Lagos: Supernatural City

 

Lagos: Supernatural City

 

By Tim Cocks

Barnes & Noble. $25

 

This is a frantic, mystical journey through Africa's biggest metropolis: Lagos. Going beyond the popular images of mad traffic or crowded slums, it tells of the incredible feats Lagosians must pull off to survive their broken-down city. It also reveals the secret enabling them to cope with the chaos and precarity of Nigeria's most populous centre: spirituality. A female street fighter in a male-dominated mafia extortion business. Two powerful chiefs locked in a deadly feud over billion-dollar real estate. An oil tycoon who gambles her fortune on televangelists' prophecies. A rubbish scavenger dreaming of a reggae career. A fisherman's son trying to save Makoko, the ‘floating slum,’ from demolition and transformation into luxury waterside flats. A priestess to a river goddess selling sand to feed Lagos's voracious construction boom. If anything unites these disparate figures, it is their belief in unseen forces, and their commitment to worshipping them – whether at secret shrines to West African gods and ancestors, or in the iron-roofed churches and domed mosques dotting the Lagos skyline. In this extraordinary city, Tim Cocks uncovers something universal about human nature in the face of danger and high uncertainty: our tendency to place faith in a realm beyond.

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