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.