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The rest of us fell about laughing.

‘We should be crying and praying for their souls,' Success implored with a twinkle in her eye.

Some Americans might have been surprised or appalled by our flippant reaction to the concept of heritage festivals. But Nigerian sadness about the past is expressed differently; it is an all-encompassing emotion that lies beneath the wry jokes and laughter; it doesn't attach itself to specific places or objects. As we are not descended from slaves, slavery didn't inspire the same angst in Mabel, Success and Sesi as it does among our American cousins. Mabel envied the lives of African Americans, the source of her beloved hip hop and R'n'B, who lived in a land of milk and honey, as far as she was concerned. I wondered whether she and other Lagosians had time to worry about the slaves' tortuous boat journeys when every cramped bus ride to work felt like a mini Middle Passage, and people filled Internet cafés to apply for US green cards. Slavery is seemingly another of those traumas that falls within our nation's high pain threshold. We still don't fully understand its effects on our society and psyche.

We returned to Badagry's waterfront and then Mabel, Success, Sesi and I walked to the first two-storey building built in Nigeria. Constructed in 1845 by a church missionary, it was also the first Nigerian parsonage, and was now a school. The teacher, a charismatically stern man, led us to a room housing the first ever Bible to be translated from English to the Yoruba language.

Mabel and I stepped back outside and waited for okadas to take us to Badagry's motor park. ‘These towns . . . they never progress,' she said as we squinted at the boiling, white-hot sky. ‘You look at them now . . . they're always so quiet.'

Badagry was one of the first places in Nigeria to establish links with outsiders through the slave trade and then nineteenth-century British colonialism. But sub-Saharan Africa's geography and tropical diseases marginalised the continent in the global flow of people and ideas. We fell behind, and by the time foreigners settled on our shores, their advanced technology ensured that the nature of their relationship with us was exploitative rather than mutually beneficial. These days, Badagry has little to show for its early contact with missionaries and the slave trade. It's as shabby and poor and undeveloped as any other town, and Shegu, an indirect beneficiary of slavery, was studying for a degree and trying to make his way through life like everyone else.

 

 

Exploring Lagos from my base in Satellite Town – so far away from the heart of the metropolis – required much arduous wading through the city's sweltering, viscous crowds. Satellite Town was a separate universe from the fancy Lagos that I saw in the Sunday newspaper pages, the Lagos where lavish wedding ceremonies are frequented by celebrities, entrepreneurs, senators, royalty and every eminent ‘Chief and Mrs' in the vicinity; the Lagos that arranges for American R'n'B superstars to come and perform concerts, where Nigerian hip-hop stars work the red carpet at glamorous award ceremonies, speaking with faux American accents, and underpaid ‘Nollywood' actresses feign a wealth and glamour befitting of their cultural status.

Only a few contacts lay between me and that side of the city's life, but reaching that epicentre required far too much physical effort. I felt shackled to the haggard, quotidian side of mainland life and, after three weeks, increasingly comfortable in it, too. Happy to let the tide carry me wherever it pleased, I began taking aimless bus rides around town during my last few days in Lagos.

As I sat on a danfo at a bus stop, a man walked past, pushing a
cake-laden trolley. He was drawing the attention of customers by blasting the recording of a baby's screams from loud speakers. He sniggered at my horrified reaction. As my bus waited to fill up with passengers, a beggar hopped on board and faced the passengers. Intoning like a church pastor, he began a very long speech detailing his sad life story in Liberia. But far from drawing sympathy, the beggar's laboured, inarticulate ramblings only irritated the buck-toothed old man next to me.

‘I beg,
what
is your point?' he barked at the beggar, who snapped his mouth shut immediately. The old man angrily rummaged his pocket for some naira notes. ‘I'm tired of your
mad
talk,' he muttered before pressing hush money into the Liberian's palm. The beggar jumped off the bus, and the old man let out a disgruntled sigh.

‘Where are you from?' he asked me once the bus got moving.

‘I'm Nigerian,' I said, disappointed that he had discerned that I was a diasporan. ‘What makes you think I'm not?'

‘You don't look like a Nigerian . . . you dress like those YMCA girls,' he said. ‘And I can see you staring out of the window . . . you are looking around curiously. You cannot come from Lagos.'

YMCA girl? That was a new one. Most passers-by asked me if I was a ‘footballer' because I wore running shoes all the time. We chatted all the way back to Satellite Town. We found ourselves disembarking at the same stop, walking down the same side street, through the same market. It turned out the old man – his name was Julius – lived five minutes away from Aunty Janice. He invited me to his house for lunch.

Like all the houses in Satellite Town, Julius's was a modest bungalow fronted by a porch and a tiny yard. A retired civil servant, Julius received his accommodation from the government. His first house, back in the 1970s, had been in Ikoyi, which in those days was still a quiet suburb of Lagos, and nothing like the swarming downtown area it is now. Julius couldn't bear the area's calm. He was later
moved to a house in Satellite Town, even further behind the back of beyond.

‘In fact, it was worse than Ikoyi,' Julius said as we sat in his small living room. ‘You could hear the sound of a bird – that's all. No human traffic . . . nothing!' he laughed. ‘It was like being in solitary confinement. You see, I like to
see
human beings. But Ikoyi is better now. Things have improved in terms of human traffic. Ikoyi has improved
tremendously
.' Julius must be the only person who considered the chaos of Ikoyi to be an improvement on the past. He was a Lagos old-timer, at ease with the city's pandemonium. ‘I like the hustle and bustle. I'm used to noise!'

‘Lagosians do like their noise,' I said.

‘I think it's natural with human beings. If you are born in a noisy environment, you are afraid to be taken away from it. What will you do? That's one of the ways of life in Lagos . . . shouting, arguing. A first-time visitor will see Nigerians as mad.
Mad
people coming together,' he gave a closed-lipped chortle. ‘So now that you are in Rome, you have to do as the Romans!'

Julius showed me his collection of old naira notes and coins. He poured a bagful of old money onto the coffee table.

‘I remember these!' I said, picking up some
10 and
20 notes. My parents used to give me these low-denomination bills as pocket money when I was child. I could spend the cash on fruit and skewers of
suya
meat, and I still had change to spare. In the 1970s, two naira equalled one British pound sterling. Now the exchange rate was
250 to the pound. Over the years, the government has reprinted naira notes in higher denominations to keep up with the naira's declining value. Regardless of their economic value, I cherished those crisp, newly issued notes, which seemed an improvement on the current soggy, bacteria-infested bills.

Julius handed me a one kobo coin, a sure contender for the world's most valueless coin. One hundred of these coins made up one naira. Once upon a time, a few kobo could buy me some
sweets; now they wouldn't buy me a mouthful of banana. Julius showed me a
2 coin, issued in 2006 by the government in a bizarre imitation of the British £2 coin. The coins were withdrawn from circulation after public protests about their weight: most things cost
100 or more; even sachets of ‘pure water', the cheapest item, go for
5.