Music: Recommended but not necessary
I wasn't going to write this.
My friends have come to know me as a documentarian. This is exactly the sort of thing I am likely to write about. And I did. For the first week, when I still had a semblance of downtime in the morning, before breakfast became a rushed croissant and gulped juice; and before my days were long hours of standing, talking, and walking; before all that, I wrote a daily journal.
A journal of my personal experiences, of my thoughts on the World outside the only one I had been witness to. Describing my feelings about the slower, less noisy, less dampened and somehow sunnier more colourful life outside Nigeria. My plan was only to write that, only to write for myself, to myself. So I wasn’t going to write this. This trip was me for me. The people, the shared experiences and the adventure were to be mine. I wasn’t going to write to you.
But
On Tuesday morning when I got back to Lagos. Something that I already knew became more vivid in my mind. And it was from the airport. The airport, nothing in comparison to all the others I had been through, where there was no warmth or welcome. Just a harshness of reality that in its own crooked way felt familiar. Nigeria isn’t a home that is homely, it’s a home that is
It was on the drive back to my house that the dissatisfaction solidified itself in my mind. An extreme dissatisfaction at the manner of life lived in this place. All the effort of these people is dedicated to surviving. To see the end of each day. To reach some short vision, something trivial, like eating.
There is little room here for much more. This has nothing to do with her poverty. Poverty is what poverty is. But the people, the people are what they are and the people refuse to explore outside their realities and refuse the idea that someone else should explore outside it. Dressing too strangely gets you more looks than is actually justifiable.
In this other city, there are all kinds of people being all kinds of ways, living all kinds of lives. I spent such a small time there that I cannot claim to be able to report much about it. I did not do any of the popular culture or tourism things. I did not stand by the tower or see the most famous painting. But I did see the people, looked at them, awed at them. I feel like my time there was spent being this thing that was neither tourist nor local, this third point where I was lucky enough to talk to strangers at 3 am, in a foreign place about foreign things.
This is the type of travel I wish to do more of.
Tuesday morning, on my drive back to Lagos. I thought about the beginning of new lives. Lives within lives. People usually only recognise important points of their lives in retrospect.
‘This event changed my life’
isn’t something we realise until our life actually changes. But now, I have this strong feeling that these two days in this city have actually changed my life. I don’t think I think the same way now. There is this additional richness to what I think is possible for myself and for what I am surrounded by, and for what I wish to create and for the conversations I wish to have and for the life I wish to live.
A satisfying one.
