A memoir of Nigeria: Madmen on the ground:

“Looking for Transwonderland: Travels in Nigeria. By Noo Saro-Wiwa. Granta; 309 pages; £14.99. Buy from Amazon.co.ukTHROUGHOUT her childhood and early teens, Noo Saro-Wiwa spent every summer in Nigeria. The flight back always came as a shock, as was the arrival itself. The noise, decay and corruption of Lagos airport were unending, along with the insects, power cuts and the higgledy-piggledy way of living that was far too intimate for one brought up in Britain’s home counties.Ms Saro-Wiwa would far rather have stayed in the family house in leafy Surrey, with its golf clubs and Leylandii trees, or holed up with her smart boarding-school friends from Roedean. But her mother thought of their Surrey home as the ‘house’, whereas their Nigerian home was ‘home’, a character-building ‘tropical gulag’ with kerosene lamps, rice-and-okra soup, ‘body-temperature Coca-Cola’ and a live-in tribe of cackling uncles and aunts. Home, that is, until Noo’s father, Ken Saro-Wiwa, a businessman and activist from the oil-rich region of Ogoni, was arrested, imprisoned and then hanged in 1995 for his outspoken political views. The trips back to Nigeria came to an abrupt stop.For a decade afterwards, Ms Saro-Wiwa traded Surrey and Roedean…”

(Via The Economist: Books and arts.)