Africas First City

Taken from : National Geographic History

Magazine
January 2015
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2015/01/lago
s/draper-text

By: Valentina Acua.

Class: EDI1106C Section 3
Bursting with a get-rich spirit that has made Nigerias economy the continents
largest, Lagos is Africas first city.

When he was 15 years old, David Adeoti worked in an Internet caf in blue-collar
Satellite Town, where it was almost possible to see the gleaming towers of Lagos
Island less than ten miles to the east.
Sentence structure: Complex 1.
Satellite Town was a step up for Adeoti. His birthplace was off to the north in Orile, a
wretched village of flooded streets and collapsing buildings. Technology had
provided his way out. The Internet caf in Satellite Town was run as a side business
by a banker, who saw that the boy had a natural facility for computerseven the
shops ancient desktops, which operated at lurching speeds. The banker paid Adeoti
a little more than $200 a month to run the place. Adeoti spent his money on courses
at a technical institute, determined that the Internet caf would not be the end of the
line for him.
Satellite Town was a step up for Adeoti.
Structure sentence: Simple 1.
Technology had provided his way out.
Structure semtence: Simple 2.
One day in 2010 the shops customers looked up from the computers to see who
had just walked in the door with the mannered British accent. His name was Jason
Njoku, a bespectacled 30-year-old Londoner who had relocated to his ancestral
homeland of Nigeria.
Njoku asked Adeoti if he could scan some documents.
Njoku asked Adeoti if he could scan some documents.
Sentence structure: Simple 3.
His name was Jason Njoku, a bespectacled 30-year-old Londoner who had
relocated to his ancestral homeland of Nigeria.
Sentence structure: Complex 2.
While Adeoti operated the scanner, the genteel visitor mentioned that he was trying
to find investors for a new business venture and asked the Internet caf manager if
he enjoyed his job. They exchanged cell phone numbers.
They exchanged cell phone numbers.

Sentence structure: Simple 4.

A few months later Adeoti inquired about a job and was invited to Njokus apartment.
Adeoti walked inside to find six young men wedged behind desks with computer
cables snaked around their feet as they typed. This, Njoku informed Adeoti, was his
new business: an indigenous version of Netflix that would stream movies to Nigerian
computers and bring Nigerian movies to the world. Njoku needed someone like
Adeoti to convert Nollywood DVDs into a YouTube format. As was evident by the
cramped environs, the project was perilously low on money. Adeoti signed on
anyway, thinking, Its going to sell itself.
A few months later Adeoti inquired about a job and was invited to Njokus
apartment.
Sentence structure: Compound 1.
When I met David Adeoti in spring 2014, he was 24 and wearing an elegant knit shirt
and designer jeans while sitting behind a Mac laptop in the sleek three-story office
that now houses iROKOtv in Lagos. Njokus company has about 80 employees, with
additional offices in Johannesburg, London, and New York City. Adeoti makes twice
the salary he made as the manager at the Internet caf. But all this exposure to
money and movies had whetted his appetite for more of both. I plan on starting my
own businesssomething in the film industry, he told me. He was saving money to
travel to Hollywood. He wants to be a cinematographerand perhaps one day, a
Nollywood studio executive.
He was saving money to travel to Hollywood.
Sentence structure: Simple 5.
Its a very far distance from middle class to being rich, Adeoti said. With a widening
grin, he added, But the middle class, we strive. Everyone is very desperate to be
very rich these days.
Almost anywhere else in the developing world, such a sentiment would seem pitiably
delusional. In Lagos, Nigerias commercial center, Be Very Rich has all but become
the citys motto. The country recently recalculated its gross domestic product to take
into account sectors of the economy that barely existed two decades ago. As a
result, Nigeria determined that its GDP surpassed South Africas in 2012 to become
the continents largest economy. About 15,700 millionaires and a handful of
billionaires live in Nigeria, more than 60 percent of them in Lagos.
In Lagos, Nigerias commercial center, Be Very Rich has all but become the citys
motto.
Sentence structure: Compound 2.

As with other African metropolises, oil-enriched Lagos has long nurtured an elite
class only marginally inconvenienced by the squalor enveloping the city as a whole.
Now the upper class is expanding, and despite persistent income inequality, so is the
middle class. The growth of the latter in Nigeria, according to a 2013 survey by Ciuci
Consulting, a strategy and marketing firm in Lagos, is driven by the expanding
banking, telecommunications, and services sectors, particularly in Lagos. Nigerias
middle class grew from 480,000 in 1990 to 4.1 million in 2014, or 11 percent of
households. Seemingly overnight, Lagos has transformed itself into a city of Davids
clamoring to become Goliaths.

This is a great African success story. And how lovely it would be to tell this bright,
uplifting tale while ignoring altogether the dark and demoralizing saga of Nigerias
grotesque terrorists, which has blocked the boomtown narrative from the worlds
consciousness like a lunar eclipse. But Lagos does not exist in a parallel universe,
any more than the Islamic extremist group Boko Haram does. Both are indigenous to
Nigeria, a vast West African nation teeming with industrious strivers like Adeoti but
also with poverty, despair, and violence. If anything, the miracle of Lagos is that its
economy gallops onward even when fettered by the same federal incompetence that
allows terrorism to go unchecked. A lesser city would be crippled. Then again, in a
sense so is Lagos.
Parts of speech.
Content words.
Nouns
Lagos
Universe

Adjectives
wretched
lesser

Adverbs
now
while

verbs
expanding
recalculated

Determiners
more
that

Prepositions
at
from

Conjuctions
for
and

Function words.
Pronouns
he
they