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trained carpenters, masons and bricklayers, who used their skills to replicate the baroque styles of eighteenth-century Brazilian houses: Portuguese-style pointed arched windows, wrought-iron balustrades, ornate ceiling cornicing and colourful facades. The buildings cling wearily to their beauty. Preservation is a distant priority for everyone – even the 1970s office blocks now dwarfing the Brazilian houses are subject to the same neglect, withering in the aftermath of the oil boom that funded their construction.
    I walked past the former State House, once a residence of colonial governors. On its front, the statues of several white horses reared majestically towards the sky as if fleeing the hordes of yellow buses and fruit stalls below. Traders have taken over the island’s streets with their piles of stereos, bananas, film DVDs, torches, body lotion, batteries, sunglasses and shoes, turning Lagos’s defined street grid
into a contiguous mass of confusion. Nigerians love to transform every place into a giant market, no matter how grand the location. We’ll grab any opportunity to sell, discarding all sense of pomp and ceremony. If Nigeria conducted a space exploration programme, you know that women would be offering bananas to the astronauts as they climbed aboard the shuttle. Perhaps knowing this, the authorities fenced off the small grassy Tinubu Square where a bronze statue of a man in ragged clothing reads a book above the inscribed words: Knowledge is power . Without the protective fencing, the statue would undoubtedly be smothered by a throng of illiterate hawkers.
    This part of Lagos felt feral and impenetrable. But I was here as a tourist, and I wanted to make a ‘destination’ out of this city. The National Museum down by the racecourse was an obvious and easy place to start, a buoy to cling to in this wild sea. I entered the museum’s gate. Its large grounds were probably the only place in Lagos Island where I could walk freely, away from the maddening crowds. After I paid for my ticket at reception, the museum guide, a thin man with pointy sideburns and carefully plucked eyebrows, welcomed me with an unsmiling hello. He pointed at a map of Nigeria outside the entrance to the exhibit room. ‘Nigeria is made up of three main tribes,’ he began automatically.
    â€˜I know . . . I’m Nigerian,’ I informed him, piqued at being mistaken for a foreigner in my own country, especially when speaking in my best Nigerian accent. The museum guide was thrown by my declaration. His speech had been well rehearsed for the foreigners and schoolchildren who make up the majority of visitors to the museum, but I sensed he wasn’t sure how to tweak his spiel for the likes of me. And so he carried on regardless, and I listened regardless, both of us enacting this charade for the benefit of nobody.
    We walked into the quiet, dimly lit exhibition room. A female employee sat slumped asleep on a chair in the corner. She surfaced briefly to look at me before nodding off again. I felt a strange obligation to tread lightly and not disturb her. There were no other
visitors in the room. Around me were glass cabinets containing artefacts and clothing belonging to various ethnic groups: bronze sculptures from the old Benin empire; chain mail from the Islamic north, and a camel saddle made from leather, wood, brass and iron. The museum provided no other information. Each artefact was simply labelled ‘camel saddle’ or ‘Yoruba drum’ without any clue about its age, rarity, provenance or cultural significance. The museum guide had no extra information either, but he insisted on giving me a guided tour anyway.
    Just as he showed me some divination symbols, the power cut out and threw the entire museum into semi-darkness. ‘I’m coming,’ he said to me, as he rushed out to switch on the power generator. I stood in the shadows and waited patiently. Eventually, I decided to