Staceyann Chin at Barnes and Noble, NY

Poet, Activist; Staceyann Chin on her memoir, The Other Side Of Paradise. Barnes and Noble, Union Sq. New York. April 14, 2009.

My First Period

Judge: Kachi Ozumba

Log in to enter

Closes on 30 Jun 2011

Results published on 8 Sep 2011

Fee: £10.00

Word Limit: 600

 

The Prizes

1st Prize: £500

The winner and nine runners-up will be published in the Lightship paperback anthology to be printed by Lightship Publishing Ltd and Alma Books and will be invited to read from their work at an awards ceremony in Hull in 2011. (Please note we cannot fund travel costs to and from the awards.)

The Judge

Kachi A. Ozumba will judge the Lightship International Flash Fiction Competition 2010-2011. Kachi was born in Nigeria and currently lives in Newcastle, UK. Kachi’s debut novel The Shadow of a Smile (Alma Books, 2009) was published to critical acclaim. It was short-listed for the Commonwealth Writer’s Prize (Africa) and the Royal Society of Literature’s Ondaatje Prize (2010), has been long-listed for the Desmond Elliot Prize (2010), and was listed as one of the Observer’s Books of 2009. Kachi is a brilliant short story writer - he won the 2009 Commonwealth Short Story Prize (Africa) and in 2006 he won a Decibel Penguin Short Story Prize. He was the judge for the 2010 Commonwealth Short Story Prize.

The Rules

1. Our 2010 Flash Fiction competition opens on 14th August 2010 and closes at midnight (GMT) on 30th June 2011. Any stories submitted after the deadline will not be eligible for entry.
2. Short story entries should not exceed 600 words.
3. The short story competition is open to writers of any nationality writing in English. There is no restriction on theme or style.
4. Entrants must be 16 years of age or over.
5. You can enter on-line, or by post. No entry form is required. If you enter by post please include your name and address on a separate sheet of paper along with the title of your story entry.
6. You can enter as many times as you like. One story per entry fee.
7. Please do not put your name on your story. All judging is done anonymously. Stories with names on them will be disqualified.
8. Stories cannot be altered after entry.
9. The ten winning stories must be available for the anthology and, therefore, must not have been published previously in any form. If enter your story in other competitions and you win, please notify us and withdraw your submission. Where work is withdrawn, entry fees will not be refunded.
10. Copyright returns to the author one year after publication. Entrants are deemed to grant us exclusive worldwide licence over each entry submitted for one year after publication, and for publicity purposes thereafter. Selected pieces may appear in electronic format on the Lightship website, or in other electronic forms.
11. Please note that notification of receipt of entry will come from your payment processor (Paypal) and that no correspondence will be entered into once you have submitted your work.
12. Entries will not be returned under any circumstances.
13. The judges' verdict is final. No correspondence or discussion will be entered into.
14. We reserve the right to disqualify any entry if we have reasonable grounds to believe that the entrant has breached any of these Rules.
15. We cannot accept any responsibility for any damage, loss, injury or disappointment suffered by any entrant entering the Competition.
16. We will act in accordance with current UK data protection legislation in relation to your personal data. All personal data entered on this site is secure.
17. The Competition and Rules will be governed by English Law and any dispute will be subject to the exclusive jurisdiction of the courts of England and Wales.
18. We reserve the right to amend these Rules where it is deemed necessary to do so or where circumstances are beyond our control. Any changes to the Rules will be posted on the Lightship website.
19. We reserve the right to not award the first prize, and to cancel the publication of the anthology, where circumstances are beyond our control, or if the judges’ overall verdict is that the level of entries is not up to the required standard for publication. In the unlikely event of the competition being cancelled, entry fees will be refunded.
20. Submission of entry is taken to be an unqualified acceptance of these Rules.

Enter On-line

On-line entry costs £10.00

A Story Critique (Optional) costs £15.00

On-line entries will only be accepted if entered through our website. Please do not send your stories as email attachments.

Do not put your name on your story, please. Your story is will be automatically linked to your name when you enter through the website.

The cost of an on-line entry is fixed at £10.00 Sterling. Conversion to your local currency will be done automatically by your credit card company, according to the exchange rate at that time.

Postal entry costs £12.00. A Story Critique request sent by post (optional extra) costs £20.00. To enter by post, please include entry fee and story in the same envelope. Cheques payable to Lightship Publishing Ltd. Please note that cheques must be made out in the currency of the country from which they are sent, to the full value of the fee, or the entry will be deemed null and void. Receipt of entry will be sent by email only so please provide an email address. Stories will not be returned. Critiques will be returned by email. Post to: Lightship Publishing Ltd, Meredith Building, 23-33 Reform Street, Hull HU2 8EF, United Kingdom.

 

Log in to enter

 

YourLovePunch.com Call For Submissions

Posted on October 7, 2010 by yourlove

“The hottest love has the coldest end.” -Socrates

Call for submission of anonymous letters written by both men and women to an ex or soon to be ex.

Our upcoming book, Your Love Punch Letters, is a compilation of anonymous letters, that offer a peek inside raw human emotion, when coping with the demise of a relationship.

Writing an anonymous letter to an ex allows the release of negative feelings from a failed relationship, that would otherwise surface into a new relationship. A failed relationship doesn’t define you. How you deal with the emotional aftermath will determine how the next chapter of you life is written.

Guidelines:

• Your letter submissions can be emailed with “Love Punch Letter” in the subject to yourlovepunch@gmail.com. Minimum word count is 500. Maximum word count is 1000. Letters that do not meet the word count qualifications will still be considered.
• Letters may be edited for clarity and length.
• All letters are anonymous. When writing your letter to your ex or soon to be ex, please include their first name and last initial only.
• All letters must be signed Sincerely, Your Love Punch.
• Letters submitted become the property of YourLovePunch.com. Letters not chosen for the book will be published on the website.
• If you are considering making a submission, send us an email by December 1, 2010 as space for this project is limited.
• Final letters must be received by January 1, 2011.

Contact:

If you have any questions or suggestions please contact Stesha at yourlovepunch@gmail.com

Twitter: http://twitter.com/YourLovePunch

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/YourLovePunch

Announcing the Winners of Meridian’s 2010 Editors’ Prize Contest

 

POETRY
WINNER: Josephine Yu, “Why the Lepidopterist Lives Alone”

 

FICTION
WINNER: Allis Hammond, “The Faces”

Both winners will receive a $1,000 prize, and their pieces will be published in our May 2010 issue.

Thank you to everyone who entered the contest. It was a strong year for poetry and fiction. We hope you’ll submit again in the fall.

 

---

Editors’ Prize Contest

The deadline for our 2011 Editors’ Prize is December 17, 2010, midnight EST.

For a $16 entry fee, you receive a chance at a $1,000 prize. The fee will also cover a one-year subscription to Meridian (entries from outside the U.S. will receive only the prize issue due to additional mailing costs.)

We expect to announce winners in March 2011.

All submissions will be considered for publication in Meridian.

Fiction writers may submit one story of 10,000 words or fewer. Poets may submit up to 4 poems.

You may enter more than one time; however, in the past, entering multiple times has not significantly increased a contestant’s odds.

Submit your work through ManuscriptHub.com. Make sure that your account includes a working e-mail (one valid through March of the contest year). It’s the only way for us to contact you.

Best of luck!

Contest Eligibility Rules:

• UVA alumni who graduated after June 2007 are NOT eligible.
• UVA MFA graduates/alumni are NOT eligible.
• Current UVA students, staff, and faculty are NOT eligible.
• Former Meridian staff are not eligible. (If you’ve been on our masthead, don’t enter.)
• Friends, relatives, and former teachers and students of current Meridian staff or its advisor are not eligible.
• Current subscribers may enter the Editors’ Prize Contest for the same $16 fee. Your subscription will be extended by one year (and you will remain, as always, one of our favorite people in the world, even if you get treated like everyone else for the purposes of the contest).

Zora Neale Hurston

Jump at the Sun

Zora Neale Hurston wrote the following letter to Countee Cullen, her friend and fellow writer, in 1943. In it, she discusses lynching, segregation, and her feelings about white “liberals.”

March 5, 1943

Dear Countee:

Thanks a million for your kind letter. I am always proud to have a word of praise from you because your friendship means a great deal to me. It means so much to me because I have never known you to make an insincere move, neither for personal gain, nor for malice growing out of jealousy of anyone else. Then too, you are my favorite poet now as always since you began to write. I have always shared your approach to art. That is, you have written from within rather than to catch the eye of those who were making the loudest noise for the moment. I know that hitch-hiking on band-wagons has become the rage among Negro artists for the last ten years at least, but I have never thumbed a ride and can feel no admiration for those who travel that way. I have pointed you out on numerous occasions as one whose integrity I respected, and whose example I wished to follow.

Now, as to segregation, I have no viewpoint on the subject particularly, other than a fierce desire for human justice. The rest of it is up to the individual. Personally, I have no desire for white association except where I am sought and the pleasure is mutual. That feeling grows out of my own self-respect. However blue the eye or yellow the hair, I see no glory to myself in the contact unless there is something more than the accident of race. Any other viewpoint would be giving too much value to a mere white hide. I have offended several “liberals” among the whites by saying this bluntly. I have been infuriated by having them ask me outright, or by strong implication if I am not happy over the white left-wing associating with Negroes. I always say no. Then I invariably ask why the association should give a Negro so much pleasure? Why any more pleasure than with a black “liberal”? They never fail to flare up at that which proves that they are paying for the devout worship that many Negroes give them in the cheap coin of patronage, which proves that they feel the same superiority of race that they claim to deny. Otherwise, why assume that they have done a noble deed by having contact with Negroes? Countee, I have actually had some of them to get real confidential and point out that I can be provided with a white husband by seeing things right! White wives and husbands have been provided for others, etc.

I invariably point out that getting hold of white men has always been easy. I don’t need any help to do that. I only wish that I could get everything else so easily as I can get white men. I am utterly indifferent to the joy of other Negroes who feel that a marriage across the line is compensation for all things, even conscience. The South must laugh and gloat at the spectacle and say “I told you so! That is a black person’s highest dream.” If a white man or woman marries a Negro for love that is all right with me, but a Negro who considers himself or herself paid off and honored by it is a bit too much for me to take. So I shall probably never become a “liberal.” Neither shall I ever let myself be persuaded to have my mind made up for me by a political job. I mean to live and die by my own mind. If that is cowardly, then I am a coward. When you come to analyze it, Countee, some of the stuff that has passed as courage among Negro “leaders” is nauseating. Oh, yes, they are right there with the stock phrases, which the white people are used to and expect, and pay no attention to anymore. They are rather disappointed if you do not use them. But if you suggest something real just watch them back off from it. I know that the Anglo-Saxon mentality is one of violence. Violence is his religion. He has gained everything he has by it, and respects nothing else. When I suggest to our “leaders” that the white man is not going to surrender for mere words what he has fought and died for, and that if we want anything substantial we must speak with the same weapons, immediately they object that I am not practical.

No, no indeed. The time is not ripe, etc. etc. Just point out that we are suffering injustices and denied our rights, as if the white people did not know that already! Why don’t I put something about lynchings in my books? As if all the world did not know about Negroes being lynched! My stand is this: either we must do something about it that the white man will understand and respect, or shut up. No whiner ever got any respect or relief. If some of us must die for human justice, then let us die. For my own part, this poor body of mine is not so precious that I would not be willing to give it up for a good cause. But my own self-respect refuses to let me go to the mourner’s bench. Our position is like a man sitting on a tack and crying that it hurts, when all he needs to do is to get up off it. A hundred Negroes killed in the streets of Washington right now could wipe out Jim Crow in the nation so far as the law is concerned, and abate it at least 60% in actuality. If any of our leaders start something like that then I will be in it body and soul. But I shall never join the cry-babies.

You are right in assuming that I am indifferent to the pattern of things. I am. I have never liked stale phrases and bodyless courage. I have the nerve to walk my own way, however hard, in my search for reality, rather than climb upon the rattling wagon of wishful illusions.

I suppose you have seen my denial of the statements of Douglas Gilbert of the World-Telegram. I know I made him sore. He is one of the type of “liberals” I spoke of. They are all Russian and want our help to put them in power in the U.S. but I know that we would be liquidated soon after they were in. They will have to get there the best way they can for all I care.

Cheerio, good luck, and a happy encounter (with me) in the near future.

Sincerely,
Zora

Document from Amistad Research Center, Tulane University.

“Zora Neale Hurston: Jump at the Sun” is available on DVD at www.newsreel.org

Time	Saturday, October 23 · 6:30pm - 8:30pm
Location	Southwest Arts Center Theater and Gallery, 915 New Hope Rd, Atlanta, GA 30331
Created By	Susan Ross
More Info	Join Sistagraphy for the opening reception and artist talk for our exhibit "Autonomy: A Conversation With Self", exploring the notion of women's identities, lives and cultures. The exhibit will be at Southwest Arts Center from Oct 23 - Nov 27, 2010, in conjunction with the Fulton County Arts Council and Atlanta Celebrates Photography.   For more information, visit our website, www.sistagraphy.org

On Black Sisters' Street

 

By Jeremy Weate

“They often talk about it: the standing and waiting to be noticed by the men strolling by, wondering which ones are likely to tip well, and which not.  From their glass windows they watch the lives outside, especially the men’s.  It is easy to tell those who have stumbled on the Schipperskwartier by mistake.  Tourists with their cameras slung around their necks, mostly Japanese tourists who do not know Antwerp, seduced by the antiquity of the city and deceived by the huge cathedral, wander off and then suddenly come face to face with a line-up of half-dressed women, different colours and different shades of those colours.  They look and, disbelieving, take another look.  Quickly. And then they walk away with embarrassed steps. Not wishing to be tainted by the lives behind the windows.”

 

I lived in Liege for over a year in the early 1990s.  This city in francophone southern Belgium is apparently unremarkable; a European urb that has yet to recover from the soot of its industrial past.  The Belgian equivalent of Stoke-on-Trent.  When my pal and I were trying to organise our Erasmus year studying philosophy in Europe, we had had something a little more glamorous in mind, and definitely something francophillic. Tours perhaps, or Strasbourg. Lyons at least. But Belgium was the line of least institutional resistance, and Liege was where we found ourselves.

 

Looking back, Liege sur Meuse has become a phantasmagoric city of the mind.  I’m grateful for the time I spent there. Hidden dreams and desires lurk still, beneath the threshold of my consciousness.  An infinity of stone steps reaching up, via occluded gardens, to medieval palaces where talented Belgo-Italians play bebop deep into the night in louche bars. Restaurants designed like swimming pools in deserted factories, with cultivated men playing huge board-games in surreal side rooms. A chiaroscuro pall cast over cobbled streets.  Piss swilling into drains from a thousand alfresco penises. Liege was and still is an unheimlich city, where mittel-Europa catholicism sprinkles its ritual powder like snow: in hidden corners, shrines to the Virgin, forever fresh with flowers; Paques celebrations that last for days, resolved only by alcohol, the sound of the drum and mistresses spent in the arms of mistresses. Between the cracks in the mottled seminarial stone, catholic yearnings forever sprouting forth.

Prostitution was part of it all.  There were two red light districts in Liege, one near the Gare Liege-Guillemans and the other, at the back of the Rue Leopold near the footbridge to the Outremeuse.  The one near Guillemans was the upmarket option: young European women in catalogue lingerie, with plastic stickers of accepted credit cards near the doors.  The other place was far more gothic; haggard vixens draped in leather and torn fishnet, idling for an impoverished cash-only clientele.

 

And so it all seemed to my innocent eyes.  Something in the place haunted me as the years passed.  The memories folded in each other: parallel love affairs with a woman and with jazz; the genesis of arcane philosophical detours; the design of Lucky Strike cigarette packets and sex for sale, behind glass. As the years passed, a gathering desire to be back in the depths of Europe, chimed intermittently, like the quiet bell in the far-off village.  There is a specific type of nostalgia for the foreign cities of youth which threatens the bounds of velleity: to wander once again to the place where vivid memory was set becomes an irresistible impulse.

 

And so, over a decade later, I headed back, on the pretext of visiting a friend in Maastricht.  The first thing I noticed at Guillemans was the red light district had gone.  Or maybe it was never in the place my memory had allocated it: a shear wrought by time on the mind’s cartography.  The second area was now populated with young black women, dancing and beckoning from behind the neon lit windows.  They were signs of a shift in the economy of desire.  I walked quickly on. The city had also developed; yawning cavities of rubble had been filled with glass and glitz. I struggled to find my way about and had no way of finding anyone that I had known.  The jazz club which soldered my ears to Miles and Coltrane was no more.  I was bereft in the primal scene of youthful departure.  The dissonance had added another layer to my strange desire for Liege. I must return again.

 

A few years later, in quite another part of Europe, I found myself, at a later stage of philosophical development.  I was bound for the Collegium Phenomenologicum, a philosophical retreat held each year in Citta di Castello in Perugia.  It was a thrill to go at last; I had never had the funds during my years as a doctoral student. Many of the celebrated “continental” philosophers participated, one year or another.

 

The getting there would be part of it: from Stanstead to Rome airport and then the train to Arezzo, with the final leg by bus.  As Tuscany skidded by from inside the metal and plastic interior of the train, it felt like a journey to the heart of things, or to the heart of thought. An English woman told me about her vineyard on a hill close by.

 

By the time I boarded the bus at Arezzo, the delight of travel had receded; I was by now keen to just arrive, find the hotel and meet my fellow penseurs.  As my mind began to slumber, the bus stopped in some forgotten village and about ten young black girls got on.  I was immediately perplexed: who were they?  Where did they come from?  Where were these girls going and what were they going to do?  They were about fourteen or fifteen at most.  They sat around me.  One had a Walkman and danced to the music.  They all wore jeans and had pink bags and chewed gum.  Their talk was girlish, their perfume garish.  I tried to listen, to understand what they were doing there, but the scene refused to be set.  They spoke in a mixture of fast pidgin and an African language I was yet to recognise. I turned back in my seat.  And then, as the bus sped on, out of the window I noticed girls in laybys, standing, staring up as we passed.  And the shock of what it all meant finally drenched me with ice-water.  Young African girls, a long way from home, selling their bodies, deep in the Italian countryside. 

 

But these girls are too young! The thought-protest repeated itself.  As the bus twisted and turned on its way to the historic town of Sansepolcro, each widened space would feature a young girl, advertising herself.  Always alone, always black, precipitously vulnerable against a stunning renaissance backdrop.  Sex and the shadow of death amid the cypresses.  And then, the road widened, and a man on a bicycle in racing gear, shaking hands goodbye with two young African women, emerging from behind a bush, a post-coital grin on his face.  Stop by stop, the girls alighted.  By the time we arrived in Citta di Castello, I was alone on the bus, shocked by had transpired.  Back then, I had no idea of the thriving sex trafficking of young Nigerian girls to Italy.

 

These are some of the capsules of time that flood back to me as I read Chika Unigwe’s devastating novel, On Black Sisters’ Street.  Unigwe’s second book follows the lives of four African sex workers, Sisi, Ama, Efe and Joyce, as they hustle their lives away in Antwerp, in Flemish speaking north Belgium.  Language and diamonds aside, a town probably quite a bit like Liege: ancient and industrial and solemn and leery.  The four women dream of glamorous futures while swilling beer and falling in and out of friendship.  As the narrative progresses, the cat-fight between them quells, for a specific reason.  Sisi has died and no one knows how or why.  The event brings the remaining trio together.  Their Madam gives them the day off.  Unigwe deftly weaves the back-stories together on that day of mourning as they sit on the black sofa in the unlovely living room. All the girls have been trafficked by Dele, a bear of a man with scant command of English and a shag pile carpet in his cavernous office on Randle Avenue in Lagos.  The stories the girls tell each other in those desolate hours after the death are knives sharp enough to slice into any human heart; Ama running from sex abuse at home, Joyce fleeing from Janjaweed ultra-violence in Sudan via a failed relationship in Lagos, Sisi and Efe from the gloomy horizons of impoverished destinies in the slums of Lagos.

 

The narrative structure of On Black Sisters’ Street is simple but highly effective.  In the aftermath of the death of a friend, shared stories among the ‘sisters’ begin the prolonged work of healing and the transition from non-self to selfhood. Sisi’s sordid end, and the sorrows that led each to Belgium are the two points of trauma the three young women share that bring them together.  The stories they tell begin the work of redemption. At the beginning and on arrival, each woman had taken on an assumed identity.  The transition from Nigeria to Belgium created an existential void.  In a sense, each woman left their identity behind, and had not yet taken up a new sense of self along with the fake passport that got them into Europe.  Each exists therefore in a sort of limbo or hiatus being, between a horror that was and a prophecy that is not yet.  In the new world of Antwerp, each develops their own coping mechanism.  For instance, when Sisi is finally found a window and can move out of working the bar:

 

“She learned to stand in her window and pose in heels that made her two inches taller.  She learned to smile, to pout, to think of nothing but the money she would be making.  She learned to rap at the window, hitting her ring hard against the glass on slow days to attract stragglers.  She learned to twirl to help them make up their minds, a swirling mass of chocolate flesh, mesmerising them, making them gasp and yearn for a release from the ache between their legs; a coffee-coloured dream luring them in with the promise of heaven. She let the blinking red and black neon lights of her booth comfort her, leading her to the Prophecy.”

 

The agency of the sex worker is affirmed in passages like this, at the same time as the distance between active self and pleasure is maintained.  Pleasure or even happiness remains deferred, in the form of the dream of the life that will take place once the mortgage to the fat pimp in Lagos is paid off. The novel is all the more powerful for the crystalline dramaturgy of Unigwe’s language.  For instance, in the scene where Oga Dele decides to try out Ama before she is packed on her way to Antwerp, she writes,

 

“He pulled Ama close and she could feel his penis harden through his trousers.

‘I shall sample you before you go!’ he laughed. The sound that stretched itself into a square that kept him safe. Lagos was full of such laughter.  Laughter that ridiculed the receiver for no reason but kept the giver secure in a cocoon of steel.”

 

Chika Unigwe’s On Black Sisters’ Street is a shockingly powerful read, exposing the lives of women who are far from home and from familiarity, using the power of story to weave a sense of belonging amid the cold strangeness of northern Europe.  It shocks me just as I was shocked back on that bus in Perugia. There is however a form of therapy at work in the text, for both the characters, and for the reader. For the women, the tragedy of Sisi’s passing is the moment when the surface is broken: artificial identities and stories that cannot be told cede to narrative integrity: three selves meet and recognise each other in that tawdry red living room. 

 

“They do nothing.  They are in unknown territory here, having always had a relationship which skimmed the surface like milk.  They have never before stirred each other enough to find out anything deep about their lives…The territory they are charting is still slippery.  They are only just beginning to know each other.”

 

And for us, we think back to all those other windows we may have passed.  For the stagnight wolf pack over from England, or the Japanese tourist missing his way, or for the alienated divorcee, or for the trembling virgin, or even the young philosopher, these streets present a gratuitous street porn, good for a laugh or even for a quick release.  And yet, behind those windows there are shattered lives and fractured dreams resolving to mend.  And there, amidst the shadows and the death, as Unigwe reminds us, we may find solidarity and even love. 

Posted by Jeremy

 

__________________________________

Cross section of guest at the commissioning of skill acquisition centre; National Agency for the Prohibition for Trafficking in Persons (NAPTIP)'s Director of Rehabilitation and Counselling, Lily Oguejofor, disclose the human trafficking statistics at the commissioning of a skills acquisition project established by the agency.

A Few Images of Precolonial West African Women

Below are some images Sugabelly put up on FB a while ago that I’m reposting here with her graceful permission. While writing about Nigerian historical dramas, I thought the point I was trying to make there would go down better if everyone saw actual images of African women from the precolonial days. Not everyone (Africans included) has seen images of those who were here before us depicted in a positive manner. After seeing this, you’ll understand why I was upset that the women in Apaadi did not have the kind of badass hairstyles shown in the images below.

I also had to include the inevitable images of women doing their hair,

Which reminds me I was debating with my fellow youth corpers yesterday and got into an argument with a man who claimed to know his African history but still opened his mouth to say that the first multi-storey house in Nigeria was built by the Europeans in Badagry. I vehemently disagreed with him and argued that Nigerians, West Africans and Africans had been building multi-storey houses before the Europeans even dreamt of building one here. The argument then changed to ‘yeah our ancestors may have built tall houses but they didn’t build stairs to lead up to higher floors’. How does that even make sense? How can someone build a tall two storey building and then forget to build a way to reach higher floors? *Shaking my head* I’ve concluded that there are different versions of history, everyone knows that but for the African, there is colonised history and uncolonised history. Learn your uncolonised histories please! Yes, Africans slept on beds before they were colonised. Yes, Africans wore clothes before they were colonised. Yes, Africans built multi-storey buildings before they were colonised. Yes, Africans had complex belief systems and religions before Islam and Christianity reached the continent, they were NOT worshipping any devils. And yes, Africans did crazy things when they fell in love before they were colonised.

Funmi Iyanda

Another Lagos Documentary (and a Little Something on Governance)

 

BBC has been killing it with the Nigeria documentaries. Via my twitter friend @419Positive, here's a great one featuring Funmi Iyanda, TV personality and probably one of my favorite people anywhere. She talks to major Lagosians like eccentric entertainer Charles "Charley Boy" Oputa and Lagos State Gov. Babatunde Fashola.

Lagos, unlike the rest of Nigeria, has always had some good luck with it's leaders. We (Yes, I'm from Lagos) have definitely been a lucky state, always having one thing tangible with which to attribute to a certain governor, from Jakande (the free high schools) to Marwa (the bicycle taxis), and Tinubu (the much-needed road splitting in Allen Avenue and ambulances on Third Mainland) to Fashola (the BRTs). My theory is that Lagos is the one place in the country where you do not want to lose face. A lot of major business in Nigeria is done there, so it adds a good amount of pressure on its leaders to make sure that you do a good enough job that you can still make an appearance in those high society parties, those tennis clubs, those functions in those hotels, be taken seriously as a leader as the city evolves in its role as epicenter of one of Africa's major economies. The last place in the world a Nigerian wants to be persona non grata is Lagos.

This line of thinking definitely has its holes. Among other problems, Lagos is quite socially segregated and the ghettos are still sprawling, so this societal pressure has not worked well for everyone (Maybe it's worked best for whom the likelihood of bumping into said governor at MUSON Center or Yoruba Tennis Club are quite high). Still, everyone I've heard from who lives in Lagos quite likes Gov. Fashola. His administration has made laudable changes to improve transportation, but I do not know much about his work on Lagos's ailing infrastructure, nor on his initiatives (I believe there have been some) to encourage small business. It's also worth mentioning that I have no idea how this pressure that I think works so well in Lagos holds out in a commercial area in other regions of Nigeria, like Port Harcourt, for example.

I think I'm right on the merits and I'll stand my ground until corrected, but I'm curious if there is a correlation at all between the number of major cities in a country -- and therefore pockets of industry where a sizable middle class can thrive -- and the likelihood of there being good governance practices.

 

Posted by Saratu

 

I Try

When I See You

She Ain't Right For You