Who Will Write the Great Lagos Book?

In 1991, the French novelist J. M. G. Le Clézio published Onitsha.

The author, who later won the 2008 Nobel Prize in Literature, spent part of his childhood in Nigeria. The book was set in 1948 when the town was a colonial trading post. It remains one of the more serious novels of that kind about a Nigerian city by a foreign novelist.

Let me provoke: it took a Frenchman to write Onitsha.

Let’s call the subject of this essay The Lagos Book. It would be more than a good novel set in Lagos. It would read Lagos with an anthropologist's patience and a storyteller's ear for urban randomness. That is because the subject, heavy and dynamic, would require a lot of excavating and cultivation.

Soyinka has written Ake and Isara superbly. J.P. Clark wrote the widely celebrated poem about Ibadan. Achebe wrote Umuofia as a place that exists in the imagination. Adichie has written Nsukka, the diaspora, the Biafran past. Teju Cole has written Lagos sideways. Atta wrote a fine novel that takes place there. Onuzo too. Abani gave us a darker Lagos. They entries contain memorable impressions of Lagos, but would any of those contend for the title of the Lagos book, in the canonical sense?

Where is the Lagos Ulysses or Maximum City or Istanbul? We have not found the Nigerian writer who has decided that this city would be the work of a lifetime, and would take, say, ten years working on it, to make everybody admit that, Lagos, finally, is on a page.

Maybe this is the wrong question. Maybe the novel cannot contain Lagos. Maybe Lagos wants an epic form. The question would then be a search for a chanter, not a Joyce.

And if it's destined to be a novel, why hasn't it been written?

One reason is that since the 1980s, Nigerian fiction has been increasingly produced outside the country. The agents and the editors are in London. The prize juries are often in New York and Stockholm. While the arrangement has rewarded Nigerian fiction generously and reputationally, it tends to favour books it can follow on a first reading. The familiar tropes include the anatomised village, the war, the immigrant at Heathrow, framed as pilgrim rather than professional. The argument runs that a Lagos written from within is harder to follow on a first reading, so the arrangement does not back it.

Fair to say this argument may not survive its examples. The same arrangement marketed Naples through Ferrante and Bombay through Salman Rushdie. It awarded Mahfouz the Nobel without requiring him to explain Cairo. The point is that the local book has travelled and made money, which suggests that the arrangement (actually an apparatus), and indeed, its homegrown version, can carry a city that won't translate itself. It's a different point whether the weight would be carried evenly because Naples and Cairo enjoy a universality that Lagos is asked to earn. Maybe. Blaming the arrangement and a lack of local publishing infrastructure is easier than admitting the book has not been written, but both can be true.

The first generation of Achebe and Soyinka came of age in the village or in university towns. Things Fall Apart is Ogidi, or, one might say, Umuofia transformed from Ogidi. Death and the King's Horseman is Oyo. This might have been the case because colonial encounters were more visible in those places, and the city a less obvious subject. Achebe's Lagos books fit this pattern. No Longer at Ease makes the city the scene of moral collapse, and A Man of the People sets its capital nowhere.

Cyprian Ekwensi’s People of the City was published in 1954, four years before Things Fall Apart, and is a Lagos novel. Jagua Nana, in 1961, is wholly Lagos, with its showcase of nightclubs, the party politics, and the ageing and magnificent woman at its centre. Yes, Ekwensi may have been the first to write the megacity. His work was filed under popular fiction, the Onitsha-market type, which by contrast moved Achebe and the village into the more serious space. This means most writers of that generation passed Lagos through. The one who didn't was demoted. (The Nigerian government and the literary establishment owe Ekwensi a special posthumous recognition.)

The generation that followed inherited the posture. It became the shape of most of their work and was reinforced abroad by a foreign system that viewed villages and diaspora settings as exotic backgrounds. Chai!

What language should the Lagos book be written in? Pidgin might be the candidate, at the risk of alienating some readers. The translation industry is thriving these days. Pidgin functions as a working tongue in Lagos because it is spoken at bus stops and during Sunday lunches before English takes over. It signals comradeship in some settings and carries a stigma in others.

The executive who speaks in pidgin while joking will not speak it in the boardroom. Our languages are labelled colloquial; English is treated as premium. That is the reality. Writing Lagos in standard English is writing it with one hand. The works that come closest keep pidgin in narration and dialogue, which hands the reader a translated Lagos. The only notable work with pidgin as its primary register is Ken Saro-Wiwa's Sozaboy. It has no successor for reasons partly aesthetic and commercial. The Lagos book that combines pidgin and English in a way readers can appreciate would be a major work.

Writing Lagos honestly means letting the languages run where standard English is inflected by Yoruba or Hausa or Igbo, and pidgin in natural stretches. A reader who cannot tell "How body" from "How are you?" gets it from context. It's how one learns Rushdie's Bombay and Ferrante's Naples.

But novels usually take years to complete. The Lagos a novelist starts may not be the one the novelist finishes. This may be why much of the best Lagos writing has been reportorial. Understandably so, since the past is the only part that stops moving. Suketu Mehta resolved the same problem for Mumbai by writing Maximum City as narrative nonfiction. Maybe the Lagos book will be nonfiction too.

One difficulty might be how to make a single book carry a city like Lagos without turning it into an inventory. And Lagos has too much material.

I imagine Lagos written as performance, say, aso ebi as both uniform and rank, the air-conditioned hush of Banana Island above a street that floods every July. A writer without an ear for these registers will not manage it.

Then there is the brochure version of Lagos, the one where Eko Atlantic rises and rendered like Dubai or Singapore. That is the thing about Lagos. It is never short of optimism and confidence.

The operational infrastructure for this book exists now. Cassava Republic. Masobe. Ouida. Even Substack. And a dozen experiments running out of laptops in Ikeja and Port Harcourt. A Nigerian writer can now write a difficult book, find a publisher, and find readers who require no translation.

Le Clézio wrote Onitsha from outside, with a child's leftover and limited knowledge. If the Lagos book comes out, it will be written by an insider who knows a Friday in Ikoyi is different from a Friday in Ikorodu. Who knows maybe the book is already in draft, in a laptop in a room where the power keeps going off.

Maybe this wish is itself a problem. Should the Lagos book be measured in European terms of a single author, a single masterpiece, a city flattened like Joyce's Dublin, for a global audience?

I only know I want to read the book. Maybe I am asking for too much.