Books After Four: Episode 04

Lagos: Supernatural city

“The fourth episode of the Lagos Stories series on Books After Four is ready. Books After Four is the podcast of the Goethe-Institut Lagos that delves into critical book reviews. In this episode, Tim Cocks was our special guest. Please note that this session will be held virtually.

We invite you to enjoy our fourth episode with a focus on Tim Cocks' extensive and thought-provoking collection of narratives titled "Supernatural City."

Tim Cocks is a British-born journalist with South African roots, currently residing in Johannesburg. Previously, he served as the Reuters West & Central Africa bureau chief based in Dakar, following a four-year tenure as the Nigeria bureau chief in Lagos. Presently, Tim Cocks holds the position of Chief Correspondent, Southern Africa, at Reuters. His career has taken him across Africa, reporting from over two dozen countries, and he also has experience as a resident correspondent in Baghdad during the Iraq war from 2008 to 2009.

  This unique thing is what Tim Cooks highly praises the city of, as “something about Lagos that captivates you . . . an endlessly fascinating place,” in the fourth episode of the podcasts. He tells Damilare, his host: “After Lagos, where else can you go from there? Everyone knows it’s a difficult place, it has its own challenges, but I wanted to cast it in a more sympathetic light than it is often seen by outsiders. The idea was to try and show what makes the city ticks and why it functions the way it functions,” which he did in his book Lagos: Supernatural City (2022).
He wasn’t thinking about writing a book when he first came to Lagos, but we can see that the city charmed him. Cooks spent four years in the country as the bureau chief of Reuters Nigeria, from 2011 to mid-2015, during which he gathered research about Lagos city which he embellishes the book with, so resonant Damilare admits to not having learnt of such histories until the read Cooks’ book. Lagos: Supernatural City is a kaleidoscopic epic of the spirituality that governs Lagos as a place of fortune and wealth, where man pursues his or her destiny.
Contextualizing his book with the history of Lagos and Yoruba mythology was a crucial aspect of Cooks’ vision. He tells Damilare: “The importance of that was that even though Lagos is a cosmopolitan city, it also has a very Yoruba flavour about it. It’s the language on the streets and makes up majority of its population. And I felt this has very much shaped what Lagos is. I couldn’t ignore it. So I had to go back to the very beginning of time and start the story according to traditional Yoruba mythology.” Damilare feels it’s a book that deserves more attention than it has and calls it one of the most important books in Nigeria at the moment.
A really enriching experience, the podcasts are co-produced by Olaide Kayode Timileyin. Each episode intros with a background soundtrack of the streets of Lagos, to give an accentuation of place or the city’s spirit. When Bouillon is asked what Lagos has been for her so far, she says it has made her an entrepreneur, owning two businesses; something she never dreamt of ever becoming. The city has also made her confident in herself. Nadine Siegert concludes, “Lagos can take a lot from you, but it can also give you something. And it is what we are still very grateful for.” As its people say in espousing the spirit of the city: “Èkó ò ní bàjé.” Lagos will not spoil.