Welcome to Lagos: A Journalist Review By Sam Wollaston

• This rubbish dump in Lagos has shops, bars, restaurants – and even a barber

By Sam Wollaston (The Guardian)

Fifty years ago, Nigeria's capital, Lagos, was a city the size of today's Bradford, with a population of a little less than 300,000 people. Everyone said it was lovely. Now 16 million people live there: it is one of a new breed of megacities in a world that is abandoning the countryside. And it grows by 600,000 a year. That's like chucking in Glasgow every 12 months. It's a monster, force-fed to morbid obesity, but with the bone structure of a baby. It can't function properly, just lies there growing, groaning, and threatening to burst. No one says Lagos is lovely any more.

It is extraordinary, though, as is this documentary, Welcome to Lagos (BBC2), which zooms in on a handful of those 16 million. Bottom of the pile, literally, are the scavengers at the Olusosun rubbish dump, human vultures who pick through the stinking detritus with metal claws, looking for stuff that can be recycled and sold: tins, plastic, copper wire, rubber, clothes, anything. In the dry season, fires often break out, adding toxic smoke and mortal danger to a day's work. And in the rainy season, the place turns into a slimy netherworld.

Up the road, the Oluwainshola cattle market and slaughter yard is a different kind of hell. Here the smell is not of rot, but of death, and of the fear that precedes death. Once a price has been agreed, animals are dragged off to a pit where they are brought to their knees and executed. Ladies then take the heads – sometimes two at a time – away in plastic basins balanced on their own heads. It's a strange sight, a woman with a woman's head but then with two cows' heads on top, four horns in all, walking around, like something Odysseus might have come up against. The animals' hooves are hacked off, the carcasses flayed, the innards scooped out, and carted away in plastic basins. Even the contents of the stomach are saved for fertiliser. And underfoot, spilled blood and faeces mix into the mud. Mmmm.

Amazingly, and refreshingly, this is not a misery film, though. It's surprisingly upbeat, a study of ingenuity and how people adapt to survive in places they shouldn't really be able to function in at all. The characters are remarkably unperturbed by their lot. At the dump, Eric, a young musician, sifts through the rubbish to make enough money to record his album. He's a bit of a lad, to be honest, but he always has a smile on his face. People live on the dump as well as work – there are shops, bars, restaurants, a barber. It has its own system of law enforcement. A lack of infrastructure doesn't mean that society can't exist.

Eric, a musician, hopes to fund an album through what he finds in the dump. Photograph: BBC/Keo Films/Keo Films

At the cattle market, Gabriel's job is to process the blood to make chicken feed. He collects it in oil drums. Then he burns old tyres – it needs to be rubber, you can't get the necessary high temperature with wood – to boil the blood until it's black and solid. It's hard work, stirring the thickening blood, with the intense heat and thick black smoke. But Gabriel enjoys his job he says. He actually loves it! Can that be right? Maybe he's really a British internet start-up mogul, in Nigeria for a new Channel 4 philanthropic ego trip, Secret Slumdog Millionaire does Africa. But then he'd be wiping away the tears because of the injustice of it all, instead of stirring away with a bloody great grin.

Welcome to Lagos is so much better than Secret Slumdog Millionaire – for one because it's actually about the people in the slums, not someone wanting to be seen to be doing good. But also because it's not all hand-wringing and bleeding-heart charidee. It doesn't pretend life is brilliant for these people, but nor does it feel sorry for them. It's more a celebration of their resourcefulness. And with the world going that way – populations coagulating into these out-of-control megacities – we all probably need to learn a bit of that.

I'm heading out there now, because I've seen a gap in the market, the cattle market at Oluwainshola, that is. They say that, what with Gabriel doing his thing with the blood, nothing is wasted, every part of the animal is used – apart from the hair, that is, which is thrown away. I'm thinking there's got to be something you can do with a cow's hair isn't there? Hair extensions? Wigs? For wags?


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