http://www.newsweek.com/2011/03/06/the-city-lagos.html
How does one translate Oge? Reluctantly, I had agreed to receive the
newly crowned, new-generation Sisi Oge—Lady of Chic?—of Lagos. She
wanted my advice on the social agenda for her year on the throne. With
her "court"—photographer, chaperone, press secretary, etc.—she turned
up in a small convoy of cars, head framed in a tiny coronet. As we sat
in my home of dense foliage, any semblance of which had long vanished
from most of Lagos, I listened to their dreams, wistfully pondering—
were these young enthusiasts the hidden spirit of Lagos, a butterfly
seeking to break free of its cocoon?
The Lagos of my childhood was a well-laid-out maritime city. The
adventurer Leo Frobenius fantasized the lost city of Atlantis sunken
in its bay. Washed by the Atlantic, pocked by lagoons, and veined by
canals through which canoes plied a steady commerce with inland
riverine settlements, memories of that past provided the setting for
my radio play, A Scourge of Hyacinths.
Lagos was … exotic! Brazilian architecture—names like Pacheco,
Pereira, Santos, da Silva, etc.—still links Lagos with the history of
slavery. The "returnees" brought back the culture of Brazil: cuisine,
music concerts, street spectacles like the caretta (satyr-costumed
riders), and, simply, a distinctive lifestyle. There were well-tended,
landscaped green areas along the beach and inland—one, lined with
royal palms, was known as the "Love Gardens." At Ita Faji cemetery, in
the heart of this island city, students, workers, petty traders, and
the "area boys"—that early urban breed of mildly violent street gangs—
all intermingled. They shared the broad shades of breadfruit, local
apple, and cashew trees with the true landowners—the departed—in their
subterranean abode.
The post-independence cannibal feast, accelerated by the incursion of
military rule in 1966, grew insatiable after the petroleum boom. First
the trees were eaten, then the lagoons and canals swallowed. They
vanished under a steady vomit from sand chutes, to be surmounted by
putative skyscrapers and fortress architecture—for this violation
brought the death of community and the ascendancy of violent, urban
crime. Even the dead did not rest in peace. A military governor
ordered the total evacuation of their coveted land, banished the bones
to the outskirts. On their hallowed abode rose his concrete banality
in town-hall architecture. The leavings were shared among the favored.
The trend became irreversible. Lagos became ugly—physically, socially,
and spiritually. The traditional compound architecture—encased spaces
of humanized dwellings, usually with a well at the center, where
families congregated, nursed infants, cooked, gossiped, quarreled, and
settled disputes—crumbled before the advancing maw of "development,"
in reality, naked land greed. Organized crime flourished in the choked
streets and behind ornate gates. Lagos suffocated under population
crush and commercial explosion; traffic became one frenzied, writhing
dragon, vainly seeking escape.
Remedies were superficial and rhetorical. The city's trapped inmates
sought to make up for their daily nightmare with ostentation. Parties
spilled onto streets, with all-night bands, nothing on tap but XO
cognac and champagne. Beer?—screamed an outraged Mamma Oge—beer is for
drivers. In my house you drink only champagne! But the city had aged
prematurely—only one title then befitted her—Arugbo N'soge—the gaudy,
mincing hag. To that period belonged the provocation for my play The
Beatification of Area Boy.
Yet numerous redeployed expatriates and visitors return again and
again, complaining that they cannot get Lagos out of their system—
these devotees have a huge surprise in store! The butterfly is
emerging from the chrysalis, a reversal of the cannibalistic orgy from
the '60s into the '90s. How often—South Africa excepted—does one
encounter a historic prison transformed into a Freedom Park, with a
theater implanted where the gallows once stood! The scale of ambition
is staggering. Side by side with a refurbished Lagos, the foundations
of a sister city are being laid—the Eko Atlantic City—rising like
Aphrodite from the foam of the Atlantic. Frobenius would be pleasantly
astonished!
My callers proved, unwittingly, emblematic. From Arugbo N'soge to Sisi
Oge, Lagos is mastering the art of rejuvenation.
Soyinka was awarded the 1986 Nobel Prize in literature.
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