Why go? Lagos is a melting pot of West African culture with a diverse mix of people. Get into the rhythm of its clamoring street life.Don’t go for a peaceful holiday. Lagos is chaos on a stick.
This was my impression when I first visited Lagos in January 2008: a vast, chaotic city that somehow found a way to function everyday. My view of Lagos is becoming more nuanced, but I do marvel at the overlapping of people, infrastructure, and commerce that marks this city.
On Friday evening I found myself stuck in traffic on a major highway inside Lagos. Adjacent to the highway were the Nigerian headquarters of Exxon Mobil, Shell, and dozens of banks; below the highway dwelled the poorest residents of the city, who cook and sleep and do laundry in public spaces; and on the highway, weaving in and out of cars, were people hawking everything from cell phone credit to houseware to fried plantains.
This moment captured two of Lagos’s trademarks: the industry of its people… and the traffic.
Time Out describes Lagos traffic this way:
Lagos is not everyone’s favorite place. The largest city in Africa was built for a few hundred thousand people and now houses 13 million – at least. One of the greatest evils of this phenomenon is … traffic. Bumper-to-bumper, nose-to-nose, stuck, jammed, gridlocked.
It takes an excessively long time to get anywhere in Lagos because there are so many cars on the road, and there are so many cars on the road because there is no reliable form of public transportation, and the highways haven’t caught up with the exponentially growing population. The traffic is loud, it smells, and it’s made more chaotic by the motorbikes that zip between cars stuck on the road. Every morning when I arrive at work, and every evening when I return home, my head spins and I feel nauseous from the ride.
It’s easy to resent this aspect of life in Lagos. (“How can people here live like this?!” I think to myself every day.) But Time Out’s advice helps one relax:
Don’t hold your breath. Stay calm, turn up the radio, sip a soft drink, maybe buy a dustbin. You’ll get there in the end.
This is the attitude I’ve been trying to cultivate. (Wish me luck!) I also remind myself that the spirit of a people is not necessarily reflected in the environment in which they live. Two weeks after my arrival in Lagos, it’s the people who impress me, not their surroundings…
