Bukka [www.bukka.org] has organised a panel discussion to speculate on the urban future of the city of Lagos in Nigeria. 'Mega City or Crisis City?' [Please see ArchiAfrika's Agenda and News posting]. Lagos, often viewed as a city in crisis, its urban infrastructure barely able to support and add meaningfully to the lives of its citizens, is the fastest growing city in the world. In parallel, the city has attracted the attention of a wide range of international urban practitioners and thinkers as well as the international print and electronic media gaining a degree of notoriety for its supposedly anarchic and extreme urban condition. A documentary recently produced by the BBC 'Welcome to Lagos' set out, it claims, to explore the sheer energy and mass of people located in the city eking out a living. But, in a city where extremely wealthy districts like Victoria Garden City also exist does the choice to not include this other side in portraying Lagos' extreme urban condition just feed into the Western media's relentless portrayal of a poverty stricken Africa?
Will Anderson, the series producer of the BBC Three part documentary 'Welcome To Lagos', in an article titled 'Welcome to Lagos - It'll defy your expectations' published on the BBC TV Blog [http://www.bbc.co.uk/blogs/tv/2010/04/welcome-to-lagos-itll-defy-you.shtml] said he was driven to make the series by a belief that there was more to Lagos than the 'noisy, dirty, dangerous city' that most people in the West imagine 'probably because all we ever hear about it on the news is the corruption, religious violence, and dodgy email scams'.
Despite living in the slums of the fastest growing city in the world, in a different scale to most in the West, with very little income, Anderson stated about his experience in making the documentary: 'we realised then that all our characters, wherever they lived, however extreme their working environment, went through all of the same things which we do in the West - love, heartbreak, marriages, births, deaths etc... And yes, they may be terribly poor, but that doesn't stop them being human and, if the films have succeeded, then I hope they've succeeded in showing that.' Showing what Anderson describes as being 'more resourceful, energetic, and optimistic than most people in the West.'
Wole Soyinka, a world respected writer and activist who won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1986, said in an article published by The Guardian newspaper (UK) the programme displayed "the worst aspects of colonialist and patronising" attitudes to Africa.
"What I saw I found very unjust and sensationalist. What I saw was not an honest reportage. The problem is the title – it programmes the mind of the viewer in advance and sets the overall context.
"One could do a similar programme about London in which you go to a poor council estate and speaking of poverty and knifings. Or you could follow a hobo selling iron on the streets of London. But you wouldn't call it Welcome to London because that would give the viewer the impression that that is all London is about."
His remarks were echoed by the government of Lagos, one of 36 states in Nigeria's federation. Opeyemi Bamidele, the city's commissioner for information and strategy, has submitted a formal complaint to the BBC calling on the corporation to commission an alternative series to "repair the damage we believe this series has caused to our image".
A BBC spokeswoman said: "Welcome to Lagos explores the impact of the massive rate of global urbanisation in one of the fastest growing mega-cities in the world. Its aim was to give a voice to those living at the sharp end of this ever-expanding population and highlight the resourcefulness, determination and creativity of those adapting to life in this most extreme of urban environments.
However Adeyemi Adisa asks: 'Why cant BBC show a documentary about the ongoing gigantic projects like EKO ATLANTIC CITY or LEKKI FREE TRADE ZONE?' (comment nr 3 in response to Andersons Blog post).
Is the series 'Welcome to Lagos' a realisitc portrayal of Lagos? Of 'resourcefulness, determination and creativity' of the majority of citizens making up the 'Mega' city? Or does it pander to stereotypical portrayals of the crisis-stricken African continent?
The series can be watched on YouTube [Please see below]
ArchiAfrika will explore this debate further in our newsletter in the near future.
