I suppose the reason I write about the Lagos elite at all is that they don’t become writers. Ikoyi people in particular are underrepresented in Niger… - Sefi Atta

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.

Most of the children were shoeless and you were confronted with the dilemma that, no matter how much money you had and no matter where you could escape to overseas, you could not save yourself from your own country.

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”.