Lagos

When an average German is asked what he knows about Nigeria , the guessing game revolves most of the time around the key words: petroleum, religious conflicts and malaria. Some might perhaps even refer to Keziah Jones or Dr. Alban, acknowledged experts on West Africa , or even Wole Shoyinka. The Super Eagles enjoys a wider acquaintance and that is not because of the victory at the Altlanta Olympics but rather linked to that goal which Jay Jay Okocha in Eintracht Frankfurt jersey scored against the baby-faced goal keeper Oliver Kahn in 1993. This incredible dribbling is one of the most beautiful moments in the history of German Bundesliga and certainly occupies a prominent position in Kahn’s cabinet of nightmares. One can definitely say that that was what made Okocha the most famous Nigerian in Germany for some years. He was later relieved of this role by Berti Vogts, but since the unlucky football coach left for Azerbaijan the Nigeria-German cultural exchange supported by the media came to a stand still.

Now coming to the point, an average German does not have the faintest idea about Nigeria and because this average German could be me, I was so happy when the Goethe-Institut offered to send me to the office of This Day Newspapers as guest editor for a month.

The exchange programme in which I am participating is titled “Close up”. If only it was that simple! Lagos is the largest, hottest, most densely populated and overcrowded, most chaotic and most exciting city I have ever set my foot in. It will take days before I will be able to take a close shot. In the meantime I am so busy taking a general look at the whole city and taking just the overview. Since my arrival at the Murtala Muhammed International Airport last Sunday evening I have constantly been in a state of sensory overload. Wherever I look, my eyes fail to catch a spot on which it could rest. Everywhere something is moving, there are people, animals, cars and Okadas. The drive from my hotel in Ikoyi to the editor’s office on the mainland is like an adventure through the crazy city jungle. I would very much like to take a shot of each street trader offering for sale onions, umbrellas, multiple sockets, soft-toy rats and roast chicken in the heat of traffic which creates the impression of a heavy slow-moving metal avalanche dragging itself down the road. But before I can focus my camera I discover yet another object: a cow by the road side, a baby asleep on a bed made of jerry cans, a hopelessly overcrowded small bus, the national theatre sitting on the mainland like a stranded whale. I have not taken any meaningful photograph, so I decided that taking of photographs will have to wait until I have adapted midway to the tempo of this city held up in traffic.

I am not on the African continent for the first time. As a student, I travelled through Namibia, Botswana, Zimbabwe, Morocco to Egypt . Now, for the first time, I have the feeling that I am really in Africa . I have begun to understand Africa as something which, in European thinking cannot function, but which functions in wonderful way. If there is power failure in a German city people grope helplessly in the dark, get upset for the fact that they do not have a candle at home, call their friends anxiously on the phone or simply go to bed. In Lagos, there is power outage every couple hours and apparently this city seems to solve the problem by ignoring the consequences. Yesterday evening, when the restaurant in which we were was suddenly thrown into darkness, my partner Abiodun, did not even interrupt the sentence he started when the lights were on. Even the programme on the flat screened television set simply went on uninterrupted.

It is natural that being a Central European, I was not made for life in a tropical mega city. I live allday under a thick coat of insecticides and sun cream. I avoid ice cubes, open drinks and raw salads. In a traffic I am as helpless as a tortoise lying upside down, I have to be watchful at nightfall so I do not fall into the gutter and if I come into the street from a well air conditioned building, my glasses become misty.

Nevertheless or probably that’s just why I came under the spell of Lagos from the very first moment. Yet, quite frankly I know little about this city. I know however that I have not been as heartily received anywhere in the world as here, so much that on a normal Monday evening in Obalende more people dance, drink and joke around on the street than in Berlin in a whole summer. I also suspect why the Nigerian dancer, Vera Ephraim tells me she flies reluctantly back to South Africa because human life does not count much there.

If I were to strictly keep to the advice of my tour guide and my doctor from Berlin , I would not have experienced all these at all. Hence, I would have to spend the next four weeks under an airconditioned mosquito net with self protection device and wait till it is over.

I will probably exchange my mosquito net unopened on my return to Germany . What my tour guide and my doctor did not precisely make clear to me was that over my hotel bed hangs a fan, which makes impossible the installation of one of these protection tents for unsuspecting Central Europeans.