Lagos is home, the place where I don’t have to explain myself

So, obviously I did my research on you. You’ve written quite a bit about cities and about the legacies of colonialism as it applies to cities. They feature prominently in your fiction-why do you think that is?

About the city in general or about Lagos?

About the city generally, but also Lagos itself.

I’m a city person. Maybe the older I get, the more open I am to living away from the city. But when I came to England, I went to school in Winchester, which is about an hour out of London, and I hated it. It was nice, but I always remember spending my half-terms in London and going ‘Yes! People! A crowd!’ I like the buzz of it, the pace. The country is nice because it’s an escape from the city, but if there was no city to escape from … [laughs]

So you’re like Virginia Woolf. You’d much rather be in the city.

Yeah. Like today, for example, I’ve been walking around Cape Town. If I was in a rural area, obviously there’d be nature to walk in, but …

Nature gets boring after a

while?

Exactly. Anyway, I haven’t seen that much. From a plane, it looks like any European city. But then as the plane gets closer to the ground, and you see the-do you call them shanties over here? The townships. And I think, ‘Yes, I’m still in Africa.’ And when we drove from the airport, I thought ‘This place looks like Lagos!’, and then you come here [looks around the hotel] and it’s just such a contrast. This isn’t my first time in South Africa, though: I’ve been to Joburg and Durban as well. What I noticed the first time, and what I find frustrating, is that, in Nigeria, the government doesn’t work-for anybody! If you’re rich, or if you’re poor, you don’t have running water! You don’t have constant electricity. In that sense, the government doesn’t discriminate-thank you rubbish government! [laughs]

At least they’re an equal opportunity rubbish government.

Whereas here, the government is capable of running infrastructure to some of the people, but at the expense of these other people. I saw the same thing in Brazil, where the favelas are in stark contrast to the luxury places.

Finally, let’s take it back to the writing. What’s your writing routine? Are you one of those fabled authors who gets up at four in the morning and writes for three hours every day, or do you write as it comes to you?

I write on my laptop when I have a stretch of time. I used to write at night and I used to be very precious about my time. From midnight to about four in the morning there’s a special quality of silence that you get, which you don’t get during the day even when you’re alone at home. It’s as quiet as death, with no cars, nobody coming to deliver the post. The problem is that your sleep pattern becomes different from the vast majority of the world’s-sleeping in the afternoon and being awake at night isn’t sustainable, so I’ve given up on that and I now make do with normal hours.