Chapter 3: Rulers Make Bad Lovers

Living for the city

By a stroke of luck I caught the second episode of BBC2’s ‘Welcome to Lagos’ last night, and it was just as fascinating as the first. Last week the focus was on born-and-bred city people, but this time the thousands who migrate from Nigeria’s countryside to live in the city’s slums were in the spotlight. In the same way that the first episode looked at life on the rubbish dump, the lives of various people living in the slum of Makoko, built on stilts over the massive Lagos Lagoon, were examined. Chief among the many characters was Chubey – fisherman, entrepeneur, father of 18 children and master of the weekly Lotto, who served a linchpin for the other stories to revolve around. Highly intelligent, with plenty of what we Irish call ‘cop-on’, Chubey nevertheless was a firm believer in traditional sorcery and remedies, wearing what appeared to be a bird’s head around his neck and arranging for his son to receive an elaborate cleansing ceremony when he started running with a bad crowd. It’s not just rural ignorance that causes people to cling to such remedies – as Chubey revealed when he stated ‘We don’t have gates and guards like the rich men in the city, so we use our own protection’ – it’s also about asserting identity in a city where the haves and have-nots look at each other across such a vast chasm. Racial identity is also maintained through these practices – many people spoke of how traditional medicine was a uniquely black way of doing things, distinct and separate from the ways of white people. Makoko is like a slum Venice, made up out of thousands of small wooden huts supported on stilts sunk into the thick black sand of the lagoon bed. Inhabitants get around on small rowboats, often perilously overloaded with people, logs, sand, bricks and other bits and pieces. The presenter (refreshingly always behind the camera) astutely noted how ancient and modern coexist almost seamlessly in this place – the few medical centres provide antibiotics and tree-bark potion, everybody has a mobile phone but the primary method of disseminating information is still word-of-mouth. The patchy-to-nonexistent levels of service provided to the inhabitants was revealed by two deaths by electrocution of saw operators in the slum’s largest business, the Ebute Metta timber yard. Worn cables and a lack of protective gloves meant that even touching the wrong part of the wire connecting the huge electric saws to the power source led to instant death for two unlucky employees. The workers formed a makeshift union and demanded rubber shoes and gloves for safety, which appear to have eventually been provided. Also working at the mill were two boys of about eleven, who had left their rural villages behind and were saving to return home and build a house. How realistic their ambitions were remains to be seen. But as Chubey pointed out ‘If you come to Lagos and don’t have sense, you will get sense very quickly. You will never leave Lagos without getting sense.’ One person who seemed to be lacking in sense was Chubey’s teenage son Payo, who, as Chubey put it ‘is only good at going out’. Despite the traditional ceremony, he continued on his no-good-nik ways until eventually he was thrown out of the family home, along with his mattress and few belongings. Teenagers everywhere fall out with their parents and run away from home, but I don’t envy Payo trying to negotiate a life alone in Lagos’ slums. He maintained ‘I refuse to beg him [Chubey]’ but a few weeks out in the world might make him rethink his stubbornness. Female voices have been fairly absent from the series so far, probably due to to the fact that the central characters tend to be family patriarchs who would be unlikely to allow their wives (seemingly plural in Chubey’s case at least) and daughters to speak alone to the camera team. However the women of the slum were noisily present in most scenes last night, even if we didn’t get to find out much about their thoughts on life. One charged into the sawmill when she heard of the second electrocution, clutching an empty bottle of schnapps and roaring about how God had forsaken them. Meanwhile a couple of concerned sisterly types tried to persuade Payo to apologise to his father, but to no avail. Chubey – who despite his rather aggressively irascible manner, seemd fundamentally decent – eventually won the equivalent of £54 on the state Lotto, and the programme ended with his entire (and extensive) family celebrating. Another man, Paul, saved up enough money from his work at the timber yard to buy his own tiny home. Their ebullience and repeated assertions that money was making them extremely happy shows yet again that the bizarre mental trickery involved in separating money from a certain level of contentment is an invention of the affluent West. Again this super series provides a humanist, unpatronising view into the lives of people inhabiting a confusing, dreadful, fascinating and thoroughly modern city. I look forward to the next episode!

Beatlemania was fun but now it's time for beatledepression

The Beatles at the Cavern Club in Liverpool, England | 25 March 1963 (I)

Suze Rotolo

The death of Suze Rotolo is sad news; it almost seems symbolic of the passing of a certain kind of 60s innocence and idealism. But more than a symbol of an era, or a poet's muse, Rotolo seems to have been a talented artist and an interesting and thoughtful person. Her interviews in 'No Direction Home' Martin Scorsese's celebrated documentary on Dylan were illuminating and good-humoured, and she came across as very likeable. Her 2008 memoir of life in Greenwich Village, 'The Freewheelin' Years' bears this out. When reading the book, I found the sections where she described her upbringing, political awakening and youthful exploration of art and poetry more interesting than those describing her relationship with Dylan, which after all only took up four years of a full and varied life. I was struck by her descriptions of time spent studying in Perugia - her solitary excursions into the countryside to draw and write indicated a broad creative curiosity and need for solitude quite at odds with the intense, incestuous atmosphere of New York's folk scene. No wonder she felt compelled to leave, despite being subjected to a barrage of disapproval on her return for 'abandoning' Bob. I'm sure he, even in the midst of his bellyaching, recognised that her absence during that period was crucial to his artistic development, providing the creative fuel for some of his finest early songs. Judging by the book and the testimony of those who knew her, Suze was very much her own person, loyal to her principles and friends and stands out among the baby-boomer generation for remaining married to same person for 40 years! (film-maker Enzo Bartoliucci.)

In some of the interviews from the time her book came out she mentioned the lot of so-called 'red-diaper' children of Communist parents, who were obliged for years to keep quiet about their parents' political activities due to the insidious atmosphere of the McCarthy era, a necessary secrecy that she reckons contributed to the atmosphere of lively storytelling and self-mythologising of the early folk scene. Her account of growing up in what she described as a materially poor but 'culturally wealthy' family and her own love of poetry, art and literature growing up is very moving, as well as her commitment to civil rights and similar causes early on. In the memoir, she captured the essence of being young, idealistic and thrilled by art in the same way that Dylan captured the essence of being young and in love in his early songs inspired by her. It would have been good to know more of her art and writing during her lifetime, but ultimately it seems she preferred a private life above all, and would never sacrifice that for fame or wide renown. She speaks of reading Francoise Gilot's memoir of life with Picasso at the time of her trip to Perugia and feeling a strong sense of recognition at the plight of the talented woman forced to play second fiddle to her genius lover. There was no way she could fit herself into the reductive 60s role of a male singer’s ‘chick’, even if she had wanted to. Her wit is evident in this podcast, where she nicely skewered the essence of Dylan (and perhaps the essence of all geniuses who seek fame) when she described a song of his ('What Was It You Wanted' from the 80s album Oh Mercy) as 'very clever, very funny, with a big nasty streak!'. True, witty, and delivered with a wry smile and not a shred of bitterness. Both her natural sense of privacy and her strong sense of self could not continue in a relationship with Dylan as his fame began to spiral into the stratosphere, though by all accounts making the break was a long, painful process. One gets the feeling from her interviews of great love shared in those early days, but no regret now for how things panned out. Seeing how insane things got for Dylan in later years, I think the modern term for Suze’s experience is ‘bullet dodged’.

Though it's sad she's gone before her time (she had been suffering cancer for some years), it's still in keeping to raise a glass to a good person who lived her life well. RIP Suze.

John not into chicks in this January 1966 issue of Fabulous magazine.

Naturally I googled the photoshoot...

The face and sleeves of a man who does not want to be doing this at all 😄❤️🐥🐥

The Beatles rehearse for the BBC radio show Teenager's Turn (Here We Go) in Manchester, England | 11 June 1962 © Mike McCartney

Drawings of John Lennon by Klaus Voormann

The Quarry Men’s banjo player, Rod Davis, recalls, “I had bought the banjo from my uncle and if he’d sold me his guitar, I might have been a decent enough guitarist to keep McCartney out of the band. I might have learnt guitar chords, I might not, and that was the big limitation really. McCartney could play the guitar like a guitar and we couldn’t, and let’s face it, a banjo doesn’t look good in a rock’n’ roll group. I only met Paul on one other occasion after the Woolton fête and it was at auntie Mimi’s a week or two later. He dropped in to hear us practising. From my point of view, I was the person he was replacing – it’s like Pete Best – you’re the guy who doesn’t know. Some things had gone on that I was unaware of.”

(Best of the Beatles: The sacking of Pete Best by Spencer Leigh, 2015)

Social conditioning is so strong that many people here seem so honored that a white man cared enough to steal their ideas. Instead of, you know, wondering why they don't have the opportunity of publishing such material themselves.