Tim Cocks, Lagos: Supernatural City (2022)
Can a non-Nigerian, much less an Englishman, hope to understand the "impossibility-ism" of Africa's star megacity?
About a year after its publication, Tim Cocks' Lagos: Supernatural City received a positive review in the Los Angeles Review of Books with the unfortunate headline "When a White Man Writes a Good Book About Africa." I call it unfortunate not because of its untruth — for indeed, Tim Cocks, a white man, has written a good book about Africa, or at least a part of Africa — but because of its tendentious clickbait-adjacency. That belies the nature of the review itself, whose author, a New York-based Nigerian journalist called Kovie Biakolo, concedes the potential advantages of Cocks' "outsider perspective." She also admits that he actually does know Lagos "more fully and better than I do," in the face of the assumption to which fashionable lines of thinking tend to lead: "I am Nigerian, he is not, and therefore I should know Lagos better than he does."
An Englishman with South African roots, Cocks has been (as his Twitter bio indicates) reporting from the "mother continent" for a couple of decades at this point. He now lives in Johannesburg, but previously lived in Dakar and before that in Lagos, where he worked as Reuters' Nigeria bureau chief from 2011 to 2015. He makes that clear right at the beginning of the preface, shortly before stating that "this is not a book about my own experience of Lagos." As a reader, I always find such a declaration somewhat dispiriting, though it's also unsurprising coming from a writer of Cocks' professional formation. For better or for worse, reporters get habit drilled into them of staying out of (or minimizing their presence in) the "story," which, of course, should involve only their interviewees and the people to whom those interviewees are connected, a cast in this case 100 percent Lagosian.
"Lagosian" doesn't necessarily mean Nigerian, since Lagos could hardly have become one of the world's so-called megacities (usually defined as having a population of at least ten million) without migrants from other regions of the country, as well as from other West African nations like Benin or Cameroon. At any rate, Cocks uses the word without exception in reference to black Africans, the enormous demographic from which he draws his six main characters: a female ex-gangster; a garbage scavenger turned pop singer; an ambitious career woman turned oil entrepreneur; a small-time "overlord" engaged in a bitter turf war; the native son of a watery slum whose educational facilities he dedicates himself to improving; and a sand dealer who becomes, for a time, a kind of priestess in service of one of many native deities.
When he hears of a figure engaged in similarly ambitious, risky, and often ambiguously legal pursuits at the edges of mainstream society — and one that, ideally, reflects the state of the society to which that figure belongs — a Canadian foreign-correspondent friend here in Seoul likes to say that his "reporter sense is tingling." This is not a sense I've ever developed, and I thus enjoy seeing it in action. Cocks takes the material to which his own such instinct leads him in Lagos and presents it almost novelistically. "A couple of scenes or descriptions in the characters' stories that do not advance the plot have been inserted into the past narrative, when in fact I witnessed them years later," he confesses in a disclaimer at the end of the book, acknowledging that that "this obviously runs up against the limits of creative interpretation when it comes to non-fiction."
Despite being a professional writer of non-fiction myself, I have no particularly deep concern about the limits of creative interpretation. If it turned out that Cocks had, say, fabricated one of his major characters out of whole cloth, I suppose it would strike me as a poor show. But to my mind, any of the impressions he collected during his Lagos are fair game, and had he placed himself closer to the foreground of the narrative, he could have included those impressions without the need for contortions of this kind. The book's conspicuous journalistic scrupulousness suggests that such self-foregrounding is exactly what he wanted to avoid, or felt he had to avoid, in order not to come off as yet another exploitative white men, regarding Africa with what Bialoko calls the "colonial gaze."
Surely no gaze, however politically correct or incorrect, could ever survey the whole of Lagos, estimates of whose population "currently range between 15 and 25 million." I get the sense, from not just Cocks' book but everything I've seen or heard about the city, that most of those Lagosians spend their days in the single-minded pursuit of money. A quote from Eric, the scavenger-turned-singer, sets the tone early: "We say “This is Lagos' not 'Welcome to Lagos.' It means: don’t expect anyone to help you. You have to hustle if you want food before bedtime.'" "Hustle" soon becomes the book's byword. "Even after becoming famous, Cocks writes, he "still needed to hustle for a living." Noah, who works to build schools in the lagoon where he grew up, remains "a hustler at heart." Kemi, the sand magnate, "liked the thrill of the hustle, the cat-and-mouse game of haggling."
Years ago, a friend got married in the Philippines. While hanging out in Manila in the days before the wedding, we enumerated the "signs you're in the third world." These included the public presence of animals in rough shape, the honking of automobile horns with a frequency that renders them meaningless, and the need to haggle. That last is particularly difficult for the American abroad, whose experience of price negotiation tends to be limited to getting taken for a ride (in more than once sense) every few years at a car dealership. But in addition to this distaste, he also feels a kind of respect for the businesslike spirit on display in everything from milking a few extra dollars from tourists to scavenging copper wire to finding a way to sell obscure parts of slaughtered cows that nobody else wants — a respect, that is, for the hustle.
"I don't want to sell anything, buy anything, or process anything as a career," declares John Cusack's character in the most widely quoted line from Say Anything. "I don't want to sell anything bought or processed, or buy anything sold or processed, or process anything sold, bought, or processed, or repair anything sold, bought, or processed." But in the Lagos I imagine, selling things bought or processed, buying things sold or processed, processing things sold, bought, or processed, and repairing things sold, bought, or processed is all anyone does. I'm sure this mental image has a certain truth to it, but also that it's influenced by the fact that twenty-first-century megacities are usually portrayed to first-world audiences less through the perspectives of their architects and philosophers than of their citizens who have personally engaged in violent turf wars over patches of commercial territory in decrepit bus stations.
It would, in any case, be untrue to claim that all Lagosians are occupied with the making of money. Some are occupied with simply acquiring it, from the "area boys" who block the road in order to demand payments from drivers to the policemen and other officials who augment their pay (and thus acquire the means to develop a "government belly," as Cocks notes that some African countries call it) by doing what amounts to the same thing. "For many Nigerians, the giving and receiving of bribes, tips, extortion money, or alms — the categories are fluid — is not thought of in moral terms," says the narrator of Teju Cole's Lagos's-set novel Every Day Is for the Thief. "It is seen either as a mild irritant or as an opportunity. It is a way of getting things done, neither more nor less than what money is there for."
Despite having been born in Michigan and first celebrated for the New York-set novel Open City, Cole has long been my go-to Nigerian writer. For years he talked about working on a long-form non-fictional "narrative of Lagos," where he grew up, and I couldn't have anticipated any book from him more. That he seems ultimately to abandoned the project is a shame, since it would no doubt have complimented Cocks' Lagos nicely. As novelist and essayist, he wouldn't have been writing under quite the same pressures or expectations as a reporter; he would also have seen it through a outsider perspective that's a partial inversion of Cocks', having been raised in Africa but institutionally shaped in the US and the UK. He could also, I suspect, have got away with more direct criticisms of the city, country, and continent as a more-or-less native son.
That's hardly to say that all is well in Cocks' portrayal of Lagos. The aforementioned corruption appears to run through every sector of society, public, private, and religious, the last of which takes particularly striking forms in Nigeria. Countless diverse and persistent native faiths have merged with not just African Islam but also the more prestigious missionary Christianity, creating a host of weird variants of the prosperity gospel with extravagantly wealthy leaders like "Pastor Chris," a self-described "dynamic multi-faceted preacher the Lord has decanted His Spirit upon" who boasts of "mega-dimensions of barrier-breaking in Christendom." But it is just such charismatic figures, Cocks finds, who give many Lagosians the hope that sustains their hustle, the will to get through what a more admirable Lagosian celebrity named Fela Kuti (a nearly eight-hour Spotify playlist of whose music provided my Lagos-reading soundtrack) evocatively termed "impossibility-ism."
Some of the qualities of Lagos that stand out in this book are qualities that stand out of the description of any large third-world capital, especially when presented as a harbinger of mankind's fully urbanized future: its enormous size and accelerating speed of growth; its apparent chaos masking an underlying organic order; its hopelessly inadequate infrastructure (this is "the only megacity in the world without an organized mass transit system"); its brazenly vivid manifestations of that bête noire of Western journalism, inequality. Of that last, Cocks has a knack for spotting representative images: e.g., "a stretched Hummer whizzing past a beggar in rags, splashing a filthy puddle over the poor man for good measure." But I do wonder if the Lagosians in the stretched Hummers — most if not all beneficiaries of Nigeria's oil-extraction industry — really have it as much better as it seems.
The viewing material with which I supplemented Lagos included Welcome to Lagos, a three-part BBC Two documentary from 2010 mentioned by Cocks that prominently features Eric the scavenger (and indeed, played a part in getting him out of the dump) as well as Makoko, the shantytown built on the water. Though the series captures a certain joviality in Lagosian life — and indeed, a few expressions of happiness more radiant than any I've seen in the developed world — it also gives an almost wall-to-wall impression of desperate, unrelieved poverty. To get a different view, I also watched a French documentary on Lagos' millionaires. What I saw supported my assumption that Nigeria is the America of West Africa, in that rich Nigerians have a good deal in common with rich Americans, not least their siege-mentality obsession with safety, their tendency to install themselves to remote estates, and their highly questionable taste.
Visiting the home of one successful subject, Cocks sits amid "an opulent arrangement of black leather sofas and white-painted wooden tables with ornate gold trimmings and marble surfaces, all in faux-baroque style" — an immaculately subtle interior design, by the standards of Lagos' elite. (It shows commendable restraint that he uses forms of the word kitsch only five times throughout the book.) This sort of thing isn't unknown in the US, but those who make it in Nigeria also face a set of what we might call third-world problems. Far from the watchful community security of the slum, they have to contract round-the-clock protection. If they can't manage to send their children abroad for their education, they must at least get them into the right international school. And heaven help them if they forget to carry sufficient cash for the hostilely supplicating crowds that swarm their chauffeur-driven armored vehicles.
In this former British colony whose population speaks 530 different languages, the upper class defaults to a stilted, uncannily American-sounding English — as opposed to the more heavily accented but evocative version on Lagos' streets, with its vocabulary-test words hammered into askew grammatical structures. This would suit an Anglophone journalist — or Youtuber, or traveler, or person of any kind looking for a "way in" to twenty-first-century Africa. Having never set foot there myself, I've wondered for years which country offers the best starting point for my own experience of that continent. The front runner used to be Ethiopia (I enjoy kitfo and dabble in Amharic), which has fallen on even tougher times than usual of late. The Francophone regions would be linguistically viable, more or less. Then there's South Africa, homeland of J. M. Coetzee (whom Teju Cole also idolizes), though his work is hardly an advertisement for the place.
An editor of mine has traveled for decades with the goal of visiting every country in the world. I asked him which one so far has shown the least interest in the United States. He didn't have to think long before answering that it was Nigeria. Whatever the factors behind this (and I suspect the aforementioned America-of-West-Africa status counts among them), it sparked my interest, or at least compensated for my inherent disinterest in any country that uses English as a lingua franca. And indeed, I've seen it borne out in the attitude of Lagosians profiled in Cocks' book and elsewhere. They may live in Hobbesian conditions (without, that is, even the merciless guarantees of a Leviathan), but they pursue their aspirations within them, and those aspirations involve moving to Houston less often than they do improving their lot — or that of their family or community — where they are.
In some cases, those aspirations extend to Nigeria as a whole, expressed by talk of making its metropolis a node of world commerce on par with Singapore or even London. Though it can sound somehow fantastical and trite at once, this will to prosperity has its appeal, and the opportunity to witness it in action at scale surely explains some of the fascination with Lagos in the developed West today. Though few events could be less likely in my life than moving there, I do wonder how I'd make a go of it if I did. My imagination started turning at Cocks' early, brief description of Ikoyi, an "exclusive residential district, home of rich Nigerians and expatriates, and the place I lived in for nearly four years." Despite being "all coconut palms, tennis lawns and luxury apartments," it remains "shabbily Lagos in its way: roads are cratered, drains blocked."
A successor of Graham Greene could do something with that setting. Cocks, apart from a reference to the colonial throwbacks at the Lagos Yacht Club, scarcely acknowledges expatriate life in the city at all. I kept thinking of an observation from Roger Ebert's review of Danny Deckchair: "Here is a man who knows more than anyone alive about manned flight using a lawn chair and helium balloons, and that is the one thing he never gets to talk about." Hints of another book I'd like Cocks to write one day come outside the main text. Among the epigraphs, between a quotation from Wole Soyinka and a Yoruba proverb, is a passage from David Hume's The Natural History of religion about how, when life is "subject to fortuitous accidents, it is natural that superstition should prevail everywhere" — natural material, perhaps, for a writer a master's degree in philosophy from Oxford.
In the very last pages, after his notes on his sources, Cocks also includes a acknowledgment of his Nigerian wife. I was glad to read this, but certain readers will no doubt seize it as the basis for a tired "gotcha" — behind every expatriate man, a local woman — or they would, at least, had Cocks not added that his wife's nationality guarantees that she "understands Lagos better than I ever will." Can he truly believe that any given Nigerian understands the city about which he wrote a book better than he does? Even Kovie Biakolo, the reviewer who claims to avoid not just books by white people but white people themselves, had to hand it to him on that count. Lagos should prove definitively that a white man can write a good book about Africa. Now, who dares to write a good book about a white man in Africa?
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities, language, and culture. His current projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall, or on Facebook.