Mr. Walter S. Rogers
Institute of Current World Affairs
522 Fifth Avenue
New York 36, New York
May 16, 1955
Malta
Dear Mr. Rogers:
Lagos is squalid, filthy and noisy. It is packed with humanity – nearly 300,000 people – and it reeks with foul odors. When you first see Lagos, you feel as if you were carried back to another century – to one depicted in old wood-cut prints of plague cities in medieval Europe. Bubonic plague swept through Lagos in 1924. But, though the city appears ripe for any epidemic, none has occurred since then. “I guess it’s just luck,” said an educated African who has lived in the city all his life.
The slums of Nairobi are bad enough, but they are confined to small areas. In Lagos, for street after street, mile after mile, there is nothing but slums. There are a few decent houses here and there, but they are lost in a sea of mud-walled hovels. Most are not more than cubicles, packed tightly, against other hovels. They are roofed with flattened five-gallon tin cans or with rusted corrugated metal. The narrow lanes between these dwellings are muddy and littered with garbage. Goats and chickens wander up and down the lanes, and sometimes into the hovels, and add their bit to the refuse.
Sometimes when you look inside the slum dwellings, you can see people squatting on the floor, eating with their hands from a piece of matting. Many of these people are desperately poor. But others are well off, even by European standards. One Nigerian I met, a prosperous auditor trained in England, lived in a slum area, though in a slightly better house. Yet the filth in and around his home was the same as that of his neighbors. He had recently purchased a shiny new American car.
Open concrete ditches run along the edges of the streets of Lagos. They are designed to carry off rain water, but the populace sometimes uses them for other purposes. The stench is considerable. In addition, the weather is hot and humid in Lagos and the air often hangs motionless over the city so there is no chance of its foul odors to be carried elsewhere. Naked children play in the streets and lanes and sometimes in the ditches too. There is no place else for them. Quite often their bellies are puffed out nutritional diseases and some of the children have grotesque umbical [sic] hernias.
The Marina, Lagos’ harbor-front drive, is not much better. Slum life spills over onto it as well. It is lined with office buildings and stores, many of them ramshackle and decrepit. Aside from the European residential areas at the edge of the city, an energetic city planner would find little in Lagos that he would not want to demolish.
You find none of the ease and politeness of East Africa in Lagos. Its people are in a hurry. Taxis, trucks and cars race through the narrow streets at twenty and thirty miles an hour, angrily blasting paths with their horns. Pedestrians, cyclists and pushcart pushers jump quickly when they hear a horn and once I saw a man wind up in one of the putrid storm ditches. Death or disability goes to those who dally. Road courtesy toward other vehicles also is unknown. When two vehicles meet, the drivers behave like knights of old at a narrow foot bridge. Bad accidents occur regularly.
There is a god who rules over Lagos with a firm hand and his name is Get-Rich-Quick. People bent on making their fortunes pour into the city daily from the outlying districts of Nigeria and the population has been growing rapidly. A good many of these people are traders, and you see them everywhere. They even wander into hotel lounges to pester visitors into buying cheap watches, trinkets, crude wood carvings and other junk.
The streets are lined with shops, most of them so tiny that they amount to not much more than a niche in a wall. They sell flashy cloth prints, wrist watches that run only until the buyer has parted with his money, pots and pans, herbs and juju, or witchcraft, charms. A great many of the traders are women – “mammy” traders – and some of them even spread their wares at the edge of the street, only a few feet from the wheels of speeding trucks.
There is a continual din in the streets, the combined result of the cries of vendors, auto and truck horns, the chatter and laughter of passers-by and the cacophony of a dozen radios and phonographs blaring out different American jazz and African tribal tunes. Even the naked urchins have picked up the mood of Lagos. “Give me money,” they scream at you when you walk down the street. Failing to get any, they scream insults. Sometimes people stop you on the street and tell you that you can photograph them if you will give them a couple of shillings.
The costumes of the people in the streets are varied and colorful. Most of the people are Yorubas as Lagos is in western Nigeria, the home of the Yoruba-speaking tribes. Yoruba women wear big blue turbans, western-style blouses and long pieces of blue cloth which they wrap around themselves as skirts. Every few minutes a Yoruba woman will unhitch her skirt, revealing a stretch of brown thigh or more, then hitch it up again with a flourish.
Many men wear the traditional Yoruba dress, a gown, usually of bright colors, pajama-like trousers and a cap. This costume is said to be of Arab origin, having come across the Sahara. It is considerably modified from the Arab style and Muslim, Christian and pagan Yorubas alike wear it. In these days of impending self-government, when national feelings are running high, a number of Yorubas have given up western dress for the traditional one.
* * *
One evening in Lagos I had drinks with the correspondent for The Times of London. He is an African in his sixties and his name is Ernest Ikoli. Ikoli is a veteran Nigerian newspaperman and politician. He is portly and has bushy gray hair. He invited me to come to the Island Club, an inter-racial social center. Several young men, some of them Lagos town councilors, came up to pay their respects to Ikoli. None of them ever began or ended a sentence without including at least one “Sir” in it. All over Africa the older generation complains that the younger men have no respect for them, but Ikoli seems to show that the younger men will pay the traditional respect if the older man has the education and background to meet them on equal terms.
Ikoli and I talked about the hostile attitudes between the three regions – the west (mostly Yoruba), the east (mostly Ibo) and the north (inhabited by the Hausa and other Muslim tribes). At present these regions are loosely federated, each having its own premier, and some people think they will fly apart, or at each other’s throats, once the restraining hand of the British is removed. In fact, some Africans I met talked gleefully of war. I asked Ikoli if he thought war was possible.
“There’ll even be war between Ibos and Ibos,” he said. “The British brought us together by one government and by roads, communications and schools attended by boys of different tribes. We never had been together before and we never wanted to be. When the British leave, we’ll probably go back apart again, unless we get a really big leader to hold us together.”
“Is there any leader like that around?” I asked.
“Heavens no,” he said.
Some more young men came up to greet Ikoli. After they left he sighed and said, “We’re going too fast and nobody knows where we’re going.”
As we were leaving the Island Club, Ikoli introduced me to a young African woman and he said that she is the third Nigerian woman to become barrister. “I may be primitive but I think a woman’s place is in the home,” Ikoli told her. “That’s where I like them.”
“Well, you’re wrong,” she said good-naturedly.
* * *
When I returned to my hotel, an African in sloppy western dress bounded up from a chair in the lounge and said, “Hello, my friend.” It took a while for me to place him and then I remembered that I had stopped my car to ask him for directions a few days before. He got into the car and rode along to show me the way. I had given him two shillings for his trouble.
“You didn’t recognize me and you don’t know that I am a prince,” he said.
I bought the prince a beer.
“Some days I will be King of Lagos,” he exclaimed loudly. “When I saw you, it was like an elecka [sic] trick shock to my body. I said to myself, ‘There is a man who has come to Nigeria to set up a business!” I also told myself, ‘I am the man to help him!’”
The prince’s eyes gleamed through a fog of many beers. I told him I was not a businessman. He took that for caution on my part and dismissed the denial with a wave of the hand. Pulling his chair closer to mine, he said:
“Yes, I told myself that I, the prince, who has the local knowledge, is the best man to be associated with this foreign businessman who has come to Nigeria. I worked for an American once and when he left Nigeria he gave me his radio. I said, ‘Should you be giving me this expensive radio?’ and he said, ‘Yes!’” The prince inadvertently expectorated on the table.
At that point, the prince’s brother, who seemed to be the senior prince, rose from a nearby table and stared out the door. The junior prince quickly bolted down the rest of his beer and bounded after his brother. “I will come back to talk more business with you tomorrow morning, my friend,” he hollered over his shoulder. Fortunately he did not.
* * *
★
Read more:
Notes On Nigeria (II)
Notes On Nigeria (III)
Notes On Nigeria (IV)
