I have come to sing the lore 
of the modern mega-city. 
Odia Ofeimun W E CITY lmagination& 
A city is like a poem. You enter it, and you are into a world 
of concentrated time Different ages, said Mark Twain, are 
brought together. Different histories spanning a common 
geography. And so you are in the City of God but have 
not left the City, of Man. The secular meets the profane and 
untold extremities are resolved into a common sensibility 
The more the diversities are threshed into a common imaqe 
the more intense the experiences they yield;, and the more 
they enlarge our consciousness and capacity to create. 
The sheer meeting of disparate elements and the consequent necessity to make conversation possible between conflicting 
tendencies! This is the essence of both the poem and the city: in them, every event invokes and maps, evokes and repeats 
another event. This breathes an uncertain bonding; but a bonding, all the same, which is not necessarily determined by any 
GLENDORA REVIEWxAfr/ctf/i Quarterly on rte Arw><V0I3@No2>
ancestral lore. A certain here-and-nowness arises from 
greater openness between its constituent parts, and between 
them and the outside world. In cities as in poems, the past 
does not overwhelm the present; its proximity speaks at one 
and the same time through all the events and images that 
you come across; which is how the present creates its own 
myths in which all the old myths are given accommodation. 
This is how the city approximates the highest form of poetics. 
Quintessential^, it is an issue of a universal vernacular, a 
mode for breaking down the garrison of individuality and 
the fortressed ways of the different histories and the different 
motivations in the human adventure. It is a poetics linked to 
origins, size and geography, defined by all its parts rather 
than by a fraction of it. The extent to which this has become 
irreversible is, truly, what gives the name of city to mere 
vastness and sprawl. This must be emphasized: for the citiness 
of a city lies in the absorption of its many parts into a 
common whirlpool. Its core experience intimates a civis: a 
place of civilization where people who may not have the 
same occupation, or accept the same ancestors, and people 
who may not bow to the same deity, can live within a common 
frame of politics, thus entrenching the possibility of shared 
decision-making as a permanent way of life. The city is, in 
this sense, an ever-ready chal.lenge because it is continually 
suggesting the necessity to find a common morality that can 
hold people together. The city, as such, has proved to be 
humankind's most permanent experiment in living together 
beyond the ethic of hunter-gatherers. 
Invariably, like a poem which must represent so many 
diverse elements in the concentrated time of a metaphor, the 
city can beget abstraction and anonymity. This is both its 
strength and the source of its many tragedies. Anonymity 
enhances individuality; it encourages the persistence of 
peculiarities and motives what may appear to be blurred 
because of the sheer profusion, the frequency of their 
manifestation. But as individuality may be embossed only 
by not destroying the bonding that makes living together a 
pleasurable adventure, the room available for its expression 
becomes, inevitably, a source of common problems; problems 
encountered commonly by different people and to which no 
<aiENDORA 
individualistic, but only common solutions, can be found. 
A new kind of creativity, therefore, is almost law. In the context, 
to talk of common solutions means never forgetting that a 
metaphor necessarily changes the individuality of images 
that it hitches together. The problem arises: how to ensure 
that what is lost by the individual in the process of responding 
to common needs results in a genuine enhancement of the 
quality of life across the board. Otherwise, the goal is not to 
reduce extremities to sameness but to channel the tension 
between them to a conversational civility: engendering a 
marvelous reality that allows diversities to flower; a flowering 
without which the clock of cities, the citiness of cities, may 
stop ticking—like music that runs flat because it lacks a 
contrapuntal. 
By the same token, we must acknowledge that when 
different images in a poem have not been worked into a 
conversation, it is as if the different parts of a city were to 
become garrisons of uncommunicative departments with all 
poetics ruined and citiness jeopardized. This is the paradox 
of cities that are divided as Johannesburg and other South 
African cities were, by racism, or tribalism as in the case of 
Sabongaris, the stranger quarters induced by British policy 
in many Northern Nigerian cities. The more common divide 
is the untenable state of derelic slums sitting side by side 
with massive skyscrapers in many metropolises of the world. 
Surely, no matter how much science, how much industry 
and endowment of the arts, and how many journeys to 
space become the vernacular of progress in such cities, they 
cannot, properly speaking, be called civilized places. 
Whatever else they may be, to the extent that they 
accommodate such distancing, such divisions, they are 
uncivilized forts. They lack the modality for a true civis. For 
civilization, as we have suggested, implies a capacity for 
sustained conversation between the dissimilar such that 
extremities may be tempered and civility enhanced. Thus, a 
CIVIS suggests the necessary revision of that code which makes 
the protection and defence of what is mine an ineluctable 
basis for distancing, aggression and assault on what is 
yours. It requires the elimination of the blind spots which 
occlude shared needs between political spaces. It should 
Quarterly on the ^mxV0l3(SNo2>
yield common solvents that link people to more objective 
interests than those divined by ancestry. 
II 
Being human, we must wonder how people survive where 
the notion of the city as a civis is in distress. How do people 
survive in such cities without being crippled in their bodies 
and in their minds? What possibilities are there for 
transcending such distress? These indeed are the questions 
that creative writers have tried to unravel for as long as 
there have been cities. Across the ages, especially in Western 
literature, there has been a deep-seated dissentience with 
the poetics of living which cities represent. A virtual cult of 
city-bashing has been on the prowl in the literatures with a 
certain universal ramification. Its most critical edge arose 
from a distate for the horrid circumstances of the early decades 
of the industrial revolution when capitalism traded on its 
unacceptable faces: crowded and unsanitary living, child 
labor, prostitution and the progressive breakdown of the 
deference that characterized relations between the higher 
and the lower classes. The cult of city-bashing was given 
much lease by the tendency for the rural virtues to be 
undermined in the smoky tenements and cement jungles 
(as now in the polluted conurbations assaulting the ozone 
layers), and the congested streets, to which the desire for 
opportunities, and the sheer craving for a means of 
livelihood, if not adventure, drove millions. 
Of course, it must be acknowledged that it is a shortmemoried 
view of the city which sees it as a function only of 
the rise of capitalism. Such a view is very much due to the 
heavy weather made by the Romantic Movement in general 
and the Romantic poets, in particular, of the breakdown of 
the rural virtues. The Romantics were seduced by the beauty 
of the small. No one put it better that Jean Jacques 
Rousseau, the French philosopher, who not only wished for 
the idyll of the rural environment but hoped that future polities 
would be small affairs of the pattern and mode that he 
prescribed for his native Geneva. However, like all the 
Romantics, especially those who were to be accosted in later 
GLENDORA REVIEW><African Quarterly on the Arw><V013@No2> 
decades by the full-blown monstrosities of industrial 
conurbations, Rousseau had to face the reality: that the 
creative urge engendered by science and industry, the 
knowledge generated, and the growth of common sensibilities 
evolved over and above the more parochial rural virtues, 
were a function of the rise of the city in history. 
What, it seems, the Romantics saw but could not 
immediately assimilate, is that the destiny of the human 
race is tied up, ineluctably, with large conurbations. It has 
taken time for this to become commonplace. Otherwise, if 
urbanization is a scourge, it is an inexorable one: a feature 
of organized life whether in Nineveh, Babylon, Cairo, 
London, Berlin, New York, Tokyo, Rome, Ibadan, Nairobi, 
Johannesburg, Kano, New Mexico, Brasilia, Timbuktu, 
Delhi—the ancient, the modern, the universal city. In 
whichever time or place, the pervasiveness of the city across 
time has made it naive to use industrialization—machines, 
the rise of science, the mass media, skyscrapers and the 
increased speed of movement in cars, railways, and 
aeroplanes—as the full measure of the character of a 
metropolis. To do so is actually to ignore the almost 
unchanging nature of what we have called citiness and to 
which writers and folklorists have been responding in a fairly 
coincident manner whether in ancient Greece, Rome or in 
the completely non-literate urban environments that were 
known to sub-saharan Africa. In this respect, Charles Dickens' 
London and Cyprian Ekwensi's Lagos belong to the same 
bend in the river. 
The truth is that once cities are accepted as the destiny of 
all mankind, they become a challenge to be confronted 
and embraced; not something to be deprecated. They 
become, not a cause for escapism into the presumed idyll 
of rural peacedom, or the humdrum security of daily life 
that Marx described as rural idiocy, but a prod to the 
imagination, intimating how cities may be built which express 
the idyllic, whole-earthness and healthy greenness associated 
with rural felicity. Something distinct from the cement and 
steel and glass jungles that most cities are. The hope is that 
cities may be built in which children can grow as children 
rather than be thrust into the forced-draft adulthood waylaying
them in the overcrowded slums of the megapolis: places 
where there are no playgrounds, no parks, no sidewalks 
for normal dwellers and where daily living is an adventure 
insinuating all manner of risks and tragedies. The 
presumption is that human imagination is capable of 
building an alternative, the Good City, one in which life is 
not so much a war against the neighbor but an enterprise 
to find the missing link that turns distances and anonymities 
into insensitivities. It demands a form of imagination that 
poets, writers and artists are supposed to have; and, which 
I think is why it is not the experts—city planners, architects, 
the city cop and the estate manager—who are invited these 
days to talk about the city. The business of how we all live 
together in cities is certainly too important to be left to experts 
for whom city space may be no more than a laboratory of 
sorts for the execution of textbook inspiration. For that matter, 
experts are not necessarily the best suited to appraise how 
the use of space obtrudes on fellow-feeling for those who, 
like us, need the sun and air and water, rarities in the polluted 
and congested cities of today. 
Ill: Read the City 
It is a fact worthy of embossment as myth, that all the 
large conurbations, the cities and metropolises, the megacities, 
known to history have had similar problems. Read 
the poets of ancient Rome and Greece; listen to the folklore 
of all the clans, moieties, tribes, nationalities known to the 
world today. It is amazing how close ancient Rome is to 
modern New York and how much of a family resemblance 
exists between the city of London and Lagos in spite of 
superficial differences. The sprawl and the anonymity that 
size engenders; the diminution of the city dweller to an antsize 
beside massive skyscrapers; the problem of filth and 
public conveniences. The perennial inadequacy of 
transportation and housing. The loneliness of individuals 
in the large crowds that pepper the landscapes and 
mindscapes of the city. We are confronted by all the factors 
that make the rural virtues appear superior to urban values: 
the absence of a sense of community, of communal welfare, 
<GIENDORA 
the underdeveloped nature of the practice of being your 
brother's or neighbor's keeper. Also, the decadence and 
the corruption of manners arising from an underdeveloped 
ethic of shared living by people of diverse backgrounds. 
The paradox is that, although resistant to, it is an invitation 
to a new ethic. A new sense of work. A new sense of law. 
Inescapably, although people in large urban settlements 
may believe that they can beggar their neighbors and thrive, 
they are also always more aware of neighbors than the 
rural environment makes possible. The urban ethic thrives 
on self-interest but one which instinctively highlights the 
fundamental commonality of interests on offer. Once 
recognized, it alters a sense of space and time. Or perhaps 
one should say that it depends on character of the governing 
principle, the organizing frame of the state structure, upon 
which city is modeled, as states were once modeled on cities. 
This needs elaboration: for the state system or governing 
principle within which cities subsist account for what they 
may become. Begin with the world system which tends to 
over-determine the governing principles across geographies. 
As the city divided against itself in uncommunicative 
departments loses its salt, its citiness, a world divided by 
racial, ideological, or religious creeds, runs a similar gambit. 
The weaker side of the divide grows according to a will 
based on the stronger. The disposition of the weak is sucked 
by the sheer logic of power, if not stratagem, to bend to the 
strong. This, in the Southern Hemisphere, where reality is 
stark enough for us to see the suction effect of the Big Cities 
of the Northern Hemisphere, dredges more than symbolic 
power. For, in general, the city, especially the industrial city, 
is like a larger than life serpent that gobbles and enlarges, 
gobbles and bloats; it never gets smaller unless in the maw 
of a major natural disaster. No, cities hardly emaciate unless 
to create other cities. Nor do they die except in the rare 
eventuality when coal mines shut down, iron foundries go 
to pot, nuclear stations implode, or floods and famine 
overawe a geography and history. In a world of the rich 
and industrialized, the poor and largely rural live lives 
structured by warfare trade. The logic and logistics are of a 
beggar-my-neighbor paradigm, skewed to outmatching, 
Quenerfy on
hamstringing and sucking in all potential competitors. Cities 
locked within this paradigm acquire the penny-wise 
dispositon of ethno-marketeers: they turn trade into a form 
of robbery. They wheedle less well-heeled neighbors into 
victimhood in a profit-mongering that soon makes the poorer 
too abject to buy from the rich. 
Soon, the villager, permanently endangered, is overtaken 
by the desire to migrate to the city which exercises the pull of 
alternatives. The villager's propensity to migrate, if only as 
a shifting cultivator between the rural dump and the city 
slum, remains unstoppable. This is the case even when the 
destination is under eternal threat of being carted 
unceremoniously out of sight, off the rack, as city planners 
and minders of the civic ethos think of city renewal or a 
face-lift to humor visiting dignitaries. The nearness of the 
gleam of the city is compensation enough as it intimates 
opportunities that may not be open but could and would. 
Essentially, migration tells the endgame stories of where the 
villager is coming from, not where the villager is going. 
Thus, unless the source of migration, the village, is taken 
into account, and gets a good looking over, a hearing, its 
destination, the city itself, may never get a meaningful rethink 
and rework. The logic is the same across international 
boundaries as between the city and the village within national 
boundaries. As events in the world have proved since 
Margaret Thatcher's and Ronald Reagan's beggar-myneighbor 
policy of the age of market forces in the eighties, 
the logic has a universal relevance. As the missionary 
economics which the duo adopted disregarded the Third 
world, except as a point of extraction for the aggrandizement 
of the West, so the minders of the city get too self-centered 
to consider the countryside. For them, it was a matter of 
maintaining and defending a part of world civilization at 
the expense of the rest. They would damn global harmony 
if it came to that. As ideologues who wished to privatize 
hope and enterprise, they derided public purpose and cultural 
economies that would not live by the same logic. Since 
autarky is an option that the City does not allow to those it 
sucks into its orbit, a forced-draft cultural economy is imposed 
on the less fortunate within the system. A structural 
<GLENDORA REXlBVfx African Quarterly on fAe,4/zs><V0I3@No2> 
adjustment involving the devaluation of the national currency, 
a policy that Thatcher considered beneath Britain while the 
Labor Party was in power, was turned into the sense of being 
a Third Worlder. The City as victimizer was realized: allowing 
no alternative directions to those it held in thrall or forced 
into victimhood. 
It bears repeating: that, as with migration from village to 
cities within national boundaries, so is the migration from 
the cities across hemispheres. The more the center oppresses 
or depresses the periphery, the more it encourages the 
migrations that it may eventually resent. Between the 
southern hemisphere and the metropolises of the northern 
hemisphere, immigration walls may be built to ensure an 
environment sanitized against the boat people, the 
gastarbeiter, usually the darker peoples now joined by the 
Others from the Eastern European maelstrom. The 
dimensions are most threatening to the idea of citiness. 
They may be viewed against the background of a West African 
situation where economic distress yields a refusal to 
accommodate so-called strangers, a self-perpetuating 
spectacle that provides excuses for sheer scapegoating and 
neighbor-bashing. It has been quite blatant in the behavior 
of Ghanaians who, in distress, expel Nigerians from their 
cities. In retaliation, insecure ruling classes in Nigeria, afraid 
of losing power and incapable of priming the economy, 
have deflected attention from their inadequacies by expelling 
Ghanaians in a see-saw of mutual attrition. The sheer 
spectacle of members of one ethnic group or nationality 
being expelled from a city to give living room to supposed 
indigenes offends the idea of the civis. 
The history of pogroms in Africa in this century bears 
witness to its devastations. Not just a matter of what 
colonialists did in order to remain in control of the natives; 
it is also about what the natives do, fighting clan to clan, 
moiety to moiety, tribe to tribe, and nationality to nationality, 
sometimes in conformity with pre-colonial modalities or newly 
hatched enmities arising from modern competition for power 
and economic advantage. In Europe, the history of such 
pogroms runs like sores which the case of the holocaust 
against the Jews turned into an abscess. Clearly, wherever 
>> PAGE 135
<< PAGE 15 
it manifests, it rests upon a pattern, a logic of beggaring 
neighbors which, in the end, becomes self-immolating. 
Usually, it is based on an architecture of prejudice which 
begins by granting the more menial jobs to the invited or 
uninvited migrant worker, the gastarbeiter who is the first to 
be fired, even in a literal sense, as economic downturns 
threaten. The logic is that of a welfare system, capitalist or 
socialist, which functions upon the need to see the guest 
worker or the stranger, as someone taking bread from the 
mouth of the citizen, the native. At first, it is a case of 
informal, or formalized, indifference towards the stranger 
and then as history has shown, towards the powerless native. 
This has implications for the management of both the physical 
and the mental spaces of the city. Eventually, the migrant's 
lot waylays the city. 
Beat the Street 
The civis, swollen by wave after wave, grows until, growing 
out of proportion to its capacity to manage city-ness, enters 
regress mode. Sometimes, this may happen in a whimpering 
sort of way, with migrations from its centers wolfing up the 
hinterland. Or, regression may take the form of 
unemployment—inevitable retrenchment of workers—the 
peppering of social life by economic uncertainties and the 
rise of vicious ideologies such as the intermittent re-emergence 
of neo-Nazi movements and the marching ogre of racism 
and ethnicity in many metropolises of the world. The example 
of Nigerian cities overrun by village-to-city migrations that 
have wiped out all civility from cityscapes is worth observing. 
It is not merely marked by the beggar colonies, but also the 
community of the homeless spreading from the shelter of 
bridges and overpasses to the derelict tin-shack slums that 
are increasingly under pressure from land-grabbing 
nouveaux riches who use their friends in government to 
overtake all town planning rules. The easy misuse of 
government power under the pressure of cronies and wheelerdealers 
works out into a lack of creativity and planlessness 
that overcomes whole political and cultural economies. The 
yawn in the system may be viewed from the melee of not 
GlENDORA REVIEWx/lfr/ca/? Quarterly on fAe/lrf5><V0I3@No2> 
<137> 
1 
only beggars but hawkers who swoop on the traffic jams 
and lock-jaws that define cityscapes. 
To mention traffic jams is like twiddling a raw nerve in 
many cities: In Lagos, it is the rawest nerve. It is celebrated 
by its most popular musician, Fela Anikulapo-Kuti in his 
masterpiece of social criticism, Confusion Break Bone, about 
Ojuelegba where the convergence of the scarred will of 
motorists without the control of traffic lights, or the presence 
of a policeman or traffic warden tells the story of a city and 
a country that lacks managers. A city of blocked wills: let us 
call it that. It is a matter of blocked wills occasioned by a 
division of the heartmind of the city from the original divide 
between the city and the village. An incapacity to do overall 
thinking ensures that two mentalities overlap: the low-density 
thinking of the gleaming conurbations of the city where the 
administrators and city lords live and the high-density feel 
of the slummier zones where the masses of the people eke 
out their lives. Ikoyi mentality confronts the slum of Obalende. 
Victoria Island is serviced by the raucous howl of the 
beleaguered slums of Maroko and Ebutte Metta. And, 
following it, Surulere degenerates from a middle class haven 
and Ikeja which becomes the capital of the new administrative 
arrangement sprawls out into Shogunle as a service zone 
for the government reserved area. It is the new version of 
the role that Ajegunle—the famed jungle city plays for Apapa, 
the port city that, in the end, is the daily end point of business 
for the rats and cockroaches of the underground economy. 
Apapa happens to be the wharf of wharfs where the goodies 
tend to come from, which unites the con men and boodlesharers 
who supply the hawkers on the streets. 
The hawkers sell anything and everything from bread and 
imitation motor spare parts—Tai-one or Tai-two—to live birds 
and puppies and, of course, the ubiquitous "pure water" 
that's anything but pure. Behind the trade on the streets are 
mafiosi-controlled underground economies that ramify from 
petty larceny to big time robberies. Honest street labor within 
the context of illegitimate trade opens out a vista that connects 
with corruption in government and corporate bureaucracies 
hamstringing and undermining the police and literally 
empowering the robbery gangs that, at night or in broad
day light, hold the city hostage, challenging neighborhoods 
to inventiveness that has led to the flowering of a garrison 
architecture: high-wall fences and huge iron-gates, Alsatian 
dog cultures and vigilante communities that hide gross 
underemployment and misdirection of valuable labor. The 
ensuing circumstance takes on an almost natural paint in 
the face of an industrial sector in comatose—factories closing 
down in droves and being taken over and turned into 
churches at a rate that should make anyone wonder whether 
the workers who used to work in those factories are the 
worshippers in the churches. 
The truth of the matter is that this city by the lagoon 
fascinates, if for nothing else, because it offers the closest 
Nigerian parallel to a melting pot. This, as I see it, is our 
prime city of crossed boundaries. It is the most open ground 
for the meeting of nationalities and the criss-cross of 
individual talent in this country. Hence it is like going to 
meet a good deal of all the colors of Nigeria when you 
come to Lagos. Yet I am only too aware that in many artistic 
circles, in spite or because of the celebration or send-up 
that this city has enjoyed in our literature from Cyprian 
Ekwensi, Wole Soyinka and Flora Nwapa to Ben Okri, Afam 
Akeh and Izzia Ahmad, Lagos is not regarded as a writerfriendly 
city. Let me concede the point straight away: that 
Lagos is not a city where you may read a book in the comfort 
of a bus or train or recollect emotion in Wordsworthian 
tranquility. Perish the thought! Lagos conjures images of 
traffic lock-jaws, progressively decrepit roads and rickety 
public transportation systems, crude commercialism, 
indifference to the products of the human mind, lack of 
olaces of genuine public relaxation, an inhospitable culture 
sf hospitality, tortured banking services and, in general, 
he tendency for brash materialism and uncouth and abrasive 
luman relations to overcome good sense and aesthetics. 
All the same, in a country which appears to be running 
>ut of dreams, this city also provides the finest of Archimedian 
joints from which dreams may be regenerated and a new 
vay found of gaining access to the future. Whatever our 
ndividual dispositions, we are face to face with the reality of 
i city that breathes creativity in dense and varied forms of 
GLENDORA REVIEW><African Quarterly on the /4/wxV013@No2> 
<I38>
life, a variegation of lifestyles and colors, and an intermixture 
of motifs that brings all of Nigeria and, indeed, all of Africa 
together in one fist. It hits you with a certain comeliness, 
almost profound and unerringly beautiful when you consider 
the possibilities it holds out. All you need is to visualize the 
removal of the bottlenecks and communication jams in this 
city; consider the intensity of pleasurable interactions that its 
spaces could accede to a consequence and imagine what 
leisure would be available for self-recreation in a new world 
of thriving arts and culture - if only a little imagination was 
added to the raw energy of this city. And think of the fallouts 
for the development of a reading culture and the special 
boon to imaginative literature in a Lagos free of 
communication jams and able to reach out to and be 
reached in return by other cities of the world outside the 
brash vernacular of what Fela Anikulapo Kuti describes as 
shuffering and shmiling. What a marvelous city of 'so so' 
enjoyment that would be. The truth of the matter, however, 
is that, from the standpoint of literature's role in enhancing 
cross-boundary activity, the reality of this city as a metaphor 
for the whole country is far too far from the ideal. We are 
still where we were during the Annual Convention in 1987 
and the Symposium of 1988. 
Lagos is easily one of the most congested and chaotic 
cities in the world. Prisons hold 200% more inmates than 
they are supposed to; women in maternity wards have to be 
discharged sooner than necessary to make room for others 
coming into already congested spaces. Some may even 
bring their own mattresses to take to the floor. Queues at 
banks and post offices were getting longer and longer until 
what are called new generation banks. Which, like the old 
guard, do not plug into the international culture of travelers 
checks because planners gave up planning within the chaos. 
In this city, intellectual life—like the intellectual life of all 
cities that are seats of governments before they become cities 
of learning—has progressively thrived on the opportunism 
of workaday politics. Its commercial sense is shallow, more 
kobo-wise than naira — efficient; its sanitation is an eyesore, 
one of the many modern capitals in which nightsoil is still 
dumped as it was done in the nineteenth century; its
transportation is a nightmare. Even with the building of a 
national theater, Lagos is certainly not what may be called 
a city of culture although more cultural events certainly take 
place in this city than in all the cities on the West Coast of 
Africa combined. To crown the matter, it is one of the most 
expensive cities in the world. Even in these years of the horrid 
devaluation of the national currency to meet the purblind 
claims of the international market, the city is still one of the 
most expensive, perhaps, bested in this regard only by the 
alternate capital in Abuja. 
This alternative capital was supposed to help escape the 
ambush of problems that had overawed the very processes 
of building a new city. The Federal Government of Nigeria 
decided to move the political capital to a site mathematically 
determined as the centre of the country. The purpose was to 
avoid congestion, traffic chaos, and the presumed 
impossibility of ridding the nation's Mecca from particularistic 
ethnic flavors. The new capital, soon inhabited through a 
forced draft program by the military administration, is reputed 
to be one of the largest construction sites in the world. But 
this is one instance, at least, in which the new literally 
'bodied' out the old if only in the sense of being overtaken 
by the many pathologies which led to the abandonment of 
Lagos; a thieving class of military and civilian warlords swiftly 
overtook the need for creative planning and dragooned a 
horde of buccaneering contractors into the site. 
The stink of corruption, presumed to be too much the 
vernacular of life in Lagos, became the breath of air in this 
Medina. Although whole communities were paid to move 
out of the area in order to create the reality rather than the 
illusion of an ethnically neutral zone to which all Nigerian 
from all the 428 groups could relate, the botched 
administration resulting from the interference of greedy 
administrators and contractors resulted in the problem of 
indigeneity becoming a problem even before the city took 
off. The indigenes were so unconscionably shortchanged 
that rather than move, they reasserted their indigeneship 
with vigor. The incoherence of federal policy ensured that 
one out of the many religious groups was having a headstart 
in determining the cultural ambience of the city. In effect, if 
<GLENDORA HEVIEW></l/r;ca/7 Quarterly on the Ar£sxV013@No2> 
<139> 
li
a new capital is actually emerging, it seems to be coming 
out of the existing city—the city of political wrangling that 
characterized the era of the first capital. To ensure that those 
who may feel disadvantaged by the movement from Lagos 
do not obstruct the new city, something calculated almost to 
guarantee that the new city is built in chaos was embarked 
upon: a rush to ensure that all government departments 
were garrisoned in the new city within a deadline. The result 
is a city in which the paucity of housing is making a mockery 
of a bureaucracy already in tatters from sundry assaults; a 
general scarcity of course induces a pressure on costs, inciting 
an inflationary spiral that those who remember the 
expensiveness of Lagos find infernal. Congestion and 
inflation have to be bedfellows in such a city, and the calm 
efficiency of planning which was supposed to be the bedrock 
of the dream of this all-nationality capital has not been 
the 
able to find a habitation. Usually, when dreams are failing, 
ideologues whip out their wands, so you sometimes hear 
that it is the absence of private investment in the city that is 
the root of the problem; but we also know that cities built by 
private investment are no better. Usually, the toothmarks of 
greed are there for all to see: the disorganization and chaos 
that the absence of a unitary vision can inflict on a city. 
Crisis is native to the situation because all large 
conurbations are necessarily hostages to a division of labor 
if only for the purpose of handling size and complexity. 
Where there is no structure or bureaucracy to deal with it, or 
where the resultant bureaucracy behaves like most 
bureaucracies by holding on to whatever it can grasp, the 
city grows wild like weed in gardens where there are no 
gardeners. Many such cities there are where no authority 
appears to be in charge even though elected mayors and 
city planners may grow on every street and alley. Such cities 
essentially may not be called the Good City. In the Good 
City there should be some authority in charge with which 
dwellers may identify. Creating such an authority and 
ensuring that it serves the constituents of the city and not 
just its bureaucracy is perhaps at the core of the many 
problems that cities face.
IV
It is also, in a way, the core problem that has challenged 
many creative writers. In the Third World where colonialism 
provides the kind of hiatus that the industrial revolution 
had for many Western societies, the fascination in the 
literature is with ancient societies that have been turned new, 
inside out, by new codes, a different culture. The most 
celebrated work in this respect must be Gabriel Garcia 
Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude which traces the 
rise of Macondo from that time when things had no name 
and you had to point at them in order to indicate them. 
True, there is an underlying factor of primordial power in 
the redrawing of the city: it is prefigured by founding 
patriarchs and matriarchs whose composite image of 
themselves dissolves until all that is left is the normal swarm 
of plain city-dwellers shorn of myths except the most banally 
secular ones. Ngugi Wa Thiong'o in Petals of Blood and 
Ben Okri in The Famished Road provide the same sense of 
the growth of cities from unprepossessing beginnings. From 
times when hands could encircle the city to when an embrace 
meant a linking of so many hands around a seemingly 
endless sprawl. 
All the cities—Marquez's Macondo, Ngugi's llmorog and 
Ben Okri's un-named city—grow in a haphazard fashion. 
They are unplanned cities. From small, rural beginnings in 
which everybody tends to know everybody, to headier times 
when the town is overawed by so many seeking fortune; so 
many luxuriating in the anonymity to pursue the things of 
their heart without the pull of family and the customs of 
more primordial ties. The city is not one until the idyllic 
concerns of the small artisan and the Macondo scientist reinventing 
the wheel, because of a lack of contact with the 
rest of the world, is outgrown. As more denizens overcome 
the unpeopled spaces, a rampart buccaneering syndrome 
materializes which is symbolized in the case of The Famished 
Road by the image of the prize fighter, Azaro's father, who 
takes on the whole world to protect his family and the slum 
in which he lives. It is the spirit of individuals mangling to 
seize the day offered by the beast of a city that is set to 
consume you with hunger and violence unless you are tough, 
and wily and have eyes to see both men and the vermins 
who hobnob in the maelstrom of the streets. The spirit of 
rampart individualism however goes leg in shoe with a certain 
reaching for communion with neighbors. Fellow-feeling may 
be knocked sideways as the city grows. But there is in both 
Ngugi and Okri a picture of the city as a communion. There 
is the communion of those who have made good and are 
wallowing in obese insensitivitytothe needs of other denizens 
of the city; and there is the communion of those who have 
not made good and are living on the edge of poverty and 
schizophrenia. 
Equally disruptive was the looting of centuries-old 
accumulation of bronze and brass works: 2,500 bronze 
plaques and carvings: many of which were the means by 
which an oral society recorded its own history. Today, they 
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are to be found around in the museums of Europe. 
Dispossessing the city of many of those art works may well 
be said to have contributed to making the receiving cities of 
Europe acquire an age that gives them the character of 
much older metropolises. The fact that neither the Kingdom 
of Benin, nor the Nigerian State of which it now forms a 
part can recover the art works also means that the status of 
Benin as an old city is to that extent abridged. To boast so 
much past and so little to show for it means that although 
its inhabitants may wax lyrical about being the source of so 
much art culture, it can lay less claim to culture than the 
cities to which its arts have been shipped. It could be said 
with some justification that by her losses, it has ceded its 
age for the eternal youth imposed by the colonial encounter. 
It is an eternal youth that is not helped by the rise of modernist 
European architecture as well as the revamping, paving 
and macadamizing of main streets in the tradition of the 
colonizer In the absence of much of the art that earlier 
generations bequeathed to the city, and precisely because 
there is hardly any interaction between Benin City and the 
present domiciles of its art, there is a dead letter, a hollowness 
which the power of its modern artists can never quite 
overcome. 
An even more insidious side to this picture is the 
regression, the city's general incapacity to relate effectively 
to the sources of the knowledge by which it could overcome 
its historically imposed handicap. A parochial inwardlooking 
propensity has induced a luxuriation of its traditional 
elite and hence its core indigenous population in the customs 
of its ancient past. Celebration rather than a capacity to 
question; valorization of yesterday's habits, including many 
bad habits, without a willingness to create a larger space 
for self-appreciation in accordance with new knowledges, 
has become the very bane of the society. A poorly 
interrogated past commingles with the anxiety of a poorly 
explored present: with the result that little, only very little of 
the knowledge that made it possible for a small expeditionary 
force of the West African Frontier force to annihilate the city 
has been assimilated. Such that 100 years after Benin city 
was conquered by the British, the inhabitants have not been 
able to come to terms with the changed circumstance of the 
world and the means with which their ancestors were 
overawed. Simple requirements of survival in a difficult world 
demanded that the city should, by 1997, have acquired the 
physical and mental instrumentation for resistance of a 
possible repeat of 1897. It tells a lot about the vibrancy 
and resilience of this city that if the British came back today, 
they could still have an ease of penetration that can make a 
mockery of both the city and the nation state of which it 
forms a part. It is a function of how the city, on its own, or 
handicapped by the state system of which it is a part, relates 
to and extracts from the world the means of its own survival 
and development. 
I dare say that when you are a child born into such a 
culture, fed on a folklore which props up a communal 
memory that history books are only just catching up with,
the ambition to build or to learn how to build great cities 
becomes a pap to be absorbed with mother's milk. 
Unfortunately, unlike Ogun Ewuare who could create a 
tabula rasa by becoming an arsonist, and unlike the British 
conquerors whose arson led to the despoilation of centuriesold 
systems of governance and industry, all of us who must 
think of building cities, whether this is only in our heads, as 
poets, or as architects and town planners, must know that 
we cannot just build from our dreams. The environment to 
which we must apply our dreams has a say in the matter. 
To take on existing cities requires even more imagination 
than if we had to make a fresh start: almost in the proportion 
that a writer needs to plot a novel, an epic, a historical 
tragedy. Imagination here is not just a matter of populating 
the landscape of the mind but stretching the mind into 
landscapes already spoken for. No doubt, if a choice had 
to be made, a virgin land is naturally to be preferred to the 
spoken for. Imagination could then conform to a unitary 
principle, a plan, subject to diverse plural interventions. At 
least, this is the manner in which in this century we have 
seen cities being built from scratch by governments intent 
on abandoning the terms of existing cities. Even such cities, 
let us face it, are built from what is already in existence. A 
Nigerian should know this as ours is one of the few countries 
in the century that have had to jettison an inherited city and 
to set out to build a new Capitol from scratch. 
Indeed, the manner in which new cities emerge from the 
old may be viewed in terms of the relationship between 
Lagos and Abuja. Since we are creative writers, our first 
measure of a city's greatness ought to be related to how its 
literature, I mean literature in the languages spoken by the 
people, has grown. I would say that the antiquity of this city 
is not justified by the volume of literature it produces. Even 
then, what is available is not given any environments, the 
story told is of lamps being lit and guttering under the table. 
As exampled by a writer in this city who has an unpublished 
translation of Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe in the Edo 
language. Our translator, a creative artist in his own right, 
is as hidden as the greatness that once marked the annals 
of this city. Not unlike the case of Festus lyayi whose many 
friends in this city did not know he was a novelist until he 
began to win international prizes. Understandably, we blame 
mass illiteracy for this. But the real albatross is larger. As 
in virtually all Nigerian communities, the city's fall from great 
is indexed by the non-accession to literary culture; it is a 
function of the displaced sense of romance as social 
education. The point is that a city which lacks autonomous 
prompting or one that shuns contacts with the rest of the 
world will sooner than later go into regress. Put differently, 
a city which fails to democratize the use of power and the 
access to knowledge is doomed to lose its citiness because 
popular vitality is soon mortgaged to a moribund sense of 
cultural correctness. Perhaps, in this regard, the most 
Nigerian example is provided by Sokoto, a city that 
mesmerized Clapperton in 1824 with a core of mallams 
who had mastered arcane philosophy and Euclidian 
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Geometry in Arabic. Today, in spite of efforts to correct old 
neglect by a self-satisfied ruling echelon, only Allah knows 
how many descendants of those mallams can deal with 
Euclidian Geometry in any language. Sokoto remains a 
lesson in how not to keep the knowledge industry in stasis. 
To return to my autobiographical warrant: it happens that 
it was in Benin City that I began to take myself seriously as 
a poet in the late sixties. It was a different kind of city in a 
number of ways. For an aspiring writer, jobless and in 
need of self-recognition as an artist, Benin City offered the 
pleasures of "thirsting for sunlight." Absorption in things of 
the mind was passably available in the American Library, 
the British Council and of course the City Library which 
balanced out the nationalistic stock of the other two by offering 
rare literatures, from Rabindranath Tagore to the dissident 
writers of the then Soviet Union. The Mbari Olokun Club 
run by the ineffable Jacob Egharevba, the legendary 
historian, offered those seductive Black Orpheus editions of 
Christopher Okigbo, Dennis Brutus, J.R Clark, Wole Soyinka, 
illustrated by artists like Bruce Onobrakpeya and Demas 
Nwoko. The Mbari Olokun Club was a shout away from 
the CMS Bookshop which was the most poet-friendly 
bookshop in the city. In it, the aspiring poet made the 
acquaintance of that unmatched series, the Penguin 
European poets, which offered an irremediable conversation 
with Raina Maria Rilke, Quasimodo, Hans Magnus 
Enzensberger and George Seferis and the lot who are today 
such outlandish names because we have regressed behind 
the raffia curtain of book famine. True, Benin City in the 
late sixties was not a city of literary communities in the sense 
in which today you have monthly readings of the Association 
of Nigerian Authors. But it was a city whose contact with 
the rest of the world was surer, more seminal, more inducive 
of creativity. Although we now have a larger number of 
literate people than in 1969 who may appreciate the literary 
arts, I think that in terms of the prospects available for the 
advancement of literature in both English and the Edo 
language, we are actually closer to the stone age. In this 
respect, Benin City is a very Nigerian city. 
The truth is that most cities in the world are not built for 
the purposes for which cities are supposed to exist. They 
become a civis, a place of civilization, by default. They are 
not a polis: a place of legitimated power. They are frictional 
definitions of space which offend all the hopes that today's 
green movements represent even though they too have a 
view of cities which imply a regression, a necessary return to 
a rural past rather than the humanization of the cities that 
we know. The truth is that like Abuja, new cities are built 
from old ones, and those who mean to build cities must 
begin by learning how to deal with existing ones, how to 
make them livable. GR