BUILT ON WATER, OIL AND ISLANDS, LAGOS IS NIGERIA'S GETRICH LOUD-AND-PROUD CITY, WHERE DRAMA UNFOLDS ON EVERY CORNER AND SIMPLY OBSERVING IS NOT AN OPTION

Switching from the slumber of middle England to the sensory explosion that is Lagos was a transition I had to make during childhood summers.

- NOO SARO-WIWA

Life in Surrey was punctuated by returns to Nigeria where I was born, enforced by parents who were hell-bent on neutralising my Britishness. Reaching our hometown of Port Harcourt involved stopping over at relatives’ houses in Lagos, and even at that young age the big-city charge of the then capital—its noise and swagger—was magnetic, repellent and always unforgettable.

The last time I took an extended trip here was in 2007, at the beginning of a four-and-a-half-month odyssey around the country for my book, Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria. There was an organised chaos to it. I was intimidated by the density and impatience of the crowds and the kamikaze okada—motorcycle taxis—that flew at me from every direction. It was a steam pot of vehicle fumes and go-slow traffic jams which vendors weaved through, selling anything from squash rackets to books titled How to Get Fat, while self-styled preachers on the distinctive yellow danfo minibuses laid seven shades of Jesus on their fellow passengers. An urban jungle with the Darwinian survival ethos of Texas and the infrastructure of Kinshasa, where islands of staggering wealth existed without shame in a lake of poverty. If the state were a person, she would wear a Gucci jacket and a cheap hair weave, cruising in her Porsche over rain-flooded potholes. In a nation where the middle class had atrophied and the rich got rich very quickly, the poor were not irrational for believing that prosperity was within their reach. Nearly everyone had a side hustle, with even university lecturers supplementing their income by hawking Chinese cure-all teas on public transport. Rawness abounded.