A month-old in Nigeria

Time must be flying because I realized I have been in Nigeria for a month now. On Friday I had my first beer by night in Lagos. Not as exotic as one might have hoped – a visit to a pub called the Londoner in Ikeja GRA. This is the nice part of Ikeja, where government officials’ housing used to be, but now well-to-do Nigerians irrespective of profession live here. The GRA has a few bars and clubs but most of the nightlife action seems to be in VI, which means an hour’s drive on the notorious bridge. Looks like I will have to make friends with some VI expats, so I can spend the night if out late.

Not the original, but the current-day, Shrine is in Ikeja, and so is Lagbaja’s club Motherlan’. Fela’s son, Femi Kuti, apparently plays at the Shrine when he is in Lagos and that is a definite must. On Saturday Chantal stayed at my place and we cooked and had a meal in the garden. The weather was balmy and there was lovely music floating around in the air till late. It sounded more like calypso or some other Caribbean type of rhythm and I got so curious, I found a ladder in the garden and leaned it towards the fence to climb up and try and see where the music was coming from. I couldn’t locate the sound, but got talking to the neighbours and they said Kingstine Joe was the bar hosting the performance. If Kingstine is meant to be Kingston, as in Kingston Town, then it even makes sense. Chantal and I decided we would investigate further next weekend and do a bar crawl in Ikeja.

The secret ingredient to making this plan come true is finding a local musketeer to accompany us – it is not entirely relaxing to go out just two white girls to bars or clubs. I will have to ask one of my colleagues. But they are mostly married and sadly during the time I have been here two of the staff’s close relatives have passed away - one’s father and another’s sister - so naturally this further restricts the pool of interested people for a night out. They bore their grief with such dignity and both colleagues came into the office same day they got the news to make sure nothing was left at a loose end. Already a few days later they were back working. I think faith is an important factor in the grieving process here. There is a deeprooted acceptance in the ‘lord giveth and he taketh’ spirit. Noone mentions what the cause of death is when someone has passed away. But a lot of things go through one’s mind, pondering the fragility of life. So many die prematurely here for all sorts of reasons.

Today I was talking to a Ugandan VSO, Julius, who works with HIV/AIDS awareness raising and testing and he confirms that the disease is very stigmatized. Officially 5% of Nigerians are infected, which makes them one of the most affected countries in the world. However, the truth may be much much more chocking than that. Julius’ organization finds that 22% of those tested are actually HIV positive. In some subsegments of society HIV is carried by the majority – for example young mechanics is a huge target group. They often have money and, sadly, buying sex is a well-entrenched custom, as is having many girlfriends on the side, even though married. As the most populous country in Africa this has devastating consequences, yet funding available to combat the disease is only a drop in the sea and cultural barriers and ignorance continue to stand in the way for proper prevention.

Poverty strikes on so many levels – lack of education translates into ignorance about vital issues concerning health, sanitation or the environment. And to make things worse people have become jaded and cynical, distrustful of the establishment. In fact a big dilemma in Nigeria today is how to reach the most vulnerable groups. Lagos, not unlike Rio, has some of the largest and most notorious slums in the world. Patrolled by ‘area boys’ they are dangerous to enter and this makes outreach and advocacy almost impossible.

CFC is in the starting phase of getting involved in a project that would entail empowering slum dwellers to document the issues they face living in such poor conditions. To tell the story their own way, they would get a camera and help with editing their shots into a 20-minute documentary, which will be shown at a UN-backed conference in Canada. This sounds like such an exciting project, but the challenges to find someone who is willing to open up and who wants to affect social change are enormous. Most people who have had contacts with this segment of society warn that youth in the slums want money for any kind of participation, even if it is meant to benefit their own situation. And why should they not be disillusioned and callous? Time after time society has let them down or forgotten about them. To a large extent this is the problem in the Niger Delta as well. The locals feel that they are being stripped of their main resource without any investment going back into the local community and they perceive that the rest of Nigeria and the world are reaping the fruits of their hard labour.

Now back to my micro cosmos. Earlier in the week I visited Chantal in Ojota, a neighbourhood not too far from me by Lagos standards. In the morning I tested getting to work by public. Ojota bus stop is a rowdy place. By now I am quite used to the shouting and staring, but in Ojota they were pulling and grabbing me and that is not on. I was under the impression there was a riot, even though nothing out of the ordinary was going on. The crowd was huge and spilled into the road, having very little regard for the ruthless traffic. I have often wondered how come not more people are run over or bump each other. But I think the whole organized chaos of Lagos works on some sort of fragile equilibrium, where pedestrians and cars perform an intricate dance: people ducking away in the last minute or cars screachily coming to a halt seconds before they actually bulldozer you down. All the while beggars and streetsellers are zigzagging between the vehicles, making it impossible to concentrate on what is going on in the traffic. The number of people with deformities is unbelievable, and they push themselves around amidst traffic on little skateboard-type constructions: invalids with deformed limbs, stumps instead of legs, humps on their backs, twisted, crooked extremities. The walking bridges over expressways are a favored spot for them to beg as they are quite narrow and it is hard to get past. But what can one do? There is a new invalid/blind person/malnourished child at every corner and I am already noticing that I am beginning to become immune to all these people in great need.

I went to Lekki market with Chantal on Saturday to find the film, City of God. I wanted to put on a screening at the office to kickstart the slum dweller project. To my disappointment they did not have City of God in the pirated DVD stalls – however they did have about a 1000 copies of White Chicks… and most of the other blockbuster American movies that are being released on the other side of the pond. The pirate releases of these films often concur with the actual US premiere - if there is one thing Nigerian’s have mastered it is how to get fake anything, from DVDs to computers to passports. Nevertheless the market was good fun and I ended up buying lots of things I don’t really need: little brass pendants from Ghana, peanuts and earrings.

And today the shopping spree continued. We went to the beach, Tarkwa Bay, which is a 25min boat ride from VI. I was hoping for a quiet day on the beach but the beach sellers decided otherwise and in the end it was quite fun to bargain from the comfort of a beach chair and be presented with jewelry, sarongs, cold drinks, fruits and handcrafts. I bought a flowy batik dress and a turquoise sarong for a total of 600 Naira, which is less than $5. Then a funny but a bit too persistent sand shark insisted on buying me some bracelets and a necklace so I came back to the mainland with quite a bounty.

And the list of well-doers continued. I got on a bus that ended up going somewhere different than my destination. So a bossy African madame, who basically got everyone on the bus involved, told off the conductor for not dropping the white woman at the right spot and she ended up taking me along in her taxi and would not let me pay. She was wonderful – as soon as she got into the bus, she asked one man for 20 Naira because she needed to pay the street vendor who’d sold her some yam, another was told to hold her shopping bags while she was rearranging her head tie. It did not occur to anyone to disobey her, and eventually all her ‘assistants’ were all rewarded with a “Godbless”. Who says Africans are patriarchal? Some women certainly are calling the shots.

I finally had to take a bike from the bus stop to my house and the okada driver said he recognized me from the neighbourhood. He said ‘I see you every day around Allen Avenue. Like you I am a foreigner as well, so I cannot accept any payment’. Isn’t that something? Nigeria has such a bad reputation for dishonesty and people trying to squeeze money out of foreigners every step of the way, and then I meet all this hospitality and generosity, from people who do not have much themselves. I think we should all remember not to give in to stereotypes and generalizations: there are good, competent, clever, warm-hearted people everywhere in the world irrespective of nationality.