Lagos Noir
A familiar yet unsettling take on crime in Lagos Metropolitan.
Lagos Noir, edited by Chris Abani, with stories from prominent Nigerian writers like Leye Adenle and Nnedi Okarafor is a vivid portrayal of crime in Lagos across its varied population — income, geography, and ethnicity. This depiction of the darkness that lurks in Lagos’ streets, alleys, and waterways is haunting and strange but quite familiar to those who live within the city’s gates. The entire collection justifies its qualifications as the first African city to join the Akashic Noir collections.
The stories are separated into three parts: “Cops and Robbers”, “In A Family Way”, and “Arrivals and Departure”. “Cops and Robbers” primarily details the might of corrupt systems. “In a Family Way” reveals the cunning and violent nature of some of the city’s inhabitants. “Arrivals and Departure” showcases the city’s fraught relationship with foreigners. All through the thirteen short stories, the multiple shades of Lagos come roaring alive.
Across the stories, there are subtle themes that victims’ suffering ensue from the failures of institutions and systems rather than random unfortunate occurrences. In Chika Unigwe’s “Heaven’s Gate”, Emeka has left the village for Lagos in search of miracles. When he finds a job as a bike rider, the police’s relationship with the poor rears its ugly head. In Igoni Barret’s “Just Ignore and Try to Endure”, the housing market forces a man into inhumane living conditions. There’s the quiet riposte within the story: “In Lagos, without money to buy your way, ideals and comfort are impossible to find.”
While some stories show a nuanced perspective of how characters find it impossible to resist or are unfortunately victims of corrupt or evil systems, some portray the darkness as a result of an innately cunning and cruel individual. The explorations of family drama in “The Swimming Pool” by Sarah Ladipo Manyika, of an in-house murder or an engineered killing of one’s colleague as a result of sexual abuse in Adebola Rayo’s “What are you going to do?” are first-hand tales of salacious crimes that have become a mainstay in Lagos. That being said, Wale Lawal’s second-person-narrated “Joy” has to perhaps be the most disturbing and realistic of the lot. There’s something familiar and haunting about the tale of hired help bringing about the downfall of their employers.
The collection shows a common thread across Nigeria’s most prominent writers — an authentic reveal of the underbelly of Nigeria’s mega-city that rarely makes its way out. Written in 2018, long before the EndSars movement, it astutely calls out to the corrupt and abusive nature of the country’s police, challenges within the housing market, and general crimes within the state. The evil depicted by the writers is one all too familiar — a general systematic decline and dysfunction in the metropolitan state than random acts of violence or supernatural occurrences.
Each writer shows colour and nuance that showcases an astute understanding of the state. Several of these moments are flashed within the book and across all thirteen stories that it’s impossible to pick one. Lagos Noir is a must-read, mainly because of its familiar yet unsettling insight into the dysfunction that plagues Lagos. Also, it is solid proof that our stories can be accurately told only by us.
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