He nods. ‘An address. I have to cover a demonstration. The address is somewhere here, a Local Government Secretariat.’

‘The Secretariat is at the next turning,’ she says, then she adds, ‘I was hoping you’d come along and get to know my place. After all, we might never meet again.’ She stops in front of the Secretariat.

‘I promised someone I’d come,’ he says. He gets down. The demonstrators have already gathered before the building. Lomba recognizes the young man, Joshua, on a drum by the gates, giving an impassioned speech; behind him is the Secretariat wall, huge, topped with barbed wire. Suddenly a vision of handcuffs and stone walls flashes in his mind, like a presentiment; he shivers.

‘Thanks,’ he says to Mahalia.

‘Maybe I’ll see you again,’ she says.

‘Maybe.’ He thinks of James in Emeka Davies’ house and wonders what is happening to him at this moment, and if they’ll meet again soon, or never at all.

‘Maybe,’ he repeats.

He watches her drive away, veering sharply to one side to avoid the dark, pendent sun before her windscreen. When she disappears, he turns and makes his way in the comfortless twilight to the gathering at the Secretariat.

Afterword

It was a terrible time to be alive, especially if you were young, talented and ambitious – and patriotic. A human-rights commentator once described the state of things in the Nigeria of the 1990s as:

a roster of hundreds of political prisoners and others who have been detained arbitrarily by the military regime; the judiciary is in paralysis having [been] subjected to all manner of military interference, you have prisons in appalling states and public services in a [state] of collapse, every element of the rule of law has been thoroughly undermined and compromised by Abacha.

This was actually understating the matter.

Now imagine yourself, young, talented and ambitious, living in such a dystopia: half the world has slammed all sorts of sanctions on your country; you cannot listen to the radio without hearing your country vilified; you cannot read any international paper without seeing how much lower your country has sunk on the list of nations with poor human-rights records. The weight on the psyche could be enormous; all Nigerians became stigmatized by their rulers’ misdeeds.

I think if there is a passage in this book that illustrates more than any other the lived experience of those years, it is the one where Lomba – journalist, aspiring writer and not much of a believer in political activism – gets a wake-up call from James, his editor. He is told that he can write his novel, but he might never get it published, or if he got it published he could definitely not enter it for the Commonwealth Literary Prize because Nigeria had that very morning been expelled from the Commonwealth of Nations.