By Obi Nwakanma
Lagos is a great city. Hot, roiling, edgy, bitter and sometimes cruel, the city’s great source of energy, the oil that fuels the dynamo of Lagos, is its great diversity. It is a city, depending on whose statistics you’re using, of about fifteen million people. It is certainly the largest city on the continent of Africa, and as some economists have said, Lagos as a city alone is the fifth Largest Economy in Africa.
This is what makes it attractive: the theatre of the streets of Lagos, the bitter sweet smell of sweat, grime, and the most expensive perfumes in the world, mixed with the heady whiff of spicy African food floating in salt-sea air, leaves the senses swooning with complexity. The crowd – the concert of people in their daily motions speaks directly to the kind of frenzy of the French social theorist, Gustave Le Bon’s three stages of Crowd behavior, submergence, contagion, and suggestion. I have lived in Lagos, and I have experienced its…
