Lagos

The Popular Story, The Real Story, and The Other Story “Every morning in Africa, a gazelle wakes up, it knows it must outrun the fastest lion or it will be killed. Every morning in Africa, a lion wakes up. It knows it must run faster than the slowest gazelle, or it will starve. It doesn’t matter whether you’re the lion or a gazelle. When the sun comes up, you’d better be running.” I have never spoken with But…wait…that can’t be all. Lagos is not that simple. It’s always a common thing for us humans to generalize the behaviour and lifestyle of a certain group of people living in a city, country or even a continent. We tend to look for a convenient and simplistic word or phrase to lazily describe this set of people. For some, people are generally defined by their race, ethnic tribe, religion, and so many other unquestioned and unbelievable boxes. We fit people into tiny boxes and spend time trying to name these boxes – the time that could possibly be spent living with these people, learning and loving the beauty these set of people embody. Experiences are unique to every human – beautiful, ugly, and the beautifully ugly (the oxymoron that keeps coming to mind while thinking of Lagos). You can’t simply find a word or a group of words to explain the experiences of those living in this Lagos. You need to walk up to each person living in this city to reach an appropriate conclusion. For Lagos, what you would experience is determined based on some key factors: Location, age, soci...

World Cities The Portuguese first landed on Lagos Island in 1472. Trade developed slowly, however, until the Portuguese were granted a series of asientos de negros—monopolies to sell slaves in the Spanish Americas—a century later. The local obas (kings) enjoyed good relations with the Portuguese, who called the island Onim (and later Lagos) and established a flourishing See also