities, its spirit, and how it informs its residents, remains largely consistent. Thus, many modern classics still offer powerful and faithful evocations of the city.
Set mostly between 1930s and 1940s Lagos, Buchi Emecheta’s novel “The Joys of Motherhood” follows Nnu Ego as she navigates childlessness and the challenges of womanhood and motherhood in a patriarchal society. Emecheta, with immense deftness and subtlety, provides a haunting and forceful attack on patriarchy, sexism and misogyny in Nigeria, and indicates how they taint and limit a nation.
Corruption, a major societal ill in Nigeria, is unsurprisingly a prevalent theme in the nation’s literature. In Chinua Achebe’s novel “No Longer at Ease,” the sequel to his masterpiece “Things Fall Apart,” the author examines how Nigeria’s endemic corruption results from the exploitation of colonialism, and how everyone in the nation ends up both perpetrator and victim. The novel also explores the clash between traditionalism and so-called modernity, a key Achebean concern.
Area boys (agbèrò in Yoruba) are the street gangs of Lagos. In “The Beatification of Area Boy,” by Wole Soyinka, a multilayered, exhilarating and moving play, the author presents a day in the life of Sanda, a security officer and the “King of Area Boys,” unraveling his relationship with the tenants and patrons of a Lagosian shopping center. The play begins with a seemingly quotidian sunrise. But as the action proceeds, we see how extraordinary the “sunrise” and the day are — and, by extension, how monstrous the problems plaguing Nigeria are: the brutality of dictatorship, the all-pervading corruption, the staggering poverty and inequality.
Many Nigerians believe in the supernatural, and this often stems from the animistic ontology that undergirds self and being in many Nigerian communities. This is exactly why Ben Okri’s “The Famished Road” is stunning. The novel employs “animist realism” in depicting the phantasmagoric experiences of Azaro, an abiku (“spirit-child”) who negotiates between our mundane world and the “spirit-world” to which his spirit companions attempt to lure him back. Although set before Nigeria’s independence from Britain in 1960, its Lagos street scenes are some of the most vivid I’ve read.
For a historical overview, I’d recommend “Lagos: A Cultural History,” by Kaye Whiteman. It traces the history of the city from the arrival of Portuguese explorers in 1472 to the British takeover in 1861 and contemporary times. It takes us through the topography of Lagos (the Island-Mainland dichotomy), the streets and their stories, the city’s nightlife and its film, music, art and literary scenes.
Read Your Way Through Lagos
By Stephen Buoro
Feb. 7, 2024
Lagos is an experience of a lifetime. The city will enchant and wreck you. The bedlam. The 15-minute journeys that stretch to five hours because of traffic jams. The multitudes everywhere you turn, each individual fizzing with hope and energy and stories, each unfazed by the maladies of living here — crumbling infrastructure, an oppressive kleptocratic government, the daily whiff of disasters brewing.
Lagos, or Èkó (as it’s known in Yoruba), is a city of paradoxes, of extremes. Every condition exists prodigiously here. This is why Lagosians sometimes quip, “Èkó no dey carry last”: “Lagos never ranks last in anything.” Take housing. In the neighborhoods of Lekki and Ikoyi, you’ll find mansions posher than any in Manhattan or Mayfair. But across the Lagos Lagoon, you’ll find a floating city: thousands of families living in shacks built over stinking waters.
With more than 15 million people, Lagos is Nigeria’s capital of culture, finance and entertainment. It is the laboratory of two of Nigeria’s major cultural exports: music (including Afrobeat) and cinema (Nollywood). Afrobeat songs chart high on the Billboard Hot 100; Nollywood is the world’s second-largest movie industry by output. Even when I was a boy growing up in northern Nigeria, hundreds of miles away, the city was my reality. Like most Nigerians, it informed my identity — culturally, linguistically, philosophically.
Each time I visit, time seems both to freeze and to hasten. Every moment amid the orchestra of Lagos’s streets or the polychrome of its markets, every stop at its psychedelic owambe parties or its devious police checkpoints, every conversation overheard or scene witnessed makes me wiser, more conscious, more human.
What should I read before I pack my bags?
Although Lagos is ever-changing, like most Nigerian cities, its spirit, and how it informs its residents, remains largely consistent. Thus, many modern classics still offer powerful and faithful evocations of the city.
Set mostly between 1930s and 1940s Lagos, Buchi Emecheta’s novel “The Joys of Motherhood” follows Nnu Ego as she navigates childlessness and the challenges of womanhood and motherhood in a patriarchal society. Emecheta, with immense deftness and subtlety, provides a haunting and forceful attack on patriarchy, sexism and misogyny in Nigeria, and indicates how they taint and limit a nation.
Corruption, a major societal ill in Nigeria, is unsurprisingly a prevalent theme in the nation’s literature. In Chinua Achebe’s novel “No Longer at Ease,” the sequel to his masterpiece “Things Fall Apart,” the author examines how Nigeria’s endemic corruption results from the exploitation of colonialism, and how everyone in the nation ends up both perpetrator and victim. The novel also explores the clash between traditionalism and so-called modernity, a key Achebean concern.
Area boys (agbèrò in Yoruba) are the street gangs of Lagos. In “The Beatification of Area Boy,” by Wole Soyinka, a multilayered, exhilarating and moving play, the author presents a day in the life of Sanda, a security officer and the “King of Area Boys,” unraveling his relationship with the tenants and patrons of a Lagosian shopping center. The play begins with a seemingly quotidian sunrise. But as the action proceeds, we see how extraordinary the “sunrise” and the day are — and, by extension, how monstrous the problems plaguing Nigeria are: the brutality of dictatorship, the all-pervading corruption, the staggering poverty and inequality.
Many Nigerians believe in the supernatural, and this often stems from the animistic ontology that undergirds self and being in many Nigerian communities. This is exactly why Ben Okri’s “The Famished Road” is stunning. The novel employs “animist realism” in depicting the phantasmagoric experiences of Azaro, an abiku (“spirit-child”) who negotiates between our mundane world and the “spirit-world” to which his spirit companions attempt to lure him back. Although set before Nigeria’s independence from Britain in 1960, its Lagos street scenes are some of the most vivid I’ve read.
For a historical overview, I’d recommend “Lagos: A Cultural History,” by Kaye Whiteman. It traces the history of the city from the arrival of Portuguese explorers in 1472 to the British takeover in 1861 and contemporary times. It takes us through the topography of Lagos (the Island-Mainland dichotomy), the streets and their stories, the city’s nightlife and its film, music, art and literary scenes.
