Before the City Wakes

At 5am the streets belong to the people who never really left — the ones who stayed out too late or rose before the world remembered to watch.

I have been walking Lagos at this hour for three years, since insomnia became a companion I stopped fighting. There is a version of this city that exists only between 4 and 6am, visible only to those who have surrendered the idea of sleep. It is not the version the city presents to itself during the day — not the version of traffic and transaction and the constant renegotiation of space. It is quieter and also more honest, the way people are honest when they think no one is looking.

On Bode Thomas Street I have seen the same woman every Thursday for two years. She sells ogi from a cart that she pushes from somewhere I have never been able to identify, arriving at her spot at 4:45 as if the time were not approximate but contractual. She told me once that she has been selling ogi on this street since 1987. I asked her what the street was like then. She looked at me for a moment and said: it was a street. People walked on it. I wrote that down.

This is what I have been trying to write about, though I am not sure I have the right form for it yet. The accumulation. The way a place accretes identity not from its physical features but from the repeated choices of people to return to it, to stake something on it, to build a life that assumes its continued existence.

My grandfather built a house in Surulere in 1964. The house is still there. He is not. My father grew up in that house and moved to the island and has not been back in eleven years. I go back every few months. I stand outside it sometimes, in the early morning, and watch the current tenants' lights come on, and think about all the versions of this single address that have existed and do not exist anymore.

Lagos will outlast everyone who has ever loved it. This is not a tragedy. This is what it means to love a city.