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Restless Ground
by Giles Omezi [ 2003 ]
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Lagos, - borrowed, imposed name, Portuguese trading post, then; Lagos anarchic, performative, theatre, city, now. The city starts its week on Saturday, it seems, with the event of union, the wedding, shifting into crescendo gear in the promise of multiple unities, two becoming one, rites of permission granted by archaic threads connected to territories beyond the city. Structures of authority from the villages nudge and impose wisdoms and desires. The city accommodates these, appropriates and melds on Saturday, sequences of events and everyday uplifting the Lagosians hope on this day; indeed Saturday starts the week. The city as concentrated production unit grafts onto a latticework of union rituals accessibility a paradox in city which is much about exclusion and separation. Its structure reinforced by the dualism of control and tension between the Federal and State governments. Territorial seeds planted by empire. Exploitation forcing the colonisation of landmass edge and Atlantic, strategically anticipating flight and proximity of naval guns; pith helmet + wily native. General Babangidas move to Abuja and General Abachas entrenching the Federal government here, polarising the proximities of mutual suspicions; the Federal government provider + oppressor, the Lagosian - haranguer + oppressor. A move in the opposite direction inland. Adding another source of power projected for the city to contend with. Distance achieved by technological supremacy and conquest, expressed in Lagoss segregations, seeps into, becoming entrenched in the conscious as a series of mythologised icons the invisibility of the attackers is remembered for later in the novel by one of its 1 survivors ! first they came, the invincible white, and dealt death from afar.. at extremes the, metropolitan centres of empire (old + new) that was London, the great metropolis that ruled my world from afar without 2 letting me into any of these secrets, without admitting that, like me, it was also vulnerable.. distance, skewing perceptions, thrusting Abuja as the new axis onto the Lagosian. Again its surface permitted another layering. simultaneously, the supporters of Chief Gani Fawhenmi and other veterans of the prodemocracy struggle had taken the police on their word and had started to infiltrate the cordons thrown 3 around Yaba and Ojuelegba axis, waiting for their leaders to signal the commencement of the rally and still accommodates the start of every week ; Saturday. The sinews which hold the city lie not within the sensed and absorbed but in the self-exclusion and it s co existent connecting web which sustain this paradox. Lagos becomes just like any other international city with an airport whose whirr and pull appeal to global capitalism. But there is in the makeup of the citys identity an elusive perfomative dimension which defies the 4 logic of global capitalism. This surface possesses an intrinsic value intensified by the urgency of its exploitation; animated territories, cultivated tracts and tufts test the perceived polarities of husbandry and production line in their proximities and juxtapositions. Contrasted, the void of dwelling imposes a pause, a slurring of the frenetic possibilities of surfaces. Necessity forces upwards the qualitative value of these surfaces of outside, tacitly acknowledged by the stark will to be. Valued thus, the urgent programmatic layers cannot be contained by conventional boundaries, which exist to express imposed norms of ownership and territory. Surface programme spills from dwelling territory, to street creating taut exertions on these conventions; hybridizing, reconfiguring and ultimately appropriating the disparate in an inescapable collision of psyches. As we behold this cacophony of energy, do our references allow an accommodation of the whole or a rejection? We are obliged however to absorb and dissect the accelerating flux in the performance of existence to anticipate possible

configurations, adjust the existing and keep in step with the heaving of the collectives will. This programmatic exploitation of surface, its exertions of productivity, condensed within the typology of compound, occupies the centrality of the collective consciousness. As phenomenon, it appears to morph as it occupies varying scales possible. At the scale of the city, notions of territory, inherently more complex, become aggressively tested by the phenomenas qualitative exploitation. Protagonists (the collectives will), driven by co-existing universal needs of capitalist energies, and the reality of survival. Paradoxically, whilst capitalizing energies would then be assumed to define territory as a finite item of exploitation, its collision with perceived collective ownership of state, renders the state impotent; a mere stomping ground exploited voraciously as surface. This assault blurs the inherited definitions of state in the physical manifestation of its will and authority. Ultimately, the structures and matrices no longer project but become mere latticework over which the complexity of collective survival is draped over and subsumed. Lagos, in its present guise, consists of fragments of these phenomena; events, reconfigurations, collisions, appropriations; the frenetic anarchy of the bus stop, motor park, mask an order which has held the whole together in its lack of strategic cohesion by a sheer will to be. The question mark on the state points to the possibilities of the future, in our quest to impact the flux in the city. Emergence, of these realities are however not unique to Lagos as City or the society which it holds, all we see in Lagos is an intense instance of the mans latest redefinition of the structures of state and orders globally; the collective will of the individual appears to take on a frighteningly powerful latency which is beginning to emerge. Challenging the perceived dominance of the state and corporation, this collective will may be rendering the Orwellian grip these systems aspire to nothing short of a myth. A new order seems to be emerging, a triumph of both capitalist and socialist models of order at once; both have been questioned, interrogated, tested and it appears have been appropriated and exploited, depositing residues within our psyche. Lagos needs to be dissected, not just physically, but at levels which are ineffable. Clues may emerge which surely permit the future to harness the real energy of humanity, the will to be.

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Lindqvist Sven Exterminate all the brutes. Pg 68 para3 (Granta London 1998). Achebe Chinua Home and Exile. Pg 101 para 2 (Canongate Books Ltd. Edinburgh 2003). Oshun Olawale The Open Grave (Josel London 2002). 4 Okwui Enwenzor Lagos 1955-1970 Century City Art + Culture in the Modern Metropolis.pg 56 para 1 (Tate Gallery publishing Ltd. 2001)

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This paper has been published on Scribd by the BUKKA TRUST [2013]

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Facilitating a dialogue on spatial issues through a variety of prisms: cultural, art, literary and the more conventional forms of architectural and urban notation.