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The museum's apathetic display of these photographs placed murderous dictators next to the few democratically elected presidents. All judgement had been withheld, along with any information. A novice would have no idea that during its forty-seven years of independence Nigeria has lurched from one kleptocracy to the next. The leaders' photographs resembled a series of criminal mugshots, a line-up of chief suspects in the ruination of Nigeria. The sight of them soured my tourist's jaunt. For all their talk and intentions, most of these men pocketed billions of the country's wealth, ruined the infrastructure, devalued the education system and obliterated Nigerians' trust in one another, cultivating a dog-eat-dog attitude in all corners of life. A lack of professionalism characterises the top echelons of government, and extends down to the ordinary workers, including the managers of this museum. Nothing works, talent goes to waste, and nepotism is rife.

 

I stepped outside. It was already 4.30 p.m. Aunty Janice had instructed me to be back indoors by sunset at 6.30 p.m. for safety's sake. I was surprised that visiting the museum was the only thing I achieved that day. When people told me that heavy traffic allowed you to complete only ‘one thing per day' in Lagos, I thought they were exaggerating. But my watch told me it was time to hurry back to the mainland and Satellite Town.

By the glittering blue lagoon, I stood next to the main ring road to flag down a motorcycle taxi, or
okada
. Okadas are the scourge of Nigeria's roads. These Chinese-made, 100cc motorcycles buzz around the streets in their thousands, like a plague of giant flies. They're popular because they're cheap and fast and can weave through the traffic go-slows that consume such a huge proportion of people's days. They barely existed as a form of transport in the 1980s, but when public transport fails, and the increasingly teeming roads aren't expanded, two wheels become the best option.

The okada drivers zip around at homicidal speeds, without any
regard for who or what lies ahead of them. No one is safe. They will use every available space, even cutting off their wing mirrors to squeeze through the traffic more easily. While they're willing to avoid inanimate objects such as market stalls and fruit tables, pedestrians and anything else with limbs and reflexes are considered fair game. Walking down a street, I never knew quite when an okada would fly into me. They would surprise me from all angles, sometimes from the side, sometimes from behind and sometimes against the flow of traffic. When one is inevitably mown down by an okada at some point, the drivers can be startlingly unrepentant. Mabel had recently been hit by an okada, and lost a tiny chunk of her left leg. ‘I
told
you,' the scowling driver had snorted. In his mind, Mabel had paid the right price for disrupting his precious momentum; her well-being hadn't been worth the slightest deceleration.

I had never intended to ride one of these things, but time was running out. Just one day in Lagos had taught me to blend into my surroundings by wearing a streetwise frown and barking my request. The okada man initially refused to take me to the bus stop I wanted (‘It's too far'), but when I offered to double the fare he ordered me to ‘Sit down.' The two of us sped off, and now that I was an okada passenger rather than a pedestrian, my disdain for these bikes disappeared.

As we rode away from the museum, I privately applauded my driver's aggression when he mounted the pavement and beeped two terrified pedestrians out of the way. Back on the main ring road, he swerved violently through traffic, cussing any car driver who tried to run us off the road. My mood changed slightly when he slid close enough past the cars to endanger my kneecaps, and the wind yanked my headscarf from my head, tossing it far behind me. When my driver suddenly applied the brakes, I slammed jaw-first into his back, then clawed his torso as he lurched forward. At that moment, I could see why Nigerians are so religious: an okada ride will have the staunchest atheist praying for Christ's protection.

Twenty minutes later, I boarded a danfo, which dropped me off near Aunty Janice's house. My life was threatened again when trying to cross the expressway to reach Satellite Town. Without traffic lights – of which Lagos has only a handful – my fellow pedestrians and I were at the mercy of the cars and lorries. As soon as a sizeable gap in the traffic appeared, the old, the young, the suited and the crippled sprinted across the expressway as if fleeing an apocalypse. We hurdled the central reservation and then stood on the other side of it, panting and scouring the second half of the expressway for another suitable gap. The wait seemed endless. In a moment of optimistic madness I leapt forward, only to be pinned back by the outstretched arm of the woman beside me.

‘Please, I beg, o,' she warned. She kept her arm there until she could shepherd me to safety on the other side.

By the time I arrived back at Aunty Janice's, I had the ravaged appearance of a fugitive: sweaty, saddle-sore and flinching at any sudden movement in my visual periphery. The sunlight and fumes had furrowed my forehead, but everyone else around me seemed unflustered and collected. Men regally attired in white
agbada
robes sidestepped goat shit and puddles. Their clothes were clean, their foreheads uncreased, and they barely perspired. Without a composed temperament, Aunty Janice told me, life in the city can chop years off your life span. At this rate I think I'd be finished at fifty.

 

 

While I spent my childhood summers in a modest house on the periphery of a quiet neighbourhood in the humdrum town of Port Harcourt, some of my wealthy Nigerian schoolmates were living my dreams in Victoria Island, the most expensive part of Lagos, once a genuine island, but now joined by a land bridge to the mainland. Their lives were an inaccessible blur of nightclubs, boat clubs and neon-lit restaurants – far more exciting than England. VI, as it is known, might even have been an adequate proxy for all those Caribbean holidays I craved but, frustratingly, my father never took us to Lagos. Now I had come to Victoria Island independently, to reacquaint myself with proper pavements, supermarkets, familiar global brands and air conditioning.

In the absence of informal traders, the streets felt sedate and spacious. Residential mansions lay strategically inconspicuous behind guarded security gates, and the okadas wove at deferential speeds between the tinted-windowed 4 x 4s. Here, Nigeria dusts itself down and shakes hands with world commerce: Chinese, Thai and Italian restaurants, foreign banks, art galleries and sports bars lined the streets. By the water's edge stood several embassies, their dozen or so armed guards chatting under the shade of palm trees. Further east, a string of boat clubs lined the island edges, overlooking the
lagoon where some people were jet-skiing. I was inspired. I hoped the two middle-aged British expats drinking by the boat club's bar might know more. There was wariness in their gaze, the dread I recognised in westerners' faces when an African approaches them for something. Swallowing my pride, I asked them where I could rent jet skis. They pointed me to the next boat club along. It had jet skis, the manager said, but their engines had broken down and couldn't be fixed in Nigeria; new engines would have to be imported. I stared longingly at the yellow jets skis bobbing in the water, sleek and useless.

I looked for something else to do. At the suggestion of the new Nigerian version of
Time Out
magazine, I visited Terra Kulture, a cultural centre-cum-restaurant. The walls were smothered in elegant black-and-white photographs of Victor Olaiya, Fela Kuti and other illustrious musicians. Sunlight flooded through the wall-to-ceiling windows, which looked out on to fresh, immaculate gardens. Rarely did Lagos architecture have such a therapeutic effect. When the staff told me that my plate of rice and plantain would cost me an eye-watering $18, I accepted that I was paying not just for food but the scant commodities of style and serenity.

Upstairs was the art gallery, manned by a young, alert assistant with high, Cameroonian cheekbones and an industrious smile. Thank goodness for the private sector. He encouraged me to look around. The paintings and modern portraiture and aerial photographs of the Lagos skyline were charming, though none of them matched the exquisiteness of the ancient abstract sculptures. At the back of the gallery, a theatre was staging one of its regular afternoon plays. I joined an audience of about two dozen people seated sporadically on wooden chairs. After an hour's delay, the lights dimmed, and the spotlights bore down onto the stage. In the opening scene, an actress pushed another actress in a wheelchair and tried to enter the stage living room, but the wheelchair got stuck in the doorway. For sixty toe-curling seconds, the lady
pushed and heaved and tried to roll the wheels over the door threshold. The seated actress, feigning paraplegia, looked on with self-imposed helplessness while the audience took it all in without a snigger.

Eventually the play started. It was a family drama set in the aftermath of a politician's death as his three daughters discover some nasty truths about their father. The director was aiming to give insight into the complications of Nigerian family life, but the audience's behaviour interested me far more. During the play, people chatted amongst themselves or spoke on their cell phones at unapologetic volume. Even more distracting was the unsolicited audience participation in the stage action. As the plot unfolded, spectators vented their opinions. ‘Story!' one lady shouted out when one of the characters lied about something (‘story' is a word Nigerians use when accusing someone of lying).

Annoyed by these frequent disruptions, I kissed my teeth and harrumphed and sighed and stamped my feet, hoping that these raucous spectators would get the message. They were oblivious to my irritation, and I ended up losing the plot of the play entirely. Audience participation can be a beautiful thing, and call-and-response is one of my favourite aspects of African culture. Nothing is more powerful than watching an audience replying to a speaker's words, emoting between his or her phrases and amplifying the sentiment (the singer Erykah Badu's live version of ‘Tyrone' is a form of audience participation at its most sublime). But to do it during a sombre stage play? It didn't seem appropriate to me.

A second, portly lady in a front-row seat was anxious to let the rest of us to know that she had figured out the plot in advance. ‘She's their half-sister!' she cried out, pointing to the maid character on stage. ‘It's her, now.'

Two minutes later, the play reached its climax when in the final line, the housemaid confessed to being the illegitimate daughter of the deceased politician: ‘
He was my father
.'

‘See, I told you,' the portly lady commented as the lights dimmed, pleased at her foresight. The cast took a bow, the audience clapped, and my anger imploded into resignation. There was no point hoping for quiet. This was the Lagos way of watching a play, and if I ever wanted to enjoy the city, I simply had to get used to it. In Nigeria, every diamond, even Victoria Island, was fashioned with rough edges.

 

Across the water from Victoria Island was Tarkwa Bay, a sheltered beach along Lagos Harbour. It wasn't the prettiest of places, but it was a diversion from the city, singled out by my guidebook for its mere existence rather than its attractiveness. In Lagos a trip to the seaside – with all its debris and harsh views of Lagos's industrial harbour – represented a break from the hustling multitudes and non-stop irritation of city life.

After the play, my okada man took me to the western edge of Victoria Island, past the foreign embassy buildings and the armed soldiers idling on chairs beneath a grove of trees by the water's edge. At the jetty, I saw a shaven-headed man with a goatee wrapped around extremely shapely lips. He was sitting at an outdoor desk. As I watched him stand up and walk towards me, I could tell he was a hustler right from the start. Obscuring his shifty eyes behind dark sunglasses, he homed in on me with a swiftness that made his motives clear. He worked in the office near the boats, he told me, helping people apply for visas to the US. Though this bore no connection with the boats, he acted as an intermediary between me and the man in charge of the water transport.

‘My name is Sam,' he intoned smoothly, extending his hand to shake mine. ‘I can show you around Tarkwa Bay.' His intentions aside, I couldn't help being impressed by his cool, laconic demeanour. He led me to the boat and tried to charm a free ride from the boat man, but the old guy was having none of it.

‘You're a thief,' he jibed at Sam, a stern glint piercing his smiley eyes. Sam begrudgingly paid for a full-price ticket.

The motor boat took us and a quartet of Italians through Five Cowrie Creek and out to the Atlantic. We cruised beneath the flyover bridge separating Victoria Island from Ikoyi, and headed into the choppy blue waters. Lagos's industrial sprawl extended into the lagoon, filling its blue surface with oil tankers and oil pipelines that stretched above our heads. A group of hardened white expats, embracing the industrial aesthetic, sailed among the tankers on their yachts and jet skis.

Once at Tarkwa Bay, everyone waded onto the beach, except me. I stayed on the boat, adamant about keeping my shoes and legs dry. Sam gallantly lifted me up in his arms and carried me onto the beach. I felt his knees buckle briefly.

‘Ai, I didn't think you were so heavy,' he said as he tipped me onto my feet.

‘I weigh nine and a quarter stone. How heavy
should
I be?'

‘You've been eating too much yam,' he informed me, examining my frame at arm's length.

The beach was relatively empty at that time of the day. A bald friend of Sam's bounded up to him, slung an arm around his shoulders and whispered conspiratorially into his ear, eyes darting towards me between giggles. I caught the words ‘. . . at least ten thousand naira,' and prepared myself for the scheming that was to come.