Last week, as you may have heard on the program, I was in Lagos, Nigeria. I was looking into the legacy of the late Afrobeat musician Fela Kuti.

Fela's songs were like jazzy editorial cartoons.

In "Original Sufferhead" -- recorded in 1981 -- Fela sang about the injustices of life in Nigeria.

How most people there have no electricity, no clean water, and, in many cases, poor housing.

All while Nigeria's leaders have every luxury they want.

I wanted to see the extremes Nigerians live with in Lagos today; to judge for myself the environment that Fela's music came from.

My local producer Kole Payne, took me to a slum called Bariga.

There we connected with two local guys he knows, Tunde and Toby.

Tunde and Toby are both dancers and dance instructors. They wanted to show me their neighborhood, a place called Bariga.

Bariga sits on the large Leeki Lagoon in Lagos. In order to accommodate more residents, the slum has literally sprawled into the lagoon.

Now, thousands of people live on man-made spits of land. The base is sand. And, on top of the sand, garbage over a dozen feet deep.

Locals regularly use the water's edge as their toilet. There's no electricity. And no running water, except for a communal neighborhood pump. Children run naked through the trash.

As I looked in disbelief at this, I wondered what Tunde and Toby and Kole all thought of these conditions.

And almost as if they knew what I was thinking, the three of them began singing a rendition of "Original Sufferhead."

It was impressive: the best way these guys knew how to comment on the wretched situation in Bariga was to sing a song by Fela Kuti.

A few minutes later, I was on a beat-up canoe, pushing off from the mainland of garbage and heading out into the lagoon.

There's another neighborhood nearby, right in the lagoon. It's built on stilts, and there I found mostly fishing families. Their situation is created out of necessity and desperation.

But it was an oasis compared to the part of Bariga that had resigned itself to living on trash heaps.

I found a real oasis from all of this as the boy who rowed my canoe steered it into the shade of the Third Mainland Bridge.

Packed buses, harried commuters, and trucks teetering with their loads make the bridge an unpleasant place to be.

But beneath the Third Mainland Bridge in my canoe, it was quiet and cool, out of the heat of the midday sun.

A second young man in my canoe happened to have a recorder in his pocket. And he began playing a traditional song.

And for a few minutes, both he and I and our boatman were far away from the traffic, the slum, and from Lagos.

Even Fela's words seemed distant. But certainly no less relevant.