How these cities
were made.
A growing map of the things Nigerian cities were built out of — and the decisions underneath them. Every number here is sourced, and you can check it.
How Lagos was made.
A growing map of the things this city was built out of — and the decisions underneath them. Every number here is sourced, and you can check it.
Schematic, not to scale. The amber line is the Third Mainland Bridge; the two short crossings west of it are the Carter and Eko bridges.
The bridge everyone crosses and nobody looks at
Eleven kilometres over a lagoon, fourteen years to build, and eight of them with nothing happening at all.
A country with more cement than it can use
Nigeria makes roughly twice what it consumes and exports the rest. The price went up anyway.
The bridge that has been demolished twice
The crossing is 125 years old. The structure is about 50. The third demolition started in August.
The most Nigerian building in Lagos was drawn in Bulgaria
Built for a festival of Black cultural independence, and modelled on a concert hall on the Black Sea.
Apapa
The port that decided where everything else went.
Eko Atlantic
Land that did not exist, and what it is holding back.
How Kano was made.
A thousand years before Nigeria existed, this was a walled city that made its living moving other people's goods. Everything valuable here is downstream of that.
Schematic, not to scale. The amber line is the trade route — north to the Sahara, south to the coast. It is drawn broken where the wall has gone.
The wall that took 250 years, and went in 50
Begun in the eleventh century, finished in the fourteenth. About a fifth of it is left.
The pyramids that everyone photographed and nobody kept
Nigeria's most valuable export crop, stacked in the open air. Then it fell by 71% in a decade.
Twenty camel-loads of silver
The man who built the pyramids bought at a price he did not set. His great-grandson sells at one anybody can look up.
Kurmi
The market inside the walls, and what it was built to handle.
The dye takes a month. The cloth it lost to is printed in a day.
Kofar Mata has been dyeing cloth since 1498. A hundred and forty-four pits; five still working.
Dawanau
Grain leaving for four countries a hundred trucks at a time. Nobody can show us the price mechanism.
The line south
The year the caravan route acquired a timetable.
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Sponge pays for it. Films made about these subjects may carry a sponsor; where a film appears here, its funder is named at the point it appears. The page itself is not for sale.
Every number is checkable
Tap any highlighted figure to see where it came from — the publisher, the date, the link. Where sources disagree, we show you both rather than picking the tidier one.
It gets corrected in public
Figures go stale and mistakes happen. When one changes we change it here and log what changed, with the date. Nothing is quietly edited.
It grows
Each entry is a place on the map. One is an article. Twelve is an argument about how this city got made.