London, Circa 2008
Of an Unexpected Trip to Facebook: A Recollection of the Lagos Crowd and the London of My Teenage Years
The most extraordinary journeys in my life (all twenty-one of twenty-three years I can just about remember) have always been spontaneous. From getting into a car with my father and my siblings late one night when I was 7 and lived in Mushin, Lagos (because he wanted to show us what Victoria Island looked like at night, and did), to cruising around London in 2010, having declined sleep after a night at Studio Valbonne (a now-defunct nightclub) to, instead, ride in a car with friends in search of the next thrill, these “journeys” had in common that they were not burdened by the weight of prior planning. That they occurred, in fact, despite my finest attempts at keeping an organised life. The most extraordinary journeys in our lives may very well begin, in other words, as surprises. And we can, indeed, try to make arrangements beforehand, try to contain what is yet to come in straitjacket documents or to map out the possibilities in the sands of our imaginations — it is only human nature. But, sometimes, before we know it, the tyres jerk forward and the vehicle shoots us into the night — life, it seems, snatches us by the scruff and takes us on a joyride…
One evening last December, I was at my desk in my bedroom when my phone rang. I thought I had received an email, but it was a notification from Facebook, one of those freakishly personal reminders that, I suppose, only Facebook can send. It said something like I hadn’t been online in a while, which I thought strange given my insignificance against the millions of people who are constantly wired into the great blue book. But I guess the message worked because before I could even consider closing the app, I came across a post by someone I knew from Sixth Form. She had just delivered a presentation at a forum and looked very corporate in the picture she had uploaded, so straightened out that I had to wonder just how long it had been since we last spoke.
Years, most likely; I can’t remember exactly when I stopped using Facebook, but that night it occurred to me that in leaving my account, I had left a great number of people, too. People who had remained on Facebook and had become, I realised as I scrolled down my timeline, part of what was so unfamiliar about my entire account. I lose touch more often than I stay in touch with people, and so I wish I could say that any of this was surprising or not anticipated. Scrolling through my account, however, I began to ask myself why even though I wasn’t an active user anymore, I had refused to take my profile down; why the account, which seemed meaningless now — my most recent posts being impersonal and not at all recent — still felt valuable to me. I wondered, at last, why I even kept the app on my phone.
I decided that if there was an answer to any one of those questions, it lay somewhere in the period to which my account truly belonged. This period being when I was the most active on it; a time I have on several occasions tried to recount to people but find I cannot without leaving them either conflicted or overwhelmed, incapable either way of grasping the full extent of what it is that anchors me to those years. 2008–2010, the single most important period in my young adulthood, is among the worst of times in recent history and that is, I imagine, the hurdle most people cannot scale. Perhaps I, too, wouldn’t understand it if I hadn’t lived it. Perhaps I, too, would wonder how, for a sizeable number of Nigerians, young and helplessly notorious, the year in which the greatest financial crisis of our time occurred, could have possibly been a gateway to liberation. And maybe I, too, would be left asking why this liberation chose to occur in, of all places, London.
I joined Facebook in the English summer of 2008. It was the 3rd of JuIy, and three days later, Rafael Nadal would win the Wimbledon Cup beating Roger Federer in what went down in history as one of the greatest tennis matches ever played. I had just finished from a secondary school in Agbara, an industrial town outside of Lagos, and was in England with my parents, where we were visiting a number of schools I had applied to for Sixth Form. In fact, I managed to catch a segment of that tennis match at a boarding school in Somerset. And, incidentally, two months later in September when I heard the financial services giant, Lehman Brothers, had gone bankrupt, I was a student in that very school.
Like numerous other Nigerians, in England, I had to attend a school that was outside London. At that time, London — having visited the city a few times — was my only knowledge of England; and two grim novels, Dillibe Onyeama’s Nigger at Eton and required reading in my JS2 English Language class, Agbo Areo’s Mother’s Choice, were my only sources of ideas about what being Nigerian at an English boarding school was like. For my parents, I was better off the further I was away from the city. They believed London, with its “distractions”, was no place for serious students and found themselves trusting of only schools that could boast classic bucolic elements. And with that school in Somerset, with its cavernous chapel that immediately raptured my mother, and its lush, golden cricket fields all nestled in a town three hours outside London, they agreed entirely. But like numerous other Nigerians, too, I found myself in London during the holidays. And with my discovery of the Lagos crowd, the city became, for me at least, practically inevitable.
It was a London of another time: when it was just as common for people to speak of moral hazard, “Big Banks” and financial decrepitude, as it was to buy movies from HMV or to rent them, instead, from a Blockbuster store. A London, in which no two places stood out to me, as Camden Town, in the north-west, and Brixton, in the south, did. Camden Town felt like the centre of the world’s authenticity: alternative but not intentionally and for that reason truly enchanting. Brixton, however, was a place of such fixating brooding: terrifying on the face yet holding inside of it clusters so rich in culture, like Skittles in introverted hands.
2008 made it Estelle’s London: when, I would soon discover, American Boy dominated every nightclub and you attached yourself to it instantly because either finally some black music! or just then you were realising that you were black in England and nothing there or anywhere else seemed cooler. The same London where chanting pull up your socks and stand up tall with your squad was, legit, a form of communication was where I also discovered Cold Play, whose Viva La Vida, I’m now beginning to understand, will echo through time, chiming that era for all eternity.
But hidden in all of that was a London I can only describe as ephemeral, passing, characterised by unique combination of spark and impatience. A Nigerian London, where blacker than night and clad in leather jackets and sneakers, tight jeans, short skirts and gut-wrenchingly expensive weaves, a breed of teenagers that London had never seen before stood on Edgware Road until dawn, outside Café Helen, reeking still of first-time Marlboros and AQ’s shisha, talking until our hastily-acquired British accents cracked. It isn’t the best shawarma, we’d remind ourselves, because autumn always brought a new face to Edgware Road and he or she needed to hear this. Or, if not autumn, was it Café Helen’s iconic red lights and were we simply moths drawn to it from another continent?
At some point, that shawarma was the cheapest route to Lagos. Somewhere in the meat, in the oases of hot spices in-between, was a history of the Lebanese and, in that history, a recrudescence of tentative arrivals on the Nigerian coast. In one bite, you could taste Victoria Island, Dolphin Estate and Ikeja; you saw, again, Third Mainland Bridge, breezed through Yaba and Lekki without settling; drawing juice from the struggle, you could feel the Nigerian heat — all for under ten pounds.
Back then, whenever I arrived in London, I stayed with my older brother in Colindale, in a small community of newly risen residential complexes slowly gentrifying North London. Now, Colindale is a receptacle of the old Lagos crowd, filled only with calm and memories, my time there having just coincided with the apogee of the storm. My brother was a student, then, but at night he was something mythological — every club promoter seemed to be, in those days. And it was they who orchestrated our London, a London that — call it their magic, call it our immaturity — never occurred to us to realise, wouldn’t last very long.
I remember my first attempt at going clubbing: I was fifteen and a fresh wound to the game. I remember the queue that night, and how I thought I looked like a fool because my brother’s shirt was too big for me. I kept thinking none of this — the clothes, the rehearsed identities — could possibly work. The rule was at night, everyone was above eighteen — or above twenty-one if you could pull it off. It sounded simple enough until I arrived at the door and confessed my actual age because I had been thinking too much. I can recall trying, immediately, to correct myself to the bouncer — no, not fifteen, eighteen, honestly — and how he looked at me with what seemed like pity, and just laughed; and the taxi ride back home, how failure stung like a wasp; and how regret nailed me in the gut several days later, when the pictures emerged on Facebook. Facebook was the sun in those days and our lives little planets circling around it. It was through Facebook you heard about parties and Facebook was, if you missed a party, where you caught up. But I got good at entering clubs. Eventually. And by the next half-term, I could walk right into any club on Mayfair (as long as it was a Nigerian party). I had come to realise that the bouncers were white, which, in those days, signalled an inability to distinguish between black people, age-wise included. This was a particular inability we used to our advantage.
We were, as you can imagine, every club’s nightmare; standing outside clubs and railing until we were let in like each club was an embassy to paradise. From Après to Taman Gang (both are now closed), we hit them all. In clubbing, we found ourselves one hell of a dream, the kind nothing my life in Nigeria could have prepared me for. It is hard to imagine that at some point it was almost impossible to find clubs that regularly played Nigerian music or Afrobeats in London. This, however, was the London I met. But I remember our humble playlists like anthems, and how with the urgency of a hijacking, suddenly, you heard all the girls in the club want to hold me for ransom and knew, just then, that DJ Xclusive was in control of the booth.
Often, I lost track of time watching the Lagos crowd, which extended to Nigerians from every part of Nigeria, and sometimes even other West Africans, but held in its nucleus those of us from Lagos. We overwhelmed me. It seemed crazy to me, how in one nightclub you could find the offspring of all kinds of Nigerians (famous, infamous, unknown, forgotten) intermingling; we moved in collective spontaneity: parties were never any good until between 1 a.m. and 2 a.m. so we never arrived until then and never stayed longer than was needed. The crowd appeared just as quickly as it disappeared. But even when a party was quick as to make it difficult to recall attending it the next day, there was always the residual feeling that at some point the night before, you were having the time of your life.
In time, our DJs grew more confident in their music, each one’s room for manoeuvre expanding as our club promoters gathered more clout. Soon, you could hear Da Grin’s Kondo, Naeto C’s Kini Big Deal, Sasha P’s Adara, Wande Coal’s Pere, and 9ice’s Gongo Aso back to back, and eventually we didn’t need to hire out a section of the club, we could force entire clubs to listen to our music. That was the moment we arrived.
I owe it to that era to explain that, as much as it is cherished, not everything about that era was an underage obsession over Nigerian music, champagne sparklers and glow-in-the-dark entry wristbands. In this sense, being in London wasn’t itself a guarantee of enjoyment but only an opportunity to escape pressures from Nigeria as well as — much to our surprise — the pressures we found in England. It was, ultimately, all on you to find a paradise and part of what made London exciting was that you couldn’t hold the city accountable to whatever misery you found instead. And there was misery: I don’t remember an end of half-term in which I returned to Somerset not entirely broke.
But — than a common taste for mischief — there were more compelling reasons why the Lagos crowd kept so tightly to itself. The most obvious of these reasons was that, for all of us, being in England had warranted a great deal of discovery that none of us, I imagine, fancied experiencing alone. I, for instance, couldn’t help that I was becoming conscious of certain things like my accent, which I devoted time to recreating until from observing reflections in the Lagos crowd, I, too, saw the ridicule and the shame in trying to be someone else.
And I was, for the first time and on my own most times, becoming aware of my own race, which meant becoming aware of racism, too. One thing is for sure, which is that you’ve met too many people by the time you meet a racist. For me, it was that I didn’t think about being black until I arrived in England but only because I had never needed to in Nigeria, because in a country as black as Nigeria, identifying as black defeats the purpose of an identity. I hadn’t realised, however, just how much of a shield Nigeria had been to me until I arrived in England where I was so unprepared, so defenceless, so guileless I think sometimes, that whenever an English person said to me this is not your country, it was my first and only instinct to agree.
The storm ended sometime between 2010 and 2011, when the universities came and swept us to various other cities; when promoting club nights lost its mythic appeal; when the Lagos crowd had had enough of itself. We had already arrived and all the mist and excitement of arriving had petered out. Even for those who remained in London for university, the city was no longer the same. I went to a university outside London but in the numerous visits I paid friends in the city, you could tell something had changed: either we had left London behind or the city had moved on without us, or, worse, we had actually blended in, becoming “accepted” and mundane where, before, what had fuelled our blood rush was not exactly feeling we had something to prove but that in proving ourselves we had, guaranteed, the constant awe of an audience. In the beginning, I had liked to think that the very features that made me conspicuous in England — my being Nigerian and often one of two or three black people in most places I went — had made me somehow significant but, over time, you learned that in reality, whatever makes us stick out is equally what makes us particularly easy to ignore.
Soon, we walked through the city like shadows amidst other shadows…
Because Facebook is my only real record of my first few years in England, unsurprisingly, whenever I log into my account, I arrive at that period immediately. What they don’t tell you about the Information Age is how unintentional much of the information is. The past has never been as unintended as we have it now, never, also, has the past been as democratised and accessible. But I have come to realise, in my case, that as time goes by, returning to those days is not as fulfilling an experience as one would hope. The reason being, both what I require from my memories, and Facebook as a silo of mnemonic materials, are constantly evolving. That December evening, I saw for the first time some truth to what, before, I had never considered about Facebook: how, I suppose, “grown up” Facebooking had become. No longer was a Facebook account a compendium of one’s youthful frivolities, now, it was more of a beacon to corporations whose eyes span all of the Internet’s crevices, an autobahn to entry-level jobs and so less of an escape from the jaws of real life than an account had, the first time I arrived on Facebook, promised to be. Against all of that, my account seemed out of place, a stubborn, almost childish attempt at holding on to another time.
Regardless, as I haven’t been able to establish an alternative means of storing that era, I have taken to not only keeping my Facebook account “alive” but also visiting my account more often. And each time I do visit, what unfailingly strikes me is how young I initially left the account; in the candidness of its photography, the meticulousness with which I had built it on a lexicon of m8, u, ur, wr, hw fr, wts up, and other variations of early millennial Nigerian text-speak. Recently, I came across my first photo album. It contains pictures from my graduation ceremony in Agbara, where I was wearing an oversized suit and ready, I believed, for life. So ready that, in the moments I took those pictures, I was eager to create memories. Later, perhaps not for myself alone but in some kind of cohesion with the multitude of us that had left Nigeria at that time, I would name that album, Exodus.
…But, now more than ever, I’m certain that a significant part of what makes life worth living is each day’s capacity to either undershoot or overshoot our expectations. There are simply too many variables to life, and even when we anticipate the journey, too many potential destinations. I think of how easily I could have experienced a London without the Lagos crowd; or how I could have experienced the crowd all the same and end up feeling nothing close to the nostalgia I feel for that London now. Mostly, I think of how the Lagos crowd was a collective invention against the thin line between thrill and melancholy that traverses all of London and how that invention saved me. Several years after I witnessed the Lagos crowd, by the time I was leaving England, I had come to recognise the line with more clarity: just as roads become networks and landscapes patchwork as seen from a plane, the line continued over and through the city until all of London was coated in mesh. I saw, then, just how an infinite number of strips teetering between genuine happiness and inexplicable sadness coordinates your life as a foreigner, an African foreigner, a Nigerian, in London; what explains why the same city that had seemed so vast a night before could become, by morning, the very thing around your neck. I understood why the Lagos crowd had meant such a great deal to me and always will. It was the spontaneity, the flash and ephemerality of the crowd and what freedom, however brief, I felt losing myself in it.
