And music is everywhere, the beats and electronic melismatic vocals of acts such as Burna Boy, who performed at Coachella last year, thumping from speakers. By night the lagoon glows with open-air waterside bars and restaurants. The rains have ceased, and the hotels teem with the local style set Aké Arts and Book Festival draws the best writers from the continent and its diaspora, including Booker Prize winner Bernardine Evaristo and sci-fi talent Nnedi Okorafor. October and November are the months to be in Lagos. What is it with these people and law degrees?” Look at the fashion industry, the film industry-and everyone has a law degree. It's a blank canvas with about 21 million inhabitants.
When I first visited 10 years ago, I thought, Oh, my God, I can't go back! The energy, the starkness. “The city's an experiential space,” said Hunderson, Alára's manager, a shaven-headed Haitian New Yorker who has lived in Lagos since 2018.
#MAJESTY GOLD HD LAG GOG WINDOWS#
It may be set opposite a decrepit property on Victoria Island, but stepping inside, I was dazzled by the imposing central staircase backed by huge windows with light pouring on leather goods and YSL clothes. Lagos's charm is concealed in its interiors, such as Alára, a gorgeous boutique by David Adjaye, a principal architect behind Washington, D.C.'s National Museum of African American History & Culture. There are flashes of beauty in the university campus and the Third Mainland Bridge, which snakes along the blue lagoon and sparkles in the twilight, but the panorama of '70s and '80s oil-boom buildings is as gray as the tropical thunderclouds, and the pavement is cleaved by open ditches.
#MAJESTY GOLD HD LAG GOG FULL#
To be a cosmopolitan Lagosian is to know the full spectrum of the human conditionĪesthetically, it wins no prizes. Nearly everyone had a side hustle, with even university lecturers supplementing their income by hawking Chinese cure-all teas on public transport. In a nation where the middle class has atrophied and the rich got rich very quickly, the poor were not irrational for believing that prosperity was within their reach. If Lagos were a person, she would wear a Gucci jacket and a cheap hair weave, cruising in her Porsche over rain-flooded potholes.
#MAJESTY GOLD HD LAG GOG HOW TO#
It was a steam pot of vehicle fumes and go-slow traffic jams that vendors wove through, selling anything from squash rackets to books with titles like How to Get Fat, while self-styled preachers on the distinctive yellow danfo (minibuses) laid seven shades of Jesus on their fellow passengers an urban jungle with the Darwinian survival ethos of Texas and the infrastructure of Kinshasa, where islands of staggering wealth existed without shame in a lake of poverty. I was intimidated by the density and impatience of the crowds and the kamikaze okada-motorcycle taxis-that flew at me from every direction.
The last time I took an extended trip here was in 2007, at the beginning of a four-and-a-half-month odyssey around the country for my book, Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria.