In this first episode, author Adewale Maja-Pierce’s The House My Father Built (2014) is a nonfictional work which began as an essay “Legacies,” published in Granta, about a property his late father left for him. While he’d left Nigeria, when he was 16, to join his mother in England, his return to attend to his inherited property re-introduced him to Lagos. He documents his experience, making a fine roll call of the people he encounters and how the city shapes them into the interesting characters they are.
Damilare says Maja-Pierce’s memoir reflects present realities in the country, like police brutality. Maja-Pierce answer throws us off. “Nigeria is a semi-militarized state,” he says, “and the only thing that keeps this country together is the Army. It is a fiction, not a country. An invention of a foreign conquering power for its economic interests.” One cannot say for sure what this tells us about Lagos. But since the coastal territory that is the state today was the nucleus of the project that became Nigeria, we can say that Lagos’ show of power and grit (man pass man) and its beastly notoriety for commerce shows it has maintained the beat that founded it.
