She drinks her Eva water. Their parents were taken down by cancer, heart attacks and strokes. Respectable diseases. - Sefi Atta

The people who gave Ikoyi a bad name were the ones who rarely allowed other Nigerians into their social circles, except to serve and look up to them. Occasionally they were open to outsiders who had as much money and were equally materialistic. They were self-conscious but not particularly self-examining, and they were afraid to admit their vulnerability. As my protagonist Remi Lawal notes at the Dadas’ cocktail party in the novel, their lives are full of frivolous contradictions and, ultimately, they are replaced from one generation to the next. She is right about that. Ikoyi of 1976 is not the same as it is today. That society is gone now. The band and the song have changed.

It doesn’t matter whether Frances Cooke – the bead collector – was spying or not. It was enough to show there were allegations in those days, which may have been partly due to xenophobia. Ikoyi, however, was where business and political leaders lived, and the United States did have an interest in spreading neo-liberal ideas to developing countries like Nigeria.

The quotation is for those whom it may concern. Our country doesn’t work. We know that. We also know why. What we may not be ready to accept is that progress will continue to elude us so long as we follow trajectories that are alien to us, the most damaging of which are driven by unbridled capitalism. This is not to suggest that a return to our traditional systems is the way forward; I don’t idealise them in the novel.