by The Routes of Man: How Roads Are Changing the World;the Way We Live Today
From there, things got better. Broadway runs boulevard-style through the Upper West Side, with a planted center island. The sidewalks are wide. Margot, back when she lived in the East Village, explained to me that the Upper West Side was “suburban,” a concept that it took me a while to grasp. She meant, I think, that it was newer, more oriented to families, and had among its big stores some of the franchise businesses found in malls.
We had a lunch of sweet potato pie at Wilson’s soul food restaurant (now defunct), just north of 125th Street on Amsterdam. Then we walked back to Broadway. Nobody bothered us. Harlem (named after the Dutch city of Haarlem) had bottomed out a few years before and still had plenty of abandoned buildings. Street life, and people speaking Spanish, increased as we passed into the Dominican neighborhoods around Inwood and Dyckman (200th) Street (Dyckman had been a burgher in old New Amsterdam). We stopped at a diner for coffee, then made our last push: over the metal bridge (it can rise up when a ship needs to pass underneath) that carries both Broadway and the elevated subway over the Harlem River into the Bronx (named for Jonas Bronck, 1600-1643, a sea captain who became a farmer nearby).
We deserved a beer. On West 231st Street, just a few doors off Broadway, we walked into a neighborhood bar. It was late afternoon and full of regulars, all white, who nevertheless stared at us, maybe because of Seth’s ponytail. There was a bar with stools, there were booths, there were beer steins hung on the walls. We drank our fill and then, sore of foot, climbed up metal stairs to the subway and zipped back downtown.
That bar is no longer there. I know because I pass by a couple of times a week while doing errands; I live about a mile away. I also ride my bike downtown a lot, using the Broadway Bridge to access the bicycle paths along the Hudson River in Manhattan. Sometimes when I’m riding across its metal mesh roadbed I think back to that walk with Seth. But a fresher memory is from the afternoon of September 11, 2001, when I drove to the bridge to pick up Margot, now my wife, who had made her way that far on foot and by taxi from her office in midtown after the attacks on the Twin Towers.
Just north, past the end of the subway, is one of the city’s great parks, Van Cortlandt, once a vast grain plantation owned by the Dutchman Frederick Van Cortlandt (1699-1749). Broadway runs alongside it up to Yonkers, and I spend a fair amount of time cruising it in our car, looking for a place to park when I pick up the kids from soccer practice. Van Cortlandt is heavily used, not just by youth soccer teams but by cricketers from the West Indies, Irish curlers, baseball players (including a lot of police teams), joggers, cross-country runners, dog walkers, and enthusiasts of remote-controlled model race cars. Not many of them look Dutch. But I do, and feel at home there. It took Broadway a few generations to get this far, and me a couple more to return to the city where my father’s family began.
SIX
DRIVE SOFT—LIFE NO GET DUPLICATE
A HIGHWAY PASSED OVER ANOTHER HIGHWAY. Drivers could exit the top highway to get onto the one beneath; the ramp that made this possible curved 270 degrees as it sloped gently down. It was like one petal of a cloverleaf, and within it was a little circle of land. On the edge of that circle my ambulance sat, awaiting a call on the radio.
The slanted sunlight of afternoon streamed through the open rear doors. The crew had the right-side door of the big Mercedes van open as well, hoping for a little breeze. This was optimistic, both because the air was still and very hot and because this post was a busy one, and the crew might have to close up the doors and respond to an accident any second.
In the meantime, there was little rest for the nurses, Rasheedat Lawal and Florence Bada, because the presence of the ambulance attracted walk-up patients, and, even though we were inside an exit ramp, there were a lot of people around. People compete for seemingly every square inch of Lagos, Nigeria, and traffic circles are no exception. On the other side of a big dusty bush and the ambulance Port-a-Potty, which was kept padlocked, a bunch of men sold plants for landscaping. Most vendors, though, were mobile, because every congested road in Lagos doubles as a market, a selling opportunity for people hawking plastic spatulas, car telephone chargers, kola nuts, newspapers, phone cards, meat pies, and just about everything else. They competed for space with beggars, such as the legless boy who used a kind of skateboard to move himself up and down the ramp, slapping the ground with his hands.
Many of the vendors sold little plastic bags of water, and among their biggest customers were a detachment of policemen who were always hanging around the shoulder of the Apapa-Oworonshoki Expressway about twenty yards upstream of us. Two lanes of traffic exited there for Ikorodu Road beneath, through a channel of traffic cones; this was the cops’ fishing pond. While they waited for drivers to charge with infractions, they drank from the bags of water. Spent bags are everywhere, a part of the city’s notorious trash problem.
Down the ramp, behind us and just visible, was a funky sculpture gallery squeezed between the roadway and a high wall that ran alongside it. The gallery’s main feature was a stone-and-mortar elephant head with a gaping mouth, the whole thing five feet tall, that you ducked through to enter the “office.” Beyond that stood a ten-foot-high plastic bottle of beer—an advertisement—and another group of policemen, from a different division of government. Underneath the bridge, in the dark and out of sight, lived a group of “area boys”—homeless gang members, which the single Nigeria travel guide I had found warned me “use physical intimidation to get what they want and simply stop people and demand money or property whilst threatening them with belts, whips, sticks or worse, guns.” The roads were the area boys’ hunting grounds as well, though I wouldn’t really see how until later.
Everyone in the vicinity treated the ambulance as a sort of mobile health clinic. Florence and Rasheedat were generally happy to attend to cuts and bruises, dispense “analgesics” (aspirin), and offer quick (if tentative) diagnoses of the neighbors’ many ailments. I watched as a woman brought in an old man, maybe her father, whose eye was swollen closed. Florence put on latex gloves, took the man’s temperature, and looked closely at the eye with a flashlight. She told him to use warm compresses and have it examined by a doctor. Next came a teenager with a scrape on his arm. Rasheedat handled this one; she put on gloves and went looking for antiseptic wipes.
In the cab, meanwhile, the third member of the crew, Nurudeen Soyoye, monitored the radio. He was a young man, handsome and powerfully built. As “pilot,” or driver, he made only about half what the nurses did, but, like most low-paid Lagosians I met, he seemed grateful to have steady work. He taught me how to listen to the calls. Generally they came from mainland ambulance headquarters at Base 1, Ikeja General Hospital, a few miles to the north. There was another dispatch center, Base 2, at the general hospital on Lagos Island, and seventeen ambulance waiting spots, or “points,” around the city. We were at Point 5, also known as Anthony, a central location well-known for getting a lot of calls.
One came in just as the nurses were enjoying a lull, sitting on the part of the gurney that was out of the sun and treating themselves to bags of water. “Let’s go!” called Nurudeen through the little window that connected the cab to the rear. “Truck crash,” he explained to me. The nurses closed the doors and battened down the hatches. Everyone buckled in. The engine roared to life; emergency lights and siren were activated. A bit of adrenaline began to pump in me, but soon I wondered if that was only because I was still new to this; as Nurudeen eased over the low curb and into the traffic, the wailing siren seemed to make about as much difference as Zhu’s had, back in Hubei province. Traffic was so heavy that other cars could barely move out of the way if they wanted to, and most didn’t seem to want to. The road was packed, and we were in the same sardine can as everyone else.
The ambulance crew at the Anthony post alongside the Apapa–Oworonshoki Expressway: nurses Florence Bada and Rasheedat Lawal and pilot Nurudeen Soyoye
In cities, roads turn into streets. Roads that connect two towns often become avenue
s or boulevards (sometimes named after the places they’re coming from or going to) when those towns grow up, principal corridors in a network of streets; they intersect and get lined with businesses, houses, apartment buildings. Even as the global road network grows, with more throughways linking more places together, other roads are subsumed into urban street grids.
The rise of cities is a defining trend of our time: half of the world’s people now live in metropolitan areas, and the proportion is growing. For millennia, cities, though centers of civilization and economic activity, attracted only a small percentage of the human population; as late as 1900, 86 percent of the world’s population lived in rural areas, and 14 percent in cities. Though opinions vary about why cities are growing so fast, one important factor is, of course, advances in agricultural technology: fewer people are now needed to grow food, and so, globally, fewer people can make a living at it. From dying small towns of the American Midwest to rural villages almost everywhere else, young people can tell you: the action, the opportunity, the future are in the city.
The cities, of course, are hugely various, ranging from planned self-contained communities in Florida, to new suburbs in Edinburgh, to entire new megalopolises now rising in China, complete with mega -towers. The majority of people, however, are living in cities that are growing in a way that governments can barely monitor or control, much less plan for. These are cities whose populations have jumped manyfold in the past half-century, places like Alexandria, Egypt; Jakarta, Indonesia; São Paulo, Brazil—and Lagos. They may not be as wealthy or advanced as celebrated world capitals like London, Paris, Moscow, Montreal, Sydney, and New York, but they are quickly becoming larger. The world’s population of 6 billion will increase by 2 billion over the next thirty years (it is tentatively expected to peak around 10 billion), and almost all of that increase will be in cities in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. By virtue of their sheer size these megacities will be, in certain ways, the most important in the coming century.
I chose to end my travel in Lagos for a number of reasons. One was its extremity: of all those fast-growing cities, its growth has for years been projected to be the fastest. In 1950 Lagos had 288,000 people; as I write it is estimated to have 14 million; by 2015, predicts the Population Reference Bureau, it will be the third largest city in the world, with over 23 million souls. Another reason was how relatively little known Lagos was, and still is: when I polled a dozen of my best-traveled friends, I found that none had ever been to Africa’s largest city. It has a daunting reputation for corruption, starting at the airport. It would be a very hard city to traverse with a backpack. And for a white-skinned Westerner to feel safe and comfortable there, he would need to spend much more money (on guides, safe hotels, private transport) than he would in, say, Amsterdam. “And what would you go there to see, exactly?” asked one culture-minded friend. She had a point. Lagos has few museums, not too many antiquities, only a handful of public spaces or buildings of note, and stunningly little natural beauty. It does, however, have a reputation for crime, and lots and lots of people.
But people are interesting. So is crime. Finally, I chose Lagos because, as a subject, it seems to inspire extreme reactions. Most typically, Lagos is Exhibit A for observers worrying about the population explosion and urban planning crises in the Third World. Western observers, perhaps rightly, seem to fear it, linking it to the possibility of apocalyptic disease or massive civil unrest. Nigeria, writes Jeffrey Tayler in The Atlantic, “is lurching toward disaster.” Rapid urban growth, argues Mike Davis in Harper’s, “has been a recipe for the inevitable mass production of slums. Much of the urban world, as a result, is rushing backward to the age of Dickens.”
It could also be said that many of the people in the new urban world, driven by need but also by ambition, are fashioning inventive new ways to get by. Despite the congestion and chaos in Lagos, its pollution and absence of infrastructure (most neighborhoods lack running water, central sewage, and dependable electric power), many millions of people survive there. The hundreds and thousands who arrive each day evidently believe their prospects to be better there than in the places they left behind. Architect Rem Koolhaas has drawn criticism for focusing on the undeniable vitality of Lagos rather than on its equally undeniable pathology. While teaching at Harvard, he visited the city several years in a row. “Dangerous breakdowns of order and infrastructure in Nigeria are often transformed into productive urban forms,” he and his students wrote. “Stalled traffic turns into an open-air market, defunct railroad bridges become pedestrian walkways.” As part of the “improvisational urbanism” that is Lagos today, he notes that the city “has no streets; instead, it has curbs and gates, barriers and hustlers … even the Lagos superhighway has bus stops on it, mosques under it, markets in it, and buildingless factories throughout it.”
Until recently, it had very little of this. Named by Portuguese slave traders after Lagos, Portugal, the port on the Algarve through which many slaves were brought to Europe, the settlement on Lagos Island had an active slave market for at least two hundred years. Three and one-half million slaves are estimated to have been taken from pre-colonial Nigeria, of a total of 15 million taken from all of West Africa. Britain shipped more slaves than any other country until 1807, when it declared the transatlantic slave trade illegal and set out to quash it. The tribal rulers of Lagos Island who profited from the trade were slow to conform to the new law, which Britain cited as a justification for annexing Lagos in 1861, making the city a British colony.
Southern Nigeria, including Lagos, was joined to the Muslim north in a loose affiliation in 1914. Oil was discovered in the Niger delta in 1959; it quickly supplanted palm oil as a major export. Nigeria gained its independence from Britain in 1960; by 1971, it was the world’s seventh-largest oil producer. (As of this writing it is estimated to be the world’s tenth-largest producer, after Venezuela.) The whole coast of West Africa, from Senegal to Gabon, is densely populated, but Nigeria has the most people of all: its population was estimated by the United Nations to be 141 million in 2005, and may reach 289 million by 2050.
Oil wealth started making a difference to Lagos in the 1970s, funding the construction of skyscrapers, the airport, some roads and bridges, the military, and large villas in places like Ikoyi (formerly an island adjacent to Lagos Island but now, due to landfill, a part of it) and neighboring Victoria Island. Some made its way to Abuja, the inland capital city built during the 1980s, and to Muslim precincts further north. But the main oil-producing part of the country, in the Niger delta area in the south, has scarcely benefited at all and remains impoverished; likewise, the blessings of oil have barely helped the common citizen, instead remaining in the hands of a small but often fabulously wealthy elite. According to the World Bank, 54 percent of Nigerians live on less than one dollar a day.
Lagos began to grow quickly beginning in the late nineteenth century with British administration and the connection to international markets. The British introduced the railway, electric lighting, and the telephone. As the largest city in the region, Lagos attracted a mix of returning expatriates, migrants from the various neighboring countries, many fleeing rural famine and drought, and refugees from the Biafran war (1967-70), in which a southeastern province, Biafra, attempted to secede from Nigeria. The continuing popularity of Lagos, and its ability to assimilate new arrivals, whether foreign-born or native, surprises not only foreigners but Nigerians themselves.
The growth of Third World megacities repeats patterns seen in nineteenth-and early-twentieth-century Europe and North America but also “confounds” these precedents, writes Mike Davis. It’s the confounding parts that interest Koolhaas and others. Are these cities moving toward a robust, vibrant future, or into the apocalypse?
Either way, Lagos represents the future for perhaps the majority of people on the planet, a compelling example of what happens when the track through the wilderness comes to the center of society. I wanted to see what it was like.
I didn’t know a soul in Lagos. But, years earlier, I had bought some life insurance from a Nigerian in the Bronx. Given the e-mail scams emanating from Nigeria, its reputation for chaos and crime, I knew that might lead friends to question my judgment. But the term life policy Agbonifo Akpata touted in a mass mailing happened to be exactly the one I had identified through an online broker, and I thought: Why not give the commission to an immigrant? What, actually, could go wrong?
So I had called Akpata and he had visited our house, where I’d signed papers and everything had turned out… perfectly. Now that I was Lagos-bound, I tracked him down. He’d left the insurance biz; of the hundreds or thousands of people he’d approached via postcards to my zip code, he said, I was the only one to actually buy a policy. He was now trying his hand at real estate brokerage and a bit of property management. But yes, he was from Lagos, and yes, he had friends and family there he would put me in touch with.
Agbonifo’s second cousin, Biola, was married to Oritsejolomi “Bill” Okonedo, and Agbonifo soon enlisted him to meet me at the airport. He also mentioned a man who drove for his brother, an executive with the telephone company in Lagos. I was delighted and relieved, because the Lagos airport is an almost mythically awful place, notorious among travelers for shakedowns by officials, and also the only airport on earth about which the U.S. government had seen fit, at various times, to post signs in American airports alerting travelers that “the U.S. Secretary of Transportation has determined that Murtala Muhammed Airport, Lagos, Nigeria, does not maintain and carry out effective airport security measures.” I read the phrase again on a special page of my plane ticket, and was reminded to pass my arrival information on to Agbonifo so that he could tell Bill. No sooner had I said “airport” on the phone than Agbonifo told me to make sure I arrived in the morning, so that I wouldn’t have to drive into the city when it was dark: bandits prey on cars leaving the airport at night, he warned. But it was already too late—I was set to arrive around dinnertime. Should I change my ticket? I asked him. “Well, hmm. Maybe things are better now,” he said, doubtfully.