{"http:\/\/dx.doi.org\/10.14288\/1.0448637":{"http:\/\/vivoweb.org\/ontology\/core#departmentOrSchool":[{"value":"Creative and Critical Studies, Faculty of (Okanagan)","type":"literal","lang":"en"}],"http:\/\/www.europeana.eu\/schemas\/edm\/dataProvider":[{"value":"DSpace","type":"literal","lang":"en"}],"https:\/\/open.library.ubc.ca\/terms#degreeCampus":[{"value":"UBCO","type":"literal","lang":"en"}],"http:\/\/purl.org\/dc\/terms\/creator":[{"value":"Atolagbe, Olusegun","type":"literal","lang":"en"}],"http:\/\/purl.org\/dc\/terms\/issued":[{"value":"2025-04-28T19:26:52Z","type":"literal","lang":"en"},{"value":"2025","type":"literal","lang":"en"}],"http:\/\/vivoweb.org\/ontology\/core#relatedDegree":[{"value":"Master of Arts - MA","type":"literal","lang":"en"}],"https:\/\/open.library.ubc.ca\/terms#degreeGrantor":[{"value":"University of British Columbia","type":"literal","lang":"en"}],"http:\/\/purl.org\/dc\/terms\/description":[{"value":"My thesis engages anew with the representation and storyworld of Lagos in two major contemporary Nigerian city novels. Since 1954 to the present, the ways in which Lagos has manifested in literary imagination have often given it a larger-than-life presence. Scholarly debates around the spatial representation of Lagos have led to a number of affective approaches, which focus on structures of entropy, estrangement, and the ungraspable. In contrast, the twenty-first-century city novels explored in this thesis present a distinct narratological shift. Adopting the socio-spatial dialectic phrase \u201cknowing one\u2019s place\u201d to read Everyday is for the Thief (2007) by Teju Cole and Welcome to Lagos (2017) by Chibundu Onuzo, this thesis offers a spatio-temporal aesthetic practices of \"Orientation\" and \"Participation\" as a strategy and tactic, respectively, for readers to think with Lagos city novels and African cities. My MA thesis begins with the introduction, where I regard the notion of knowing one\u2019s place as an appreciation of the possibilities and potential of the urban built environment, as well as a reading process. I also define the concepts of orientation and participation here. The first research chapter, titled \u201cOrientation,\u201d focuses on Teju Cole\u2019s novel to investigate how the narrator is immersed in the psychogeography of Lagos. Through a spatial orientation of the city\u2019s signs, symbols, taxis, places, buildings, and individuals, the narrator finds their way in the labyrinth of Lagos. \u201cParticipation\u201d is the second research chapter, where I turn to Chibundu Onuzo\u2019s novel. Here, I show how five diverse characters collectively interact with the city of Lagos through autogestion and participatory practices. Finally, the concluding section, from the angle of \u201cLagos Thought,\u201d reflects on my interdisciplinary analysis of the two city novels to answer: what does it mean to think with the city, and how can location be used to the best advantage of a story? Ultimately, my work contributes to the narratology and representations of Lagos novels in the twenty-first century. Offering the ideas of orientation and participation, I propose them as urban thought to inquire Lagos city novels.","type":"literal","lang":"en"}],"http:\/\/www.europeana.eu\/schemas\/edm\/aggregatedCHO":[{"value":"https:\/\/circle.library.ubc.ca\/rest\/handle\/2429\/90865?expand=metadata","type":"literal","lang":"en"}],"http:\/\/www.w3.org\/2009\/08\/skos-reference\/skos.html#note":[{"value":"  Knowing One\u2019s Place: Orientation, Participation, and Lagos Novels.  by Olusegun Atolagbe  A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF  MASTER OF ARTS  in   THE COLLEGE OF GRADUATE STUDIES (English)   THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Okanagan)   April 2025   \u00a9 Olusegun Atolagbe, 2025 ii  The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the College of Graduate Studies for acceptance, a thesis entitled:  Knowing One\u2019s Place: Orientation, Participation, and Lagos Novels.  submitted by Olusegun Atolagbe in partial fulfillment of the requirements of  the degree of Master of Arts.    Dr. Sakiru Adebayo, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies  Supervisor Dr. Jennifer Gustar, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies  Supervisory Committee Member Dr. David Jefferess, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies  Supervisory Committee Member Dr. Bonar Buffam, Irving K. Barber Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences  University Examiner           iii  Abstract My thesis engages anew with the representation and storyworld of Lagos in two major contemporary Nigerian city novels. Since 1954 to the present, the ways in which Lagos has manifested in literary imagination have often given it a larger-than-life presence. Scholarly debates around the spatial representation of Lagos have led to a number of affective approaches, which focus on structures of entropy, estrangement, and the ungraspable. In contrast, the twenty-first-century city novels explored in this thesis present a distinct narratological shift. Adopting the socio-spatial dialectic phrase \u201cknowing one\u2019s place\u201d to read Everyday is for the Thief (2007) by Teju Cole and Welcome to Lagos (2017) by Chibundu Onuzo, this thesis offers a spatio-temporal aesthetic practices of \"Orientation\" and \"Participation\" as a strategy and tactic, respectively, for readers to think with Lagos city novels and African cities. My MA thesis begins with the introduction, where I regard the notion of knowing one\u2019s place as an appreciation of the possibilities and potential of the urban built environment, as well as a reading process. I also define the concepts of orientation and participation here. The first research chapter, titled \u201cOrientation,\u201d focuses on Teju Cole\u2019s novel to investigate how the narrator is immersed in the psychogeography of Lagos. Through a spatial orientation of the city\u2019s signs, symbols, taxis, places, buildings, and individuals, the narrator finds their way in the labyrinth of Lagos. \u201cParticipation\u201d is the second research chapter, where I turn to Chibundu Onuzo\u2019s novel. Here, I show how five diverse characters collectively interact with the city of Lagos through autogestion and participatory practices. Finally, the concluding section, from the angle of \u201cLagos Thought,\u201d reflects on my interdisciplinary analysis of the two city novels to answer: what does it mean to think with the city, and how can location be used to the best advantage of a story? Ultimately, my work contributes to the narratology and representations of Lagos novels in the twenty-first century. Offering the ideas of orientation and participation, I propose them as urban thought to inquire Lagos city novels.    iv  Lay Summary My thesis explores Teju Cole\u2019s Every Day Is for the Thief and Chibundu Onuzo\u2019s Welcome to Lagos\u2014novels that \u201cthink with Lagos,\u201d to imagine new ways of knowing the city. By centering the concepts of orientation and participation, I argue that Cole and Onuzo invite readers and critics to see Lagos in storytelling, as a place where the boundaries between material geography and narrative invention is blurred, and where the act of reading becomes its own form of urban engagement. My thesis contributes to the narratology and representations of Lagos novels in the twenty-first century, and offers these concepts as strategic elucidation and everyday tactics characters adopt to think with the urban realities of Lagos.             v  Preface This dissertation is an original, unpublished, and independent work by the author, Olusegun A. Atolagbe. Generative AI tools were not used at any stage of the research process.                        vi  Table of Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iii Lay Summary ............................................................................................................................... iv Preface ............................................................................................................................................ v Table of Contents ......................................................................................................................... vi List of Figures .............................................................................................................................. vii Acknowledgements .................................................................................................................... viii Dedication ..................................................................................................................................... ix Introduction: Knowing One\u2019s Place ............................................................................................ 1 Review of the Literature and Socio-Spatial Dialectic ................................................................. 1 Knowing One\u2019s Place as a Reading Process .............................................................................. 6 Defining Orientation and Participation...................................................................................... 9 Methodology: Interdisciplinary Urban Reading ...................................................................... 13 Chapter 1: Teju Cole\u2019s Everyday is for the Thief ..................................................................... 16 Orientation................................................................................................................................... 16 Unpacking Nigeria\u2019s \u201cOT\u201d (Orientation) ................................................................................ 20 Orientation in Place: Built World of Lagos as Interlocutor ..................................................... 24 The Labyrinth as Conceptual Metaphor of Orientation ........................................................... 45 Chapter 2: Chibundu Onuzo\u2019s Welcome to Lagos ................................................................... 50 Participation. ............................................................................................................................... 50 Strangers in Motion: Arrival and Disorientation ..................................................................... 55 City in Motion: Street Politics and Mobility as Participation .................................................. 61 Corruption in the City: The Betrayal of Lagos ......................................................................... 69 Bridges and Abandoned Buildings: The Subversion of Infrastructural Pessimism .................. 72 People as Infrastructure: The Power of Participation ............................................................. 78 Conclusion: Lagos Thought ....................................................................................................... 81 Works Cited ................................................................................................................................. 87    vii  List of Figures Fig 1: \u201cLagos, Nigeria. Road sign for Ikorodu Road and Lagos University\u201d .............................. 27 Fig 2: \"Health and Wellness in Africa. Danfo buses operating in Lagos, Nigeria, at one of the rugged bus stops (Obalende)\". ...................................................................................................... 30 Fig 3: \"Ilojo Bar also known as Olaiya House, yellow buses (danfo) parked in front.\". .............. 34 Fig 4: \"This is the entrance gate to National Museum, Lagos, Nigeria, when you want to access the inner museum.\". ...................................................................................................................... 36 Fig 5: \"Market in Mushin, Lagos.\" ............................................................................................... 39 Fig 6: \"Welcome to Lagos (Yoruba: Agba Meta or Aro Meta) is an Art Deco statue of three Lagos white-cap chiefs located in Lagos. ..................................................................................... 60 Fig 7: \"When traffic hits at Ojuelegba, Under Bridge.\". .............................................................. 65 Fig 8: \"Aerial view of Makoko Slum in Lagos, Nigeria.\". ........................................................... 68 Fig 9: \"Under bridge Obalende, Lagos.\". ..................................................................................... 74   viii  Acknowledgements Since my project is about place and space, I begin by acknowledging my presence on the traditional, ancestral, and unceded tm\u0313 x\u02b7u\u0301 la\u0294x\u02b7 (land) of the syilx\/Okanagan people, who have stewarded this territory since time immemorial. I recognize their enduring relationship with this land and express my deepest respect for the privilege of living and working here.  I extend my heartfelt gratitude to the Department of English and Cultural Studies and the Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies for their generous support through the Okanagan Graduate Research Funding, which enabled me to pursue this project over the past two years. To Dr. Sakiru Adebayo, my thesis supervisor: thank you for your unwavering guidance, patience, and brilliance. Our weekly Thursday meetings, your incisive feedback, and your relentless encouragement transformed my ideas into a cohesive work. Your mentorship opened doors to opportunities, and your calm presence eased every moment of doubt. Thank you for the timely reads and responses, I really appreciate them and I feel very lucky to have completed my studies under your supervision. Also, I enjoyed your Memory Studies and Black Intellectual Tradition class profoundly, thank you for your wisdom.  I am deeply indebted to my supervisory committee, Dr. Jennifer Gustar and Dr. David Jefferess, for their invaluable insights and significant critiques. Dr. Gustar, your kindness, your enthusiasm and the generative conversations for my project fueled many breakthroughs, and Dr. Jefferess, your warmth and expertise in academic writing reshaped my thinking. Thank you both. To the other faculty at UBCO who shaped my journey: Dr. Emily Murphy, thank you. Dr. Maria Alexopoulous, your teachings on affect theory and urban spaces expanded my horizons. Dr. Allison Hargreaves, for your insights on precarity of place and relationality, I say thank you. Dr. Lisa Grekul and Dr. George Grinnell, my TA supervisors, thank you for mentoring me in teaching with grace and effective practices. Also, Dr. Niyi Asiyanbi, thank you for the homely love and always considering me for opportunities, you are a gem Sir!  And to my family, thank you for the moral support and prayers. Also, my dear friend, Mrs. Maggie Wileman, your endless generosity: the books, the gifts, the check-ins, celebrations, and laughter, kept me grounded. You are a light in every storm.  ix  Dedication To God almighty, always reminding me of His everlasting love. 1  Introduction: Knowing One\u2019s Place In the first instance, Orientation, Participation, and Lagos Novels is conceived as a contribution to the study of Nigerian literature and the broader field of African urban narratives, focusing on the material and infrastructural possibilities of Lagos as a space that simultaneously embodies constraint and transformation. In the broadest terms, this project examines how Lagos, as both a local and global urban space, is celebrated for its cosmopolitan character and its symbolic role as a microcosm of Nigeria\u2019s cultural, political, and economic complexities. Review of the Literature and Socio-Spatial Dialectic For over seventy years, Lagos has been a fascinating subject of literary exploration, appearing in novels, poetry, drama, and travel writing. While the novel remains the dominant form\u2014perhaps due to its capacity to capture the city's dynamism and contradictions\u2014other genres have also shaped its literary imagination. Novelistic depictions of Lagos by Nigerians began as early as Cyprian Ekwensi\u2019s People of the City (1954), which introduces its irresistible pull as a city of ambition. Post-independence novels like Chinua Achebe\u2019s No Longer at Ease (1960) and Buchi Emecheta\u2019s The Joys of Motherhood (1979) further explore Lagos\u2019s role in shaping aspirations, where money, capitalism, and cultural hybridity dictate the lives of its inhabitants. During Nigeria\u2019s military era, Ben Okri\u2019s Stars of the New Curfew (1988) captures Lagos under military rule, portraying a nightmarish world where the powerless struggle against chaos, violence, and oppression while also insisting on hope amidst terror. Interestingly, the turn of the millennium ushered in a new wave of Lagos novels that narrate textured depictions of everyday life. Chris Abani\u2019s Graceland (2004) and Sefi Atta\u2019s Everything Good Will Come (2005) illustrate the city's complexities through the lens of youth, 2  gender, and shifting social hierarchies. By the 2010s, Lagos increasingly appeared as a perilous and intoxicating city. Leye Adenle\u2019s Easy Motion Tourist (2016) and Toni Kan\u2019s The Carnivorous City (2016) are prime examples, where crime and mystery define urban existence. Also, the period saw the rise of genre fiction and travel writing, such as Bobo Omotayo\u2019s London Life, Lagos Living (2011) and Noo Saro-Wiwa\u2019s Looking for Transwonderland (2012). More recently, the dominant literary form has shifted to collections of short stories, capturing Lagos in surreal, transient, and unclassifiable vignettes in texts such as Pemi Aguda\u2019s Ghostroots (2023), Damilare Kuku\u2019s Nearly All Men in Lagos Are Mad (2021), and Eloghosa Osunde\u2019s Vagabonds! (2022). Madhu Krishnan situates Lagos literature within world literature, observing that its portrayal over the last century captures a city shaped by its people\u2019s energy and creativity. Through dialectical analysis, she argues that Lagos\u2019 literary imagination \u201cspeaks to a range of anxieties, contradictions, and moments of creativity and spontaneity\u201d (268). In short, studying Lagos city novels help readers to see that these localized Lagos anxieties, as Krishnan demonstrates, are not isolated; they are part of a shared human story and inherent to the constitution of the world literary field itself. Therefore, from this expansive literary landscape, I focus on Teju Cole\u2019s Every Day is for the Thief (2007) and Chibundu Onuzo\u2019s Welcome to Lagos (2017) for their attention to both the physical and affective infrastructures of the city. Both authors foreground city spaces and cosmopolitan encounters, particularly through the use of unhomely and public chronotopes, to illustrate how Lagos\u2019s contested spaces generate new forms of belonging and place documentation. By selecting these novels, I examine how contemporary Lagos is documented under a neoliberal order. While both authors are intimately familiar with the city, their perspectives differ\u2014Cole presents Lagos through the detached lens of a cosmopolitan observer, 3  whereas Onuzo writes from the viewpoint of local participants\u2014creating a balanced framework for interpretation. Their works render Lagos legible to a broad audience, either those intimately familiar with the city or those encountering it through fiction, allowing readers to experience its spaces even without direct familiarity. Furthermore, both novels emphasize mobility, internal and external migration, and key urban sites as narrative anchors, making them particularly generative when it comes to discourses of orientation and participation in the cityscape. As I will show, this study is not merely concerned with how Lagos is represented as a setting but with the place of the text itself in shaping interdisciplinary conversations about African urbanism. Drawing on literary, sociological, and geographical theorists, I analyze how Cole\u2019s autofictional narrator and Onuzo\u2019s displaced characters negotiate the city\u2019s fragmented geographies, arguing that their narratives reorient readers to Lagos\u2019s generative contradictions. In doing so, this project positions literary Lagos as a site of epistemological innovation, offering critical tools for rethinking urban resilience, community agency, and the role of narrative in worlding cities. Madhu Krishnan, in her work on worlding Lagos, describes the city as a \u201csignificant geography\u201d in the twentieth-century global literary imagination (265). Expanding on this, Krishnan cites Chris Dunton\u2019s \u201cEntropy and Energy: Lagos as City of Words\u201d (2021), which places Lagos on par with cities like London and Paris as one of the most distinguished fictionalized urban spaces. Dunton argues that Lagos possesses a \u201cpower over the imagination and its capacity to engender a broad range of affected responses\u201d (quoted in Krishnan 265). These \u201caffected responses\u201d: emotional, intellectual, and imaginative reactions to Lagos\u2019s complexity, dynamism, and contradictions, are central to understanding the city\u2019s role in global urban discourse. Writers and readers alike are drawn to Lagos for its ability to evoke awe, fascination, disorientation, and even anxiety, making it a fertile ground for literary exploration. 4  As a result, it is this capacity of Lagos to elicit such varied responses that has inspired my conceptual framework of orientation and participation. Dunton\u2019s emphasis on Lagos\u2019s affective power provides the platform for engaging with the city not just as a physical or symbolic entity but as a site of lived experience and imaginative possibility. By examining the affective states of orientation (navigating the city\u2019s rhythms and contradictions) and participation (contributing to its reimagining), I seek to understand how individuals and communities \u201cknow\u201d Lagos and how the city works as a dynamic and contested space. Cities, as Michel de Certeau reminds us, are \u201cthe most immoderate of human texts\u201d (91). An attempt to make sense of Lagos has dominated global city scholarship for decades, as it is a difficult city to understand. For instance, the spatial organization of Lagos has a \u201ckinetic quality that allows it to escape conventional methods of analysing cities\u201d (Isichei qtd. in Gandy14). Also, the city is often approached through a lexicon of failure, often framing it as a \u201cspatial enigma,\u201d a \u201cruined geography,\u201d or a city that \u201cdefies the norms of the modern city\u201d (Obute 110, Mbembe and Nuttall 348). Scholars like West-Pavlov (2014) describe Lagos as a place of overwhelming complexity, where its ever-changing dynamics resist summing up or definition, particularly from an external perspective (6). Similarly, Lagos has been viewed as a site of \u201curban exceptionalism\u201d (Gandy 372), highlighting its dynamic yet precarious systems. Gandy\u2019s portrayal of Lagos focuses on infrastructural breakdowns and ecological crises, reinforcing the trope of urban collapse. While these studies capture the challenges of Lagos\u2019s urbanity, they risk reducing the city to a singular narrative of failure, neglecting its generative and transformative possibilities. As Obute suggests, Lagos\u2019s dynamism resists fixed representations; it is a city perpetually \u201cin motion,\u201d where scholarship risks obsolescence if it fails to engage with residents\u2019 fluid practices (112). This necessitates a methodological shift: rather than seeking to \u201cdefine\u201d 5  Lagos, we must analyze how its inhabitants know and make use of the city, which is the strategic and tactical repurposing of precarious infrastructures to forge \u201copenings onto somewhere\u201d (Simone 9). To reconcile Lagos\u2019 contradictions, this project adopts Rita Barnard\u2019s (2014) idea of \u201cknowing one\u2019s place,\u201d a socio-spatial dialectic that navigates both the constraints and possibilities of urban space. It highlights the liberatory potential embedded in this phrase. While 'knowing one\u2019s place' is often interpreted as submission to spatial hierarchies, Barnard observes that this concept can also signify an appreciation of place as a dynamic site of creativity, action, and possibility (3-4). Barnard extends this insight by emphasizing the transformative capacity of African cultural and literary production to render visible the spaces occluded by dominant ways of seeing. For Barnard, the reciprocal relationship between urban studies and literary studies reveals how fiction can serve a cognitive function, helping urbanists understand the emergent spaces of the African city while offering literary critics tools to analyze the peculiarities of contemporary African fiction. Building on this analytical framework, my project then proposes a reading process grounded in the socio-spatial dialectic of \u201cknowing one\u2019s place.\u201d These ideas inform my textual analysis of Lagos as a space of mediation, which ultimately contributes to postcolonial urban thought and African city literary scholarship. In my work, Lagos emerges as a site where global inequalities and local agency collide, producing new urban forms. Each chapter in this work will analyze novels and spatial practices through this lens, asking: How do character(s) \u201cknow their place\u201d in ways that transform it? How do everyday acts of inhabiting and repurposing space redefine the city\u2019s legibility?  Such questions recenter Lagos not as a problem to be solved but as a dynamic praxis of survival and invention.  6  Knowing One\u2019s Place as a Reading Process As a multidimensional dialectic, the phrase \u201cknowing one\u2019s place\u201d is often wielded as a tool of social control, a directive to remain within the boundaries prescribed by hierarchies of power. Yet, in the context of urban life, particularly in a city as fluid and contested as Lagos, this concept transcends simplistic notions of compliance. It becomes a dialectical process of negotiation, resistance, and self-awareness, shaped by intersecting forces of power, space, identity, and belonging. To \u201cknow one\u2019s place\u201d in Lagos is not to accept marginalization but to engage dynamically with the city\u2019s rhythms, contradictions, and possibilities. My goal is to unpack this concept through philosophical, sociological, literary, and geographical lenses, arguing that \u201cknowing one\u2019s place\u201d is a way of interpreting and inhabiting the city that reveals its hidden logics and latent potentials.  Importantly, and originally, \u201cknowing one\u2019s place\u201d remains a discourse of power, containing cartographies of control. However, in human geography, \u201cknowing one\u2019s place\u201d can also be understood as a spatial practice. Henri Lefebvre\u2019s The Production of Space posits that space is not neutral but socially produced through everyday actions. Similarly, Doreen Massey\u2019s For Space argues that spaces are \u201cconstellations of trajectories,\u201d shaped by power relations and global flows. These layers of meaning are evident in the novels examined in this project. In Every Day is for the Thief, Cole\u2019s narrator visits structures that serve as metaphors for Lagos\u2019s identity and as sites where aspiration and precarity coexist. Likewise, Onuzo\u2019s Welcome to Lagos depicts an abandoned building transformed into a communal home, illustrating how forced coexistence can foster new forms of belonging in shared spaces. 7  To put another way, \u201cknowing one\u2019s place\u201d is also a process of identity formation, mediated by cultural memory and community. Stuart Hall, in Cultural Identity and Diaspora, asserts that identity is not fixed but a \u201cproduction,\u201d continually reinvented in dialogue with history and place. In Every Day is for the Thief (EFT), Cole\u2019s protagonist, a Nigerian-American returnee, embodies this liminality. His diasporic gaze renders Lagos both familiar and alien, a city he must relearn. His visits to the National Museum and encounters with street hustlers reflect a struggle to reconcile multiple identities: the \u201cAfropolitan\u201d intellectual and the skeptical insider-outsider. To \u201cknow his place\u201d is to navigate this duality and exist in the interstices of belonging. Similarly, Onuzo\u2019s characters (a displaced soldier, a runaway teenager, and a kidnapped minister) in Welcome to Lagos (WTL) forge a makeshift family in an abandoned building. Their collective labor transforms derelict space into a site of belonging. Here, \u201cknowing one\u2019s place\u201d becomes not about individual conformity but a communal project of reinvention. One might then ask, is \u201cknowing one\u2019s place\u201d an act of conformity, resistance, or self-awareness? The answer lies in the meshing of these forces. In Lagos, conformity often masquerades as survival. The civil servant who accepts bribes to feed their family, the market trader who pays off area boys for protection\u2014these acts of compliance sustain the status quo. Yet, even here, agency persists: conformity becomes a tactical choice, a way to navigate oppressive systems. Resistance in Lagos is rarely overt but embedded in everyday practices. The Danfo1 driver who decorates his bus with slogans like \u201cNo Condition is Permanent\u201d (Onuzo, WTL 148) subverts despair with humor. To \u201cknow one\u2019s place\u201d in this context is to code-switch                                                  1 Danfo, (pronounced \/\u02c8dan-fo\u028a\/) is a Yoruba-derived term referring to the iconic yellow minibuses that serve as the primary mode of public transportation in Lagos, Nigeria. The word itself originates from Nigerian Pidgin and loosely translates to \u201chustle bus.\u201d They are privately owned buses and operate on informal but structured routes.  8  and manipulate the system from within. Self-awareness, on the other hand, emerges when individuals interrogate their positions within power structures. Cole\u2019s narrator, for instance, acknowledges his privilege as a diasporan, a perspective that alienates him from locals. Similarly, the strangers in Onuzo\u2019s novel confront their problems together, gaining knowledge about surviving the city. Thus, for this thesis, \u201cknowing one\u2019s place\u201d is ultimately a reading process, a way of deciphering the city\u2019s hidden texts. Lagos, like all cities, is a semiotic landscape: its streets, buildings, and bodies encode histories of power and resistance. Charles Baudelaire\u2019s fl\u00e2neur\u2014the detached urban observer\u2014finds a Lagosian counterpart in Cole\u2019s narrator, whose walks through the city resemble a hermeneutic exercise. Yet Lagos demands more than detached observation; it requires embodied reading, a form of street-level epistemology where lived experience becomes a way of \u201creading\u201d the city.  For this project also, the literary Lagos implies that \u201cknowing one\u2019s place\u201d is not about stasis but navigation\u2014a continuous negotiation of power, space, and identity. It is a reading process that demands both critique and creativity, engaging the city\u2019s contradictions to imagine new possibilities. In Cole and Onuzo\u2019s narratives, Lagos is not a \u201cfailed city\u201d but a laboratory of urban becoming, where \u201cknowing one\u2019s place\u201d becomes a radical practice of worldmaking. Thus, the textual readings in this thesis will sometimes adopt a methodological loop that is of descriptive immersion followed by analytical synthesis. Like the characters who navigate the city, readers of this thesis are asked to inhabit Lagos before arriving at meaning. In this way, my thesis becomes an act of critical cartography, mapping how narrative invention and material geography blur in Lagos\u2019s storytelling. Readers will actively grapple with Lagos\u2019s complexity, 9  just as the novels (and my analysis) reject passive consumption. To read Lagos is to read the future of cities. A future forged in conformity, resistance, and self-awareness, which are foundational to the notions of orientation and participation that I will define and explore in this project.  Defining Orientation and Participation One of the questions that shaped my approach to this thesis was: How do Teju Cole and Chibundu Onuzo think about Lagos? In seeking a unique analytical strategy for reading the city in their novels, I turned to their interviews, where their reflections on Lagos informed my choice of orientation and participation as key terms. In their conversation with The Guardian, Cole describes Lagos as \u201cnot an easy city to live in,\u201d a place that is \u201cinteresting, full of history, and real human conflict, and at the same time, as slow as molasses\u201d (Brockes). For Onuzo, while expressing her deep affection for the city of Lagos, insists that \u201cit is not a place you can romanticize\u201d (Sethi). Lagos, then, is a city that demands engagement. It already presents itself as a space where stories emerge, where the medium of everyday life, the movement of people, and the unpredictability of the environment create narratives waiting to be observed.  For instance, Teju Cole describes writing Every Day is for the Thief as \u201ca liberation\u201d and says it is \u201cnot completely invertebrate\u201d\u2014acknowledging that while there is some underlying structure, it is neither rigid nor conventional. His statement, \u201cjust be with me in this space. And we\u2019ll see what happens,\u201d (Brockes) suggests an invitation to the reader to engage with the text in an open, exploratory way. In an interesting way, this sounds like an approach that values presence, engagement, and discovery. So, I thought of the term orientation to capture how the novel encourages attunement to the space of the writing, moving with it, and allowing meaning 10  to emerge through engagement. However, for Onuzo, in responding to questions about her novel with the Igbo Journal Review, the quote that stood out to me is \u201cLagos is a city of travelers, hoping to either find their luck or make it from scratch\u201d (NPR). This perfectly fits the description of her ensemble characters\u2019 experiences as they navigate the city in Welcome to Lagos. Initially, I considered the ideas of movement, agency, and aspiration, but I realized that the notion of participation captures all three together. It shows how Lagos as a city is shaped by those who come to it, actively seeking opportunities, and creating their own paths. Orientation, as conceptualized in this thesis, refers to the affective and spatial practices through which individuals navigate and interpret urban precarity. It is a dynamic process that encompasses both the physical act of moving through the city and the emotional, cognitive, and cultural responses to its material and social landscapes. In the context of Lagos, orientation becomes a critical lens for understanding how characters, and by extension readers, negotiate the city\u2019s fragmented geographies. This conceptualization aligns with Krishnan\u2019s observation that Lagos, \u201cgoverned by unwritten codes and practices, is only readable to those attuned to its particular rhythms\u201d (266). This \u2018irresistible pull of Lagos,\u2019 as described by Krishnan, presents the city\u2019s dual nature: both a tangible urban environment and a space of affective and symbolic engagement. In Every Day is for the Thief, Teju Cole\u2019s narrator embodies this idea as he wanders through Lagos\u2019s streets, markets, and transport networks. His movements, whether by foot, bus, or car, are not merely physical but deeply symbolic, invariably reflecting his attempts to \u201cread\u201d the city and reconcile his diasporic identity with the city\u2019s chaotic rhythms. Similarly, the concept of \u201cwayfaring\u201d (Ingold 149) further enriches this understanding of orientation. In Lines: A Brief History (2007), Ingold describes wayfaring as an embodied engagement with the environment, where movement is not a means to an end but a way of knowing and inhabiting the 11  world. Cole\u2019s narrator exemplifies this as he navigates Lagos. In his traversal, the spaces he visits become sites of affective and epistemological engagement. Through such moments, orientation emerges as a process of making sense of the city, not by imposing order on its chaos but by embracing and understanding its contradictions. In this way, orientation is not merely about finding one\u2019s way in the city but about redefining one\u2019s place within it. For Cole\u2019s narrator, this process involves confronting the gaps between his expectations and Lagos\u2019s realities, as well as the ways in which the city resists easy categorization.  Furthermore, the idea of participation in this thesis refers to the collective labor of forging solidarity and reshaping a city through shared practices and informal networks. It is a process through which individuals and communities, often marginalized or displaced, co-create meaning and agency within urban spaces. In the context of Lagos, participation is a lens for understanding how informal infrastructures\u2014markets, transport systems, and unplanned settlements\u2014function not merely as sites of survival but as platforms for resilience, improvisatory tactics, and cosmopolitan solidarity. Doreen Massey\u2019s concept of \u201cthrowntogetherness\u201d (149-151) provides a foundational framework for this idea. Massey argues that cities are spaces of radical openness, where diverse individuals and groups are thrown together and the \u201cchance of space may set us down next to the unexpected neighbour\u201d (149) in ways that demand negotiation and collaboration. In Welcome to Lagos, Chibundu Onuzo\u2019s ensemble cast of displaced characters embodies this dynamic: rather than succumbing to the city\u2019s challenges, they reimagine Lagos as a space of possibility and solidarity. AbdouMaliq Simone\u2019s notion of \u201cpeople as infrastructure\u201d (409) further enriches this understanding of participation. Simone describes how informal networks in African cities composed of individuals, families, and communities function as \u201cinfrastructures\u201d that sustain urban life in the 12  absence of formal systems. Onuzo\u2019s characters embody this idea as they navigate Lagos\u2019s informal economy and co-create a vibrant ecosystem of exchange and interdependence. These networks are vital to the city\u2019s resilience, enabling individuals to adapt to and reshape their environments. The concept of participation, as exemplified by Onuzo\u2019s characters, creates a sense of belonging through shared labor and experiences despite the characters\u2019 diverse backgrounds and motivations. Their actions reflect a commitment to a broader vision of justice and community, challenging the notion that Lagos is a city of chronic individualism. Instead, participation emerges as a form of cosmopolitan solidarity, where strangers come together to co-create a sense of place and purpose. In this way, participation is not merely about survival but about reimagining the city as a site of collective agency. Onuzo\u2019s characters, through their informal networks and shared practices, demonstrate how Lagos can be transformed into a platform for resilience and innovation. To be clear on the efficiency of the ideas I am offering, I am using the term orientation in this thesis to show how the unnamed character in Cole\u2019s fiction positions and navigates within the storyworld of Lagos. It includes the sense of direction, relation to surroundings, and movement through space. Basically, orientation shapes experiences, influences actions and establishes the character\u2019s spatial awareness and ability to make sense of or respond to the world of Lagos. Participation, in the context of this study, is about engagement with the city\u2019s structures, networks, and economies. My formulation of urban participation focuses primarily on people, their hustles, ability to adapt to challenges, and capacity to carve out spaces for survival and success within the city. Therefore, in reading Onuzo\u2019s Welcome to Lagos, I see Lagos as a 13  participatory city that is not merely inhabited but constantly being made and remade by the five ensemble characters that pass through it, struggle within it, and leave their imprint on it. Methodology: Interdisciplinary Urban Reading This thesis draws heavily on the foundational and interdisciplinary work on African urbanism, materiality, memory, and literature by scholars such as Stephanie Newell, Achille Mbembe, Sarah Nuttall, Cajetan Iheka, Sakiru Adebayo, and Ato Quayson, to name but a few. Their scholarship has paved the way for reimagining the complexities of representing African cities like Lagos, reminding us that these urban landscapes continue to demand nuanced and critical engagements. Their insights have shown how literature provides resources for exploring the intersections of materiality and identity in the affective and spatial dynamics of the urban experience in postcolonial Africa. As a result, this thesis adopts an interdisciplinary methodology that combines literary analysis, cultural geography, and environmental humanities to explore Lagos as a site of orientation and participation. By treating place as mimetic\u2014materially constitutive of social relations\u2014the analyses of Every Day is for the Thief and Welcome to Lagos offer a portraiture of Lagos\u2019s material and social landscapes. To further enrich the analyses, photographs of Lagos are integrated into the project, serving as visual aids that complement the literary readings. These images provide an additional layer of context. By juxtaposing textual representations with visual documentation, the methodology emphasizes the dynamic interplay between narrative, visuality, and materiality. Importantly, the methodology also recognizes the distinct yet complementary approaches required to analyze Cole\u2019s and Onuzo\u2019s works. Cole employs a literary and cosmopolitan lens, emphasizing the participant observer\u2019s perspective on Lagos. The protagonist\u2019s diasporic gaze 14  highlights the tension between familiarity and alienation, allowing for a critique of Lagos\u2019s everyday life. This literary approach enables a close reading of Cole\u2019s use of narrative techniques, such as fragmentation and introspection. In contrast, Onuzo employs a polyphonic style to tell a tragicomic realist story about the communal action and the experiences of disenfranchised individuals. Presently, my academic training in literature and cultural studies, now situated within a Canadian institution, provides me with theoretical tools, such as place-thought and Indigenous story works to critically analyze the complexities of Lagos. This dual positionality\u2014as both an insider and outsider, much like the perspectives of Teju Cole and Chibundu Onuzo\u2014shapes my approach to this thesis. In other words, this positioning enables me to engage with Lagos\u2019s urban realities both descriptively and critically in my analysis of the two novels, balancing empathy and nuance with a reflexive awareness of the limitations and privileges that shape my perspective. I aim to contribute to a dialogue about Lagos that is critical, compassionate and rooted in the city\u2019s material realities while open to reimagining its possibilities. Across the chapters of this thesis, I regard the notion of \"knowing one\u2019s place\" as an acknowledgement of the urban built environment and the lived experiences of its inhabitants, as represented in Teju Cole\u2019s Every Day is for the Thief and Chibundu Onuzo\u2019s Welcome to Lagos. The first chapter examines Cole\u2019s narrator and his interaction with the psychogeography of Lagos. Through his observations of the city\u2019s signs, symbols, taxis, places, buildings, and individuals, the narrator constructs a fragmented but evocative portrait of Lagos as both a physical and temporal environment. The second chapter turns to Onuzo\u2019s Welcome to Lagos, which illustrates a maximalist form of participation. Her characters disrupt political corruption and challenge infrastructural decay, reimagining Lagos as a space for democratic participation 15  and social change. By collectively reclaiming neglected urban spaces, such as abandoned buildings and under-bridges, these characters transform sites of neglect into spaces of solidarity, empowerment, and optimism.                16  Chapter 1: Teju Cole\u2019s Everyday is for the Thief Orientation. I am in a labyrinth. A labyrinth, not a maze\u2026A labyrinth\u2019s winding paths lead, finally, to the meaningful center. - Teju Cole, Everyday is for the Thief, 159. In Italo Calvino\u2019s city of Tamara2, the newly arrived traveler and city observer, Marco Polo, encounters a landscape where every object is imbued with symbolic meaning. The city is described as a place where \"the eye does not see things but images of things that mean other things\" (Calvino, 12). As the observer navigates the streets thick with signboards, each sign\u2014whether it be pincers, a tankard, or halberds\u2014acts as a marker pointing beyond itself, to the tooth-drawer\u2019s house, the tavern, or the barracks. The cityscape, thus, is not simply a collection of physical structures but a dense network of signs that require interpretation. Interestingly, this environment forces the traveler to engage in a process of cognitive mapping that is both rooted in direct perception and in the recognition of symbols. Marco Polo\u2019s orientation in Tamara is mediated by this \"thick coating of signs\" that codes every element of the city (13). In this context, the act of navigating the city becomes an exercise in decoding, where every building, statue, and object must be read and understood as part of a larger symbolic system. The traveler is compelled to \"scan the streets as if                                                  2 In Chapter 3 of Calvino, Invisible Cities, 1972, Tamara is described as a \"city of signs,\" where reality is mediated through a labyrinth of symbols, yet remains ultimately \"undiscoverable,\" concealed beneath its symbolic facade.  17  they were written pages,\" (13) suggesting that the city itself dictates how it is to be perceived and understood. However, this process of orientation is fraught with complexities and ambiguities. Tamara, with its overwhelming array of signs, creates a scenario where the physical reality of the city is obscured by its symbolic representation. Ultimately, it raises critical questions about the nature of perception and understanding in such an environment: \"Whatever [the city] may contain or conceal, you leave Tamara without having discovered it\" (13). These insights invite readers to consider whether true orientation is possible in a space so heavily mediated by symbols. Is the traveler ever truly able to grasp the city, or are they trapped in an endless cycle of interpretation? The significance of this scene lies in its exploration of the limitations of cognitive mapping when it is overly reliant on external signs. As such, the traveler\u2019s understanding of the city is shaped not only by their own observations and the signs imposed by the city, but also by their subjective positionality (social privileges, and lived experiences), which mediate how they decode or internalize the city\u2019s signs.  A necessary thematic consideration of the tension between perception and reality \u2013 and the challenges of truly understanding and navigating \u201cundiscoverable\u201d environments\u2013 is worth reflecting upon. To further complicate the idea of orientation from Invisible Cities (1972), Calvino\u2019s character, Marco Polo, observes Zirma, a city characterized by patterns. In Zirma, memory plays a crucial role in how the city is perceived and understood, as the city is described as \"redundant: it repeats itself so that something will stick in the mind\" (18). The repetition of images\u2014a blind black man, a lunatic on a cornice, a girl with a puma, the streets, the tattoo shops, the underground train\u2014ensures that certain elements become fixed in the traveler\u2019s memory, forming the basis of 18  their cognitive map. Yet this repetition also distorts the traveler\u2019s perception, creating a fragmented and selective memory of the city. Here, the memory of the city is seen as a double-edged sword in the process of orientation. On one hand, it allows the traveler to retain certain images and experiences, giving the city a sense of coherence. On the other hand, the redundancy of these images leads to a distorted and simplified understanding of the city, which helps to form patterned memories that are linked to small, often unnoticed, details, and the stories we construct bear in our minds. This invites readers to attempt to question the nature of experience and the extent to which our understanding of a place is shaped by what we choose, or are able, to remember. Can one ever truly orient oneself in a city where symbols overwhelm reality? How reliable is memory in shaping our perception of a place, and does repetition truly help us grasp the city's nature, or does it lead us further astray? Ultimately, can we ever escape the city\u2019s prescribed narrative, or are we forever bound to the roles and meanings it imposes upon us? I start here on Marco Polo\u2019s observation of both cities of Tamara and Zirma, to frame my reading and exploration of Teju Cole's unnamed character\u2019s orientation of the city of Lagos in Every Day is for the Thief (2007).  I sense a delicate interplay between perception, memory, and the physical environment, where the process of orientation is constantly challenged by the complex, often overwhelming urban space. In Cole\u2019s writing, like Calvino\u2019s, there is an invitation to reconsider what it means to truly know a city, to navigate its spaces both mentally and physically, and to grasp the nuances that lie beneath the surface of what is immediately visible. In Cole\u2019s Lagos, orientation is not merely about finding one\u2019s way through the city\u2019s chaotic streets; it is about understanding the deeper everyday cultural, social, and spatial dynamics that define the city. I am drawn to how Cole\u2019s unnamed character provides a rich, detailed perspective on tangible and intangible Lagos, allowing readers to see and feel the city in 19  an informed and immersive way. This observational and deeply interpretive orientation toward the city is precisely what this chapter seeks to emulate. Like the traveler in Calvino\u2019s cities, who must navigate a city saturated with symbols, the unnamed protagonist in Cole\u2019s novel navigates a Lagos filled with material fragments\u2014posters, signboards, buses, markets, streets, internet cafes, museums, and architecture. I explore how Cole uses these elements not simply to describe the city but to orient the reader. This approach conceptualizes Lagos as a space governed by \u201cunwritten codes and practices only readable to those attuned to its particular rhythms\u201d (Krishnan 266). Krishnan\u2019s framing here transcends physical navigation; it requires decoding informal systems and social dynamics that outsiders might dismiss as chaotic. Cole\u2019s protagonist learns to read the city through embodied engagement, where material elements become clues to its sociocultural and spatial logic. In other words, Lagos, in Cole\u2019s hands, becomes a space of communication. Put simply, his novella examines how people and city environments influence each other through the ways we imagine, build, and share urban spaces. The focus is built on the relationship between city life and communication, studying how these connections are rooted in everyday human experiences.  In this chapter, I analyze this orientation schema in Everyday is for the Thief. First, I ground \u201corientation\u201d in a Nigerian urban context, defining it as a culturally situated practice of navigating both physical space and social codes. I then problematize the fl\u00e2neur\u2014a detached, leisured observer\u2014by contrasting it with Cole\u2019s narrator, whose positionality as a returnee complicates the idea of the flaneur\u2019s detachment. Unlike the fl\u00e2neur, the narrator\u2019s orientation is active and dialogic, shaped by his dual insider\/outsider status. Using this framework, I dissect key material sites in the novel, revealing their \u201cunwritten codes\u201d and how they reflect Lagos\u2019s informal governance. Finally, I trace the protagonist\u2019s evolving perception of the city (signs and patterns): 20  his initial disorientation gives way to a focalized cosmopolitan awareness, culminating in the novel\u2019s closing metaphor of Lagos as a labyrinth, a space where orientation is never static, and a \u201ccity that is always in motion\u201d (Obute 111). Unpacking Nigeria\u2019s \u201cOT\u201d (Orientation) In simple terms, orientation is a person's understanding of their \"self\" in relation to position, time, location, and relationships, and it reflects one's thoughts, views, and preferences. While these definitions offer a clear and literal understanding, they also challenge us to think more broadly about orientation in different contexts. In everyday urban Nigeria, particularly in Lagos, locals often advise strangers and newcomers to \u201cget an OT\u201d3\u2014 an orientation of the city. This streetwise advice goes beyond just knowing the layout of the city; it means understanding the unwritten rules, the rules of survival codes, and the perceptions needed to navigate Lagos.  Moreover, the Nigerian historian, Toyin Falola, explains that concepts like intelligence quotient and emotional intelligence are used in the academic world to assess an individual's mental stability and social relatability. However, he continues to argue, the streets of Nigeria have developed their own sociolinguistic framework to gauge a different kind of intelligence \u2014 one rooted in survival and adaptability within the often harsh and unpredictable urban environment. OT, while simply an abbreviation for orientation, encapsulates the lessons the streets teach\u2014lessons that involve unlearning, learning, and relearning in order to become street and city smart. This form of orientation is essential for a stranger to thrive in Nigeria\u2019s often                                                  3 OT is a Nigerian slang meaning street smarts and awareness, often used to signify having sense and being alert and adaptable in everyday life. This term has permeated both the Nigerian literary scene, as seen in Jindu Enugbe's Street OT\u2014a collection of comic short stories set in the rugged parts of society\u2014and Afrobeat music, notably in Olamide's 2014 album Street OT, which reflects his deep connection to the street culture  21  challenging and tangled metropolises, where survival instincts and keen perception are paramount. In the early part of the novel, Teju Cole\u2019s protagonist\u2019s return to Lagos after a decade and a half can be seen as an experience of re-acquiring this essential OT. Stepping into the city once more, he was confronted by the relentless transformation of Lagos, a metamorphosis mirrored unsettlingly within himself. Having internalized certain assumptions about life in a Western democracy, particularly regarding legality and protocol, he finds himself a stranger in a city he once knew intimately. This realization marks the beginning of his re-orientation, his journey toward understanding the new dynamics of Lagos\u2014a city that has evolved into a patronage society in his absence. He recounts,  Night descends with no warning. I am breathing the air of the city for the first time in a decade and a half, its white smoke and ocher dust which are as familiar as my own breath. But other things, less visible, have changed. I have taken into myself some of the assumptions of life in a Western democracy\u2014certain ideas about legality, for instance, certain expectations of due process\u2014and in that sense I have returned a stranger. What the trip back from the airport makes me think, and what is confirmed over the course of the following days, is the extent to which Lagos has become a patronage society. (Cole, EFT 16-17) It is important to note that, here, the protagonist undergoes an early transformation rooted in orientation tactics, shedding the assumptions and perceptions formed abroad and re-adopting the survival-oriented mindset\u2014 the OT\u2014that the everyday Lagos intuitively demands. His experience serves as a powerful illustration of how orientation, in the Nigerian sense, is not just about geographical or cultural understanding but about the ability to navigate and survive within a specific social context. Consequently, the narrator moves through Lagos by public transport and by walking, a mode of movement that has drawn comparisons to the 19th-century figure of the fl\u00e2neur. Even in the novel, the inclusion of black-and-white photographs, which map Lagos visually, also positions the narrator as a kind of \u201ctourist-fl\u00e2neur\u201d (Rodriguez 791) who observes 22  the city\u2019s everyday life with a certain detachment. However, this detachment is fraught with contradictions, which brings up the importance of problematizing the fl\u00e2neur in this chapter. To be clear, the fl\u00e2neur has traditionally been seen as a figure of modernity\u2014a detached urban observer who navigates the city with curiosity and critical distance. However, this notion assumes that urban observation can be purely objective and detached. In \u201cThe Return of the Fl\u00e2neur\u201d (1929), Walter Benjamin challenges this view, arguing that the fl\u00e2neur is not merely a passive spectator but someone intimately connected to the essence and spirit of a place. He suggests that the fl\u00e2neur understands dwelling\u2014how spaces hold meaning and how people and even images inhabit them (Kuppers 311). Benjamin further likens the fl\u00e2neur to a priest, interpreting sacred signs, or a detective, piecing together clues to reveal something about the character of the city. This framing of the flaneur as an autonomous and perceptive outsider offers an interesting lens through which to read Every Day is for the Thief, as the novel\u2019s narrator similarly moves through Lagos, observing its everyday realities. However, the narration of the novel complicates this role by positioning the narrator not merely as a fl\u00e2neur, but as a returnee\u2014a figure whose prior familiarity with the city, coupled with his long absence, unsettles the certainty of his detached observations. It is important to note that the narrator\u2019s ability to return and to move through Lagos as an observer rather than as a resident rest on a privilege that most Lagosians do not possess. His cosmopolitan awareness alienates him from the everyday struggles of the city\u2019s inhabitants. Put simply, the distance of Cole\u2019s narrator is not only impossible to maintain but also inherently precarious, as personal memory and social positioning continually disrupt his attempt to assume a neutral gaze. In this way, the narrator\u2019s performance of the fl\u00e2neur in observing the cosmopolitan city of Lagos becomes an uneasy one. 23  As an exemplary novel that shows cosmopolitan performance in relation to place narratives, Cole\u2019s unnamed narrator is referred to as a \u201ccosmopolitan stranger\u201d (Rodriguez 790) and \u201ccosmopolitan aristocrat\u201d (Hallemeier 2) respectively. These descriptions complicate his positionality in Lagos, as he performs the role of a fl\u00e2neur in wandering and documenting the city. As a result, it is important to review how the narrator interacts with (and is shaped by) Lagos in a bid to critically reflect on his own position, biases, and interactions with the city. In this context, the ethos of \"OT\" which involves grasping the social dynamics, localized undertakings, survival instincts, and unwritten rules essential for thriving in the urban environment, will be used to analyze the narrator\u2019s relationship with Lagos. The narrator\u2019s return is not merely a geographical journey but a re-engagement with his memory of a city that is at once familiar and alien, forcing him to confront both Lagos and the memory of his younger, non-cosmopolitan self. Like the \u201coutsider-within\u201d (Collins 16), the returnee\u2019s experience of Lagos is marked by both intimacy and distance. He knows the city, its rhythms and landscapes, but his long absence has also distanced him from the lived realities of its present. His position allows him to view Lagos through fresh eyes\u2014both as an insider attuned to its nuances and as an outsider who observes its transformations with discerning clarity. Yet, as a returnee, there are elements and codes within the city that remain elusive to him, requiring a process of orientation to fully navigate and engage with the city affectively and \u2018psychogeographically\u2019.  24  Orientation in Place: Built World of Lagos as Interlocutor Cole's literary work has gained broad and critical appreciation from both critics and reviewers. The novella is about the accumulation of experiences of a young Nigerian medical student who returns home to Lagos for a short visit and invites the readers to steal a glimpse of the city with him. While the New York Observer praises the wandering expatriate as an \u201cobservant walker,\u201d4 the Publishers Weekly observes that the novella has been narrated \u201cwith journalism-like objectivity.\u201d5 However, beneath this seemingly objective lens lies the subtle narrative strategy of autofiction, which blurs the boundaries between the protagonist\u2019s experience and Cole\u2019s own life. As a work of autofiction, the narrator shares significant biographical details with Teju Cole\u2014both were raised in Nigeria, moved abroad for extended periods, and returned with a fresh gaze upon the city of their upbringing. These parallels between the narrator and the author allow the novella to function as both a \u201cpersonal narrative and a cultural and social memory\u201d (Maretoja 127) of Lagos.  Having grown up in Nigeria but having spent a critical part of his life completing his education and embarking on a professional career in America, Teju Cole\u2019s narrator\u2019s extended absence from home, combined with his eagerness to reconnect with his roots, brings him back to Lagos. The novella narrates this experience of reconnecting through the protagonist\u2019s wanderings through the city. His return to Lagos begins with an immediate immersion into the city\u2019s visceral contradictions, a disorienting encounter marked by the airport\u2019s \u201cecstasy and confusion\u201d (Cole, EFT 10). Similar to Noo Saro-Wiwa, a travel writer, who frames her arrival in                                                  4 https:\/\/observer.com\/2014\/03\/every-day-a-chance-to-reflect\/  5 https:\/\/www.publishersweekly.com\/9780812995787  25  Lagos for the first time, as a plunge into \u201cold spasms of apprehension\u201d (16\u201317)6, Cole\u2019s narrator is greeted by the tacit warning of the sign \u201cTHIS IS LAGOS\u201d\u2014a kind of blunt disclaimer and threshold that demands both surrender and survival. The airport\u2019s chaos, rendered through sharp vignettes, serves as a microcosm of the city\u2019s moral economy: a customs officer\u2019s brazen demand for a \u201cChristmas gift\u201d (10) and the performative inefficiency of bureaucratic systems reveal corruption\u2019s banal presence. Yet Cole\u2019s autofictional lens refuses simplistic condemnation. Instead, he positions these encounters as initiation rites, forcing the narrator to confront the fluid ethics of transactional survival. When the protagonist rebuffs the extortionate official\u2014\u201cI have brought only resolve\u201d (11)\u2014 his defiance marks the beginning of a realization that moral absolutism alone cannot navigate the complexities of Lagos.  In Everyday is for the Thief, the tension between cosmopolitan idealism and local pragmatism intensifies during the protagonist\u2019s car journey from the airport with his aunt, Aunty Folake. Within forty-five minutes of leaving the airport, he witnesses three instances of institutionalized corruption: police checkpoints, arbitrary tolls, and the casual exchange of bribes framed as \u201csocial lubricant\u201d (17). The narrator dissects this economy with anthropological precision, noting how money \u201ceases passage even as it maintains hierarchies\u201d (17). For Lagosians, such transactions are neither inherently immoral nor exceptional; they are the grammar of daily life, a means of \u201cgetting things done\u201d (17). The narrator\u2019s initial shock gradually gives way to a reluctant fluency, as he begins to decode the city\u2019s unspoken codes. On top of that, Aunty Folake\u2019s anecdotes, such as the matter-of-fact account of Mr. Adelaja\u2019s kidnapping and murder, a tragedy \u201cextremely common in Lagos in the 1990s\u201d (45),                                                  6 In Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria, Noo Saro-Wiwa vividly describes her emotions upon arriving in Lagos in the first chapter of her memoir. Page 16. 26  further catalyzes his necessary reorientation. By the journey\u2019s end, the narrator\u2019s cosmopolitan detachment begins to erode. His refusal to pay bribes evolves from principled resistance to tactical navigation, a shift that propels him to seek deeper immersion in Lagos\u2019s public spaces to develop a streetwise literacy. In this way, Cole positions the narrator\u2019s arrival as both homecoming and exile\u2014a paradox that fuels his quest to reconcile Lagos\u2019s brutality with its vitality. Consequently, the narrator\u2019s orientation to Lagos unfolds through a deliberate decoding of the city\u2019s visual semiotics\u2014billboards, car stickers, and posters that serve as both navigational aids and cultural texts. From his departure from the airport with Aunty Folake, his gaze fixates on these visual markers, a practice central to what M. Gottdiener and Alexandras Ph. Lagopoulos describe as the study of \u201cenvironmental perception and symbolic life within the city\u201d (2). In a way, what the narrator experiences in Lagos mirrors what most strangers or newcomers do when they arrive in a city. As they get to know the city and have an evaluative image of it, they pay close attention to and interpret the signboards, posters, stickers, and billboards that populate the urban landscape on \u201cdenotative and connotative levels of signification\u201d (Stahl 257). Yet this reliance on the visual, while enabling a critical understanding of Lagos\u2019s contradictions, simultaneously exposes the limitations of the protagonist\u2019s Western-influenced perspective. As Oyeronke Oyewumi argues, Yoruba epistemology privileges multisensory communication\u2014the oral, the tactile, and the communal- over the visual framework that seems dominant in Western thought (100). For the cosmopolitan narrator of Cole\u2019s novella, these signs function as a primer for decoding Lagos\u2019s contradictions, yet his reliance on the visual inadvertently raises a crucial question: does his focus on the visuality of the signs reflect a Westernized lens that obscures the non-visual, embodied dimensions of Lagosian life? 27   Fig 1: \u201cLagos, Nigeria. Road sign for Ikorodu Road and Lagos University\u201d Zouzou Wizman. \"Lagos, Nigeria. Road sign for Ikorodu Road and Lagos University.\" \u00a9 Wikimedia Commons, 3 May 2005, https:\/\/www.flickr.com\/photos\/61111202@N00\/12127531. CC-BY-2.0. Cole structures this tension through ironic juxtapositions that critique both the city\u2019s performative rhetoric and the protagonist\u2019s interpretive biases. At Ikeja bus stop, the narrator observes policemen arguing beneath a billboard that states: \u201cCorruption Is Illegal: Do Not Give or Accept Bribes\u201d (Cole, EFT 15). The scene crystallizes Lagos\u2019s paradoxes: institutional slogans are rendered absurd and ironical by the very actors meant to enforce them. Similarly, the Ojota Bus Terminal billboard\u2014 which has the inscription, \u201cWho are you sleeping with tonight?\u201d (142) \u2014advertises British American Tobacco\u2019s claim that Nigerians are \u201cthe happiest people on earth\u201d (142). Here, Cole layers commercialized optimism over the city\u2019s harsh realities, forcing the narrator to confront the dissonance between image and lived experience. These moments in the novel reveal how urban signs \u201ctrigger a particular performative logic\u201d (Quayson 23), where visual cues encode societal anxieties and survivalist pragmatism. 28  Also, the narrator\u2019s hermeneutic labor extends to smaller, intimate signs in the city. A sticker on a dilapidated Peugeot 504 states \u201cRelax! God is in control\u201d (Cole, EFT 145). He interprets this as a dissonant attempt to soothe urban anxiety, yet his analysis remains anchored in the visual, overlooking how such slogans might resonate within Yoruba spiritual frameworks that integrate faith into daily survival. Likewise, his misreading of the advertisement to \u201cBulletproof your glasses\u201d (148)\u2014initially mistaking it for a Superman reference \u2013\u2013 clearly reveals his struggle to reconcile Lagos\u2019s vernacular idioms with his cosmopolitan assumptions. Only when he recognizes it as an ad for reinforced car windshields does he grasp the city\u2019s grim pragmatism as a commercial landscape. Yet Cole\u2019s narrator\u2019s visual orientation is not without value. It enables him to map Lagos\u2019s \u201clanguage of contradictions\u201d (142), where commercialized optimism coexists with systemic precarity. The signs he deciphers, from the ironic (\u201cNo wonder Nigerians are the happiest people on earth\u201d) to the absurd (\u201cBulletproof your glasses\u201d), become hermeneutic tools, guiding him toward what Ato Quayson terms the \u201cstatus of spatial practice\u201d (25). As a result, these visual signs, while recognizable from high and busy streets, Cole\u2019s narrator notices they are imbued with a mix of local characteristics, that also proves the improvisational nature of urban spaces. In other words, these signs are emblematic of a city where faith, politics, and commerce collide in strange and often humorous ways. This use of irony allows Cole to provide social commentary without heavy-handedness, blending wit with critical observation. Through this, the protagonist navigates the city visually and learns to read between the lines, recognizing how these signs reflect and obscure deeper societal truths. However, Cole ensures this process is neither seamless nor complete. While the protagonist meticulously documents signs like AIDS cure posters and religious slogans, his focus on only 29  visual codification risks eliding the multisensory richness of Lagos life and requires more embodied interactions for fully developed modes of knowledge about the city. Notably, the narrator travels by Danfo, a yellow commercial bus that brings together people from different classes and professions in Lagos. The Danfo\u2019s materiality and anatomy are not merely functional attributes but constitutive elements of Lagos\u2019s cultural economy and social imaginary. As a vital technology of mass mobility, the Danfo operates as both a physical vessel and an epistemological archive: it mediates the city\u2019s rhythms, encodes its contradictions, and orients its passengers to the productive imagination of Lagos life. Its very name, derived from Yoruba and loosely translating to \u2018everyone for himself\u2019 or \u2018you\u2019re on your own,\u2019 crystallizes the paradox of informal transport systems as a collective necessity forged through individual survival. This duality is etched into the Danfo\u2019s material form. Fascinated with the anatomy of the Danfo, which is described as \u201csquealing brakes, bald tires, and rattling exhausts\u201d (Agbiboa 17), Cole\u2019s narrator interacts with the vital technology of mobility not as symbols of dysfunction but as semiotic markers of a system that thrives on adaptive resilience. 30   Fig 2: Oyewole Lawal. \"Health and Wellness in Africa. Danfo buses operating in Lagos, Nigeria, at one of the rugged bus stops (Obalende)\" \u00a9 Wikimedia Commons, 10 September 2020, https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/Commons:Wiki_Loves_Africa_2021. Cole\u2019s narrator experiences the Danfo as an auditory archive. Its sonic landscape further entrenches its role as a site of popular wisdom in Lagos. The evocation of the bus terminus as a \u201cchorus of cantors or auctioneers\u201d (Cole, EFT 35) \u2013\u2013 with the bus conductors rhythmically chanting destinations like \u2018Ojota\u2019 and \u2018Ikeja\u2019 by engaging in the phonological processes of vowel deletion and double pronunciation as \u201cJotajota-jotajota\u201d and \u201cKejakejakeja\u201d (35)\u2014reveals how sound structures urban orientation for the narrator and prompts him to be \u201ccognisant of these pronunciations in order not to miss his locations\u201d (Obiora 180). These cries, layered over the drone of traffic, form a performative language that maps the city\u2019s kinetic energy. The repetition of routes (\u201cBalende\u2013CMS\u201d) functions as both navigational shorthand and cultural incantation, embedding the Danfo within the social imaginary as a space where urgency and improvisation 31  collide. In the novel, Cole does more than evoke sensory overload; he also demonstrates how the Danfo\u2019s soundscape organizes the affective and cognitive rhythms of Lagosians. The bus becomes a pedagogical site where passengers learn to decode the city through its auditory excess, transforming chaos into legibility. This sonic materiality, the pronunciation of locations by bus conductors, along with the physical structure of the vehicle, actively shapes the narrator\u2019s experience, reinforcing what Agbiboa describes as the \"quintessential experience for any fl\u00e2neur of the African city\" (372). Also, the Danfo\u2019s spatial design\u2014its one seat at the front and four in the back arrangement repeated across four to five rows, accommodating twelve to eighteen passengers (Agbiboa 42-44)\u2014alongside its panoramic windows, frames Lagos as a dialectic of visibility and exclusion. The narrator\u2019s observation of the \u201chigh bridge at Ojota\u201d and the \u201cpanoramic picture of Molues, Danfo, and people\u201d (Cole, EFT 108) shows how the bus\u2019s material transparency forces passengers to confront Lagos\u2019s socioeconomic differences. For instance, Aunt Folake\u2019s blunt description of the Danfo as a \u201cdeath trap\u201d and \u201csanctuary for practitioners of black magic\u201d (30) exposes not only class prejudices but a rejection of this democratizing visibility. Her warnings attempt to structure social hierarchies, positioning the Danfo as a space for the lower class and thus incompatible with the narrator\u2019s Afropolitan7 identity. Yet, as the narrator insists, \u201cbeing on the Danfo [\u2026] is the whole objective of the exercise\u201d (Cole 36). Here, the bus\u2019s materiality, its cramped proximity becomes a pedagogical tool. By refusing the aunt\u2019s private car, the narrator submits to what he terms the Danfo\u2019s symbolic role as a \u201ccarrier of the people\u201d (36), where                                                  7 https:\/\/blog.ted.com\/our-passports-dont-define-us-taiye-selasi-live-at-tedglobal-2014\/ 32  \u201ccreative, malicious, ambiguous\u201d urban life converges (36). The Danfo\u2019s anatomy, in this sense, reconfigures the fl\u00e2neur\u2019s gaze from detached observation to embodied participation. For the narrator, however, the Danfo is romanticized as a perfect symbol of his desire to reconnect with Lagos. He views taking public transport as a rite of passage, a way to experience the \"authentic\" Lagos. This tension between the Danfo as romanticized symbol and lived materiality shows its fraught position in Lagos\u2019s cultural economy. For returnees like Cole\u2019s narrator, the bus and sometimes okada8 represent a conduit to authentic Lagos experience as a space of reconnection and discovery, while Ye Li describes him as a \u201cmotorized returnee\u201d (47). However, the family members of the returnee, who are locals, perceive the Danfo as a site of embodied risk, demanding vigilance against theft, accidents, and occult threats. Cole\u2019s narrator\u2019s insistence on riding the Danfo thus reveals his outsider-within status. His romantic framing of it as a \u201cperfect symbol\u201d (Cole, EFT 36) contrasts with the ingrained wariness of those for whom the bus is a necessity rather than a choice. For the narrator, therefore, to ride the Danfo is to engage in a form of kinetic epistemology, as its materiality orients him to Lagos\u2019s transport culture and an enduring vital technology of mass mobility. Another instance of the narrator\u2019s orientation to Lagos is mediated through its architectural landscape, which includes colonial relics, museums, and modern structures. Primarily, they function as structures that educate him about Nigeria\u2019s layered history and identity. Drawing on Aldo Rossi\u2019s concept of architecture as a vessel for collective memory (1966), the narrator treats Lagos\u2019s \u201cfaded colonial centers\u201d (Cole 71), its churches, Brazilian-                                                 8 Okada, also known as achaba or going in Nigeria, is a motorcycle taxi commonly used for transportation across Nigeria and other African countries. Similar motorcycle taxis are found in other West African nations, where they are known by various names, such as ol\u00e9yia in Togo, z\u00e9midjans in Benin, and phen-phen in Liberia. 33  style buildings, and \u201cporticoed and decrepit institutions\u201d as physical repositories of history and cultural memory. These spaces are not mere backdrops but active sites of education where he grapples with the social consequences of a nation that neglects its past: \u201cWhat\u2026 are the social consequences of life in a country that has no use for history?\u201d (79). To be clear, the duality of Lagos\u2019s architectural decay alongside \u201cgleaming modern buildings\u201d becomes a dialectic of \u201cborrowed old and uncertain new\u201d (71), reflecting the city\u2019s struggle to reconcile its colonial legacy with its aspirational, commerce-driven present. For the narrator, these structures are narrative tools; their materiality helps him piece together an understanding of Lagos\u2019s evolution, where colonial buildings symbolize cultural imposition and modern towers gesture toward self-determination.   34   Fig 3: Chukwuba Tolulope Ogun. \"Ilojo Bar9 also known as Olaiya House, yellow buses (danfo) parked in front.\" \u00a9 Wikimedia Commons, 1 August 2016. CC-BY-SA-4.0. In another instance, the narrator\u2019s orientation deepens at the National Museum in Onikan, a site he initially idealizes as a \u201cmemorial touchstone\u201d (72-73) for Nigerian heritage but eventually encounters it as a symbol of national neglect. According to the narrator, the museum\u2019s artifacts lie \u201ccaked in dust and under dirty plastic screens\u201d (73), and its silence on Nigeria\u2019s military regimes proves the government\u2019s failure to confront history. The narrator\u2019s disillusionment stems not just from the museum\u2019s physical decay but from its erasure of difficult histories, such as the crimes of military leaders. Unlike Western museums such as the British                                                  9 Ilojo Bar, popularly known as \u201cOlaiya House\u201d or \u201cCasa do Fernandez,\u201d a historical monument once located near Tinubu Square on Lagos Island. Before its demolition, Ilojo Bar was the last surviving example of Brazilian-style architecture in Lagos. Built in 1855 by formerly enslaved Africans returning from South America (notably the Alakijas, Fernandezes, and Evaristos), many of whom were skilled craftsmen, the building stood as a testament to their construction expertise and heritage 35  Museum, which showcase Nigerian art with \u201ccareful lighting\u201d and \u201coutstanding documentation\u201d (74), Lagos\u2019s institution reflects a society ambivalent toward its past. This neglect, the narrator realizes, fractures collective memory: \u201cI don\u2019t know how to make sense of what I am looking at\u2026 [It\u2019s] as though there is the idea that a national museum is a good thing to have, but no one has the interest or capacity to display it properly\u201d (74). The museum\u2019s inadequacy as an educative space mirrors Nigeria\u2019s broader struggle to use history as a foundation for identity, which is a failure with tangible consequences for national cohesion. This erasure creates a gap in local historical consciousness. Without accessible narratives of shared heritage, the city\u2019s inhabitants are left to navigate a fragmented sense of belonging. As a result, even Lagosians\u2019 understanding of the nation remains incomplete, undermined by the very institutions meant to tether its people to a common story.  36   Fig 4: Olusola David Ayibiowu. \"This is the entrance gate to National Museum, Lagos, Nigeria, when you want to access the inner museum.\" \u00a9 Wikimedia Commons, 9 September 2022, https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:National_Museum_Lagos_Entrance.jpg. CC-BY-SA-4.0. Building on Sakiru Adebayo\u2019s idea of the fictional character of Julius in Cole\u2019s Open City (2011) as a fl\u00e2neur and \u201cmemory archaeologist\u201d (7), Cole\u2019s narrator in Every Day is for the Thief similarly navigates Lagos through walking. In doing so, the narrator\u2019s urban wandering transforms Lagos into a show of colonial and postcolonial histories and goes beyond \u201ctourist 37  gaze.\u201d10 His encounters with architecture\u2014the \u201cenduring symbols\u201d of colonial violence (Cole, EFT 71) and the aspirational modernity of commerce\u2014reveal how buildings function as spatialized lessons about power, memory, and identity. However, the museum\u2019s decay highlights a critical tension: when institutions tasked with preserving history are neglected, they become sites of disorientation rather than education. The narrator\u2019s critique extends to governance; the museum\u2019s omission of military history reflects a government unwilling to punish corruption or engage with the past honestly. In other words, this lax attitude perpetuates a cycle where the physical markers of history, in this case: buildings and artifacts, lose their ability to anchor society in a coherent narrative, leaving Lagos suspended between erasure and reinvention. Ultimately, the idea the narrator gestures towards is that postcolonial cities like Lagos require honest engagement with their built environments to forge a sustainable future. Architecture and museums are not neutral; they are pedagogical spaces that shape how individuals and nations understand themselves. When preserved and contextualized, they offer orientation, grounding citizens in a shared history. When neglected, they become metaphors for fragmentation. The narrator\u2019s journey through colonial ruins, failed museums, and gleaming towers reveals that a city\u2019s identity is inseparable from how it curates its past. Without deliberate stewardship of these built imaginaries, postcolonial societies risk losing the tools necessary to educate, remember, and reimagine themselves. Although grounded in the Yoruba worldview, the market in Lagos operates as both a classroom and a container for the cosmopolitan narrator. To the narrator, the market is a space                                                  10 Urry, John. 1990. Tourist Gaze: Leisure and Travel in Contemporary Societies quoted in Adebayo page 17 38  where the city\u2019s soul is laid bare, and his orientation to its dynamics, ethics, and contradictions is forged. Cole\u2019s narration transforms the marketplace into a philosophical arena, echoing Yoruba proverbs and sentiments that frame it as a metaphor for life itself (Lawuyi 8). Here, the narrator\u2019s encounters move between communion and exploitation, revelation and brief disillusionment, mirroring the city\u2019s duality. The beauty of the market rooted in African sensibilities and knowing is aptly captured by Teju Cole: One goes to the market to participate in the world. As with all things that concern the world, being in the market requires caution. The market\u2014as the essence of the city\u2014is always alive with possibility and danger. Strangers encounter each other in the world\u2019s infinite variety; vigilance is needed. Everyone is there not merely to buy or sell, but because it is a duty. If you sit in your house, if you refuse to go to market, how would you know of the existence of others? How would you know of your own existence? (Cole, EFT 57) The narrator\u2019s assertion that \u201cthe market is the essence of the city\u201d (57) is rooted in its role as a microcosm of Lagosian society. It embodies what the Yoruba describe as \u201cthe home of the world\u201d\u2014a place where human existence converges in all its complexity. At first, the initial immersion in the market\u2019s \u201cinfinite variety\u201d (57) is marked by sensory overload: the voices, the kaleidoscope of goods, and the kinetic energy of bodies navigating narrow aisles. This participatory chaos, as Cole\u2019s narrator notes, is not passive; it demands \u201cvigilance\u201d (57), a survival skill the protagonist must adopt. For instance, when the protagonist challenges a vendor\u2019s exorbitant fee, the man deflects with a laugh: \u201cI didn\u2019t know you knew the language; I took you for an oyinbo11 or an Ibo man!\u201d (47). This moment crystallizes the market\u2019s shady                                                  11 Oyinbo\" is a Yoruba term originally used to refer to white people, but it has since evolved to describe individuals of European descent, Africans not perceived as culturally Yoruba, or light-skinned people in general. This term is widely understood by most Nigerians and many other Africans (Falola and Genova 2005).   39  pedagogy. The vendor\u2019s remark, which is a blend of bias and capitalist cunning, exposes how identity is commodified in Lagos. To the protagonist, this interaction is revelatory: the market\u2019s \u201cduty\u201d to connect (57) is entangled with an ethos where \u201csurvival often means bending the rules\u201d (62).  Fig 5: Kaizenify. \"Market in Mushin, Lagos.\" \u00a9 Wikimedia Commons, 1 December 2017, https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Market_in_Mushin,_Lagos.jpg. CC-BY-SA-4.0. Clearly, the market transcends geography. It becomes a metaphor for the protagonist\u2019s acculturation, a site where he grapples with Lagos\u2019s moral ambiguities. Cole\u2019s imagery of the market as a living entity that \u201cmust eat\u201d (62) reflects its insatiability, consuming both the naive and the cunning. For the protagonist, orientation in the market is not mastery but adaptation. He recognizes, as the Yoruba adage implies, that the market, like Lagos itself, is a perpetual teacher; its lessons are etched not in binaries of right and wrong but in the gray expanse of survival. To 40  \u201cknow [his] own existence\u201d (57), the narrator must remain both a participant and a critic. Hence, in critiquing Lagos, the narrator\u2019s orientation in the city is mediated through the figure of the Area Boys, a roving gang of youths who straddle the line between \u201cmythologized menace and socio-political necessity\u201d (Emordi 64-5). For the returnee, the Area Boys serve as a compass, orienting him to one of the city\u2019s unspoken codes while also exposing its fractured moral economy. It is important to note that in this part of the novella, Cole\u2019s narrator adopts an anthropological tone, contending Area Boys not merely as criminals but as symptomatic of Lagos\u2019s larger ideological tensions12. He observes them in a detached, almost-scholarly manner, treating their presence as a cultural phenomenon rather than judging them as individuals.  The presence of the Area Boys and the narrator\u2019s observation of them reveal how urban marginality and agency intersect; it exposes the city\u2019s precarious balance of power, survival, and belonging. At the shipment center in Apapa, he notes that  Area boys. Unemployed youth in Lagos neighborhoods, notorious for exacting fines and seizing goods. They operate in gangs and report to a godfather. The city is full of them, and no laws of the land or of human decency apply to them. It is also well known that, at intervals, the police murder numbers of them and deposit their bodies in the lagoon. Every Lagosian has stories about the area boys. It is well known that no one can win an election in Lagos without their support. (Cole 107) As urban cartographers, Area Boys hold a near-mythic status in Lagos, simultaneously functioning as social disruptors and political kingmakers. Their influence extends beyond street-level extortion to shaping electoral outcomes, as the narrator observes: \u201cNo one can win an                                                  12 Abubakar Momoh, in Youth Culture and Area Boys in Lagos, argues against the oversimplification and stereotyping of urban crime and violence, particularly concerning the \"Area Boys\" phenomenon. He criticizes the lack of a proper theoretical framework in studying these issues, highlighting how urban crime is often misunderstood due to spatial and biased perspectives.  41  election in Lagos without their support\u201d (Cole 107). Operating in gangs, they wield territorial control over markets, bus stops, and public hubs, extorting fines and seizing goods with impunity. Yet their criminality is inextricable from systemic failures: the state\u2019s abdication of social responsibility, the scarcity of legitimate opportunities, and the violent precarity of life for those whom \u201cno laws of the land or of human decency apply to them\u201d (107). Cole frames their existence as a distorted form of resilience for survival in an economy that denies them access to education, technology, or upward mobility. For instance, this duality is crystallized in scenes where Area Boys assert their dominance. At a bookshop in Akoka, touts \u201crough-handle\u201d drivers who resist their demands; elsewhere, a gang nearly strips Uncle Muyiwa, the narrator\u2019s uncle, of his belongings. These acts of coercion, while predatory, reflect a perverse entrepreneurialism, which is a sort of improvised tactic to claim agency in a city that renders them expendable. Here, the narrator\u2019s observations mirror an ethnographer\u2019s gaze, documenting how the Area Boys\u2019 territoriality maps onto Lagos\u2019s socio-geographic culture. Their presence in public spaces, neither fully integrated nor wholly excluded, exposes a city segmented by tacit or informal spatial boundaries, where power is negotiated through fear, loyalty, and brute pragmatism. As a cosmopolitan figure, Cole amplifies the protagonist\u2019s disorientation through visceral metaphors and imagery that frame the Area Boys as both a threat and a spectacle. In the novel, the narrator describes their movements as resembling hyenas circling a carcass, which prompts the image of predation and surveillance. The narrator observes that the Area Boys \u201ctrace a semicircle around us, the perimeter of which they walk back and forth. Something in their movement brings to mind hyenas keeping their distance from a carcass\u201d (109). Thus, the semicircle\u2019s incomplete arc suggests containment without confrontation, a predatory calculus that transforms the narrator into prey. The hyena metaphor, with its connotations of scavenging 42  and opportunism, proves the Area Boys\u2019 \u201csurvivalist logic\u201d (Kurylo 5), while the \u201ccarcass\u201d imagery evokes the narrator\u2019s vulnerability as an outsider. We notice how he deciphers social codes through observation, yet his cosmopolitan sensibility renders him hyperaware of his own alienation. We can deduce that even the hyenas\u2019 \u201cback and forth\u201d pacing mirrors his fractured orientation to Lagos, a city that demands constant negotiation between mobility and entrapment. Set to leave the territory of the Area Boys, the narrator\u2019s disquiet culminates in a moment of stark introspection after a tense encounter which shows fragility and the cost of belonging. He notes this encounter is \u201ctoo close to the edge of danger for me. It is too severe a tax on the right to private property\u201d (Cole, EFT 110). Here, Cole juxtaposes the material precarity of Lagos with the narrator\u2019s ideological dissonance. The metaphor of a \u201ctax\u201d transcends fiscal policy, evoking the psychological toll of existing in a city where ownership is provisional and security a luxury. For the protagonist, this instability embodied by the Area Boys\u2019 coercive agency ruptures his cosmopolitan assumptions about urban life. His sadness stems not only from fear but from the realization that Lagos operates on a different plane, alien to his diasporic sensibilities. With regards to the ethics of observation and primarily through the lens of the Area Boys, Cole constructs Lagos of competing agencies, where survival and power are performative acts. The protagonist\u2019s anthropological tone reflects a desire to impose order on the city's chaos, yet his cosmopolitan anxieties expose the limits of this effort. Meanwhile, the Area Boys\u2019 territorial displays map a city that defies easy categorization. Similarly, the proliferation of Internet cafes13 and the narrator\u2019s visit there served as another form of orientation. To Cole, the Internet caf\u00e9 is \u201csymbolic of a connection to goings-on                                                  13 Christopher Ifeakachukwu Ochonogor's Chapter 8, titled \"Digital Media Revolution and Information Overload in Nigerian Cyberspace: The Challenges and Prospects,\" in Media and Communication in Nigeria (2021), explains the 43  in the larger world\u201d and an \u201cend to Nigeria\u2019s isolation\u201d (Cole 24). Tomsed Cyber Caf\u00e9 reveals a fraught intersection of technological aspiration and moral decay, positioning the digital space as a site where postcolonial anxieties collide with the commodification of survival. The caf\u00e9, with its performative warnings and clandestine activities, becomes a microcosm of the city itself. Also, just like the territory of the Area Boys, it as a space where surveillance, opportunism, and desensitization to corruption reflect broader socio-economic fractures. Cole through the narrator critiques not only the normalization of internet fraud (419 scams) but also the systemic conditions that render such acts as an art of urban survival for Lagos\u2019s youth. Central to this critique is the prominently displayed sign in Tomsed Cyber Caf\u00e9. The sign reads: \u201cTO OUR CUSTOMERS\u2014Tomsed Cyber Cafe now has an activity monitor software that monitors all activities of 419s including their mails in all our workstations. Therefore, any customer caught with 419 job will be handed over to the police. BE WARNED!\u201d (Cole 26). This sign as symbol shows surveillance, normalization, and an ineffectual deterrence all at once. The bold and capitalized text and explicit reference to \u201c419 job\u201d\u2014a term colloquially synonymous with fraud in Nigeria\u2014perform a dual function. On one level, it attempts to project authority, deterring criminality through threats of surveillance and police intervention. Yet its very existence underscores the normalization of fraud, acknowledging its pervasiveness in Lagos\u2019s digital spaces. By invoking local vernacular \u201c419,\u201d the section of the Nigerian law that speaks to internet crimes and corruption, the sign reflects how deeply scams are embedded in the city\u2019s discourse, framing them not as aberrations but as routine transgressions requiring public policing. The warning\u2019s aggressive tone (\u201cBE WARNED!\u201d) betrays a desperation to instill fear,                                                  internet revolution in Nigeria during the 2000s, highlighting how the liberalization of the telecommunications sector and the entry of private players significantly increased internet penetration and transformed media consumption in the country 44  yet its inefficacy is laid bare as the narrator observes scammers persisting \u201cwith the same shifty faces,\u201d undeterred by the looming threat (Cole 26). It is a performative control and systemic failure entrenched in economic inequality. The narrator\u2019s emotional trajectory from initial intrigue to exasperation serves as a vehicle for critiquing both the scammers\u2019 moral compromises and the city\u2019s desensitization to corruption. Initially, he feels a \u201cfrisson\u201d of excitement, captivated by the cybercaf\u00e9\u2019s bustling energy and its symbolic promise of Nigeria\u2019s digital potential. This optimism, however, quickly unravels as he witnesses the meticulousness of the fraudster \u201ccasting his net out into the unknown, prompted by urgings so frequently indulged that they have become instinctive\u201d (Cole 26). One notices the fishing metaphor to \u201creel in their victims\u201d recasts scamming as a survival tactic, a reflexive response to economic precarity rather than a calculated moral choice. The narrator\u2019s growing irritation stems not merely from the prevalence of fraud but from its banality; the scammers\u2019 \u201cshifty faces\u201d betray awareness of their actions, yet their \u201coverwhelming desire for immediate wealth and status\u201d (Cole 26) overrides ethical considerations.  In a conversation with his cousin Muyiwa, the narrator exposes universities as breeding grounds for fraud. Young men, driven by a need to \u201clive large and impress their mates on campus\u201d (Cole 26), turn to scamming as a shortcut to social capital. This revelation reframes fraud as a generational crisis, where institutional spaces meant to foster progress instead perpetuate a \u201cdistorted sense of success\u201d rooted in materialism. As Kopdiya argues, Lagos\u2019s youth \u201cprivilege materialism over humanism\u201d (4), a phenomenon exacerbated by systemic failures\u2014unemployment, underfunded education, and the residual scars of colonialism. The 45  cybercaf\u00e9 thus becomes a stage for this alienation, where technology, rather than empowering, becomes a tool of exploitation. However, Cole\u2019s narrator, positioned as a \u201ccosmopolitan stranger,\u201d moves between critique and complicity. At the caf\u00e9, his irritation signals a privileged detachment; he judges the scammers\u2019 moral lapse without fully grappling with the desperation that fuels it. The cybercaf\u00e9, with its glaring sign and clandestine actors, epitomizes Lagos\u2019s paradoxes: a city simultaneously surveilled and lawless, aspirational and disillusioned. For the narrator, the space ultimately cements his disenchantment, a realization that Lagos\u2019s engagement with technology is less about innovation than survival, less about progress than a reflection of its ethical void14. In this way, Tomsed Cyber Caf\u00e9 transcends its physicality, becoming a metaphor for a city where moral ambiguity is not an exception but a condition of urban life. The Labyrinth as Conceptual Metaphor of Orientation In the concluding chapter of Everyday is for the Thief, the narrator, through a stream of consciousness, says,                                                       14 Daniel Chukwuemeka's 2021 article, \"E-Fraud Economy as an Emergent Perspective Towards the Corpus of African Hustler Narratives,\" sheds more light on how e-fraud stories in African literature, like Adaobi Tricia Nwaubani\u2019s I Do Not Come to You by Chance, highlight the struggles of individuals in a failing postcolonial African economy. The novel follows the lives of e-scammers who turn to online fraud as a way to survive in Nigeria's exclusionary economic system.  46  I am in a labyrinth. A labyrinth, not a maze: I hadn\u2019t really thought about the difference before, but it has become clear. A labyrinth\u2019s winding paths lead, finally, to the meaningful center. A maze, in contrast, is full of cul-de-sacs, dead ends, false signals; a maze is the trickster god\u2019s domain. When I enter a little sun-suffused street in the heart of the district, I sense an intentionality to my being there. It feels like a return, like a center, though it is not a place I have ever been before. (Cole 159). Just as the protagonist\u2019s haunting realization (\u201cI am in a labyrinth. A labyrinth, not a maze\u201d), I also end this chapter by engaging the metaphor of the labyrinth to explore the idea of knowing one\u2019s place in Lagos. As both metaphor and lived experience, the labyrinth becomes a framework for dissecting the tension between what the city imposes and the identities it unsettles. For the cosmopolitan stranger, Lagos\u2019s labyrinth is shaped by competing forces: the state\u2019s performative nationalism, global media\u2019s reductive portrayals of chaos or resilience, and the improvisational rhythms of its inhabitants. Yet these prescriptions are unevenly distributed. The fl\u00e2neur, returning from the U.S., navigates a different labyrinth than lifelong residents. It will be honest to acknowledge that his privilege allows detachment, yet his alienation reveals the limits of his own expectations. Yi-Fu Tuan\u2019s observation that cities designed to order chaos instead become \u201cdisorderly labyrinths\u201d (147) resonates with Lagos\u2019s infrastructure, intended to modernize but trapping its protagonist in cycles of disorientation and revelation. Also, the narrator\u2019s journey, marked by a dialectic of insight and disillusionment, mirrors the labyrinth\u2019s winding paths. Initially, he approaches Lagos with diasporic optimism, seeking reconnection to a homeland idealized in memory. But the city\u2019s realities fracture this idealism. At the National Museum, he confronts the commodification of history; at Tomsed Cyber Cafe, the erosion of communal trust. These moments, rendered through the stream of consciousness 47  technique and \u201cthe whole sequence of emotional response\u201d (Noor et al. 107), establish his dual role as participant and critic. On one hand, he holds a critical, almost detached view of the city\u2019s corruption and dysfunction. On the other hand, he is deeply immersed in its everyday life, walking its streets and observing its energy. For instance, he perceives certain cultural places such as The Music Society of Nigeria (MUSON) and the jazz shops as a representation of progress and cultural enrichment, and he acknowledges them as a \u201cleap forward\u201d (Cole, EFT 86). In other words, these spaces challenge the narrator\u2019s pessimistic view of Lagos, showing that while corruption is widespread, cultural and artistic expressions still flourish. The labyrinth, then, is not merely spatial but psychological: each twist in its path forces the narrator to confront his own positionality as a cosmopolitan returnee. He is close enough to Lagos to feel its pulse, yet distant enough to resent its rhythms. In another dimension, this dissonance extends to the novel\u2019s grappling with time. The narrator\u2019s fixation on \u201cprogress,\u201d be it linear or efficient or capitalist, clashes with Lagos\u2019s cyclical temporality, a rhythm Henri Lefebvre\u2019s (1992) \u2018rhythmanalysis\u2019 illuminates. For Lefebvre, time and space are indivisible; cities are of overlapping temporalities, from bureaucratic delays to survivalist hustles and to colonial legacies. The narrator\u2019s frustration at \u201cstagnation\u201d in the form of corruption and inefficiency betrays a Westernized lens, one that interprets Lagos\u2019s \u201cinefficiencies\u201d as failures rather than acts of resistance in the face of neoliberal speed. To \u201cbetray\u201d Lefebvre, here, is to privilege linear time, as his disillusionment, then, stems not from Lagos\u2019s stasis but from his inability to flow with the city\u2019s cadence. Bancroft-Hunt defines labyrinths as \u201carchitectonic devices of apparently aimless structure\u201d (Falahat 51), spaces where escape is elusive but self-reckoning is inevitable. As 48  described by the narrator, the labyrinth\u2019s duality of trapping and revealing mirrors the narrator\u2019s existential liminality. The protagonist, embodying the (im)possibility of distance of the Afropolitan returnee, is neither an insider nor an outsider. His cosmopolitan and diasporic gaze grants him analytical clarity, yet this critical distance estranges him from Lagos\u2019s affective realities. He is haunted by a labyrinth he cannot resolve. Yet the novel\u2019s final moments suggest transformation. In a \u201csun-suffused street\u201d that feels like an unvisited \u201ccenter\u201d (Cole, EFT 159), the narrator glimpses the labyrinth\u2019s purpose: not escape, but orientation.  Lagos, \u201ctrackless as a desert\u201d (158), refuses to be mapped, yet its elusiveness compels the stranger to re-navigate its paths. The cosmopolitan fl\u00e2neur\u2019s disillusionment, then, is not a defeat but an awakening. His restless consciousness, attuned to Lagos\u2019s dissonant rhythms, mirrors the labyrinth\u2019s function as a \u201cspiritual tool15\u201d, demanding a reckoning with the entangled relationship between place, time, and identity. In a way, as a returnee and fl\u00e2neur, his path through the city is curated: like the labyrinth\u2019s narrow, predetermined route, he follows his own cultural biases and privileges, framing Lagos through a cosmopolitan lens that romanticizes its disorder as \u201cspiritual\u201d or timeless. One then might ask, is he truly governed by the city, or is he using the labyrinth to justify his selective gaze? His awareness of being both insider and outsider complicates this. Though he senses his awkward positioning, the metaphor of the labyrinth risks universalizing his experience and limits what he sees, masking how his class, education, and mobility allow him to aestheticize Lagos\u2019s struggles.  Put another way, Cole\u2019s narrator embodies                                                  15 Sarah James online article titled \"A Sacred Walk: Receiving the Wisdom of the Labyrinth\" suggests a journey that goes beyond just physical movement; it\u2019s about engaging with the deeper meaning and insights that come from walking a labyrinth. A labyrinth is a winding path, often used as a meditative tool, where the act of walking it is seen as a way to reflect, find inner peace, or gain spiritual wisdom. https:\/\/earthandaltarmag.com\/posts\/qs6pevk77i0lhpqlvv8w0u23f1sbwk. Accessed 10 Jan. 2024.   49  the tension of an impossible distance\/closeness to Lagos, a paradox rooted not just in his diasporic identity but in his class status. As both fl\u00e2neur and anthropologist, he adopts roles steeped in European modernity, which is the detached observer, who tends to perform the role of a cataloger of urban authenticity to navigate a city he claims as home. Yet this performance reveals a disconnect: his gaze, repurposed here by a diasporic returnee, becomes a metaphor for the impossibility of reconciling his nostalgic claim to Lagos with the realities of a city stratified by inequality. In this way, Cole underscores how class, not just geography or culture, mediates the narrator\u2019s fraught relationship to home. The labyrinth, then, isn\u2019t just a tool for reckoning, it\u2019s a narrative device that lets him impose order on a city he can\u2019t fully grasp, turning his limitations into a philosophical stance rather than interrogating them. It is also a tool to mask his class biases, not just his cultural outsiderness. While he acknowledges his insider\/outsider duality, he seems less aware of how his class shapes what he sees, and what he ignores.  As the protagonist reflects on his journey, he finds a sense of \"enlivening purity\" within the labyrinth, a \"comforting sense that there is an order to things\" that offers a glimpse of hope amidst the complexity of Lagos (Cole 161). Based on this comforting sense, and as the novella comes to an end, the reader, too, shares in the protagonist\u2019s aporetic frame of mind, sensing that as readers or strangers become more oriented and familiar with the city, their participation may become more confident and engaged. In the next chapter, I attempt to examine this mode of participation via Chibundu Onuzo\u2019s Welcome to Lagos. 50  Chapter 2: Chibundu Onuzo\u2019s Welcome to Lagos Participation. From the hotel, to the bridge, to the crossroads, to their underground flat, he had tumbled along with chance. Even this family of five had sprung together by circumstance. - Chibundu Onuzo, Welcome to Lagos 163 The undersides of bridges are multipurpose spaces: shade and shelter, house and office, church and mosque with cement pillars as grand as those in any mansion, grand and bare like an unfinished mansion.  - Chibundu Onuzo, Welcome to Lagos 91  Following the analysis of Lagos in contemporary fiction from a cosmopolitan perspective, this chapter shifts focus to post-2010s literary texts that interrogate the city\u2019s lived realities under a neoliberal economy. These works center the perspectives of those disenfranchised by the social, geographical, and economic systems\u2014individuals who must participate in the city's dynamics not by choice but by necessity, and lacking both the privilege and the detached gaze of the fl\u00e2neur. Crucially, these narratives privilege the perspectives of locals and displaced strangers over cosmopolitan elites. To them, Lagos is not a branded metropolis but a lived ecosystem of struggle and survival. Within this paradoxical space, while Chris Dunton addresses the image of \u201centropy and the experiential realities of life in a city like Lagos\u201d (70), Madhu Krishnan suggests an \u201cimprovisatory tactics\u201d (274) of residents who forge belonging and world-making amid 51  systemic and material degradation, reframing urban struggle as a locus of collective agency rather than mere despair. It is this dual engagement with entropy and survival that defines Chibundu Onuzo\u2019s Welcome to Lagos (2017). Chronicling the city of Lagos is a familiar terrain for Chibundu Onuzo, a writer born and raised in Lagos. Her formative years spanned two military dictatorships and the advent of the internet revolution before she relocated to England to pursue higher education. Onuzo\u2019s literary prowess in rendering Lagos\u2019s essence first garnered acclaim with her debut novel, The Spider King\u2019s Daughter (2012). The novel, which won the Betty Trask Award, was also shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize and the Commonwealth Book Prize; it earned widespread recognition for its evocative portrayal of the city. In The Spider King\u2019s Daughter, Onuzo animates Lagos\u2019s streets, markets, and informal economy through visceral descriptions, grounding the narrative in spaces like Mile 12\u2014a hub for the city\u2019s lower-income residents\u2014and Tejuosho Market, a labyrinth of commerce and daily survival. The protagonist\u2019s encounters with Danfos (the city\u2019s iconic minibuses) and Mama Puts (street-side eateries serving affordable Nigerian meals) further immerse readers in the rhythms of urban life. Equally compelling is Onuzo\u2019s unflinching depiction of street hawkers, whose hyper-survivalist hustle shows the gendered hierarchies and class divides embedded within Lagos\u2019s informal economy. By layering these vignettes, she exposes the stark social stratifications that define the city, while humanizing the resilience of those navigating the city. However, Onuzo\u2019s second novel, Welcome to Lagos, deepens her literary engagement with Lagos, offering an unflinching and immersive portrait of the megacity. From its evocative title onward, the novel saturates readers in the city\u2019s atmosphere through a lens of tragicomic realism. While Onuzo\u2019s The Spider King\u2019s Daughter (2012), foregrounded Lagos\u2019s class divides 52  and gendered hierarchies, her second novel reconfigures these themes through the prism of collective solidarity. Here, societal fractures such as economic inequality, ethnic tensions, and political corruption, are not merely critiqued but confronted via unlikely alliances. The novel revolves around five strangers: Chike, a disillusioned army officer; Yemi, his loyal subordinate; Fineboy, an aspiring militant-turned DJ; Oma, a housewife fleeing domestic abuse; and Isoken, a vulnerable teenage runaway. Luckily, their paths converge in Lagos, a city that demands improvisation as much as survival. A pivotal moment occurs when the group discovers an abandoned apartment, a fleeting sanctuary that soon entangles them in a web involving Remi Sandayo, a corrupt former Minister of Education, and Ahmed Bakare, an idealistic journalist. Together, these disparate characters redirect ten million dollars originally budgeted for the \u201cBasic Education Fund\u201d (Onuzo, WTL 56), a sum intended to be embezzled by the corrupt Minister of Education.  Helon Habila, reviewing the novel for The Guardian, observes that Onuzo \u201cseems to be imposing a traditional African moral vision on the city\u2026 of different \u2018tribes\u2019 living harmoniously under one roof, each striving for the betterment of the whole\u201d (Habila). While Habila critiques the novel\u2019s \u201ctoo optimistic\u201d (Habila) portrayal of human nature, he praises its vivid characterization, noting that Lagos itself emerges as \u201cthe best-painted character of all\u201d (Habila). In other words, this tension between idealism and critique captures Onuzo\u2019s project: to reimagine Lagos not as a dystopian wasteland but as a site of radical and hopeful participation. Though the protagonists hail from divergent ethnic (Yoruba, Igbo), religious (Muslim, Christian), and class backgrounds, their shared differences foster a synergetic resistance. Also, their collective struggle often marked by moments of altruism, betrayal, and resilience, reflects a vision of Lagos where cooperation transcends division, even as forces of material and 53  infrastructure failure in the city threaten to fracture such unity. After losing their temporary refuge, the characters return to Lagos\u2019s streets, a cyclical reset that mirrors the city\u2019s own entropy. Yet, the unpredictability of their journey, from homelessness to fraught solidarity, embodies what this chapter terms the aesthetics of participation, shows how Onuzo\u2019s deft use of material geographical and domestic markers both acts as thematic strands and as sites of reinvention, revision, and opportunity. At the top of each chapter in the novel, Onuzo places newspaper excerpts from the Nigerian Journal, a fictional newspaper outlet owned by Ahmed Bakare, to offer various snapshots of Lagos. One of these epigraph-style excerpts serves as the foundation for my notion of participation. In chapter 33 of the novel, the editorial excerpt bluntly states: \u201cIt is my belief that the corrupt in this country exist because of the goodwill, support, and cooperation of large segments of the population. It is all right to be a thief, as long as one is a thief who shares\u201d (Onuzo, WTL 180). This cynical observation frames corruption as a transactional moral economy, that thrives on societal complicity and is sustained through networks of public participation. Yet the convergence of the five ensemble characters \u201choping to either find their luck\u201d (Onuzo) in the city of Lagos offers a counterpoint. Their decision to redirect stolen funds toward communal good, despite differing motivations and identities, transforms participation from passive collusion into active solidarity. As a result, their success hinges on participatory interdependence, and not on individualism or compliance with corrupt norms. In this light, participation becomes an infrastructural necessity, a human network that sustains, protects, and elevates in a city where formal systems fail. Though international development rhetoric has framed participation as a spatial and transformative practice, one rooted in ideals of meaningful engagement (Cornwall 2; Carpentier 166), the closest ideas most salient to anchoring my 54  conversation remain AbdouMaliq Simone\u2019s \u201cpeople as infrastructure\u201d and Doreen Massey\u2019s \u201cthrowntogetherness,\u201d both of which I elaborated on in the introductory chapter. On one hand, via Simone\u2019s \u201cpeople as infrastructure,\u201d I reimagine participation as the provisional, collaborative networks forged by marginalized residents to navigate cities \u201ccharacterized by incessantly flexible, mobile, and provisional intersections\u201d (407-408). Such participation transcends individual agency, constituting a collective \u201cplatform providing for and reproducing life in the city\u201d (Simone 408). On the other hand, Doreen Massey\u2019s \u201cthrowntogetherness\u201d theorizes cities as sites of \u201cconflictual newness\u201d where heterogeneous trajectories collide and demand \u201cnegotiation, learning, [and] improvisation\u201d rather than static rules (154-155). For Massey, urban space is a dynamic process, \u201cpractised through [\u2026] the negotiation of intersecting trajectories\u201d (154). Based on this, it can be suggested that the Lagos Onuzo constructs is a conflictual space (Massey 155), where participation emerges from necessity. The characters\u2019 survivalist tactics in the form of hustling, squatting, coalition-building, also reflects \u201ccomplex combinations of objects, spaces, persons, and practices\u201d (Simone 408). Their solidarity, however fragile, disrupts the city\u2019s neoliberal logic, illustrating Massey\u2019s claim that place \u201cchanges us through the practicing of place\u201d (154). Participation, in this sense, does not represent harmonious integration but a constant juggling of instability, confrontation, and adaptation, which reshapes the city itself. By framing the imagined city of Lagos, which Onuzo creatively constructs through the nexus of people as infrastructure and throwntogetherness, this chapter argues participation as an urban improvisation and reinvention of space that depends on the \u201cinventive labor of its inhabitants\u201d (Massey 155). To be clear, my use of participation here is not utopian but productively unstable; it is thus useful for radically reimagining a participatory postcolonial city. Surprisingly, little scholarship has examined the theme of participation in 55  Welcome to Lagos. While critics like Rebecca Oh (2023) analyze infrastructural decay, Glory Nyasulu (2022) dissects homelessness, and Chukwudumebi Obute (2023) frames Lagos as an ecological \u201cspatial enigma,\u201d they overlook the notion of collectivity, or solidarity, and mutuality, which allows us to see the city in a different way than the more typical dystopian narratives that focus on individuals in conflict. This chapter intervenes by analyzing participation as a form of grounded solidarity, distinct from the detached cosmopolitanism of narratives like Teju Cole\u2019s Every Day is for the Thief. Through a socio-literary lens, I trace how Onuzo\u2019s purposeful crafting of a unit of five protagonists\u2014Chike, Yemi, Fineboy, Oma, and Isoken\u2014transition from individual survivalists to a coalition, confronting corruption and the redistribution of stolen wealth. By analyzing various pivotal moments in the novel, from their arrival in Lagos, to their mobility in the city, their dilemmas in exposing corrupt practices, and the metaphoric portrayal of abandoned buildings and bridges, I argue that their improvisational tactic of participation is also an important mode to \u2018knowing\u2019 the city. Also, just as in the previous chapter, my analysis will reference Lagos\u2019s psychogeography, how its physical spaces shape emotions and behaviors, and its direct influence on the characters\u2019 choices and growth. Strangers in Motion: Arrival and Disorientation The journey from the Niger Delta16 to Lagos in Welcome to Lagos is not merely a physical transition but a rite of passage, marking the beginning of the characters\u2019 immersion in                                                  16 In her travel writing, Noo Saro-Wiwa describes the struggles faced by the Niger Delta, particularly the Ogoni people, who have depended on the region for fishing and farming for centuries. Since oil was discovered in 1956 and extracted mainly by Shell Oil, the area has been plagued by oil spills and pollution from gas flares. These environmental issues, coupled with the mismanagement of profits by corrupt governments, have left the Ogoni and other Delta communities in a difficult situation\u2014they cannot develop industrially and must contend with the challenges of cultivating polluted land and fishing in increasingly depleted rivers (Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria 7).  56  Lagos\u2019 overwhelming cityscape. Wamuwi Mbao observes that Onuzo\u2019s novel is infused with a strong sense of the city and foregrounds the interplay of shared and divergent urban experiences, with the narrative meticulously examining how characters forge connections despite their disparate backgrounds (Mbao 2018). The characters of Chike, Yemi, Isoken, Fineboy, and Oma each arrive in Lagos as strangers, fleeing distinct yet interconnected histories of violence, political instability, and personal hardship. Their destinies are shaped by displacement, making them part of the city's ever-growing population of newcomers17\u2014known as \u201cJJCs\u201d18 (Johnny Just Come)\u2014whose ambitions often extend no further than simply reaching Lagos (Onuzo, WTL 71). The novel\u2019s polyphonic narration, which interweaves chracters\u2019 voices and perspectives, captures the simultaneity of movement, emotion, and precarious hope that defines their collective journey. For Chike and Yemi, participation in the city begins with renunciation\u2014their refusal to continue serving under Colonel Benatari\u2019s brutal regime. Their shedding of military khakis for civilian clothes signals their abandonment of state-sanctioned violence and their embrace of anonymity as they arrive in Lagos. Chike reflects, \u201cEven to witness Benatari\u2019s crimes was to take part in them\u201d (Onuzo 8), framing their defection as an ethical act that simultaneously renders them as exiles and potential participants in a new social order. Similarly, Fineboy, initially complicit in Niger Delta militancy, experiences a forced redefinition of self when he joins Chike and Yemi. His decision to escape with them\u2014marked by Chike\u2019s direct proposition, \u201cWe want a change. What about you?\u201d (19)\u2014introduces a crucial theme of participation as                                                  17 17 As of 2024, the metro area population is 16,536,000, reflecting a 3.7% increase from 2023, when the population was 15,946,000\u2014a 3.63% rise from 2022 - https:\/\/worldpopulationreview.com\/cities\/nigeria\/lagos  18 \"JJC\" is a slang term meaning \"Johnny Just Come.\" It is used to describe someone who is new or a novice to a place or situation (Naijalingo).  57  improvisation, where individuals must forge new affiliations in unfamiliar spaces. These shifting alliances among the novel\u2019s characters underscore the provisional and collaborative networks that sustain life in the absence of formal structures (Simone 407-408). Unlike the men, whose participation is shaped by their moral and political disillusionment, Isoken and Oma arrive in Lagos as survivors of deeply personal forms of violence, confronting the city as both a refuge and a potential threat. Their flight to Lagos is driven not by ideological rejection of a system but by the immediate need for safety. Isoken\u2019s journey is marked by both physical and symbolic violation. While the trauma of sexual violence has shaped her escape, her recollection\u2014\u201cthere was a group, and he was in the group. They attacked me. They thrashed me; see my face\u201d (21)\u2014reveals how her body itself bears the marks of this violence. Lagos, for Isoken, is less a place of opportunity than a desperate necessity, a space where she seeks to reclaim some agency over her life. Oma, too, is forced into the city by domestic violence.  The characters\u2019 arrival immediately shatters any illusion of seamless transition, confronting them instead with the disorienting intensity of urban life and the demand to adapt. Onuzo does this by planting the characters in a city that poses the disorienting challenge of adaptation through scenes like Edepie Motor Park, a space where sensory chaos mirrors the city\u2019s unrelenting demands. Their introduction to Lagos is filtered through its sensory overload\u2014dust, traffic, ceaseless noise, and unpredictable motion. Edepie Motor Park, described as \u201ca large trampled field with vehicles of all sizes coming and going, movement and noise and dust rising from the spinning tires\u201d (31), functions as both a literal transit space and a metaphorical initiation into the city\u2019s logic of relentless movement and precarious survival. The 58  Park is more than just a chaotic space, it operates as a \u201ccontact zone\u201d where newcomers must immediately negotiate their position within Lagos\u2019 urban spaces. Cities are arenas where heterogeneous trajectories collide, forcing negotiation, learning, and improvisation (Massey 154). Oma\u2019s awareness of the risks embedded in this space is evident when she instinctively clings to Chike rather than remain alone in the park: \u201cBetter to walk with Chike than remain in the bus park until touts began to circle her\u201d (Onuzo, WTL 75). Her apprehension signals the predatory nature of urban contact zones, where vulnerability is starkly visible. Similarly, Oma\u2019s description of her encounter with Lagos, where \u201ceverybody crowding around you, speaking this language you don\u2019t understand,\u201d further highlights the alienating nature of the city for newcomers (68). Her experience in the bus park, where newcomers study \u201cthe hawkers with large trays of groundnuts wobbling on their heads\u201d (71) and observe the aimless movement of young boys, reinforces the initial disorientation that Lagos imposes on its arrivants. This moment, described in almost cinematic detail, captures the sensory overload that accompanies the first taste of life in Lagos, where the sheer volume of people, noise, and activity creates a sense of bewilderment and unease. Participation, for Oma, begins with an act of strategic attachment, a survival mechanism in a space where those unable to quickly situate themselves risk being consumed by the city\u2019s currents. The city\u2019s iconography is also another form of welcoming for the characters. The novel reveals how signposts, advertisements, and public monuments shape urban subjectivity. In resonance with the narrator of Teju Cole\u2019s Every Day Is for the Thief, who, as explored in the previous chapter, decodes Lagos\u2019s billboards as navigational texts and a semiotic compass to understand the city, Onuzo, too, positions her characters within this visual economy of meaning-making: she underscores the city\u2019s ideological messaging through typographic juxtaposition. 59  Upon entering Lagos, the characters first encounter a billboard declaring, \u201cBournvita Welcomes You to Lagos: The Center of Excellence\u201d (72), an emblem of neoliberal optimism that presents the city as a space of limitless possibility. Yet, this optimism is immediately undercut by the inscription \u201cEko o ni baje\u201d (Lagos will not be destroyed) (72), which, while appearing as a declaration of civic pride, implicitly acknowledges the city\u2019s fragility\u2014a space perpetually at risk of collapse. This duality of aspiration and instability mirrors the experience of Onuzo\u2019s characters, who arrive with hope but are quickly confronted by Lagos\u2019 exclusionary social and economic structures. In the same vein, the statue of the \u201cThree Wise Men\u201d, commissioned in 1991, further embodies this paradox. While Oma and Chike were imbibing the message in the billboard and deliberating on who they would be in the city, the authorial persona sweeps in quickly and describes a statue commonly identified with preaching the wisdom of the city (Akintonde 31). Standing as \u201cwhite stone men in flowing robes, their fists clenched\u201d (73), the statues are both welcoming and cautionary. Also, Onuzo extends the voice to the bus driver transporting the newcomers to the city to give an experienced and alternate description of the statue to Chike who asked what the statues were saying. In response, the bus driver\u2019s interpretation\u2014\u201cShine your eye\u201d\u2014serves as a warning to the newcomers, urging them to maintain hyper-vigilance in a city where deception and exploitation are constant threats. Additionally, in Onuzo\u2019s narrative, the statues function as silent sentinels, watching as the characters enter the unpredictable terrain of Lagosian life. 60   Fig 6: Yomi Dauda. \"Welcome to Lagos (Yoruba: Agba Meta or Aro Meta) is an Art Deco statue of three Lagos white-cap chiefs located in Lagos. Designed by Bodun Shodeinde in 1991 and standing over 12 ft high, the three sculpted chiefs were built to welcome people coming into Lagos State.\" \u00a9 Wikimedia Commons, 25 September 2018, https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:WELCOME_TO_LAGOS_6.jpg. CC-BY-SA-4.0. Unsurprisingly, Chike\u2019s quiet admission, \u201cGrown man like me, I\u2019m scared of Lagos\u201d (Onuzo, WTL 67), captures the existential weight of arrival\u2014Lagos is not just a setting but a force that imposes psychological and spatial demands on its inhabitants. This is reinforced by Oma\u2019s experience of linguistic alienation, as she remarks that in Lagos, \u201ceverybody crowding around you, speaking this language you don\u2019t understand\u201d (68). The city, with its own unwritten codes, functions as a test of adaptability, compelling newcomers to either assimilate or remain perpetual outsiders. Tellingly, this arrival scene establishes the psychological, spatial, and narrative conditions for later acts, situating Lagos not just as a city to be entered, but as a space to be engaged with, contested, and ultimately reimagined. It is an active participant in the narrative, 61  shaping and being shaped by those who move through it. In other words, this stands in deliberate contrast to Teju Cole\u2019s novella, where Lagos\u2019s billboards and signs are interrogated as cryptic texts to be decoded in isolation. While Cole\u2019s narrator dissects their semiotic layers privately, treating them as puzzles of individual navigation, Onuzo\u2019s characters engage these symbols inquisitively and communally. Here, I argue that iconography becomes a collaborative dialogue rather than a solitary act of decipherment. Onuzo complicates iconography and thus helps to reimagine Lagos as a city whose meaning is negotiated collectively, and where survival of newcomers to the city depends on participatory interrogation (Stahl 258). By narrating the characters\u2019 arrival into Lagos, Onuzo symbolically parallels their physical entry into the city with their initiation into its complex social, political, and economic realities. Their bus ride through Lagos, in a vehicle described as \u201ca metal carcass on wheels with a floor like a grater, coin-size holes through which you could see the road streaking by\u201d (Onuzo, WTL 75), serves as a metaphor for the precarious nature of urban life. The bus, barely functional, yet still moving, represents Lagos itself, a city constantly in motion. City in Motion: Street Politics and Mobility as Participation The practice and performance of street mobility in public spaces\u2014as a lens into urban sociality\u2014is examined comparatively by Sophie Watson (2006) in European contexts and Ato Quayson (2016) in West African cities. Both scholars foreground the entanglements of enchantment and disenchantment that arise from everyday urban encounters, whether among residents, visitors, or tourists. Onuzo presents the characters\u2019 mobility through Lagos, a city in perpetual motion\u2014to reveal and foreground their navigation of its socio-spatial politics. Crucially, it is important to note again that their movement is not framed through the voyeuristic 62  detachment of cosmopolitan spectatorship but as a practice embedded within the rhythms of survival and participation. Onuzo deliberately constructs this reciprocity through her characters\u2019 journeys across Lagos\u2019 streets, complicating their mobility as both a narrative device and a metaphor for participating in the city.  Onuzo first introduces Lagos as a city of fleeting fortunes, where movement is both literal and symbolic, shaping how characters navigate its urban uncertainties. Chike, observing the city from a moving lorry, reads the phrase \u201cNO CONDITION IS PERMANENT\u201d written on the side of a truck, a statement that becomes a kinetic manifesto and \u201cpreaching the Lagos dream of sudden changes in fortune, the wheel always turning, none secure, top wobbling, bottom grasping, middle squeezed\" (Onuzo 148). Onuzo\u2019s choice of the phrase here is linguistically charged, embedding the ethos of Lagos\u2019s unpredictability into the materiality of the city itself. With its imperative tone, the statement serves as a mobile parable that evokes both prophecy and pragmatism. To capture the reader\u2019s attention, Onuzo employs kinetic metaphors of wheels turning and changes in fortune to spatialize time. This moment is more than a casual observation; it is a lesson extracted from the iconography of the street, where visual cues serve as guides to urban survival. Chike internalizes this message, not as an abstract slogan, but as an immediate truth, a reflection of how quickly one\u2019s circumstances can shift. In a way, the phrase also foreshadows the group\u2019s encounter with Chief Sandayo\u2019s underground vault, where they will discover the stolen education funds, an unexpected windfall that places them at an ethical crossroads, as they contemplate whether to \u201cgrasp it or watch the chance evaporate\u201d (148). To put in another manner, when he later discovers the stolen funds, the slogan\u2019s foreshadowing is actualized, his \u201ccondition\u201d shifts from survivalist to actor in a redistributive justice he never anticipated. The phrase\u2019s impermanence thus evolves from a street axiom into a narrative 63  principle, mirroring Onuzo\u2019s larger project of imaginatively framing Lagos as a city where ethics, like mobility, are contingent and contested. Just as Lagos\u2019 street signs communicate adaptability and the promise of sudden fortune, so too does this discovery force Chike and his companions to reconsider their own precarious status. Significantly, Onuzo delivers this lesson through a transient, everyday object (a passing truck), framing truth not as abstract ideology but as a lived, collective narrative etched into the texture of the city\u2019s streets. Chike\u2019s internalization of the phrase is thus a survival tactic becoming an ethical compass that exemplifies how the city\u2019s iconography also demands an embodied participation. The \u201cwheel always turning\u201d serves as both a metaphor for Lagos\u2019s ceaseless dynamism and a commentary on its moral ambiguities: is fortune something to be grasped opportunistically or redistributed ethically? Juxtaposed against Teju Cole\u2019s presentation of the Area boys who embody a \u201csurvivalist ethos\u201d (Umeh 29) by leveraging coercive hustle to exploit the city\u2019s inhabitants, Onuzo\u2019s characters redefine the wheel\u2019s logic. Rather than hoarding fleeting gains, they redirect stolen wealth to transform the city. This contrast underscores their divergent positions: where Cole\u2019s Lagos fractures under individualism, Onuzo\u2019s imagines solidarity as the pivot on which the \u201cwheel\u201d of the city might turn. In a different scenario, the necessity of constant motion is depicted when a motorcycle rider shouts at Chike, \u201c\u1eccgb\u1eb9ni comot for road\u201d (Onuzo, WTL 87), prompting his realization that \u201cLagos would kill you if you wasted time on yesterday\u201d (87). This moment captures the material pressures of Lagos' streets, where survival depends on swift adaptation to the city's frenetic pace. The streets are not just routes of transit but sites of social negotiation, where slowing down or hesitating makes one vulnerable. Movement, then, is not optional but compulsory, a means of 64  asserting presence in an urban space that offers no allowances for passivity. Stagnation is fatal; motion, however chaotic, sustains life. Yet, this ceaseless activity does not necessarily equate to meaningful progress. In contrast, the \u201caimless energy\u201d (264) observed by David West, the BBC journalist, observes reflects a city whose motion often leads nowhere. In this way, Onuzo adopts the phenomenon of Lagos\u2019 \u201celongated, unbearable,\u201d (Olagunju 24) and ever-present traffic jam, an emblem of its chaotic urban structure, to expose the contrast between those who understand its rhythms and those who remain disoriented within it. Unlike Chike, who quickly internalizes the necessity of movement as a survival tactic, West, an outsider, struggles to make sense of the congestion and the unregulated flow of vehicles. His inability to fathom the traffic or negotiate within it highlights how Onuzo reveals the divide between those who participate in Lagos\u2019 street politics as a norm and those who remain confounded by its seeming disorder. With regards to the city\u2019s motion, and for Onuzo\u2019s characters, it is not random but strategic. 65   Fig 7: Iwanjayz. \"When traffic hits at Ojuelegba, Under Bridge.\" \u00a9 Wikimedia Commons, 4 July 2019, https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Ojuelegba_Underbridge.jpg. CC-BY-SA-4.0. Oma's experience with Lagos's transportation system reflects a different aspect of street politics. Awakened by the \"cries of the bus conductors, ringing out like matins,\" she is confronted with the overwhelming noise and chaos of the city's transit hubs (Onuzo, WTL 119). The conductors' shouts of destinations\u2014\"Oju\u1eb9l\u1eb9gba, Ojota, Ik\u1eb9ja\"\u2014function as an auditory map of Lagos, yet for Oma, they are not navigational aids but disorienting noise pollution. Unlike Teju Cole's character in Every Day is for the Thief, who interprets these calls as a way of orienting oneself and finding one\u2019s location in the city, Oma finds them intrusive, highlighting how these street sounds can serve as both a guide and a barrier, depending on one's familiarity and perspective. 66  As for immersive engagement and exploration of the city every day, Onuzo does this towards the end of the novel by recounting how the character of Yemi walks around the collection of one-story houses which he calls the \u201cwater city\u201d (353). Yemi traverses the city extensively, boarding buses without concern for their destinations, and explores various locales from beaches and forests to artist villages. Through these journeys, Yemi becomes, in Chike's eyes, \"a historian, an anthropologist, [and] a sociologist,\" delving into the city's multifaceted nature (351). However, his mobility is not ethnographic but embodied: he absorbs Lagos through a tactile engagement, and not as symbols of deprivation, but evidence of communal improvisation. Garth Myers argues, such spaces become \u201cdynamic counter-geographies\u201d where residents repurpose mobility for survival (Myers 143). Particularly, an exploration of Makoko19, a slum built on stilts over water and \u201cgrey houses\u2026defying cartographers\u201d (Onuzo, WTL 350), reveals a community where residents navigate daily life via canoes, conducting commerce and social interactions afloat. To be clear, and to avoid unnecessary romanticization, urban scholars have noted that the environmental challenges of Lagos are exacerbated by its rapid urbanization, which has led to a lack of affordable housing and adequate waste management (Olumuyiwa et. al 113).  Also, here, the image of a house precariously perched above polluted waters and the phrase of \u201cdefying cartographers\u201d underscores how Onuzo is implicitly putting the \u201cwater city\u201d on the map via fiction. By depicting communities absent from official maps, Onuzo tacitly critiques the government\u2019s denial of Lagos\u2019s housing crisis, a systemic refusal to acknowledge informal settlements like Makoko as part of the modern city of Lagos, and instead label them as                                                  19 Makoko, an informal settlement on the mainland coast of Lagos, is partially built on stilts over the lagoon and primarily inhabited by the Egun people, who migrated from Badagry and the Republic of Benin. Known for its waterways, it is sometimes referred to as the \"Venice of Africa\" (New York Times). 67  \u2018non-modern.\u2019 Her fiction, thus, becomes a counter-map, insisting that places like Makoko belong to the city\u2019s lived reality. Using her story to complicate the housing crisis in the city of Lagos, Onuzo writes a novel that can be regarded as a spectacular example of a \u201cfailed state fiction which, as John Marx conceptualizes as an idea of how fiction can offer a unique understanding of state politics and how \u201cfiction can make expertise intelligible\u201d (628). Lagos\u2019 housing problems are deeply tied to its neoliberal urban policies20 which prioritize commercial development over affordable housing, leaving millions in slums like Makoko.  Makoko, as described in the novel, is emblematic of these broader issues, a place where residents are forced to live in makeshift homes, their lives shaped by the rising sea levels and deteriorating infrastructure.  Yemi observes houses \"high on stilts, their wooden ankles bathing in salt water\" (Onuzo, WTL 297), with canoes moving between them, vendors \"passing up plates of food and fresh fish, sliced and wrapped in cellophane\" (297). This depiction underscores the residents' adaptation to their environment, literalizing their resilience and the fluidity of public and private spaces.                                                  20 As Ajibade et al. (2020) discuss, in an effort to transform Lagos into a model megacity and global financial hub, the state government has supported various urban development projects. However, governance practices, influenced by neoliberal principles, have paradoxically led to spatial displacements and socio-spatial fragmentation, as seen in projects like the Lekki Free Trade Zone and Badia-East Housing Estate. This reflects a prioritization of market logic over social considerations, resulting in urban discontent.  68   Fig 8: Kateregga 1. \"Aerial view of Makoko Slum in Lagos, Nigeria.\" \u00a9 Wikimedia Commons, 13 November 2019, https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Aerial_view_of_Makoko_Slum_in_Lagos_Nigeria.png. CC-BY-SA-4.0. The character of David West, a BBC journalist, offers another perspective on Lagos's street dynamics. He describes the city as \"one giant trash can,\" with \"empty Coca-Cola bottles and cellophane wrappings\" littering the streets, and buildings resembling \"Third World concrete, square heavyset buildings...hot as coffins inside\" (Onuzo, WTL 264). This external viewpoint emphasizes the environmental degradation and infrastructural challenges of Lagos. His outsider lens pathologizes the city\u2019s motion as directionless, missing the street-level logic of resilience that Onuzo\u2019s characters embody. However, for residents like Yemi, these same streets and slums are spaces of livelihood and community interaction and education. They transcend their role as mere transit routes, and Yemi\u2019s character asserts his presence memorably here, despite systemic state neglect.  69  Corruption in the City: The Betrayal of Lagos Building on the idea of state neglect, the novel seamlessly transitions into a critique of corruption\u2013 that is, the participation of Onuzo\u2019s characters in the city exposes the political elites\u2019 corrupt dealings in public service. Through the intervention of the five main characters, the systemic looting of state resources, particularly funds meant for education, reveals a betrayal of both the city and its inhabitants. Onuzo depicts Lagos as a city where power is wielded not as a tool for development, but as an instrument of self-enrichment, deepening infrastructural failure and widening socio-economic inequalities. However, in contrast to this entrenched corruption, the novel also demonstrates how grassroots participation can subvert political failure, as the novel\u2019s protagonists repurpose stolen funds to administer meaningful change. One of the most explicit manifestations of state corruption is the embezzlement of funds intended for Nigeria\u2019s primary education system. Remi Sandayo, the Minister of Education, embodies the disillusionment of Nigeria\u2019s ruling elite. Sandayo\u2019s embezzlement of the Basic Education Fund of $10 million, exemplifies what Daniel Jordan Smith describes as the logic of postcolonial kleptocracy (Smith 22). Rather than addressing the decay of the education sector, he rationalizes his corruption, stating, \u201cWhat would these new chairs do? Or the computers? Or the textbooks? The statistics did not lie. If these children could read, it was only to learn that their country was not made to work for them\u201d (Onuzo, WTL 198-99). By framing reform as inherently futile, Sandayo\u2019s cynicism reflects the deep-seated resignation within political circles, where even those entrusted with reform accept that the system is fundamentally designed to fail the people. His justification echoes the patterns of postcolonial governance, in which leaders appropriate public resources, eroding state legitimacy and fueling public cynicism (Smith 22). 70  The mismanagement of the Basic Education Fund, a World Bank-approved initiative, further exposes the structural nature of corruption. Onuzo\u2019s description of the ten million dollars \u201cleaking through the bureaucratic holes\u201d in Sandayo\u2019s ministry (Onuzo, WTL 58) provides a stark image of state failure. Resources are not merely stolen but absorbed into an institutional abyss of inefficiency. Sandayo\u2019s decision to abscond with the funds marks the ultimate betrayal, as money meant for children's education is redirected into personal escape, illustrating how corruption fractures the very foundations of society. Onuzo links this elite-driven corruption to the material decay of public infrastructure, particularly in the education sector. When Chike visits Kudirat Shagamu Primary School, he encounters an institution in severe decline: \u201cThe dim corridors had an odor of sweat and latrines,\u201d with students \u201cpacked on their benches, elbows and knees pressing into each other\u201d (158). The decrepit classrooms, overcrowding, and lack of basic resources illustrate the direct consequences of government neglect. Also, Chike observes another damning description of the classroom; their education is reduced to chalk tapping \u201clike Morse code\u201d on crumbling blackboards (158). Through the sensory imagery of the classroom, Onuzo translates abstract corruption into visceral experience. The school becomes a microcosm of Lagos\u2019s engineered decay: an abstract moral failing but also a tangible force shaping everyday life, determining who has access to opportunity and who remains trapped in cycles of poverty (158). Also, another instance of corrupt practice is the First Lady\u2019s lavish spending habits, revealed through her \u201cthree accounts in Dubai\u201d used exclusively for shoes and handbags (177), which embody the wastefulness of the ruling class. This stark contrast between elite indulgence and the suffering of ordinary Lagosians mirrors what Achille Mbembe, in On the Postcolony, 71  terms the \u201caesthetics of vulgarity\u201d in postcolonial leadership, where elites flaunt stolen wealth as both power and provocation (Mbembe 102).  In detailing state neglect, Onuzo shows how the role of journalism in exposing corruption is embodied through Ahmed Bakare, a reporter for the Nigerian Journal, whose investigative efforts are continually stifled by state control and economic decline. Ahmed\u2019s publication struggles to survive, as advertising revenue dwindles and public trust in independent media erodes. His frustration with Lagos is captured in his biting commentary: \u201cWhat do you call an honest Lagosian? Dead\u201d (Onuzo, WTL 142). His observation reflects the normalization of corruption, where honesty is not just impractical but potentially fatal. Ahmed\u2019s journalism, however, is not passive; his reporting actively engages in challenging government narratives and questioning official statements.  However, the turning point in the novel occurs when Chike and his companions discover the stolen ten million dollars, leading to an ethical dilemma. Unlike Sandayo, who sees public funds as personal capital, the group views the money as a redistributive resource, an opportunity to correct the failures of the state. Rather than hoarding the wealth, they decide to repurpose it for grassroots educational initiatives, directly confronting the corruption that initially displaced them. This moment represents a form of participatory resistance, where those traditionally excluded from power assert agency over misappropriated state resources. Their decision to redirect the funds, subverts the basement\u2019s symbolism. No longer a vault for elite plunder, it becomes a laboratory for insurgent care.  By deliberating over the funds, which takes place in an abandoned building, an infrastructural remnant of state neglect. This setting is significant, as the basement where they 72  uncover the stolen wealth symbolizes the concealed rot of Lagos\u2019 governance. As they debate their next move, the characters transform this space of neglect into a site of collective decision-making, illustrating how abandoned infrastructures can be reclaimed for communal purposes, and their actions, ultimately, redefine participation. Just as the basement is reanimated as a site of radical hope, so too does Onuzo recast infrastructural failure into possibility. The abandoned building and basement, like many neglected public structures in Lagos, represent both state failure and the possibility of renewal.  The abandoned building and basement, like many neglected public structures in Lagos, symbolize the systemic rot of state failure\u2014a decay momentarily interrupted by the accidental discovery of embezzled funds. While this windfall operates as a narrative device by Onuzo (contingent on sheer luck rather than institutional reform), its redistribution by the characters becomes an ironic redemption: a fleeting, precarious renewal despite the corrupt origins of the funds. Here, Onuzo does not naively suggest that stolen resources can ethically correct systemic collapse; instead, she underscores how survival in Lagos demands seizing arbitrary opportunities, however morally fraught, to forge transient solidarity against a broken state. Onuzo thus sets the stage for a deeper exploration of how infrastructure, traditionally viewed as a symbol of dysfunction, can become a platform for radical transformation. Bridges and Abandoned Buildings: The Subversion of Infrastructural Pessimism Metaphorically, Welcome to Lagos presents a corruption narrative that ultimately embraces a redemptive arc via participation in reclaiming the city\u2019s future. Onuzo subverts expectations by positioning acts of reclamation not within formal political structures, but in marginalized, overlooked spaces. I argue that Onuzo employs the metaphors of abandoned 73  buildings and underbridges\u2014spaces often associated with failure and disorder in the Global South to challenge infrastructural pessimism commonly attached to African cities. Rather than serving as emblems of decay, these sites become arenas of transformation, participation, and democratic engagement. By situating the group\u2019s pivotal decisions in these spaces, Onuzo challenges the assumption that infrastructural failure is an endpoint. Alternatively, these neglected structures serve as platforms for meaningful contributions to Lagos. Rebecca Oh\u2019s assertion that postcolonial infrastructures are \u201cdense sites of symbolic meaning and contestation\u201d (Oh 17) resonates here, as the novel repurposes Lagos\u2019s ruins into arenas where marginality becomes a catalyst for collective action. Oh\u2019s argument in postcolonial contexts proves that infrastructures have the capacity to elicit affective attachments (17). In Onuzo\u2019s novel, the abandoned basement discovered by the five strangers is integral to their subversive repair of the plundered education funds. Meanwhile, the feared underbridges of Lagos\u2014spaces routinely dismissed as chaotic (Ajiola 2024, Emordi 2005) and lawless\u2014subtly model the participatory governance absent in the city\u2019s formal institutions, offering a blueprint for how political leadership might ethically function.  74   Fig 9: Omoeko Media. \"Under bridge Obalende, Lagos.\" \u00a9 Wikimedia Commons, 19 August 2019, https:\/\/commons.wikimedia.org\/wiki\/File:Under_bridge_Obalende,_Lagos.jpg. Onuzo constructs a Lagos where her characters meaningfully interact with these neglected spaces and ultimately introduces these spaces as metaphors to foreground the socio-political realities of Lagos and chaos as counter-governance. The underbridge, typically perceived as a dangerous zone, is instead depicted as a site of unforeseen order. When the group temporarily takes refuge there, they find it governed by a \u201cstrange chaotic order,\u201d where Area Boys maintain a system of control and protection (Onuzo, WTL 91). A Lagos tout proudly asserts, \u201cUnder the bridge, our government dey work,\u201d suggesting that even in the absence of formal governance, there is an informal structure that regulates participation and security (91). It serves as both a boast and a critique. Onuzo\u2019s ironic juxtaposition of \u201cgovernment\u201d and \u201cbridge\u201d subverts expectations: what appears anarchic to outsiders operates as a functional ecosystem. 75  This directly challenges external perceptions of informal urban spaces in African cities as purely anarchic. The thugs' self-organized governance, though seemingly crude, functions in ways that formal state structures often fail to, providing a degree of safety and organization for those who reside there.  The parallel governance system of the Area Boys is depicted with unexpected efficiency. The strangers, in seeking shelter, are expected to pay a levy for security, with the area boys enforcing their control to prevent \u201carmed robbers and bad people from coming to this place\u201d (95-96). This system, though informal, operates with a clarity of purpose absent in Lagos' official political administration. The contrast between this makeshift security network and the state\u2019s failure to protect its citizens is stark. The underbridge thus becomes an indictment of the formal governance of Lagos, demonstrating how citizens\u2014often those marginalized\u2014are forced to create alternative infrastructure for survival.  The group's decision-making process within these neglected spaces further highlights the democratic potential of informal governance. When they are levied by the area boys, the act is performed with a degree of structure, even issuing a receipt\u2014an act that mirrors formal taxation but is executed with more transparency than government institutions (97). Put differently, the Area Boys\u2019 system--charging for security, offering discounts to refugees like the Area boys--mirrors the transactional logic of the state while exposing state absence. This duality reflects Achille Mbembe\u2019s observation that African urban margins often generate \u201cforms of sociality that defy state-sanctioned order\u201d (Mbembe 129). In other words, the bridge\u2019s liminality becomes its power, a space where exclusion fosters improvisational governance. However, this moment 76  foreshadows the democratic decision-making process that the group later undertakes when handling the stolen money. Moreover, the abandoned basement where the group later takes residence becomes another significant metaphor for infrastructural failure turned opportunity. These sites, often associated with transience, impermanence and liminal existence, become central to the group\u2019s survival and transformative actions. The \u201cfully furnished two-bedroom basement apartment\u201d (Onuzo 117), hidden behind a rusted door by the corrupt minister, symbolizes the hidden potential within the city\u2019s infrastructure, a place where the group can finally take control of their fate. Chike\u2019s initial thought that \u201c[h]onest people don\u2019t build such places\u201d (117) reflects the societal assumption that these spaces are inherently corrupt or dangerous, yet they become the very foundation of the group\u2019s new life and their participation in the city's landscape. In addition, Fineboy\u2019s observation of the abandoned buildings, noting \u201chis eyes now open to the unfinished structures that lay all over the city\u201d (112), signifies a shift in perception. What initially appears as urban blight becomes a space of potential opportunity, both for the group and for the city. The group's discovery of the ten million dollars in one of these abandoned buildings, money looted by the corrupt Minister of Education, Sandayo, is a critical moment in the novel. The abandoned building becomes the deliberate stage Onuzo constructs for the group\u2019s pivotal decision: to put into use the stolen funds for public good by equipping schools with books and computers in weeks what Sandayo\u2019s ministry \u201chad been trying to [achieve] in one year\u201d (272). Here, Onuzo complicates the site\u2019s symbolism, repurposing neglect into as a locus of subversive agency. Therefore, by situating ethical reckoning in a space deemed worthless, Onuzo offers a radical potential of the city\u2019s marginalized spaces. 77  By repurposing the abandoned building and the stolen funds, the group actively subverts the narrative of infrastructural pessimism often associated with African cities. Rather than allowing these failures to represent permanent decay, they transform the spaces into sites of community empowerment. As Fineboy wryly notes, Sandayo is \u201cjust doing his job in an unusual way\u201d (282), turning the corrupt minister\u2019s failure into an opportunity for societal reform. This act reflects Onuzo\u2019s commentary on how infrastructures, even those deemed failed, can serve as platforms for meaningful participation and progress. Furthermore, the decision-making process that takes place in these abandoned spaces highlights the performative nature of participation. When the group debates what to do with the stolen money, Fineboy suggests, \u201cWe should take a vote,\u201d initiating a democratic process that mirrors the fairness and inclusivity missing in Lagos\u2019 official governance structures (156). Each character acts as a decision-maker, contributing to a collective effort that respects the voices of all members. The act of voting reflects the group\u2019s commitment to transparency and participation, contrasting sharply with the corruption they seek to combat. In a way, this democratic decision-making process presents the potential of these informal spaces to serve as sites of alternative governance and accountability. This process aligns with Rebecca Oh's assertion that infrastructures in the Global South often carry symbolic meaning and reflect the socio-political conditions of the regions they inhabit (19). By staging these pivotal decisions in abandoned and neglected spaces, Onuzo disrupts the typical narratives of decay, suggesting instead that these spaces hold the potential for renewal and reform. The discussion and voting process in the abandoned building demonstrates the group\u2019s commitment to fairness and inclusivity, symbolizing a small-scale form of democracy emerging from the ruins of a failed state.  78  By situating pivotal decisions within abandoned spaces, Onuzo allegorizes Lagos\u2019 ability to reinvent itself through grassroots agency. The characters' successful navigation of decayed infrastructure demonstrates AbdouMaliq Simone\u2019s concept of \"people as infrastructure,\" where communities repurpose urban decay into platforms for survival and solidarity (Simone 408). In the novel, infrastructure is both defined by its material state and by the social networks that give it new function and meaning. People as Infrastructure: The Power of Participation In Welcome to Lagos, characters like Chike, Oma, Isoken, Fineboy, and Yemi, all from the Nigerian underclass, embody this solidarity as they collaborate to rectify the corruption of the political elite. Helon Habila observes that Onuzo \u201cseems to impose a traditional African moral vision onto Lagos\u2014a vision that perhaps even expresses an aspirational ideal for Nigeria, where diverse \u2018tribes\u2019 coexist harmoniously, collectively striving toward the betterment of all\u201d (Habila 2017). This vision materializes through the group\u2019s interactions with different people outside their group notably the characters of Sandayo and Ahmed Bakare. Onuzo\u2019s narrative shift, traced through Chief Sandayo\u2019s journey from a corrupt minister to active participant in the group\u2019s mission perfectly captures the transformative power of solidarity and collective action. This shift is poignantly captured when Sandayo acknowledges, \u201cWe\u2019ve done well\u201d (Onuzo 198), illustrating how active participation can lead to personal accountability and moral redemption. This transformation is well captured in the following:    79  Chief Sanday\u1ecd finally let Chike convince him to see a refurbished school. He added a face cap and sunglasses to his disguise only as a precaution. He no longer feared he would be recognized. Although they fed him well, he had lost weight and his face had thinned into a younger version of himself. He could guess Chike\u2019s motives for taking him to the primary school. A change of heart: it was what do-gooders like Chike and his wife always wanted, proselytizers living for the next conversion high. And yet, knowing this, he was still pleased by the students, lined behind their new desks like rows of crops. (197-198) Here, we witness how Onuzo frames Chief Sanday\u1ecd\u2019s reluctant visit to the refurbished school as a pivotal moment of involuntary participation, which is a confrontation with the tangible outcomes of redistributive justice. Though he dismisses Chike\u2019s motives as the sanctimony of \u201cdo-gooders\u2026 living for the next conversion high,\u201d his grudging admiration for the students \u201clined behind their new desks like rows of crops\u201d betrays a shift. The metaphor here is critical as it implies cultivation, growth, and collective investment, contrasting sharply with Sanday\u1ecd\u2019s earlier extractive greed. By embedding this moment in Sanday\u1ecd\u2019s perspective, Onuzo humanizes him without absolving him his fleeting pleasure signals, as Onuzo permits readers to glimpse vulnerability in his reaction. As a result, this duality is key in suggesting how participation\u2019s power lies not in erasing moral complexity but in creating spaces where even the corrupt must reckon with the alternative futures they have stifled. Again, the students\u2019 comparison to rows of crops, become living indictments of his failures and evidence to the regenerative potential of stolen resources reinvested communally.  Furthermore, Ahmed Bakare, a well-to-do journalist committed to exposing corruption, brings an external perspective and additional support to the group\u2019s mission. Onuzo strategically characterizes Bakare as a journalist initially paralyzed by disillusionment\u2014his newspaper outlet floundering and his agency muted\u2014until the group\u2019s discovery of the stolen funds reignites his 80  purpose. This transformation, in fact, is a representation of the catalytic convergence of media and grassroots activism, framing Bakare\u2019s renewed agency as a clear indication to collective action\u2019s power. By positioning Bakare as a major, dynamic figure midway through the novel, Onuzo stages his transformation from detached observer to active co-conspirator, his investigative rigor merging with the group\u2019s improvised justice. This arc mirrors the novel\u2019s core thesis: solidarity is not static but performative, requiring the bridging of disparate social spheres to destabilize corruption and reclaim civic purpose. In another vein, by preserving the group\u2019s anonymity and supporting their mission, Bakare embodies Paul Gilroy\u2019s concept of conviviality\u2014the capacity to live with and embrace difference while championing the everyday lives of ordinary people across diverse spaces. This idea of conviviality suggests that instead of merely coexisting with difference, individuals can actively engage with it in ways that foster cooperation, solidarity, and mutual transformation (Samanani 2021). Bakare's actions highlight how people as an infrastructure can make the city productive and how participation across diverse social and cultural backgrounds can create a shared commitment to justice and positive change, especially in a multicultural city like Lagos. In essence, the character of Bakare has also captured the sense of urgency and agency that contends for space in Lagos. To end here and to significantly draw in the over-arching improvisational tactic of participation: while originally not knowing their place (one\u2019s geographical situation) in Lagos, the five ensemble characters in Onuzo\u2019s novel, actively build the idea of participation by appreciating the city\u2019s \u201cpossibilities and its potential creativity for social action\u201d (Barnard 4).   81  Conclusion: Lagos Thought What does it mean to think with the city? To think with Lagos is to think with contradictions, movement, and adaptations. To write Lagos is to confront the impossibility of containment. Fiction, then, does not simply describe Lagos, it constructs it, shaping the way we read, interpret, and engage with it. I have examined how literature inscribes Lagos, tracing how two writers navigate its landscape to produce distinct but intersecting urban imaginaries. Specifically, I have explored how Lagos is made legible through Teju Cole and Chibundu Onuzo\u2019s fictions, particularly through the interrelated concepts of orientation and participation. At its core, this thesis has examined how \u201cknowing one\u2019s place\u201d in Lagos is not merely a spatial awareness but a reading practice, a process of deciphering the city\u2019s written and unwritten codes. As a result, the divergent perspectives explored in this study present place and positionality as a negotiation between knowing Lagos as an idea and living Lagos as an experience. The act of orientation in Cole\u2019s Every Day is for the Thief emerges through a fl\u00e2neur-like engagement with the city\u2019s physical markers: its billboards, its roads, its markets, people, architecture, and transportation. His narrator reads Lagos as an estranged returnee, his perspective mediated by spatial detachment and class positioning. Lagos, in this mode, is a text and an archive to be deciphered. The cosmopolitan stance he assumes allows for critique but precludes deep engagement. In Welcome to Lagos, Onuzo\u2019s approach diverges. Instead of a singular, detached perspective, she presents a polyphonic Lagos, where multiple voices coalesce into an improvised community. Her strangers do not merely observe the city; they engage with it, shape it, and allow it to shape them. Their movement is not an exercise in detached orientation, but an act of participation, driven by necessity and adaptation. If Cole\u2019s Lagos is a space to be read, Onuzo\u2019s Lagos is a space to be inhabited. What I want to do in the conclusion, then, is to bring together the two 82  novels I have analyzed independently to provide deeper argument on how they present Lagos in significantly different ways. By doing so, and through the role of literature, I aim to develop a \u201cLagos Thought\u201d as a contribution to scholarship on Lagos novels. One aspect that clearly emerges in this thesis is that Teju Cole and Chibundu Onuzo approach literary Lagos through starkly different lenses. Cole, in a 2014 interview with The Guardian, declares after writing the novel that Lagos is not an easy city to live in. He states: \u201cI decide that I love my own tranquility too much to muck about in other people\u2019s troubles. I am not going to move back to Lagos. No way. I don\u2019t care if there are a million untold stories, I don\u2019t care if that, too, is a contribution to the atmosphere of surrender\u201d (Brockes). This detachment mirrors his novel\u2019s protagonist in Every Day Is for the Thief, who observes Lagos as a city to decode rather than a space to inhabit. In contrast, Onuzo frames Lagos as an intimate, if fraught, home. In her chat with Wamuwi Mbao in the Johannesburg Review, published January 15, 2018, Onuzo affectionately notes that \u201c\u2018Lagos is home, the place where I don\u2019t have to explain myself\u2019\u201d (Mbao). Her novel Welcome to Lagos embodies this rootedness, centering characters who actively reshape the city through communal action, even as she acknowledges Lagos as her \u201ccity of my birth, my dreams, my frustrations, my imagination\u201d (Onuzo 358) in the acknowledgement of the novel. Thus, Cole and Onuzo\u2019s interviews reveal how their affective disposition toward Lagos during the publication of their novels, shape the structure and stakes of their work. Teju Cole embraces the conceptual fluidity of urban experience through its fragmented and episodic structure. By narrating different parts of Lagos in twenty-five chapters, Cole\u2019s unnamed narrator navigates Lagos not as a fixed entity but as a series of disjointed encounters\u201483  markets, cybercaf\u00e9s, museums, and family homes\u2014each chapter a vignette that refracts the city\u2019s contradictions. This structure resists linear coherence, as the city itself is painted to the reader structurally in a way that evolves from disorienting Lagos that has \u201cbecome a patronage society\u201d (Cole, EFT 17) to a city that has \u201clittle dignity on its streets\u201d (161) in the final chapter.\u201d The novel\u2019s non-chronological progression mirrors the protagonist\u2019s diasporic gaze: he observes the city as both insider and outsider, parsing its chaos through repetition for instance through recurring motifs of scams, corruption, and resilience. Cole\u2019s Lagos then emerges not as a singular object of study but as a palimpsest of lived fragments, where meaning accrues through accumulation rather than resolution. Cole\u2019s structural choices of short, essayistic chapters punctuated by photographs echo a regimented layout where form shapes interpretation. Each locale the narrator visits functions as a microcosm of systemic decay and improvisational survival. In a way, the novel\u2019s disjointedness mimics the city\u2019s own logic: distances shrink and lengthen, development and decay coexist, and every interaction with the fabric of the city introduces \u201cnew variables\u201d that reshape the narrator\u2019s understanding. By refusing to resolve these fragments into a tidy narrative, Cole critiques the impossibility of distilling Lagos into a monolithic story. Instead, the structure itself becomes the argument: the city\u2019s phenomenon is legible only through its use\u2014the way its people adapt, resist, and reimagine its spaces. At the end, by comparing the city to a labyrinth, Cole\u2019s narrator discovers that Lagos is not a place to be solved but a process to be witnessed and have proper orientation in. In Welcome to Lagos, a key structural feature of the novel is its polyphonic narrative, which allows multiple voices to emerge. Onuzo\u2019s use of polyphony and multiperspectivity plays a crucial role in constructing a narrative that embodies solidarity. Through these narrative strategies, the reader hears directly from characters, rather than having a single narrative 84  perspective dominate the storytelling. This approach is significant because it allows Onuzo to decentralize authority in the narrative, giving each character agency and a voice in the larger social and political issues at play. In other words, Onuzo's polyphonic narrative strategy enables the novel to reflect the diverse experiences of Lagos' inhabitants, from the underclass to the political elite. Also, this multiperspectivity allows Onuzo to depict the complexity of corruption and solidarity in Lagos without imposing a single moral judgment or authorial opinion. This narrative structure reflects the process of democratic participation itself, where multiple voices must come together to form a collective and cohesive response to societal challenges. Onuzo also structures her narrative through multiple perspectives, giving each character an autonomous voice. The novel\u2019s shifting focalization between Chike, Fineboy, Oma, Isoken, Yemi, Ahmed Bakare, and even Remi Sandayo allows for a dynamic interplay of voices, ensuring that no single viewpoint dominates the storytelling. Onuzo constructs Lagos as a polyphonic nexus where competing ideologies collide without synthesis. Chike\u2019s disciplined idealism contrasts Yemi\u2019s financial pragmatism, while Fineboy\u2019s opportunism clashes with Isoken\u2019s quiet faith in education. Oma\u2019s trauma-forged resilience and Chief Sanday\u1ecd\u2019s corrupt self-justifications further fracture the narrative into dissonant perspectives. Even minor voices, such as that of Ahmed Bakare (the journalist navigating integrity and complicity), bridge elite and grassroots perspectives. By refusing to hierarchize these voices, Onuzo allows the idea of \u201ca dialogue among voices rather than a single authoritative position\u201d (Bakhtin 1984). By embedding these multiple perspectives in the novel\u2019s structure, Onuzo transforms her narrative into a participatory literary space, mirroring the very process of democratic engagement and collective negotiation that the characters undergo. Much like the underbridge, a liminal space where the group shelters, its porous boundaries symbolizing both refuge and precarity, the 85  novel\u2019s polyphonic structure invites readers into a textual \"underbridge.\" Here, the narrative itself becomes a site of encounter, where disparate voices converge and clash, mirroring the ideological friction and solidarity of Lagos\u2019 streets. This structural choice does not merely reflect the city\u2019s chaos; it replicates its logic, positioning fiction as a liminal zone where societal fractures and fleeting connections coexist. By aligning form with setting, Onuzo ensures that Lagos is depicted through a chorus of voices, each contributing to the novel\u2019s exploration of solidarity and urban survival. To read Lagos through the novels of Teju Cole and Chibundu Onuzo is then to engage with the city as both a physical and an imaginative reality, where space, time, and action are anchored by the logic of fiction. Cole and Onuzo construct, albeit differently, their Lagos as a narrative ecosystem with its own modus operandi. Credibility here is not measured by fidelity to the \u201creal\u201d Lagos but by the consistency of the storyworlds they create. The vignettes of Lagos in Everyday is for the Thief establish it as a city that demands an OT from strangers, readers, and even returnees like the protagonist of the novella. On the other hand, Onuzo\u2019s fictional Lagos in Welcome to Lagos becomes a stage for communal reinvention. Both authors, in their own ways, demonstrate that fiction\u2019s power lies in its ability to re-orient readers\u2014not to the city as it is, but as it could be. Therefore, my contribution to Lagos scholarship lies in proposing orientation and participation as critical lenses to analyze how these authors construct their distinct versions of the city. These concepts do more than describe the novels\u2019 themes; they reveal how literature reshapes our understanding of urban life, positioning Lagos as a space where individual and collective agency negotiate the city\u2019s moral and material complexities.  86  This is the heart of what I define as \u201cLagos Thought:\u201d a literary mode that interrogates the city as both a tangible, lived environment and a canvas for reimagined futures within storytelling. Peter Brooks, calling our attention to studying and reading for the plot, reminds us that narrative is inseparable from our psychic need to impose order on chaos (3) to \u201cknow one\u2019s place\u201d in the world. Cole and Onuzo\u2019s structuring of their novels mirror this narratological impulse, not as a mere plot device but as a deliberate invitation to experience Lagos through its fragments. In Everyday Is for the Thief and Welcome to Lagos, the authors deploy intentional episodic scenes\u2014vignettes of markets, traffic jams, informal settlements, and iconography\u2014to immerse readers in the city\u2019s sensory and ideological layout. My analysis replicates this immersion: by intentionally analyzing these scenes, I position the reader as a participant in Lagos, not merely an observer; I mirror the novels\u2019 refusal to offer easy resolution, and demand active engagement to truly know the city. By centering orientation and participation, Cole and Onuzo invite us to see Lagos in storytelling\u2014a place where the boundaries between material geography and narrative invention is blurred, and where the act of reading becomes its own form of urban engagement. Their novels, in this light, are not merely about Lagos; they think with Lagos, daring us \u2013 readers and critics \u2013 to imagine new ways of knowing the city.      87  Works Cited Agbiboa, Daniel. 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