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‘If not more so.'

Both of us had visited the Ashanti palace in Kumasi, Ghana, and were impressed by its museum. Ghanaians took real care of their exhibits.

‘That's because they don't have oil,' Maurice said, ‘so they must use their heads. Here we have been pampered by nature. Every time I go to the museum, I try to see how we're losing out. Because we're not able to put things in their proper places. And lots of looting goes on in our museums. Even the top officials are partaking in theft.'

The 800-year-old soapstone figurines at Esie sprang to mind.

‘I'm so impressed by them,' I gushed. ‘Do you think the figurines come from the twelfth century or later?'

‘I think there was carbon dating. But bear in mind that the dating was not done in Nigeria. It was taken to Europe. And sometimes the specimens are taken there and never come back. I'm sure they don't involve Nigerian scientists in the dating process. So we are at the mercy of what the Europeans tell us.'

‘But twelfth-century is pretty flattering,' I said, not quite sharing Maurice's distrust of Western scientists.

‘Flattering enough, but they could be older. You must be accurate. How do you know? The researchers didn't take it elsewhere for confirmation, you understand. If it were a bipolar world and you dated something in the West, you would take it to the East for “control” dating.'

‘I love those figurines so much, I wanted to steal one.'

Maurice tipped his head back and laughed loudly. ‘Where would you keep it?'

‘In my bedroom. I'd just want to look at it when I wake up.'

‘Ah, but you need to make sure the things do not have powers. Some persons have stolen those things and had to return them. There's a story . . . I can't prove it empirically, but somebody went to a shrine in his village and stole some objects, which he sold to some German guy. The German took it home, but every evening there would be some cries in the room where the artefact was kept. He didn't know where the sound was coming from but he suspected it was from that object. When the sounds kept coming from that part of the room he knew it must be the artefact. So he went to the trouble of flying all the way back to Nigeria to return it!'

In the taxi on our return to the mainland, Maurice regaled me with the stories he had covered during his days as a news reporter. The occasional headless bodies discovered around town; the boy who gouged his girlfriend's eyes out in order to sell them to marabouts for black magic purposes. Along with most Lagosians, Maurice was disgusted by it all, but almost as confounded by European society, where ‘people don't believe in
anything
'.

Maurice's openness to the supernatural was unexpected, and made me feel more isolated than ever. Four and a half months in Nigeria hadn't made it any easier for me to digest the widespread enthusiasm for the paranormal. I was still reeling from a newspaper opinion article I'd recently read in which the columnist, complaining
about speeding drivers on our roads, called upon ‘those who administer prayers to exorcise the demons that possess these drivers'. Government initiatives hadn't been factored into his solution to the problem.

When I mentioned this article to Aunty Janice later that evening, it quickly led to another religious quarrel.

‘We can't rely on prayer to solve this problem,' I carped. ‘How can demons make people speed on the roads? We have to create practical solutions to our problems!'

‘How?' Aunty Janice angrily asked. ‘What can the child on the street selling groundnut do to change things? The child's parents must go around and beg for money to send her to school . . . she graduates but she is not paid well and must stay with her parents because she cannot afford her own home.
What
is she to do?'

Aunty Janice had misunderstood me. She thought I was criticising individual Nigerians for not escaping poverty, but my worries actually lay with a broader mindset, which saw a link between living standards and the spiritual.

‘I'm not saying it's easy, but if a large part of the country believes in practical solutions, then eventually a few individuals like my father will emerge, and they'll try to change things!'

‘People don't want to fight the government like your father. They have families. They don't want to die!'

‘Well, Europe became what it is today because people took matters into their own hands. They realised they had control of their own destiny.'

‘Europeans are wealthy because they
prayed
,' Aunty responded.

‘But they don't pray now, and they're even better off than they were four hundred years ago!'

‘Their ancestors prayed and this has helped their descendants. But now that they're not praying things will go bad again in the future.'

Things might very well go downhill, but not, I believed, due to
a lack of prayer. I was a little annoyed that future events (oil shortages, superbugs, elderly populations) might accidentally validate Aunty Janice's theory.

‘It's a pity that Africans who grow up in Europe are becoming godless,' she lamented reproachfully.

I was too drained to explain that I was suggesting more pragmatism, not godlessness. Aunty Janice saw me as a hedonistic
oyibo
, submitting mindlessly to Western values without proper consideration. I didn't want to be seen that way, but fighting her perceptions was pointless.

We ate dinner silently, in the flickering gloom of the candlelight.

 

For the next two days, I hung around Victoria Island and Ikoyi to enjoy the lovelier side of Lagos. I was hit by the traveller's paradoxical urge to spend money at the penniless end of the journey, and the desire to purge myself of Nigeria's shabbiness; a reaction to the strain of the last four months.

And so I drank wine at a Mexican restaurant on Victoria Island, where the ethnic Lebanese owners smoked cigarettes and sat back in their chairs with an enviably proprietary air. I perused the books at the glorious Jazzhole bookstore. At a Thai restaurant, I overheard fellow diners discussing business ideas in uncharacteristically muted voices, and women with long, opulent weaves, tight jeans and high heels chatting with their music industry boyfriends.

While searching a supermarket cake aisle for a present for Mabel, I fell into conversation with a woman called Marie who turned out to be my father's contemporary at Ibadan University.

‘You'd better control yourself,' Marie joked as I eyed a Black Forest gateau.

‘What are you getting?' I asked.

‘Croissants for an old couple. I'm buying five to avoid arguments.'

‘Five? How does buying an uneven number avoid arguments?'

‘If I buy four the husband won't like it. You know what African men are like . . . the man always has to have more!'

Marie worked for an NGO in Washington, DC. She was the face of Nigeria's lost opportunities: confident, educated, articulate, a rare specimen who wasn't cloying or trying to extract money from me. In fact, she cut the conversation short and went on her sprightly way, as fleeting and elusive as Nigerian success.

Later, I knocked back vodka and Coke at a bar with giant windows looking out onto the lagoon. ‘The Girl from Ipanema' wafted into the air-conditioned room. Through the huge windows I watched three European expats on jet skis overtaking a pair of fishermen as they cast a net from their canoe. The green waters of the lagoon sparkled salubriously, yet bobbing against the restaurant walls were plastic bottles, sucked oranges, and sachets of pure water floating like lilies on the surface.

Throughout town I saw glimpses of how handsome Lagos could have been: a few swaying palms lining the seafront like Miami, or the Third Mainland Bridge, an engineering wonder, snaking across the blue lagoon during sunset. I savoured these scenes and tried to block out the waterside stilt-house shanty towns or the partially collapsed skyscraper on Lagos Island, standing erect like a sarcastic standard bearer of our Excellence.

Now that I was ending my journey, though, I realised that Lagos is in fact one of Nigeria's greatest success stories. It's an achievement when 15 million people across 250 ethnic groups can live together relatively harmoniously in an unstructured, dirty metropolis seemingly governed by no one. Lagos is an anthropological case study in how humans interact with one another when confined in tight, ungoverned spaces; proof, as one NGO director once said, that the theory of free competition as a social regulator doesn't work. When two cars inevitably end up locked in a perpendicular stand-off, each party roars at the other for
denying him right of way, as if an outrageous breach of protocol has taken place. Every hour some kind of altercation takes place, and as I watched yet another motorcyclist trying to squeeze between two cars, getting stuck and losing a wing mirror, I marvelled at the fact that such incidents generally ended so placidly (and that so many of London's ham-fisted traffic wardens originate from this bedlam).

At CMS, I flung myself across the traffic and jumped into a minibus. London in the old days was once as chaotic as this, its residents having to run for their lives when crossing the torrent of cars and horse buggies. The attitudes and behaviour of British drivers eventually changed, though. Nigeria just needs to catch up. But maybe Lagos isn't a laggard on the bottom rung of urban evolution. Perhaps the city is more futuristic than we care to realise. Isn't its low-tech overcrowding and pollution what our planet is heading towards, after all? As Albert Einstein said, ‘I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.' Oil will run out one day. I was saddened by the prospect, but relieved by it, too – Nigeria might be better off, anyway; the country seems innately prepared for a simple, back-to-basics future. It's as if our government has eschewed a fully industrialised economy in favour of the fundamentals of life that will outlive civilisation: growing crops, maintaining extended family networks, worshipping deities.

There were many glimpses of hope: the mechanised farms, Cross River State's tourism, and Lagos's fancy new bus transit system, which I noticed as my minibus cruised along the mainland expressway. The system had been built in the few months since I was last in the city, with its own separate lane. Things were improving. But beneath it all lurked the belief in witchcraft, the oil dependency, the politicians' constant acceptance of low standards, all of it waiting to negate our achievements in an instant. I wasn't sure I had the patience.

‘You'll get used to it,' people kept telling me. Knowing my temperament, I would only get used to it and stop being angry if I either had nothing to lose or something to gain from the status quo. I was in neither of those positions. For me, getting used to the situation meant capitulating to it, which required an unhealthy shift in mentality. It's not right to stop being angry about the state of Nigeria, but anger is only useful if one is willing to risk one's life changing the system. Was I brave enough? My cowardice – the extent of it – was one of several revelations for me on this trip. The strength of society's religious fervour had flattened me. I was the cowardly lion, no longer willing to roar my disagreement with my cousin Tom and Big Mama. The Nigerian reliance on God to change material circumstances will ultimately hold our country back even more than corruption, I suspect, but even if I had the strength to challenge excessive religiosity, it would be an enormous task, like extinguishing a forest fire with spittle.

But over time, I had come to love many things about Nigeria: our indigenous heritage, the dances, the masks, the music, the baobab trees and the drill monkeys. I, the progressive urbanite, had become a lover of nature and pre-colonial, animist ceremony; the mirage of a Transwonderland-style holiday wasn't worth chasing. Yet Nigeria, for all its sapphire rivers and weddings and apes, couldn't seduce me fully when all roads snaked back to corruption, the rottenness my father fought against and the cause he died for. At least my journey had cured my emotional fear of the country. It was a far scarier place for those who have to live here, for whom flight was not an option. They had to fight their way through life in a way that I didn't have to, and for that I wanted to hug my father's knees in thanks for raising me abroad and expanding my life choices.

So all was forgiven: the unspeakable train rides, the itchy tropical nights in the village, the enforced essay-writing in hotel rooms. For years they had turned me off Nigeria, but all of it, I now realised, was a necessary induction, a way of ‘breadcrumbing' the
trail between my village and my life as an émigré. My mistake as a child was to assume that my summers there were a rehearsal for an adult life filled with pounded yam breakfasts and sweaty water-fetching. But my parents had never expected me to live in Nigeria permanently. I could maintain a relationship with it from my chosen home, much as my father engaged with Ogoniland from his air-conditioned office in Port Harcourt.

Of course, returning to Nigeria on my
own
initiative was crucial to the epiphany. Travelling here as an adult helped me to finally wipe away the negative associations and start a new relationship with the country, in which I was prepared to embrace the irritations with tentative arms, and invest some of myself.

For my last three days in Nigeria I stayed with my cousin Loveday and his wife Helen at their modest, second-floor apartment on a quiet street in the Ippu-Ileju neighbourhood, near the airport. Most of my time was spent playing with the eldest of their two daughters, Donu, a precocious three-year-old with an eye for detail: ‘Where is your second phone?' she asked me after I finished making a call (Nigerians often have more than one cell phone in case of robbery, or in case a power outage prevents them from recharging). The girl pestered me constantly for pens, paper and alphabet lessons. But above all, she wanted to use my colourful raffia fan, the only thing standing between me and death by dehydration.