Across the Divide

Ngozi had not been back to Ajegunle in fourteen years, and the first thing she noticed was the silence. Not true silence — Lagos never permitted that — but an absence where noise used to live, as though someone had removed a frequency from the air. The go-slow vendors were gone, the mama-puts with their coal-fired stoves, the boys who used to wash windshields with dirty water and dirtier rags. In their place stood a construction hoarding decorated with an architect's rendering of something called "Waterside Luxury Living."

She parked her rented car beside a drainage ditch that used to flood every rainy season, drowning chickens and occasionally children. The ditch had been covered over with concrete and someone had planted ornamental grasses along its edge, as if beauty could be a form of amnesia. Her notebook was open on the passenger seat, her recorder charged, her questions prepared. But standing here, breathing air that smelled of fresh cement instead of open sewage, she felt her professional distance collapse like a badly built scaffold.

The story she had come to write — an investigative piece on displacement for a British broadsheet — suddenly felt like a confession she was not ready to make. Because Ngozi knew something her editors did not: the development company reshaping Ajegunle had used her own prize-winning article from six years ago as part of their feasibilitystudy. Her words about "untapped waterfront potential" had been quoted in the glossy brochure she now held in her trembling hand.