I don't have much of an imagination, but I have a mind bank of details, which I play with. It's how I daydream, so writing like that is natural for m… - Sefi Atta

History is very important to my work in that regard and thank you for noticing. I’m no expert on Fanon, but I used the quotation as an epigraph because I found it amusing and apt. The bourgeois phase in the history of a country like Nigeria is indeed completely useless, which is why the novel ends as it begins, with middle-class preoccupations, despite the political changeover that occurs in the story.

When I was a child, I was called oniranu a lot at home because I poked fun at people I ought to respect. I was about six years old when I made up a song about a certain Lagos society woman. One line, I remember, said she had rashes, even though she didn’t. I’m still an oniranu at heart. I never grew out of it. In my play Lengths to Which We Go, which you’ve read, I have an aspiring character called Mrs. Babalola who calls herself upper “clarse”.

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.