21 November 2024

By Neele Mundt

You can feel the humidity as soon as the plane doors open. It quickly seeps into the cabin as people start to get up, grab their hand luggage and – more or less patiently – wait to leave the plane in an urgency that you can only feel after being stuck in a metal box 30.000 feet above the ground for hours on end. I connect to the internet and hear a ping: a weather warning ‘extreme heat – Lagos (Nigeria) 45°C’. Amazing, I think, before grabbing my bags and making my way through the airport, huffingly telling myself that I will get used to the humidity and heat by the next day – boy, was I wrong!

‘If you survive the chaos of Lagos airport, you made it through the craziest part of Lagos’ was something I had read weeks earlier in one of those blogs about living in Nigeria. It was just one of the millions of things I read in an attempt to be prepared for the crazy hustle and wonderful (dis)organised chaos that is Nigeria. Nervously waiting for the chaos to erupt, I joined the immigration queue, checking my visa, my invitation letter from the University of Ibadan, and the DAAD confirmation about my fellowship again and again as if it would just magically disappear and leave me in a jam. No jam, but smooth sailing through immigration, at the baggage claim, and – all of a sudden – I sat quietly in the pick-up-area, puzzled, wondering what had just not happened (in the blog poster’s defence, there were some recent administrative changes to fight hustling in the airport).

A mixture of excitement and nervousness took over in the first few days – Herbert had picked me up, we chatted about linguistics and life as we drove through Lagos’s never-ending suburbs northbound to Ibadan. The roads were dotted with people and cattle going about their day, cars bumper to bumper as far as the eye can see and, all of a sudden, I am sitting in my hotel, my new home for the next two months, and am finalising my graduate courses for the next day. In my normal manner, I had brought a projector to show my presentations during class only to be reminded that electricity is indeed a rarity (and also a good enough reason to interrupt class for students to charge their devices – from laptops, phones to electric razors). So I am confronted with a choice: no presentation in a regular classroom (but windows and the hope for a refreshing breeze) or use the generator in the phonetics lab (a room without any windows). I opt for the ability to feel a fresh breeze and enter the classroom where numerous graduate students already wait for me. Over the next few weeks, I learn as much from my students as they (hopefully or even ideally) learn from me. The tales of the Yoruba, Igbo, and Hausa groups are fantastically vast and facilitate discussions, that foster mutual understanding. I learn more about their communities and the socio-cultural structures, as well as the role of spirits, elders, and religion. The nervousness disappears, the excitement spreads.

Kidnapping is a flourishing business model in Nigeria – there is no way of sugar-coating this. Putting on my running shoes at 5:30 am, my brain goes through all the tips and tricks to avoid this predicament – be unpredictable and spontaneous, don’t go off the safety of the campus alone, get a trusted driver (especially since I am a horrible driver anyway). As I run laps around campus, breathing in the fresh morning air, I plan my data collection trip later that day: my research assistant and I will go out and talk to people across the city. Let’s be unpredictable and spontaneous – it’s fun, isn’t it? Fast forward… the sun is at its peak, the extreme weather warnings have already lost their meaning, and I can feel my skin burning, which leads me to say ‘break?’, my research assistant nods. We search for shade and maybe (this is a big maybe) a cold coke. We find shade and a warm coke – good enough! I fall onto the little wooden bench while the shop owner looks at my sweaty face with pity. She suddenly smiles; it is a heartfelt smile, which suddenly turns into loud and infectious laughter. ‘Pack me in your bag when you go back to Europe’, she says, still laughing. While I sip on my warm coke, she tells me all about the rising inflation, how it makes life so much more difficult, about local kidnappings, her woes and worries as a business owner and a woman. It reminds me, I had read somewhere that 70% of Nigerians want to leave their country – they even have a Yoruba word for it: japa. As an outsider, I see so much joy, love, cultural and linguistic richness, savviness, and entrepreneurship but it is not my place right then and there to point this out, so I just sit and listen while being impressed by this feisty force of a woman.

Days turn into weeks; weeks turn into months, and it is time to say goodbye – would I go back? This is a question with an easy answer: Yes, in a heartbeat! I made friends, I learnt so much, and at some point, I even got used to the heat. Is it an easy country to travel to? This is a more complicated question with a more complex answer: One of the most important parts is that you need to have community! I am so grateful for the people who took me in, looked out for me and created a home away from home.