Wole Soyinka
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, chaperon, 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?
Lagos of my childhood was a well laid out maritime city – preserved in surviving plans, sketches, and daguerreotypes. The adventurer Frobcnius 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, a work that would later be turned into an opera, with music by the Cuban composer, Tania Leon, and directed by the avant-garde American director Robert Wilson for its Swiss premiere.
Lagos was – exotic! Brazilian architecture, names like Pacheco, Pereira, Santos, da Silva etc. still link 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 life-style. 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, heart of island Lagos, students, workers, petty traders and the ‘area boys’, that early urban breed of street gangs of mild violence – 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, became 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 favoured.
The trend became irreversible. Lagos became ugly – physically, socially and spiritually. The traditional compound architecture – encased spaces of humanised dwellings, usually with a well at the centre, where families congregated, nursed infants, cooked, gossiped, quarreled and settled disputes – crumbled before the advancing maw of ‘development’, in reality, naked land greed. Organised 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 ns’oge – the gaudy, mincing hag. To that period belonged the provocation for my play – The Beatification of Area Boy: A Lagosian Kakeidoscope.
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 of the sixties into the nineties. How often – South Africa excepted – does one encounter a historic prison transformed into a Freedom Park, with a theatre 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 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.
Wole SOYINKA, Abeokuta, February 21, 2011
Excerpted from ‘INTERVENTIONS VI: Between Defective Memory and the Public Lie’, by Wole Soyinka, published by Bookcraft, in Ibadan, Nigeria, 2017.
