Anthony Azekwoh — Homegoing

When you’re learning how to drive in Lagos, they start with the most fundamental rule of driving anywhere in Nigeria, and it’s this: on the road, you’re the only sane one— everybody else is mad. To someone who has never been in Nigeria, this is strange advice, to us however, it’s a valuable thing to keep in mind when you’re on the road with people who think traffic signs are suggestions. And then, there’s traffic. Lagos traffic is, perhaps, the closest thing to hell there is on Earth. You could drop a friend at the airport and they’d get to London before you got back home.

Last year, we were in the car with my mother driving when I saw a man ablaze on the road, tyres wrapped around him, his body a broken frame, his face contorted in fear, and pain. There were people around him, shouting and hurling insults, stones in their hands, a policeman stood at the edge of the mob, a bottle of gin in his hand.

Maybe I should’ve looked away, maybe I should’ve turned, but I couldn’t and the memory of the man stuck in my head. What had he done? The people in the front, how could they live with that image forever, of what they did?

One thing you have to give the Americans is this—they have gusto. With mass shootings, corruption and racism, they still hold the Greatest Country in the World flag high. It’s a kind of self-image that comes with media and books and everything around you reflecting who you are as an individual. To be in the centre of the world stage, and have a kind of security in knowing that not only are you recognised in the world, but you’re also at the top.

For us, it’s a bit different. Our country is awful, and we know it’s awful, so when Trump came with his statements, it was a mild outrage. Something like, “Damn you for saying this… but damn, you’re kind of right.”

Lagos is home to Nigerians, a people who would rather allow a ten-year-old girl marry a fifty-year-old man than allow two adults of the same sex get married. It is home to senators and rule makers who can abuse women, on tape, and still be given humanitarian awards, all in the same year. It is home to rapists, and murderers, to the homophobic and transphobic. It is home to the most religious people, who, it turns out, are also the most hypocritical. Who worship a God of peace in their homes, but would rather burn a man with tyres on the road than arrest him.

But.

Lagos is where my mother and my father met, and got married. Lagos is where my sister and I were born. The small street in Surulere is where we grew up, where my father used to sing us to sleep, where my mother would teach me to read, with newspapers on her lap, the sunlight spilling through the window.

Lagos is hell, and heaven. A place that dashes dreams and raises them up. It is a place of hope, and desolation. Of pride, and of joy, and of pain, and of loss. The tale of Lagos is a tale of two cities, one dripped in woe, and the other bathed in celebration.

You see, the question of home is a complicated one, with a simple answer. One that I don’t know. And so, when people ask me about my home, where I grew up, I look at them, and I smile then tell them I come from Lagos, Nigeria, the second greatest country in the world.