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paranoid alert, my Visa card stuffed down my bra and some emergency banknotes folded inside my shoe. I’d been warned several times to expect danger at any given moment and to treat everyone as a potential predator. But in reality, the roadside signage that confronted me was a sedate WELCOME TO LAGOS, a message of warmth and optimism which, when I first saw it, seemed almost chilling in its apparent sarcasm, like some kind of sick joke. The same went for the car number plates, which were all printed with the motto ‘Centre of Excellence’, a ridiculous conceit if ever there was one.
    As my taxi driver made his way towards Satellite Town, I struggled to discern which part of the city we were driving through. In Lagos, place names exist largely in people’s minds. There were barely any signs or distinguishing landmarks, just a monotonous sequence of characterless, blocky, oil-boom 1970s architecture, fruit sellers, corrugated iron rooftops, iconic yellow buses, beggars and motorcycles that repeated itself mile after mind-boggling mile under a carpet of litter scattered in all directions, like confetti.
    Every square metre of the city was scribbled with informal advertising. The buildings and lamp posts, even the sloping undersides of the numerous pedestrian bridges, beseeched me to buy this product or call that number. Presiding over everything were a variety of uniformed authoritarians: black-clad traffic wardens orchestrating the symphony of horns, and police swaggering about in black shirts and green army trousers. A man wearing a deep red outfit ushered the vehicles along with sticks, whacking cars as if they were donkeys, before casually swiping the back of a boy’s leg as he crossed the road.
I watched one uniformed man try to prise open a car door, then sheepishly concede defeat when the driver hastily punched down the door lock. These officers were predators and guardians all at once, and everyone knew it.
    Young gang members, known as Area Boys, also stake out their territory along the roads and collect cash from drivers. Employed by politicians to intimidate voters during the gubernatorial elections, they’ve been rewarded with uniforms and a licence to extort on the expressways. Now they clothe their scrawny bodies in green-and-white shirts and patrol the streets, waiting for bus conductors to lean out of the buses and slap money into their palms.
    Once upon a time, Lagos was a placid cluster of islands and creeks separated from the Atlantic by lagoons, where local men caught fish, the cry of white ibis could be heard and snakes shimmied among the bushes. By the fifteenth century, the area had become a busy slave port. Under British colonial rule it became Nigeria’s economic and political capital. The grasses, wild birds and trees were quickly devoured by urbanisation, its wild metastasis cluttering the cityscape so densely it seems to have made a crater that has sent the rest of the country tumbling into it. Nobody knows how many people live in Lagos; it could be 10 million, it could be 17 million – no one is counting the teams of street urchins and shanty dwellers, or the illegal buildings erected under the distracted eyes of previous governments.
    Although peopled by every Nigerian ethnicity, Lagos is a city of the Yoruba, the dominant ethnic group in the south-west. Their melodic lingua franca sounded in the streets around me, as foreign to my ears as any language from Cameroon or Ghana. I had arrived in a country I had never lived in, and a city I’d visited only briefly twice before, among a thoroughly foreign-sounding people. It was the most alienating of homecomings. I might as well have arrived in the Congo.

    My taxi driver turned off the Badagry Expressway and went through the narrow, sandy shop-lined streets of Satellite Town, a suburb several miles away from downtown Lagos. As our destination drew near, I shrank into my seat, wishing I could stay in the car forever,