The City Choirs Singing the Season's Ledger Back to Itself

LAGOS — When a season is survived rather than won, a city needs a way to hold what it went through, and in Lagos that way this month is song. In the Makoko district a volunteer choir has set the summer to music — the standpipe queues, the hot nights, the corridor water that finally came — performing to courtyards packed past capacity. "We don't sing to forget the heat. We sing so the children remember we got through it together," said Folake Adeniran, who assembles the singers each week from market traders and schoolteachers. The project is small, unfunded and spreading; three neighboring wards have started their own. In a year measured elsewhere in gigawatts and migration counts, the ledger these voices keep is a human one — who queued beside whom, who shared a jerry can, whose door stayed open. It settles nothing and mends something. The audiences, many of them newcomers to the city, stay long after the last verse.