Lagos Noir

I am listening to Lagos with my eyes closed.

My first memory of Lagos is one I cannot trust. I was four, maybe five years old and my family, my mother and my four siblings, have just returned from London where we fled in 1968, as the war in Nigeria raged for its second year.

Ikeja Airport in 1970 has few amenities to offer us, particularly since my mother has been a vocal pro-Biafra activist in England during the Nigerian-Biafran civil war, one of the many war wives who spoke up against the British government’s support of the Nigerian side. We were held for questioning in a hot tin-roofed hangar for hours. This is only what I remember.

An okra and palm oil stew that nearly burned my lips off is my second memory of Lagos. It was 1980 and my mother, my sister, and I were heading back to London. We were on our way to Lagos by car because the flight we were supposed to take from Enugu to Lagos had been cancelled—and then rebooked at twice the price to other passengers. So, my brother had accompanied us by road and after an eight-hour trip in a nauseously hot taxi, we had stopped in Shagamu, fifty miles outside of Lagos, for a roadside café lunch. Even then, Lagos had sprawled out to Shagamu. 

My third memory of Lagos is about my Uncle William. I didn’t know I had an Uncle William until he died when I was fifteen. Two men appeared on our doorstep claiming to come from my Uncle William’s congregation. It turns out that having failed out of school in Germany and having not returned to the village for my grandmother’s funeral, William was exiled not just from the family, but also from the memory of the family. And yet he haunted it, from his small Santeria-based church in the worst ghetto of the city, Maroko.

It was in search of this uncle, this memory, this loss that I couldn’t even shape my tongue around, that I went to Lagos for the first time as an adult: hitchhiking alternately by train and lorry; a stupid but exhilarating journey. It was in Maroko that I found the Lagos inside me.

***

Lagos has, like many coastal cities, a very checkered and noir past. It is the largest city in Nigeria and its former capital. It is also the largest megacity on the African continent, with a population approximating twenty-one million, and by itself is the fourth-largest economy in Africa. Though named by the Portuguese (Lagos means lakes in Portuguese; the city was also known briefly as Onim) because of the many islands and lagoons that make up its sprawl (it has since had so much land reclaimed from the city for its expansion that it bears no resemblance to that time), its pronunciation, with its subsequent British history, has been anglicized. Surest way to annoy a Lagosian is to call it by its Portuguese pronunciation.

It was previously inhabited by the Awori and then it was under the rule of the Benin Empire, then the British, and then independence. It was known locally as Eko, then Onim, then Lagos, then in slang as Lasgidi, and gidi, and on—the city of many names that wears as many faces as there are people. People from Lagos call themselves Omo-Eko, children of Eko. It is a beautiful, chaotic, glorious, resplendent, mess of a city. In many ways Eko makes New York feel like a small town.

The Yoruba, who are the natives of Lagos, have lived in urban-style locales for over seven thousand years, some of the earliest people to do so. Cities by their very nature lend themselves to noir, or at least the earlier antecedents of noir—morality plays and, one can argue, even the Penny Dreadfuls of Victorian London. But classic noir as we have come to know it is an invention of the post–World War II era, an invention that is used to express the ennui and desperation that followed the two wars.

The horrors of the slave trade and the subsequent colonial expansions of empires into Africa did much to shake the European sense of moral superiority. But it was something about the nineteenth century, the Victorian obsession with death perhaps, that really ignited the fire for noir. There was Jack the Ripper, the work of Arthur Conan Doyle, and then Joseph Conrad. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was written after his visit to the Belgian Congo. What happened there, the horrors the Belgians perpetrated against the Africans—amputations for not paying taxes, amputations on children to compel obedience among adults—is old history now. But then, it was happening. A sympathetic reading could be that this evil inherent in whiteness was too much for a mind like Conrad’s, so deeply mired in the myth of white moral superiority to accept, so he projected outward the darkness onto the Africans, making them less than human, as though that somehow justified what was going on. The First and Second World Wars did the rest, shredded what was left, and the noir genre was born. It ranged from hard-boiled detective fiction to more general suspense, thriller, etc.

Nigerians fought in both the First and Second World Wars on behalf of the British. The men who served lived through hell and came back to no pensions and no job prospects. But the struggle for independence was the focus of the elite, and so not much attention was paid to the returning soldiers, and to the feelings of emptiness and horror that they must have shared with their European counterparts. The literature that bears the closest resemblance to noir were the pamphlets of the Onitsha Market pulp varieties.

***

It is rumored that there are more canals in this Lagos than in Venice. Except in Lagos they are often unintentional. Gutters that have become waterways and lagoons fenced in by stilt homes or full of logs for a timber industry most of us don’t know exists. All of it skated by canoes as slick as any dragonfly. There are currently no moonlight or other gondola rides available.

Christ Church Cathedral rises from the slump of land between the freeway and the sea and Balogun Market, like Monet’s study of Rouen Cathedral. In the shadow, in the motor park that hugs its façade, is the best “mama-put” food in Lagos. Its legend travels all the way across the country. The seasoned Lagosian gastronomes can be heard chanting their orders, haggling with the madam—Make sure you put plenty kpomo, or, No miss dat shaki. No, no, no, dat other one. There can be no sweeter music, no better choir. In the distance, bus conductors call like Vikings from the prows of their ships, testing the fog of exhaust fumes—Obalande straight! Yaba no enter!

In the shadow of high-rises, behind the international money of Broad Street, the real Lagos spreads out like a mat of rusting rooftops.

In Ikoyi Bay, boats dot the sea, sails like lazy gulls catching the breeze. Across the bay, the millionaires’ village that was once Maroko sits in a slight mist. I think it is the ghost of that lost place haunting the rich to distraction, so that even their twelve-foot walls, barbed razor wire or broken glass crowning them, or the searchlights, or the armed guards, cannot make their peace with the moans of a woman crying for a child crushed by the wheels of bulldozers. Or maybe it is just the wind sighing through palm fronds.

Like in any world city, there are so few original inhabitants that they wear their Eko badges like honor. There is nothing like Bar Beach on a Sunday afternoon. The sand is white, the diamond-shaped all-glass Union Bank Building across the street reflects the water and makes you think it is a wave frozen in time. Children ride flea-infested horses, squealing in a childish delight that is a mix of fear and awe. Slow-roasting lamb suya blankets everything with desire. A cold Coca-Cola here tastes like everything the ads on TV promise—I shit you not.

In one corner, as though they stepped out of a Wole Soyinka play, a gaggle of white-garbed members of the Order of the Cherubim and Seraphim church dip themselves in the water, invoking the Virgin Mary and Yemoja in one breath.

Gleaming cars—BMWs, Lexuses—line the waterfront, spilling young people giddy with money and power and privilege and sunshine.

All of this belies the executions that used to happen here in the 1970s. Families gathered to cheer the firecracker shots from the firing squads dispensing with convicted robbers.

 ***

But as with much of the world, none of it exists until we arrive and cast our gaze about. And so, it wasn’t until the early seventies that I realized Lagos even existed as a place. My introduction was detention in a hot military aviation shed where my mother (and thus us), on our return to Nigeria after the Biafran War, was held for interrogation for being a Biafran supporter.

Those of us who grew up in the detritus of the war knew, and many of us still know, and carry, an unsettled darkness. A danger, a sense of the ominous we cannot explain. There was death around us, as memory, as suffering, as a scent that permeated everything we did. Even our play was marked by that war; unexploded grenades that went off as we played catch with them, skulls still in helmets, bullets everywhere, burned-out armored cars. And then the guilt of the war—collaborators who were killed, publicly sometimes or privately. Then there were the suicides, people who couldn’t live with who they were and who hung themselves. And then the aunties who couldn’t stop crying, grieving for what had been lost in the war, either men or their innocence. That stays with a person, becomes a second skin you forget you are wearing.

But my first real intimation of Lagos and noir was Lagos Weekend, a Saturday publication, a newspaper I wasn’t meant to read. It was like the National Enquirer and True Crime had merged. There were salacious stories of affairs, of marriages broken down, of women driven to murder their husbands by a jealous rage or for fear of being beaten to death. Men with penises cut off by angry wives. Murders, burnings, lynch mobs—many of the stories were followed by gritty photographs that were hard to make out but that didn’t censor mutilated bodies and other dark subjects, none of them suitable for a child. But I would steal my father’s copy, hide behind the water tank, next to the sugarcane clump, ignoring the vampires my brother convinced me lived in them, and I would devour the paper, the cheap ink sticking to my fingers and palms, leaving a residue, a darkness.

The seventies were also a period of the photo novel, a magazine that was like a TV episode or a short film. A story played out in panels with writing and stark black-and-white photographs, a storyboard, but more. They were amazing, and had titles like True Africa, and Monster of Doom, and She, and SuperMask, and Rex Bullit, and Chunkie—they were either costumed superheroes, private detectives, maverick cowboys, or mystical women. But the most popular was a detective called Lance Spearman. Lance wore neat suits, shiny shoes, smoked cigarettes, sported a mustache and a porkpie hat, looking like a low-rent Richard Roundtree in Shaft, and I loved him. I wanted to be Lance Spearman. Lance took on all kinds of criminals and won, even an African Blackbeard serial killer. Published by African Film Magazine and Drum Magazine, these photo books were noir at its best. Many of them came from Kenya, Zimbabwe (or Rhodesia, as it was still known in those days), South Africa, and also Nigeria.

***

The complex network of spaghetti bridges that make up the Berger-built freeways limns Lagos like the cosmopolitan city that it is. Driving at night across them, you end up on Third Mainland Bridge and the dazzle of lights on the water is more breathtaking than anything you can imagine.

Lagos never sleeps. Ever. It stays awake long after New York has faded in a long drawn-out yawn, matched only by the vigil of Cairo. On the Internet, the tourist board once promised:

There is something for everyone in Lagos. If your interest is sport, we have it. Soccer (football), tennis, swimming, golf, sailing—all within easy access. If you enjoy volunteer work, it’s here—International Literacy Group, the Motherless Babies Home, the Pacelli School for the Blind—just to name a few opportunities. Perhaps you are a collector. You’ll have plenty of chances to search for artifacts of West Africa. Masks, trader beads, artwork, woodcarving, drums, fabrics, walking sticks. You can find it all in Lagos. Own your very own beach hut on one of the local beaches. We have various clubs—both social and business—representing many nationalities. Have you ever wanted to go on a safari? Lagos is your gateway to East Africa. We offer culture in the MUSON (Musical Society of Nigeria) Centre, the German-sponsored Goethe Institute, and many other venues.

By the way a man sits smoking on the hood of his burned-out Mercedes-Benz, it is clear he wants you to know that this is all temporary. He will be rich again. By his feet a rat skulks for cover. In front of him, dead rats thrown from houses litter the street like a fresh rash of dried leaves from fall.

In front of the National Theatre, shaped like an old Yoruba crown, the statue of Queen Amina of Zaria, on horseback, sword drawn, face pulled back in a snarl, reminds you that here, women will not bow to men, I don’t care what the propaganda says.

On Victoria Island, there are houses that even the richest people in the US cannot imagine owning. In Ikoyi, the money is quieter: the thing here is not the house, it is the land and the fescue lawn and the trees and the quiet swish of water against a boat docked at the end of the garden.

The poor go out of their way to drive past them. Everyone can dream.

Underneath the government-sponsored billboard that says, Keep Lagos Clean, a city of trash, like the work of a crazy artist, grows exponentially.

***

Lagos is no place to be poor, my brother.

Even though the rich don’t know it or see it from their helicopters and chauffeur-driven cars, for most of the poor, canoes and the waterways are perhaps the most popular means of travel. That and the rickety molue buses.

The sign over the entrance to the open-air market announces: Computer Mega City. This is no joke. There is everything here from a dot matrix printer and the house-sized Wang word processors of the eighties to the smallest, newest Sony VIAO. In Lagos, it is not about what is available but only what you can afford.

The Hotel Intercontinental looks like something out of The Jetsons. It would be more at home in Las Vegas. Inside here, you could be in any city in the world.

 In Idumota, the muezzin at the Central Mosque has to compete with the relentless car and bus horns, the call of people haggling, the scream of metal against metal, and the hum of millions of people trying to get through a city too small for them.

And yet, hanging tremulously in the heat, there it is, that call to prayer. And all around, in the heart of the crowd, as though unseen snipers are picking them off, the faithful fall to the ground and begin praying. As though it is the most normal thing in the world—people, buses, and cars thread around them.

The Lagos Marina looks like the New York skyline. Don’t take my word for it. Check Google Images.

Far away from where the heart of the city is now, you can still find the slave jetty and the slave market. Don’t be fooled. A lot of Lagosians got rich selling people into slavery. It was a trade, remember?

Today, in Evanston, Illinois, I am watching a series of short films by Lagosians, and, as dusk falls over the city, listening to Fela Kuti on my iPod and drinking a soothing latte, I am listening to Lagos with my eyes closed.

The thirteen stories that comprise this volume stretch the boundaries of “noir” fiction, but each one of them fully captures the essence of noir, the unsettled darkness that continues to lurk in the city’s streets, alleys, and waterways. I was honored to receive such stellar contributions from this highly talented group of writers, some very well known, some just now emerging. Together, these stories create an unchartered path through the center of Lagos and out to its peripheries, revealing so much more truth at the heart of this tremendous city than any guidebook, TV show, film, or book you are likely to find.