Visas and ArrivalNavigating LagosEat Drink SleepSights and EntertainmentWeekend TripsHealth and SafetyUnderstanding Nigeria
Appendix
Moving to LagosUnderstanding Nigeria
While you can visit Lagos without much prior knowledge, your visit will be much richer if you learn a bit about Nigeria’s history and rich diversity of peoples and cultures.
Read
- Nigeria: What Everyone Needs to Know – great concise primer
- Nigeria: Dancing on the Brink – older but still good
- Formation: The Making of Nigeria from Jihad to Amalgamation – awesome book that goes much more in depth of pre-amalgamation history than the previous two. Highly recommend.
- All of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's books: Americanah, Half a Yellow Sun, and Purple Hibiscus
- Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria
- Lagos (Landscapes of the Imagination) – very long but great
- Things Fall Apart - a classic
- Born on a Tuesday - insight into Northern Nigeria
Watch
- Tayo Aina is a great Nigerian youtuber. Check out:
- Makoko: What's Inside the floating slum of Lagos Nigeria?
- At 26 Years, She owns a Multimillion Dollar Furniture Company in Nigeria.
- Ludo Liu makes great videos of street life here. Check out
- Dive into the belly of Africa's most populated city
- Lost Inside Africa's Biggest Auto Spare Parts Market
- Driving in the rich neighborhoods of Lekki, Ikoyi, VI
- Finding Fela - documentary about Fela Kuti’s life
- Nigeria's struggle to break the 'oil curse' - 2024 short documentary from the Financial Times
- Take Light - 2018 documentary on issues in the power sector
- The Legend of the Underground 2021 documentary on the discrimination and activism of the LGTBT community
Listen
- Here’s a playlist of some top hits recently. Nigerian music is taking over the world!
- Here’s Spotify’s Top 50 in Nigeria
- We’re partial to older Nigerian music. This album of Nigerian Funk from the 70s was on repeat for months at our house.
Language
- You don’t need to know any pidgin English or Yoruba to get by here, but if you watch a few pidgin english videos you’ll recognize some of the more common phrases during your stay: how far, abeg, sha, omo, abi, na wa o, etc.
- Greetings here are used much more frequently than in the US. Life can be hard and basic courtesies go a long way so on every call or text interaction get used to starting with good morning, good afternoon, and good evening.
- “Welcome” or “Well done” are also greetings. Take them less literally than you might in the US / Europe.
- Similarly, “Do you get” or “Do you understand” are not literal questions here. They’re equivalent to “ya know?” in American English.
← Previous