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swings their way, their more proactive counterparts arrogantly weave through the traffic on makeshift skateboards and demand money far more successfully. The beggars’ buff biceps and chests were a reminder that in this twenty-first-century urban jungle, the laws of natural selection still apply.
    Hustling is the lifeblood of Nigeria’s economy since our corrupt politicians have not diversified from the crude oil that has served their bank accounts so well. Around 60 per cent of people in urban areas earn unofficial wages in the informal economy as petty traders, construction workers, food sellers. Life for these Nigerians is an
incalculable struggle. The arithmetic of their survival was totally lost on me: $2 (around300) is the most they might earn in one day, with 90 per cent of the country somehow surviving on less than this. Only half the population meets the official breadline of 50 cents, says the UN. Water for bathing and washing clothes is a luxury these people must save up for. Their homes are desperate erections of corrugated iron, tarpaulin and slabs of old wood; some sleep outdoors.
    At a glance, the insouciant muscularity of the beggars’ bodies masks the ravages of regularly skipped meals, not to mention tooth decay, depression, dulled IQs and parasitic infections. Often illiterate, these people are deaf to the city’s posters and billboards that speak endlessly of God’s love for them. One in five of the barefoot toddlers defecating on the roadsides won’t live long enough to start primary school. Their births and deaths are not registered in any formal sense. They enter and exit the world unnoticed by government, with few photographs to commemorate their brief existence. Forced to live like animals yet cursed with the fears of human consciousness, the plight of these Nigerians made me question not just the purpose of life, but the very point of it. Compared to these people, Aunty Janice belonged to a privileged stratum.
    Naturally, corruption is the main cause. Politicians steal $140 billion a year from Africa – a quarter of the continent’s GDP – mainly by controlling trade licences and skimming funds from government contracts. No facet of the economy goes unaffected: every road, school, oil drum, hospital or vaccine shipment is milked for cash. It diminishes the quality and quantity of everything in the country, including our self-esteem. For it doesn’t matter what I might achieve in life, these street scenes represent me; in England, cheerful telephone queries about the provenance of my name are occasionally met with silence when I tell them I’m Nigerian. The world judges me according to this mess, and looking at it made me feel rather worthless.

    The danfo finally arrived at the CMS bus stop on Lagos Island, a major transport hub, and I emerged from the vehicle, sweating and tottering like a newborn giraffe. Looming ahead of me was the rangy former headquarters of the state electricity company, NEPA, its neon sign appropriately non-functioning. Further away, the upper floors of a skyscraper had partially collapsed, a vision of post-apocalyptic neglect. Lagos Island was once the commercial centre of the city. But when Abuja became the country’s new capital, the government neglected Lagos Island’s infrastructure, and big companies abandoned it in favour of neighbouring Victoria Island and Ikoyi. But the Island still looks the part, with its corporate architecture and concreted canyons that create the urban echoey acoustics I love so much. In between the crumbling skyscrapers stands the occasional Brazilian building. They were built by freed slaves who had returned to Nigeria from Brazil in the mid-nineteenth century after slavery was abolished. By the 1880s, almost a tenth of Lagos’s population was Brazilian. Some of them were successful merchants in Brazil, who continued their transatlantic trade when they returned to Nigeria. Others were