On Lagos Night/Life and Queer Inhabitation(s)

Abstract An early 1940s, editorial of the West African Pilot laments that in Lagos, most residential homes had been converted into pubs and that each street had at least one pub, in a genre of moral pamphlet which often took the city at night as a site whose assumed excessive nature brought about specters of delayed, suspended, or compromised futures. This paper proposes to read these pamphlets as manifestations of a desire for straight time, that is, an ordered, progressive timescape “shaped by linked discourses of heteronormativity, capitalism, modernity and apocalypse.” Taking inhabitation at night as its object, this paper examines the vexed relationship between nighttime and the category of “life” in Lagos, looking instead at taverns turned into homes, with the contemporary proliferation of kill your traffic bars. These are sites where urban residents try to avoid traffic, subverting sites of entertainment into functional proxy-homes or temporary shelters. Kill your traffic bars are but one element of a constellation of migratory sleeping places for low-and middle-income urban workers during a given week—from the occasional night in the vehicle one works with to shared rented rooms, bedholds, friends’ houses, or partner's houses. As a form of temporal waywardness, these forms of nocturnal inhabitation disrupt the idea of “nightlife” as contained excess within functionalist imaginations of social reproduction. As commuters produce and inhabit contradictory social times, the outstretched, shapeless contours of nightlife express a social world in disarray. A hegemonic “straight time” still fails to cohere in the chronic instability of nocturnal habitation in contemporary Lagos, as neoliberal reconfigurations of the city multiply proxy-homes, bedholds, and “kill-your-traffic” bars and nightclubs. Contemporary night/life in Lagos point out to the ways in which hegemonic norms fail all the time, as well as to points of potential rearticulation of a politics of solidarity, of shared homelessness, vulnerability, and abjection from straight time. In Cathy Cohen's essential formulation: “Who, we might ask, is truly on the outside of heteronormative power—maybe most of us?”