Books after four

Episode 3

Sophie Bouillon is a French Journalist and writer based in Lagos. In this third episod of "Books after Four" hosted by Dr. Nadine Siegert, the Director of the Goethe-Institut Nigeria, we discuss Sophie's book titled "Manuwa Street".

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.”