Michela Wrong

Not for sissies

Nigeria is not exactly a tourist destination. A colleague chortles over the memory of trying to wangle his way in — without a journalist’s visa — during Sani Abacha’s military regime. ‘Purpose of visit?’ barked the immigration man. ‘Tourism,’ he lied. ‘No one comes to Nigeria for tourism,’ said the official. He was promptly expelled.

The official was voicing a truism. Even seasoned Western adventurers avoid Nigeria — ‘is Lagos airport as terrifying as they say?’ you are often asked — while the country’s oil-fattened elite, oscillating between the national superiority complex and hardened self-loathing, regard an international flight as the obligatory start to any holiday.

Writing a travel book for this Baedeker black spot might seem slightly counter-intuitive, then, but Noo Saro Wiwa pulls off something remarkable. Making no claims to intellectual gravitas, wearing her research remarkably lightly, she nonetheless manages to tell us more about Africa’s modern-day giant in this deftly woven account than most academics do in a lifetime.

Her trip starts in pullulating Lagos, where the car registration plates bear the laughingly ironic message ‘Centre of Excellence’, heads to the drawing-board capital Abuja, continues north to dusty Kano, where Sharia law is nominally practised — a scenario she finds nothing like as alarming as human rights groups would have you believe thanks to the corrupt pragmatism of the local authorities — before turning east to Rivers State.

She attends a dog competition in Ibadan, comes to understand why few people go on Abuja’s rollercoaster (it just might kill you), explores the personal ads placed by cash-strapped men looking for ‘sugar mummies’, learns to love the okada, the motorbike taxi which cuts a swathe through the traffic ‘go-slows’ and develops a strange addiction to the Nollywood dramas on TV, more effective narcotics than any sleeping pill.

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