“…What’s unique about the traffic in Lagos is the hopelessness.”
Jad, Ruby and Ben come from places with notoriously heavy traffic - New York and LA - so, they aren’t strangers to traffic. But there is something special about Lagos. At our table in Brisk where we were having brunch, I told them what I thought set Lagos traffic apart.
“I feel like with traffic in other cities, and I have been in traffic in some other cities, you at least still feel like you are making progress. Your car is still moving in the direction you are meant to be moving. So often in Lagos traffic, there are moments when it feels like no one knows what is going on.”
Earlier that week, I found myself in depressing traffic like the one I was describing to them. To those unfamiliar with it, the Third Mainland Bridge is one of three bridges connecting Lagos Mainland to Lagos Island. It’s the most important stretch of road in the city (possibly the country). Maintenance work started 6 months ago and halved the capacity of the bridge. It only allowed one direction of traffic at a time. On Wednesday, March 6, without substantial warning, the bridge was shut altogether. It took me 5 hours to get home that day; it should only take 20 minutes.
Today, Friday, March 8th, I left home at 11 am to get across the bridge before the direction of traffic changed. At Noon, I arrived at a coffee shop 5 minutes from Brisk, a restaurant in Ikoyi where I would meet Jad Abumrad, one of my podcasting Heroes. At 1:30 pm, Fayfay, my friend who had set up this meeting, texted me to join them at the restaurant. The short drive took me 30 minutes (6 times longer than it should have). I ended up getting stuck in traffic even over such a short distance. I could see my destination right there in front of me but I couldn’t get through the traffic, not when some politician with too many cars in his convoy had decided to drive on the wrong side of the road at a roundabout. The motorists and traffic wardens were stomped and we all just sat there confused.
“That’s traffic in Lagos for you. “
Jad, Ruby and Ben nodded in understanding. They’d experienced similar traffic in their short time around - sat in traffic for half an hour only to find they’d been two minutes from their destination the entire time.
Fayfay called me about a week earlier to catch up. Fayfay Odudu runs a podcast production company called 808 Extra. She's also the founder of Nigeria's largest podcast community, Naija Pod Hub. In the years since I started making audio stories, we’ve slowly grown closer. Where initially, there was only mutual respect expressed from afar, now we put each other onto opportunities. We recently cohosted a workshop for the audio community I started (but more on that later).
On the call a week ago, she mentioned to me a project she was working on with a few audio producers who had flown into Nigeria from the US. One of them was supposed to be a big deal, ‘Jad - something.’
“Jad Abumrad is in Nigeria! What! That’s like one of my biggest influences. I literally have his name on a list of people I want to meet at some point in time in life.”
That’s true, I do have him on a list, along with a handful of people whose work I admire greatly. Jad Abumrad started a podcast called Radiolab in 2002. I still remember the first time I listened to an episode of his podcast. I had already been producing audio for over a year. I started making audio as an attempt to produce stories I could relate to, in the format of what I listened to. It didn’t exist and I thought to myself:
‘Maybe I should be the one to change that’
The first podcast I ever listened to was the TED Radio Hour hosted by Guy Raz. Then I started listening to Hidden Brain and Rough Translation both previously under NPR. When you listen back to my first podcast, ‘Inside a Bubble,’ you can sort of hear my attempt at imitation. As the episodes progress, you can tell when I start consuming new podcasts. You can tell exactly which episode was made just after I first heard This American Life for the first time. My second season was heavily influenced by Jad Abumrad’s work with Radiolab. The final episode in the Inside a Bubble feed is about Bipolar Affective Disorder and is very clearly a mesh of my two biggest influences at the time, This American Life and Radiolab. In the episode, I even use music Jad made for another podcast called More Perfect. All this to say that meeting Jad in real life was a really big deal for me. I made this clear to Fayfay and on March 8th, I met Jad Abumrad. I also met Ben Adair, Ian Wheeler and Ruby (whose last name I sadly never got).
About 5 minutes after sitting down with them and talking about traffic. I turned to Jad and said like
It’s weird actually. 4 years ago, I made a list of people I wanted to meet. These were people I dreamt of meeting and hoped that maybe one day I could tell them how important their work was to me. Maybe I could one day tell them they were the reason I was doing this at all. When I made that list, all the people on it felt so distant. But now here we are. You are the second person I am crossing off that list. This is so weird.
A few moments later, Ruby showed me a document she had on her phone, she’d done some research before coming to Nigeria and they had made a list of local audio producers. I was on that list. I was on Jad‘s list.
There’s something there, something about being visible to the people you look up to.
In case you are new here. My name is Mo Isu. I am an audio producer based in Lagos, Nigeria. I am currently attempting to build a career in audio storytelling and art. This newsletter features personal essays about this journey.
You are reading issue 27.
How do you build a sustainable community?
Here’s an excerpt from my cover letter to a residency I participated in last year
“So far, what I have learnt, I have learnt from consuming documentaries of all formats. Where I have been able to, I have invested resources to learn the skills I need to get better but so far, it has been a lonely journey. I have not been opportune to have a community to guide me. I have not been able to learn directly from experienced people - to have an editor guide me - to have someone point out which of my ideas are good or bad. The audio documentary ecosystem in Nigeria, where I am, is young and growing. There is simply not enough expertise present to have it create the stories that are important. The way I have learnt so far has been slow and riddled with mistakes and there are still so many questions on my mind, so many questions that I have no one to ask.”
Recently, I have been thinking about 2021. In particular, I have been wondering what was going through my mind when I decided to dive head-first into audio production. I did not know anything then. I really didn’t. I did not know what doing this full-time would look like. I didn’t have a blueprint for any of it. I started producing my first podcast towards the end of 2019. I had two of my friends join me as co-hosts. We made two episodes that were recorded entirely on phones and we enjoyed it. In 2020, we started releasing episodes biweekly and each episode featured at least two stories. They were not easy to produce and I was doing a lot of the work. Midway through the season, I broke down. I sent my cohosts a voice note. Here’s a transcript
“I am feeling like I am alone. I think that’s because of the anxiety I feel about all the things I am working on. I think maybe part of it is I don’t say as much of what i am thinking so you guys don’t realise. I am struggling to say all of the right things…”
Loneliness has been a recurring theme on my audio journey. In 2021, it felt bigger than me. Everything I wanted seemed so far away. All the people I wanted to be like were so far away. What I wanted to accomplish was so far away. Audio production of this type is really new in Nigeria. There’s no existing pathway to creating a career in narrative audio stories. So when I think back to that time, I cannot understand why I chose to do this. If I knew how much work it would be to get to where I am now, I don’t think I would do it again. At the same time, I think I absolutely would.
I have been lucky. I was too naive when I started to know how difficult all of this would be. I was scared but I wasn’t scared to the point of inaction which must be some sort of privilege. Lately, I have found myself struggling to do this work and I think a lot of that has come with experience. Does that make sense? The more I know, the less capable I feel. Impostor syndrome is starting to sink its teeth into me. With each passing year, I am making less and less and that’s something I am struggling with. The positive thing is that I don’t have to do it alone anymore. I have a community around me now.
Just this week, I have spoken to three of my friends/colleagues about a story I have been trying to wrap my head around for a few months now. Last year, for all the stories I made, I had editors to guide me. These are all things I didn’t have in 2021. Not feeling alone is so important and I don’t think I can make anything truly worthwhile without my community.
In that light, I have been thinking about who else out there might be in the same place I was in 3 years ago. It is one of the reasons this newsletter exists. A big motivation for the work I do, the essays I write, and the stories I produce, is to make people feel less alone.
So, I started an audio community with two of my friends. We are calling it the Audio Bubble. As 2023 rolled on, I kept coming back to this thought about how lonely it is to make Narrative Audio from a Nigerian context. Eventually, I had that one thought that gets so many of us in trouble. The same thought that got me into making podcasts.
“Maybe I should be the one to change that”
Mind you, I don’t know the first thing about community building. So yet again, I am signing up for something I don’t know how to do. I think something that’s becoming quite clear to me about myself is that I will always attempt things I don’t know how to do. Somehow, I keep getting these thoughts that I obsess over and I just… try.
The Audio bubble exists on the internet as a newsletter. We organised our first workshop a couple of weeks ago where we talked about what Narrative audio was and how to make it. The way I imagine it, the Audio Bubble is a way for people in the audio community to exchange ideas and collaborate. I am leaning hard into organising in-person events because there’s just something about being able to exchange your ideas in person. Those events will look like workshops sometimes, other times they will look like podcast listening clubs where we listen to curated podcasts together and talk about them. We are also thinking of ways to use the community to support new talent. Support people who are interested in making audio; help them make their first audio stories.
So that’s one thing I have been doing since you last heard from me. I am trying to build a community. I am trying to do the thing I always try to do. I am trying to make people feel less alone.
Thanks for reading to the end.
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