Lagos the Chameleon

My grandfather moved to this city nearly a century ago. He was a two-year old boy with only one parent: his mother, a Beninese trader from Port Novo; his father had just died in the city of Ibadan, our ancestral home.

No one thought he’d survive because his mother had lost several children before him. Abiku. His rarely-used name said it: Bámidúró — wait with me. My grandfather waited. Against all odds, he survived and by 1970, he had six sons and had built his first house in Lagos.

This was my first impression of Lagos — it was a tender, soothing thing, welcoming strangers with open arms, giving the resilient a place to claim as home after ‘home’ spat them out.

When my grandfather died in 2013, his body was not returned as is the custom in Yorubaland. Lagos had become his home, so he was laid to rest in an old cemetery. This solidified my impression about Lagos, the city that gives and gives.

But I didn't really know Lagos. Certainly not Lagos the chameleon. Not until I set out into the world myself. Alone. In rickety yellow buses that breezed through the Third Mainland Bridge and on bikes that snaked through corners and on sidewalks, I saw the aloofness of the cramped city.

It was in the battered shoes of workers who set up at dawn to find bread, and in the woman singing ‘Ẹ káàárọ̀…, oní búrẹ́dì ti dé o’ as she moved from home to home, making barely enough to feed the child on her back. 

The same thing that welcomed strangers with warmth, was the same thing that spat them out.

If you move around Lagos long enough, through its depth and it’s breadth, you’ll know that more than one thing can be true.

From portholes on narrow roads with buildings that are so close you can stretch your hand from your parlour into your neighbour’s kitchen to high-rise buildings, overlooking neighbourhoods with manicured lawns and gardens growing orchids and hibiscus, Lagos is Jack, off too many trades.

Sitting in the corner in my grandfather’s old house, I write stories about this spectrum: the Lagos that gives and gives, the Lagos that takes away and takes away, and everything, everything in between.