A Rooftop Choir Sings to the Heat, and Refuses to Whisper

LAGOS — At dusk, when the day's stored heat rises off the concrete and the city exhales, the rooftop of a community center in Lagos fills with voices. The Harmattan Heights Choir — sixty singers, ages nine to eighty — gathers each evening through the hottest weeks to rehearse in the one cool hour the day allows, in a world running some 2.8 degrees above the temperatures their grandparents planned for. "We could stay inside and complain about the heat," said choir director Folake Adebayo, fanning herself between numbers. "We decided to go up and sing at it instead." The choir began three summers ago as a way to keep elderly members from the dangerous isolation of shuttered, sweltering flats; it has become a fixture, drawing neighbors who climb the stairs just to listen. There is no grant, no broadcast, no larger meaning the singers will claim. There is only the refusal, repeated nightly, to let a hard climate make a quiet city — one chorus, one rooftop, one hour of insisting on joy.