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 m… - 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.

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.

People don’t fear the wind until it fells a tree. Then, they say it’s too much.