A Rooftop Choir Sings to the Heat, and to Each Other

LAGOS — Every evening this month, as the day's heat breaks, forty-odd voices climb to the roof of a walk-up in the Yaba district and sing until the streetlights come on. The choir has no name and no conductor to speak of, only a retired schoolteacher, Funmilayo Bello, who started it in July when the ground-floor flats grew too hot to sit in after dark. "We came up for the air," Bello said, laughing, "and stayed for the noise we make." The gatherings have become something the neighborhood organizes around — a place to trade news of which standpipe is flowing, whose relative just arrived from a flooded coast, whose child passed an exam. In a city absorbing its share of the migrants now past 112 million, the rooftop is a small argument that a summer of scarcity need not be a summer of silence. The songs are old, mostly. The reason to sing them is entirely of this year.