Trapped in the trappings of luxury

People with relative wealth often look on, astounded, at those who live with so little: how can they survive? How can they be happy? And, embedded in those questions, is the assumption (or the assertion) that these people would be happier if only they had more money or possessions.

It happens at all levels of the prosperity ladder. Celebrities and footballers cease to understand how anyone could possibly live without multiple cars, full time hair and make-up artists and first class travel. People who work in the City can’t conceive of giving up their morning latte, or of preparing their own lunch to take to work, or of travelling across town on a bus rather than taking a cab. Parents visiting their grown-up children bite their lips, but behind closed doors justify the brevity of their stay with references to the lumpy mattress, the lack of en suite facilities and the noise of the occasional plane flying over head. And even those of us living relatively modest lives in the developed world, experience books, documentaries and images of the developing world with a sense of wonder – how is it possible to live on less than $1 a day? How can people put up with sleeping on mats, in dirty, infested homes?

When one signs up for something like VSO, part of the experience you’re anticipating – perhaps even looking forward to – is a more basic way of life. It’s an adventure to see how you’ll survive with no electricity or running water, and it’s a volunteer badge of honour to live with no air conditioning, no generator, no chauffeured cars: we sniff at the luxurious expat way of life, and are proud of the fact that we are toughing it out (although, of course, we live very well compared to many local people). So in that sense, because it’s a definite choice to live in that way, and because we’re prepared for it before we come out here, living without the usual trappings of our lives at home isn’t too much of a hardship.

But I’ve noticed, since moving into this new expat-style house, that I’ve started to get annoyed about things not working. Things like the air conditioning, which we didn’t even have in the old house – now, if it doesn’t work, I get frustrated. We’ve been having a (-nother) problem with our electrics, in that when the generator is on, it seems only to power one side of our home, and that has been making me really angry: but we rarely had power at all in the old place! And last night the TV stopped working and I was desperately trying to get it fixed: I didn’t even want a television, and have enjoyed not being a slave to it over here, but the second it was taken away I was furious. It’s like my frame of mind has changed with my physical relocation: I am no longer in the mindset of “whatever we have is a bonus” and “we’ll make do”; instead, I’m thinking “well, if it’s here, it should work”.

As one moves up this ‘prosperity ladder’, it seems to me that there is no easy route back down. With the exception of making a deliberate choice to sacrifice certain luxuries (as in VSO), once one has a certain standard of living, one becomes reliant on it (even addicted to it) and quickly forgets how it was possible to be happy with less.

This recent experience, for me, is a timely reminder: a reminder that I need to try to hold onto what I have learnt and experienced here, even when I return to the hustle, bustle and affluence of the UK. I have loved living with fewer conveniences and material possessions over here: this, combined with a much better work-life balance than I had at home, has made me happier than I ever remember being in recent years. As I start to look for jobs for after my return to the UK, and as I begin to experience this illogical frustration with broken appliances I don’t need and was happy without, I can begin to see how easy it would be to slip back into a frantic life of ‘things’ – and, frankly, of greed – and to forget completely how blissfully happy one can be, sitting and thinking by candlelight.

Moving House

A few weeks ago, when I got sick for the millionth time over here, we decided we couldn’t just keep going like that: I had to put my health first, and another four months of being ill every two weeks wasn’t going to leave my body in a great state when I got back to the UK. So we agreed to monitor my health for the month of August: if I managed to stay well for those few weeks, we would carry on, stay until the end of our placement in December; if I continued to come down with something every couple of weeks, we would cut our placements short.

When we spoke to our partner organisations about this, the funder came back to us to ask whether we thought a change of environment might help to improve my health, and they offered us a move to their guest house compound in the north of Kaduna. It was a genuinely difficult decision: although the guest house offers considerably more comfort (air conditioning, a generator, constant running water, a television, swimming pool etc), we have grown to love our life in Kigo Road. To leave our neighbours, the children who come in to play every day, the community of people who greet us on our way home from work, the bars which have become our locals, the friendly couple and their baby who run the little shop across the road and order in diet pepsi especially for me… The guest house is more isolated, in a richer area of the city with fewer little corner shops, and offers a more ex-pat style of life – not the life volunteers generally want, and not what we had come here to experience.

In the end, we decided it would be churlish not to accept this generous offer: living in the guest house affords me the greatest chance of being able to stick around until the end of my placement, which is the most important thing (I really don’t want to leave Nigeria at all, let alone early!), and I didn’t want to end up in a situation where I got sick again and had to explain to my colleagues that I was going home without having given this a shot.

So, with Simon out of town for work, I spent most of Thursday and Friday packing up our home. Although we’ve managed to acquire quite a bit over here, we really don’t have that much stuff, but somehow it was still a huge job to pack it all and I was totally exhausted by the time Simon arrived home to find a pile of packed bags and boxes on Friday evening. But no time to rest – we’d promised some other volunteers that we would show them a bar which they hadn’t been to yet (the Rugby Club), so off we went for beer and some dinner. Somehow, we ended up back on Kigo Road and in a nightclub.

The next morning was not pretty. In a fug of hangover, I somehow managed to help with the packing of the truck. And then, with a goodbye to the kids from next door and our neighbour Tony, we were off – Simon and I crammed into the front passenger seat together, clutching a sculpture of a Yoruba goddess and a bottle of vodka with an ill-fitting cap (our two most delicate possessions) and hoping I wouldn’t vomit before we arrived.

Anyway, the move went fine in the end – nothing broken, no vomit – and now we’re in the new place. It’s very nice: patio doors opening out onto the swimming pool, a television with satellite channels, a spiral staircase up to a mezzanine bedroom level with an en suite bathroom. On the other hand, the electrics are highly dodgy. One socket in the kitchen is blackened and has obviously, at some point, been on fire. On our first night, the air conditioning unit upstairs stopped working and when I went to investigate, I found that the plug had started to melt and the socket was very hot and turning black: so that doesn’t work now. When the second air con unit didn’t seem to be having much effect, I went to check out why it wasn’t working properly and I found that it was plugged into the only working socket in the kitchen. However, as well as powering this unit, a multi-socket extension lead (powering the fridge, kettle etc) is connected by wires round the back of the actual socket (which has been pulled slightly away form the wall), and a second ad hoc socket had also been connected by wires round the back of the main socket fitting, into which was plugged the microwave. None of this seems very safe. So we’re having to turn everything off, including the fridge, when we go to bed, for fear of a fire while we’re sleeping.

There are things to get used to – new things that don’t work, things which didn’t used to work in our old home which we now have access to. We even have access to a washing machine, but trying to figure out how to get it to work when the NEPA was going off every 30 minutes or so was a challenge which kept Simon busy more or less all day yesterday! I think we’ll be sticking to handwashing. We still have to work out where our local shop is, and finding a local bar is going to be challenging in this richer, predominantly Muslim area.

Oh, and we have been visited twice by a large lizard which, somehow manages to get itself inside even when all the doors are closed, and then flip flops around frantically at the patio doors, trying to get out. The second time, I tried to let it out, but it ran back into the house and under the sofa. It has never come out and doesn’t seem to be stuck anywhere inside – a mystery.

Totally Powerless

I am sitting in the funder’s office – I came here today to print off a whole heap of documents to give out to people at the government body (since they don’t have working printers or photocopies that work there). There is no Nepa. The generator has been broken for two days now. So I can’t print anything. With no power, there is also no wireless internet here. I have my dongle with me, but that hasn’t worked all day for no apparent reason. When the electricity does come back on for a few minutes at a time, for some reason it only powers half of the building; of course, the wireless router and the printers are in the half that isn’t powered. There is lukewarm water in the water cooler, but I can’t make myself a cup of tea until we have power. Since there is no power, the boss has gone back to his home to work. Since there is no power and the boss is not around, all of my Nigerian colleagues seem to have disappeared. The way to get lunch around here – in an area where there aren’t really any shops – is to ask one of the admin staff to go and get it for you (from the magical places only she seems to be able to access) or to ask her to cook something for you; but she’s not around and I doubt she’d be able to prepare anything without electricity anyway.

It’s raining, and since my mode of transport is okada, I can’t go anywhere until it has finished and the bikes all come out to play again. So I can’t go home, and I can’t go and get myself some food.

I’m onto my second laptop battery, having already exhausted the first one. I have under 2 hours left until this one dies, in which time I need to finish off the documents that I will then not be able to email or print anyway. We have had almost no NEPA at home for the past week, so it’s unlikely I will be able to charge them up overnight. There is rarely NEPA at the government building, and when the generator’s on we get power for the lights and the fan but the sockets don’t work. So, even if I go to the other office tomorrow, I won’t be able to charge anything up.

This is all most frustrating. I am powerless – in more than one sense – to do anything at all*, other than sit in a dark office and drink lukewarm water, waiting. Waiting for either power to return or the rain to stop.

*Including publishing this post - this actually happened several days ago.

London's burning

It was very surreal, last week, to be in Nigeria – a country where I have frequently feared, and now come to expect, unrest – and to be reading reports of riots, looting and general chaos on the streets of the UK. If a similar thing were to happen over here (and there have been various small incidents while we have been here, not to mention the widespread election violence while we were out of the country), I would panic, frankly. Information would be shared quickly with the organisations we are working with, security advice would be issued, people would be evacuated or advised to stay at home all day to avoid any potential trouble (although the Nigerians tend, largely, to go about their business as usual).

And yet, here I was reading about events in my own country, and reading Facebook updates describing how friends and family were having to go about their own lives amid the chaos, worrying about their commuter route taking them through planned riots, walking past looters in broad daylight on their high streets, trying to be safely tucked up at home by dinner time. I can’t imagine how I would have reacted to experiencing a breakdown of law and order in my own country – it’s something I think I had compartmentalised to my life in Nigeria.

This isn’t a political blog, but I can’t not comment on the situation in my own country as I see it from over here. And frankly, from what I have been able to read on the internet, I am deeply saddened by the reaction to the riots and looting.

I am appalled by the Prime Minister’s official response to the events of last week. To divide the country into ‘them and us’, to say that “Those thugs…do not represent us, nor do they represent our young people – and they will not drag us down” is to further alienate those people who already feel they have so little part to play in society that they feel no shame in taking what they can get with little thought for how it might affect others.

In one video of looting in Clapham, I watched teenage girls carrying boxes out of Currys. The Sky News journalist filming it on his phone asks “Why are you doing this?”; their answer: “We’re getting our taxes back.” Now, I don’t know if those girls pay taxes or not, and I think we can be pretty sure that their argument hasn’t been thought through in terms of what taxes are for, how they are spent and whether stealing a telly from a high street store will in any way reclaim the money that has been taken out of their pay packet. But if you de-code that statement, I think the message is clear: “Society has done f**ck all for us, so we’re taking what we can when we can get”.

As an individual, I want to be someone who, as a first instinct, looks kindly on other people and their behaviour and feels compassion. I want to be someone who has empathy with others, rather than condemning. I want to be someone who, when faced with a difficulty with another human being, looks first to myself and asks whether I am the cause of the problem and/or whether I can do anything to help the situation, regardless of blame. And that’s the kind of society I want to live in.

Even as a non-parent, I know that if a child misbehaves, you don’t immediately withdraw all of its privileges, because then the child has no incentive to cease the bad behaviour – they have nothing left to lose. And so it is with those members of our society who feel they have nothing and who have taken the chance to act out. If we respond to this behaviour by cutting their benefits, evicting their parents (has Cameron gone totally insane?!?) and further shutting them out of society, what motivation will they have to in any way uphold the social contract? It can only serve to further alienate these groups and to make matters worse. It’s the political equivalent of saying “Well, if you don’t know, I’m not going to tell you.” – “Well, if you’ve got so little stake in society that you’re actively destroying law and order, we’ll make you even less a part of society. So there.”

Now, I’m not saying that looters should be rewarded or put into highly funded school-holiday schemes to distract them from the trainers in Foot Locker, but what I am saying is this: to dismiss and hold in disdain these people as “evil” or “scum”, and to distance ourselves from them is only going to make matters worse. If we believe in society, then we’re all in it together – the good, the bad and the ugly. When people do wrong, we have a system of penalties and – to some extent – reform. We believe that people can change with the right support. We believe that people are not inherently good or bad, but that we all perform actions which fall into both categories. Society is about trying to create a context in which people can thrive, in which we support each other to do well, in which we accept that people are different from us and will behave differently; it’s not about judging people on individual actions and throwing them away when they do not perform to our own exacting standards. In fact, the only time when we really remove someone from our society is when we believe them to be so psychologically disturbed that they are a danger to themselves and/or others – mass murderers, and the like. (Don’t even get me started on the current movement to bring back the death penalty.)

Isn’t it a bit like a marriage? (Of which Mr Cameron is such a fan.) You don’t rush to the divorce lawyer as soon as your spouse does something you don’t like – you made a commitment, you signed a contract, and you’re in it for the long-haul. Together. You find ways to work things out, to live with each other, to accept each other’s differences; you forgive, you try to empathise, you try to see both sides rather than seeing things in black and white. In short, you take each other for better or worse, flaws and all, the whole package, and you accept that the other person isn’t always going to do things you like, but that those elements are part of what makes the whole person you married.

These “thugs” are part of our society whether we like it or not. As well as making sure our criminal justice system is in healthy, working order (not something we can be sure of right now) and able to deal with the penalties which need to be paid, we also need to accept these people, to try to empathise with them and to work out what has caused them to behave in this way. The Prime Minister himself ended his recent speech by saying “There is no them and us – there is us. We are all in this together”; unfortunately, he was talking about the government and the citizens – he still clearly believes that this new united ‘us’ is firmly pitched against the evil ‘them’ who haven’t behaved as we would have like them to.

Osogbo

I heart Osogbo. I think I could quite happily live there.

Getting around is easy and the people are friendly. Tiny, bright blue minibuses make their way up and down the main roads (of which there aren’t many). There are so many of them, and they are so small, that they don’t try to cram too many people in, and the fare is rarely more than N20 to go anywhere in this little town. On two occasions, I’m pretty sure they altered their route, just so we could go to the exact place we were trying to get to! And not only the buses – there are also bright blue drops (= taxis)! These are exclusively very battered, scrapyard-defying old cars with drivers who speak very limited English, but a real luxury to those of us who live in places where there are no taxis.

Away from the handful of main roads, the town is mainly sleepy, potholed streets lined with small shops, two story homes, and people just sitting, hanging out and saying hi to you as you pass. Osogbo felt different from the West we had experienced in Lagos and Benin City – we never felt threatened, no-one tried to steal from us, and the people were without exception friendly and helpful. The children of the shopkeepers who lined the street leading up to our hotel, would smile and wave and chant ‘oyibo peppe’ at us whenever we walked by, and their parents would smile and wave too. (Apparently, ‘oyibo peppe’ – which means ‘white man chilli’ – comes from a common rhyme which Yoruba children like to sing, and the full thing goes “Oyibo peppe, American shine shine, blacky shadow”!!) There are a surprising number of mosques here, as well as the expected churches and the evidence of a thriving traditional religion in the occasional shrine and the slightly scary juju section in the market. Someone told us that Osogbo is an incredibly liberal and tolerant place and, while I know everyone here likes to brag about their home town being better than other places, I can believe that’s true just from the happy co-existence of these three religions and the fact that we felt so welcomed.

Osogbo is the centre of Nigerian art. It is still home to Chief Jimoh Buraimoh – a significant artist whose works are mainly brightly coloured, beaded paintings, and after whom a street has been named (the street on which he has his home and gallery). We stayed in a hotel owned by him (Hotel Heritage), and, after a visit to his gallery, were privileged to meet him and share a beer in the hotel bar. A very interesting, generous man, who arranged for someone to come and pick us up the next day and take us around the Sacred Forest.

The forest is one of only two UNESCO World Heritage sites in Nigeria. It contains a shrine to Osun, the river goddess, who is central to the Yoruba traditional religion, and whom a group of young men were worshipping when we arrived on a mid-week morning. It’s a beautiful and very peaceful place: seemingly endless trees, the river flowing through it and full of sculptures and small structures which were created by Susanne Wenger. Wenger was an Austrian artist who came to Osogbo in the 1960’s (and was part of kickstarting the movement which Buraimoh was a part of), converted to the Yoruba religion, and spent the rest of her life living there and creating stunning sculptures around the Sacred Forest. Her “workshop” – also within the forest – is an enchanting building, which really belongs in a myth or fairytale: sloping, curved walls; tiny passageways; low roofs; enclosed spaces; chairs carved from the same stone as the walls; and a generally very surrealist feel. It’s incredible; and also incredibly difficult to imagine how it could have served as her “workshop” – you can barely walk through it, let alone sculpt in it. Apparently, she is buried there.

After the visit to the forest, we were taken to see her home: a beautifully decaying four storey house, with carved pillars, a wooden staircase, a winding, twisting, ancient vine climbing up the front wall, sculpted doors, mosaiced floors – everything about it is stunning in its artistic detail. Being in Osogbo, where there is such a thriving art scene, I realised that I was relieved and overjoyed to find that there were things that had been built/planned/created with aesthetics in mind. So much of life, architecture, invention in Nigeria is functional (understandably so) – I’d forgotten just how much I missed things being intentionally beautiful, how wonderful it is when you come across something that is there just to be nice to look at. That’s one of the things that I loved about this town – there are sculptures and pictures around every corner, the buildings are interesting and sometimes beautiful, and there are numerous galleries and artists’ workshops (and Buraimoh is currently building an ‘Artists’ Village’ on the outskirts of the forest to foster young talent in the area). The place just has an artistic buzz.

While we were there, we visited another gallery owned by Nike Davies-Okundaye (whom we had met in Lagos) and finally found a piece of hers we could afford: a small batik, dyed with the indigo which is common in Nigeria and also her trademark. We also bought a very large piece of batik by one of her students, but using Nike’s style and geographical designs. We actually came away from Osogbo with considerably lighter wallets and considerably more luggage, ending up with those two batiks, a wooden sculpture of the goddess Osun, carved by one of Susanne Wenger’s students in her style, and a simply gorgeous indigo quilt, by one of Buraimoh’s protégés, who had batiked, dyed and stitched the whole thing by hand. It was a relief to find some mementoes of our time here which are actually, in and of themselves, really beautiful objects.

The only downside to our stay in Osogbo was trying to get out of the place. Knowing we had to travel by road to Ilorin, then from Ilorin to Ilorin airport before 11.30am (our flight was at 12.30pm and there wasn’t another until 2 days later!), we were a bit nervous about things going wrong and so started out early. As we were walking out of the hotel at 7am, one of the staff mentioned to us that it was a sanitation day. No, no, we said, that was last week. Oh no – apparently in Osun state, they do it EVERY SATURDAY. So no-one can travel anywhere between 7 and 10am EVERY WEEK! We bolted out of the hotel and managed to flag one of the few remaining buses down and persuade him to take us quickly to the motor park. We leapt out of the bus, grabbed the first driver we found and agreed a price to take us directly to the airport, if we could leave immediately. Ok ok – all good. We threw our stuff into the car, got in and – of course – the driver was nowhere to be seen. Much shouting and screaming later (much to the amusement of the gathered crowd of men), he finally came over to the car and we left. On our way out of Osun state we met no fewer than 7 roadblocks by sanitation enforcers, and 3 normal security roadblocks. At each one, the driver had to get out of the car and go and plead with the officials to let us through, while we smiled and saluted and rubbed our hands together in a begging action – anything to try to make it smoother. Of course, several of them wanted bribes but, surprisingly, even though I think we were at the stage of considering it just so we wouldn’t miss our plane, our driver categorically refused to bribe anyone (very unlike all other drivers we’ve come across, and very impressive). Of course, we got through each block eventually: there were never more than one or two other cars stopped there, so clearly earlier cars had been let through. And of course, we were at the airport far too early and our plane was delayed by over an hour. This sanitation thing is just so infuriating – what’s it even for? If it’s that important, why did they let us through? Why don’t they have a couple of signs up telling people when sanitation is?! And why does one state decide to do it EVERY WEEK?!!

However, our troubled exit aside, Osogbo’s just a lovely, friendly, fairly sleepy place with a buzzing art scene and attention to beauty, and, if it weren’t for my apparent and incapacitating allergy to Nigeria, I would seriously be considering living there. 

Benin City

We were very excited about going to Benin City – centre of the ancient Benin kingdom, lots of history, lots of culture and art, including bronze casters whose work we had seen across Nigeria in galleries and shops. What we got, however, was a bit of a disappointment.

The roads to and around Benin are pretty bad, and also hugely busy with traffic. If you’re ever in the area, do all you can to avoid a place called Ore. It’s probably impossible to avoid, because it’s on the main expressway from Lagos to Benin and at the junction to the road to Ife and Ibadan, so wherever you’re travelling around here, you’re likely to have to go through it. But it’s a horrible mess of muddy, bumpy roads, many of which are less road and more HGV graveyards. Long go-slows are around every corner, either because yet another tanker has broken down in a hugely inconvenient place or, as in the most terrifying of the hold ups we experienced yesterday on our way out of Benin, because there isn’t actually a road – just a huge mess of mud and sludge which cars and lorries are still driving through, making it worse with every vehicle that passes. At one point I actually had to close my eyes as our battered old Peugeot station wagon skidded over a swamp, with the brand new Toyota pick up truck in front clearly struggling and spraying mud onto our (cracked) windscreen (The car in front is a Toyota…so you haven’t got a hope.) One man in our car said that they had been repairing the road for 7 years in that spot, and it still wasn’t finished. You can’t help but think that allowing huge great oil tankers to drive over your unfinished road every day isn’t the quickest way to get it finished; you also can’t help noticing just how much the local economy is flourishing with stationary car-loads of travellers buying food and drink from hawkers who roam the go-slows, and wondering whether it actually isn’t in Ore’s interest to keep that road unfinished.

Anyway, after a long and bumpy journey in a –thankfully – air-conditioned minibus from Lagos, we arrived in Benin City and paid a little extra for the bus to take us right to the Hotel door. The Hotel is surprisingly nice (the Motel Benin Plaza) – rooms are a little grubby and basic (“shabby splendour”, as Simon called it), but the lobby and bar are lovely and you can sit drinking beer and eating suya by their “Olympic sized swimming pool” (that was the way the brochure in our room described what was, at most, a 10m pool in an angular kidney shape).

The next morning, we headed for the street of the bronze casters, crossing busy roads and walking alongside the (permanently rush hour) traffic on yet more pavements. En route we passed a very interesting building with carvings and statues, and as we stood looking up at it, a man arrived and introduced himself as Patrick, the King of Benin’s first cousin. He took some time to explain some of the area’s history and told us that the building we were in front of was the home of the King’s High Priest. That was pretty cool.

A little further along the main road we came to the bronze casters, proudly announced as a World Heritage Site (it’s not, although UNESCO did support a project to revive this all but forgotten craft) by a huge arch at the start of the street. That was about as good as it got. Far from being the authentic street of craftsmen which the guidebook promised, with workers who are unused to visitors and don’t hassle you, it was instead the most touristy place I have seen in Nigeria. We were constantly hissed and shouted at by pushy sales people trying to force us into their shops. When we did enter a few shops, the work was largely poor and obviously for a tourist market, and – the most frustrating thing – was clearly made from brass rather than bronze! The one interesting thing we saw was an old man – the only person actually crafting that we could see – who was making the small wax models which are then covered in clay to form a relief mould into which the metal is poured. That, too, was pretty cool. But all in all, disappointing – definitely not worth schlepping all this way for.

From here we went up to Benin’s National Museum – a striking round orange building, much more attractive than the run down Lagos museum. It has three floors containing some very interesting (and very old) artefacts, though there’s very little information about them and it’s poorly lit (when I complained I couldn’t see inside one of the display cases where the light was broken, an attendant gave me her mobile phone with a torch on it so I could look!). The really difficult part, though, is getting to the museum. It’s set in the middle of a huge roundabout with no walkway or crossings at all – so you have to negotiate the5 or 6 lanes of chaotic traffic if you want to get in! When we asked some official looking types in high-viz jackets if they could help us cross, they kept saying “The entrance is over there. You go in over there” and pointing to the museum gate in the middle of the island. “It’s not finding the gate that’s the problem, it’s crossing the road!!” They didn’t seem to understand, so we just went for it. Benin is not a place for the faint-hearted pedestrian.

We decided to give the Oba’s (King’s) Palace a miss, since it sounded like you could only walk around the “grounds” (i.e. car parks and forecourts) and couldn’t actually see inside, and instead we walked to the other end of the main road to look at an ancient house. This mud building is from the time of Old Benin (so anywhere from the 15^th century onwards) and was the only structure to survive a huge fire started by the British to destroy Benin in the 19^th century (because it wouldn’t agree to the trade rules that we wanted to impose). Once we got into the inner courtyards, it looked like people were still living in parts of it, so we didn’t pry too far, but did manage to see some amazing traditional shrines, complete with feathers, blood stains and jaw bones.

So that was our day in Benin. A couple of really cool moments, but the main attraction – the bronze workers – was a huge disappointment and generally it just felt like a busy, noisy city, with little to charm us. 

Lagos

Our whirlwind tour of the West took us first to Lagos by plane. Obviously, nothing is easy. The flight for which we had booked tickets was due to leave Kaduna airport at 9am; so, having haggled hard, we had booked a driver to pick us up at 6.30am to get us to the airport in plenty of time. Of course, on the Friday, the State government announced that there would be a “sanitation day” in Kaduna on the Saturday – meaning that there can be no traffic on the roads between 7am and 10am (perhaps ostensibly to reduce air pollution, or maybe to allow for roads to be cleaned ; probably, in honesty, something to do with ticking the boxes for some international environmental grant or other). So we rearranged the driver for 6am to be sure that we would be at the airport before the roads ground to a halt. Then we received a text  message later that night from the airline: the flight had been rescheduled for 11am “due to sanitation”. Now, actually, this meant that everything was made hugely more difficult: we still had to leave before the no movement began, but now we would have a 4.5 hour wait at the airport. Brilliant.

So, that’s what we did. And with the obligatory 1 hour delay in taking off, we had been up and about for 6 hours before we even took off. Thankfully the flight landed at the nicer of the two domestic terminals in Lagos (the nastier one has an incredibly short baggage conveyor belt, against a wall so there’s only one side to stand, and surrounded by loud, elbowy Lagos women. We had booked with a hotel called The @venue - a bargain for the mid-range traveller, which is quite a rare find in Lagos, where everything is either very high-end business accommodation or scratty little hostels in the middle of nowhere.The @venue is on the ex-pat territory of Victoria Island, in walking distance of Bar Beach, within a short bus ride of most other things we wanted to see, and they had thrown in a free airport pick-up, so that part was relatively easy.

That afternoon, we attempted to visit the house and gallery of Nike Davies-Okundaye – a famous Nigerian artist who exhibits all over the world, including in MoMA in New York. I was extremely proud of us for managing to work out the buses, getting off at the right stop and walking for quite a way until we found the place: only to find that they had moved since the guide book was published. Hm. We were taken for a ride (literally and figuratively) by a taxi driver who took us to the new location round the corner for a whopping N1,500, all the time chuckling and – as he turned up the A/C and put a new CD into the player – saying “You enjoy your money!”.

The long and misled journey was worth it. We were welcomed by Nike and her family who were eating dinner in the forecourt of the gallery, and spent a while looking round the four floors of art work – some of it really very good. Once we’d finished, we had our arms twisted into drinking glass of red wine on them, which turned into two glasses and some fried plantain. All very lovely.

Dinner was a selection of suya (grilled meat) bought from some Hausa men at the side of the road – it was ridiculously comforting to find people who spoke Hausa, like we had found old friends. I have to say, I have noticed a big difference between people of the North (generally Hausa people) and the people we have met in the West. For example, down here, people seem to laugh more at us than with us. Where on a bus journey in Kaduna, people are generally happy to see foreigners, pleased to see when they know a bit of the lingo and generally joyful that you’re trying out their local ways, here in the West, people seem to just laugh at you for even trying and for getting pronunciation slightly wrong.

Another big difference is that we have been cheated out of money twice. The first time was on our very first bus ride. The driver told us the fare was N200 each, which seemed extortionate to us, but since we didn’t know Lagos prices, we turned to a woman sitting next to us, who nodded and said “Yes, that’s the price – it’s because of fuel prices”; so we paid it, only to find out the return journey – which was even slightly longer that the outward journey – was only N70 each. Sneaky.

The second time was when we were leaving Lagos to travel to Benin City, and were getting onto a bus at the motor park. The guy selling tickets told us one seat cost N1,700. So we paid up and took our seats, asking whether it would be ok with the luggage and being told “No problem, no problem”. We were waiting for quite a while for the bus to fill, and at some point I happened to notice how much someone was paying and realised that it wasn’t a multiple of N1,700, so I asked a woman in front of us how much she had paid: N1,500 came the answer. When I challenged the ticket guy, he swore blind that she was getting off earlier that us, and that was why she was paying less. It was only when I asked another guy to get involved and he checked with the woman that we were able to get the extra money back. And after all that, he had the cheek to try to cheat us out of some more money “for the luggage” – a totally spurious charge that no-one else was paying.

Now I know that this is what you expect when you’re travelling: seasoned travellers will think nothing of this. But the point is, that it doesn’t happen in the Nigeria I know (namely, the North). When we first arrived in country, of course I was used to checking with local people on buses how much they had paid, to make sure we hadn’t been swindled. But after a few times, I started to be embarrassed by the fact that I was asking – the answer invariably came back as the same as we had been charged, and the quizzical looks I was getting just confirmed to me that I was being paranoid, and I felt ashamed to even be doubting it. As far as I know, I have only ever been cheated out of N10 on transport in the North (= c.5p). But down here, I’ve had to recalibrate my mindset – I have to wear my “traveller’s” hat rather than my “Nigerian” hat.

Also, on at least three occasions down here in the West, we’ve been followed by children around a town or market, presumably with the intent of stealing something from us. I say “at least three”, because on those occasions it was painfully obvious what was happening – it may have happened many more times but more subtley. Genuinely, I don’t think this has ever happened to me in the North, and I have been round many markets and crowded city centres. It’s upsetting to have to readjust my view of a country I thought I knew, to be more suspicious and cynical about those around me.

On the other hand, there have been many people down here who have been as helpful and lovely as I have come to expect from Nigerians, and Lagos itself I found very enjoyable. There are pavements (very exciting), KFC and even the occasional pedestrian crossing with a green man – all mod cons. And I can’t tell you just how proud I am that we managed to work out the buses (hell, I’m proud enough when I work them out in Sheffield, let alone in crazy mega-city Lagos) – it gave us such a sense of satisfaction to be travelling in a ‘normal’ way around the city and not be forking out thousands of Naira for taxis.

On the second day, we walked through an old and busy part of town on Lagos Island, kind of like a sprawling market. Through alleyways and backstreets, we wandered through people’s daily lives (a little uncomfortable, and people here are definitely less happy for you to do that than we’re used to – we didn’t even take the camera out of the bag for fear of upsetting people), through rows of shops, under washing lines, past children playing football in the street, or using paper and balls of foil as a makeshift pool table, or a large plank of wood as a table tennis table with a breeze block for a net. There were lots of shouts of ‘Oyibo!’ (=white person) – some friendly, some less so; some children were clearly a little perturbed by us, others ran after us, shook our hands and beamed with delight as they proudly strutted back to their friends.

After a trip to the National Museum (a lot better  than I expected, and I actually think I learnt something about Nigeria’s history), we headed out to spend our last evening on Bar Beach. The write-up in the guidebook suggests this is really quite a nasty place, so we were pleasantly surprised to find clean water, clean sands and a busy row of tables and chairs where we were served beer and offered grilled fish and all manner of touristy knick-knacks. A beautiful place to watch the sun set on our brief time in Lagos.