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.