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Short Read
LIFE IN LAGOS
In Search Of The
African Middle Class
Lagos, Nigeria, is Africa’s most populous metropolitan area, with an estimated 21 million
inhabitants. It also boasts the biggest economy of any city in Africa, housing some
of the richest people on the continent, as well as huge numbers of poor.
We attempt to make understanding foreign societies easier
by putting them into neat little boxes in our heads. The
French are like this, the Chinese like that. It’s how we make
sense of the world.
The great thing about working for National Geographic is
having the time to challenge preconceived ideas of a people
or a place. We leave realizing that those neat little boxes
don’t work; life “over there” is as complex as it is here.
I went to Dolphin Estate in Lagos, Nigeria, to see a typical
working-class neighborhood from where the oft-reported
on African middle class was rising.
Like many of my encounters in this enormous, changing
city, it wasn’t what I expected.
I went to Dolphin because it looked poor — the type of
place where people could only go up. The buildings are ramshackle,
there is rarely electricity, water must be delivered by
hand, the streets are often flooded. If you were driving by, you
would assume that this was a concrete slum. But that would
be wrong. A closer investigation reveals more. Multiple satellite
dishes hang off every building, men with briefcases and
women in skirt suits come and go; the cars parked on the road
outside the apartments are all modern and shiny. Come early
in the morning and you would see them being cleaned. Stay
a little longer and you would see that those cleaning the cars
are the drivers employed to chauffeur the cars’ owners.
I went to Dolphin Estate to find those who would make up
the middle-class of the future and discovered that much of
Dolphin Estate had already made it.
But it wasn’t a simple error of judgment, it was a complex
one. Along with the teachers and civil servants with shiny cars
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