By Ben West
Taking SharedCity’s two-hour ‘Little Lagos’ tour in Peckham certainly provides a fascinating glimpse into the day-to-day life of London’s Nigerian Yoruba community.
London has the UK’s largest concentration of Nigerians (nearly 115,000 in the 2011 census), with the neighbourhood of Peckham having the largest overseas Nigerian community, making up around 7% of the population of the area. Significant numbers also live in Dalston, Hackney, Swiss Cottage, Shepherd’s Bush and Kilburn.
Civil and political unrest in Nigeria contributed to many refugees migrating to Britain in the 1960s, along with skilled workers. The collapse of the petroleum boom in the 1980s triggered an increase in the numbers of Nigerians coming to Britain, and asylum applications from Nigerians peaked in 1995, when the repression associated with the military dictatorship of Sani Abacha was at its greatest.
Our guide on the tour is the very affable and lively Kemi, whose parents emigrated to Britain in the 1960s. Kemi moved back to Nigeria when aged two, returning to the UK in the 1990s. At the start of the tour she gives us colourful Yoruba hats to wear, made from hand-woven African fabric (Aso Oke), cotton, velvet, or damask. They traditionally show your status, such as being a member of royalty, or from a certain tribe.
We visit a couple of food shops. Many of the food shops in central Peckham sell the same things. Many popular Nigerian dishes consist of hot peppers and root vegetables like yam and sweet potato, so we see a lot of those. Plantains are another staple, and dried fish, and there are rows of sliced white bread stacked up, each brand typically named after a city or suburb in Nigeria, such as Agege and Abuja. The bread is softer, more doughnutty, more chewy and sweet than its British counterpart.
There are crates of non-alcoholic malt drinks for sale everywhere. No Nigerian celebration would be complete without an ample supply of this.
We enter a butcher’s shop. Nigerians eat every part of the animal, so we see tripe and other stomach parts for sale, gizzards, lambs necks, cow’s feet, scrawny chickens for boiling, and fatter, more expensive ones for roasting.
Entering a textile store, we’re surrounded by a rainbow of deep, bright colours and rows and rows of striking patterns, known as Aso Ebi styles. Dress is so important in Nigerian culture that when there’s a wedding it’s not uncommon for the invitation to state the colour, textile type and style the congregation are expected to wear, and the colour that will be worn by the celebrants. Woe betide any guest wearing the same colour as the principal people at the celebration.
This necessity for the wedding guests to wear identical fabrics means the effect is visually stunning – and also expensive. Buying the fabric and getting a dress or suit made up by your tailor will set you back at least £150 or £200 each time.
Hair styles are also extremely important to Nigerian women. We enter a large shop, Paks, that sells a large assortment of wigs, braids, weaves and hair accessories, everything from £2 synthetic hairpieces to human hair wigs costing £400 or more.
To have your hair styled, you’ll most likely visit somewhere like Licious Place in the depths of a small shopping arcade near Peckham Rye station where a trio of women are braiding, weaving and platting.
“It’s very hard work,” says Kemi. “The women can spend 12 hours a day standing up doing this job, and some may have babies on their backs.”
Nigerian parents are often keen their children aim for university, professions and clerical jobs. In a 2013 survey, The Institute for Public Policy Research found that Nigerian pupils are among the best performing student groups in the UK. In England it found that the proportion of British Nigerian pupils gaining 5 A*–C grades at GCSE in 2010–2011 was 21.8 percentage points higher than the England mean of 59.6 per cent
Higher Education Statistics Agency data found that 17,620 students from Nigeria were studying at British public higher education institutions in the academic year 2011-12, making them the third largest country-of-origin group behind students from China and India.
Also, the number of Nigerian pupils at British private schools is growing, and in 2013 the number of entrants to private schools from Nigeria increased by 16 per cent.
We walk on and enter a Christian church. Church is very important in Nigerian society, indeed there’s a church or mosque on almost every street corner in Nigeria.
“The Church is an organic thing for us,” says Kemi. “You can wake up one day and have a calling from God to start a church, and just start one in your front room if you want.”
Peckham has a sizeable number of religious buildings, indeed the Borough of Southwark as a whole is home to 240 African or black majority churches, the largest concentration outside Africa.
The churches are typically tucked away in pretty nondescript buildings such as old factories and bingo halls, or in drab industrial complexes – in great contrast to the brightly coloured outfits the congregations wear, and loud, boisterous services they hold.
The church we visit is sandwiched between shops on a busy street, and opening the modern wooden doors reveals a large hall packed with long rows and rows of wooden seats seating hundreds. A big sign above the stage decrees ‘Jesus Christ is the Lord’.
“The church is not just for turning up on Sunday to say ‘hallelujah’ but to give support if you struggle in life, as we all do,” says the pastor accompanying us (who is wary to give his name). “The church focuses on helping people. Indeed, I was a messed up teenager, I came here and it changed my life.”
These churches seldom receive any public funding. However, a high proportion of people coming to the church volunteer to help out. Kemi says that 60 per cent of the congregation at her church volunteer.
At times during the tour Kemi switches to Yoroba – one of Nigeria’s 300 or so languages – when talking to locals. She’s grateful that her father taught her the Yaroba language. However, it is a dying language in London as many London Yorubas have neglected to pass their traditions on to their children.
Kemi has increasingly been struck at how Peckham has two parallel worlds: “In the day you have the Nigerians hustling, and at night the hipsters come out and socialise at the Bussey Building and Frank’s Cafe, a rooftop bar and restaurant.”
Our tour finishes with a sampling of some Nigerian dishes at a local cafe. Accompanied by a bottle of Supermalt, naturally, we are presented with cow stomach, cow foot and pomo (cow skin). We’re also given joloff rice with peppers, yam porridge (asaro), black-eyed beans and cooked spinach. I must admit that the former selection, chewy and a range of unfamiliar textures, was rather more of an acquired taste.
It’s all mildly spicy, but the dishes have been toned down for British tastes. In Nigeria your taste buds would invariably be rather more battered by an exuberance of hot chilli peppers and other spices.
I came away from the tour with a much deeper understanding of the Nigerian presence in London. It had been really entertaining and informative, and SharedCity also conduct London tours focusing on other communities, such as South India, Norway and Finland and Turkey. I highly recommend them.
Ben West is the author of Cameroon: The Bradt Guide
Further information:
SharedCity Tours: 020 8459 2906; sharedcity.co.uk
Film: the Nigerian community in Peckham: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=x9DNJDE7OZQ