lagos

« Reading test (30 min) Letter from Lagos L’accès au sens nécessite la mobilisation simultanée des connaissances et compétences suivantes : 1.

Connaissances culturelles • Le plurilinguisme au Nigeria • La ville de Lagos 2.

Compétences pragmatiques • Construire du sens à partir de repérages partiels • Identifier les émotions dans un texte littéraire 3.

Compétences linguistiques Lexique • La musique • Les sens • La description physique Grammaire • Le présent simple • Le présent be + V-ing Lagos Vibes And because I am thinking of writing this letter from Lagos, I decide then that the first line should be this: Lagos is all about God —and also about cologne and phones.

People walk past you and then follows the cloud of perfume or cologne; with smelling good for the average Lagosian, subtlety is not the point.

And everyone is holding a phone.

Phone conversations go on in the row behind me, in the row ahead, mostly repetitions of “Eh? I can’t hear you.

The network is bad.” There is a comedian on stage.

People are laughing.

He introduces Waje.

Contemporary Nigerian music is exploding —the Lagos clubs mostly play only Nigerian music these days, and corporate events are no longer complete without a live performance—and the comedian tells us she is the “next big thing.” She is a young woman whose stage outfit, a winged skirt, makes her look like a butterfly.

She sings in Igbo, in a voice so clear it startles, and then follows a sort of disco performance with lots of prancing about.

Obiwon comes on stage.

He is better known than Waje but still not famous enough to be played on the FM stations often.

He has clearly watched a lot of Michael Jackson.

He is slender and is wearing a white jacket and elegant black trousers.

He slides and shimmies and his song, “Obim,” is one of the most beautiful I have ever heard.

People are standing up to sway along.

I stand, too, and feel, for a moment, that odd sense of liking people I don’t know. Letter from Lagos , Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, in The San Francisco Panorama, 2010 Notes: the row: the line of seats corporate events: social events for businesses a stage outfit: what a performer is wearing to startle: to surprise to prance about: to dance in a lively manner slender: gracefully thin odd: strangew to shimmy: to do a particular dance Obim: Igbo name for boys meaning ‘my heart’ to sway along: to move to the rhythm of the music. »