Lagos, Nigeria
by Seb Emina

The key rule during any long-haul flight is this: striking up small talk with the stranger next to you is acceptable only at the very end of the journey. The reasons for this are obvious. They are to do with the dangers of forced proximity and the fact that the ice, once broken, can never be unbroken again.

When the man to my right (vertically striped shirt, gold bracelet) turned and asked, “first time in Lagos?” it was simultaneous to the ping prompting us to fasten our seatbelts in preparation for the descent: exquisite timing. I said yes. We talked. He was a property developer based in London, here to visit family. I got the sense this was a quintessential arriving-in-Lagos-from-Europe sort of conversation. He was both besotted and frustrated with the country of his birth. “People always talk about Nigeria as rich in natural resources,” he said, “but that’s not the country’s biggest asset. Its biggest asset is human resources. When Nigeria has a decent infrastructure, so people have the freedom to flourish, it’ll be like the United States in Africa.”

As far as the infrastructure went, I soon saw what he meant. Ninety minutes after meeting the driver and the press liaison from Lagos Fashion Week we were still in the airport’s exit system. Earlier that afternoon a rainstorm had clogged the roads. The traffic was a mess, seemingly without any prospect of clearing up before night-time. I didn’t really care. It’s hard to describe the sheer bombardment of the new that greets a Lagos debutante when they look out of the car window. Pretty much everything you can imagine exists in some form at the roadside. It’s not only moped taxis, food stands and homeware merchants: at one point I saw a woman sitting beneath a parasol with a desktop computer and a banner advertising ‘PR and marketing services’.

I couldn’t get over the music playing on the car stereo. It was incredible. I asked the driver, who was wearing a Hawaiian shirt, and the liaison, who it turned out was something of an Instagram star, what it was. She said it was South African house music, which confused me as I don’t like house music. Later I wished I had asked for more information like artist names or track titles as no online search for ‘South African house music’ has yielded anything like the sound of what they were playing, which was hypnotic and puzzlingly complicated but not in a way that felt overthought.

Four hours later we arrived at the hotel, which was only 30 kilometers from the airport: it had been a long-haul drive. My editor was in the foyer. “We’re going to a gallery opening,” he said, “are you coming?” I turned around and got back in the car.

• Seb Emina is the editor in chief of bookish magazine The Happy Reader and author of The Breakfast Bible, a breakfasters’ compendium of recipes, essays and miscellany.
  
  Photography by Harley Weir, top, and Stephen Tayo, below.