Frontier Town

The Lagos my mother grew up in was a small city. She lived a middle-class life in a part of town that some considered a slum, playing on the streets with neighbors. My grandfather was a doctor, and other professionals lived nearby, but the neighborhood was also home to petty traders, mechanics and blue-collar workers. Since the early 1960s, Lagos has grown from a population of fewer than one million people to more than 20 million today.

My mother was raised in a part of the city called Isale Eko. It was known for street parties. Neighbors would erect canopies in the middle of the street to contain the spill out of guests from their front parlors, while loudspeakers blared music all night. The dancing went on until morning. My grandfather often got into arguments over these “‘block-road”’ parties, as they were called. He grumbled about living in the “slums” but never joined the middle-class exodus.

Lagos’s population growth is fueled mostly by migration. It is a city of travelers hoping to either find their luck or make it from scratch. My father was one such migrant. He grew up all over Nigeria, moving from the north to the east to the southwest, but he only settled in Lagos as an adult, after qualifying as a doctor. He and my mother are from different ethnic groups. He is Igbo and grew up Christian, and she is Yoruba and was raised Muslim. His parents were not wealthy, whereas her father sent her to boarding school in England.

Elsewhere in Nigeria, their relationship might have seemed “Romeo and Juliet-esque”— star-crossed lovers fighting against the prejudices of their families and the wider community. But in Lagos, there was nothing unusual about them. Interethnic, interreligious, international marriages were common. It was a cosmopolitan city, a capitalist city. Where a man was from was secondary to how much money he made. The naira, the Nigerian currency, had no caste.

In many ways, my father lived the Lagos dream. After moving to the city, he and my mother founded the first private dialysis center in the nation. Lagos was fertile ground for his dreams, as London, New York and Paris have proved to be for the dreams of other migrants. Their practice was successful. At first, my family lived in the hospital, in a room at the rear of the building. Then, they moved to a nearby house and finally into a house in a private, gated estate. It was in this house that I spent almost all of my childhood. As the last born, I never experienced the early, peripatetic years.

By the time I was a child in the late 1990s, many members of the professional classes had retreated into gated communities like ours. Although Nigeria is an oil-rich country, decades of corruption and mismanagement had weakened the economy. Crime was high. If you could afford it, you and your neighbors banded together to form an estate. Ours had about thirty families. There was only one entrance, a gate manned by private security. The guards didn’t have guns, but they had flashlights, whistles, sticks and a large padlock to bolt the gate from inside.

All households in the estate paid monthly dues. In exchange, the gutters were always clear, the streetlights remained on, the roads were swept clean, rubbish was collected weekly, the gate was manned 24 hours a day and the streets were tarred. In the Lagos outside our estate, things did not run so smoothly.

Years later, I wrote my master’s dissertation on private estates in Lagos and their relative functionality. How did they stop free-riding residents who didn’t pay their dues but enjoyed the public services paid for by others? And was it possible to scale the order of private estates to the rest of Nigeria?

You couldn’t be brought to court for failing to pay your dues, as you could be for, say, not paying your taxes. Nor could you be stopped from walking on the pristine estate roads and enjoying the streetlights. But your trash could remain uncollected, forming a stinking mound outside your house, although this method was not foolproof. In the dead of night, trash from a free-rider would be moved in front of the home of their dues-paying neighbor.

Of the estates I surveyed, one of the most effective methods of coercing residents to pay their dues was public shaming. In some estates, the names of defaulters were printed in bold and hung at the gate for all to see. In others, guards at the entrance would refuse to open the gate for defaulting residents. Those people would be forced to get out of their cars, in all their finery, in full view of the world, and push open the gate themselves.

This method was effective because Lagosians are very susceptible to shame. We want to be seen by our peers to be winning, and nothing shouts “not winning” more loudly than being shamed for unpaid estate dues. Lagos engenders competition in its inhabitants, as do all cities, but nowhere else is the contest so brazen. Consider standby generators. They are common in many countries where the electricity supply is erratic (as it is in Nigeria) but in Lagos, the most common standby generators are called “I beta pass my neighbour,” which translates to “I am better than my neighbour.” You are better than your neighbour because you have a standby generator and they do not, or even if they do, yours is bigger and louder. You are better than your neighbour because your children go to private school and theirs do not, because you traveled abroad for holiday and they did not, because you drive a Range Rover and they peter through Lagos traffic in a Ford.

The conspicuous display of wealth is a hallmark of Lagos culture. “Dress the way you want to be addressed” is one popular maxim. Dress so people think you are rich, even though your account is overdrawn. We call this tireless attention to outward presentation “packaging.” We know our brands and designers. We can distinguish our Hermès from our Chanel. Lagos is the only place I know where the noun “oppressor” is used as a compliment.

Let’s say you walked into a party, decked out in designer clothes, your face beat to the gods (heavily but stylishly made up), your hair on fleek (perfectly coiffed). Friends might shout out in praise as you made your entrance: “Oppressor!” In a choice between Moses and Pharaoh, we know who we want to be: the head and not the tail. The victor, not the vanquished. Except perhaps Pharaoh is not the best example. In that story, the oppressor lost. The slaves went free.

I went to private school in Lagos. There, we enacted the neuroses of our parents on a smaller, pettier scale. We were all identically dressed in uniforms, so we found new markers of status. Shoes. Where did you buy yours? In Nigeria or abroad? Stationery. Where did you buy yours? In Nigeria or abroad? Gel pens were a particular indication of rank. Sports kit. Were your trainers Adidas, Nike or simply some unheard-of brand? We were little capitalists, little strivers, mini Lagosians, waiting to gain our majority so we could begin oppressing in earnest.

The poor of Lagos are very oppressed. They are overlooked by the government when it comes to providing welfare and infrastructure and yet targeted by the government when it comes to scapegoating a class that is stopping Lagos from becoming a “modern mega-city.” They are blamed for crime. Their dwellings are sometimes arbitrarily deemed “illegal structures” and are destroyed by government agencies. Even their jobs can be banned—hawking in parts of the city is prohibited.

The protagonist of my first novel, The Spider King’s Daughter, was a hawker. The idea came from an interview I conducted when I was about 10. My mother entered me in an essay competition, and the topic I had to write about was child labor. As part of my research, I interviewed a hawker who was under 16. I don’t know how my mother found her. We sat in a room for a couple of hours, and I asked questions and took notes. She was amused by my precociousness. “Small journalist,” she called me. Some of my questions were direct, perhaps even insensitive. If I were older, she might have thought me rude. But to be young is often to be blunt, and we spoke with frankness.

“Do you want your children to be hawkers?” I asked.

“Never. I want something better for them.”

Social mobility exists in Lagos, but the odds are heavily weighted against the poorest. The characters in my second novel, Welcome to Lagos, migrate to the city and end up homeless. They live under a bridge, the only shelter they can find. When I was researching the book, I came across many stories of people drawn from the rural parts of Nigeria by the siren song of Lagos. Lagos is where they’d make it, hammer blow (become wealthy suddenly). They come from all over Africa. They give up the close-knit kinship structures of their home towns and come to a city where everyone is a stranger. The penalties for not making it are harsh: poverty, hunger and even death.

Lagos is toughest and cruelest to the poor, but it is also hard on the middle classes and the rich. Workers can spend hours commuting to their jobs, inching forward in traffic that stretches for miles. Basic healthcare and consistent electricity come at a high cost. Many have migrated to Britain, America and Canada, but many others have stayed. Those who remain do so because of a sense of opportunity. “There is a ceiling for black people in England,” a friend who moved back to Lagos from the US said to me. “There is no ceiling for black people here. If I work hard, I can be anything I want to be. I can even be president. Show me your black prime minister.”

There is the feel of a frontier town to Lagos. The city is old, but the people are new. Few can claim to be original Lagosians. We’ve arrived for the gold rush. And, as in frontier towns, there are high stakes, and danger colors everyday, mundane activities. In the Wild West, at least that of Hollywood’s imagining, a man could walk into a saloon for a drink and end up shot dead by an outlaw. In Lagos, a person can drive to work one day and end up robbed in traffic at gunpoint.

Almost everyone has their own tale of derring-do. A friend spun a 360 on a highway because she spotted a robbery happening 100 meters ahead. My mother’s friend saw armed men approaching his vehicle and slipped out of the back seat of his car. He found his way home, changed into his sport kit and still made it down to the club for his evening game of tennis. My aunt’s neighbor was kidnapped while she was out on her morning jog. She was held in captivity until the ransom of millions of naira was paid.

And yet, Lagos remains for many the city of dreams. It is home to Nollywood, one of the largest film industries in the world. Its stars are household names in Africa and beyond. The Afrobeats industry that has birthed giants like Burna Boy, Tiwa Savage and WizKid is also headquartered in Lagos. Lagos weddings, Lagos fashion, Lagos music and Lagos films set trends that are copied worldwide.

My brother moved back to Nigeria after graduating with an economics degree from an American university and a master’s from a British university. He founded a production company with his friends and, over the course of just a few years, produced more than 10 movies, many of which you can now watch on Netflix. Would he have been as successful if he remained in England? Unlikely. According to the British Film Institute, only three percent of people working behind the camera in the British film industry are members of racial minorities.

I left Lagos when I was 14. I moved to Winchester, then to London, neither of which matched the pace of Lagos. In England, I learned that to announce your ambition was considered impolite. I learned that self-deprecation was read as modesty, and one must never admit to being good at anything. In Lagos, people said, “I am the best person for the job.” In England, people stayed silent on their qualifications.

Whenever I visit, I am always struck by an energy that has never quite left me. In England, I am conscious of trying to speak softly, of quieting my effusion, of ending sentences with full stops instead of exclamation marks. In Lagos, I am struck by the confidence and ambition of my friends and acquaintances, some of whom studied abroad before returning home. Many have started their own fashion companies. Some are presenters on television. One has founded a tech company.

Most of my Nigerian friends in England work nine-to-five jobs. Many naturalized and became British citizens. They never have to worry about running water or electricity. On weekends, they don’t write business proposals or make plans for their side hustles. They go to brunch and talk about microaggressions and how slowly they’re moving up the corporate ladder.

Will I ever return to live in Lagos? The chances are good. My parents and brother live and thrive there. The social scene is constantly evolving. Every time I visit, there are new bars, brunch spots, cafés and cinemas that have opened. On my last trip, I went to the Ake Arts and Book Festival, the Lagos Fashion and Design Week and the international art fair, ART X, all in one week.

If I do return, I’ll have to revive my inner Lagosian. I’ll have to put on the lens of a pioneer, never expecting things to work, ready to create a whole infrastructure from scratch, to build a business, then build the road to the business, then build the electricity plant to power the business. My brother always says, “Lagos is not for the faint-hearted.” Lagos welcomes nobody, and yet they come by the thousands. Because dreams do come true in Lagos, but only for those who can dream with their eyes open.