Books after four

In this first episode, author Adewale Maja-Pierce’s The House My Father Built (2014) is a nonfictional work which began as an essay “Legacies,” published in Granta, about a property his late father left for him. While he’d left Nigeria, when he was 16, to join his mother in England, his return to attend to his inherited property re-introduced him to Lagos. He documents his experience, making a fine roll call of the people he encounters and how the city shapes them into the interesting characters they are. 

In the second episode, Sylva Nze Ifedigbo’s Believers and Hustlers (Parrésia, 2021), which won the 2022 Chinua Achebe Prize for Literature, takes listeners into the enterprise of Pentecostalism that pervades the city. Ifedigbo calls his novel an “important Lagos story. I might not have even thought of it in that sense until the book was published, as I began to get comments from readers who said ‘this is an aspect not too many have written about, especially in fiction’.” He goes on to say, “But yet it is such an important part of our lives.

In the third episode, we encounter Manuwa Street (Farafina, 2022) by Sophie Bouillon. The name of the book is derived from the actual street where Bouillon lives in. She is a French journalist who worked in Lagos for five years as the deputy bureau chief at Agence France-Presse and currently works for RFI Hausa. Manuwa Street, a work of journalistic nonfiction, can be classified as a pandemic memoir as its landscape captures turbulences and changes the world went through during the COVID year, especially in Lagos. 

This unique thing is what Tim Cooks highly praises the city of, as “something about Lagos that captivates you . . . an endlessly fascinating place,” in the fourth episode of the podcasts. He tells Damilare, his host: “After Lagos, where else can you go from there? Everyone knows it’s a difficult place, it has its own challenges, but I wanted to cast it in a more sympathetic light than it is often seen by outsiders. The idea was to try and show what makes the city ticks and why it functions the way it functions,” which he did in his book Lagos: Supernatural City (2022).