Pirates by Ross Kemp

Author:Ross Kemp [Kemp, Ross]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780141931937
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2009-08-24T00:00:00+00:00

The residents of Ajegunle call it the Jungle. It’s a bit of a misnomer. Jungles are green and fertile. Stuff grows there. You’d be hard pressed to find anything that grows in this desperate place.

Ajegunle is Lagos’s biggest waterside slum. It’s difficult to say how many people live there – like the rest of Lagos, the population is fluid and expanding. Estimates vary. Whatever the true figure, one thing’s for sure – it’s too many.

To get to Ajegunle from our hotel we had to drive through the perpetual Lagos traffic. Once we had freed ourselves from that snarling logjam, we drove through some suburbs that weren’t, by Nigerian standards, too bad. I remember passing a school not far from our destination that wouldn’t have looked out of place in a less impoverished part of the world, with big bright paintings of animals on the walls. But with a population so large, I knew it was only a privileged few that received the advantage of any kind of education. We stopped our car at the end of a long thin alleyway – perhaps half the length of a football pitch – and as we unloaded our vehicle we started attracting the usual attention. Locals approached us, intrigued by the camera gear and offering to carry it. In Africa, it’s easy to assume that when this happens they mean to rob you, but that would be a lazy assumption. These people were poor, and like so many others they wanted chop-chop – a small tip for services rendered.

We walked down the alleyway. There was litter on the ground, but nothing out of the ordinary for Lagos. The further I walked, though, the more I could tell that there was something round the corner. Something unpleasant. A sudden stench filled the air – the sort of stench that makes you screw up your face, and which grew stronger and stronger the further we walked down that alleyway.

And then we saw it.

Ajegunle is hell on earth, its principal waterway like the River Styx. I half imagined the Devil cruising by in his speedboat, nodding proudly at a job well done. A couple of years previously, when I had travelled to Kenya to try and meet members of the Mongiki clan, I had visited Dandora, the biggest, most toxic rubbish tip in Africa. Ajegunle was like Dandora by the sea. The slum is so polluted that you can’t see the riverbank for the rubbish that is piled up by the side of the water. To get to the main drag of the slum, we had to cross the river in one of the crowded punts that ferried the inhabitants back and forth. The water that carried us was thick with debris – plastic bottles, food wrappers, all manner of day-to-day waste that you or I would put in the bin, ready for the tip. But there are no bins in Ajegunle. It is the tip and this rubbish covers every spare space.

A large proportion of the population of the slum originates from the interior.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.