Lagos, Life and Sexual Distraction

Will Baami ever stop beating up his wife and become a commissioner? Will Ezinne ever go on a date with Chibuzor, Segun’s answer to Cristiano Ronaldo? Will Oladayo always be bullied by Benjamin, the corrupt politician’s son? Will Musa’s friends Maryam and Kabiru survive Boko Haram’s attack on their village?

The life of the underprivileged is always desperate and provisional, whether in urban Lagos or in the countryside in northern Nigeria. In this energetic collection of twelve short stories, Tunde Ososanya exposes the challenges of daily life and the efforts of ordinary people to aspire in the face of overwhelming odds. There are distractions. Humour is one, observed in the audacity of conmen who ride the yellow danfo buses. Magic is another, in the spirit world that Mr Benson asks his Literature-in-English students to write about. But the most immediate is always sex, the ultimate escape. Twelve stories about invisible heroes, each fighting the tragedy of modern Nigeria in their own way.

Lagos, Life and Sexual Distraction, published by EnvelopeBooks in 2023, is a collection of twelve stories, most of them situated in Lagos, although two concern the very different circumstances of people living in northern Nigeria. The stories range across domestic violence, political corruption, religious belief, poverty, sexual relationships, crime and the everyday struggle to survive.

The title is deliberately provocative but also describes one of the book’s central ideas. The people in these stories live in circumstances in which life is precarious and escape is continually sought. Sex is one form of escape; humour, fantasy, religion and crime are others. The result is not a uniformly bleak portrait. Ososanya’s characters frequently respond to difficult circumstances with ingenuity, opportunism and humour. The publisher describes them as ‘invisible heroes’, which is a useful description of his underlying interest: people who would scarcely register in conventional accounts of Nigerian public life nevertheless possess complicated inner lives and ambitions.

Lagos is particularly important to Ososanya’s work. It is not merely a setting but an active force in the stories: ‘crowded, energetic, dangerous, entrepreneurial and relentlessly competitive’. The collection is concerned with the gap between Lagos as a place of extraordinary opportunity and Lagos as a place in which many people struggle simply to maintain a tolerable existence. One of the book’s recurring ideas is the necessity of vigilance—the Lagosian injunction to ‘shine your eyes’—and of learning how to negotiate a society in which formal rules and everyday reality do not always coincide.