Emmanuel Okoro had been born in Nsukka, in Enugu State, after the failed Biafran war. The Igbo separatists had fought bravely (and had brilliantly appealed to world opinion—that image of the starving child), but the central government, with outside aid, had prevailed. The official post-war policy was “no victor, no vanquished,” but on the streets of Nsukka it certainly felt like they had been vanquished. Emmanuel’s family’s savings were gone, half his cousins were dead or disappeared or absorbed into strutting gangs, preying on the impoverished. His father had been invalided in the war, shot in the left knee. Persevering through a painful limp, he spent most of his time in Lagos, eking out naira by selling plastic bags of allegedly clean water to drivers stuck in go-slows. He hauled the water in a small green wagon. When it was stolen, he switched to lighter goods—handkerchiefs, T-shirts, belts. (It was said a Lagos driver could leave home stark naked and, with purchases from vendors in traffic jams, arrive at work fully clothed.) Emmanuel, back at home with his mother and sisters, worked streets as well, selling his mother’s bean cakes and firewood he hacked from the bush at the edge of the city. His father had been a schoolteacher before the war, and his family valued education—Igbos generally valued education, it was a point of pride. With the money he earned and the little his mother could spare, Emmanuel paid fees to attend a state school. When older boys tried to get him to smoke wee-wee—marijuana—he resisted. The drug was also called “igbo,” which he found personally offensive. He wondered why it didn’t bother anyone else; they were all Igbo. They should all have their eyes on something bigger, something better. He certainly did.

But why a police officer? To serve justice? He had seen friends bullied in school (but never him, he would fight back fiercely no matter how hopeless), and market women extorted by gangs, and newspaper headlines about businessmen shot dead by robbers on the Obolo-Idah Road. Or to avoid injustice? He had seen plenty of that, too. Police constables demanding money from motorists at checkpoints. A taxi driver who accidentally splashed mud on constables dragged from his car and forced to sit in a puddle up to his waist. The police an ambiguous force, combating injustice and committing it. It was complicated. Life was complicated. Grow up in Nsukka, Enugu, Nigeria, and you learn that.