Lagos

Some days ago a big German popular newspaper described Lagos as being „hell on earth”, in which white people are allegedly robbed and murdered night after night by a furious mob. Now, I do not want to paint a romantic picture of the poverty, the dirt and the violence in this city, but as far as I am aware, I have neither been robbed nor murdered since my arrival well over three weeks ago. The sentence ”Lagos is hell on earth” says more about the quality of German popular newspapers than about the realities in this city.

In Lagos, it is never a matter of what one can see. It is rather a matter of what one wants to see. Only on one weekend, visitors, who are determined to understand this place scale through various innumerable city dwellings, city quarters, garbage dumps and brackish water, markets for Voodoo things, road side brothels and muddy roads, policeman standing along the roads with loaded Kalaschnikows trying to earn some additional change for their Christmas shopping, down to orgies of Champagne, gigantic churches, marvellous concert halls and completely relaxed promenades at the beach. What one sees as a stranger on a single weekend in Lagos is enough for several evenings of feature films. Lagos is a non-stop movie theatre.

Friday, 12 midnight

My discovery trip through the unreal reality of Lagos begins on Friday evening at the bar Number Ten in the city part of Victoria Island. So as to forestall any misunderstanding the name of the owner is engraved with golden letters above the entrance gate: Jay Jay Okocha. The probably most entertaining footballer that Africa has ever produced, ensures a good mood- only just in another way. From the outside, Okocha’s nightclub seems like a mausoleum for a living person. Whoever passed through the high-security door, finds himself though again in a bar dominated with stylishly flowered wallpaper, which could also be in Brooklyn, Lavapies or Kreuzberg.

At Number Ten the young elite celebrates with a drink the beginning of the weekend. This elite from artistes, advertising agents and management consultants is after all so numerous that at about midnight no champagne flute fall to the ground again- the crowd is too big for it.

Every minute, pot-bellied champagne bottles move over the heads and get over behind a black swing door with porthole, which separates all favourites of Okocha from the special favourites of Okocha.

The former Number Ten made for himself a velvet couch corner behind the swing door. A kind of VIP- area in the VIP-area. Okocha sips from a gold plated champagne bottle. I introduce myself as a sport journalist from Germany. “Hello, how are you” says Jay Jay Okocha. He smiles politely, we arrange an interview for the coming week. Then he returns to his couch again and watches how his guests enjoy themselves at his expenses. I cannot help myself, but amdist these hopping and sweating bodies, wound into one another, the greatest Nigerian football hero seems lonely. Lagos is an invisible city sensation.

Saturday, 1:00pm

The next morning starts with a alternative programme. 32 year old technician, guitar player and hobby author Abiodun takes me along on a journey into his past. Today, Abiodun lives and works on the wealthy side of Ikoyi. To get by, he has to stick to simple temporary jobs, but he does get by. He was brought up in the Timberland ghetto one of the last forgotten slums of this area. Timberland is a dead-end – not only metaphorically. It has only one entrance that is hidden at the end of a dusty road behind a grey wall. Through a not even three metres narrow tube of shanties meanders a black bubbling stream which is both, water supply and sewers. This Saturday, it is the last Saturday in the month, small scum mountains glow at the edge of the stream. It is environmental day in Lagos. The population is called to leave their cars behind and clean their houses. Of course no one owns a car that he could leave behind in the Timberland ghetto. So at least the state-ordered cleaning action is taken seriously. The people of Timberland fish tin cans, jerry cans and rotten shoes out of the mawkish smelling canal. Then they burn everything – because no waste disposal truck will come here.

In the geographic centre of Timberland stands an old open air pool table. A friend of Abiodun brings us two poorly cooled bottles of Guinness. We sit on a stone block in the shadow of a rusty housetop and watch the ghetto kids playing pool. Abiodun says it is absurd for him to be here as a visitor since he still has family, friends and relatives here. He grew up in a military barracks and came to Timberland when he was 12 years old. When his father had to quit the military for reasons of age, he could not offer his four children a middle-class lifestyle anymore. So the family packed up it’s gear and moved together into the slum. “From one day to the other, my life did not circle around school, future and education anymore but around survival”, says Abiodun. Three years ago, the music brought him back into a real house on a paved road – after 14 years without electricity, running water and window pane. Lagos is a dead-end with an emergency exit.

Saturday, 7:00pm

The air-line distance between Okocha’s Bar and the Timberland ghetto is maximally five kilometres. And still they could not be more afar from each other. This is one of the reasons why it is so important to know the brothers Chike and Azu Nwagbogu in Lagos.They are mediators between the Okacocha and the Timberland world. They sell art, organize concerts, own a hotel and a gallery, meet poets for tea and celebrities for gin tonic – but they also play rugball at the beach, foster the area boys in their neighbourhood and understand the language of the suburb kids.

Every Saturday, the Nwagbogus organize a dinner where big fish are grilled, palm wine flows and an invited group of ten to twenty guests of all educational and income levels discusses the course of the world. Usually, there is a beforehand agreed upon topic and since in Nigerian theory the course of the world really begins only when it is already at its end from an European point of view, the topics usually circle around religion, transcendence and the afterlife. A dinner discussion is maybe the wrong way to describe this wonderfully bizarre event, because that would imply a relatively orderly course of conversation. The truth is that at these dinners for two hours everybody argues loudly with everybody, Gods are summoned, capitalists cursed, sins hailed. Preachers, prophets, death and the devil come here into one’s own and the only moment of silence appeared last Saturday when I made the assumption that there is at least a possibility that there is no life after death. Lagos is a spiritual show bag.

Sunday, 2:00am

Seun Kuti ist he youngest son of the 1997 deceased Afrobeat-inventor Fela Kuti. He entered the stage with the legendary band Egypt 80 already when he was eight years old. Since the death of his father, Seun carries out the heritage of Nigeria ’s greatest musical legend. And one is allowed to say that he does not always carry lightly on it. To skip a concert of one of Kuti’s sons is in Lagos about as proscribed as questioning the existence of the afterlife.

We reach Africa-Shrine in the early morning hours. Azu Nwagbogu leads me without many detours into the backstage area where Seun Kuti sits on a yellowish mattress, playing a golden saxophone. Kuti wears a bodysuit in leopard design that at least matches his leopard design shoes. We talk about Berlin, my experiences in the editorial department of This Day and, of course, about God and religion. Bit by bit, the backstage room becomes crowded with all sorts of people who the musician apparently meets for the first time. “Hello, how are you? … Where are you from? … oh! … ah-hah? … interesting …” Half an hour later, Seun Kuti has abruptly disappeared without biding farewell. Somebody realizes that also the saxophone has disappeared.

When the left-behind backstage crowd reaches the main hall, the concert is already at it’s peak. Kuti is accompanied by about 20 trumpet players, drummers, percussionists, bassists and dancers. Some members of the audience dance in front of the stage; most of them sit in white plastic chairs at white plastic tables and follow the event motionless. It is the quietest audience I have ever seen at a pop concert. But it does not seem to be a kind of disinterest. On the contrary. Something sacred seems to be in the air. As if every clapping, every crackle, every rattle with a chair could anger the Gods. Lagos is Afrobeat.

Sunday, 6:30am

As it dawns, we drive with a taxi over the Third-Mainland-Bridge back to Ikoyi. One can not say that the city awakens at this time. It never went to sleep. Ten thousands of people are already on the road, in white busses, over bumpy roads, they are driving towards Canaan-Land to celebrate, like every Sunday, the largest church service of the Christian world. I drink a coffee in the hotel then I follow them in my company car. Around 7:00am I reach the Northern outskirts of the city and end as so often during these weeks in the traffic jam. The caravan of pilgrims pores in walking pace through potholes and knee-deep brown puddles. When I reach the pink pagoda of the Winner’s Church by 9:00am, the preacher reads the choice of topic-related merchandizing articles to a crowd of 50.000 believers. There are blue and white t-shirts with polo collar for 750 Naira, the version with a round collar is already available for 500 Naira. “Advertise Jesus,” cries the preacher in his microphone, clipped on to his designer suit. The bibles of my bench-neighbours are pasted with stickers. “I’m a winner”, stands there in red and white.

After a gospel-medley, which sound-wise out-qualifies the performance of Seun Kuti by far, Bishop David O. Oyedepo enters the stage. “Obedience is the most important key to the world of the blessed” echoes it out of the giant speaker systems that hang like sinners from the ceiling. I take the words to heart and decide to get official photo permission, before unpacking my camera. They bring me into a futuristic control room where 11 screens show the Bishop’s sermon from 11 different camera angles. I have the permission to make as many photographs as I want, but only after the well over three hours lasting sermon is over. So I go back to my seat and try hurriedly to write down the seven keys to blessedness which are now displayed on three public-viewing-screens. But when I now skim through my notepad, I can only find three times in scrawly ball-pen writing “You shall serve – he shall bless”. Lagos is the power of recurrence.

Sunday, 11:00am

Around lunchtime, the largest crowd of believers I have ever seen turns back home through the burning tropical sun. I am in the traffic jam for three hours and on this occasion try to catch up a bit of the sleep I had missed during the past 48 hours. Unfortunately, the feature movie in front of my windscreen is so fascinating that there is no way of thinking of sleeping. I see street vendors who show me dead rodent through the window to advertise their rat poison. I see two men and two goats on a motorbike. I see an oily bridge, where freshly laundered shirts and underpants are drying. And I see my favourite movie of the thousands of yellow VW-busses whose scruffy letterings testify of an eventful German past: “Verkehrsschule Gladbeck”, “Elektrotechnik Poschmann-Wetzel”, “Arbeitsgemeinschaft mobile Kindergaerten”.

I barely make it to the kickoff of this Sunday’s rugball match at half past four at Kuramo-Beach. After a short time, rugball became a ritual for me in Lagos. While I am in Germany , I watch the detective story “Tatort” every Sunday on television. While I am in Lagos , my ”Tatort“ is at Kuramo-Beach. When I return to the hotel shortly before 10:00pm, I discover sand at parts of my body which I never knew of. A shower and a bed is all I want after this weekend. Unfortunately, just this evening we have a problem with the water supply. The man at the reception explains me politely that it would not take longer than two hours to solve the problem. Lagos is a waiting course for advanced learners.