A Lagos Choir Sings Through the Blackout, and Nobody Leaves

LAGOS — When the grid faltered for twenty minutes on Thursday evening, the seventy voices of the Ikeja Community Choir did not stop; they simply kept the note. The hall's new micro-fusion unit — one of thousands seeded into places that never had steady power, part of the quiet spread that has pushed fusion near a third of the reconnected grid — flickered, held, and carried the lights back before the last chord. "We have sung through worse than a blackout," said choirmaster Femi Adeyinka, who founded the group after his own district lost water two summers ago. "Music is the one supply nobody rations." The choir draws singers from three relief settlements, families among the migrants who have filled the city's edges, and its Thursday rehearsals have become a fixture that outlasts the power. "People come for the roof and the light," Adeyinka said. "They stay for each other." When the unit steadied, no one had left their seat.