Saturday evening, seven o’clock. The row of squat shops along Falomo road in Ikoyi are lit up, mini-generators coughing their ghastly fumes out from the puddle-filled forecourt of each one. An old woman sells apples from a tray on the ground, there is a beggar, a couple of shops selling plastic plumbing pipes, some girls dressed in tight tops with mis-spelled random English phrases across bulging breasts, and the loud and comforting noise of excited chatter, generators, men calling out to other men, merchants and busy-bodies asking what we would like. It is a typical west African scene, and completely reassuring to me, who has heard nothing but bad things about Lagos City.

On Friday I ventured to the National Museum. I found a taxi, another reassuringly west African moment, the taxi barely held together with panels of thin rusted metal, and he fought his way all the way up Awolowo Road, competing with hundreds of ocadas, stinking motorcycle taxis, to get through impossibly small spaces. At the museum, the lights were out, I was told. There is a generator, but we can not put it on just for one person. Perhaps come back Tuesday when there might be some school children, we can put it on then. Sorry.

A man crept out of the shadows, wearing a daftly shiny black boubou and offered to show me around the dark exhibition. I said I would come back another day, but he insisted, said it would be his pleasure. I said I had to leave, as he cornered me against a display case of heavy metal beads and a wooden fertility statue. I resorted to sucking my teeth, as my only defence against the overbearing west African male, and was able to escape into the drizzle.

Back on Awolowo Road, trying to find a cash dispenser that worked, bright sun had broken out above the clouds, and wet steam rose off the pavements and shop parking slots. I tried to get from one side of the small road to the other, and remembering the Saigon Shuffle, learnt nearly a decade ago, set out across one lane only to be pushed back by a crack team of ocada drivers. Heavy-duty Land Cruisers racing in the other direction, I was defeated, wanted to hold me head in my hands, wanting to hate Lagos. I naively thought I had seen it all in west Africa, there was nothing left to shock me. Perhaps that’s why I like it here, it’s not west Africa, it’s a whole other world.



Today there is grid power and we can open the windows and let in some fresh air. This morning I was woken up by the sound of a bird singing, a shocking noise in this place where the generator normally grinds outside the bedroom window from morning through till morning, seven days a week. There is a breeze, and palms are rattling their leaves. Last night I went to the cinema, thinking how nice to be in a place where there is a bit of cash, where there are cinemas, where other people can afford my luxury items too. When the film came to an end, the Nigerians were up and out of their seats before the credits rolled. It reminded me we were in west Africa, reassuringly familiar, where no one waits until the end or demands encores.

Coming back over the bridge after the film, a police checkpoint herded the small amount of traffic into one lane. A rickety car beside us, dwarfed by our colossal size, wanted to take his chance to beat us through the check point. Neither of us stopped, and he ground his already-smashed wing mirror along the side of our car. The policeman, in alarming black fatigues, stepped out infront of us, his AK47 in one hand and a torch in another. His oily face glistened in our headlights, as he shouted at the other driver, a guttural rumble of a voice which did not sound like words, but another kind of language. The second driver, seeing he was in trouble, slammed his car into reverse and sped backwards, down the hump of the bridge, his dim lights receding. The policeman grabbed his Kalashnikov, held it in the air, and slammed the handle forwards and back ready to shoot. Another policeman, watching this scene lazily from a chair nearby, told him to drop it, and the tension passed.

“You see dat?”, the wild-eyed policeman barked through the open crack in our window, “he’s animal”.