Danfos, and particularly their subculture of slogans, offer an acute window into the political economy of everyday life in Lagos, especially the order and chaos that mark this megalopolis as simultaneously familiar and strange.
Urban megaprojects and megacity planning across Africa today threatens to injuriously exclude or predatorily include hundreds of thousands of informal workers, provoking shock, anger, and resistance from below. Such large-scale projects—generally couched in the Manichean dualism of Euro-American modernity—reproduce the DuBoisean double consciousness of colonized subjects: always looking at African cities through the eyes of the West. But what if we looked at African cities through their own eyes? Through the eyes of the danfo?
Since the 1970s, Lagos, Nigeria’s commercial hub and one of Africa’s largest cities, has run on informal modes of mass transportation, mostly privately owned and operated. Typically, minibus taxis—danfos, which in Yorùbá means ‘hurry’—provide the core (about 70 per cent of motorized trips), although motorbikes, tricycles, and shared taxis all contribute to the public transportation ecosystem. Far from being mere containers that constitute the mise en scène in Lagos, danfos mirror for Lagosians the duplicity of Nigeria: both as a place filled with hope and joie de vivre and as a redoubt of stuckedness and immiseration. The failure of state-owned mass transportation services occasioned the emergence and popularity of these ‘transportation torture on four wheels.’
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