In an interview on Nigeria

Your next choice is Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan. I studied this at university, but I can’t remember that much about it. Is it the book in which we’re told that life is ‘nasty, brutish and short’?

That’s the one-liner. I read it not because it was one of the founding texts of Western philosophical thought but because a couple of Nigerians said it was a good book to read in Lagos. There were parallels between this book, written in the middle of England’s 17th-century civil war, and Nigeria, in particular the jockeying of various competing interests. There are some long digressions in it on the nature of man which look dated now, but at its heart it does still have an important, timeless message: it helps explain why in a society where all hope of law and order and stability have broken down, decent people end up doing awful things to each other. This idea of ‘the war of all against all’, when there’s no law, and what a man can win through his strength is what he gets, definitely has parallels in modern Nigeria. It also helps you understand another aspect of demagoguery: why dictators can be genuinely popular, if only for a while, and why, for example, fundamentalist religious movements have such appeal. You surrender your freedoms to Leviathan, the all-powerful sovereign, in exchange for being guaranteed a certain level of stability.

That’s the ‘social contract’, if I remember correctly.

Exactly. In Nigeria, you see that in the administration of Muhammadu Buhari, the dictator who introduced all these extraordinary measures after coming to power. Compulsory street-cleaning days. People say those caught peeing in public were made to hop down the street like frogs. Public horsewhippings. In one sense, barbaric stuff, but some Nigerians do look back and say: ‘That was a time when we had a measure of public order.’ An author friend of mine said: ‘Nigerians respond well to the whip. We must like it.’ I think what he meant by that was the kind of message you see in Leviathan, that someone, however insincere or self-interested, can genuinely attract a lot of support if they come to power promising that stability. I remember going to an all-night service in a Pentecostal church in a hangar-like building on the outskirts of Lagos. Tens of thousands of people spent the night in fervour, the pastor delivered his message, and all around, there was order. Chairs were in neat rows, there were litter bins – where else in Lagos did I ever see a litter bin? It was intense and passionate, but in a very structured way. I could see how, if you lived in a crowded slum, coming for one night into that environment of control and order would have felt like a tremendous relief. Certainly, surrendering an element of power to the Leviathan in exchange for it would seem worthwhile.

I’m impressed by the classicism of your Nigerian friends.

I think a lot of Nigerians do look outside for explanations. It is a hard place to get to grips with, and we’re all searching for the analogies and parallels to help us.

Nigeria shares a certain quality with former Zaire, doesn’t it? When I lived there I used to feel that a certain model had been taken and pushed to its logical extreme, and that there was something intellectually interesting in the surreal situations and absurdities that resulted from that purity of experience. My attitude was: ‘If you are going to live in a society that isn’t functioning, it’s more interesting to live in a place that is completely screwed-up, rather than half screwed-up.’

It’s certainly more honest. The abuses of power, the exploitation is there for all to see; they sometimes aren’t in a place that is only half screwed-up. You had that great phrase in your Zaire book – ‘the quality of negative excellence’. I was very angry you used it, as it meant I couldn’t. It’s what frightens people about a place, but also what makes it so compelling.