Adapted from Chapter 5 of my book Chasing Black Unicorns, about my first journey to Lagos for Rocket Internet.
That day was the first time I had sat in a wide-body aircraft, meaning one in which economy has ten seats in a row, not six or four. An Emirates Boeing 777 is nothing to be sneezed at. I remember the first moment I felt the ecstasy. It passed after about three minutes, when it turned out that I was sitting in the middle seat of the middle row. In booking me a ticket in economy, Rocket Internet was sending me a signal: they spend a lot, but only on things that produce growth for the company.
I could not sleep. (I only learned to sleep straight after takeoff during my later years in Africa, when I was flying four times a week.) The flight went to Dubai, where I had a connection to Lagos.
One night in Dubai
We landed just before 11 pm. The airport, rightly considered one of the most magnificent in the world, seemed not to notice that it was time to go to bed. Actually, all of Dubai has no idea what sleep is. My flight to Lagos was not until 11 am the next day. I supposedly had a hotel reservation, but I don’t know anyone who spends their first night in Dubai in bed, and this city had summoned me.
I got into a taxi, gave the driver $300 in cash and told him to show me as many places of interest as possible, but above all to take me from one end of the city to the other. I wanted to “feel Dubai”. Normally I would do that while jogging, which is how I most often discover a city, but I wasn’t sure the weather or the traffic would allow it. The driver was extraordinarily keen. Since he hadn’t wanted to haggle, I must have given him three times too much. Well, no one has ever become poor by giving.
He came from India and told me his moving story along the way: he had worked in Dubai for ten years until he could bring over his wife and children. They hadn’t seen each other for a decade. And we complain about a “long-distance relationship” between Koszalin and Warsaw.
One of our stops was the Burj Khalifa, 829 meters tall including the antenna. I got out, looked up and said in awe: “What the f…”
“Yes, yes,” the driver agreed in his Indian accent, nodding as if he had understood exactly what I was thinking.
Although it was night, it is never dark in Dubai. I quickly understood that I would never get to like the place. I felt like Truman Burbank in The Truman Show: everything was so plastic, pretty and artificial, and anything ugly and cheap was hidden away. At the hotel I noticed an interesting rule. The receptionists were beautiful white girls with the same harsh east European accent as mine. The staff in the restaurant and spa had Asian features. The cleaning staff were black. “It’s surely a coincidence,” I told myself. “There is absolutely no reason to think that in this region we could be dealing with the slightest element of class division.”
I checked in on social media, of course, with a deeply motivational quote from Google as cover. Your ego won’t massage itself, you know. After a couple of minutes I received a private message from Gosia, an old friend who now worked as cabin crew for Emirates. “Hi Marek, are you in Dubai? The morning is still a long way away. Drop in.” It was her birthday, and a pool party at a villa where the Mercedes S-class I arrived in turned out to be the least impressive car. My African adventure had begun in a truly interesting way.
The only white man on the plane
In the morning I turned up at the airport late, tired but happy. Boarding for my flight had already begun, and when I got to the gate I froze. The queues were longer than those for toilet paper in communist Poland. Dozens of passengers stood armed with enormous suitcases, backpacks and colored bags, all waiting to board the plane. Didn’t they know you can leave larger bags at the check-in desk?
That was my first encounter with the famous Nigerian trait of carrying colossal amounts of hand luggage on board. Check-in on any flight to Nigeria always follows the same format: the ground crew first ask, then try to convince people to follow common sense, then negotiate, and finally threaten either not to let them on or to cancel the flight. In the end they gain control. Having flown the route many times, I started to suppose it was a kind of game between the passengers and ground staff, after which the opponents shake hands and go their separate ways.
When I found my seat, I knew there was something different about this flight, but didn’t know what. Eventually I figured it out. There was only one white man in the whole plane. Me. “Hello adventure, I’m coming,” I chuckled to myself. I had picked up Paul Collier’s The Bottom Billion at the airport, to help me understand why some nations wallow in poverty, and I had a printout of the annual report of Priceline, the owner of Booking.com, to help me understand the online reservation business. I read them alternately but couldn’t concentrate, because the beautiful girl in the next seat was snoring. I remember exactly what I was thinking: if she didn’t stop, I swear to God I would shout “Bomb” and get the plane turned around.
In the end I put on a “Calm down” playlist on Spotify and fell asleep, only to be woken by my neighbor, who wanted to take photos through my window. Looking out, I saw no clouds at all. We were flying 12 km above the earth and the only thing you could make out was vastness.
Welcome, Africa
When we approached Lagos the plane was enveloped in cloud and shook a bit. I had wanted to see Lagos from a bird’s eye view, expecting a great African metropolis, millions of people scurrying around like ants and skyscrapers in the financial district. Meanwhile all I could see was a great white nothing. Eventually, a few hundred meters up, the plane broke through the clouds, and I saw for the first time what Nigeria looks like from the air: a red ocean of sheet metal roofs covering ruined hovels leaning almost to the ground. Fortunately, the view finished as quickly as it had started, and we landed.
I moved off to be first at the exit, because otherwise I would have had to stay in my seat for another hundred years. The stewardess opened the door.
“Welcome, Africa!” I shouted.
“Get out!” Africa shouted back, directing a blow of terrifying heat straight into my face. I took a step back.
“Oh no, you won’t get me that easily,” I thought, and raced down the steps to the air-conditioned terminal.
Which wasn’t air-conditioned. But that wasn’t what dismayed me most. I saw thousands of people but heard a million. The first thing I discovered on coming to Nigeria was that you don’t speak here. The one and only thing you do is shout. If you meet two men jumping up and down, gesticulating and screaming to high heaven, there is a strong possibility that they are in the middle of a calm discussion about the weekend weather forecast.
The corridor was long and dark. There was no electricity, so no light and no air conditioning. I couldn’t find a single sign, so I followed the crowd with its elephant-sized hand luggage to customs, which comprised three checkpoints. The information system at Lagos airport takes the form of three guys standing at checkpoints and roaring incessantly. If you can hear anything, or see anything, maybe you will understand where they are directing you. If not, you only end up annoying them.
I came to a checkpoint and stood in front of an official in a T-shirt and jeans.
“Oyinbo! Welcome! Do you have anything for me?” he asked with a smile.
“Oyinbo” is the word for a white person in Nigeria. If someone on the street doesn’t know your name, they call “Oyinbo” at you. It is also often said out of admiration for your skin color. That was how I met corruption in Nigeria for the first time, in the very first conversation I had there. For a moment I wondered what stupid thing I could say to feign idiocy.
“Maybe I could… pray for your good fortune?”
I think I only didn’t notice his blushing because of the dark color of his skin. A smile appeared on his face, he glanced at my passport and waved me on. When I later told people who had known Nigeria for some time, they all said it was a brilliant move. Nigerians are very religious, Muslims and Christians alike, and when they are trying to extract a bribe from you and you bring up God, they get awkward and usually withdraw.
Five kilos of waste paper
According to an email I had received the previous day, a driver in an orange T-shirt was meant to be waiting for me. He wasn’t, but several others were, and as it happened all of them were wearing orange T-shirts. They all started shouting at me at the same time. One used sign language, pretending to turn an invisible steering wheel in the air. Another wanted to change money. A third waved an identity badge under my nose to show he was a certified airport taxi driver, so I wagered he wouldn’t kidnap and eat me. Some beckoned me with kissing sounds. I said “No, thank you,” they shouted even more, and I retreated to the arrivals hall. Today I can laugh about it. Now, whenever I’m at the airport in Lagos or Abuja, I can tell who is in Nigeria for the first time just by looking at them.
I decided to wait for the driver at the airport restaurant and then remembered that I had no local currency. In Warsaw I had gone to a large and very good bureau de change.
“Hello, I’d like to change 500 zloty into naira.”
“I’m sorry, into what?”
That was when I found out that only one country in the world recognizes the Nigerian naira. So I changed $100 at a bureau in the airport, and the cashier gave me five kilos of waste paper. One dollar was almost 350 naira, so I received around 35,000 naira, in fives, tens and twenties: wads of banknotes at least three inches thick.
My driver was two hours late. It was only after several weeks in Nigeria that I understood this was the norm. In Africa, time is treated in a metaphysical manner. If you ask how long a journey will take, no one tells you minutes or hours, only “short” or “long”. We have watches, they have time. If someone complains, they will apologize, promise to do better, and later do exactly the same.
Twenty kilometers in three and a half hours
The airport of the commercial capital of the largest economy in Africa seemed nightmarish: frequent power cuts, general chaos, eight gates, and access to the terminal along a single route. From the car park we dragged our suitcases along a sandy road for about fifteen minutes, past the scaffolding of a new terminal the Chinese were building. I hope they finish it before I die, I thought. Getting out of the car park took an hour. If you haven’t been to Lagos, you have no idea what a traffic jam is. It’s a paradox, but the stress goes down with every passing moment.
The closer we got to the center, the more modern the buildings outside the window became. We crossed the Third Mainland Bridge, 12 km long, the longest in Africa, with three lanes in each direction. Expensive cars passed, almost all of them SUVs. In the distance I saw billboards advertising banks, cell phone networks and internet deals, and thought: Zmysłowski, it’s OK. Money can be made here. In an emerging economy the most important pillars of development are banking and telecommunications, because only on such infrastructure can you build other businesses.
There were very many people everywhere and almost every one of them was holding a cell phone. Believe it or not, there are more active SIM cards in Nigeria than people. The reason is the very poor quality of the connections: people often carry two or three phones, each with a card from a different operator, to increase the chance that at least one will work. And then they can continue to roar at each other.
My new home was in Lekki, a residential part of Lagos, hidden behind a three-meter-high fence. It was a large house with many bedrooms, a communal kitchen shared with other people Rocket had sent from various corners of the world to start up enterprises, and a cook/cleaner/housekeeper who ruled over all of us. I was to live there for the first few months, until I had acclimatized and found a place of my own. I was used to sleeping in lower temperatures. The journey from the airport had taken three and a half hours for a drive of 20 km, and the entire trip, including the stopover in Dubai, had taken 39 hours. I opened the window as wide as I could, naively hoping for a cool night breeze, hopped into bed and fell asleep as soon as my head hit the pillow.
This is from Chapter 5, “In Desert and Wilderness”, of Chasing Black Unicorns. All of my income from the book goes to the MaYa Foundation.
Listen to this chapter: Polish audiobook on YouTube (English version coming soon) · Spotify
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