A Rooftop Choir Sings to a City That Rarely Looks Up

LAGOS — Every evening when the worst of the +2.8°C heat finally breaks, the residents of a Yaba housing block climb to their shared roof, and lately they have been climbing to sing. The choir began as an accident — three neighbors humming over a cooling fan — and has grown to some forty voices drawn from a building that houses long-settled families alongside recent arrivals from the drying north. "We could not agree on the water schedule, but we can agree on a key," said its unofficial conductor, retired music teacher Ngozi Bello, who leads without sheet music because half her singers cannot read it. The repertoire mixes hymns, market songs, and melodies the newcomers brought with them, and the mixing, Bello says, is the point. No one filmed it for an audience; there is no audience but the block itself and whoever below happens to look up. In a season measured in shortages, the roof offers a small surplus — of sound, and of the ordinary grace of neighbors who have decided to make something together.