Water Has No Enemy | New Writing | Granta Magazine

Water Has No Enemy | New Writing | Granta Magazine: It is one thing to guess at the danger that is Lagos, quite another to experience it first-hand. Whenever I land at Murtala Muhammed International Airport – I go back once or twice each year – I feel that an actuary calculating my life-insurance premiums would have to temporarily charge me more. What I feel each time I enter the country is not a panic, exactly; it is rather a sense of fragility, of being more susceptible to accidents and incidents, as though some invisible veil of protection had been withdrawn, and fate, with all its hoarded hostility, could strike at any time. When I’m in the US, I argue with those who think Lagos is too dangerous a place to visit. I tell them I grew up there and wandered its streets for seventeen years, and nothing untoward happened to me.