The Books after Four podcasts series, a project of the Goethe-Institut Nigeria, feature discursive sessions and critical book reviews on books written about Lagos, involving a host, a guest author, and readers. The aim, among others, is to contribute to discussions around the Nigerian burgeoning literary space.
So far in the series has been the discussion of four books. Adewale Maja-Pierce’s The House My Father Built, Sylva Nze Ifedigbo’s Believers and Hustlers, Sophie Bouillon’s Manuwa Street, and Tim Cooks’ Lagos: Supernatural City. The hosts so far have been Kolawale Oludamilare (episodes 1 and 4), Patrick Odimnfe (episode 2), and Nadine Siegert (episode 3).
Lagos, a city of dreams, is no doubt an enigma of sorts, inasmuch as its mystic can be quickly demystified after experiencing it. In Teju Cole’s novella Every Day Is for the Thief, we come across this scene described by the young male protagonist who takes odd walks in the city:
One morning, walking outside the estate to where the Isheri Road joins the Lagos–Sagamu Expressway Bridge, I witness a collision between two cars. Immediately, both drivers shut off their engines, jump out of their vehicles, and start beating each other up. They fight fiercely but without malice, as if this is an ancient ritual they both have to undergo…
This narrator witnesses another fight scene a week later and sums up, that “Life hangs out here. The pungent details are all around me. . . . Just one week later, I see another fight, at the very same bend in the road. All the touts in the vicinity join in this one. It is pandemonium, but a completely normal kind, and it fizzles out after about ten minutes. . . . Everyone goes back to his normal business. It is an appalling way to conduct a society…”
One of Lagos’ curses is its chaotic atmosphere. Yet it seems this chaos is a charm on its own, something that enchants and stupefies the mind. It is this character that writers mostly try to capture whenever you read a book about Lagos, be it fiction, nonfiction, memoir, or journalism. And the conversations from Books after Four podcasts intricately, in one way or the other, presents a peculiar portion of the chaos and beauty that is Lagos.
In the first episode, author Adewale Maja-Pierce’s The House My Father Built (2014) is a nonfictional work which began as an essay “Legacies,” published in Granta, about a property his late father left for him. While he’d left Nigeria, when he was 16, to join his mother in England, his return to attend to his inherited property re-introduced him to Lagos. He documents his experience, making a fine roll call of the people he encounters and how the city shapes them into the interesting characters they are.
Damilare says Maja-Pierce’s memoir reflects present realities in the country, like police brutality. Maja-Pierce answer throws us off. “Nigeria is a semi-militarized state,” he says, “and the only thing that keeps this country together is the Army. It is a fiction, not a country. An invention of a foreign conquering power for its economic interests.” One cannot say for sure what this tells us about Lagos. But since the coastal territory that is the state today was the nucleus of the project that became Nigeria, we can say that Lagos’ show of power and grit (man pass man) and its beastly notoriety for commerce shows it has maintained the beat that founded it.
In the second episode, Sylva Nze Ifedigbo’s Believers and Hustlers (Parrésia, 2021), which won the 2022 Chinua Achebe Prize for Literature, takes listeners into the enterprise of Pentecostalism that pervades the city. Ifedigbo calls his novel an “important Lagos story. I might not have even thought of it in that sense until the book was published, as I began to get comments from readers who said ‘this is an aspect not too many have written about, especially in fiction’.” He goes on to say, “But yet it is such an important part of our lives. Every Sunday from 8 am till evening, what we are involved in has to do with church. Young people, especially in this city, are quite religious – you can now define what that religiosity means and how it impacts their lives every other day, between that Sunday and the next Sunday.”
Ifedigbo calls into question issues of poverty and the divide in social class, where the poor and middleclass climbers are sold hope by enterprising men of God and pastors who are just milking their victims, like Lagos itself which promises the Nigerian dream. Nevertheless, the people declare their faith in phrases like “E go better” and “It is well”; that such “a declaration in faith is what the church sells.”
In the third episode, we encounter Manuwa Street (Farafina, 2022) by Sophie Bouillon. The name of the book is derived from the actual street where Bouillon lives in. She is a French journalist who worked in Lagos for five years as the deputy bureau chief at Agence France-Presse and currently works for RFI Hausa. Manuwa Street, a work of journalistic nonfiction, can be classified as a pandemic memoir as its landscape captures turbulences and changes the world went through during the COVID year, especially in Lagos. Nadine Siegert, who is German and the host on this episode, admits she likes the book because it gives her “another foreigner’s view of Lagos, being a foreigner herself.” But surely, it’s a book, whether foreigner or not, anyone would find very interesting and full of reflection.
“Manuwa Street is a typical Lagos street,” Bouillon answers Siegert. “It’s an interesting place because it’s at the border of south-west Ikoyi, an upper-class Island neighbourhood, and Obalende. It’s a mix of people – like in my street I had the biggest ogas in town in the building opposite mine but also people living in the streets, like the mechanics – so it was a really nice social laboratory of Lagos,” Bouillon says.
A day after the book’s launch in Lagos, construction vehicles moved in and destroyed parts of Manuwa Street for real estate development. Bouillon’s book captures an essence of cities as palimpsests, where one thing rises and erases what was present before. “I was happy I wrote this book. It was more like to pay a tribute to the street. It’s so representative of what we all know Lagos is about; things changing perpetually, things never last, as development is going on, it’s a typical Lagos street,” she says.
The episode discusses other issues in the book like the January 2020 eviction of Takwa Bay and the explosion in Abule Ado of 15 March 2020, which Bouillon covered. Takwa Bay “was a disruptive moment in her career as a journalist and as a citizen of Lagos, it was extremely difficult to cover,” she says on the podcast. It led her to hate Lagos as the state of things overwhelmed her, the misery of watching the condition of the poor. People crying for help, the violence with the presence of the military too much to witness. Takwa Bay happened just before the pandemic struck. Without much left to do but remain in lockdown, the book Manuwa Street was born out of an existential question Bouillon asked herself then: why was she in Nigeria? Irrespective of the book’s sober content, she calls it a “declaration of her admiration to the city.”
Thus, in a portion of the book, she writes about the quiet the city assumed during the lockdown, which Siegert comments on, sparking a reaction of Patrick who joined the session. “One character of Lagos is the noise,” he says, “and somehow one gets used to it inasmuch as it’s very uncomfortable. And so when the noise goes away it triggers fear. You ask, what is wrong? Something is wrong. Something is strange about this.”
The podcasts also give us anecdotes about the lives of the writers. In Bouillon’s case, for example, she arrived Lagos in 2014 with just a backpack; she’d imagined it to be a random trip. But when she set foot in the city, she knew there was something different, unlike other African cities she’d visited, “which I cannot really explain,” she says. “I remember every hour of that day, because I felt something was happening, something unique.”
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.
