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  ‘Mile Two!’ the conductor announced. I jumped out and walked through rain puddles, crowds and dozens of parked danfos. After asking in my best Nigerian accent which bus was bound for Lagos Island, I was shown to a largely empty vehicle and took a seat.

  Waiting for the bus to fill up and reach (beyond) maximum capacity was the hardest part of the journey, thanks to the lack of physical space, steaming humidity and the hawkers constantly swarming around the vehicles. These vendors attracted attention by using their lips to make a very loud and high-pitched squeaking noise that tingled down my spine. One after another they came, squeaking in my ear and waving dried plantain chips, socks or handkerchiefs so close to my face I wanted to slap them away. Some merchants offered me exactly the same product as the person I had turned down just seconds previously. Untroubled by the market saturation, they kept coming and coming, imploring and squeaking and slowly nibbling at my sanity.

  Just as I savoured a lull in the noise, an old blind beggar woman, guided on the shoulder by her young relative, sang Islamic prayers and shook a tambourine by my window. This noise, combined with the heat and cacophony of shouting and horn tooting, almost sent me over the edge. I realised that if I were to protect my sanity I quickly needed to find some inner peace, since it couldn’t be found externally. Blocking my ears didn’t work, and any ‘relaxing’ deep breaths only drew in the stench of petrol fumes and rotting refuse. Achieving mental relaxation required a kind of strength I didn’t have, yet the Lagosians around me maintained a stoic serenity.

  A man boarded the minibus and stooped in front of the passengers to bellow the gospel at us. ‘Brothers and sisters, before we complete this journey, let us pray!’ Everyone lowered their heads and closed their eyes while the preacher called for the ‘blood of Christ to cover this bus and protect us from thieves’. By the time the bus pulled out of the motor park and rattled along the expressway, we had received a full service of hymn, prayers, and a sermon steaming with ideological fervour.

  The preacher railed against abortion, painting a scenario of an aborted foetus confronting its mother in heaven on Judgement Day. ‘You killed me,’ he intoned in a mock-baby voice. ‘Wetin I do?’ I learnt from this point onwards that there was no need to attend church in Nigeria – the church always found me no matter where I hid. And if people weren’t trying to sell God, they were selling something else, from motivational pamphlets to medicines. The city’s population density offers endless opportunities for everyone to pitch their wares, and danfos are especially handy for securing a captive audience. Once the preacher sat down, he was immediately replaced by another passenger promoting a medicine he wanted us to buy. More shouting. Like many Lagosians of all professions, he was selling merchandise on the side in order to make ends meet.

  This man was offering sachets of Chinese mistletoe tea as a cure-all for every illness under the sun. Among other things, he claimed it could reduce hair loss, boost your immune system and improve the fertility of women who ‘suffer wahala for womb’. For thirty minutes he itemised the tea’s magic powers with a surprisingly seductive eloquence and sincerity. In fact, all Lagos salesmen have an earthy and genuine sales pitch that is devoid of all that shady infomercial patter I’m accustomed to. Perhaps it’s easier for them to relax when they know they can rely on their audience’s gullibility and patience. After the mistletoe tea man finished his pitch, I watched in amazement at how many passengers reached into their pockets to buy some.

  I stared out of the window and tried to make sense of the cityscape. A torrent of humanity poured out of buses and streamed along the streets and bridges as if heading towards a big event. To the novice eye, Lagos looks a chaotic jumble, but I could see that there was method in the madness, a tapestry of interweaving lives and agendas criss-crossing each other a million times over.

  People cram themselves into any conceivable space. The spaces beneath the flyovers are used as car washes, bus stations and ad hoc mosques. I saw a pig farm by the expressway, and men getting shaves and haircuts on the grass of a busy roundabout; the Ita Toyin Food Canteen stood proudly on the edge of a vast rubbish dump near the National Theatre. Women sold oranges next to ditches filled with evil-looking sewage sludge so black and shiny it was almost beautiful. Hawkers were selling an eccentric jumble of items, convinced that they would eventually find a buyer who would want that random squash racket or set of weighing scales. A man even roamed through the rush-hour traffic carrying two large, framed oil paintings of waterfalls. It was hard to imagine anyone buying them spontaneously and wedging them inside their vehicle. But the vendor had no such doubts, and as he strode confidently from car to car, his die-hard salesmanship appeared to be driven by something greater than financial desperation, as if he genuinely believed in his product.

  Belief, especially self-belief, seems a vital ingredient in helping people get through life in Lagos. There’s no room for equivocation or weakness. People have to compete for what they want in an environment that punishes the unambitious, the sick and the incapacitated. Street vendors need sharp eyesight in order to catch the lingering stare of a potential customer. And they need fast legs to respond to that interest and sprint alongside the moving traffic to exchange their merchandise for cash. While legless beggars lean against the central reservations and moan for charity that rarely swings their way, their more proactive counterparts arrogantly weave through the traffic on makeshift skateboards and demand money far more successfully. The beggars’ buff biceps and chests were a reminder that in this twenty-first-century urban jungle, the laws of natural selection still apply.

  Hustling is the lifeblood of Nigeria’s economy since our corrupt politicians have not diversified from the crude oil that has served their bank accounts so well. Around 60 per cent of people in urban areas earn unofficial wages in the informal economy as petty traders, construction workers, food sellers. Life for these Nigerians is an incalculable struggle. The arithmetic of their survival was totally lost on me: $2 (around 300) is the most they might earn in one day, with 90 per cent of the country somehow surviving on less than this. Only half the population meets the official breadline of 50 cents, says the UN. Water for bathing and washing clothes is a luxury these people must save up for. Their homes are desperate erections of corrugated iron, tarpaulin and slabs of old wood; some sleep outdoors.

  At a glance, the insouciant muscularity of the beggars’ bodies masks the ravages of regularly skipped meals, not to mention tooth decay, depression, dulled IQs and parasitic infections. Often illiterate, these people are deaf to the city’s posters and billboards that speak endlessly of God’s love for them. One in five of the barefoot toddlers defecating on the roadsides won’t live long enough to start primary school. Their births and deaths are not registered in any formal sense. They enter and exit the world unnoticed by government, with few photographs to commemorate their brief existence. Forced to live like animals yet cursed with the fears of human consciousness, the plight of these Nigerians made me question not just the purpose of life, but the very point of it. Compared to these people, Aunty Janice belonged to a privileged stratum.

  Naturally, corruption is the main cause. Politicians steal $140 billion a year from Africa – a quarter of the continent’s GDP – mainly by controlling trade licences and skimming funds from government contracts. No facet of the economy goes unaffected: every road, school, oil drum, hospital or vaccine shipment is milked for cash. It diminishes the quality and quantity of everything in the country, including our self-esteem. For it doesn’t matter what I might achieve in life, these street scenes represent me; in England, cheerful telephone queries about the provenance of my name are occasionally met with silence when I tell them I’m Nigerian. The world judges me according to this mess, and looking at it made me feel rather worthless.

  The danfo finally arrived at the CMS bus stop on Lagos Island, a major transport hub, and I emerged from the vehicle, sweating and tottering like a newborn giraffe. Looming ahead of me was the rangy forme
r headquarters of the state electricity company, NEPA, its neon sign appropriately non-functioning. Further away, the upper floors of a skyscraper had partially collapsed, a vision of post-apocalyptic neglect. Lagos Island was once the commercial centre of the city. But when Abuja became the country’s new capital, the government neglected Lagos Island’s infrastructure, and big companies abandoned it in favour of neighbouring Victoria Island and Ikoyi. But the Island still looks the part, with its corporate architecture and concreted canyons that create the urban echoey acoustics I love so much. In between the crumbling skyscrapers stands the occasional Brazilian building. They were built by freed slaves who had returned to Nigeria from Brazil in the mid-nineteenth century after slavery was abolished. By the 1880s, almost a tenth of Lagos’s population was Brazilian. Some of them were successful merchants in Brazil, who continued their transatlantic trade when they returned to Nigeria. Others were trained carpenters, masons and bricklayers, who used their skills to replicate the baroque styles of eighteenth-century Brazilian houses: Portuguese-style pointed arched windows, wrought-iron balustrades, ornate ceiling cornicing and colourful facades. The buildings cling wearily to their beauty. Preservation is a distant priority for everyone – even the 1970s office blocks now dwarfing the Brazilian houses are subject to the same neglect, withering in the aftermath of the oil boom that funded their construction.

  I walked past the former State House, once a residence of colonial governors. On its front, the statues of several white horses reared majestically towards the sky as if fleeing the hordes of yellow buses and fruit stalls below. Traders have taken over the island’s streets with their piles of stereos, bananas, film DVDs, torches, body lotion, batteries, sunglasses and shoes, turning Lagos’s defined street grid into a contiguous mass of confusion. Nigerians love to transform every place into a giant market, no matter how grand the location. We’ll grab any opportunity to sell, discarding all sense of pomp and ceremony. If Nigeria conducted a space exploration programme, you know that women would be offering bananas to the astronauts as they climbed aboard the shuttle. Perhaps knowing this, the authorities fenced off the small grassy Tinubu Square where a bronze statue of a man in ragged clothing reads a book above the inscribed words: Knowledge is power. Without the protective fencing, the statue would undoubtedly be smothered by a throng of illiterate hawkers.

  This part of Lagos felt feral and impenetrable. But I was here as a tourist, and I wanted to make a ‘destination’ out of this city. The National Museum down by the racecourse was an obvious and easy place to start, a buoy to cling to in this wild sea. I entered the museum’s gate. Its large grounds were probably the only place in Lagos Island where I could walk freely, away from the maddening crowds. After I paid for my ticket at reception, the museum guide, a thin man with pointy sideburns and carefully plucked eyebrows, welcomed me with an unsmiling hello. He pointed at a map of Nigeria outside the entrance to the exhibit room. ‘Nigeria is made up of three main tribes,’ he began automatically.

  ‘I know . . . I’m Nigerian,’ I informed him, piqued at being mistaken for a foreigner in my own country, especially when speaking in my best Nigerian accent. The museum guide was thrown by my declaration. His speech had been well rehearsed for the foreigners and schoolchildren who make up the majority of visitors to the museum, but I sensed he wasn’t sure how to tweak his spiel for the likes of me. And so he carried on regardless, and I listened regardless, both of us enacting this charade for the benefit of nobody.

  We walked into the quiet, dimly lit exhibition room. A female employee sat slumped asleep on a chair in the corner. She surfaced briefly to look at me before nodding off again. I felt a strange obligation to tread lightly and not disturb her. There were no other visitors in the room. Around me were glass cabinets containing artefacts and clothing belonging to various ethnic groups: bronze sculptures from the old Benin empire; chain mail from the Islamic north, and a camel saddle made from leather, wood, brass and iron. The museum provided no other information. Each artefact was simply labelled ‘camel saddle’ or ‘Yoruba drum’ without any clue about its age, rarity, provenance or cultural significance. The museum guide had no extra information either, but he insisted on giving me a guided tour anyway.

  Just as he showed me some divination symbols, the power cut out and threw the entire museum into semi-darkness. ‘I’m coming,’ he said to me, as he rushed out to switch on the power generator. I stood in the shadows and waited patiently. Eventually, I decided to view the rest of exhibition by myself. I squinted at some bows and arrows, Yoruba bracelets intricately carved from ivory, and the silhouettes of the splendidly clothed waxwork figures of a northern emir and a Calabar chief, towering scarily in the twilight gloom.

  When the lights finally came back on, the museum guide reemerged with a bearded German tourist who had just arrived at the museum. The sight of the European visitor woke the dozing female staffer like a splash of cold water; she immediately stood up to lavish him with attention, both she and her colleague hovering around the man as if money might ooze from his pores at any moment. All interest in me disappeared. I felt irked. Why focus all their attention on this German when they’d be better off getting a juicy tip from him and me both?

  Across the courtyard, I stepped inside a room housing exquisite Benin empire elephant tusks carved with low-relief hieroglyphs. The female staffer followed me inside (museum rules) and resumed her snoozing in another corner chair. I left her there and went through to the gallery next door, which was filled with contemporary paintings, including Japanese manga-style drawings. My favourite was an oil on canvas depicting a woman sitting on the back of a motorcycle taxi. A double victim of fashion and Nigeria’s transport system, her low-cut hipster jeans rudely revealed the crack of her backside. In a spirit of playfulness or sternness – I couldn’t tell which – the painting was titled Watch Your Back. The Nigeria I knew as a child was never this interesting or humanised, never filled with artwork. I was enjoying being a tourist, even if I hadn’t been happy with the museum guide for presuming I was one.

  I moved on to another annex of the museum, which displayed the car in which President Murtala Mohammed was assassinated in 1976. Mohammed was an army general who took power in a coup in 1975 and presided over a fractious military regime, another episode of the violence that had undermined Nigeria ever since it gained independence. The sight of the car punctured my mood and plunged me back into the mire of Nigerian history and politics.

  Until 1960, Nigeria was ruled by the British. They introduced Western education to the south, and also developed it economically, exploiting its ports and oil, but they preserved the north’s pre-colonial emirate system. The north was divided into several mini-states, each centred around a paramount ruler or emir. This structure made it easy for the British to exercise colonial rule without having to spend money on employing colonial administrators. They interfered little with the emirate system, its sharia law or its traditional Islamic education. Consequently, the north fell behind the south in terms of modern education and economic development.

  Because they outnumbered the rest of the country according to the census, northerners were allocated more seats in the Federal Legislature after Nigeria gained independence in 1960. The three main parliamentary parties reflected the dominant ethnic make-up of the country: Muslim Hausas in the north, the Igbos in the south-east and the Yorubas in the south-west. Abubakar Tafawa Balewa, a quiet northerner, was elected the country’s first prime minister.

  At the time, my mother was a ten-year-old living in our Ogoniland village, where traditional life continued despite the discovery of oil in 1957. She fetched water from the stream and wore new uniforms on Empire Day and prayed at the small church. My father, in his late teens, was a student in the city of Ibadan, the first member of his family to attend university.

  By the time Nigeria became a republic in 1963, the tensions caused by ethnic and economic inequalities were already surfacing. The less educated northerners feared be
ing dominated in a new, westernised political system. In the central region, the Tiv people held violent protests over minority rights, and factional fighting broke out in the Yoruba West, leading to the imprisonment of the country’s main opposition leader on spurious treason charges. By this stage, government corruption had already taken root.

  General elections were held in 1965 but were sullied by boycotts and alleged fraud. Riots broke out. The following year, a group of mainly Igbo army officers overthrew the government and assassinated Balewa, the prime minister.

  The replacement military government couldn’t govern effectively or produce a new constitution that satisfied all Nigerians (we’re still dissatisfied to this day). When the military tried to change the country’s federal structure, a second coup was staged, led by a Ngas, General Yakubu Gowon. Igbos living in the north were massacred in attacks intended to avenge the killing of Balewa. The killings fuelled a growing desire among the Igbo people to separate from Nigeria and create a nation state of their own, and in 1967, they declared the eastern region an independent state called Biafra, which included the oil-rich Niger Delta – Nigeria’s main source of wealth. A brutal civil war ensued.

  At the start of the war, my parents were living in Nsukka, an Igbo town. The government had asked Nigerians to return to their broader regional homelands, so my father transferred his PhD from Ibadan University to Nsukka University in the south-east of the country. It was here that he met my mother, who was living with her sister and brother-in-law in Nsukka town. Without TV and objective newspapers, my mother, then seventeen, had little sense of danger. But the placidity of normal life was gradually eroded by rumours that ‘Northerners’ were out to kill everyone. My mother only started to believe the rumours and fear the worst when she heard the morale-boosting Igbo war songs on the radio, and the wail of air raids accompanied by anti-aircraft gunfire. Nsukka’s non-Igbo residents began returning to their home towns in convoys of lorries. My parents returned to Ogoniland and stayed with my father’s parents.