STREET LIFE

Nigeria's creative scene is exploring new angles in a bid to reshape Lagos' architectural language, embracing the informal structures used by the city's market traders as paragons of adaptability, flexibility and identity

- WRITER: IJEOMA NDUKWE

On any given afternoon at Ebute Ero market it can seem as though the entire population of Lagos Island has gathered there. Tailors trudge the streets clinking giant scissors to advertise their services, while women selling the most vivid red tomatoes spilling out of baskets call out from corrugated iron-roofed stalls lining the teeming road. Then there are the moving traders with huge loads on their heads, carrying everything from sachets of water and pyramids of dried fish to cardboard boxes piled high.

But despite appearing chaotic, the marketplaces in Lagos are state-structured to a certain extent, says Taibat Lawanson, Leverhulme professor of planning and heritage at the University of Liverpool.

And they play a special role culturally as 'places of interaction and transaction', she says. Cultural historian Nze Ed Emeka Keazor also challenges the notion of them as 'informal'. 'Many of the market traders are registered companies,' he says. 'Virtually all of them pay tax in one form or another to the state government.

More recently, the Lagos marketplace has become a laboratory for stall design, emerging as an abundant source of inspiration for creatives such as Nifemi Marcus-Bello, who founded Lagos-based design practice Nmbello Studio in 2017. After studying overseas and returning to his homeland in 2013, he was told repeatedly that no one was 'doing design' in Nigeria. But his visits to the markets taught him otherwise: his ongoing project researching and documenting market structures and objects has formed the basis of some of his most celebrated design work.