Review – Lagos: Supernatural City by Tim Cocks

For anyone who has experienced the hot and humid charms of Nigeria’s biggest city, this book will resonate. But unless you are a native of Lagos, the beliefs and superstitions that underpin its most diverse populations can be hidden behind a wall of secrecy that is rarely penetrated.

In Lagos: Supernatural City Tim Cocks attempts, and for the most part succeeds, in revealing a world inhabited by what the Nobel laureate Wole Soyinka  describes as the “Yoruba metaphysics [that] holds the view of there being three major areas of existence… the world of the unborn, the world of the dead, and the world of the living.”

To this, Cocks adds a fourth realm – the area of transition: “It is the chthonic realm, the area of the really dark forces, the really dark spirits, and it also is the area of stress of the human will.”

Rather than claiming a comprehensive understanding of the complex pantheon of small deities and ancestral spirits that have guided the lives of many West Africans for millennia, Cocks uses this as a jumping-off point to describe the way in which an adherence to deep, traditional world views brushes up alongside the Christian and Islamic faiths in a system of relative if sometimes uneasy harmony. 

Through this transition between local ritual and the Abrahamic religions, Cocks relates tales that incorporate Nigeria’s complex history of colonialism and conversion. It is a history tied in with the turbulent arrival of the European – and Arab – interlopers who  were adept at blood-letting and mayhem – those who dragged millions of Africans away into servitude and slavery with a gun in one hand and a holy book in the other.

Religion with an entrepreneurial flavour

“The red-faced European missionaries wouldn’t have looked like people about to conquer an entire nation,” writes Cocks. “With their buttoned-up black waistcoats and appalling body odour, they were struggling in the heat and dying of malaria in their droves.”

However, within a few decades, millions of Africans had abandoned their culture and embraced the religion of the cross, a massive shift which has had a visible impact in Lagos and Nigeria beyond, where brands of Christianity have been forged with a very local – and entrepreneurial – flavour. 

Pentecostal churches are everywhere in Lagos, as are mosques – both offering a certain succour for the difficult lives that the vast majority of Lagosians lead.

Cocks explains: “Head north up the Lagos-Ibadan expressway and the slums of the Lagos mainland give way to vast estates owned by preachers with names like ‘Winners Chapel’ and ‘The Mountain of Fire and Miracles’ while billboards feature sharp-suited Nigerian pastors advertising a ‘Three-Day War to Kill the Witches’.

“Some venues fit as many as a quarter of a million people, and many of their pastors are multi-millionaires.”

The author meets one of them, a certain Pastor Chris Oyakhilome  – dubbed “The Oracle”, “a dynamic multi-faceted preacher the Lord has decanted His Spirit upon.” According to the first part of a long list of accolades on his website, he has “a divine ability to decipher, decrypt and demystify the deeper meanings and messages of the Bible hereby delivering to mankind God’s epistle”. 

Cocks observes these claims with a certain irony. “As with other popular pastors, his spiritual gifts have generated substantial material ones. He flies around in a chartered private jet, and wears a gold-trim tunic and gold-buckle shoes with a fancy Swiss watch,” he writes.  

But to dismiss and belittle this as just as a parochial Nigerian habit would be to underestimate the power such pastors exercise worldwide.

On a recent visit to Egypt, this writer was handed a newsletter by a Nigerian proselytiser entitled  “Healing to the Nations” –  a dozen A4 pages printed in glossy colour listing offices in South Africa, the US, Canada, the UK as well as, of course, Nigeria. 

Nigeria’s exciting and entrepreneurial take on religion, it seems, has gone global. 

Making fortunes in the city

Cocks is equally assured when he turns his eye on that other bedrock of Lagosian society – those making a fortune from the oil industry. Cocks draws on the story of Folorunsho Alakija, once a clothes designer for the wife of former President Ibrahim Babangida, who became one of the richest women in Nigeria despite entering the oil industry with almost no experience.

What appears to have driven Alakija to success – aside from her access to the powerful – is her faith. As she told a Nigerian magazine, “God Himself orchestrated and organised by divine intervention the beginning and continuation of our delving into the oil industry.”

The story – incorporating, God, oil, and power politics –  is an extraordinary one that seems to characterise something of the magical reality of the Nigerian experience. 

Illuminating snapshot

But for most, Lagos remains a desperately difficult place in which to get by. Cocks is adept at describing the poverty that mars the city far beyond the lights of Victoria Island. He describes the floating slum of Makoko with its thousands of wooden homes built on stilts above the water. 

“Smoke from thousands of cooking pots lends the air a dreamy haze. For Makokoites, the lagoon is a transport network, a food source, a swimming area, a toilet, a rubbish dump. The lagoon’s odour is often described by outsiders as that of sewage, but it’s actually more subtle than that, almost more of a softer, meaty smell: salty, pungent, raw.”

It is here we meet Noah, the last born of his father Moses’ 22 children. The life and challenges of this biblically-named family in surviving the rough and tumble of the city while navigating its multi-faceted spiritual life provide an illuminating snapshot of the life of the Lagos majority, as does this book.