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My father's patriotism was even more fervent. He carpeted our hallway in green to match the colour of the national flag, and once interrupted a crucial TV episode of
Little House on the Prairie
to teach me verses of the national anthem – a pointed stand against our Americanisation. Even our passports remained resolutely Nigerian, a snub to gold-dusted British citizenship.

One year, when I was twelve, my father tried to instil a love of country in his children by taking us on a road trip to see the beautiful side of Nigeria. From our home town of Port Harcourt in the south we travelled north into the interior. My sister, younger brother and I sat in the back of our Peugeot 504 while our father puffed on his pipe in the front passenger seat and hummed with us to Richard Clayderman, a deeply uncool classical pianist who performed covers of 1970s pop songs. Our driver, Sonny (who hated those tinkling Bee Gees and Barbra Streisand covers), drove in agonised silence through the central highlands.

Throughout the trip we were repeatedly reminded of how lucky we were to travel in this way. ‘Very few Nigerians have seen as much of the country as you,' my father would say on the way to the Yankari National Park Game Reserve, to the new capital city Abuja, to Jos and to Kano. But I was too young to grasp this privilege. Fun as the trip was in parts, I still wasn't sold on the country.

The following year, on our last holiday in the motherland, my opinion was finally cemented. While my mother stayed behind in England, my siblings and I were unexpectedly introduced to two half-sisters we'd never met nor known about, the product of my father's polygamous ‘other life' in Nigeria. He called it tradition. I took it as a betrayal. It clarified the fuzz of parental tension that my childhood antennae had picked up on but never quite understood: the arguments, the clothes my father regularly bought for our
‘cousins'; my mother fuming tearfully about ‘that woman'. Luckily, being children, we had the emotional elasticity to adjust to the situation. By holiday's end, the two halves of the family had warmed to each other, but Nigerian family life now seemed to me as treacherous and unpredictable as the military dictatorship that destabilised Nigeria during those years. Had someone told me then that the holiday of 1990 was to be our last in Nigeria, I would have performed cartwheels down the street. Little did I know that the reason for our future absence would be so grim.

Our ethnic group, the Ogoni, have relied on the Delta for fishing and farming for centuries, but ever since oil was discovered in 1956 and extracted primarily by Shell Oil, this fertile agricultural region has suffered oil spills and pollution from gas flares, which are used for eliminating waste gas, a by-product of oil extraction. A succession of corrupt governments squandered profits that should have developed the region economically, leaving the Ogoni and other Delta peoples in a bind: we are unable to develop industrially, yet we struggle to cultivate our polluted land and we're fishing gradually emptying rivers.

In the early 1990s, my father, Ken Saro-Wiwa, had started a campaign against government corruption and environmental degradation by Shell. His battle led to his being arrested and imprisoned several times. The optimist in me believed the situation would resolve itself relatively uneventfully, a perception he himself fuelled. Solitary confinement did not stop him occupying himself with the relative minutiae of our everyday lives, demanding by letter that I tell him about my exam results and the universities I had applied to. His focus on such matters made it easy for me to underestimate the implications of his arrest. But a phone call from my mother on the evening of 10 November 1995 destroyed that illusion.

My father's murder severed my personal links with Nigeria. Though safe to travel, I was not obliged by my mother to go there any more, nor did I have the desire. Nigeria was an unpiloted juggernaut
of pain, and it became the repository for all my fears and disappointments ; a place where nightmares did come true. As a word and as a brand, it connoted negativity. The green of the national flag reminded me not of life and vegetation but of murky quagmires. Nigeria sapped my self-esteem; it was the hostile epicentre of a life in which we languished at the margins in England, playing second fiddle in my father's life. I wanted nothing to do with the country. In the ten years after my father's death, I returned only twice for very brief visits, to attend his official funeral in 2000 and his actual burial in 2005.

In the meantime, I concentrated on other parts of the world, scratching the travel itch that had tormented me in my childhood: Europe, South America, North America, the Middle East, West and Southern Africa – I made up for my misspent youth. But as the world grew smaller and less mysterious, Nigeria began to take on a certain mystique, especially as I was no longer forced to spend time there. Writing travel guidebooks in other West African countries made me question my juvenile notions of West Africa as an unappealing destination. I saw alpine valleys in Guinea, Ghanaian Ashanti sculptures that were fit for the Queen's living room, and in Côte d'Ivoire I ate braised fish that makes me salivate even now. Didn't such things exist in Nigeria too? How could a country of 140 million people, stretching from the tropical rainforest of the Atlantic coast to the fringes of the Sahara,
not
be interesting? There had to be more besides the media reports of kidnappings and the scam e-mails from ‘Sani Abacha's wife' wanting to split her millions with me. Suddenly I found myself in the unfamiliar position of wanting to visit Nigeria independently, exploring its breadth, and voyaging to this final frontier that has perhaps received fewer voluntary visitors than outer space.

There was another reason why I felt ready to return. Obligations of the First Born had forced my eldest brother, Ken Jr, to go back to Nigeria. Reluctantly, he had taken over the family business and
reacquainted himself with Ogoniland, while I hunkered down in England. I pitied him. But he adapted and, over the years, nestled into Nigerian life without losing his sanity. Things weren't so bad, he assured me. In time, his successful plunge proved to be an inspiration, more powerful than any of our father's stern reminders that we should go back to the country at some point and use our good education to help people.

But re-engaging with Nigeria meant disassociating it from the painful memories lurking in my mind's dark matter. I needed to travel freely around the country, as part-returnee and part-tourist with the innocence of the outsider, untarnished by personal associations. Then, hopefully, I could learn to be less scared of it, perhaps even like it, and consider it a potential ‘home'. My trip would begin in Lagos, the biggest city, in the south-west. I would travel to the arid Muslim north, then down to the central highland plateau and north-east, before moving on to the tropical lowlands in the south and south-east, including my home town of Port Harcourt. Along the way, I would revisit some of the places my father showed me; see them with adult eyes.

 

It was almost midnight when the passengers finally boarded the plane at Gatwick in haphazard style. They talked loudly and clogged the aisles, wedging bulky hand luggage in the overhead carriages.

‘We will be landing in Lagos at 6.20 a.m. local time,' the captain announced. Those words triggered old spasms of apprehension. The plane took off and I ascended, moving away from England's lights and into the black canvas of night, trying not to write my unease all over it.

 

 

The plane broke through the clouds and swung low over a sea of palm trees that abruptly became endless tracts of metal rooftops. That vista still choked my heart with dread. I made my way through the airport's mustiness and out through the exit, where I was ambushed by the clammy aroma of gasoline, so familiar and potent.

When describing the character of our biggest city, Nigerians always like to tell a wry anecdote about the man who steps off a plane and is greeted with a sign that reads: THIS IS LAGOS. The message offers him nothing in the way of a cheerful welcome, nor can he even take it as a warning (since such a gesture would imply that the authorities actually care for his safety). What the sign provides is an indifferent announcement of his arrival in a city that he is visiting at his own risk; a blunt disclaimer. If he can't handle the squalid, uncompromising callousness then he should tuck his tail between his legs and go somewhere else, because This Is Lagos –
take it or leave it
.

Lagosians will be the first to tell you that their city is a disaster of urban non-planning characterised by overcrowding, aggressive driving, traffic ‘go-slows', impatience, armed robberies and overflowing sewage, all of it existing alongside pockets of dubiously begotten wealth and splendour. If Lagos were a person, she would
wear a Gucci jacket and a cheap hair weave, with a mobile phone in one hand, a second set in her back pocket, and the mother of all scowls on her face. She would usher you impatiently through her front door at an extortionate price before smacking you to the floor for taking too long about it. ‘This,' she would growl while searching your pockets for more cash, ‘is Lagos.'

With this image in mind I rolled into town on paranoid alert, my Visa card stuffed down my bra and some emergency banknotes folded inside my shoe. I'd been warned several times to expect danger at any given moment and to treat everyone as a potential predator. But in reality, the roadside signage that confronted me was a sedate WELCOME TO LAGOS, a message of warmth and optimism which, when I first saw it, seemed almost chilling in its apparent sarcasm, like some kind of sick joke. The same went for the car number plates, which were all printed with the motto ‘Centre of Excellence', a ridiculous conceit if ever there was one.

As my taxi driver made his way towards Satellite Town, I struggled to discern which part of the city we were driving through. In Lagos, place names exist largely in people's minds. There were barely any signs or distinguishing landmarks, just a monotonous sequence of characterless, blocky, oil-boom 1970s architecture, fruit sellers, corrugated iron rooftops, iconic yellow buses, beggars and motorcycles that repeated itself mile after mind-boggling mile under a carpet of litter scattered in all directions, like confetti.

Every square metre of the city was scribbled with informal advertising. The buildings and lamp posts, even the sloping undersides of the numerous pedestrian bridges, beseeched me to buy this product or call that number. Presiding over everything were a variety of uniformed authoritarians: black-clad traffic wardens orchestrating the symphony of horns, and police swaggering about in black shirts and green army trousers. A man wearing a deep red outfit ushered the vehicles along with sticks, whacking cars as if they were donkeys, before casually swiping the back of a boy's leg as he crossed the road.
I watched one uniformed man try to prise open a car door, then sheepishly concede defeat when the driver hastily punched down the door lock. These officers were predators and guardians all at once, and everyone knew it.

Young gang members, known as Area Boys, also stake out their territory along the roads and collect cash from drivers. Employed by politicians to intimidate voters during the gubernatorial elections, they've been rewarded with uniforms and a licence to extort on the expressways. Now they clothe their scrawny bodies in green-and-white shirts and patrol the streets, waiting for bus conductors to lean out of the buses and slap money into their palms.

Once upon a time, Lagos was a placid cluster of islands and creeks separated from the Atlantic by lagoons, where local men caught fish, the cry of white ibis could be heard and snakes shimmied among the bushes. By the fifteenth century, the area had become a busy slave port. Under British colonial rule it became Nigeria's economic and political capital. The grasses, wild birds and trees were quickly devoured by urbanisation, its wild metastasis cluttering the cityscape so densely it seems to have made a crater that has sent the rest of the country tumbling into it. Nobody knows how many people live in Lagos; it could be 10 million, it could be 17 million – no one is counting the teams of street urchins and shanty dwellers, or the illegal buildings erected under the distracted eyes of previous governments.

Although peopled by every Nigerian ethnicity, Lagos is a city of the Yoruba, the dominant ethnic group in the south-west. Their melodic lingua franca sounded in the streets around me, as foreign to my ears as any language from Cameroon or Ghana. I had arrived in a country I had never lived in, and a city I'd visited only briefly twice before, among a thoroughly foreign-sounding people. It was the most alienating of homecomings. I might as well have arrived in the Congo.

My taxi driver turned off the Badagry Expressway and went through the narrow, sandy shop-lined streets of Satellite Town, a suburb several miles away from downtown Lagos. As our destination drew near, I shrank into my seat, wishing I could stay in the car forever, suspended in this comfortable no-man's-land between the airport and my aunt's house. I was scared of reaching her home and starting this trip in earnest, turning months of mental planning into live action.