Embraced
Recently, I had the privilege of being able to travel to the country of my in-laws, Nigeria, and specifically to the largest city - Lagos. It is difficult to overstate how terrifying and dangerous this is made to seem by most UK media, and by extension, it is difficult to overstate the level of opposition to this plan I faced from all of my close family. In general, it seems that people feel able to write with supreme confidence about how Nigeria is terrifying and dangerous despite never actually having been there. But the bizarre thing is that it seems that this relatively uninformed viewpoint is somehow the orthodox one. In my case, this orthodoxy led to me spending my wedding day without any of the family who have raised me for the last 31 years - with the exception of my darling mother - which made it quite a bittersweet occasion. I hope that this article might contribute to ensuring that someone else doesn't have to go through that, on what should be the happiest day of their life.
The Orthodox View
The orthodox view of travel to Nigeria (at least, among middle-class white British people) is largely understandable. Governmental travel advice tends to talk about risks of robbery and theft (which, on balance, it does for almost everywhere except Belgium); and designates large swathes of northern Nigeria are "do not travel" zones due to the Boko Haram insurgency - even though advising against travel to Lagos due to insurgency issues in Maiduguri is a bit like saying you should rethink your trip to Paris because a missile hit Kharkiv. Even modern television documentaries allegedly trying to show more nuance - such as the recent "Michael Palin in Nigeria" - play into this stereotype by focussing on the disparity between "rich" (garish penthouse bars in Lekki, anachronistic polo players reliving the British Empire in Kaduna) and "poor" (overcrowded schools in Makoko, fistfighting as the only way to make a living as a young man in Kano) rather than telling the stories of the lives of the tens of millions of ordinary Nigerians who lie somewhere between these extremes.
Coupled with this, Nigeria is often in the news for all of the wrong reasons, which means that most people in the West associate Nigeria with instability, coups, and crime. On almost the same day that I travelled to Nigeria, Harry and Meghan also travelled to Nigeria, and predictably, all of the TalkTV and GBNews pundits chimed in with thoroughly-well researched breathless frothing about how the real royal family would never visit a hell-hole like Nigeria (except, of course, the Queen in 1956 and 2003, and Prince Charles in 1990, 1999, 2006, and 2018 - but I am sure they knew that). Cue unending newsreel footage about female genital mutilation (which "the country" practices apparently), Boko Haram, kidnapped schoolchildren, and piracy in the Niger Delta.
With all of this, the orthodox view seems pretty understandable, except when you consider that Nigeria is the beating heart of Africa, and Lagos is the beating heart of Nigeria. Many flights a day land into Lagos from London, Atlanta, Paris, Madrid, and Rome, and there are tens of thousands of business travellers going back and forth through the airport. Anybody who has actually been to Lagos tells you that it is a wonderful, dynamic, and bustling place. So why does it have this reputation? I want to offer some opinion on this question later, but first I want to describe my trip to Lagos, with a view to helping counter some stereotypes.
A Personal View
As a disclaimer, I know that Nigeria has its problems. I know that there are security issues, and I know that I'd probably have had a very different experience if I had not been in the company of my Nigerian family for the whole trip. All I want to do is recount my experience so it can stand next to all of the other travel advice, and perhaps offer some useful counterpoint.
Firstly, I should say some words who I am and about my family in Nigeria. I am very visibly a British man, and my wife is very visibly a Nigerian woman. My wife spent the first 28 years of her life living on the Lagos mainland, away from the centre in an area called Okerube. This is not a wealthy area, and her family would not have been considered affluent by Lagos standards. Her travel to the UK was enabled by compensation she got from a traffic accident she sustained while working, which enabled her to pay tuition fees to come to Leeds and study, where we met. My wife was raised solely by her mother - an immigration officer, and one of the most wonderful people I have ever met - after the untimely death of her father when she was 10. Her mother's job was a good one and paid well by Nigerian standards, but raising and schooling three children on it alone (Nigeria has no free state education) was not easy, and she did not grow up in a privileged environment. I say all of this to emphasise that I did not spend this trip in a gilded cage with the wealthy 1% of Nigerians. Seeing them and their family home, my wife's family struck me as probably the Nigerian equivalent of a lower-middle class family in the UK - though I appreciate that my sampling area is limited to southern Nigeria.
I travelled to Nigeria to get married, but spent the days before and after the wedding exploring Lagos and spending time with my new family. Various people before I arrived had advised me that I should watch out, as I'd likely be:
- Robbed at gunpoint in traffic, or,
- Run off the road by criminals and robbed/kidnapped, or,
- Kidnapped by criminals climbing through the hotel room windows, or
- Murdered in cold blood while walking around due to the possible role of my ancestors in past colonial injustices.
And if none of that happened, I'd definitely either get malaria, typhoid, Ebola, or cholera, and probably die that way. Note again none of the people who confidently gave me these warnings, and shook their heads at my foolhardy planned visit, had ever been to Nigeria. My experience of Lagos could not have been more different from their warnings.
We travelled around the Lagos mainland and islands for several days - never once did I feel unsafe, threatened, or intimidated. There are some insistent people hawking and begging in traffic, but never in a threatening way. Most people who saw me in the car looked slightly puzzled and then wanted to greet me. Everyone I met in the streets or in shops and restaurants either ignored me (the majority - Lagosians are all on a mission, it seems), or stopped to ask how I was finding Nigeria and seemed pleased I was enjoying it (the minority - but a significant one). Overall, the feeling I got from most people I met out and about was one of a friendly nonchalance - not really bothered that I was there, but given that I seemed to be having a nice time, they were pleased. It was markedly different from other places I have been where I visibly stand out, such as China, where people either stop and stare, or are much more gushing and try and drag you into restaurants. My impression was that in Lagos, nobody cares that you are there, and nobody cares if you hate it, but if you like it, they like that you like it. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie writes in her essay Still Becoming that Lagos will "treat your love with an embrace, and your hate with a shrug", which captures the feeling perfectly.
Later on, away from the main central parts of Lagos city (Ikeja and the islands), I spent some time with my new family in Okerube, and met many family members and friends who had travelled from Eastern Nigeria for the wedding, most of whom I had never met before. I was quite overcome by how loved I felt and by how unreservedly these people welcomed me into their family. Many of these people live in conditions that in the UK we would probably think of as severely impoverished - yet the generosity of their gifts to me and my wife, and the love that they showed to me was incredibly touching. My mother-in-law has called me "son" for many months now - and the lengths that she went to to welcome me and show me that I am part of her family were quite overwhelming. Distant Aunts and Uncles sang and danced for me and helped me understand and partake in all of the traditional ceremonies. Multiple people told me they loved me in a way that was so sincere I was quite taken aback. Everybody seemed to be on a single-minded mission to ensure that my mother and I had the best time we possibly could. It is impossible to put into words the warmth of the embrace that I felt from my new Nigerian family and friends.
Overall my experience of Nigeria was that of an amazing country filled with wonderful kind, generous, and loving people, who are struggling with bad government and economic conditions. Being on the ground, and quizzing my family about the actual economics of Nigeria in 2024, I think it is a testament to the average Nigerian that there is not significantly more unrest and instability than there is. As I found it, I pretty much felt perfectly safe all the time - though I was with my family - even out away from the central "tourist" areas. So what is the reputation about?
Without trying to embark on a lengthy treatise about the troubles of Nigeria, which I am not remotely qualified to give in any case, I think a large part of the reputation likely stems from the size of the country and the disparity of living conditions across the country. Insurgency and instability in northern Nigeria, coming down through the Sahel, is well documented. Corruption is a big problem, though being with my family helped this. I suppose if you are doing a risk assessment for Nigeria travel from a company, then you're likely to err on the side of very cautious even if your worker is travelling to a Lagos hotel for a conference and unlikely to see any sign of unrest except an argument (albeit possibly a heated one) over some plantain chips in a market. Similarly, I've also heard that a lot of companies organise armed escorts to take people from Lagos airport into the hotels (a journey of between 5 and 45 minutes), which, having been there and driven around for several days in my mother in law's car, strikes me as ludicrously unnecessary (though the traffic is something else).
So what's the deal? Maybe there's a security company that's updating all the online travel guidance to help business. Or maybe it's all underpinned by some Conrad-esque fear of the Heart of Darkness - after all, there are are places more unsafe than Lagos that people seem happier to travel to. Sure, I'd probably have felt a lot less secure without my family with me, but that's true of many places. All I can say is that the Lagos I saw, and the Nigeria I saw, was a fascinating, chaotic, marvellous country filled with bright, vibrant, kind, and loving people. If you are planning a trip, go, and enter the country with love - it will embrace you in return.