Due to a national holiday I got to spend this Wednesday relaxing, which by all measures is a nice little break in a work week that usually offers around 60 hours of fun at the office. Besides, this allowed me to take a night of darts, drinks and fun with the guys Tuesday which is always fun. Apart from Jordan displaying his until now hidden excellence within the fine art of show wrestling we also had the pleasure of meeting Jamie, an American guy who has been bicycling around the world the last 5 years to promote peace. I must admit that I was very impressed with his mission, and my adventurous side certainly dreams of doing something similar, though that will have to wait. But check out his webpage at www.peacepedalers.org.
Well, normally reading, watching episodes of 'The Office', chilling out by the pool or spotting suitable German mansions to purchase once funds permit are my embarrassingly ordinary top priorities when it comes to spending time outside of the office. Today was no different, and going to the pool at the Marina Hotel with a psychology book was picked as the main event of the day. Before going to the watering hole we did however swing by the Ganhi Market in the vain hope that a copy of Depeche Modes' greatest hits CD could be bought at a reasonable price (I have lately been haunted by the desire to hunt down "Enjoy the silence" which quite frankly is one of the best pieces of music I have ever listened to (you can turn the Patrick Bateman accent off now)). Besides, this past month I have had this unreasonably good French African song on my mind. The only time I heard the song was in a club in Lomé (the capital of Togo) where circumstances and my alcohol inflicted memory didn't permit me to get the name of the song, thus the only memory of it has been a quite inaccurate humming. Yet, due to my mediocre musical skills and my very well developed dislike for public humility I never managed to hum it for Jean, my driver and commercial hitman - the only person who could possibly have found that song for me. So given the circumstances I had pretty much given up on ever finding it.
As expected the guys in the market could not find any Depeche Mode, and since they asked if it was American (please!) I strongly doubt there is a big market for this divine band in Benin. Besides people are too happy here, so the occasional 'yovo' who has a melancholic urge to feed is forced to rely on the internet. Yeah, and to answer your question then take the fact that I even look for physical CDs instead of downloading the music from the internet as a proof of my old age. Aaanyway, as the folks at the market could smell money and had all the time in the world to try to talk me into a purchase it didn't take long before I was going through piles of completely unrecognisable Beninese pop and hip hop CDs, the unavoidable Angelique Kidjo came into my bag... and then it happened, one of the vendors put on a CD with a band called Espoir 2000, and the first track was that song from Lomé! The joy, the relief, I was speechless, especially since I got a CD with their pimped music video on for a little more than 2 USD. Yeah, the small wonders of existence.
But in all events, I thought sharing this great song with all of you would be the least I could do to thank the voodoo Gods or whoever brought this circumstance about, so here you go (besides, the more people watch it the bigger are the chances that it will actually be a commercial hit in the western world):
http://www.kewego.co.uk/player/?csig=iLyROoaftwBU&sig=iLyROoafteXg
The song is from Ivory Coast and is called "Abidjan Farot", the video that they display on this page is rather dull compared to the Sean Paul style video that I've seen, but the music is the same. One could ask why I would spend a blog rambling about a random piece of music, and the answer is equally obvious - I think so far this song really captures my west African adventure – the joy of life, the optimism in spite of challenges, the great smiles of people, the warmth of the place, it's hard to come up with adequate words, but I think this song will be closely tied to my memories of Benin when it's all over, and hell, with such a song they will be good. So listen to it, then you know how it is to be down here :).
Wednesday 15 August 2007
Saturday 11 August 2007
Lagos
So, this week I was fortunate enough to spend some days in lovely Cape Town on a business trip which by most measures feels like being on leave into western capitalism when you arrive from west Africa. Don't get me wrong, life is sweet here in good ol' Benin, but having a few days with the world's best steak and wine, real freeways with properly marked lanes (!) plus nice hotels, excellent shopping and bars can be an overwhelming experience. While the trip itself was worthy of elaborate descriptions, not least due to the great hospitality of some of my South African colleagues, this blog will actually focus on an entirely different place – Lagos. I understand if you have problems connecting the dots at this moment, but take a look at the route map of South African Airways, then the pieces will fall into place. Yah, to get from Cape Town to Cotonou one has to fly into Lagos and drive from there to Cotonou. Then of course comes the question of why one should spend time and bites on the internet to describe Lagos, well, that's a little more complicated. For beginners (http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/world/la-fg-lagos25jun25,0,1166186.story?coll=la-home-center), Lagos is the biggest and wealthiest city in Nigeria, and one of the largest metropolitan areas in the world. It seems to be the place in Nigeria where most of the enormous riches from the country's booming oil industry is channelled into and undoubtedly the home of most of the Nigerian email scams. Moreover, it is a powerhouse of African contemporary art. Apart from that it is a place with a bleak reputation - whenever the words Lagos and Nigeria are mentioned to people familiar with the situation in Africa, a certain sense of horror invariably sneaks in. The British teacher sitting next to me in the plane opened our conversation saying "so, what is a young white man like you doing in Lagos?" with the characteristic curiosity I myself have developed towards these individuals who deliberately (though often helped by healthy financial incentives) move into countries where a bullet proof vest ought to be part of the dress code. The notion that it is a bad place seems entrenched in the views of most westerners who know the place and the fact that expatriates are kept in heavily guarded compounds and driven around in 4x4s with at least one armed guard is a perfect reflection of a security situation that at best can be described as unstable (http://lagos.osac.gov/Reports/index.cfm). Well, to answer my initial question, Lagos is a place that spurs emotions, hence my preference to write about it.
That evening I naively hoped that scrambling out of the plane would allow me to be one of the first privileged people in the crowd to hand over my very important immigration form and get out of the airport. However, I soon came to realize that hordes of people some way or the other once again had gathered out of nothingness and were entertaining the two immigration officers who were ensuring the nation against intruding villains this evening, so, unsurprisingly another 45 minutes could be added to the expected 45 minutes delay on the flight. Once through immigration I went through the customs and then out of the terminal building where there is a small reception area where big crowds of people are waiting to pick up new arrivals. The place is lit by big projectors, but outside of the small circle of sharp light there is darkness, the kind of darkness where you envision monsters, trolls or more realistically robbers jumping out from. At least a place you don't want to go on your own. It was time to find the driver my company had sent for me, in many ways this resembles 'Where's Waldo?', yet, not quite as cosy, since you can't just turn to the next page if you don't find him – taking a cab could be an option, however, if I wasn't killed in the cab, our security officer would certainly wish to do it for him the next morning. This evening was good, it only took me 5 minutes to spot the driver, compared to last time where more than an hour and three phone calls were needed. The driver quickly greets me and as he confirms my odd name it's evident that no scams are pulled. We swiftly walk out into the warm dark night to a white Toyota pick up truck equipped with lights and sirens, the armed guard is woken up and I'm told to enter the car, we're waiting for some other people that we will be escorting as well, so they start the car to put on the a/c and some music. As we're parked in the side of the road with several BMW and Mercedes SUVs zooming by while the gangster rap is playing in the car with a guard holding his machine gun, it starts dawning on me what exactly it was that was dragging and repulsing me when I saw the vast ocean of lights as we flew in over Lagos. One can say many things about Lagos, but it is never boring. The other people finally arrive and get into the other 4x4, the emergency lights are put on and our two cars depart with an urgency that is characteristic for this place. Soon we're on the highway where traffic is still abundant though nowhere close to the chaos that prevails in the daytime where police officers with golf clubs ferociously smash cars in an attempt to defy the laws of physics and squeeze enormous amounts of vehicles through roads of insufficient dimensions. As we drive across one the long bridge leading to the islands the city lights come closer. The guard and the driver are having a conversation in Nigerian English, which apart from being completely incomprehensible also has the tone of a heated bar fight, not exactly comforting when one of them has a gun. Yet after a while the aggressive appearance of Nigerians becomes a habit, a little like how the early humans learned to handle fire by ignoring their instinctive fear. As we pass through the smaller roads and make stops, it is hard not to sit and look around for dodgy people, the sense of alertness is always there, and while it might not be a permanent adrenaline rush it keeps you on your toes. As one of my colleagues in Nigeria said 'once you start forgetting where you are and you just do things like back in Europe, it's time for you to go back home'. Suddenly we roll into the fenced and guarded expat neighbourhood where the other people in the escort lives. It is a very large neighbourhood with buildings that people in most part of the world would consider highly prestigeous and certainly in stark contrast to the tiny shacks that a majority of the population stays in. We drop the other people off and continue back in the normal neighbourhoods. In the darkness and with the busy traffic the place invariably looks like Mordor from Lord of the Rings – a purpose driven place robbed of normal aesthetics, a place where people are too busy to enjoy the nice beaches and palm trees known from Cotonou and Lome. The city is alive, a heart pumping oil and money around to whoever happens to be in the right spot, and millions of people chasing them.
We roll into the metal gates that protect the South African franchise hotel I will be staying in until the morning comes and I can safely be escorted back to Benin, polite people greet me and I depart with the driver, go to my air conditioned room with clean bed sheets and no other noises than the humming fan. Another trip from Lagos airport ended without drama.
As the immortal lyrics of Guns N' Roses' "Welcome to the Jungle" start playing in my head, it all falls into place -
Welcome to the jungle
It gets worse here everyday
Ya learn ta live like an animal
In the jungle where we play
If you got a hunger for what you see
You'll take it eventually
You can have anything you want
But you better not take it from me
Yeah, Lagos, the wild west of Africa, the scramble for money, power and for some, survival, has brought this place to where it is, for good and for worse. In some way a glimpse into Hobbes' "State of Nature" and an unfiltered view into aspects of human nature. I love it and I dread it.
That evening I naively hoped that scrambling out of the plane would allow me to be one of the first privileged people in the crowd to hand over my very important immigration form and get out of the airport. However, I soon came to realize that hordes of people some way or the other once again had gathered out of nothingness and were entertaining the two immigration officers who were ensuring the nation against intruding villains this evening, so, unsurprisingly another 45 minutes could be added to the expected 45 minutes delay on the flight. Once through immigration I went through the customs and then out of the terminal building where there is a small reception area where big crowds of people are waiting to pick up new arrivals. The place is lit by big projectors, but outside of the small circle of sharp light there is darkness, the kind of darkness where you envision monsters, trolls or more realistically robbers jumping out from. At least a place you don't want to go on your own. It was time to find the driver my company had sent for me, in many ways this resembles 'Where's Waldo?', yet, not quite as cosy, since you can't just turn to the next page if you don't find him – taking a cab could be an option, however, if I wasn't killed in the cab, our security officer would certainly wish to do it for him the next morning. This evening was good, it only took me 5 minutes to spot the driver, compared to last time where more than an hour and three phone calls were needed. The driver quickly greets me and as he confirms my odd name it's evident that no scams are pulled. We swiftly walk out into the warm dark night to a white Toyota pick up truck equipped with lights and sirens, the armed guard is woken up and I'm told to enter the car, we're waiting for some other people that we will be escorting as well, so they start the car to put on the a/c and some music. As we're parked in the side of the road with several BMW and Mercedes SUVs zooming by while the gangster rap is playing in the car with a guard holding his machine gun, it starts dawning on me what exactly it was that was dragging and repulsing me when I saw the vast ocean of lights as we flew in over Lagos. One can say many things about Lagos, but it is never boring. The other people finally arrive and get into the other 4x4, the emergency lights are put on and our two cars depart with an urgency that is characteristic for this place. Soon we're on the highway where traffic is still abundant though nowhere close to the chaos that prevails in the daytime where police officers with golf clubs ferociously smash cars in an attempt to defy the laws of physics and squeeze enormous amounts of vehicles through roads of insufficient dimensions. As we drive across one the long bridge leading to the islands the city lights come closer. The guard and the driver are having a conversation in Nigerian English, which apart from being completely incomprehensible also has the tone of a heated bar fight, not exactly comforting when one of them has a gun. Yet after a while the aggressive appearance of Nigerians becomes a habit, a little like how the early humans learned to handle fire by ignoring their instinctive fear. As we pass through the smaller roads and make stops, it is hard not to sit and look around for dodgy people, the sense of alertness is always there, and while it might not be a permanent adrenaline rush it keeps you on your toes. As one of my colleagues in Nigeria said 'once you start forgetting where you are and you just do things like back in Europe, it's time for you to go back home'. Suddenly we roll into the fenced and guarded expat neighbourhood where the other people in the escort lives. It is a very large neighbourhood with buildings that people in most part of the world would consider highly prestigeous and certainly in stark contrast to the tiny shacks that a majority of the population stays in. We drop the other people off and continue back in the normal neighbourhoods. In the darkness and with the busy traffic the place invariably looks like Mordor from Lord of the Rings – a purpose driven place robbed of normal aesthetics, a place where people are too busy to enjoy the nice beaches and palm trees known from Cotonou and Lome. The city is alive, a heart pumping oil and money around to whoever happens to be in the right spot, and millions of people chasing them.
We roll into the metal gates that protect the South African franchise hotel I will be staying in until the morning comes and I can safely be escorted back to Benin, polite people greet me and I depart with the driver, go to my air conditioned room with clean bed sheets and no other noises than the humming fan. Another trip from Lagos airport ended without drama.
As the immortal lyrics of Guns N' Roses' "Welcome to the Jungle" start playing in my head, it all falls into place -
Welcome to the jungle
It gets worse here everyday
Ya learn ta live like an animal
In the jungle where we play
If you got a hunger for what you see
You'll take it eventually
You can have anything you want
But you better not take it from me
Yeah, Lagos, the wild west of Africa, the scramble for money, power and for some, survival, has brought this place to where it is, for good and for worse. In some way a glimpse into Hobbes' "State of Nature" and an unfiltered view into aspects of human nature. I love it and I dread it.
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