Traveling to Lagos Advice

Appendix

Understanding Lagos

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

• Michael Palin in Nigeria - great 3 part docuseries (watch for free from a UK VPN)
• 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 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.