With his eightieth birthday looming, it crossed Michael Palin’s mind that now might be the time to hang up his boots, to lounge about at home, to take things easy. Then the opportunity to visit Africa’s most populous nation arose. A few weeks later, he was at Lagos airport, camera crew in tow.
The journal he kept during his trip offers a fascinatingly kaleidoscopic view of a country where some 500 languages are spoken and which contains within its borders everything from tropical rainforests to grasslands to desert plains. At one moment he is in vibrant but chaotic Lagos, the next in the seemingly deserted streets of Nigeria’s hyper-modern capital, Abuja, the next in the polluted oil fields of the Niger Delta. He is welcomed as an honoured guest by a powerful emir and harangued by a passerby in Benin City. He hears the testimony of a kidnap victim of the terrorist group Boko Haram and experiences the collective spiritual ecstasy of one of Nigeria’s mega churches. And throughout his trip, he experiences at first hand the contradictions of a country that has so much natural wealth and human talent and yet simultaneously grapples with corruption, religious strife and deep inequality.
Illustrated throughout with colour photographs taken on the trip, and brimming with wry humour and fascinating insights, this is a vivid and varied portrait of a complex country.