Lagos

Supernatural City

Tim Cocks

• Publisher: Hurst Publishers
• Year: 2022
• Print ISBN:
  9781787386945
• eBook ISBN:
  9781787388758
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Global Development Studies

This is a frantic, mystical journey through Africa’s biggest metropolis: Lagos. Going beyond the popular images of mad traffic or crowded slums, we learn of the incredible feats Lagosians pull off to survive their broken-down city, and the secret enabling them to cope with the chaos and precarity of Nigeria’s most populous centre: spirituality.

A female street fighter in a male-dominated mafia extortion business. Two powerful chiefs locked in a deadly feud over billion-dollar real estate. An oil tycoon who gambles her fortune on televangelists’ prophecies. A rubbish scavenger dreaming of a reggae career. A fisherman’s son trying to save Makoko, the ‘floating slum’, from demolition. A priestess to a river goddess selling sand to feed Lagos’s construction boom.

Belief in unseen forces unites these figures, as does their commitment to worshipping them–at shrines, in mosques and in churches. In this extraordinary city, Tim Cocks uncovers something universal about human nature in the face of danger and high uncertainty: our tendency to place faith in a realm beyond.

1

MAN-OF-WAR

Atop NECOM House, Lagos Island, 2016

Whenever I look at a map of Lagos, the image that always springs to mind is of a beached Portuguese man-of-war. The relentless urban sprawl, with its shacks and town houses, is the beach. The polyp’s distinctive sail-shaped bubble is the lagoon at the centre of the city. And its poisonous blue tentacles are the tangle of creeks that extend out of the lagoon, breaking up south Lagos’s neighbourhoods into myriad islands before running into the Atlantic. Lagos is, always has been, a city defined—and menaced—by water.

Water is Lagos’s biggest paradox. The city exists only because of its position between the Atlantic and a lagoon with a harbour big enough to park a whole naval fleet. Yet its expansion from a seaside trading settlement of 20,000 people in the 1800s to a megalopolis of some 20 million today has meant a battle against sea, swamp and storm that constantly threaten to swallow it. Thousands of newcomers every week erect houses on precarious wetlands, where many collapse. Land is often ‘reclaimed’ by developers, only for the waters to claim it back.

The city takes its name from the Portuguese word for ‘lakes’, and much of it is built around the various nooks of the lagoon, which covers more than six and a half thousand square kilometres. Lagos’s wealthiest households face the lagoon, their flashy boats tethered to its shore. The southern parts of the city facing the Atlantic, over which millions of slaves were shipped to the New World, are saturated with canals and brooks connecting lagoon to sea. Drains are few and blocked. The briefest burst of rain turns roads into rivers. The rainy season, which lasts about half the year, spares neither slum nor luxury apartment—everybody gets submerged. The rich splatter jeeps through instant lakes; the poor hitch up robes to wade through puddles; the middle classes lose their battered saloon cars in hidden ditches. Down one street during a heavy downpour, I saw two enterprising fishermen paddling their canoes as if it were just another creek.

The highest view you can get over Lagos and its tentacled lagoon is from atop NECOM House. West Africa’s tallest building, erected for a now defunct state telecoms firm, lies in the heart of what used to be the main commercial district, Lagos Island, before congestion and street gangs forced many businesses to move. From its rooftop, the view is a jambalaya of office blocks, town houses, hotels, churches, mosques and shops spaghettied by freeways. Flyovers slice it up, joining bridges stretched over the lagoon’s different tentacles. Multi-coloured roofs jostle so close together that they give the impression of a wild stampede in every direction to the water’s edge.

NECOM’s thirty-two storeys were finished at the end of a 1970s oil boom, when Lagos was still capital of the ‘Giant of Africa’, as guidebooks called Nigeria. It eventually went bust, rotting from the inside under the military misrule that followed. In its last days, it was providing just half a million landlines to a country of 120 million (Nigerians of the pre-mobile age remember spending half a day trying to make a phone call). These days, the most useful thing NECOM House does is act as a lighthouse to the thousands of ships bringing goods into Lagos’s congested ports of Apapa and Tin Can Island.

Their black shapes are visible for miles from up here. Right out to the gunmetal horizon, rows of container ships import the things—cars, plastics, milk, toothpicks—that Nigeria gave up producing when oil started flowing in the 1950s. To the east of those ports, across the wide channel stuffed with ships where the lagoon meets the Atlantic Ocean, lies Victoria Island (V.I.)—the newish financial district that is the locus of the insanely wealthy Nigerian elite. With its smart hotels and restaurants, it is home to one of the world’s highest concentrations of millionaires.

Further south, poking out of V.I. like a lizard’s tail, is the ‘Eko Atlantic’ city, a ten-square-kilometre stretch of reclaimed land set to be the hottest new development in Lagos. Millions of tonnes of sand have been poured into the sea for this planned Dubai-style gated community. Eko Atlantic is, or will be when it’s finished, Lagos’s answer to that most ominous of trends in extreme twenty-first-century capitalism: the private city. It is also a most revealing answer to the threat of climate change: a bubble of private luxury for a quarter of a million rich people protected by a concrete perimeter. The perimeter can, it is claimed, withstand storm surges and sea level rises of several feet, even while the sand dredged from the Lagos lagoon to build it erodes the coast and makes poor neighbourhoods in the vicinity more prone to flooding. The Eko Atlantic is a place of chrome skyscrapers with sea views, four-lane highways with wide pavements, business parks, restaurants, palm trees, and a luxury marina with ample space for luxury boats. It gets 24-hour power from a private grid, clean water from the tap—both unimaginable in other parts of Lagos—proper sewerage facilities. Oh, and not a single affordable room for the armies of cooks, cleaners, drivers, car washers and security guards that will be needed to attend to the whims of its hyper-affluent residents. The servers will instead sit in morale-melting traffic for hours to reach the gates of Elysium. Many of the flats in its residential towers were sold out before the first bricks were laid, some before they’d even finished filling in the sea.

On a clear day, you can also see the thin Five Cowries Creek separating the northern shore of V.I. from Lagos Island and neighbouring Ikoyi island. Ikoyi is the city’s other exclusive residential district, home of rich Nigerians and expatriates, and the place I lived in for nearly four years. It’s as wealthy as Victoria Island but lacks the bustle, being more residential: all coconut palms, tennis lawns and luxury apartments. It is still shabbily Lagos in its way: roads are cratered, drains blocked. But it retains the posh private clubs—golf, boat, polo—founded when Ikoyi was a ghetto for Lagos’s white rulers.

Finally, off the western edge of the islands, the longest bridge in sub-Saharan Africa, Third Mainland Bridge, ribbons across the lagoon for 11.8 kilometres. The Third Mainland Bridge connects Lagos’s three main islands—that is, Lagos Island, Victoria Island and Ikoyi—with the continent of Africa. It was completed under military ruler Ibrahim Babangida in the early 1990s to relieve traffic on the other two bridges to the burgeoning mainland neighbourhoods. From up here, it looks like a bicycle chain lying sideways in a murky puddle. As with the other bridges, it didn’t take long for it to become throttled by traffic, every day except those mercifully peaceful Sundays, when half the city retreats to sing praise to Jesus, while the other, Muslim half simply rests their exhausted bones.

The bridges of Lagos are the city’s spine. They hold its otherwise amorphous jellyfish-like shape together. They traverse salty lagoon to join islands, sandbanks and peninsulas. They are at once what unite Lagos and expose how glaringly divided it is—connecting mansions with tin-roof slums. Along them, 4x4s in shiny black carry the wealthy to seal their deals or play in their gilded playgrounds, while their specially hired AK-47-toting VIP police escorts force lesser cars off the road. They jostle for space with decrepit minibuses stuffed with weary humanity. Meanwhile, underneath the network of flyovers connecting the bridges, there is an entire undercity, where the homeless and down-and-outs sleep rough, play football, wash and hustle. Observe the bridges for long enough, and you will see all of Lagos.

From this high vantage point over the city—staring down at cars oozing over its suspended freeways—I wonder whether Lagos isn’t the perfect microcosm of our increasingly urban and unequal planet: billionaires importing champagne and collecting sports cars while half the city’s population live in slums with no running water or sanitation. A migrant a minute arriving with nothing but a change of clothes, hoping for a job that isn’t there. Discordant buildings. Relentless cement. Too many cars and not enough roads. Too many roads and not enough houses. Too many houses and virtually no public green space between them, despite all the admirable efforts by the state government to address all of these things. Every waking hour consumed by hustle. In Lagos, I once saw a stretched Hummer whizzing past a beggar in rags, splashing a filthy puddle over the poor man for good measure.

In any city, money is what separates the man in the penthouse suite from the one sleeping on a concrete ledge under a bridge. The bigger the city, the more frantic that equation becomes, as space shrinks and the number of hands chasing the dollars multiplies. But in a country like Nigeria, where a predetermined quantity of oil wealth gushes out of the ground each day and overshadows other endeavours (the so-called oil curse), an idea naturally forms: my success depends on how big a share I can grab.

So, hustle or die. Hustle, hustle, hustle and do your best not to be hustled yourself: for that is how the winners and losers will be determined. The immigration official hustles you for money to let you into Lagos airport. The street kid hustles you for money to park your car in a public space. The policeman hustles you for money because it’s the weekend and he wasn’t paid on time (and, more persuasively, because he’s holding a gun). While you boil with rage in a traffic jam stretching from here to the next ice age, the hawker selling pirated DVDs or fried plantains at your window will cheerfully breathe your fumes until his lungs are charcoal if it gets him enough money for a portion of yam. And don’t expect a miracle from God without a hefty donation to your Pentecostal pastor.

Check your change, check your pockets, check the product you just bought isn’t fake or poisonous, check a phoney estate agent hasn’t sold your house to multiple buyers when you get back from holiday. Make sure you get paid up front, but never, if you can help it, pay up front. Pay off only those who need to be paid off, like the thugs and the cops—the ones capable of erecting roadblocks (literal and imaginary). But show no weakness. The Lagosian brain has a specially fitted device for detecting weakness. Weakness is a wallet-killer. Don’t let anyone squeeze into your traffic space, on pain of death. Never mind the paintwork on your car: show even the slightest concern for your car’s aesthetics and you’ll be stuck at the same traffic light till dawn. Take a deep breath. Don’t stop, never stop, not even for that dead body that will most likely fester for days on the roadside (you don’t want to be tarred with blame if you attend to it). Let it be collected by the municipal authorities or, failing that, merge with the tarmac like a squashed rat. Keep moving. Stop and you’ll be the next body in the street.

Stop and you’ll starve.

PART I

THE IRON LADY

A squirrel that wants to climb the plantain tree must have sharp claws.

Yoruba proverb

Let us make no pretence about it, every human being loves power; power over his fellow men in the state, or in business enterprises; or, failing that, power over his wife and children, and over his brothers, sisters, and friends. Of these categories of power, the desire for power over one’s fellow men is the strongest.

Obafemi Awolowo, statesman and former premier of the
Western Region in colonial times, in an address to a
students’ parliament, 1975

2

TOYIN

Obalende, adjacent to Lagos Island, 2003

Blood was spattered all over the road. Some of it had already started to congeal in the Lagos heat into little black dots. It was coming from a bus driver being punched and kicked repeatedly by the touts outside Obalende Bus Terminus. Toyin relished the variety of sounds the victim was making: a whiny yelp, the guttural sound of his wind being knocked out, the faint crack of his ribs on impact. She pulled her boot back to get momentum, and swung it into his torso.

The driver deserved it, to be sure. The ‘city bus’ he was driving was an affront to the Obalende Boys, the gang that ran the busiest bus station on the three islands of Lagos. Most Lagosians used the old creaky yellow minibuses that plied much of the city, from which Toyin’s gang extorted handsome sums of money. But these shinier, white buses owned by a businessman with links to the governor were supposed to be off limits to the touts. The gangs had been warned to leave them alone, and so their emboldened drivers were refusing to pay ‘loading fees’. They had to be taught a lesson.

Other gang members were smashing the bus’s windows with nail-studded clubs and letting the air out of its tyres. By now, the sun was just up, bathing Lagos in a mellow light ahead of the steamy harshness that kicks in around nine. Obalende is a typically apocalyptic Lagos cityscape: a post-modern jumble of flyovers, bridges, cloverleafs and motorways, with high-rises poking up between them, that forms the main valve in the city’s clogged heart. Ramps rise and descend, carving up spaces stuffed with crumbling, half-abandoned high-rises, concrete shacks blackened with soot, sagging power lines and gable-roofed apartment blocks. Toyin knew almost every street and its regular inhabitants, down to the lowliest hawker.

Ever since she was a girl, she had loved what she called ‘the rugged life’—fighting and hustling on the streets of Lagos. It was much more rewarding than sitting around looking pretty so that a boy would lavish money on her, as many Nigerian women were taught to do. With her slump-shouldered physique and round belly, Toyin would have stood out from the mostly wiry young men beating up the driver that day. But her bulging biceps were ample warning that she was as tough as any. Toyin had, by West African standards, pale skin—Nigerians call this much-sought-after shade ‘yellow’. She never needed the dangerous, skin-burning peroxide tonics that many Nigerian women apply to lighten themselves. Her narrow eyes looked ‘almost Chinese’, she would say. She had a round face, a small jaw, teeth that stuck out, and a mouth that curled in a disconcerting way but could also smile warmly.

The official name of Toyin’s gang was National Union of Road Transport Workers: Obalende Chapter. But that was just one of Nigeria’s many misnomers for a massive extortion racket. As long as anyone can remember, Lagos has been full of such ‘unions’ and ‘associations’, labels that legitimise gangsterism. They are top-down affairs, with a national leader sitting atop a spider’s web of extortion. There is the national association for market women, shoe hawkers, car washers, scrap scavengers, scrap dealers, even shea butter makers. There is the Nigeria Automobile Technicians Association, the Nigeria Association of Food Vendors, and the Witches and Wizards Association of Nigeria.

Yet none of them do extortion quite like the ‘transport union’. For in Lagos, whether you reside in a shack-lined slum or a tree-lined avenue, if you are in the business of moving people or things around, you will pay a portion of your earnings to a tout. It might happen something like this …

A skinny but wirily muscular boy leaps out of nowhere onto the side of a bus on Mobolaji Johnson Avenue, not far from the high-rises on the Lagos mainland that house the main state government offices. The traffic is stalled, so the driver has little chance to escape. The boy and three thugs backing him are chanting ‘Owo mi da?’—‘Where is my money?’ in Yoruba, the main ethnic language of Lagos and southwest Nigeria. It is a common phrase, easily understood even by those who don’t speak much Yoruba.

The bus driver knows that if he refuses to pay, they may smash his wing mirror or drag him out and beat him. His weary eyes fix a contemptuous stare on the boy, but he doesn’t resist. He reaches into the pocket of his torn combat trousers and pulls out a filthy-looking 100-naira note. The boy snatches it, then vanishes into the crowd of female hawkers taking advantage of the stoppage to sell hot dough balls and sachets of Pure Water to passengers. The bus crawls away.

Thanks to its strategic location, Obalende was one of the biggest such transport rackets. It lies about four kilometres down a flyover joining the Third Mainland Bridge, that bleak structure connecting Lagos’s three main islands with Africa. Every weekday, millions of Lagosians pour out of the continental Lagos mainland, where most of them live, and cross one of just three bridges to come and work on these islands, and then go back again. After reaching Obalende, some will travel east to work as cooks or drivers or guards in Ikoyi’s leafy, residential streets, where Nigeria’s rich rub shoulders with expatriates in mansions shaded by mango trees. Some will go south over Falomo Bridge across the Five Cowries Creek to their white-collar jobs in the corporate offices, banks and insurance companies of upmarket Victoria Island—or perhaps in the restaurants, bars and nightclubs that entertain its professional class. Others—an assortment of traders, state government civil servants, cyber-criminals, artists and con artists—will head immediately west to the queerly romantic dystopia that is Lagos Island. This is the oldest part of the city, with its government high-rise buildings, its gnarly sausage trees, grey old churches, peeling colonial offices and hyperactive markets. Most of these commuters can’t afford a car, so they take the bus. To the gangs who run the bus stations, all those millions of journeys mean one thing: money.

Like the other ‘chapters’ of the ‘transport union’, the extortion racket run by the Obalende Boys was a more or less exclusively male affair. With a notable exception: Toyin. Somehow, in a world of men, where a woman’s role tends to be cleaning up after them and cooking food to fill their ever-expanding stomachs, she was a gangster on a par with the meanest boys of the Obalende bus park.

Toyin had learned at an early age that there were two survival strategies for Nigerian girls. You bat your eyelids at the boys in the hope of courting their protection—or you beat them at their own game. She grew up in Lagos in the 1970s, just as a heady, oil-fuelled boom was taking off and Nigerians were getting into money in a big way.

Back then, Lagos had fewer than two million people, but her street in Offin, Lagos Island, was one of the most crowded in Africa. Its Portuguese-style colonial villas and tropical modernist concrete box...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Prologue: A Place of Endless Impossibility
• 1. Man-of-War
• Part I The Iron Lady
• Part II The Scrapyard Bard
• Part III God’s Energy
• Part IV Ghosts
• Part V The Overlord
• Part VI Noah’s Lagoon
• Part VII The Ajah Woman and the River Goddess
• Epilogue: Gods of Hustle
• A Note on Sources
• Acknowledgements
• Back Cover