In her newest ebook, Sophie Bouillon shares her ardour for Lagos, a West African metropolis the place she works for AFP. Between the strains, the portrait of a metropolis through the Covid disaster, and what it takes to stay there.
“In the event you suppose you might be robust, come to Lagos. You will see. “As a spotlight of the Manuwa Avenue story (Premier Parallèle), this little sentence from Chinwe Okafor, the motive force of” kéké “(three-wheeled taxi) sums all of it up. self.
The nagging query arises within the story: what can a French journalist do there, in one among the hardest, costliest and craziest megalopolis in Africa? The solutions are within the jerk, on this metropolis of 20 million inhabitants, which she writes, “welcomed her once I had nowhere to go or the need to go someplace”.
Sophie Bouillon, the youngest winner of the Albert Londres Prize, acquired 25 in 2009 for a report in Zimbabwe printed by the journal XXI, lived in South Africa from 2008 to 2013 and put down her luggage in Nairobi for some time. Now deputy head of the Agence France Presse (AFP) workplace in Lagos, she “beats” broadcasts, as they are saying in commerce jargon. A brief and precise format that will not be very favorable for stylistic results. However his style for writing stays intact, after two already printed books – Une vie de pintade en Afrique du Sud (Calmann-Lévy, 2013) and Elles, les prostituées et nous (Premier parallel, 2015).
Lagos by the large gaps
His watchful pen lets us see Lagos with nice variations, between distress and abundance, which shine in all its splendor contradictions. Lagos has a hope for development and African success that draws a complete era of “scratches” from the diaspora, and continues to fall again in its personal tracks, beginning with black gold. Extract:
In 2014, the worth of a barrel of oil exceeded $ 100. Two million barrels have been formally exported each day. Petronairas returned to the treasury earlier than being discreetly hijacked. Twenty billion {dollars} disappeared in lower than 4 years and a whole lot of hundreds of thousands extra left the inventory market and the banking circles, secretly divided between worldwide corporations and the highly effective. Lagos fireplace. The elite stuffed up. My buddy Emeka regarded on the portrait of Che framed on the partitions of Sip, Lagos’ most well-known nightclub, with enormous admiration. He stated the Cuban revolutionary would have been proud to see them right here. That was what he had fought for. For Africa to succeed. Che, stapled to the partitions of a nightclub, watched Lagos fill with champagne. ”
It’s also a subjective and intimate Lagos shared by the creator, who now not imagines dwelling anyplace else. “My metropolis, not my reporting discipline,” she says, recounting the life and humor of the pidgin conversations on the foot of the house constructing the place she lives, on Manuwa Avenue.
Information calls for, going from catastrophe to catastrophe, from a lethal fuel explosion to the manu militari expulsion of 10,000 individuals from a poor space wanted by property builders, by way of the overall congestion when the eruption broke out. Covid-19 disaster. It’s hardly shocking that the efforts in an “previous Europe” can appear ridiculous, when each day is a matter of survival.
“The postcolonial satisfaction of the Western journalist“
And this, even when one is conscious, as Sophie Bouillon is absolutely conscious, of 1’s personal privileges. Dwelling with Fela, much more so than with Mandela, the place apartheid and its obsession with separation have made poor neighborhoods invisible from wealthy neighborhoods, she factors out, you may have to construct a shell. Historical past of not seeing the beggar who will knock on the automotive window in site visitors jams. “Like everybody else, I had surprised myself, the one treatment for shifting ahead.”
Nevertheless, a part of herself stays uncooked, as within the blues of a get together night time the place she “actually has no coronary heart for decadence”. Or, within the panic that grips her when the Covid-19 disaster arises, a “terribly horrifying factor lined with a postcolonial satisfaction in a Western journalist.” With the deep conviction that it will not be actually for us. That this can not deeply upset the course of our world. That it should probably not have an effect on our lives or the lives of our households. That regardless of what occurs, there’ll all the time be plans to get out of it. “
Collateral falls one after the other beneath confinement that stops the poorest from incomes their bread. And abruptly anger erupts through the revolt in opposition to the police brutality in October 2020, after one other information merchandise: a younger man was shot to loss of life by the police, who felt that he was driving a automotive that was too stunning for him. He noticed him as a “Yahoo boy”, one among the scammers who thrive on the Web. The #EndSARS hashtag went viral, however led to a wave of looting and massacres at Lekki’s tollgate in Lagos.
A carnage for nothing? “When the scents evaporated, everybody awakened a bit of ashamed, caught in it that they dared to fantasize about one other Nigeria. Once more, life has resumed its course ”. However one thing has modified in Lagos: the creator, in “the intimate safety, henceforth having discovered my refuge there within the noise of the world”, doesn’t need or cannot surrender a surrounding, stronger hope. That every one, what she did her personal.
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