Lagoon

by Nnedi Okorafor

He moved his eyes from his shoes to the first kneeling woman. He had to work hard to keep his disgust from showing. He could almost smell her. Peasant, he thought. Rubbish. Filth. But he would take her money.

He hoped that the audience beat up every single one of them. In the name of Jesus.

The others began to join her. Maybe it was to drown out her awful voice or maybe it was a show of true solidarity. It didn’t matter. Soon the entire church was singing their support for Father Oke. Everyone except Chris.

“Human beings have a hard time relating to that which does not resemble them. It’s your greatest flaw.”

Late-afternoon johns were looking for a girl to spend an evening with, and this usually included fine treatment and a meal. Evening johns were crueler and looking for something less companionable.

But Jacobs felt so humiliated that he couldn’t bring himself to tell the bishop (or his mother) that he wasn’t gay at all. He just liked wearing women’s clothes.

“We’ve been hiding for too long. Tell me you don’t feel it. This is it. This is revolution.”

“Agu never lies. That’s his biggest problem.”

Being a vigilante loyal only to justice was always better than being any kind of head of state.

These kinds of people always showed up whenever the masses stopped “suffering and smiling.”

“In less than twenty-four hours, I have seen love, hate, greed, ambition, and obsession among you,” Ayodele said. “I have seen compassion, hope, sadness, insecurity, art, intelligence, ingenuity, corruption, curiosity, and violence. This is life. We love life.”

It didn’t take much in Lagos. All it took was a semi-peaceful alien invasion to destroy everything she held dear.

He was a positive force. But only because he chose to be one.

My white lie was to protect them . . . at least, until the photos came out in the papers and on the Internet showing the brutal scene.

These roads are full of ghosts. I’d always known that. That’s why I’d have preferred to be as far from the expressway as possible at midnight on a night like this, when something was attacking Lagos.

There was a flicker of oddness about her if you looked long enough. Like she was more than what she was and less than what she was presenting, like a double-exposed photo.

She was not earthly. She was something completely other. But she was not evil, either.

that woman, she was from outside this earth, yes. But that thing, that thing that was haunting the road, it was from here and had probably been here since these roads were built, maybe even before then.

Concrete that smelled like fresh hot tar . . . and blood. It smelled like blood, too.

Never in my entire life had I witnessed such a selfless act. She was not from earth. Yet still. I thought of Nigeria’s worst diseases—pervasive corruption and unsafe roads. The one who had spoken through my wife’s phone was right. She and her people were indeed agents of change. I could feel the change in me then, while I knelt there. I’m sure I was not the only one, either.

when it was done, I heard the relieved sigh of millions of ghosts.

Papa Legba, the god of the crossroads was alive and well in the country of his origin.

And if there is one city that rhymes with “chaos,” it is Lagos.

He saw them helping people escape Area Boys. He saw two putting out the flames in a burning truck. He saw one helping a little girl find her father. He saw them watching as so many people of Lagos made fools of themselves.

“You saved each other but I saved you all.

Old outdated ways of thinking don’t die easily, and sometimes they don’t die at all.