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PERFORMING COMMUNITY
Lagos, 1970 Lagos is unknowable. The largest and wealthiest metropolitan region in Africa, Lagos is home to the continent’s largest port and urban economy. The region grew from around 800,000 residents at the time of independence in 1960 to 16 million at the end of the second decade of the twenty-first century. Capital of Nigeria from independence until 1991 (when political power transferred to Abuja), Lagos has continued to control the country’s commanding heights. As the country’s financial center, Lagos dominates Nigeria’s economy, enriched in part by its stranglehold over export of the country’s largest commodity, oil, which in turn, has spawned unfathomable corruption, crime and violence. Inept democratic governments have often given way to brutal military dictatorships in a cycle of political degeneration. If Tokyo is the most manageable megacity, Lagos could well be the least. Spread out among several islands and extending deep into the mainland, Lagos incorporates skyscrapered international business centers, gold plated residential and commercial districts, together with impoverished slums and self-built migrant settlements devouring a massive landscape extending ever further into a peri-urban hinterland. Every sort of contemporary urban neighborhood can be found within its boundaries.
Lagos also is one of the world’s great centers for artistic creativity, most notably in music. This creativity continues despite — or, perhaps because of — the city’s explosive mix of divergent people and wealth. West Africa is a global center for musical achievement. New styles blending Ghanaian rhythms such as osibisaba, with Caribbean calypso, and North American foxtrot coalesced during the 1920s in neighboring Ghana. Known as Afrobeat, the new music travelled along trade and migration routes, accelerating with the arrival of radio airwaves. By the 1960s, the genre’s animating energy found a new home in Nigeria, adding layers of native harmonies and rhythms together with American jazz and rock-and-roll. The spirit of urban Nigeria infused this new Afrobeat. Fela Anikulapo Kuti pioneered this new style. Fela grew up in the household of an Anglican minister and school principal and a feminist activist in the anti-colonial movement. His first cousin Wole Soyinka won a Nobel Prize in literature; his two brothers became medical doctors. Fela set off to London to follow in his brothers’ footsteps before dropping out of medical school to study trumpet at the Trinity College of Music. London at the time was awash with American jazz and the first stirrings of Rock-and-Roll, influences which held great allure. By 1963, he moved his family back to Nigeria,
