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At the end of a sleepy bus journey, I arrived in Port Harcourt (or ‘Potakot' as it is pronounced). I was born in this city in the mid-1970s, when its nickname of the ‘Garden City' seemed less of a misnomer. Now my home town was an uninviting metropolis, its grey flyovers soaring above a vista of banal concrete buildings, isolated palm trees and the tarpaulined labyrinth of the central market. Established as a coal-exporting port in 1912, Port Harcourt has barely transcended its industrial roots. Money, oil, family ties and an absence of alternatives are the main things yoking people to this dystopia, I think.

Sonny drove me back to the family house at the edge of town, along a road where soldiers stopped cars and made officious requests to see ‘your papers'. The tensions of old came flooding back. Roadblocks like these, once common in the 1980s, no longer existed elsewhere in the country now that the military dictatorship had ended. But Port Harcourt is a tense oil city with its finger still hovering over the trigger. It's constantly expanding as its wealth sucks poor people from the countryside every year. New buildings and churches jostle for space on roadsides that were once silent. I saw more churches here than in any other part of the country. There were so many of them they'd seemingly run out of traditional
names: FRESH OIL CATHEDRAL and CHRISTIAN RESTORATION AND REPAIRS MINISTRIES placards sprouted like weeds from the roadside, the tangible signs of all manner of desperation.

We turned off the expressway and into the Igbo neighbourhood where our family home sits. The streets were flanked by high walls and iron gates, over which I caught glimpses of the rectilinear 1970s houses, painted in pale pastels or leached white, with red-headed lizards scaling their walls and corrugated iron rooftops. Verandahs looked out onto driveways planted with banana and mango trees and white lady-of-the-night flowers that wait until sundown before unleashing their fragrance into the air. I could still hear a mysterious, invisible bird that sings freakishly human-sounding melodies from the trees.

Our house used to stand on the very edge of town on a silent, middle-class street next to the bush. Behind our garden wall loomed a mysterious forest of palm trees where we would throw our banana and mango skins. Wildlife thrived there, including the infamous green snake that once shimmied into the kitchen and brushed against Zina's unsuspecting foot (her screams could be heard in Cameroon). Nowadays, we've acquired several neighbours, and sunlight streams over the wall, liberated from the dark forest canopy. Our noiseless street has developed into a little superhighway, with lorries and okadas constantly rumbling past the fruits stalls, mini supermarkets, hairdressers and countless church placards.

The house itself was more or less the same, a modest three-bedroom residence that was always too small to fit the whole family. The same portraits still hung on the walls, including the large one of my father posing imperiously with a pipe between his lips. The blue 1970s mosaic tiles in the hallway and staircase – old enough to have survived two fashion cycles – gave the house an echoey, cavernous ambience. My father's interior decor tastes weren't brilliant. He was a discerning aesthete in many respects, judging by the quality and composition of his photography, but when it came to decor
or colour scheming he seemed to lose his vision completely (my mother had no say in these matters). I once had an argument with my father after he insisted – to my undying mystification – that a man's socks should always be the same colour as his shoes. Nonsensical as his sartorial reasoning might have been, I rather wished he'd applied it to the interior of the house; at least then we might have had curtains that matched the red-orange paisley carpet, not the geometric, black-and-white drapes he chose instead.

My father's only concession to good taste was the glamorous portrait of my mother, painted on their tenth wedding anniversary in 1976. From the time I was about ten, my mother stopped joining us on our two-month holidays in Nigeria in order to continue working in England. Zina and I would often stare at that portrait, wishing she were there to neutralise our father's influence and undo his decisions.

Junior had since inherited the house and had installed flooring that matched the curtains. But being boss still didn't allow him to stamp his full imprimatur on the decor: when he hired a team of men to pave the driveway in pale stone, they seized the initiative and laid down a few red slabs that spelled out the word ‘LOVE'. Junior could only shrug at the infuriating but endearing gesture.

The living-room walls displayed photographs of us as children. Most of them were taken in England, our large-toothed faces foregrounding the lawns of Surrey and Derbyshire prep schools. The sight of it yanked me back in time and space, and confusingly oriented my mind away from this house and this country. Upstairs, my father's tiny study was the one room that felt inhabited. It was here that he typed his manuscripts and raged by telephone about Ogoni injustices, his anger interspersed with loud belly laughs. His untouched bookshelves revealed a range of surprising interests (
Jews & Arabs
; a Jackie Onassis biography) that had long since been submerged by concerns over oil spills. In these books I found common ground with him, and for the first time I regretfully
imagined the kind of adult relationship we might have had if circumstances had been different. He was the type of father you adored until the age of eight, but once you grew a mind of your own, the attrition began. He could tell great children's stories, and he could talk on an adult level. But he wasn't so good during those intermediary teenage years when you had outgrown your cuteness and malleability, and his flaws materialised like a rash, and you strayed from the path of greatness he had mapped out for you. But in my twenties, I noticed our interests converging, particularly around travel. I once rifled through his old passports and was surprised to see visa stamps from countries such as Ethiopia and Suriname. Why did he go? What did he make of these places? I'll never know the full story.

After completing my tour of the house, I sat in the living room and pondered what to do with myself. This was the first time I had stayed here alone. Back in the day, our father would leave us at home all day most days while he went to work. We never did very much in Port Harcourt. During those hours of TV-less boredom, we survived on sibling companionship and Hollywood films, subsisting on the same two or three movies recorded off British TV on our Betamax VCR. Our tolerance for repetition was high:
Coming to America
and
Tootsie
were watched at least once every day, to the point that we knew the dialogue inside out. By summer's end we'd learnt to swear like Eddie Murphy and speak in a Southern falsetto, Dustin Hoffman-style.

Twenty years on, I needed a similar distraction. I felt a little lonely and abandoned, and more aware of the void left by my brother and father's deaths. The emptiness of the house accentuated that sense of family depletion. In my childhood, my parents' strained marriage – already cleaved by geography – left me and my siblings feeling as if we were on the margins of the extended family. We were a separate appendage on the family tree, the ‘London' ones who never knew our cousins as well as they knew each other. My
father had his own life in Nigeria, away from ours. And so this lizard-strewn shell of a house, our supposed ‘home', offered me little sense of homecoming or belonging; only a few shards of memory. But I was glad of it. Port Harcourt had become an undesirable place to live, and I had the option of evacuating without leaving a piece of myself behind.

My mother's predicament was rather different. She desperately wanted to live in Port Harcourt but had been obliged to raise her children in England on my father's wishes. After she had retired and self-determination, that elusive beast, was finally won, her plans to retire in Port Harcourt were tainted by the threat of violence and instability.

I felt thoroughly immobilised in this house, too. Sonny was away for the weekend, so I had no driver. The idea of travelling around by my beloved okadas suddenly seemed too strange and adventurous since my past experiences of Port Harcourt involved being driven around town to the houses of various relatives and family friends. I wanted more of the same. Home towns have a way of infantilising you like that. The elderly nightwatchman only encouraged that regression when he warned me to ‘No take okada.' Too dangerous, he said. And so I stood in my bedroom, clutching at the wrought-iron bars across the window like a child prisoner.

The bars had been installed to protect us from robbers, although they failed spectacularly. I still shudder at the memory of the night, sometime around 1984, when thieves attacked our house. Emboldened by their faith in police inaction, they hammered shamelessly at the metal bars, slowly prising them open, disregarding my mother's screamed insults from behind the gates at the top of the staircase. They bashed and banged without haste, squeezed through the window and helped themselves to our electronic goods. I'll never forget the chilling sound of the TV plug being wrenched from its socket.

Yet, compared with today, Port Harcourt was safe back then. Armed militant gangs claiming to fight for their indigenous right to oil wealth had turned my home town into a semi war zone the previous year, the skies reverberating with the crackle of gunfire. And kidnapping foreign oil workers and wealthy Nigerians has become big business. Abduction syndicates infiltrate all sectors of society, including the airports. Apparently, the staff at airline offices give alerts when plane tickets are purchased, then their co-conspirators, workers at the airports, track which car the kidnap target enters. One of my mother's friends was kidnapped this way. Somewhere along the road, she was asked (with surprising gentleness) to step out of her car and into armed captivity, where she briefly remained until a ransom was paid.

The tangle of corruption is woven tightly in Port Harcourt. Police are known to sell arms to kidnappers, and the navy sometimes colludes with gangs in stealing oil and shipping it. Traditional commerce no longer provides quite the same sustenance, either. Many rental properties, once tenanted by expat oil workers, lie empty, considered unsafe.

The sun was now setting and shunting me closer to the dreaded prospect of spending my first night here alone. Deebom the cook told me that the electricity had cut out for several days. If I wanted relief from the humidity I would have to buy fuel (or ‘fwell', as everyone pronounces it) to power the house generator. The price –
3,000 for 25 litres
–
nearly floored me. After pointlessly protesting to him about the cost, I handed him the money to buy it on the main street.

‘You must off the generator after eleven o'clock,' Deebom advised when he returned.

‘Why?'

‘The fwell will finish if you leave it on all night.'

I didn't want to believe him. The thought of sleeping in that heat without an air con was unbearable, so I kept the generator switched
on until the early hours, regardless of the consequences. When, predictably, it stopped working early the next evening, I was still shocked, shocked at the perversity that so much money was needed to sustain a few hours of basic comfort. When the state supply fails, I realised, buying one's own power is not a cheap option, even for the middle classes; only the very rich can do it. If it cost this much to run a household, I dreaded to think how this expense devoured the profit margins of small businesses. Nigeria can never develop under such circumstances.

Dodgy electricity supplies took the predictability out of everyday life: drying one's hair at a salon was fraught with risk, and power cuts sometimes plunged supermarket aisles into darkness, immobilising shoppers and tempting thieves. In the nightclub beneath my hotel room in Ibadan, I remember hearing a hip-hop tune thumping through the building. When it suddenly stopped mid-song, I mentally pictured the scene: clubbers grinding and flirting to the rhythm one minute, then left in embarrassing limbo when the electricity snatched away the music and lights.

For decades, the government has done nothing to fix this situation. The previous administration sank $13.2 billion dollars into restoring our power network, but there's nothing to show for it. No one knows where the money went; the nation has literally been left in the dark over the issue. Yet certain politicians still like to think they can develop the economy without fixing this fundamental spanner in our daily works. They even produced a fanciful document called ‘Vision 2020' detailing how Nigeria plans to become a leading economy within twelve years. The concept induced wry cackles among Nigerians. How, they asked, can we build an aeronautics programme when we can't power a light bulb for more than five hours a day?