it was midnight on Saturday and the club was heating up. Some men were decked out in black tie, others in Ankara print caftans and matching fezzes. They leaned on the bar in double-breasted sports coats and Windsor knots, and glided across the dance floor in high-dollar sneakers, draped in silver and gold chains, eyeballing women of all shapes and shades who dazzled in designer gowns, slinky dresses, short shorts or miniskirts, by turns accentuating or revealing ample curves, long legs or an elegant neckline.
It was my second night in Lagos, Nigeria, and once more I was in a room of clinking glasses and rumbling bass, a room filled with Nigeria’s upper crust bouncing to indigenous Afro-pop. Everything was washed in hot pink. Beams from a bank of rotating lights glinted off gaslight chandeliers and mirrored ornaments behind the bar. Bottles of Dom Pérignon set in buckets of dry ice left vapor trails as they streamed from the bar in the arms of statuesque African beauties conveying them to booths manned by oil or telecom executives, real estate developers, entrepreneurs and their guests.
Many of them, still in their 20s and 30s, were already millionaires, and all of them were hustlers. This was Lagos (pronounced “lay-gos”) after all, and one conceit is that everybody here has three hustles: An oil mogul may also own a restaurant while bankrolling a recording session with an up-and-coming MC. On the street level it’s no different. In this export-dependent, corrupt, dangerous city, whether you’re living high or low, one job never feels like enough.
