In an interview on Nigeria

What’s the common thread linking these five books?

They all, either directly or obliquely, are reflections of things I saw, experienced and felt in Nigeria, books which gave me useful insights into the place. The list isn’t chronological, but it does track the development of a thought process.

Your first choice is Anthills of the Savannah by Chinua Achebe. That’s a fairly classical choice for people reading up about Nigeria, isn’t it?

I read it pretty much immediately after arriving. It’s a great account of how a country can fall into a dictatorship, how dictators become dictators. If you’ve lived in a country which isn’t under a dictatorship and move to a country that has been for most of the last decade, you inevitably wonder how it is that these bloodthirsty pantomime figures came to be running the place. Anthills gives the human side of the story. A group of friends have all known each other in their youth. Over time they go off in their different directions. One of them becomes a key aide to the dictator, another becomes a journalist, and the book makes this gradual divergence believable. The dictator doesn’t become a dictator overnight, it’s a step-by-step thing, a bit like the story of the frog in the boiling water. The writing is very lively, the book gives you an understanding of how people who were genuinely admirable liberation-style heroes can turn into despots over time. It’s a much more sophisticated and human account of dictatorship than the one-line, comic-book dismissal you often get.

You were reading this in 2002, 15 years after it was first published, but it remains completely topical. When Achebe wrote it, which dictatorship was he reflecting upon?

He wrote it in 1987, so he would have been commenting on Ibrahim Babangida’s regime. Certainly, the dictator in the book has considerable charm and savvy, as Babangida did, whereas his predecessor Buhari was a very austere fellow who didn’t have the same bearing. There’s definitely more than a hint of Babangida.

You went in after the Sani Abacha dictatorship, which was a much grimmer affair, wasn’t it?

Yes. I also read Robert Graves’s I, Claudius at that time and there was a parallel there, in the concept of a descent through dictators. You start with Augustus, a relatively enlightened figure, move through Tiberius and end up with Caligula, where there are no holds barred. Abacha seems to me Nigeria’s Caligula, someone who didn’t care what anyone said about him and looted the Treasury. One of the reasons why Anthills is interesting, though, is that in a sense Abacha was easy to smoke out, because he was so obviously villainous, whereas Babangida had this charm – he was invited to lunch at Downing St and Mrs Thatcher was a great fan because he was open to the idea of IMF-style reform. But, as Achebe’s book shows, those are the most dangerous type of dictators, because they do fool some people, especially in the West, where people are willing to be fooled in order to get access to the oil they covet.

This is actually Achebe’s most recent novel about modern-day Nigeria, isn’t it?

Since his car accident he’s lived in the US and concentrated on other things. He’s become a trenchant critic from the outside and when I was there he certainly played a useful role in acting as a corrective to the movement there was in the West to say ‘Nigeria is reforming, everything is changing’ and to drum up this Live 8 sense of Nigeria as the great hope of Africa, which was very self-serving on both sides. Achebe was one of the few international figures who stood up and said: ‘Hang on, this isn’t really what I’m seeing.’