THE GIANT AND ITS SHADOWS

Nigeria does not ease you in. It begins at the embassy, where the visa process itself — baroque, obstinate, and not without its moments of dark comedy — serves as a fitting overture to a country of staggering contradictions: ancient markets trading in the shadow of smartphone towers, warriors on horseback in brocaded silk charging through cities of twenty million, hyena men and sacred groves and emir's palaces where history walks the same corridors as the present.

From the waterborne slum-city of Makoko to the indigo dye pits of Kano, from a sacred forest where an Austrian mystic remade Yoruba religion in clay, to a male beauty pageant on the edge of the Sahel, this is a journey that rewards the stubborn traveller with encounters no itinerary could quite have promised. Nigeria is the Giant of Africa — enormous in population, in culture, in appetite, and in the distance between what it is and what it might be. This is an attempt to take its measure.